Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Over the weekend, my children attended a birthday party and got temporary tattoos with a nautical theme as befit a pair of pirates. So Daddy talked a little extraneously extemporaneously about tattoos, and how members of the military often got them, including their Uncle Kevin and their great-grandfather Raymond. Ray, my grandfather, had a blue Marine bulldog on his arm, marred by the scar where he’d been shot while helping take Okinawa.

Suddenly, I thought to go to the coat closet and bring out a bit of history for them: My grandfather’s jacket^*. Read more »

This book collects a number of stories about technology problems from the 1980s onto its publication date, but most of the problems occur in the high tide of the Internet in the late 1990s and early part of the 21st century.

I remember some of them, but certainly not all. Most of them stem from mistakes on the technical end and not on security breaches, which do not allow for a wry commentary.

An amusing read. It reads like a series of blog posts, with each individual story only a couple hundred words, which makes it perfect for a nightstand book you want to pick up and put down quickly. The end of it includes a “Mail me your stories” bit which indicates the author might eventually have or might eventually release a sequel that I wouldn’t mind reading.

Books mentioned in this review:

As I’ve alluded to before, and by “alluded to,” I mean “have admitted with a twisted sort of pride,” I am a pack rat. However, I’ve given some thought recently to downsizing a couple of things, mostly things I’ve bought at garage sales because I thought they’d be cool to own, like an old Kodak Brownie camera or molecule assembly set. Things I’ve never actually unboxed.

As I was looking for some safety pins the other day, I dumped a couple of bins in my “pen” drawer, which is the desk drawer on the second desk in my office that I never really look into for pens. I unearthed a twenty-year-old watch, but no safety pins. And as the items of dubious value spilled out, I got rid of some.

Including:

1. Four risers for a monitor stand. Some decade ago, back when I still had a smallish CRT monitor, I bought a stand to raise the monitor to an ergonomic height. The stand had four sets of risers of varying heights that you could stack to make the stand higher or lower to accommodate your monitor or your sense of ergonomy. I had four one-inch sized risers left, little cylinders with a fluted end to fit into the other cylinders. I tossed them into the drawer in case I’d ever need to raise the monitor more. In case I got a smaller monitor, I suppose. Or because I just save things. Soon after, though, I got a 19″ monitor that needed no stand at all (and then bigger LCD monitors since then). I’ve long since donated the stand itself to Goodwill, but the risers rested comfortably in the drawer, moving into two different houses some hundreds of miles from their origin, before I decided that I would not, in fact, ever do anything with them. I can’t even imagine any sort of craft or modern art I’d use them for. Now that they’re gone, though, I’ll need something just like them next week.
    
2. A broken wine opener. For some reason, I’ve kept a wine opener whose wings section broke off from its bottle-holding portion in this drawer for five or six years. In case I ever took up welding as a hobby, I guess. Out they go.
    
3. A non-functioning dry erase marker. I have a dry erase board in my office; I’ve had it, again, for a dozen years or so, since the Casinoport house and its blue-on-blue office. I’ve had a number of things on it for a long time–it bears a little handwritten encouragement that my mother-in-law wrote on the bottom of it when she left after assisting us through our first week as parents. The tasks, though, are less than three years old on average. But for some reason, and I’m sure they were good reasons at the time, I bought a couple of packs of dry erase markers in various colors, including some lighter pastel shades. For clarity. I threw them into my Drawer of Holding, and they’ve remained there until this week, where I tested them out and put those that worked on an easel with a dry erase side that my mother gave to Jimmy on his first Christmas. I found one that didn’t work, and I threw it out.
    
4.  
5.  

Okay, that’s only three things. But it’s a step in the right direction. Next up: Shredding my credit card statements from the 20th century. Maybe.

As you know, I’ve been listening to LPs on my little Crosby turntable. I discovered that RCA, if not everyone that puts out sets of records, doesn’t put side 2 on the back side of side 1. Instead, you get, in a two volume set, side 1 and side 4 on a disk and side 2 and side 3 on a disk. If you have a four record set, such as The Barber of Seville, you can see sides 1 through 4 with sides 5 through 8 on their back sides.

What the dickens, I thought. Those guys at RCA are just crazy.

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In my essay “The Daddy Watch“, I said:

Sometime the middle 1980s, when digital watches broke the barrier from technical marvel to status symbol for middle schoolers, I got my first watch as a gift. I wore a series of digital time pieces until college, where I got a real name brand watch for Christmas as a gift from my then-current sweetheart.

I remember that the watch had real hands on it; at some point in my midpoint generation, the anachronism of hands instead of LCD digits implied some status as a grown-up. This particular model offered an elapsed-time ring that fit around the edge of the watch. You could twist the ring so that the zero lined up with the big hand. Whenever you finished your activity, you could look to see where the big hand was to see how many minutes had elapsed. Unless, of course, the minutes exceeded a full hour, at which point the digital-dependents who didn’t know what the little hand was for would be lost. The elapsed time ring lasted only a few months, until a devastating encounter with a potato bin’s edge taught me to wear the watch on the inside of my wrist. I wore that watch longer than I remained with that particular soulmate. I can’t even remember the circumstances where that watch failed, nor can I remember what it looked like when I laced that band up onto my wrist. But those salad days of collegiate vigor end like inexpensive timepieces.

While tossing my desk’s pen drawer, I dumped a bin of pens I’ve accummulated and not used for decades, and low and beleft: The very watch in question.

A twenty-year-old watch that has not worked in probably fifteen years, to be charitable. And I still have it.

Perhaps I shall have to try replacing the battery to see if it works or if it actually suffered a catastrophic failure of some sort. As I do have a watch already, maybe I’ll donate it to some church garage sale or something.

Because it has crossed my mind, briefly, in recent days that I might just possibly keep too much stuff.

Here’s an essay so old that the return address on the manuscript was Honormoor, the Noggle estate in Casinoport. I guess I never got around to making the images it refers to.

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I first worked a keyboard twenty some years ago, a Smith Corona portable typewriter. Qwerty confounded me with its elegant design created to keep mechanical type arms from clogging at the little crosshairs on the paper. I quickly moved onto the computers of the day, such as they were, with the same Qwerty layout, a keypad, and a couple of function keys on the Commodore 128 to keep me company. But sometime circa 1990, I got my first IBM clone—that’s what they called them in those days, when International Business Machines made actual machines of one sort and another—and its 104 key keyboard. Probably not a soft click, since the keyboards of the pre-Clinton era produced a mighty clack-clack-clack that served the old alarm-clock-for-a-puppy role of soothing typewriter users who were skittish with the new technology and the plethora of keys that lacked the end of the line ding or the buzz of an electronic carriage returning.

Because I got started with the keyboards early, I skipped through the whole high school typing experience and forsook the home-row based touch typing in favor of my own organically-developed claw-and-peck which allowed me to accelerate to 30-40 words a minute with only the occasional glance at the keyboard to orient myself. After taking a position in the computer industry, I began using the upper range of the 104 character keyboards, including the esoteric function keys as well as the Print Screen, Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up, and Page down keys as well as the number pad. Over the intervening years, I have become accustomed to the standard keyboard layout present on every keyboard that came standard with each Packard Bell I purchased new or, later, at garage sales for five dollars. I can easily jump to the end of the line in my word processor or to the end of the my e-mail inbox. I can easily take a screen shot to illustrate what I see or what the user should see. Aside from the whole glance every once in a whole to ensure that I’m typing my password correctly, I can manipulate the standard keyboard like a professional.

But within the last couple years, manufacturers have begun to conspire against me, possibly the only regular user of the extended key set. They’ve begun to move those keys into new configurations as some sort of practical joke shared by their engineers or usability experts.

I first noticed the shift at a previous employer. When I started, the company provided me with a fresh Dell computer, direct from the factory. That keyboard was almost standard. On a standard keyboard, the extended keys are laid out like this:

However, Dell added a handy set of keys designed to handle those pesky power-related functions of your PC: Power Off, Reset, Sleep. You know, functions previously reserved for the front of your computer case but lately (or at least since 1998) relegated to buttons on your operating system desktop. To make things exciting for its users and to accommodate these functions within the size of a regular keyboard, Dell put these keys into the position at the top of the keyboard, where the Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause/Break keys go and simply pushed those keys down a row:

I couldn’t use the keyboard, as I often toggled the scroll lock setting when I meant to go to the top of the screen, so I brought in a stained, clicking keyboard from my personal collection. Fortunately, I avoided any catastrophic errors, unlike a couple of coworkers nearby who meant to do something and ended up resetting the machine in the middle of some standard, but given their salaries, costly operation. Thanks, Dell!

Of course, it’s not just desktop Windows machines that befuddle my fingertips, but also laptop keyboards. For reasons unknown to usability, laptop and notebook computer designers have intuited that notebooks and their keyboards must not exceed in size an eight by eleven sheet of actual notebook paper, no matter how many keys it needs to hold. Not only do they make the keys smaller, but they replace the CTRL, the ALT, or the Windows key with Fn keys whose esoteric multi-finger gymnastics don’t transfer to real computer use. I pride myself on the ability to use hotkeys to navigate through applications without the mouse, but I’m rendered dependent on the mouse by the understudy keys laptops. Of course, laptops don’t actually have a mouse, so I depend upon whatever unreasonable facsimile the laptop provides. Unfortunately, my Mesozoic IBM Thinkpad doesn’t offer a touchpad; instead, it has a small joystick to move the mouse pointer. A joystick located between the G, H, and B keys that helpfully prevents me from pressing those keys half of the time. Thanks, IBM!

The consternation of glyph constellation extends to Macintoshes, or Macintosha, or Macintoshi, or however you pluralize those cute iMac and eMac boxes with their USB keyboards. Their stock USB keyboards sport concave shapes where the normal keyboard feel convex. Instead of the ALT key, we have the open-Apple key. The keyboard comes with an extra four unfathomable function keys, and the corner of the keyboard most prone to walking cats or tumbling stacks of papers offers a sensitive eject key for the CD/DVD drive. As if the mere alien nature of the keyboard didn’t make me feel enough like a stranger in a strange land, Mac OS X conspires to make my normal shortcut keystrokes into ineffective fat-fingering. The standard CTRL+C keystroke, welded to my psyche through a decade’s use, doesn’t work on the Macintosh as Steve Jobs, in a fit of pique no doubt, decreed that the Control key do nothing and that the open-Apple key, placed conveniently where the Alt key belongs, should handle all common intra-window shortcuts. So not only do I not know where the keys are, but I do not know what they do. Thanks, Steve Jobs!

I know the frantic change within the computer world brings us abundant technological wonders which I’ll probably understand for another decade or two, but I wish that the computer makers could at least not rearrange the keys more frequently than a bored housewife. Would Beethoven have created his master works if the piano keyboards in Vienna all alternated or altered the shape and locations of the keys yielding a particular note? Of course not; he would have spent all of his time adjusting to the medium instead of directing the medium to his wishes. So if I never become centuries’ worth of famous in any keyboarding art, I’ve already assigned the blame.

Hey, kids. Want to see gore? You, too can make a 42-year-old man’s head asplode without needing any special mental powers. All you gotta do is go up and say:

Hey, did you hear they’re remaking Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with that guy from Twilight as Ferris Bueller?

Now that I’ve put this unfounded rumor on the Internet, I fear this weekend is going to be like a live performance of the 1812 Overture with the popping of Gen X craniums instead of cannons.

at 5:45 as you’re having a waking up conversation with your beautiful wife, and you somehow allude to blue dog paintings…

…and you name the call the artist Rodriguez instead of Rodrigue?

All my alleged learning and education and pomposity shot down in an instant.

Maybe you’re lucky enough not to have conversations before 8am talking about contemporary New Orleans-based American artists. Or smart enough.

This book is an early collection of Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck” one-liners coupled with some drawings of his with captions and some material about how you know you’re getting old. It’s on par with You Might Be A Redneck If… (obviously), which means it’s not a very compelling read. A couple of bright spots, some chuckles, but lacking because Jeff Foxworthy is not delivering the jokes.

Books mentioned in this review:

The newest ST & QA Magazine features an article by yours truly entitled “When Users Collide”. Bloggish format here. Some registration required.

Still cleaning out the old essays.

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We recently had an event that spawned the arrival of Mylar helium balloons. Fortunately, our crowd is not of the Have a Hannah Montana Inflatable Item for Your Birthday crowd, so we get a couple cards and a gift for your normal gift bearing holidays, and I’m man enough to forget the standard Wuv holidays, so we don’t deal with them on a regular basis.

Now cards are keepsakes, at least in our household or at least when they’re in my reach. You can easily put them into boxes or binders to save them for some far away days in the future when you’ve got nothing to do an empty house full of old people’s furniture, wallpaper, and cats. Cards fit easily into these storage devices. Little letters, little notes, each of these you can unfold and review, running your fingers over the creased paper. But Mylar balloons are another story altogether.

I’ve worked in the industry, tangentially, so I know how to deflate the balloons: you simply insert a straw into the neck of the balloon so that it opens the little valve and squeezing the helium out, or the helium and air mixture, or whatever mix exists after a couple of weeks in the wild. Sure, that’s easy, and it makes sense enough if you’re in the industry and you can reinflate unsold balloons the next time the season rolls around, hoping that your dated stars and designs will become retro enough to sell then.

But what do you do with a deflated mylar balloon in the household? I can’t imagine hanging them flat on the wall like old LP covers. Certainly, you’ll never reinflate them with helium, as you’ll probably never bring home a tank full of that noble gas whose natural supply is waning. Just blowing them up won’t recapture the magic uselessness of the original, and bagging up that carbon dioxide won’t reduce your footprint a toe.

I guess the only responsible thing to do with a helium-filled balloon is to do what PEBA would recommend: returning it to the wild before it’s too weak to travel to the helium balloon spawning grounds back east (that is, downwind). I only hope I’m not too late, because all of the neighbors down the block will know the source of the newly liberated “It’s a Boy!” balloons that snag in their trees, and this very piece will shoot down my story of an accidental balloon-escaped-when-I-opened-the-door-and-I-tried-to-lure-it-back-in-with-balloon-treats story.

Living in the country, it was nigh inevitable that I would have to remove a tick from one of my children someday. This spring, a warm and wet spring, I’ve killed a number on my person before they could get a good latch. So I was unsurprised to see one on my son one morning while he was dressing.

As I might have mentioned, this was my first tickendectomy. I didn’t really have time to get to eHow to find out how the Internet does it. I had to rely on the experiences of my youth to know how to remove it.

First, you put a lit cigarette to your child. At least, I think that’s what my parents did to kill the tick. Or maybe my parents just liked to put a lit cigarette to me. I dunno.

Barring that, I did get a pair of tweezers, sterilized them with an open flame, exploded the little sucker, and pulled it straight up to remove the sucking parts. It looked pretty well removed when I finished, so I salved the wound and put on a bandage and watched for infection.

I am Daddy, dammit, and I’m supposed to know immediately how to do these things. I think I did. But I’ll get better, I suppose, as this recurs. This Daddy thing and this adult man thing really have a lot in common. You’re supposed to know how to do something or handle something, you think you kinda know how, and you do it and succeed at it without knowing exactly how you knew.

However, it is a good excuse to post Brad Paisley’s “I’d Like To Check You For Ticks”, which my beautiful wife, who doesn’t listen to country music even though she grew up in the Ozarks, has never heard.
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The worst part about moving to the suburbs is that I don’t understand the social mores of the place, the traditions, norms, and unwritten laws of behavior that guide one’s relationship with one’s neighbors. I grew up in the rain-streaked city streets and later down dusty rural dirt roads, where your relationship with your neighbor was often simpler. In the city, if you messed with your neighbor or your neighbor’s, erm, stuff, the neighbor might well shoot you dead with his nine millimeter. In the country, if you messed with your neighbor or his livestock, the neighbor might well shoot you dead with his 12 gauge. This simplicity led to a certain respect for your neighbor as well as a certain distance from those you didn’t know.

Here in the suburbs, though, the rules of behavior differ, and that confuses me. For example, many of my neighbors don’t own nine millimeters or 12 gauges and think it’s odd that someone might. Territorial rights aren’t always marked by barbed wire; instead, we have things such as mutually understood (it’s assumed) borders noted by lines in plats in the county office or by the seasonal plantings. Fortunately, though, in most of my suburban domiciles, I’ve had something of a boundary marker, such as a privacy fence that trickles into chain link. Actually, I’ve had a number of privacy fence boundaries, including those erected after I’ve moved in, so the boundary line isn’t an issue.

However, incursions across those boundaries pose an ethical dilemma. Such as the beating conundrum I confronted recently when I stepped into my slightly overgrown (gone to seed) backyard and found a Wiffle® ball amid the lush suburban saw grass. What in Suburbia was I supposed to do about it?

The neighbors on one side, hidden behind a tall wooden fence, have children. The ball could belong to them. But I don’t know about the rear abutting yards; they, too, could hold children in those hours or seasons in which I am not in the back yard cutting the grass. The ball could as easily belong to families beyond those tree-high pike pylons separating the yards.

In the city, a Wiffle® ball never gets hit anywhere but common areas or the street; if it goes into a yard, the big dog or crazy person there eats it. In the country, no one can hit the ball far enough to go into someone else’s yard. This white plastic sphere at my feet was an unknown artifact for which the lessons of my youth provided no proper recourse.

I have a son for whom I could claim the ball under the particular possession/law equation that no lawyer ever wasted a retainer teaching. But that would be theft, pure and simple.

I could march up onto the front porch of the neighbor’s house with the ball in hand and ask if it belonged to the children there, but in my old neighborhoods, the frontal approach could be confrontational. City-dwellers might fear the polite home invader or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the country, someone on your porch could be the IRS or the jackbooted thugs from the ATF (now the BATFE). In either case, one wrong dingdong, and they greet you with a hail of lead (now, due to safety regulations, this is sometimes steel).

Besides, I’m unclear if the door knocking behavior is covered under the suburban code of conduct, or if this unelicited contact would mark one as a pariah amongst the decklocked crowd. Perhaps word would spread of the forward and slightly creepy fellow up the block who confronted neighbors with only the provocation of a Wiffle® ball, and our family would purposefully not get invited to block parties sponsored by the local real estate agent.

I could drop the ball over a fence surreptitiously. Of course, that would assume that the ball belonged in the yard where I know children live. If it did not, I could perhaps be charged with littering or perhaps trafficking in stolen goods depending upon the demeanor of the local five-oh. Or perhaps they would see me as conducting a sortie upon their pristine green backyard with some sort of secret Wifflepon.

Torn, I knew I could not keep the ball, I could not break the code of silence maintained by community, and I could not throw the ball over the fence into an unseen backyard. So I did what any self-respecting adult male born of country and city would do if he were me.

Carefully in the early morning hours, in that period between darkness and dawn, I looked up and down the street from beside my front porch. Assured I was unobserved by early dog walkers or the fabled milkman, I crouched low and crossed the broad, blackened expanse of my asphalt driveway and deposited the ball at the very edge of the neighbor’s front lawn where its presence would tempt the children from that yard to reclaim it or claim it, where the father would pick it up or kick it into my driveway or the street when it came time to mow the lawn, and where I could have plausible deniability about how the ball got there.

Then I scurried back into my house and bolted the strange and frightening world of suburbia out.

I’ve got it: To show our new line of, well, whatever it is we’re showing, we’ll need a half-orc. A female half-orc. In scale mail hauberk. A female half-orc in a scale male hauberk with a lacy bird tail. Let’s make this happen!

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Once upon a time, the ruler of a great civilization decreed that henceforth, he would no longer allow the citizenry to keep gold, including the previous rulers’ coins of the realm; all citizens must turn in all gold and receive the new currency. A wily worker at the mint secreted a number of new coins from the treasury, including one taken abroad by a foreign ruler as a curiosity piece and particularly rare trophy. The agents of the ruler sought the return of the secreted coins even beyond the death of the ruler because once they were unleashed, there was no containing them even in foreign lands.

Sound like something from a fantasy novel? It happened in the United States.

The story begins in 1933. To combat the Great Depression, newly elected President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 and required that all citizens surrender all gold coins, gold bullion, and gold certificates. In exchange, they received the government’s new paper currency. Henceforth, people could not use the coins as legal tender, including the popular $20 Double Eagles, put into circulation by his cousin Teddy Roosevelt.

With the inertia-driven efficiency expected of government, the Philadelphia Mint struck 445,500 of the 1933 gold Double Eagles after FDR issued his executive order banning gold coins. The mint never issued the coins, though, as Roosevelt’s order denied their use as legal tender. Instead, the mint would take the coins it had so meticulously produced and melt them back into bullion.

Before the mint could complete the onerous reversal of its effort, someone absquatulated with a small number of the coins. Fingers would later point to a mint cashier named George McCann, who might have swapped 20 or more 1933 Double Eagles with earlier years’ coins. The theft was discovered in 1944 when one of the coins was put into public auction. The Secret Service traced the coin to a Philadelphia jeweler named Switt and began tracking down other coin owners, but not before an export license was approved for one of the coins to Egypt—as property of Egyptian King Farouk.

In 1944, the world was at war, and Egypt was an ally in the North African campaign against the Germans. The Secret Service couldn’t bring much diplomatic pressure to bear. When King Farouk I was forced into exile, his possessions fell into the hands of the new Egyptian government, who planned to sell off the goods. When the United States government pressed for the gold coin, it disappeared.

In 1996, however, a British coin dealer named Stephen Fenton came to New York with a Double Eagle in his possession. He’d allegedly bought it from the family of an officer in the military coup that drove Farouk from power. But when Fenton came to New York, the long arm and memory of the law was waiting, and he was arrested.

Fenton’s lawyers argued that the Secret Service and the United States government ceded rights to the coin when the government approved the export license. In lieu of a drawn-out court battle, the two sides agreed to auction the coin and to split the proceeds. At Sotheby’s in 2002, the coin fetched a winning bid of $6.6 million dollars from an anonymous bidder. With a buyer’s premium of 15% and $20 to the United States mint to make the coin legal tender, the coin became the single most expensive coin in history. The forbidden coin became legal tender and legally owned at last.

In 2005, the family of the Switt, the Philadelphia coin dealer, sent 10 coins to the United States Mint for authentication. The United States government discovered the coins were indeed 1933 Double Eagles and seized them. This seizure, too, has spawned its lawsuits, but the government remains adamant that these coins are contraband and prohibited. This sudden rediscovery of this many illicit Double Eagles prompts one to wonder how many other specimens might reside in dark velveteen boxes or in forgotten attic chests, waiting for the heat to cool before they, too, are revealed.

Hey, if you like the content here at MfBJN, consider hitting the tip jar.

No, wait, I don’t have a tip jar.

Instead, why not crack out your old-timey checkbook and send some money to the Northern Michigan University James A. Igert Memorial Scholarship.

My beautiful wife and I endowed this scholarship a couple years back and structured it such that the more money it has in it and generates, the more money it gives out to students.

Don’t wait until December 31 to rack up all your charitable contribution deductions is all I’m saying.

Here’s another old essay from the hard drives.

The Daddy Watch

A while ago, I dropped my old Timex, and the fall was apparently no mere lickin’. The watch stopped, so I guess this was the Bitin’ After Which There’s No Rightin’. I’d taken the watch off and stuffed it in my pocket before a rigorous game of office foosball. After delivering a vigorous thrashing to the ball if not our opponents, I reached into my pocket for the watch. It leapt from my grasp onto the floor and into the sweet thereafter. I was in the market for a new timepiece.

I’ve worn watches off and on since high school. I’d done some time before that with the obligatory Mickey Mouse watch whose hands worked almost long enough for me to learn how to tell time. Sometime the middle 1980s, when digital watches broke the barrier from technical marvel to status symbol for middle schoolers, I got my first watch as a gift. I wore a series of digital time pieces until college, where I got a real name brand watch for Christmas as a gift from my then-current sweetheart.

I remember that the watch had real hands on it; at some point in my midpoint generation, the anachronism of hands instead of LCD digits implied some status as a grown-up. This particular model offered an elapsed-time ring that fit around the edge of the watch. You could twist the ring so that the zero lined up with the big hand. Whenever you finished your activity, you could look to see where the big hand was to see how many minutes had elapsed. Unless, of course, the minutes exceeded a full hour, at which point the digital-dependents who didn’t know what the little hand was for would be lost. The elapsed time ring lasted only a few months, until a devastating encounter with a potato bin’s edge taught me to wear the watch on the inside of my wrist. I wore that watch longer than I remained with that particular soulmate. I can’t even remember the circumstances where that watch failed, nor can I remember what it looked like when I laced that band up onto my wrist. But those salad days of collegiate vigor end like inexpensive timepieces.

After college, I continued to wear the worn timepiece from those college days until a new novia wanted to help upgrade my wardrobe or lifestyle. She bought me a newer version of the same brand watch, also with hands. She was the daughter of an executive, I was a ne’er-do-well with an English degree and a retail job. Her parents didn’t care for me, but she liked me enough to get me watch for Christmas. The watch sported a Velcro-and-fabric band which I swapped out with a decent plastic band and buckle. The watch outlived the relationship (to the young lady’s parents’ relief) and a number of nothing jobs that transmogrified into an accidentally successful career.

Ten years after that relationship ended and a dozen years after the watch was new, it hit the floor at my workplace, a hip young marketing agency where I bore a pseudo-executive title of one of the unhip departments. I married a woman who will never buy me a watch, I’ve vowed, given the demise of the relationships in which I’ve received a watch. Also, I’ve become a father, starting a family with the aforementioned wife who cannot buy me a timepiece. I was in a different era within my life.

So although I fancied myself another watch along the lines of the preceding few, with dark bands and backgrounds, when I found myself at the counter at Target, I passed over the direct replacement for my old watch-—I could have replaced the fabric sport band with the band from my defunct watch—-and I passed over the other watches of similar styles. Of course, I wanted hands on the face so I could, in decades hence, use the knowledge on trivia nights. But I glanced over the watches on their display mounts and I lit upon a silver steel model with expansion bands.

I have never owned a watch with an expansion band before; I expected that the bands wouldn’t fit as securely or as comfortably. But my father wore expansion bands, with the steel spring-loaded links stretching over the thumb to allow him to snap it onto his wrist before going out to a day’s worth of construction and remodeling. On occasion, I would find the watch and play with it, stretching the expansion band to turn the watch inside out or rolling it over and over like a tank’s tread. I once found an extra band and imagined a metallic snake creeping along the sofa or the end table. Standing before the jewelry case, my previous preferences dissolved into a warm-and-fuzzy reminisce.

Needless to say, I bought the steel expansion band watch. Its shiny exterior proclaims that it is the watch of a man, not a boy. Unlike its Macy’s counterparts from Bvlgari or Hvngari or whatever former Soviet blocs provide the Citizens for sale beneath the red star, I won’t be afraid to wear this watch every day in case I bang it into a sawhorse or drop it after a foosball game. It’s shiny enough to proclaim some maturity and status. And maybe my own son will look on the band with his imagination and find something to remember.

Somebody on the Internet posted a list of 8 Movies Every Geek Should Watch (And Love).

I’ve done a number of books-you’ve-read checklists and haven’t fared so well, so I thought I’d stack the deck and make this into a checklist since I’ve done well on it.

The list below includes the list at the post. Bold means I’ve seen the film, italics means I own the film and will get to it.

1. Office Space
2. Cube (I didn’t like it. Geek demerits for me.)
3. WarGames
4. Blade Runner
5. THX 1138
6. Dark City
7. Moon
8. They Live

So, how do you do?

And as a geek point of order, the poster of this list makes cranky noises about the changes Lucas made to THX 1138, but he doesn’t have anything to say about which version of Blade Runner is definitive. This, my dear friends, is a serious lapse in geekery and might reflect someone who can bash Lucas because it’s currently coolly demigeek to do so.

Forbes has an article entitled How to Cheat at Golf — Without the Guilt which called into question today the definition for a word that I’ve used on occasion. That word? Par.

The Forbes article says:

2. PAR IS AN IMPOSSIBLE DREAM.

Give it up. Of those golfers who register with the USGA for an official handicap (just one out of five players), a mere 0.7% can be considered “scratch” golfers, meaning they actually have a sporting chance of shooting par over 18 holes. You are not one of these superhumans. Instead try this psychological trick: Consider every hole on the course a par-5. Shoot a 5 on every hole and you’ll get a 90, which is great, all things considered.

So often we use par to mean, well, mean or median. Average. It’s from the Latin for equal, after all. But if you look at the golf leaderboard, you’ll see that half of the field is not above par, nor are the leaders so far above the rest of the field to set par at the mean statistical definition.

No, in golfing terms, par is set arbitrarily by the golf course designers or professionals, and it’s a standard that most golfers can’t meet.

Please update your preferred metaphors and clichés appropriately.

In 2010, I said:

I have a great new idea for a non-profit organization, and I’m going to get in on the ground floor and get rich. My stunning idea:

An Urban Chicken Rescue Organization.

Throughout Missouri and probably the nation, people are deciding that they want to raise chickens in their suburban and urban backyards (see stories in St. Louis and Springfield). These people are doing it as part of an environmental nutbar fad and they’re doing it with a bit of Internet research and without any experience in farming or treating livestock qua livestock instead of livestock qua food-providing-pet.

Yesterday’s New York Times says:

Hindus regard the chicken as a vessel for evil spirits. The Chinese cook them to honor village deities. But here, chickens are a symbol of urban nirvana, their coops backyard shrines to a locavore movement that has city dwellers moving ever closer to their food. And the increasingly intimate relationships have led some bird owners to make plans for their chickens’ unproductive years. Hence a budding phenomenon: urban chicken retirement.

While many Portlanders still pluck aging birds for the broiler, others seek a blissful, pastoral end for them. Because most chickens lay the majority of eggs early in life, and can live about 10 years, the quest for a place where chickens can live out their sunset years has brought a boom to at least two farm animal sanctuaries and led Pete Porath, a self-described chicken slinger, to expand the portion of his business that finds new homes for unwanted birds.

You want to know how I augured this two years ago? No, you don’t.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link again as two years ago, Ms. K.