Creator of the Tv Dinner Dies, Resuscitating Logic

• Creator of the TV dinner dies
• Resuscitating logic

Creator of the TV dinner dies

Gerald E. Thomas, credited with inventing the Swanson TV dinner, died on July 18 in Phoenix. He was 83.

The first meal, introduced in 1953, included turkey with cornbread stuffing and gravy, peas, and sweet potatoes. This was not the first commercial heat-and-serve meal, nor was it as good as a home-cooked meal. But the "TV dinner" was cool.

The concept became an instant success for Swanson, which sold millions of TV dinners in 1954. Americans ate the meals while watching "I Love Lucy" and "Dragnet," the top-rated shows at the time, on their small black-and-white TV sets.

The TV dinner tray earned a place in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., in 1986, and an imprint of a Swanson aluminum tray along with Thomas' handprints were enshrined in the cement outside of Mann's (formerly Grauman's) Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in 1997 as part of the Walk of Fame.

Although times change, good ideas don't. Just check out the frozen food aisle at your grocery store. Now you can enjoy your Swanson dinner, such as grilled chicken with penne pasta in basil cream sauce, in front of a big flat-screen plasma TV.

Resuscitating logic

It's a battle to see through the rhetoric, faulty reasoning, and misinformation that we are subject to these days. Maybe this hasn't changed much in the history of mankind, but it seems to have gotten harder to sort fact from fiction.

A new book attempts to shed some logic on this problem. Jamie Whyte, a former philosophy lecturer at the University of Cambridge, in England, has written "Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders," published by McGraw-Hill. The book is a witty "troubleshooting guide" aimed at helping to cut through the chatter and the haze of facts and figures of everyday life in order to get at the important nuggets of truth. The 12 chapters focus on different fallacies, such as motives for making a claim, authority or expertise of the speaker, coincidences, drawing conclusions from statistics, and so on.

The modern world is a noxious environment for people bothered by logical error, Whyte writes. People are capable of learning and being as brilliant as ever, he notes, but stuffing ourselves with knowledge can leave us empty of common sense. Some people respond by being gullible, unable to resist the bogus reasoning of those who want something, such as votes or money or devotion, he writes. Others choose to defend themselves against these "crimes" with cynicism, discounting everything said by anyone in a position of power or influence, he adds.

Whyte provides sage advice on how to see through problems of logic, but he doesn't really say why it has become a growing problem. He hints that maybe it's because we have more opportunities to publicly show how bad our thought processes really are. We can chalk that up to the electronics age, which has given us talk radio, reality TV, and Internet chat rooms and blogs. Maybe it's also fallout from discontinued logic courses in high school or college, or maybe even the demise of Latin.

Whyte's approach of being prepared to be duped is a good one. I also prescribe a good dose of Mark Twain and a review of "The Devil's Dictionary" by Ambrose Bierce. Note that those two pundits lived before the electronics age.

This week's column was written by Steve Ritter. Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.