I waste a lot of time wondering about things other people take for granted.

    Why are all car wheelbases the same?

    Who says that noon at our place in Maine is an hour earlier than it is here in Oklahoma? Does the sun agree with that?

    When did a galloping horse decide the optimum diameter for a circus ring was 42 feet?

     Whose fingers set the size for piano keys? Whoever had those fingers, they also served as models for the typewriter and now the computer.

     Hands and fingers in the real world are different, yet keyboards are the same. I have moved from a Royal Standard to an Olivetti Portable to a P.C. with no more travail than I had shifting my piano music from an upright to a grand to a spinet.

     I know fingers are different; I've seen them.

     Fats Waller played some of the clearest, most sharply defined piano you ever heard with fingers that resembled Polish sausages. A finger ring for him would have made a bracelet for me. Look at the fingers on professional basketball players.

     And while I'm wasting time, who determines what is an ounce? I know the Bureau of Standards is the official agency in the United States, but who says an 11 ounce can of British Shaving Cream holds as much as my can of Barbasol?

     The winter Ellen and I lived in Oxford, I was delighted to learn that one of the duties of the vice-chancellor of Oxford University is to take the official copper container from the Guildhall safes and go about the market checking on gallonage, pintage, and bushellage. One of the chancellor's duties - surely, it is the activity which inspired the remark, "It's hard and it's dirty but someone has to do it." - surely, it is his most painful duty - that poor man must check the contents of glasses used in pubs. When you order a pint of bitters is it really a pint? If the vice-chancellor, after checking, says it is: it is.

     Who is the vice-chancellor in Tulsa?

     As I said, I waste a lot of time pondering such questions.