A Dogged Moment

Over the past month several of my friends and colleagues have commented that The Toad and Dogged Dialogues have both been quiet recently. I checked and it has been well over a year since I posted anything. There are a lot of reasons for that but I suspect that at the top of the list are my sloth and ennui. In defense, however, I have started writing several poems, essays, and Toad’s Words but, well, acedia always took control and my muse would run away.

To solve the problem of never finishing anything I start, I decided to create Dogged Moments. These will be very short dialogues based on some of the weird thoughts and musings that occasionally blow the windmills of my mind and then dog me for the rest of the day.

Dogged Moment #1 - Dashboards

While I was peeling my grapefruit this morning and waiting for my morning thunder tea to brew, I found myself singing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.  Don’t we all sing tunes from Oklahoma while fixing breakfast?

You can pretty well find anything in their lyrics to inspire you: “Oh what a beautiful morning,” “They’ve gone about as fur as they can go,” “I cain’t say no,” “It’s a scandal. It’s an outrage,” “Don’t start collecting things.” Although it is my wife who usually sings this last one to me. And my favorite, “It's summer and we're runnin' out a' ice.”

Anyway, if The Surrey with the Fringe on Top is good enough for Marlene Dietrich to sing and Miles Davis to play, then I can sing it in my kitchen.

Well, I got to the line which I have heard and sung a million times, “The dashboard’s genuine leather”, and it suddenly hit me that we were talking about a surrey here. That begs the questions: Why do both cars and surreys have dashboards? And, why is it called a dashboard?

The answer is simple. Surreys, wagons, sleighs, and carriages were pulled by horses and when horses run fast, or “dash”, they tend to throw clumps of mud, crud, and other, even less delightful stuff, off their hooves.  Hence these modes of transportation put boards in front of the driver and passengers to keep the mud from hitting them.

So why do they call them “dashboards” in cars? Keep in mind that early cars were called carriages or horseless carriages so it made sense to name the board holding the knobs, gauges, and controls after what everyone was already calling it, the “dashboard.”

The truly interesting thing is that now we also call computer displays that show us real-time data like weather, time, stock prices, and news, “dashboards” … clearly a misnomer. These modern day dashboards don’t protect us from the crud the news and stock market throw at us.