Category: Blogging

So I got this email from Amazon:

I guess by law they’re required to send me this notice that they’re going to just keep the, what, dollar? 30 cents? in that account.

But: It offers me no way to log in, and if I try, it indicates the account is closed. So I can’t log in and say, hey, I want my two dimes.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I made some money (not a lot; maybe a meal’s worth in 2006 dollars) from the Amazon Associates program when it first started, but they booted me when Missouri started wanting online retailers to collect tax, which Amazon resisted until it was ready and such a requirement worked against its competitors. Years later, I joined again when revamping this blog–one year, I went through all the archives imported from Blogspot/Blogger and updated the internal links to point to this blog instead of that one. At the same time, I updated all the affiliate links, hoping that some of the traffic to the old book reports might click through, but Amazon kicked me out again because the cost of administering my account by keeping it in a database somewhere was too expensive. So not only did they kick me out, but they’re keeping the last pennies I have in the account instead of turning them over to the state as unclaimed property, where I can roll them up in a claim sometime.

You know I’m on a bit of an Amazon tweehad, and this just reinforces it. If I need new record sleeves after my most recent record purchase or the next, I’ll go to Stick It In Your Ear Records. I will drive downtown and pay more (probably) just so I don’t order from Amazon.

Tam K. posted this the other day:

As you might know, having reviewed the state of the Nogglestead Library in 2026, I don’t actually have any books stacked on the floor currently, and I am sort of proud about how few I have blocking the view of the shiny, shiny things on the wall in the office. Although, truth be told, my closet still holds three boxes of books I received when my mother-in-law downsized several years ago.

However: Book sale season is approaching.

The post and the comments at Neo’s place entitled When the only lettuce was iceberg led me to some reflections.

In my home, when I was growing up, we used to have salad with dinner most nights, and that salad was iceberg lettuce and a few tomatoes and cucumbers. With Wishbone dressing. There was no thought of any other kind of salad until years later.

We didn’t have salad every night because we were poor, and probably because my mother was not much of a cook and my father’s, erm, not ready to be married ways meant he was not home that often for dinner. Was he? I don’t remember having dinner as a family when I was young. Sometimes, when he brought some game or, erm, poached dishes to the table. But not every night. But, yeah, if we had a salad, even into my college years when I was living in my father and his I’m a little more ready to be married this time wife, salad was torn iceberg lettuce with some tomatoes or onions, maybe cucumber.

Memory one-and-a-half: In those days, I was working as a produce clerk in the early 1990s, and the grocery store in transition where I worked had only a couple types of lettuce. Mostly iceberg, but a narrow assortment of red leaf, green leaf, endive, and maybe some Boston/bibb lettuce. We had almost as many selections of cooking greens, but it was a store in transition, and not on the way up. The produce section of the lesser grocery stores offer greater selections now, and I pity the poor checkout clerks who have to become familiar with that many more mops of foilage.

Memory one-and-three-quarters: One of the commenter mentions:

And as a post scriptum, I had a friend who wrote a hilarious essay for a newsletter about what a delicious treat he would make with a head of iceberg lettuce:

He would cut it in half, and holding one half in his hand, over a kitchen sink, he would cover the open side of the head of lettuce with catsup and devour it by the bite, adding new catsup when he had taken a bite.

Back in those days, a head of lettuce was relatively cheap–like thirty-nine or forty-nine cents ($2000 in 2027 dollars), and I would often just take one for a snack. I’d salt it if I had salt available, or just munch on it as-is. It caused quite a sensation when the wife of the famously literate Swedish mechanic asked me what I was eating as I traversed her back yard to the famous Iron Maiden fan Dave‘s house.

“It’s a head of lettuce,” I said. And she recounted the story to my family and Dave’s family several times, incredulous. But in those late teen years, anything that filled the belly was a boon.

Memory two: Another commentor replies:

Catsup? I rarely see that spelling. Is it a regional thing?

Ah, gentle reader. I myself held onto that spelling long into the 21st century.

Commentors on my Facebook post indicated I was wrong. But, in my defense, the Dillon’s grocery store had this on its signage even then. Of course, Dillon’s is gone, replaced by a King Cash Saver (briefly) that has turned into a Red Racks and auto parts store (I have been here long enough that I can talk about what things used to be, and sometimes natives don’t even remember).

I’m not sure how I spell it now. I don’t have course to write it much, and I’m never the one to add it to the shopping list. But I’m probably still on team Catsup.

So how many memories did Neo’s post trigger? Two, or four, or more?

He said:

“Depression People” wasn’t all old people, just some. You could tell by how they acted. They hoarded the tiniest resource. I remember seeing a box labeled “small bits of string” that had, you guessed it, small bits of string. It wasn’t a person who needed the bits for some logical reason, say a fly tying hobbyist. This was a person who’d been through The Great Depression. It created a desire to preserve things they might need. I remember other things; jars of buttons, dull needles, bent nails. All available for a song in the 1970’s. All carefully stored in case the “plenty” of 1970’s disappeared.

* * * *

Does some portion of each successive generation become “Depression People”?

I do not have a box labeled “bits of string”. I do have a bunch of campfire wood culled from old pallets. I’m damn near there aren’t I?

Who, me?

One of the reasons that I’m not making much headway on the garage is that I have so much stuff that I might use or repair someday, so I cannot throw it away today.

And AC talks about a broom that he didn’t want to get rid of. Ah, brother, I have not only a collection of brooms that do only an okay job and backup brooms that only do an okay job in the garage and a trashcan full of such tools in the shed, but when it comes time to retire them, I cut the broom handles off and save them for some unknown use in the future.

It was only three memes at View from the Porch, and yet I felt targeted.

Back around the turn of the century, I was a technical writer with prodigious output even though I am not a home-row touch-typist (even today).

One Friday afternoon, my password came to the end of its 90-day lifetime, so I changed the password last thing before I left (never do this on a Friday, by the way, nor install wonky software that requires a reboot and might brick your machine and you can’t remember what might have caused it come Monday morning).

On Monday, I was one of the first in the office as 7am start times were my wont back in the old days. I sat down in the empty office and tried to log in. I tried the password I thought I’d set on Friday afternoon, but it didn’t work. I tried again to see if I’d mistyped it. I slowed down and looked at every key as I typed it. Nothing.

So I waited in an empty office for two and a half hours for the hardware guy to come in to reset my password again. He then noticed that something was wrong with my keyboard. On Friday afternoon, after I left, El Guapo had popped off a couple of keys on my keyboard and had, anomg other things, had switched the n and m keys, and I was not a touch-typist, so I looked at them when I typed the password, and I was not familiar enough with keyboards to spot what was off. Oh, the laughs they had at my expense.

The story made it all the way to the C-Suite when the inside sales guy was on a trip to New York. Apparently, my name came up, and the originator of the Dosso Double-Snap (snapping one’s fingers twice when excited, a thing I still do today on occasion) told that story. Whereupon the company’s co-founder said, “He typed all that documentation with these fingers!” and wagged his index fingers in the air. To be honest, my method was kinda touch-typing, but not home row ASDF JKL;. I have gotten faster, and I can even type things I’m looking at, like book pages for book report quotes and whatnot. But, yeah, 3000+ pages of software manuals with mostly the first two fingers of each hand and the thumb sometimes for the space bar.

Jeez, Louise, I’ve seen references to fedora-wearing overly chivalrous young men (they say “M’lady” or “My lady,” see?) at Founding Questions, too, so I guess this is something of an archetype or more like a punchline, and when I see it, I cringe a bit inside. Literally, I figuratively cringe, not just recoil which is I guess what the kids these days mean when they say cringe.

Ah, gentle reader. I got my trenchcoat for Christmas 1993, and I got my first fedora a couple of weeks later at Donge’s down on Third Street in Milwaukee. I was more influenced by old movies with Bogart and Grant (still am, I’d like to think) than anything else–and fedoras had a brief resurgence amongst some people with television programs like Crime Story and The Hat Squad.

And, ah, yes, I did have an inflated sense of chivalry due to my exposure to medieval poetry and whatnot. So I would have been–and I was–that demonstrative in that fashion (one such story coming later). I suppose I affected a bit to portray a role to cover my natural shyness reticence. If you press me to admit it.

But, jeez Louise, I couldn’t have been following some pattern in popular culture from the 1980s? Certainly not from the John Hughes movies–I had not seen them yet. I WAS NOT DUCKY.

I’d like to think I was sui generis, but apparently not. Ah, me.

Meanwhile, this weekend, I got a new Alpine hat because I was at a German festival over in Lawrence County. I have reached an age, apparently having reached a half-C, where I think I might look okay in a stubby-brimmed hat. Also, it was a fund raiser, but there were not many opportunities to lay out greenbacks for the Lions Club and its endeavours, so I had to invent reasons to give.

But I still where my classic wide-brimmed fedora or wide-brimmed Panama hat out, so maybe not, m’lady.

There’s a third meme in the post, but I do not understand it. Otherwise, it might have been a trifecta of defensiveness. Or is it mocking my lack of understanding?

The whole world is not about me. But the Internet is.

Lileks today:

Anyway, I just remembered the name of the new place, the one that’s a cafe but also has COFFEE in its name in case you didn’t think the CAFE had COFFEE. The name?

BRIM

So I can’t wait until they open and I can walk in and ask if they have any coffee. It will also be tempting to say “Fill it to the rim,” and then have an expectant look on my face as I wait for everyone else to complete the catch phrase.

Which, of course, they won’t.

You can, can’t you?

I have been known to say, “Fill it to the rim. With grim.”

But I am a curmudgeon at best.

• The Commodore 64 Ultimate computer is the company’s first hardware release in over 30 years — pre-orders start at $299 (via Pixy at Ace of Spades HQ)
   
• A Funny Thing About Dave Barry, a review of Barry’s new memoir Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up (via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.com).

Unfortunately, we’re in the dead of summer, so no one is thinking what to get me for Christmas, my birthday, the anniversary, or Father’s Day. I’d put them on my Amazon Wishlist, but nobody in my family thinks of that. Oh, well. I can mark them here so when I’m motoring through my archives five years hence, I’ll remember them.

Meanwhile, my beautiful wife has a birthday coming up, and I’m not sure I have anything for her. Maybe I do. I should check the closet, and I should get out of the house and find more for her. And get onto my Christmas shopping.

On of the vacation days in May which we spent at home instead of the resort we’d booked, we went to a couple of game and card stores to make up to our youngest, the Pokémon speculator, for the fact that we didn’t go to any such in Branson. So we hit a few, and when we went to Meta Games up on Sunshine, I saw a big display for Pathfinder, but not much else.

I started to tell my beautiful wife that White Wolf Games were really big in the 1990s, but you hardly hear about them any more.

This weekend, Lake of Lerna started a series on the history of White Wolf Games which apparently are still, sort of, a thing.

Two things:

• It turns out the RPG section of Meta Games was on a wall we passed on our way out, not our way in, and it does indeed have some White Wolf Games.
• I’m not just turning into a referrer for Yakubian Ape’s Substack, but I do find his deep-dives into Millenial and Gen-Z culture interesting.