Sunday, January 15, 2017

Michael Lee Johnson writes



Ball Jar



I am the cut-off ends of yellow lemon, 
end cuts off green lime skin and juice
squeezed, mixed with Pure Vitamin crystals
heavy-duty vitamin C, leads me to Christ.
I hang my survival on orange and lime trees.
I cut you with Chicago cutlery knives.
6 ounces of Barton vodka brand a twist of above,
between this night, my thighs, my thoughts
morning is the master of exchanges of fluids myself or others.
Life is a single squeeze both ends of both fruits.
Jerk me hands free top end of a Ball Jar a hinge of plastic.
Bring me to the end of the straw, up/down over again
mix it/mix me to the end of hell.

Family Ties
 Family Ties -- Harry Jarman





4 comments:

  1. In home canning, food is packed into a jar, leaving some empty "head space" between the food and the top of the container. Wax sealers, named in reference to the sealing wax that was poured into a channel around the lip to secure a tin lid, became popular in the late 1830s or early 1840s, but the process was complicated and error-prone. In 1858 John Landis Mason, a Philadelphia tinsmith, patented a molded glass jar used in home canning to preserve food. Its mouth has a screw thread on its outer perimeter to accept a metal ring (or "band"), which is placed loosely over the lid to allow air and steam to escape. The jar is sterilized in boiling water or steam and the lid is screwed down, pressing a separate stamped aluminum disc-shaped lid against the jar's rim. The cooling of the contents creates a vacuum in the head space, pulling the lid into tight contact with the jar rim to create a hermetic seal via an integral rubber ring on the underside of the lid. Once cooled, the band is removed to prevent residual water between the jar threads and the lid from rusting the band; if the jar seal is properly formed, internal vacuum will keep the lid tight. (Most metal lids used today are slightly domed to serve as a seal status indicator: The vacuum in a properly sealed mason jar pulls the lid down to create a concave-shaped dome, while an improper or failed seal or microbial growth will cause the dome to pop upward.) In 1868 he applied for a patent on improved version, and had been aware of other patented designs; the courts ruled that, by ignoring these developments, he had forfeited his patent, allowing other manufacturers to patent, produce, and sell glass jars for canning.

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  2. Mason jars are also called glass canning jars, "fruit jars," or Ball jars, in reference to the Ball Corporation, originally the Wooden Jacket Can Company in Buffalo, New York, in 1880. Frank C. and Edmund B. Ball borrowed $200 from their uncle, George Harvey Ball, founder and first president of Keuka College, to buy the firm, and were joined by their brothers William, Lucius, and George. At first they made tin cans encased in wooden jackets to hold kerosene, paint, or varnish, but because the acid used to refine kerosene caused tin to corrode, they decided to use glass for the inserts of the wood-jacketed cans. Soon a group of Belgian glassblowers who were passing through Buffalo encouraged the Ball brothers to build their own glassworks instead of buying the glass containers from a factory in Poughkeepsie, New York; to keep the new factory's furnace operating at full capacity, they introduced new products and improved their glass and metal manufacturing processes. When they found out that the patent covering the Mason Improved fruit jar had expired, they began manufacturing canning jars and jar lids. The Ball Co.'s logo was embossed onto the surface of the jars, which were made of amber or aqua (blue-green) glass. In 1886 they incorporated as Ball Brothers Manufacturing Co., but their factory burned down and they took the opportunity to relocate closer to a natural gas producing area rather than relying on more expensve coal to make glass. Muncie, Indiana, offered Ball 7 acres (2.8 hectares) of land for a factory site, a gas well, and $5,000 in cash, and agreed to provide a railroad connection to the new facilities. William and George remained in Buffalo to operate the stamping works and a factory in Bath, New York, while Frank and Edmund began operations in Muncie. On 1 March 1888 its Muncie plant turned out oil containers and lamp chimneys, and the company's headquarters and its glass and metal manufacturing moved there in 1889. George joined his brothers in 1893, William in 1897, and Lucius, a company shareholder and a physician, in 1894. When natural gas supplies in the area began to decline, the Ball brothers installed gas converters to use Indiana coal. In 1898 they patented the F. C. Ball machine, the world's first semiautomatic glass machine. By 1905 the company was producing 60 million canning jars per year. In 1909 it published "The Correct Method for Preserving Fruit" with home-canning recipes and techniques; later it became "The Ball Blue Book."

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  3. Renamed the Ball Brothers Co. in 1922, and it manufactured 54% of of all the canning jars made in the US in 1939; it also operated a zinc strip rolling mill to produce metal lids for its glass jars, made rubber sealing rings for the jars themselves, a paper mill to fabricate the packaging used in shipping their products, and tin, steel, and, later, plastic companies. During World War II the company converted its production to shells and machine parts for the military. In 1947, the Supreme Court decided an antitrust case which restricted the firm's ability to acquire glass-related businesses without prior court approval, and the company suffered its first net operating loss in 1949. In the following decade the Ball company entered the aerospace industry, forming the Ball Brothers Research Corp. in 1956 (from 1995, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.) and making aerospace equipment in 1959. Its OSO-1 (Orbiting Solar Observatory) satellite, designed and built for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with $1.4 million in grants, was launched into space in 1962, the same year it cesed blass production in Muncie. Renamed the Ball Corporation in 1969, it acquired Jeffco Manufacturing Co., a maker of recyclable aluminum beverage cans, and became the largest producer of recyclable beverage cans in the world. In the early 1990s Ball left the home-canning business when it established Alltrista, a subsidiary which consisted of seven smaller Ball subsidiaries that included the Ball jar and other canning-related products. (Altrista became a separate company in 1993.) In 1995 Ball created Ball-Foster Glass Container Co., a joint venture glass company with Saint-Gobain, founded in Paris 1665 in Paris to make mirrors, but sold its interests in the firm to Saint-Gobain in 1996, thus ending its glass manufacturing operations. Two years later it moved its corporate headquarters to Broomfield, Colorado. Altrista was renamed Jarden Corp. in 2001 and retained the license to use the Ball registered trademark on its line of home-canning products; Jarden also makes the Kerr brand of Mson jars and used to produce the Golden Harvest brand.; in Canada it continues to make Golden Harvest, and its Bernardin division is the nation's most common brand.

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  4. Barton Brands, Ltd. was a company that produced distilled spirits and liquors. In 1993 it was acquired by Canandaigua Wine Company, later Constellation Brands., which sold Barton to the Sazerac Company of New Orleans in 2009. Some of its better-known brands included 1792 Ridgemont Reserve (now known as 1792 Small Batch), Kentucky Tavern, and Very Old Barton Bourbons; Fleischmann's, Skol, and Wave Vodkas; the 99 line of schnapps (99 Apples, 99 Bananas, etc.); Calypso and Barton rums; Capitan, El Toro, and Montezuma tequilas; and Mr. Boston and Fleischmann's gins.

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