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Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 11:04amSanction this postReply
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(Please skip directly to post 6 for a serious discussion of Sam's ironic thesis, or read the rest of this thru post 5 for a comic digression - my apologies for the initial hijack.)

Sam,

I am curious if you are familiar with a resident of Phila. PA, Harry P. Howshall?

The old systems used by the state Bell Telephone companies required all residential phone accounts to have a listed name, with at least a first initial and a last name of at least two characters. The Koreans have a family name which is simply the vowel O. These customers would generally have to be listed as "Oh" as in the actress Sandra Oh.

Ted

PS, I wonder if Mr. Howshall is still listed in the Phila. phonebook?

(Edited by Ted Keer on 8/01, 8:48pm)


Post 1

Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 11:22amSanction this postReply
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EXPANDED SEARCH INFORMATION
  • We searched Harold Howshall in PA and found 0 records
  • We searched Hal Howshall and found 0 records in PA
    We searched Harry Howshall and found 1 records in PA


    PEOPLE SEARCH RESULTS
    Search Again >> 
     See Details on All 1 People!
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     1 Person found that matches Harold Howshall in Pennsylvania.
     Click on the Name or View Details link for more info.
     intelius.com = Available Information
     NAMEPHONEADDRESSPREVIOUS CITIESRELATIVES 
    1HARRY P HOWSHALL (Age: 99)intelius.com
    intelius.com
    EFFORT, PA
    PHILADELPHIA, PA
    HAVRE DE GRACE, MD
    HARRY P HOWSHALL
    JOAN E HOWSHALL
    VERA D HOWSHALL
    ELIZABETH ARANGO HOWSHALL
    PAUL J HOWSHALL
    LIZ ARANGO HOWSHALL
    ERIC D HOWSHALL
    CRAIG T HOWSHALL
    KRIS HOWSHALL
    View Details


     


    Post 2

    Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 11:37amSanction this postReply
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    How would he be listed in the white pages? This has been a joke in the Philadelphia area since WWII. I remember looking him up in my Grandmother's phone book in the 1980's not believing what my father told me I would see.

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    Post 3

    Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 12:27pmSanction this postReply
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    Ted:

    "How would he be listed in the white pages?"

    Howshall, Harry P.

    Isn't that what you saw?

    Sam


    Post 4

    Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 12:36pmSanction this postReply
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    Yes, and the punchline was usually, either "very carefully" or "into the toilet." My father says that while this listing was well known since the war, neither he nor his friends ever called the number to ask whether it was a joke. (People were more polite back then!) It seems this guy just happened to be a real man with a very funny name. It's interesting to see he's still around.

    Ted

    Post 5

    Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 1:16pmSanction this postReply
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    Helen Wheels, traffic reporter, radio station KKOB, Albuquerque.

    I'm glad she's not driving my car.   

    Sam


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    Post 6

    Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 3:23pmSanction this postReply
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    Truman Shrugged

    "It’s a whole lot easier than actually studying those subjects and understanding their principles."

    This sentiment is all too prevalent in our society, even among scientists and some Objectivists, let alone the average blue-collar worker or lifetime welfare recipient. I think that the problem starts at about the time of early puberty which is when most children are progressing from their multiplication tables to introductory algebra. Multiplication can be memorized, but Algebra (which Rand was studying to her delight while on her death bed) requires abstract comprehension. Must people seem just to give up, to memorize words and to try to mimic their use as they hear others speaking. At least Objectivists should know enough not to fall into this habit. It doesn't require us to know everything - just to know enough to know what we don't know well enough to opine upon as if we were experts.

    To use your case in point, physicists had down most of classical physics at the end of the 19th century. The laws of motion and thermodynamics had been formulated. The principles of the conservation of mass and energy were understood. There were just a few enigmas, the apparent absence of the aether (demonstrated by Michelson & Morley) and the unexplained longevity of the sun, for example. Semi-sophisticated theologians grasped the fact that the sun could not be powered for more than a few dozen millennia by chemical means as proof that the earth was only as old as Reverend Paley had calculated, birthday October 15, 4,004 BC. Scientists knew enough to know that they didn't indeed understand what powered the sun. But they also knew that assuming that Shiva had set up the spectacle as a grand joke was no explanation either.

    Then Becquerel and the Curies discovered radiation, and within 20 years, Einstein came up with E=mc^2. Although we still have phenomena which we do not fully grasp, the paradigm of explaining ignorance by an appeal to miracles had once again been disproven. Before urea was synthesized inorganically some two centuries ago, it had been assumed that organic substances were somehow unique only to living creatures, and that the life force could not be explained through physicochemical means. Now there is not one serious biologist who posits an elan vital or thinks that there is anything at all missing or mysterious in our comprehension of the essence of metabolism and reproduction. It is only those who refuse to do the work who see something mysterious about mitosis and cell-membrane potentials.

    Of course, nowadays we still don't even have a proper vocabulary to fully explicate the nature of consciousness, free will, or perhaps the structure of spacetime on the smallest (quatuum foam) and largest (big bang) known scales. But anyone who studies these things in sufficient depth, while they will admit they are not understood, will not claim that we have to resort to the miraculous to explain them. Objectivists on occasion fall into a somewhat similar trap. We hold such things as free will to be axiomatically true. In and of itself this is sufficient for our purposes, but it is not an explanation of the underlying mechanism. Aristotle took gravity and fire as givens, and as these things are undeniably existent phenomena, it didn't pay anyone like Bishop Berkeley to deny their objective existence. Yet neither were the nature of gravity or fire explained by niggling scholastic debates on the minutiae of the Aristotelian ideas of the five elements or on the teleological desire of heavy objects to rest at the center of the geocentric universe. Rand's texts and ideas shouldn't become for us a new Talmud where we search in an isolated ivory tower for the answers to cosmological questions which philosophy can help frame coherently, but which science must answer. That volition exists is undeniable. What volition is is not a secret that we can either chalk up to the will of the gods or hope to find by ever more close scrutiny of the Randian canon.

    Even Truman finally escaped.

    Ted Keer

    (Edited by Ted Keer on 8/01, 4:12pm)


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    Post 7

    Thursday, October 4, 2007 - 10:06pmSanction this postReply
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    Harry P. Howshall was my father. He died in 1985.
     
    We had a phone book in our house when I was growing up but I can't remember anyone ever taking the time to make fun of his name. You must have a great deal of time on your hands. 


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    Post 8

    Friday, October 5, 2007 - 5:39amSanction this postReply
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    I always have time for a good joke. I hope your Father was a joyful man and would have laughed as well. 

    Post 9

    Friday, October 5, 2007 - 6:19pmSanction this postReply
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    Eesh.

    My father's name is Richard, but everyone calls him "Dick."   My brother's name is also Richard, so now everyone calls my father "Big Dick." 

    He adores the name.  


    Post 10

    Saturday, October 6, 2007 - 4:09amSanction this postReply
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    Yep and among other things I been called Hardly Grunton which was ok because then I said , I ran a mile and was hardly grunton, or Hardly Able which isn't to bad because it is also a name of a hunt club, a group of people that have a deer camp on some property in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I know an Army Ranger he says his name is Jack Spalding how would you like to play with my balls. He ought to put his favorite saying on a bumper sticker it goes like this; Three worlds fairs, two donkey *ucks and an all nigar rodeo and I've never seen anything like this 

    Post 11

    Sunday, October 7, 2007 - 12:36amSanction this postReply
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    Tres, I know what you mean.

    My grandfather and great-grandfather were both named Richard, and great-granddad's wife's name was Frances. Now, how would it sound ~these~ days to say, "Oh, look, here come Dick and Fanny!" Back then, in a more innocent time, it probably didn't raise an eyebrow.

    Yet, I have to wonder at what one of my cousins did to her poor son. One of Dick Sr's grand-daughters married a guy by the last name of Oder, and they named a son Richard. OK, Dick Oder? Yike. (I'm not making this up.)

    REB


    Post 12

    Sunday, October 7, 2007 - 5:35amSanction this postReply
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    LOL!

    Post 13

    Sunday, October 7, 2007 - 11:51amSanction this postReply
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    About as bad as a woman I knew in college - nice woman, but hard to keep straight face when calling her - Mary Knipple....

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    Post 14

    Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - 12:53pmSanction this postReply
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    Ms. Smith,

    Certainly no offense was meant, and the humor lay not in his name, but in the listing.  The best I could say is that many thousands of people in the Philadelphia area must have gotten a few seconds of joy from that funny quirk of circumstance without ever directly hurting your father.  My condolences on your loss.

    Ted Keer


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    Post 15

    Friday, August 13, 2010 - 6:03pmSanction this postReply
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    I don't know what made me think of this but Harry P. Howshall just popped into my mind. Back in the early 60s I was a cop in Philadelphia. When we completed a call we had to report it to Police Radio and get a name for our report. I would frequently get Howshall. One slow night I asked him if he was related to Harry P. and he said it was his brother. Could it be?

    Post 16

    Friday, August 13, 2010 - 6:50pmSanction this postReply
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    LOL!

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