Category: Life

When I’m doing cardio work, inside my head, I’m saying to myself, “I need to run.” And when I rest, I say to myself, “I need a doctor.”

It’s from this old Budweiser commercial:

You see, not all of my jokes require an understanding of Gabriel Marcel’s basic philosophy and software development.

Buy in bulk and pay more at Walmart:

That is, a two pack for $9.58 or two one packs for $9.56.

I don’t know if it’s Walmart setting these prices or Land o Lakes setting this price (for I’ve seen the same thing at the grocery store, where the one pound four stick pack is a couple cents more than the one pound eight one-half stick packs).

However, it does rely on a certain inability to do basic calculations to make it work.

Or haste. Or trusting that big packs are cheaper than small packs.

But still.

People call me cynical. I show you the world, and it is often as I expect.

Ross Douthat discovers something I learned eight years ago:

First, a critic’s confession: Since becoming a father, I can no longer quite trust my emotional reactions at the movies. Parenthood stretches the carapace around your feelings thin, makes the lump rise more quickly in your throat, turns the waterworks on even when the material is maudlin, cheap, heavy-handed. It makes you respond too willingly to the movies’ reliable, predictable tricks — the soaring score, the swooping camera, the child in peril, the unlooked-for reunion. Your critical faculties remain — your mind still knows what’s cornball, still recognizes manipulation — but your heart becomes a sucker.

To be honest, I’ve always been a wee bit sentimental so that brothers in danger kinds of tropes connected with me–for Pete’s sake, were I to admit I saw Legends of the Fall, I’d have to admit that the scene searching for the brother on a World War I battlefield filled me with near existential dread (and I don’t even talk to my brother(s) often enough).

But having children did something else to me entirely. I found myself with a lump in my throat singing patriotic songs to my children, and I also find the Stephen King child-in-jeopardy trope more gripping.

A cynical person on the Internet might say fatherhood is just a scam perpetuated by society on men to sell schmaltzy, sentimental music and movies.

But a father would not.

The current issue of Forbes Life has an article about a Manhattan hat store:

This is such a dead art that all of the people who know how to do it are actually dead,” jokes Ryan Wilde, the director of millinery at New York’s historic J.J. Hat Center, as she adjusts a bright orange fedora. “There’s no one to ask.”

But as the 34-year-old Wilde explains it, that’s half the fun of her work. Her decadelong career has been filled with experimentation and boundary pushing. “I love when a client walks in here and they’re like, “What can we do?’ ” she says. “ I like making it happen. I like challenging myself. I like being afraid to make something.”

The online article doesn’t include the photos that the magazine does, but, Heavens to Betsy, it almost makes me wish I lived in NYC just so I could go to that hat store.

Here in the Midwest, hat stores are pretty rare; there’s one I visited in Kansas City last year that’s good, and Donge’s used to be good in Milwaukee before it closed up.

I’m sure I have previously noted I’ll buy shirts off the rack and slacks and jeans from the stack at Walmart without trying them on, but if I get into a hat store, I have to try on pretty much every fedora in the store before selecting one after much consideration.

So perhaps it’s best I generally have to order hats by mail these days. The actual elapsed time including days of reviewing options and several go-rounds of ordering, trying, and returning is probably more efficient than me going into a hat shop and browsing.

We like to save a little money, or enjoy the illusion thereof, by buying refill bottles of window cleaning products at the local warehouse club store. However, each of the refill bottles comes with a spray bottle of its own as though you were that excited about the product that you were going to try it for the first time and buy a bunch of it.

And, being as I am, I can’t throw out a perfectly good spray bottle especially since there’s likely to be a small amount of cleaning agent in the bottle and I have the means to refill the bottle.

As such, we have six partially filled bottles of Windex in various locations throughout the house.

Including two in the master bathroom alone

Face it, I’ve got more Windex now than Nia Vardalos’s father. I’ve got enough freestanding Windex bottles that, if a hockey team showed up and wanted to do my windows and mirrors, they wouldn’t have to share bottles.

And the worst part?

The more bottles I have to refill, the faster I have to buy another refill bottle…and its attendant new spray bottle.

They are working together and reproducing in their own fashion, people. Wake up before the Windex army makes its final assault!

This isn’t the 21st century juvenile science fiction of the middle 1900s promised us. No, this is the 21st century of custom fashion surgical face masks:

Oh, how I laugh about it now. But in a couple years, when the 21st century resembles the 21st century promised to us by post-apocalyptic 1980s films, I might very well wish I had something like it.

When I say funny little hats and tight pants, of course you think mime, but in reality, mimes already laugh at those other people in funny hats and tight pants, serious bicyclists. Now, the serious bicyclists have someone to laugh at: Elliptigo riders:

It’s a bicycle with pedals that mimic the workings of an elliptical. And this ad indicates one is expected to ride this on the street. Heck, even serious road recumbent bike riders are looking at this and saying it goes against the laws of nature.

But it’s a real thing, apparently. Briefly.

Some of you are asking “Isn’t your wife a serious bicyclist?” This is true. However, it is also true that she does not look funny in tight clothing. Also, she looks cute in hats of any sort except martial arts sparring headgear, in which she looks cute and like she’s going to punch one in the throat.

The very things that irritate me most in the day-to-day living are the first things I forget tomorrow.

I just wish knowing this would make me less irritated today.

Amazon has a new benefit for its Prime members: Shipping costs.

With new Prime Pantry, people who receive free shipping with their Prime membership now get the chance to pay $6 shipping on a box of household staples.

A real reporter asked Amazon about it, and the Amazon spokesperson was a bit coy:

So I asked an Amazon spokeswoman to explain the program’s benefits to shoppers. She mentioned the exclusivity of the program — it’s only available to Prime members; the fact that you’re getting some heavy items delivered to your door; and that shoppers are getting “low prices on everyday essentials in everyday sizes.”

Uh huh. I’m willing to pay $6 shipping just because I’m one of the privileged few who pay an annual fee to get free shipping and then get the privilege to pay the shipping and handling.

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. Here’s another prediction: When that happens, I’ll no longer be a Prime member and I won’t shop on Amazon by default any more.

Back in the 1980s, which is well nigh 30 years ago, and since it’s before the Internet it might as well prehistoric, we would buy computer magazines with programs in them. And we’d type them in.

You see, storage for computers at the time was strange; you could have a floppy drive, you might have a cassette recorder where you recorded stuff to tape in audio beeps and boops that you could load back into the computer by playing the cassette, or you might not have any storage at all and your computer’s memory might go blank when you turned it off.

Oh, those were heady days. You could buy games and whatnot on disk or cartridge, but you could also buy a magazine with a bunch of programs in it and type them in yourself.

You see, we had no Internet back then. Heck, in the middle of the 1980s, we didn’t even have cable television down the gravel road I lived on. So there was a lot of time to type these things in, try to run them, and then hunt for typos. When you were done, you had something rudimentary that you would play once or twice and then stick on a disk and never play it again.

The magazines had their little helper programs, too, to help you with the program typing. Most had some sort of automatic checker program; you’d type in (and then save and load as needed). You’d then run that program and type the lines of the BASIC programs in the magazine within the helper program, and a little checksum would indicate if the line was horribly awry. Or they’d have a little BASIC program for loading machine language programs, so you could spend hours typing something like the above into the computer and (hopefully) have something interesting on the other end.

Man, I sure did have a lot of time on my hands as a young man, but I had no job, no where to go, no cable, a party line that prevented dial-up computer access, and a Commodore 128.

Now, as an old man, I still have those magazines stashed where I can get them quickly as well as a number of Commodores I could hook up to run the programs. As to the programs themselves, the ones I wanted to type in back in the day are still on their floppies with the C64s. If I had just a fraction of the time I had in my youth, I would dig them out to play with them again.

I’m pretty sure I have seen more rainbows in my five years at Nogglestead than I did in my life to that point.

I’ve mentioned before, or at least I think I have, that out in the country, you really see how the sunrise and sunset move north and south on the horizon during the seasons. Here, I know where to look for rainbows, too, because they display in the same place.

I’m sure there are motivational poster worth bits of life lessons here. That living in the country might alter your perceptions because you have distant horizons instead of buildings across the street and such. Unfortunately, these truths can be rendered twee in the repeating and the phrasing. One must experience for one’s self to get the meaning.

Robert A. Heinlein said:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

(See how I scored here.)

However, there’s a new gauge in town, and I like it a tad better:

Can you change oil. Tie knots. Build furniture. Cut grass. Drive a moving van. Rent a moving van. Build a suite of software regression tests. And, how do you react if your girlfriend said you remind her of the famous actor, [blank]. John Wayne. Clark Gable. Leonardo DiCaprio. Gary Cooper. Hugh Grant. Clint Eastwood. Tyrone Power. Russell Brand. Errol Flynn.

Holy cats, I can do all that stuff, especially the software regression test suites. And if my beautiful wife says I remind her of Cary Grant, well, I’m working on it.

Jack Baruth has a photo of a guitar he bought on eBay in its shipping container, which is a box with some peanuts that could not accommodate the guitar properly.

About fifteen years ago, I was embarking on my video game collecting bit (and by video games, I mean the full size arcade games, not just consoles and electronic games). I got my first two from eBay: A Thunderblade (which featured a suicide battery that has committed seppuku in the intervening fifteen years) and a bartop Trivia Whiz IV.

The Thunderblade came crated and strapped down, shipped via a freight service that required me to get a friend with a pickup truck and a strong back to pick it up at the airport. It was a professional job.

The Trivia Whiz, on the other hand….

It was shipped UPS heavyweight. In a cardboard box. With some bubblewrap pressed against the glass and wrapped with pallet wrap and a half box full of peanuts that had settled, of course.

It arrived with the whole heavy wood case akilter, especially the glass and framed front with the controls and glass that covered the monitor. I complained to the seller, who suggested that I take it up with UPS. I didn’t bother because the fault lie not in the shipping but the packing.

I did my best to straighten the case out, but it’s still a little wonky.

And it’s still cluttering one of my desks in my office. I should try it out one of these days to see if it still works.

Those were the only two games I bought off of eBay; the others I got at in person auctions. Video games are one of those things I’m wary of ordering online.

(Not that I’m planning to do that any time soon, honey. Although our youngest son has informed me there’s a spot of room in the office in front of the filing cabinet. I don’t need to open those drawers as much as I need another video game in my office.)

So as I was organizing my comic book collection (finally, at the age of forty-something), I came across a couple of sixteen year old playbills from a performance of David Hare’s Skylight at the St. Louis Reperatory Theater:

I have no recollection of this play.

The fact that I have two programs indicates I took my beautiful girlfriend to the play. Perhaps that’s why I don’t remember; the play was overshadowed by the woman with me.

I went to a lot of plays in the 1990s, first at college and then a few after I returned from college to Missouri. I saw the Norman Conquests five times: Round and Round the Garden, Living Together, and Table Manners (2x) in Milwaukee (with three different young ladies, I add) and once at the Chesterfield Community Theatre at the YMCA out in St. Louis County. I saw Sight Unseen and The Visit in Milwaukee during college along with some collegiate productions like The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I saw The Ghetto at the backdoor theater of the St. Louis Rep because I was kinda interested in the one young lady in it. I saw a play at St. Louis Community College-Meramec because I was dating a girl in the theatre program there. I saw Dancing at Lughnasa at the St. Louis Rep. Was that the winter one, where I took Amy on college break? I saw Picasso at Lapin Agile and some other oddity at the Clayton Community Theatre because my beautiful by then wife knew someone in the troupe. I also saw an awful lot of Ragged Blade Productions because I volunteered with that group. Well, I was at a lot of Ragged Blade Productions or rehearsals. Maybe I didn’t see that many plays there.

But Skylight? Even reviewing the rep’s production notes or the Wikipedia entry leaves me no closer to a memory.

I prefer to see this as a mark of my sophistication: That I have forgotten more play performances than most modern people can remember.

But it is probably more the case that I’m getting old and/or that I’m overwriting previously used blocks of memory with Imagine Dragons lyrics.