Category: Life

I opened a bookshop. It was the best, worst thing I’ve ever done:

January 2025
Slate-grey skies and relentless rural gloom. The Wiltshire idyll that my husband and I moved our young family to 15 years ago entirely loses its charm at this time of year. I long for London. For high heels on pavements. For culture around every corner. I head to the butcher in Tisbury, a picturesque, largely independent high street between Shaftesbury and Salisbury, to buy something cheering for dinner. And that is when I see it: the three arched windows of the shop opposite, formerly a gift shop full of cotton nightdresses and the type of wooden toys no child ever wants to play with, a “For Sale” sign hanging outside.

February
“A bookshop?” says the solicitor we have instructed with the conveyancing of the purchase. “Lovely, romantic idea. You’ll go under in a year.”

I read The Bookshop in 2021 and saw the film in June.

My beautiful wife’s barometer and comfort level with the idea of opening or acquiring a book store waxes and wanes. Given our current fiscal situation, it’s definitely not in a gibbous state.

God, I hate this song.

I am pretty sure I hate most of John Lennon’s oeuvre, especially if it’s not with the Beatles (and I’m not that much of a Beatles fan either).

I find the sentiment artificial and cloying, and I also tend to feel a stinging indictment that I’ve mostly frittered away another year, that I have continued to squander my inheritance that I’ve been given, and that the next year will probably be more of the same.

I did have some accomplishments this year:

• I got to the rank of 3rd degree black belt in martial arts (but I’ve been very intermittent in attendance since last January).
• I did manage to get three apps into the Apple App Store (Boxing Drill Companion, Dr. Franklin’s Art of Virtue Tracker, and Nico’s Kitty Translator).
• I had two poems appear in a university publication (the Green Hills Literary Lantern).
• I have four poems submitted to a major, actual print, magazine, and they have not been rejected in seven months.

  

I mean, I guess that’s a couple of things to hang one’s hat on, conversation starters and whatnot, but some other numbers are less encouraging.

• I “applied” for 1,035 jobs this year, of which I received…
• 26 responses requesting more information, assessments, or scheduling screener interviews, wherein…
• I talked to actual people at 9 companies, mostly screeners, but…
• 2 times I went deep into the interview process and got…
• 1 job offer in February, contingent on contract award in April. Given how the times have a-changed, there’s no telling if that contract was awarded. I liked my chances elsewhere, though, although this seems to have been an overly optimistic view of the market and/or my salability.

I have been blessed to have two part-time, sometimes, contracts to provide some income, although it’s frankly only enough to cover COBRA health benefits now. One of the contracts, though, requires me to be available a lot of the time but I only get to bill when I’m responding to needs. Which has left me feeling chained to my desk for many days over the year. And it has night meetings, which means I’m “on” until 8:30 or so at night, which leaves me little time for reading. I’m lucky to have it; it’s one of the few job offers I’ve had in the late over-the-transom period of applying on the Internet.

So, what am I going to do differently in 2026 to improve my lot? Probably not a lot, gentle reader.

I haven’t had “New Years Resolutions,” but I have tried to pin some themes on the years. Things to focus on improving, so to speak. The theme for 2024, for example, was “Focus.” I realized I was a little busy-minded, especially when reading at night, where I was constantly checking the Internet for this or that on my phone when I was supposed to be reading. So I worked hard to resist that urge to respond to a text until the end of a chapter or to not look up something when it occurred to me. I did okay at that one.

This year, the goal was “Industry.” Given my employment situation, I wanted to make sure that I spent the time at my computer and other daytime hours in a productive fashion. Well, kinda, especially early in the year. But my Industry yielded few sales of apps, which discouraged me, so, yeah, the latter part of this year has been less industrious.

Next year, though: “Get the hell away from the desk.” It’s not one word and not very snappy, but it will probably do a lot for me. One of the things that I’ve been proud of going into my fifties has been how sort-of athletic I am and how healthy I am, and the latter part of 2025 has seen me relinquish that day by day. Plus, I really could use the interaction with humans that I get from martial arts classes or business networking events or tech meetups.

I should probably start today. I should probably start right now. Maybe after a nap. Which is away from the desk, after all.

Kim du Toit is not interested in winning one and a half billion in the lottery:

Here’s the thing. The cash option on that beast was about $500 million, making the lucky winner a semi-billionaire. And that life-changing thing is what stopped me from buying a ticket.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I wouldn’t be able to spend the money — I have plenty of relatives and friends, all of whom I could make extremely happy/wealthy. But honestly, I don’t want to change my own life that much.

Believe me: change it would. With 500 big ones to your name, you become a target for all sorts of undesirable people: kidnappers, scam artists, robbers, whatever. You might think that you could disappear from public life and become anonymous, but you can’t; that sum of money is just too big. So you’d have to hire lawyers, accountants, financial planners and personal bodyguards… and that all adds up to a massive lifestyle change.

That’s the exact line of reasoning I express to my boys when we pass by the grocery store courtesy counter when the jackpots get that large.

I mentioned to my brother yesterday that the winning ticket was sold in Arkansas, and he said he’d have to check his numbers–he lives not far from the state line, and wasn’t sure what state he bought his tickets in.

Now that would be more my luck: he wins a billion dollars, and I’m the one kidnapped for ransom by some Eastern European syndicate or South American cartel. I mean, we’re close, but are we a million or ten million in ransom close? I’d hate to discover.

In a post about upcoming movies, he likes the trailer for The Odyssey but:

But now here’s some more Slop Superhero Content: Wonder Man. They did a race swap on Wonder Man which I don’t care about because, get this, literally no one cares about Wonder Man. The character was invented for purely cynical reasons — it was practice back then to steal another company’s IP by just flipping the gender of a character. Thus, Marvel created Wonder Man just because DC was making some money with Wonder Woman. (And Stan Lee created She-Hulk because he knew that someone, likely DC, would create a female Hulk if he didn’t do so first.)

If you never heard of Wonder Man, don’t sweat it. He’s a D-list team member on whichever Avengers team needed a spare body in the 80s. He was one of those characters I would actively avoid by not buying a comic if he was on the cover or if I knew he was on the team. Like Captain Mar-Vell or Quasar or a dozen other generic Superman-derivatives.

Oh, that’s going to leave a mark on my retirement portfolio which is heavy into Gen X Collectibles that later generations don’t want anyway.

I have the first 13 issues of the Wonder Man comic book from the 1980s and the first 17 of Quasar.

As a matter of fact, I recently saw a Facebook memory from, oh, a decade or so ago asking what everyone’s favorite Avenger was, and I said Wonder Man to tut tut the people who only knew the Avengers from the movies.

Probably not going to see a streaming series, though, so I won’t know about how it compares to the comics which were a little arch in their day.

How’s your comic book collection these days, Brian J.? you might ask. Well, the last comic I might have bought was Sarah Hoyt’s Barbarella in 2021, but I’ve read a couple from the older ones I reclaimed when my boy cleaned his room this summer, so I’m at 1216 logged in the spreadsheet. Don’t anticipate buying any anytime soon. Man, I miss the Comic Cave and it’s dollar-each multi-issue runs. But the business model that made it affordable to me put him out of business. But Comic Force is still going–I just was in there to buy a couple of short boxes and poly bags.

On the comic book movie/series front, I wonder why nobody has tapped into the Marvel 2099 titles. They came out in the early 1990s with imaginings of other people claiming the hero names in a dystopian future–Doom 2099, Punisher 2099, Spider-Man 2099, Hulk 2099, Ravage 2099, X-Men 2099…. And some of them ran for two or three years. I wonder if they could make something of that, but the people in charge are probably just too young.

My beautiful wife helped with Christmas cards this year, so we got the sixty-five or so addressed in two days, which is good because we started late. Every year, I think I should start at the beginning of December or even late November, but I never do.

Our Christmas card list is dwindling. A couple of years ago, it was almost one hundred. But people have moved, cards have been returned, or people have died. Sometimes we never know.

When the card comes back with the yellow label or when we learn otherwise someone has moved, the address gets erased but the name gets left on with a grey or yellow stripe. How long until I remove those lines from the list? Scott’s been on it ever since I started tracking diligently in the spreadsheet instead of working from an address book like an old man–I think we briefly worked from my wife’s Google contact list, but it favored recent friends.

Most of the people on our list are acquaintances from twenty years ago or more. I’ve got two friends from my time in Milwaukee in college; a couple of former co-workers, but nothing since 2007 when I went fully remote consulting. We’ve added a couple from church and the family of a girl who attended school with my youngest, but mostly it’s from 20 years ago, and mostly it’s the only contact we have with most of them, especially since Facebook has gone to ads, suggested posts, and slop instead of, you know, friends.

So far, we’ve gotten seven Christmas cards. And of those, one are from the Lutheran school we continue to support and one is a thank you card from our postal carrier after we gave her a couple of gift cards.

Christmas cards seem to be becoming an anachronism; we receive fewer each year, too, and it would seem odd to start adding to the list now.

It kind of feels like casting my bread upon the waters except without the return. But that kind of matches most of what I do with my life. A blog with a couple of readers (Rick and Chinese LLMs, mainly). Publishing books which yielded, what, 50 sales (John Donnelly’s Gold), 1 sale (The Courtship of Barbara Holt), and maybe ten sales (Coffee House Memories). I’ve written and released apps to lackluster sales (Boxing Drill Companion, 2; Dr. Franklin’s Art of Virtue Tracker, 2; Nico’s Kitty Translator, 3).

So, like so many things these days, instead of joy or pleasant memories of the people to whom I’m addressing the cards, the experience reinforces my fin de siècle mood these days.

I thought I might have mentioned the story about Curt, the guy who ran the Didde-Glaser printing press next to mine on second shift, somewhere along the line, but I cannot find it on the blog. Curt would come in at 3pm when the rest of us were getting off, and he was known to come in with a bit of a buzz. As he explained it to me, he would go down by the lake for lunch and sometimes have a six-pack somehow and then it was time for work. Of course, he was carrying on a tradition–some of the old-timers (they were all old-timers at the print shop which was over 100 years old by the time I worked there 1996 to 1998) would bring in six packs and drink them while they worked. Not a thing by the 1990s, and not a thing I would do working with industrial machines that could rip your arm off.

But sometime in the middle of my stint there, I was telling Curt all about how much you could find out about a person in the Internet. Bear in mind, this was 1997ish. And I was on America Online, the last company to buy Time Warner and die (I’d short Netflix if I could about now).

I came in with a printed (surely sheet-fed by then and not dot-matrix, but one never knows) pages including his address and a map to his house. And I asked him if that was his address even though the electric bill had a different first name.

It was his kid’s name–when he couldn’t make the payment, the electric company cut him off, and he had it reconnected in his kid’s name. As a certain segment of the population was wont to do in those days where the internet was in its infancy and all the things were not yet connected.

I thought about this yesterday when I mentioned to my oldest son, who is old enough to sign contracts now, that if he registered for a free trial of Fox One or whatever, we could watch the Packers game. I couldn’t do it because I’d used the free trial to watch the Packers game two or three weeks ago. I cancelled the trial before half time because it was not going well for the Packers.

And he did, so we watched the football game. Well, the boys watched the first half of it, and I stuck until the bitter and disappointing end.

But for a brief moment, I was just like Curt, briefly. I hadn’t thought of him for many years, maybe a decade ago. When I searched the Internet for him again then I found his obituary and was momentarily shaken. Because in my memory, he’s younger than I am now.

You are forgiven if you read the title like this:

Heaven knows I did.

This time last week, I was in Florida. My beautiful wife had purchased a “marketing package” from one of our timeshare companies in 2022, back in the days when I had an income. It was a three night stay at a resort in Orlando, and we would have to attend a pitch for buying more timeshare. She pushed it off as long as she could, but it finally came time to fly down or sacrifice our prepayment. So we did.

Springfield offers (likely subsidized) direct flights, but at odd times. So we were at the airport at 6:30, and we were in the Orlando area a little after noon. I say area because the direct flight was to Sanford, Florida, about an hour north of the southern part of Orlando where we stayed. We got to Orlando, had an early dinner, and I was wiped since I’d been up since 3am. So I read a bit and went to bed early.

The next day, we had the sales presentation. It was supposed to be only two hours, but they let us marinate for a full three and a half, sweating us or letting us discuss the pros and cons of an additional purchase. I said earlier “one of our timeshare companies” because when she bought the package, we had two, but this company bought our other company, so now we have one. Being the cynic I am and seeing how they’ve only partially integrated, I think company #2 is going to skim the best of company #1’s properties and get some of company #1’s owners to buy in and then spin the rump of company #1 off. These companies are always coming up with novel ways to acquire each other and to create new “ownership” products that are good for the company. It didn’t help that the place where we had the sales pitch was the same place we had it 11 years ago, when we bought. Back then, the plans were to develop the whole plot, with buildings surrounding the little “lake” in the center. In 2025, the project was not completed, and the company representative said they would probably not build new again since it was time-consuming and expensive, whereas fiscal gimcrackery was easier and has better ROI (well, I inferred the last part). So the great importance of buying now did not affect us, even if we could. I’m starting to wonder if the timeshares were a good idea at all, but we skipped a year and bugged out on our vacation this year. Eh, who knows.

But! I took a weekend trip. What did I do on my trip?

• We went to an outlet mall after our sales pitch and the next day we went to an Orange County park. It was a low-key visit with no amusement park trips or anything especially touristy.
• We had two dinners out and several in.
• I read a bunch of magazines, a couple issues of First Things, New Oxford Review, and Reader’s Digest. Even though I did bring books (including What the Frost?, I stuck to the magazines. And during our walks, I made several allusions to what I read in Reader’s Digest. The others, not so much.
• It was, however, a three-Wargames weekend. My wife mentioned she had seen the film again on a recent flight while we were flying; because the building we were staying in was the Ville de Falconi, I unlocked the room door at one point and said, “We’re in. It thinks I’m falcon!” (which she didn’t recognize because she doesn’t say it when logging into any new device for the first time), and New Oxford Review had a piece called “DEFCON, Neocon, Katechon” which alludes to the film.
• I missed what might be my only chance to say “Mele Kalikimaka” to a native Hawaiian–the woman giving the group part of the sales pitch. One never knows when one will get another opportunity to speak to a native Hawaiaan in December.
• Wondered if the decorators of the room knew that they had two of the same picture in it.

  

  Or if one of the housekeepers was playing a little joke.

• Got to watch most of the Packers game which we could not do at home. But turned it off near the end when they were done before the Broncos were. Just like home in the days when we had DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket.

At any rate, it was an okay trip. It was nice to spend some time alone with my wife–but we will someday soon be empty nesters spending all of our time together alone. We did have to leave Orlando at 3:45am to catch a 6:30 flight home, but I slept better and was able to function Monday afternoon. But it was essentially two travel days for two days of vacation which is a little much for my taste, especially as it involved airports.

Once home, though, the bad habits resumed. Spending too much time doomscrolling at the computer because my one contract needs me to be available even though I only bill for times I’m working–not all of the available time.

Also, I thought “Zoot Suit Riot” was Squirrel Nut Zippers, but it clearly is not. The rockabilly/Big Band sound had a brief moment back in the middle 1990s, ainna?

Out: Re-gifting
In: Re-Christmas-carding, where you scratch out the signatures of the people who sent you a Christmas card and sign your names to send it to someone else.

Spotted in Ozarks Farm and Neighbor magazine: Frito Cowboy Cabbage

That is, basically, cole slaw with canned black beans and Chili Cheese Fritos in it.

You know, for the most part, here on the Internet and in places where I go, people eat more elevated fare (or, in the case of the Internet, order it cold and expensive delivered).

But out in the real world, people with families are still trying to stretch their food budgets in novel ways.

So perhaps I should not comment archly here given that in 2026 or 2027, I might be eating noodles with fried eggs and rice with beans for two square meals a day.

I dunno what I was doing–making the bed or folding laundry–and a song from the Pump Up The Volume came to mind: “Tail O’ The Twister” by Chagall Guevara.

I mentioned that movie, and I’ve mentioned that the soundtrack how the soundtrack is one of my favorites, and this might be my favorite song from it.

I mean, the lyrics don’t make a whole lot of sense, but it does mention Trump Tower. As did so many things back then.

I played the cassette until it warped, and I eventually got the CD. And I listened to it again yesterday. And felt, briefly, like I was 22.

Tom Kockau at Avoidable Contact writes about the 1970 Lincoln Continental:

Lincoln: Great luxury car manufacturer, until they told all people who don’t want an SUV to F themselves. But such is life. People want a certain kind of vehicle, and over-promoted incompetents torch their own castle. But I digress.

But once upon a time in a BETTER time, you could get a parade float-sized Continental in metallic turquoise, and steer the luxurious behemoth to your favorite supper club for the Old 96er, a baked potato the size of a football, and side salad with bleu cheese dressing, Herbert Tareyton smoldering in the mini Coleman cooler-sized ash tray.

And this very nice ‘70 Continental takes us back to those days of yore! I’ve always liked the 1970-71 Continental four doors. Some argue they are kind of plain for a Lincoln, a little too much Marquis, and not enough pizazz, but I always loved this style.

Ah, gentle reader–at one point, my father told me that would be my first car.

You see, when I was living with him whilst I attended the university, my great-grandmother, whom we called “Grams Great” and which is why I cannot apply that sobriquet to my grandmother even after she became a great grandmother in, what, 1997? since we called her Nana in our youth and she’s now become a Grams Great Great but not if my line, wow am I getting bad at these sentences with commas–to reiterate, my great-grandmother was still living independently in an apartment down not far from my old neighborhood and a block or two away from my brother’s first wife’s parents, and probably her, too, in 1993ish–ah, what? Oh yes, my great-grandmother, who lived independently, had one of those 1970s Lincoln Continentals, and when she came to his house one day, I was given the task of moving the car for some reason and parking it on the street. Ah, gentle reader. I was still a novice even though I probably had my license by that point, but I had a devil of a time parking it even at a patch of turf between driveways–not even parallel parking which I would get adept at two years later because I when I returned to Milwaukee, I stayed with friends where street parking was the only parking. On that summer day, though, I could not handle that much car. Every time I tried to park, I was three feet into the roadway. Three feet? Well, not close to the curb in any event. And my father said to me that that Lincoln would be my first car as he expected I would inherit it from her when she passed soon. Ah, but she was at his funeral but two years later.

It might even have been in that blue that Tom spotted.

It certainly triggered a memory. I like Tom’s Lust Object posts not so much because I have fond memories of the cars themselves, but I do remember a time when those long Cadillacs and Lincolns and (sometimes) Buicks were considered the height of luxury. Like something my godfather uncle would drive. And that I might never aspire to.

I mentioned that when the Hittler family moved out of the Siesta Manor Mobil(e) Home Park–and when their trailer was moved–a table was left behind which must have been stored under the trailer but forgotten. Of course, we grabbed it right away as we were still using a small apartment-sized table in our trailer.

Not long after we got it, we got a Welsh Corgi puppy from the woman who lived next to Pixie and Jimmy N whose dog had gotten pregnant from some random dog walking by. We did not take as good of care of Bandit as we should have–my mother worked all day, and we were at school, so a high-energy puppy had lots of time on his hands to gnaw on things and engage in all sorts of high-jinks even when chained in the small kitchen for the day. Oh, how wrong we did by that dog until my sainted mother took him to the shelter over an hour away and cried on the ride home. I would like to say I’m a better person now, but a guilt-inducing dream last night of a negligently injured cat indicates I fear I am not.

You know, I’m not sure when our family stopped using that table–probably when I was in high school, when my sainted mother would have had many opportunities to inherit another. Or perhaps it was after college, when we moved to the house my aunt owned in 1995 if she had a better table for us. I know that I got the Hittler table when I moved into my own apartment–I’d thrown it atop my possessions loaded in the cargo van I used to move, and when I had to brake hard, it slid forward and hit the whiplash-protective top of the driver’s seat.

When I got married, my beautiful wife had a nicer table which we used in our homes in Casinoport and in Old Trees, so it was taken apart and stored.

It makes appearances every decade or so when we have people over. In the basement of Old Trees, I set it up to have some friends over for games after our boy had gone to bed upstairs. At Nogglestead, we had a very populated Thanksgiving, probably fifteen years ago, when I set it up. But it’s been sitting in the garage since. For some reason, I stored the legs downstairs and the top in the garage until I cleaned out the store room–which I guess was just last year, but it’s been a long year.

But with the guests coming over, out it comes.

The kittens (who are 3, 3, and 2 years old now) wouldn’t mind if I kept it in the living room all year. Put together or incomplete or maybe made into a kitten jungle gym!

But after today, it will go back in the garage for another decade, maybe. Or until one of the boys moves out and needs a table which is likely to be far sooner than I really want.

At any rate, when I call it “The Hittler Table,” people hear Hitler. Which is appropriate because they are pronounced the same. But in the 1980s, Hitler was just a guy who lost a war and not the secular Devil he is now. How much of that was due to the safety of using Nazis as the only safe villains in the thrillers starting in the 1980s? Discuss.

For the second time this autumn, I found myself needing to repair a floor lamp at Nogglestead.

In the first instance, the parlor lamp which has a main upwards pointing light and a downwards pointing reading light failed as its single switch, up by the top lamp, bent or something and was touching something else which made the metal turn knob hot to the touch (not, fortunately, electrified). It took me a couple of trips to Lowes, which has a small section of basic wiring, sockets, and switches for lamps. I made this a little difficult on myself by not realizing the difference between a three-way socket and a three-terminal socket. One handles the bulbs that change the brightness, and the second is a socket whose switch controls the two different bulbs. Well, I learned something, but I bought a new floor lamp while the ordered three terminal socket came via that long-unused online store.

But I fixed the lamp anyway, which was nice because I am thinking about rearranging the living room upstairs after the holidays so I can read books while listening to records, and I planned to use the former parlor floor lamp there.

But! The floor lamp beside the reading chairs downstairs had an issue. Its plastic socket cover, which anchored the socket to the tube, broke. So the lamp and its heavy glass shade were almost freely swinging. My beautiful wife mentioned it was loose, but that probably meant it was only partially broken at that time, but one evening, it broke completely and was not attached any longer.

I took it apart and this was the assembly:

Basically, a hollow stud bolt which has threads at both ends and threads inside bolts into the tube. Another stud bolt goes into this and through the housing that holds the shade. Another nut and washer hold the housing tightly to the tube. And the socket housing fits onto the smaller stud bolt (and the socket itself goes into the plastic housing where the wire connections to the socket will be kept, hopefully, safe).

Except: The stud bolt does not fit into the commodity socket. It’s not standard. The bolt is too large.

Were it too small, I could have cheated with some tape on the threads. Actually, it looks like it has a set screw But to fix this, I would have to special order a different pair of stud bolts. If they’re available. If I could measure the sizes I would need, but I don’t have any calipers, and I checked Lowes’ Web site for pricing. And let’s just say that’s not in the cards for the nonce.

So most of it will go into recycling and whatnot. And apparently I have even more old lamp parts to collect in my garage.

Fortunately, though, I have light to read from the spare lamp I had from the parlor. Which did have a standard size bolt to connect it to the replacement socket.

What to expect at the Mayor’s Tree Lighting Holiday Show in Springfield:

The Mayor’s Tree Lighting Holiday Show, a long-standing tradition of Springfield’s holiday season for nearly two decades, returns to Park Central Square this year.

Yes, the guy who wrote the piece is apparently 24 years old. So almost 20 years would be long-standing to him.

Ah, gentle reader. My beautiful wife were for some reason talking about trains the other day–taking them to California or something–and I started running down a list of trains whose names I remembered.

When I was in college, lo, those many decades ago, I used to take the train from Milwaukee to St. Louis on holidays. The Hiawatha Service would take me from Milwaukee to Chicago, and I would take the Ann Rutledge from Chicago to Kirkwood (since renamed the Missouri Ridge Runner. It continued to Kansas City, and stopping in Kirkwood was more convenient for pickup in the afternoon going downtown. On Sunday mornings when I was returning north, I would catch the Texas Eagle coming out of Texas since it would get me to Chicago earlier.

And I remember the name of a couple of the other trains leaving Chicago: The Empire Builder heading to Seattle, the Empire service heading to New York, and the Sunset Limited heading to Los Angeles. If you believe the review of The Christmas Train last year, I apparently also remembered (then) the Capitol Limited and Southwest Chief.

You know, every once and again, after watching an old movie or reading a book like The Christmas Train, I think how neat it would be to take a train excursion, say from St. Louis to Chicago to Seattle to San Francisco and back. But, holy cats, a small compartment on the Empire Builder alone would be somewhere in the excess of $1000 or even $2000–and the other segments probably as much.

It’s a picturesque thought, but dayum, I’ll drive that first.

Holly has a problem with Amazon’s new LLM:

Just in time for their Black Friday deals, Amazon has rolled out the most annoying, aggressively anti-customer thing I’ve ever seen. If you aren’t seeing it today, you will soon.

Every search results in Rufus, their AI, opening a chat window with you that’s part of the browser window, so your pop-up blocker is no help. You cannot turn Rufus off from within Amazon. If you beg it to stop, it’ll tell you that your browser settings are wrong.

If you check those and try again, it’ll tell you that only Customer Service can help you.

If you contact Customer Service, as I did, they will suggest that you stop shopping on the website and only shop on your phone.

Really think about that.

I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t placed an order on Amazon since the end of August. Which is likely when they ended the “family” Amazon Prime thing, where I could order under my beautiful wife’s Amazon Prime account. It had been in place for many years, and it made Amazon a default for when I needed something, often trifling but sometimes more expensive.

But that all ended. And like most streaming providers, they’re throwing ads into things you watch unless, I guess, you pay even extraer. So never mind all that. I can order on other Web sites, and I can go to department stores for what I need. Amazon has lost but a couple thousand dollars annually in revenue from me, and perhaps they’ll make it up in raising prices and adding fees to everyone else.

I guess I am lucky enough to be a cranky old man who lived before the Internet became, pardon my French, merde (know that I mispronounced it in my head while typing this, and pardon me). I don’t need Amazon. I don’t need Spotify. I don’t need Kindle. I got along fine before them, and I’m getting along fine without them.

Although I still set Spotify to play a radio station based on an artist some nights, I’ve again come to recognize that the options are limited and they tend to put artists whose “radio” stations I’ve asked for onto other radio stations I ask for–Miles Davis, for example, will have Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert, for example. I’ve also come to remember that the playlists that they come up with are rather limited in scope and duration–so if I listen to it more than once, I am heavy into repeats. I mean, I can stream actual radio stations for free, and I have a pretty extensive media library. The tradeoff of selection for convenience is starting to tip back away from the convenience of Spotify.

At any rate, I guess I’m coming up on three months Amazon-free. No reason to think that will change any time soon. Even with Christmas coming up.

So my beautiful wife prefers toothbrushes with smaller heads on them, and we had or have a couple left from when my boys were boys, so she grabbed one of them when replacing her last brush.

It’s a little pseudo-crayon with a suction cup base.

So I have “hidden” it by sticking it onto a vertical surface around the sink, including putting it onto the mirror, when tidying up the basin area.

Of course, this will remain amusing to me for far longer than it will be for her–which might have been exactly once, yesterday.

This also might be what eventually breaks the camel’s back and why I might be rooming with Lileks in 2026.