I’m Not The Shorting Sort, But I’d Short Simon Properties If I Were

I hit the local mall every couple of months when I have one of my vehicles serviced. The garage (who am I kidding, it’s not a garage; my Great Uncle Tony had a garage–I go to an Automotive Service Center which is a fast food restaurant of oil changery) that I use is in the out lot of the Battlefield Mall, owned by Simon Properties. I’ve been fairly impressed with the mall over the years, as it’s always been pretty busy and has had few vacancies (compared to my next-most-recent memories of Crestwood Plaza ten years ago, which was a movie theatre and a lumber showroom, or so it seemed with all the plywood on the storefronts).

Things must be changing.

I’ve noticed a couple more vacancies in the last couple of months and a whole lot of renovation, which means store turnover which might not be as bad as vacancies, but it’s not good.

Then I noticed that the lights don’t get turned on until 8:30; last year, when I got to the interior Starbucks at 8:10, the lights were all on for the mall walkers and early employees. But the lights were out and the mall was relying on natural light through the skylights for illumination. All right, I thought, someone at corporate is making small changes to save big dollars in the aggregate.

But there’s this sink in the men’s room.

Every time I’ve been into the mall since summer, the same sink has been “temporarily” out of service. Starting in May through August at least. I haven’t been back to the mall in about 2300 miles, so I’ll be back in to see if it’s been fixed yet in a couple of weeks. I’m not sanguine at this point. When I was in a couple weeks ago, the soap dispenser on the sink next to it was also broken.

It makes me feel like a detail-oriented stock analyst to dig deeply like this, to visit the locations and businesses I’m considering for buy or sell recommendations or merger and acquisition targets. Which I’m actually not, I’m just a guy using the bathroom at the mall.

But when one reads Forbes for the articles and not the pictures, one must be forgiven for framing every day experiences in terms of stock market analysis.

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Packrattery Justified, Again

So a decade or so back when we lived in Casinoport, our closets had those inexpensive wire shelving organization system in them. As so often happens, one of the brackets in my office shelving broke, probably under the weight of the boxes of books I stored on those lightweight shelves. So I went to the hardware store to buy a couple of the brackets to replace the broken ones.

Except they don’t sell them individually. They sell them in bags of 20, and I needed 1.

So I’ve had nineteen of these for over ten years tucked away.

A couple years ago, while playing in the back yard, one or both of my boys grabbed the cable running from the DirecTV dish to an unused outlet and pulled it free from the staples that originally held them to the bottom of the edge of my deck. So I thought about buying some metal brackets to screw into the deck to hold the cable more securely. I mean, hey, some day we might want to put a television in the dining room. Someday.

Instead of buying brackets, I remembered the white plastic brackets and so I knew I could use them for this job. When I got around to it. Someday.

Once in a while, I got to thinking about doing that particular repair, but I couldn’t remember where I’d put the clasps out in my workshop area in the garage. They weren’t amongst the other fasteners or in the cabinet that makes up the bulk of my storage. So I often got distracted by other incomplete projects or clutter in my workshop before I find them.

But earlier this week, I opened the other drawer, and there they were. Now, a word about my “workshop”: It consists of a high table with a tool box (and a lot of clutter) on it; a couple of topless cabinets I acquired from somewhere covered with clutter, some tools, and an organizer for loose fasteners; a desk that was the tool area in the small space between the furnace and the wall of the utility room in Casinoport which, of course we took with us when we left because I accumulate things; and various shelving units of tools, paints, raw materials, and, quite frankly, junk that I’ll probably clear out very gradually over the next twenty years. I store most of my stuff in the cabinets because they’re closest to the workshop and, frankly, because the floor space in front of the desk is generally stacked with junk.

But on inspiration or when looking for something else or perhaps just because I felt like I was Indiana Jones in an ancient temple, I opened the seldom opened drawer and there they were, right on top.

So I affected the repair years later without having to spend a buck on brackets.

The hero of the story: My packrat habit!

Which is why it is definitely too early to throw that thing out!

And if anyone needs a white c-clamp, I have sixteen left.

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To Add To My Confusion

I recently said elsewhere on the Internet:

When I’m talking about the film Romeo Must Die, I always have to say it slowly to make sure I don’t say Romeo Is Bleeding.

Face it, the 1990s were bad all around for Romeo. But I guess this has been true for centuries.

Now I learn there is a new film called Romeo Is Bleeding. It’s not a gritty reboot of a particularly gritty movie; instead it’s a documentary about a group of urban students staging Romeo and Juliet.

Which will only heighten the confusion in my internal monologues.

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Creeped Out By The CAPTCHA

So while I was working today, I had to work through a CAPTCHA over and over again. And this appeared:

The center image is the intersection of Swon and Lockwood. In Webster Groves. It’s not the street on which I lived, but I passed through that intersection fairly often while walking a baby some eight years ago.

So, do you think this is a coincidence, or does the CAPTCHA know things about me?

I’m paranoid, so you know which one I think it is.

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Cutting The Source of That Thing That Daddy Always Says

On Saturday mornings, I often remind my children, “Es Sábado Gigante!”

I must have seen a bit of it on Univision once in the early 1990s.

Well, all gigante things must come to an end:

Sábado Gigante, the quirky, iconic, 53-year-old variety show that has been a fixture for generations of U.S. Hispanics, will broadcast for the last time on Saturday night. As they prepared to say farewell, Sábado’s beloved host, Don Francisco, and his followers looked back on their time together with nostalgia and emotion.

“I started doing this when I was 22 years old, and since then, my whole adult life has transpired,” Mario Kreutzberger (Don Francisco’s real name), told El Nuevo Herald shortly before a taping for Saturday’s show. Kreutzberger, 74, married, raised three children (including a son named Francisco) and had nine grandchildren.

It’s not as though I’ll stop saying it, but there’s no chance my children will catch it while flipping through cable in college and think of me.

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Brian J.’s Amazon Prime Prediction Begins To Bear Fruit

Can one’s predictions bear fruit, or does one need to mix it with a different metaphor?

Anyway, I said:

Here’s a bold prediction you’ll find everywhere else: Amazon Prime will evolve out of its actual benefit of offering free shipping on Amazon purchases to merely streaming content and giving its members exclusive access to a box that you can see filling up as you add items to your shopping cart.

Less than a year later, we find:

Depending on where you live, you may no longer be able to receive certain items with free two-day shipping from Amazon — even if you’re a Prime member.

Amazon is testing a new program called Ship by Region, which will allow merchants to choose how far their items will ship with Amazon Prime, the company’s option for free two-day shipping. For example, a big screen TV warehoused in California might be available for Prime shipping in the Southwest but not in the Northeast.

Step 1: Complete.

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Marvel at the Cleanliness of the Top of My Refrigerator

I cleaned the top of my refrigerator this morning. I didn’t think you’d notice if I didn’t mention it, but I took a picture for you to see it.

You could probably start a Tumblr account featuring pictures of places people clean that nobody notices. You probably just did. And it’s already more profitable than this blog ever has been.

You’re welcome.

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Taking a Trip Down Memory Lane While Housecleaning

Here at Nogglestead, we do not dust and clean our varied myriad surfaces with the finest skins of virgin chamois from the Carpathian Mountains nor with the finest microfiber cloths from Price Cutter. Instead, we used cut-up t-shirts as dust rags.

Which makes every housecleaning chore akin to looking through an old album of photos in the triggering of memory.

To whit:

  • This Bleed Blue cloth was a free giveaway at a St. Louis Blues playoff hockey game around the turn of the century. Afterwards, it served as a burp cloth for one or more of my children. After the children stopped spitting up after a bottle, it went unaltered into the cabinet for dusting.

  • This cloth comes from a long sleeved t-shirt that was also a giveaway at a Blues game. Although both I and my beautiful wife received them, I gave mine to her as well as I didn’t wear long-sleeved t-shirts for a long time. This particular cloth is getting holed and worn, and I’ll probably toss it to make room for more t-shirts with structural integrity failures.
  • This black rag comes from the Queensrÿche Empire t-shirt I got for Christmas from Chris and/or Deb in 1990. I sometimes wore it under an open collared shirt as was not in style at the time, but was how I wore t-shirts.
  • This grey cloth comes from a sleeveless Marquette University shirt I bought in the middle 1990s, after I graduated and when I was on a return visit to Milwaukee. I wore a lot of sleeveless shirts at that time, which is odd, because I didn’t really have the physique to support it.
  • This t-shirt comes from one of my son’s Martial Arts USA t-shirts. He’d owned it for less than a year before getting caught in the crossfire of a gangland paintball/hamburger condiment fight accompanied by the explosion of an Italian restaurant kitchen. The only thing missing was grass stains from when he threw himself to the ground and slid down a hill into a muddy creek at the bottom, but there’s always his new white Orlando souvenir t-shirt for that. This particular memory does not very far back, but the memories of repeatedly trying to de-stain it remain.

I mean, sure, I’ve got a bin of worn old undershirts that I could use for this, but the old t-shirts provide me with something to think about when cleaning. Aside from wondering when the last time I’ll clean yogurt from the crown molding will come and how much I’ll miss it when it does.

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Another Clue I Wouldn’t Do Well On Jeopardy!

So, last night, I’m inspired for a Tweet wherein I would say, “I’m the COTTON MATHER of Software Testing,” and then I think, what was Cotton Mather’s son’s name? It was another noun….

And I didn’t come up with it quickly. I might not have made it in the thirty seconds you get for Final Jeopardy, which seems like a long time when you know the answer immediately or a really short time if it’s on the tip of your tongue.

But then it came to me: Increase Mather.

Except you, gentle reader, know as well as I do, now that I looked it up to confirm my guess, that Increase Mather was Cotton Mather’s father, not his son.

I mean, what kind of intellectual lightweight screws up seventeenth century cleric lineage at ten o’clock on a Monday night? Certainly not someone who’s going deep in Jeopardy!

I guess it’s just as well that I didn’t get called into an audition this year.

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I Had To Take Cats To The Vet Today

My beautiful wife helpfully recorded my attempts to get them into the pets carriers:

I’m just kidding, of course, but in all seriousness, the man who invents proton packs that can capture and hold cats (or pull them from deep from under furniture) will deserve to win the Nobel Prizes. All of them.

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The Wisdom of Victor Frankenstein (I)

As a child, I had not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth, and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge along the paths of time, and exchanged the discoveries of recent enquirers for the dreams of forgotten alchemists. Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Related music:

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Also Spotted At The Thrift Store

Available currently at the DAV Thrift Store:

What looks to be a complete or nearly complete set of Star Trek, the uncut editions, from Paramount as well as the movies.

I couldn’t help but wonder if they were Phil Farrand’s.

You might be wondering, gentle reader, if I was tempted to buy the set. Although books like Farrand’s make me want to own the whole set and to watch them in order, this particular collection is one episode per videocassette, and, as the image indicates, takes up a lot of space (no pun intended). As such, I’d only buy this set if I could also use it as some sort of visual design or decorating element, such as making a wall of Star Trek where I could fit the individual cassettes into frames facing out with little cutouts for popping them out to watch. And, really, I’d have nowhere to put it.

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Daddy Humor, Footnoted

Playing outside, my son came to the back door and knocked. I opened the door and said, “Are you selling encyclopedias? Great! I’ve got a report due on the exploration of space!”

Because:

The child, born twenty years after the commercial, didn’t get it.

But my humor is not for his amusement; it is for mine.

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Brian’s Gym Trick of the Day

Whenever I’m doing sets at the gym, lifting tiny amounts of weight with great difficulty, I find myself counting the reps. I marvel at things like the number 3 and 4 and pause for a long while to reflect upon their essential nature in the cosmos, and I stop pushing or pulling because, man, those numbers are big and meaningful.

That is, when I count by ones, my effort tends to dwindle when I get to certain numbers in the set, and I stop a little earlier than I can.

The last couple of weeks, I’ve tried something different. Instead of counting by ones, I start counting my sets using multiples of another number. I start counting by fives, or I start counting by sixes. So I do 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36….

Doing it this way engages my brain as I go along, so I don’t get to about the sixth rep and think, Man, this bar is heavy. Instead, I’m worrying about remembering the next number in the sequence. Which leads me to get more reps in.

On the plus side, I get to tell people I only did 56 or 81 reps in the last set. Also, if I get to the multiple of 12 in a set, Mrs. Perkins will give me a gold star. On the other hand, once I get really good at my multiplication tables, the trick will lose its efficacy. Or I’ll start having to work with larger numbers until I memorize enough multiplication to get a job as a mentalist at the county fair.

And I can’t stop saying bro, bro.

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Memo for File

In advance of a pool party this weekend, we picked up a couple of theme-oriented pool noodles from the dollar store.

Each of which had this set of warnings on them:

Caution: This is not a lifesaving device. Do not leave child unattended while in use. Adult supervision required. Submerged product, once released, may propel out of water and strike face or eyes.

Retain information and keep for your records.

Do I file that under P for pool or N for noodle? I wish the instructions were more specific.

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Oh, Yes, I Did

So I dropped a couple items off at Trinity Church on Tuesday for the Lutherans for Life garage sale, and I discovered there that they had a couple of TI-99 4/As in the original box.

So you know I went up there today the minute the garage sale opened to buy my precious.

I haven’t hooked them up yet, but I’ll try them out soon and perhaps dig out a couple of cartridges from my stash. I’ll be the children would like to play Surround or Hustle.

I have to wonder about the story behind these two becoming available at the same time. A pair of TIs for a pair of siblings in the 1980s whose parents cleaned out the garage? Probably something like that.

And this means that I’m now at parity between TIs and Commodore 64s in the house as I have five of each (although a Commodore 128 means I’m still tipped to favor Commodores). In case you’re wondering what I’m going to do with them, my beautiful wife suggested that I display them all in my House on the Rock clubhouse. When I get insanely wealthy. Which I have a better chance of than finding an old Apple II variant at a garage sale in the 21st century.

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