I am not the only one thinking about the upsides of inconvenience, it seems; there is even a term, frictionmaxxing, to describe the trend of people resisting the lulling ease of screens. On a Saturday morning when I do not have to help a friend move, I am in bed scrolling Instagram. One video features what appears to be an elder millennial saying that he wants the nineties back. He wants a VCR. He wants old-school arcade machines that you have to feed with quarters. He wants a Walkman and cassette tapes to put in said Walkman.
Yeah, sorry, don’t understand.
Number of video games that take quarters in my office right now: 2 (Trivia Whiz IV and Arkanoid). Nogglestead features many audiocassette players in the main stereo in the parlor, the unit I just put in my office, the radio in the storm room, the radio in the garage, and in the main vehicle of Nogglestead (my beautiful wife plays her favorite mixed tapes in it; I play old audiocourses, as you know). The Walkman? I think it’s in the office closet or a bin in the storeroom. VCR? I have one hooked up (although the last videocassette I watched was in March), and I have some backups in storage for when this one fails (spare DVD players, too, because their time is going.
I mean, I guess the original author was someone who never had these things. I am someone who has them and has never given them up.
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.
So, I have mentioned that my friend Dave sold me a nice stereo somewhere early in my college years, and I listened to it through college. But when I returned to my sainted mother’s house in House Springs after I graduated it, I didn’t need it because I wasn’t home that much to listen to music, and we had a console stereo inherited from my grandmother in the house. So I put the stereo in my mother’s annual garage sale, and it sold–to our family friend Pixie. Who reached out to me because I left the record Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd on the turntable while it sold. Did I want it back? Nah, I told her I should get the CD anyway, and I gave her the sleeve when I next saw her.
It took me probably twenty-five years to actually get the CD, but whatever. Fast forward to 2026.
Some years ago, when we were burning through Crosley/Victrola/Chinesium’s Choice all-in-one units with turntables we wore out, we wore out one such unit and let my oldest put it into his bedroom–he could still use the tape player, the CD player, Bluetooth, and radio. And he did for a while. But when he rearranged his room last year, he took the unit out and put it onto the donations stack in the garage.
This weekend, I was sorting the donations and tidying them up–we can actually, you know, donate them to a church fundraiser soon. And I came across this unit and thought, hey, some of the units we “burned out” might have been because I made that determination on Sunday mornings when spinning the Swedish Gospel Singers and thinking the first song sounded slow. Well, when playing it on a new and better turntable, it still sounded slow. So maybe I was getting rid of functional units.
So I repatriated this unit into my office and turned it on.
In a moment, I started hearing something from it, and I checked. The button was set to CD, and I ejected it to discover…. My son had left the CD of Dark Side of the Moon in it. I’m not sure if it’s the replacement I bought or if we had bought him his own copy, but….
Like father, like son.
Note: Not like mother, like son. I gather this crap up and donate it instead of having a garage sale because:
It’s a bother.
It would not net much.
I would not like to see how little other people value the things I divest myself of.
Donating it to the church yard sales means if we have second thoughts, we can buy back our stuff, cheap. This has happened. More than once.
I’ve successfully ushered Feline Fly Assassin to the Microsoft Store so it’s available to download and play on Windows.
Getting an app on the Microsoft Store is slightly more difficult than the Apple App Store because Microsoft has a Byzantine set of rules around accounts:
You have to be a Microsoft Partner, which means you have to have a parent account which Microsoft expects to be a major systems integrator or Azure Cloud player.
They expect your Partner account to be a corporation with a DUNS number.
Jeracor Group does not have a DUNS number.
Also, it cannot find Jeracor Group’s registration in the State of Missouri (it is).
If you somehow get through the Partner process (on a second try, I did), you need to use a personal account to upload apps.
Of course, my corporate account (Jeracor Group) was burned when I uninstalled the Microsoft Authenticator app from my phone.
So I created another one using an old Gmail testing account, but not a new Gmail account because the steps involved to create a Gmail account are crazy. What, I need to scan a QR code on a phone and then let it send a text message from my phone? How to make your security tighter: make it look suspicious.
Follow processes not unlike the Apple App Store to add details.
?
Success!
Seriously, the crap aligning the accounts took me several days. And I wasn’t sure that it worked until this morning–the app was stuck in the certification step even though it said it could take a few hours to three business days. It was almost three business days.
So, maybe I’ve got another avenue of revenue which might yield more than the almost $10 I’ve sold on the App Store.
You can download it here. Just 99 cents. Wotta deal!
Ah, gentle reader. I have mentioned that when my contracts get thin, I have extra time, and I often squander it (that post was a full-time position ago). I left that aforementioned full-time position sixteen months ago, and I’ve been cruising on a couple of contracts–one that I’ve worked on intermittently since that post in 2020 and one that engages me half time for six or seven week stretches. Well, the first has gone into remission for a bit, and the other went down to ten hours a week max billed for a role that really requires closer to the 20. So I have sent some finalish bills, and in the interim in this year and almost a half…..
I guess I have squandered a lot of time, again.
I guess I have been doing something–developing and releasing a number of apps which have sold in the double digits now (combined). But over the winter, I fell into the doomscrolling again–I would hit the job boards, read some blogs, and then after lunch I would refresh certain selected things and launch a game of Civ in the background.
So it occurred to me in the middle of the night one day last week that I could have learned to play guitar by now. As you might remember, gentle reader, I bought a guitar some years ago and took some lessons, but in those busier times, I didn’t have a lot of time to practice. So it sits in the corner of the office, gathering dust with a bass guitar I bought some years later some years ago now. If I had spent an hour or even a half hour on weekdays plucking at them, I probably could have learned to play something by now.
So as the spring begins, I’m resolved to tackle some things. I’ve started cleaning out the garage a bit. I’ve added some projects to Goal-Task-Chore, the app I developed for just such a purpose. And look at this:
My brother gave me that coffee table and end chairs in 1999 because I was into wood refinishing. Which means about that time I refinished something or other and wanted to do others–including a desk whose hardware I removed but never got to refinishing but instead have used as a desk in my office in all of the homes I’ve lived in since then without the hardware attached (and, as a matter of fact, I found one of the pieces of metal trim on the floor of the garage before my workbench when I was cleaning up over the weekend–no idea where the rest of it is). When I received this living room furniture, which he got tired of moving while he was in the Marine Corps, I broke it into individual pieces so I could stain them individually. And I broke one of the pieces when knocking the pieces with a rubber mallet.
And, gentle reader, I then moved those pieces from Sycamore Hills to Casinoport to Old Trees to Nogglestead, and they were on the bottom shelf of one of the plastic shelving units in the garage for fifteen years until last year when I started cleaning the garage and determined I would refinish them finally. Ah! But they remained unassembled and unrefinished because I could not find two of the cross-braces.
However, I found them as part of this weekend’s cleaning, and I glued the broken piece since I’m suddenly gluing a lot of furniture (and have many furniture/bar clamps all of a sudden). Today, I put them together for the first time in thirty years, and this weekend I shall begin stripping and sanding them, and….
Well, I’m not sure what I’ll do with them when I’m done. I’d thought about actually putting them in the living room, but now that I see them again, the end tables might be a little short. But, we will see.
And when they’re done or drying, maybe I’ll pick up the guitar.
Ah, gentle reader. I might have mentioned that I have been dabbling in poetry again for, what, the last six years? (I completed a poem six years ago which had taken me years to write it, they were the best years of my life; it was a beautiful song, but it ran too long–if you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05-wait, no, that wasn’t me, except that I finished that poem after having parts of it on a legal pad for years, unfinished.)
Anyway, so: I’ve been working on a poem about estate sales. Basically, it tells about how I used to haunt estate sales at old, dated houses (back around the turn of the century, I would spend Saturday mornings at estate sales and the other weeknights listing books, games, et cetera, that I bought on Ebay. But, now, after 16 years at Nogglestead with little change, I can understand why someone might have found their 1960s or 1970s home comfortable.
So I thought it would be two stanzas. But then I thought maybe a hinge stanza about my aunt who died in 2019, parceling out furniture while she was still alive. And I thought about it for a long time without really putting pen to paper, but considering it a bit, you know.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, I got the opportunity to go to the coffee shop for a little bit and put pen to paper. And, after another coffee shop visit a couple of days later, I had the hinge stanza. And when I got to the computer to add it to the official Word document, I discovered that I’d finished(ish) the first stanza last October. Jeez Louise, given this pacing, I’ll be lucky to finish the poem this year.
Ay, me. I am not breaking any land-speed records with these poems, and I’m certainly not a professional. But that’s okay; I’ve been reading a lot of The Complete Works of books, and even the best poets have a lot of chaff with their wheat (apologies to Leah Lathrom Wallace for stealing her chapbooks’ metaphor). Maybe I’ll just focus on the wheat. Which might well be just chaff.
I will be glad to exorcise this particular poem, however. Between a comment my wife made sometime ago (along the lines of her hoping to die before me so she doesn’t have to deal with all my stuff), the slow-motion end of Lileks’ marriage, including a downsizing sale (this weekend, in fact), and suddenly, I have been walking trhough my house like I was walking through my own estate sale. I mean, I have a lot of books, and my boys no longer like to read. The personal relics which were things my family members owned will mean little to them–they did not know much of my family. I have no urge to go to the book sales this year. I’m starting to get rid of the reified potential in my garage–I will donate some of the things to the new Lutheran High School thrift store if it gets off the ground. I brought in some wine glasses I’d bought to–I guess paint with stained glass paint, since three of them had masking tape around the lip line.
Hopefully, a combination of finishing this particular poem and maybe cleaning my garage a bit so I can do some project work in it will help fight the old ennui.
Ah, gentle reader. As you might have gleaned from the tone of the blog lately, I’ve been fighting vainly the old ennui. But last week, I had a magical moment which might have set things aright, or at least made things a little better.
My beautiful wife had submitted, almost off-handedly, a talk for the cybersecurity day in St. Louis’s Tech Week, and it was accepted. So we decided to make a little trip of it–instead of driving up early on the day of the conference, we went up the night before and stayed two nights. We ended up stationed about two blocks from where I worked when I was an executive at a marketing agency, so I spent a little time while she was in a woman’s event in the early evening walking around, trying to remember where things were. Was it this corner where Carlos with the grill sold me lunch (two brats, plain)? Is this coffee shop where the Starbucks used to be, our daily destination for work breaks? And so on. A lot has changed in the 20 years since I left that office. I walked back to the women’s tech event to escort my wife back to our hotel (“Did you walk with me just for safety?” she asked on the drive back home. Yes.)
The room was nice; I sent a picture to my oldest, and he wanted to know about the foot traffic. Not a lot–a pedestrian every block or so. The hotel is right by the convention center. There are some offices and residences down there, I guess, but the big office towers are a little to the north and the well-known loft district is a little to the west. So the foot traffic is less than what we encounter in Springfield in its more compact and destination downtown. Not too many homeless around–no tent cities, just a couple people wandering around, one guy sprawled outside the venue where her women in tech event was held–and an associate who was trying to rouse him. The pocket park outside the Old Post Office was packed with the indigent, and I picked up the cap from a nip bottle on the bottom of a shoe like a single tap for a couple dozen yards–but I didn’t feel unsafe, just wary.
And our hotel room: Ah, I don’t know whether it was developed as a hotel or was originally a loft building chopped into a hotel. Our room had high ceilings–12 or more feet–and floor to ceiling windows as two walls. Nice, but the southern exposure meant the room warmed up. No problem: Blackout drapes for the win. But it was really nice, although I often punched the wrong button at the elevator because the restaurant, fitness center, and pool were on the upper floors of the five-story building.
At any rate, what about Jim Manley?
Well, gentle reader, as you might not be aware, Jim Manley is a St. Louis trumpet player who gets played plenty on WSIE, which I stream on my computer most days. When I decided to tag along to this conference, I started checking the calendars of the local jazz artists, and–well, I didn’t get far because Manley plays weekly on Wednesday nights at Sasha’s Wine Bar in Clayton. As my wife plays trumpet, I thought this would be the right choice, and it was.
We took a rideshare from another Tech Week event to Clayton, arriving two hours early, and we told the waitress we were in no hurry as we were there for Jim Manley. So we had a leisurely dinner, and our server told us she’d reserved one of her tables where he would play. Sasha’s is a charming little shop, a jumble of rooms carved out of two buildings on Demun, and Manley played in a barroom with, I guess, a retractable roof, which came in handy. His first set started at 8:30.
It was a low-key thing; he was just the guy in the corner with a trio (he started without his drummer, who arrived fifteen minutes late and maybe intoxicated). The other people in the room continued their conversations; we had a large table of a ladies night out beside us. But we were front and center, with chairs the server had turned to face Jim Manley. Nobody else knew it was a Jim Manley concert..
As he played, storms started rolling in from the west; when I turned to glance at my wife, she was framed by flashes of sheet lightning behind her. In the middle of his set, a downpour provided its own percussion. God didn’t know it was a Jim Manley concert.
After his first set, my wife went to talk to him, and he was very gracious as they talked trumpets and then came over to talk to me was well. Because I knew it was a Jim Manley concert.
We took advantage of a brief interlude in the storm to head back to our hotel; as we began, the tornado sirens went off with a tornado warning. As St. Louis had a bad tornado rip through last year, no doubt they’re pushing that button a lot this year–it was the same after the Joplin tornado down here, where the weather people lit it up many times the next year or so, reverting to the mean (one or two a year, maybe) in more recent years.
And after a chapel service at the Lutheran seminary just a couple blocks form Sasha’s, we returned home.
I mean, people in Clayton can go see Jim Manley every Wednesday. But would I? I dunno. When we lived in Old Trees, we lived two blocks from the theater where the opera theater group and the St. Louis Rep play, but I haven’t been there in…. Almost thirty years? I guess we were in a different place then, with very young children, but…. Eh, who knows? Before children, I/we got around a little more. But now it’s fairly rare, although maybe we’ll get around the Springfield area more often. Or maybe (and probably more likely), this trip, like my “trip to see Janet Evra” in 2019, will just underline how I enjoy these little concerts. More than I did when I lived in St. Louis and could see a corner musician in a coffee shop all the time. Perhaps these experiences are more meaningful because they are excursions, expeditions, and not just part of the background noise of everyday life.
Ah, well. Jim Manley didn’t have an CDs for sale, so I didn’t get any autographed, and it looks like his most recent releases are download-only. So when I get a couple bucks, I’ll order a couple of older releases on CD. Until then, I’ll hear him on WSIE almost daily.
When I tried to release the third PhrazeMaze (Shakespeare) puzzle game, the app store balked and said it was spam. Instead of releasing individual apps which had a set of similar puzzles, they wanted me to release a game with in-app purchases for the game packs. So I have.
11 auto features that we miss (titled “The Good Old Ways: Many once-common features removed from today’s cars are now sorely missed in the AAA Explorer magazine from which I tore the article one evening).
They are:
Uncovered engines; after about 20 years, the list plastic pegs disappear, so they gradually become less covered over time.
Oil dipsticks; the newest car amongst us still has one, as the oldest kept seeing a warning light and tried to use the dipstick but ended up overfilling his oil.
Analog instruments; two of the three vehicles have spinning pointers, but they’re probably electronically determined.
Buttons, knobs, and levers; two of our three still have buttons for heating and radio and whatnot. To be honest, I don’t know about the newest vehicle because I don’t drive it. One of our three even has no screen.
Unconnected infotainment systems; one of them has a screen, but it does not play videos–although it will play DVDs’ audio, as I have learned, so I can listen to DVD lectures.
Full-size spare tires; one of the three does. Which means it has one more Tire Pressure Monitoring System sensors to report low pressure at odd moments.
Glorious color; Well, one of the three is not black or white.
CD players; at least two of the three do have it–and one has an audiocassette player. If we get a newer car, I will want a CD player installed as I have lots of audiocourses to get through yet.
Unpainted bumpers; yeah, no, all plastic and will total the cars if bumped.
Printed owner’s manual; at least two of the tree have them, and I’ve looked in one of those two in the last week (story forthcoming, maybe).
Drivers; we don’t have any of the new lane assist or blindspot warnings even. I work in tech. I’m not sure I’m going to ever have a self-driving car.
Yeah, I am not looking forward to getting a vehicle which is later than 2010, ever.
So, gentle reader, I am the sort of person who puts dryer sheets in with his laundry, especially during the winter months. And I have vacillated between the warehouse club’s house brand and Bounce name-brand dryer sheets for years. Depending upon how miserly I was feeling, mostly. But the last time I was in the market, I decided to go with Bounce because even though we run the laundry all day here, by the time we got to the bottom of a box of sheets, particularly the two-pack bundles we got, the sheets had lost most of their scent. So I went with the Bounce, and….
Wait a minute.
Instead of a two-pack of sheets, I got a single box here instead of two, and you’ve cut the size of the sheet about 20% but have put two of them together, perforated, so I have to tear them apart myself. And for the same low price?
Well, I guess if you’re going to do shrinkflation, it pays to add as many variables to the calculation as possible to try to obscure it as best you can.
Best of all, you’re doing this for my convenience.
Jeez, guys, am I getting more curmudgeonly, or merely posting the same amount of curmudgeonishness and cynicism more often? More value for you! If you value that sort of thing, I guess.
I stacked up the salvageable ones, which includes not only some heavily worn comics from my youth but also things that the boys got at The Comic Cave back in the day or things they bought at ABC Books, whether with gift cards they received or as a bribe for coming with me to the book shop (not that they had much choice ten and twelve years ago).
And…. some of these Bongo Simpsons Comics Explosion books. They’re flat-spined collections of comic strips(?).
I have a bit of a conundrum: Do I count them as books or comic books?
As you know, gentle reader, I have in the past counted collections of cartoons as books in my annual tally and generally subject you to my twee musings on what I’ve read. Not so with comic books. But, as I mentioned, these have flat spines. Like graphic novels. Which I have counted in the past.
So, if I count them as books, I can use them for blog fodder. And I can just put them on my bookshelves. If I count them as comics, I have to acquire some magazine-sized poly bags and figure out where to put them–my short boxes are comic sized. Maybe I need to get a magazine-sized box as well.
Oh, the dilemma!
Probably, though, I will bag them and store them with the comics. Not that it will make much different at estate sale time, but it will leave the room on the bookshelves for actual, you know, books.
This was the second time I drove myself there. The first time I did was back in 2022 when I took the Zed Drei, and on that occasion I stopped in Springfield, Missouri on the way home and fell in love with the twee little Holiday Inn right off I-44. It’s like a 5/8ths scale big city hotel, with an atrium and birdcage elevators and the works and if Springfield has an annual sci-fi con then this is where it happens and I’ll bet it’s adorable.
Missouri Comic Con is coming up in a week, and check out the guests. Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall, Jewel Staite, Alan Tudyk, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Vicki Lawrence (?)….
My boys are getting to be adults, and yet…. We have balls scattered around the fields of Nogglestead.
It was worse a couple of weekends ago; they had a friend over and played a variety of lightweight sports in the yard, including football and wiffleball. So I had to bring in a couple of gloves before the rain, and some equipment and/or the lightly-weighted professional folder that the oldest is supposed to be giving away to businesses about the company he is doing business development for…. That might have gotten blown away in the storms.
Ah, someday, and very soon now, they will be gone, and things will be where we leave them, and balls will not inexplicably erupt in various locations.
But, also perhaps soon, grandchildren might have the same effect.
Heaven help me (too late), but I suspect I will be a better grandfather than father. Although if my boys produce girls, who knows? I do not have experience with them.
Little Missmiss was nothing but a 野良猫, a noraneko, a stray cat on the streets when she was adopted into the International Fly Assassins Organization (IFAO).
There, she endured many years of brutal training montages to hone her skills in leaping, parkour, and swatting before she was ready for her first assignment.
And here it is: She is to rid her new adopted home of all intruding flies.
Help Little Missmiss in her efforts by tapping to leap onto the furniture and to leap to swat the flies in each room.
Jeez, that one was a long time coming, and then a short time realizing.
I had the idea for this game a long time ago–what, a decade? I read about a new platform for building games–GameSalad, which debuted in 2010, and I had this idea–I created an account, and then I got started with animating the cat, and I got…. One or two frames into it and abandoned it.
In 2026, it took about three weeks of prompting LLMs for everything from the graphics to the physics behind leaping and landing and swatting.
At any rate, if you have an iPad or iPhone, it’s under a buck here. It’s rated 13+ because of the cartoonish violence in it–a cartoon cat swatting a cartoon fly. I called that cartoonish violence in the age ratings wizard because I didn’t want to end up in the Hague because some Austrian toddler saw that and started torturing flies like he saw in the game. Where the flies are NOT tortured; they’re merely swatted.
I spent about 20 minutes yesterday installing Linux Mint on an old, out-of-date Mac Mini as I mentioned. It’s an older model without a wireless adapter, so I had to connect it to the Internet via network cable. I stretched an overly long for the distance piece of Cat5 cable between the little box and the hub under the desk, and…. It could not find the network.
So I spent a couple hours today going through forums, asking the clankers, and typing Linux commands to troubleshoot the connection.
And then I thought, huh, I what if I just connect it directly to the router on the hutch? The cable run is about the same. So I did, and it worked.
Well! Good to put my A+ Certification to use. I know, I know! A+ is computer hardware. But about the time I got that certificate 25 years ago, I was still taking networking classes, too. I did not put them to work (have not had to rely on them for a living yet), but I’ve built computers and pulled cables/crimped connectors. But, in the intervening time, I’ve gotten old less practiced in it.
So: Now I have another Linux box (the other is a developer-caliber machine with 32Gb of RAM, for example).
What should I do with them?
The funny thing about having a testing lab here is having so many devices that one only uses sporadically.
So after writing the post yesterday about old Commodore computers and magazines, I actually dug into my closet to see if I had the issue of Compute!’s Gazette that Tech Shepherd mentioned (I do not, at least not at this cursory review).
I did, however, find the Mac Mini that I’d recently (well, a couple years ago, recent in old-timer years) replaced because it would not update. And it had it’s power cord right atop it. So I wondered…. Could I put Linux on it?
I have two USBs on my desk with bootable Linux distros for installation. Mint and Ubuntu. Because we retired a couple of laptops, and when I got my new big box (what, almost a year ago?), I put Mint on the old box (and solved its cranky sound and it needing 45 minutes to boot, so undoubtedly some crypto mining was lost in this event). And I had Kubuntu on a USB drive because we had a finicky HP laptop…. Where has that gone?
At any rate, I went into the storeroom and its cable bins, and, brushing aside the tangles of VGA cables, DVI cables, KVM cables, PS/2 extenders, and other assorted cables and many, many video switchers and KVM switches, I found an HDMI cable to plug it in. So I…. Installed Linux on it.
Well, mostly. I’ve swapped a wireless keyboard and mouse combo from another machine (I need to get a couple more wireless laptop/mouse combos, or I need to find a wireless KVM switch somewhere–I probably have enough adapters to use a PS/2 and VGA KVM, actually…. Let me go back into the store room….) But! The old Mac Mini does not have a wireless networking… chip? Too small for a card.
So I will have to go back into the store room for a networking cable to stretch to the hub. I do have a couple, and maybe a crossover cable or two, but, ah! I have given up the kilometer box of Cat5 cable and the connectors I bought around the turn of the century when I thought I might go into networking. Given the nature of the QA job market, I still might. But the network cables I have are probably a little out-of-date. Ah, but so is my equipment! And, maybe, so am I!
As you might know, gentle reader, for major pieces of wall art, I’ve favored prints of master works from, er, the masters, starting with three prints I bought in college on a fresh new credit card in 1990 (The Man with the Golden Helmet by Rembrandt, Christina’s World by Wyeth, and A Saturday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat) which I got a deal on (3 for $18–and by the time we paid them off, in probably a decade later if we consider the money paid to the credit company first-in, first out, we probably paid $100 each for them including interest). Or personal relics which were gifts and/or inherited from family members now likely departed. My beautiful wife, however, favors consumer art which is mass-produced art of a topical theme, whether it’s the mere decorative squares and textures, Mediterranean landscapes, or Mediterranean cafes.
We have two such works in the bedroom, and, gentle reader, they are the same picture.
Cafe facing out: ✔
Alley upstage right: ✔
Shopfront on right facing left: ✔
Covered cafe tables: ✔
Flowers: ✔
Awnings: ✔
Basically, the artistic expression difference is packed dirt vs cobblestones, ainna?
Ah, I cannot talk; I inherited two H. Hargrove prints from my aunt and then bought another at a garage sale, and we still have two on the walls (one has been stored to make room for one of the cafes above). So they come from a personal relic source and not just a catalog or home goods retailer.
Because I like to look at them and think about them, not just have them as visual background music. But maybe that’s just me.
Well, after watching all those Bruce Lee movies, I planned to go into my martial arts class yesterday morning and say that I’d watched them and picked up some bad new habits for sparring:
A lot of kung fu kata peacocking between strikes.
Happy feet making like Irish dancing before beginning.
Making single strikes instead of combinations, and making them big so the people in the last row can see them.
Using my forearm to block everything: Spin heel kicks, bo staffs, sticks, speeding trucks, anything. And the forearm stops them cold.
Hooting when I strike. You’re supposed to exhale to tighten everything up, which leads to the “hi-ya!” Which my school has seemingly stopped emphasizing. As it stands, I already make martial arts sound effects a lot of times when I strike.
Thumbing my nose mid-bout. Although it will be harder to do with boxing gloves on.
At any rate, I didn’t get to lay the spiel on anyone since renshi asked me what I was listening to (my question to him often is “What are you listening to?” because, in the past, he’s been in charge of the martial arts playlist and picked out metal). So I had to talk about the new Frozen Crown CD instead.
And, as part of our warmups, we had to run to the edge of the mat, do a couple pushups, and then run back. Across the room, kyoshi joked with someone about doing them on fingertips like Bruce Lee, so down on my side of the mat, I tried it. And I could.
So that has been delighting me and bringing a smile to my face since. Because, you know, I am just like Bruce Lee. Although I will likely never get to one finger pushups because I do not have kung fu hands.
And, the same day, I was listening to my workout playlist whilst dusting the lower level, and Eminem’s “Monster” came on, and it mentions Bruce Lee.
Fame made me a balloon ’cause my ego inflated
When I blew, see, but it was confusing
‘Cause all I wanted to do is be the Bruce Lee of loose leaf
Again, it’s an illustration about how outsized an influence Bruce Lee had. The man only made a couple of movies, but what an impact on the culture that he’s mentioned fifty-some years later in a martial arts class.
Milwaukee’s Red Arrow Park could undergo big changes – including replacing its skating rink with a “skating ribbon” running throughout much of the small downtown park.
Not sure how that’s an improvement over a traditional skating rink, but.
You know, I have good memories of that park. I might have been taken there ice skating with my aunt and uncle when my brother and I were very young. I do remember sitting in the coffee shop next to the park on a couple of occasions in the winter, with a fire roaring in its fireplace, watching the skaters. I probably started a poem about it, once. When I was young.
My beautiful wife had submitted, almost off-handedly, a talk for the cybersecurity day in St. Louis’s Tech Week, and it was accepted. So we decided to make a little trip of it–instead of driving up early on the day of the conference, we went up the night before and stayed two nights. We ended up stationed about two blocks from where I worked when I was an executive at a marketing agency, so I spent a little time while she was in a woman’s event in the early evening walking around, trying to remember where things were. Was it this corner where Carlos with the grill sold me lunch (two brats, plain)? Is this coffee shop where the Starbucks used to be, our daily destination for work breaks? And so on. A lot has changed in the 20 years since I left that office. I walked back to the women’s tech event to escort my wife back to our hotel (“Did you walk with me just for safety?” she asked on the drive back home. Yes.)
So, gentle reader, I am the sort of person who puts dryer sheets in with his laundry, especially during the winter months. And I have vacillated between the warehouse club’s house brand and Bounce name-brand dryer sheets for years. Depending upon how miserly I was feeling, mostly. But the last time I was in the market, I decided to go with Bounce because even though we run the laundry all day here, by the time we got to the bottom of a box of sheets, particularly the two-pack bundles we got, the sheets had lost most of their scent. So I went with the Bounce, and….
