Category: Life

In a low trust society, every four way stop becomes a Mexican standoff.

Which is not much different from what they are today, which is a standoff of people waving at each other to go first.

I’m not crazy; I’m talking to the Large Language Models getting trained by all the apps that have turned my phone’s microphone and/or camera on without my permission.

And remember, gentle reader; it’s not that your phone is listening to you; it’s that the phones and so many other devices belonging to other people are also listening to you.

So the day after Christmas, the heating elements in our oven went out (for the third time since we’ve lived here). In the past, we’ve called an appliance repairman, a local company (not a lead generation company of any sort, although I guess most anyone now is a dispatcher for subcontractors unless the same guy answers the phone that shows up), he has ordered a part, and he’s come back to put it in when it arrived. Apparently, it’s two screws and two electric connectors, so this time, since I’m more seasoned now with washer, dryer, and refrigerator repairs, I thought I would maybe do it myself.

So I ordered a part from a seller on Amazon, not fulfilled by Amazon, and:

To be clear: Apparently, this part shipped from St. Louis, Missouri, two days later (December 28), and:

• Arrived and left the carrier facility in St. Louis twice.
• Arrived in Kansas City on January 1, and then left the facility twice.
• Arrived in Springfield facility January 2, last Thursday, twice.

And there it sits. It is still scheduled to arrive by Wednesday, after I ordered it and twelve days since it shipped from St. Louis. Which is a three hour drive away. For some reason, it was routed through Kansas City for a week.

Criminey, I hope it’s the right part. The males in the house are missing their frozen pizzas.

And you know what else I’ve gotten this year? A couple of returned Christmas cards with this label:

What does that even mean? I would have thought I scrawled the address incorrectly, perhaps put the zip code from the wrong line on an envelope so it didn’t match the street address or the city and state, but…. No, these were the proper addresses, and Internet maps indicate they have not been bulldozed for new roads. So what gives? No clue. Maybe the Post Office’s new AI scanners (I just made that up but now looking at it, I see they are).

Meanwhile, the current Postmaster General responds to criticism like this:

That’s him. In Congress. Responding to criticism. Man, he sure trolled those Republicans, ainna? Benjamin Franklin, he is not.

Hey, I understand that the Post Office has many fiscal challenges. Public pensions, public employees, and diminishing use of the post. But it’s not helping things by adding Sunday delivery to accommodate Amazon (and then lose a bunch of that revenue when builds out its logistical network). Or extending first class mail delivery times to, what, a week now? Combined with the fact that apparently my creditors don’t send their bills until a week before the bills are due, well, even I am not mailing many checks these days.

Jeez, Louise. I hope it’s the right part.

Ah, behavioral economics is not just for humans anymore. Now it can just be made real by algorithms.

I’ve been following Scott Walker on Facebook since he was a governor (and should have been a presidential nominee in 2012).

Anti-Scott Walker random posts? I’ve been ‘following’ them since Facebook decided I need to see them as a preface.

And, to be honest, I’m not sure why I’m still seeing Scott Walker prominently in my Facebook feed. Because he posts about the Packers? I have no clue.

But feel free to discuss amongst yourselves or to think amongst yourselves whether it’s predictable or not that the person with the handwritten note has to long-term borrow a vehicle from a parent.

Oh, one presumes so much.

For some reason, I get a lot of “Actors Then And Now” recommended posts on Facebook. And occasionally, I get one where the “now” picture is of an actor who has been dead for a number of years.

Anyfulekno Corey Haim died in 2010.

But the AI? Nah, it’s more fool than any human fool.

Weird, ainna, that presumably paying customers can post incorrect info without getting any warning or blocking or whatnot. Because that’s how the money is made.

It’s like the twelve days of Christmas, except:

2: Number of lamps my mother-in-law sent over because they weren’t working.
1: Number of lamps more broken than when they were received.
1: Number of electric shocks received (so far).
0: Number of lamps repaired.

They’re old touch lamps, and they were not working (as reported to me). I took one out and put a bulb in it. It was permanently on, apparently. So, no problem. I would just replace the socket with a turn switch socket.

Except! The socket is not easily interchangeable; the base and insulation sleeve of the existing lamp are designed for a lamp which does not have a switch, and the base attached to the threaded tube doesn’t seem to come off easily. When I gripped it with a pliers to turn it to try to loosen it, I broke the base attached to the lamp. Almost enough to fit the turning switch into it, but not quite.

So what to do?

Leave it partially assembled on my work bench for months or years is the way to bet.

By the way, the design above is available for purchase along with many other designs you can see on Nico Sez. They make great Christmas gifts, I hope, as everyone is getting a Nico Sez shirt for Christmas.

UPDATE: Uncharacteristically for me, after walking off a bit of frustration, I went back and determined that the base, broken as it was had to unscrew from the threaded tube somehow. So I gripped it with the pliers, a couple of different pairs, actually, and it broke off until I managed to actually break off the threaded part as well. The base from the replacement socket threaded right on, and within minutes I had the socket wired up and I’d similarly taken apart the other lamp, broken off the other base, and replaced its socket as well.

Sometimes, you have to break something to fix it. Advice I need to remember sometimes along with what would a professional do? (which is often to make additional cuts or holes in the wall to make things easier trusting in their ability to patch drywall or make those fixes in addition to whatever I’m trying vainly to fix without the additional steps).

When I announced my triumph to my beautiful wife, she said her mother would have wanted the touch functionality repaired, as she would have a hard time bending and turning the switch by the bulb. Oh. Well, I guess we have two new lamps for Christmas.

UPDATE 2: Moments later, Facebook weighs in with its assessment of my electrical repair skills:

Thanks, I need that vote of confidence from dubious algorithms.

I have posted about the Christmas Straggler for over a decade now. It’s generally a single Christmas decoration overlooked when packing up after Christmas which gets overlooked, and it does seem to happen every year. My posts generally occur in January or February. I don’t know how that reflects upon my housekeeping skills in the past, but I’m still mostly doing the housekeeping grind, although the lower level is only getting a full cleaning every two or three weeks–which means that anything I find whilst dusting this year I will report in…. January or February. So whatever the timing of my posts say about our housekeeping, I guess it will say it again.

But, gentle reader, this is the winningest Christmas Straggler ever, so far. Maybe.

We rearrange the living room slightly for Christmas. We turn the sofa so that one edge of it touches the wall and it faces the fireplace and the corner where the tree goes. This is not on the lower level, where we slightly rotate the furniture every decade or so; this is the main level with the record shelves and console stereo. When we first moved in, the sofa was this way all the time, and we had a television in the corner and a toy box behind the sofa (and generally toys all over the floor to better inventory them). When the boys grew older and got access to the lower level, we rotated the sofa so its back was against the wall and the mostly unused 22″ television is off to the side. We only rotate the sofa now for Christmas.

At any rate, I got the trees out this weekend, and moved the end table and little flower arrangement that hides the unused coax port on the wall, and….

That is one of the fake Christmas tree needles which has somehow lurked in the corner of the living room since…. Well, I don’t exactly know when.

Now, when we pack up after the holiday, we vacuum thoroughly where the tree was and where the sofa is going to go against the wall for the next 10.5 months. And we do vacuum the living room regularly–my son does it weekly, and I’ve done it a time or two over the course of the year. I’ve swept and Swiffered the tile in front of the firebox a couple of times over the year. I even cleaned out the firebox once this year (we don’t use that fireplace as its mantel is too close to the firebox and it lacks anything but a portable screen before it).

So where do these needles come from? Are they caught under the baseboards? Up the chimney waiting for a downdraft? In some nook in the sofa until they’re shaken out?

I have no idea, but every once in a while, one of these little plastic needles emerges, whether on the main level or on the lower level where we also have a tree.

Just to mock our housekeeping practices.

Or, I suppose, I could reframe it and think it’s just to give us a little bit of Christmas often in the middle of the year.

But, I suppose that it does our indict our housekeeping in that although I saw that needle on Saturday afternoon, it was just during the composition of the post this morning that I went upstairs to pick it up. Although in my defense, the youngest was supposed to vacuum that room on Sunday but had other pressing matters–playing football with his brother and going to the gym–and I cannot help but note that now that I have assembled the tree, the carpet beneath it has many more fake needles now. Which are undoubtedly crawling to their years-long hiding places even as I am not watching.

Jeez, I must bore people telling everyone the same thing over and over again.

Instapundit posts:

SO MANY DRAMATIC WEATHER TERMS THESE DAYS: Expert: ‘Bomb Cyclone’ Pounding The US Will Be Strong And Unpredictable.

We used to just call them winter storms, or blizzards.

Man, I’ve posted:

• The 21st Century, Where All Weather Is Above Average (2019)
• Sounds Better Than A Bomb Cyclone, Anyway (2020)
• Come On, We Need To Call It Something Scarier (2021)
• ‘Bomb Cyclone’ Is So 2019 (2022)

What, I didn’t harp on it last year? Was the weather really that mild? I dunno. That was all the way last year, and this year has been a long one.

But, unlike weather personalities, maybe I should learn a new schtick.

When I watched Shanghai Knights two years ago, I mentioned that I had not watched this film. So when I came across it at a church rummage sale this summer, I picked it up. And as I’ve been working evenings on my part-time contract of late, I haven’t had much chance to watch films. But I thought I’d watch one last weekend, and so I did.

So: The high-level plot of the film is that Chan’s Chon Wang is an imperial guard for the Chinese emperor with his eyes on the princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) who does not want to marry the man selected for her. She runs away with her tutor, who leaves behind a ransom note–instead of actually running away, she is being kidnapped–and she is delivered to an exiled former imperial guard running a set of Chinese laborers in slave conditions in Nevada. Three current members of the imperial guard are sent to America with a ransom, and Chon Wang gets sent along with them–the higher ups hope the foreign barbarians will relieve them of Wang.

When he gets to America, Wilson’s Roy O’Bannon leads a band of outlaws to rob a train. The new guy in the gang kills Wang’s uncle, the interpreter for the imperial guards and who let Wang come along. It leads to a train-borne Jackie Chan fight and to a couple of encounters between the characters where each is at an advantage to the other, but they eventually team up after another Jackie Chan barroom brawl. They team up to find the princess (and maybe to get the gold), and then a couple of set pieces involving a native American woman that Wang married by mistake who rescues them from several predicaments, and they get the girls and the gold. finis!

An amusing film. I cannot help but note that in the film, the bad guys are not Westerners trying to steal China’s heritage and treasures (which is so many Chinese-influenced or Chinese-financed East Meets West films of the last, what, forty years?). So that was nice. And it did have Lucy Liu in it.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Shanghai Noon (2000)” →

On Monday night, my beautiful wife and I were talking about an upcoming Christmas-themed trivia night, and I was not enthusiastic about it as my Christmas trivia is probably wanting. After all, at the Thanksgiving potluck last Sunday, they offered Thanksgiving-themed trivia, and I/we only got 70% of the questions right (the other couple from the North Side Mindflayers were on their own and did better, but they do carry the team in actual trivia nights).

So Monday night, I said that the best that I could hope for was to be asked in what films now-standard Christmas songs appeared, and I mentioned that “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” appeared in Meet Me In St. Louis (which I watched last year).

And suddenly, Facebook was all like….

Because of course it was. But then St. Louis Magazine was all like….

St. Louis Magazine is listening to me, too?

So I briefly thought maybe it was just a news story that Facebook thought I would be interested in because Facebook reads my blog and knows I just saw the film and is maybe not listening to the keystrokes forming this post even now.

But that’s just what they want me to think.

Coincidence starts with the same letters as COINTELPRO. C’mon, wake up!

At Powerline, the post is entitled The high cost of low-heeled joy.

I know, gentle reader, you get the allusion, but I will quote the post for those who reach this site via Internet search. I need all the Traffic I can get:

Someone may want to rewrite Traffic’s look at the dark side of the music business (I think) in “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” to cover Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Something like “The High Cost of Low-Heeled Joy” might work.

Ah, c’mon, man, are you even a blogger? You could have gone with The High Cost of Round-Heeled Joy to get the Shakespearean-era allusion in there and to cast aspersions on the political candidate’s alleged sordid sexual history. Shakespeare + Traffic in the same blog post? The ticket to mad hits and .000000018 cents in ad revenue, baby!

Ay, me.

You know, I was too young to know Traffic in its heyday, but when I was a bagger…. Oh, I’ve told that story before, the last time someone on the Internet alluded to it (probably).

After 21 years in blogging, gentle reader, I am bound to repeat myself in my dotage. You are very polite to keep coming back and listening politely or perhaps scrolling past grampa telling the same story again.

So on my way to market today, I heard “You Keep Me Hanging On” on the radio, the local robostation that places the greatest hits of 80s, 90s, and whatever from its home computer office in a shack somewhere in Iowa or something, and I tried to remember who sang it.

“Kim Wilde,” I thought. “No, wait, Kim Wilde did ‘Bette Davis Eyes’. Who was it?”

That’s a warm up for my self-doubting dithering that has become a hallmark of my Trivia Night answers. The moment where I confused myself and changed my answer from “Unchained Melody” to “Unchained Medley” and tried to convince my team to change the team answer in the exaggerated earnestness of the truly, pathetically mistaken and prepared to be only a little smug when we got it wrong and to have lost by only a point thwarted by the sound-minded team members, and we ended up winning by a couple of points….

Anyway, it is Kim Wilde who sang “You Keep Me Hanging On” forty years ago:

And you probably already know it was Kim Carnes who sang “Bette Davis Eyes”:

Which is why the North Side Mind Flayers would like to contact you to replace me.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What is important, forty years later: Kim Wilde or Kim Carnes?

Ah, gentle reader, as you might know–as my analyst would, should I ever get an analyst to pick an answer from all the things which I conceive could be wrong with me from my earliest days–I do not favor blondes with long faces probably because they remind me of my sainted mother. So I’ll have to go Kim Wilde here.

Gentle reader, only minutes elapsed between my post yesterday when I said my cat Foot grunted like a (pet) rabbit and the appearance of rabbit-themed posts on my Facebook feed.

The eyes of Truth are always watching you.

And so are the eyes of Facebook, apparently.

On this day in 2014, I posted:

Some of my behavior leaves my cats absolutely meowless.

Although the current crop does not actually meow anyway. Chimera cries and makes this weird gasping sound like he can’t even; Isis trills; Nico squeaks; Muad’Dib trills a little and raaars; well, I guess Cisco does sort of meow. And two of our relatively recent departures, Foot and Athena, did not meow either. Foot grunted like a rabbit, and Athena made this hideous sound like the pterodactyl in the video game Joust.

What are we doing to these poor cats to make them unable to speak the language ascribed to them by cartoons?

Was it only last year where I bought and placed a little resin Santa on the upstairs mantel to see if anyone noticed? Man, it has been a long year. I guess that’s why I feel as though I have aged so much, although partly that has been not hitting the gym or the dojo often enough.

At any rate, I decided that I would keep the tradition alive (although I honestly thought I’d skipped a year–I mean, this year has gone on forever–in 2024, the days were long, but the year was also long), and I looked for a cheap tchotchke at the Walmart. I found one that was under $2 which is good because I no longer have a fulltime job and am not sure if when I’ll get another.

Behold, the 2024 Christmas Pre-Straggler:

A little snow-covered church. A part of what looks like could be a little tealight-fitting village set which means I can collect them all over the course of years.

As with last year, I have just quietly placed it on the mantel, and we will see if anyone notices.

I might keep the tradition alive next year, but the year after that, the only anyone who might reside here to notice besides me might be my beautiful wife. Unlikely, but possible.

Also, “pre-straggler” is probably not the word I am looking for. I should probably think of something else. But I do have a whole year to mull that over.