Category: Life

So I’m minding my own business in the shower, trying in vain again to scrub the slime of softened water off, when I’m confronted by a demon.

Fructis the Soul-Renderer, Flayer of the Weak, Builder of Bodies

I mean, seriously, who brands their froo-froo shampoo with a made-up Latin derivation that brings to mind not so much the scents of watermelon and lingonberries but the rising chant of monks in horror films featuring demons and/or William Shatner and the eventual mauling of a poor, innocent teenager.

Triple nutrition? That means Fructis must feast on the hearts of three virgins.

No, this is not my shampoo. It belongs to my beautiful wife. I use the more manly Suave. It’s not manly because its name implies being smooth and confident; it’s more manly because it costs less than a dollar a bottle.

This morning, I told my wife I was going to make my toilet.

Sometimes, I make my beautiful wife gape, and today was one such time. “What?” she asked.

She’d never heard the expression before, but that’s because she doesn’t read early 20th century detective novels. Did I get that expression from Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen? I forget.

But make one’s toilet does not refer to building a commode nor even to installing a commode and tank. Instead, it refers to shaving, washing up, and brushing one’s teeth in the morning.

Even my own generation doesn’t understand me. Truly, I am a man out of time.

The strangest things strike me and make me a tad maudlin. Which, comes to think of it, would make an excellent name for a character in a book about a young man given everything who feels melancholy about it.

Tonight, I prepped a play bath for my children and dolloped a bit of Mr. Bubble into the running water, and I realized or futuremembered that some day, they won’t want toys in the bathtub or a dash of Mr. Bubble to add zing to the near-cleansing experience. I’ve already gamed it out: the older boy will one day decide Mr. Bubble is for babies, much like he decided at one point that Sesame Street is for babies, and that will be that. Perhaps the younger will hold out hope for another dash of the Mr. Bubble at some point, but he’ll follow his older brother’s lead, and he’ll stop asking for toys in the bathtub and for bubbles.

Eventually, the toys will get cleaned up and donated to a church sale or some such collection, but the last bottle of Mr. Bubble will just migrate to the rear of the cabinet. Periodically, I’ll clean and rearrange the contents of the cabinet, but I won’t want to dispose of half a bottle of Mr. Bubble. Eventually, I’ll say I’m saving it for the grandchildren, but I’ll not really know if I’m to have my line continue or if I’ll live to see it.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that one of the most saddening things I saw when I was carrion-crawling around the turn of the century, visiting estate sales to find books or games to list on eBay for a couple bucks, was containers of consumables marked a quarter. You never like to think this can of WD-40 that you’re tossing into your cart at Lowe’s as an afterthought might outlast you, but someday, one will.

No, I’m just Tad today because it’s not the complete recognition of mortality flashing before my eyes, but the fleeting recognition, again, that these days that I often find maddening or dull or somehow otherwise not lived entirely fully will pass and I will miss moments of them with great acuteness.

Or at least I’m planning very carefully to do so.

Note to self: stop buying the economy-sized bottles of Mr. Bubble.

From time to time, I like to step away from my desk and run the vacuum cleaner over the floors as a break (sorry, ladies, I’m taken!).

During the course of many, many such excursions, I have sometimes heard the little tickticktick of a tiny Lego or action figure’s blaster sucked into the maw of the beast, and I’ve thought about what a horrible father I am: I felt no remorse in permanently cleaning the children’s toys in this fashion.

Now, I don’t go hunting to deprive my children of the prefabricated implements of their imagination. I can remember how it would have made me feel to know my parents did that. Well, I can imagine it; my sainted mother was not that diligent in housekeeping.

So I do look over their rooms in before I mechanically groom the pile of the carpeting, but I don’t take extraordinary measures when I hear what I know is a dispensable, soon-to-be-unmissed bit of plastic.

But today was a different story.

I was vacuuming the lower level, which is not a toy-rich haven of childhood delight. When they come down, they get out board games, though, and build little narratives with the Life cars and Scooby Doo Mystery Game ghost tokens. We make them pick up, and we straighten in addition to that. But today, as I hit that dark corner by the game shelves, I heard a TICKTICKTICK, and I remembered I meant to pick up that Scrabble tile.

You’d better believe I unseamed that vacuum bag from nave to chops to retrieve a Scrabble tile. Which, by the time I got to it, looked like a little lion with all the cat hair on it. I cleaned it up, of course, which means it is the cleanest Scrabble tile we own right now.

But now I have a greater secret to hide from the children: Not only does Daddy sometimes unrepentantly vacuum up their toys without retrieving them from the garbage, Daddy will gut the dirt sack to get his toys back.

Oh, right, like I’m the only one who sometimes tries to enumerate the Four Musketeers from memory and suddenly lapse into Greek Fates.

D’Artagnan, Aramis, Porthos, Clotho….oh, blast!

Back in the late 1990s, I volunteered with a local theatre company whose productions were in a Methodist church in the city of St. Louis. The church itself was a sprawling, multi-story castle that had a kitchen, a couple of chapels, a gymnasium, offices, strangely spaced bathrooms, and vast storage spaces. There were often a couple of different groups having functions there, so it was not uncommon to run into strangers in the kitchen washing dishes or something. And the minister mentioned that he’d had a problem with homeless people unlocking doors while the front door was open so they could come in and sleep there.

So I got to thinking about a novel about a young man in the mid-twenties crisis who meets a man who has, unknown the the church, moved into just such a church and lives on the premises gratis through some trickery and even receives some mail under the name John Methodis. I was going to title it The Gospel of John Methodis and study how this older fellow went off the grid and why that appealed to the boy in transition from the immediate post-collegescence to growing up–or not.

I didn’t get too far into writing that because it seems a bit thin of a plot to hang a whole novel on and the incidents within the book never materialized or connected themselves. Also, I’m lazy and have managed only two novels out of a couple dozen novel ideas.

Somewhere I must have read the story of Chheng Guan Lim, who for several years in the 1950s did just that.

The world is far crazier than my imagination.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

So I pulled into the car wash to get the road treatment rinsed from my vehicle (this winter in Springfield has been about 2″ of snow and 6″ of road treatments to melt the snow before the sun did, which it failed to do).

And as I’m rolling and before the door behind me closes completely, I see a bird fly in. And they perch on the equipment:

He did not give my vehicle any extra polish, but that would be a very ill omen indeed.

Now that I’ve got steady freelance work again, we’re officially Dual Income, Two Kids, Animals.

Oh, no.

We’re DITKAs.

I wish to update the world and the Internet regarding the statements made in this post:

I now carry a picture of my beautiful wife in my wallet.

Actually, it’s her senior picture from high school, which is some years before I knew her.

But it had floated atop a box full of her old cassettes for years, and one day when I was looking for old cassettes to play for our children, I finally copped it and stuck it into my (bifold) wallet.

This just in: She is more beautiful now than she was then. Unless, of course, such a statement would get me into trouble with her now. In which case, I, uh….

Dynamic pricing is all the rage on the Internet these days, as online sellers like Amazon inject algorithms designed to extract as much money from each customer as that customer might be willing to pay. Instead of a grocery store, with a fixed price on an item, Internet Web sales sites are now more like car lots, where you won’t get the best deal unless you’re willing to walk out, virtually speaking, without what you want.

For example, Amazon is very happy to offer you a price on an item, but if you leave without checking out, you’ll find the next time you come back that it’s unexpectedly cheaper.

Amazon will even call you back like a car salesman does on a slow day. Well, it will email you to let you know that it’s got a better price for you.

I’m just waiting until Amazon tells you it wants to ask its manager if it’s possible to get you into that DVD for $4.99. Then, maybe, I’ll splurge on a trio of films that I won’t end up watching until I find a functional secondhand DVD player in 2033.

I’m just an old man, but the whole dynamic pricing thing just seems like another way for companies to try to take advantage of their existing and loyal customers. And it does not build good brand equity or give me the urge to buy a bunch more.

Gimlet linked to an article on Ars Technica entitled "First encounter: COMPUTE! magazine and its glorious, tedious type-in code" that talks about getting a start with type-in programs back in the old days:

My first computer was an Atari 600XL, a 16KB model with a cartridge slot and no disk drive which my parents suffered through a high-pressure time share sales pitch to obtain for me. And I loved it, not so much for playing the cartridge version of Star Raiders (though I did that, too) but because the machine opened the door to BASIC code and to writing one’s own programs. It was like a LEGO kit for the mind: if you could think it—and squeeze it into 16KB—you could build it.

But how to save these masterpieces? I quickly acquired a finicky, used tape drive to store my programs on standard cassette tapes, picked up some books from the library, and I was off, coding versions of “Hunt the Wumpus” and other early Unix delights that had been ported to BASIC for the new breed of home computer user. Then, as I was browsing the magazine rack at our public library one day in the mid-1980s, I came across a wondrous magazine called COMPUTE!. It contained cutting-edge programs—including plenty of games—with decent graphics. And the code was all free. I quickly grabbed every back issue the library would let me take and headed home.

Brother, those days are now:

What do we have here?

• Compute’s Gazette, which was Compute! Commodore 64 magazine.
   
• Run magazine.
   
• Commodore Power/Play and Commodore Microcomputers, two titles that alternated months and focus between serious computing and games and eventually merged into the single Commodore title.
   
• A bunch of sundry other titles from back in the day, either part of a subscription or picked up later at garage sales or book fairs for the nostalgia value.

Strangely, I don’t appear to have saved any Ahoy! magazines, which I also got or picked up on occasion. I don’t remember which it was.

The first three titles have type-in programs, many of which I typed in. But I don’t have to type them in again. I still own the 5 1/4″ floppies that I saved them on 30 years ago. It’s been a couple years since I fired the old Commodores up, but the disks were still readable then. I have faith they still are now.

But that’s not entirely what I mean by the past is still with me.

When I want to learn a new programming language from scratch, I’m still prone to buying a Teach Yourself [language] programming books that have a sample program that you can type in over the course of the book. Of course, they don’t really teach you much about developing in that language except how to develop that program, but I still type along with the chapters. When I’m trying to pick it up from scratch.

When I’m on the clock, I’m all about getting something done quickly, so its Internet forums and reference books (in Ruby these days).

But I still pick up the books and type along when I don’t have to do it right now, and I type along. And then I abandon it when the checksum fails and I can’t find the typo. Just like the olden days.

Restaurant chains that come to mind that are named after a pepper:

• Chili’s
• Chipotle
• Culpepper’s

What others am I missing?

And does any other vegetable get that kind of love?

Back in the olden days, circa 2001-2006, I could receive WSIE, the jazz station out of Edwardsville, Missouri, on my radio in my home office in Casinoport. I spent a lot of time listening to Laverne Holiday, Ross Gentile, Adam Tracy and Buddy Moreno, and E.B. Stevenson. I spent a lot of time in the office those days, since my hobbies included a lot of computer things (eBay, writing the novel, and starting this blog) and my first experience as a remote worker took place in that period.

When we moved to Old Trees, either the increased distance to the Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville or the plaster-and-lathe walls prevented the radio station from reaching my receiver, so I had to go with the KFUO classics station on the main receiver. It was okay; I was spending less time in those days in my office, since my career and my hobby went more toward being a daddy.

Back in the Casinoport days, I’d bought my beautiful wife an AirPort Express, the little wireless gizmo that would allow you to pipe songs from her Macintosh to the stereo receiver in the next room so she could listen to her ripped music while she crocheted. She did that a couple of times, but ultimately that gift was as useful and timely as the 100-disc CD changed I’d bought her a couple of years before ripping music to the computer became the norm.

I didn’t get much from it since I wasn’t ripping my music to the computer back then (I’m not what you’d call an early adopter). Besides that, in the dark family room in Casinoport, where I preferred to read, and in the lower level of the home on Old Trees, where I preferred to read, I had a DirecTV receiver, so I could listen to The Savoy Express or other stations on Sirius (later SiriusXM) and later on SonicTap as DirecTV and its partners cut costs and playlists. So that held me over.

This month, we cut our DirecTV. We were going to cut it altogether, but the retention office offered us $30 a month or some such with the free NFL package next year, so we kept it (we’ll see if they keep their part of it; I get the sense that after the fees and taxes are added on, our $30 a month will almost be the original price). But the move removed the music channels from the selection. So I was a bit at a loss.

Except several factors converged: WSIE now has a live stream on the Internet. I have a Macintosh with a wireless card of my own. And we still have that old AirPort Express; we even had it hooked up to the receiver in the family room, but it was not plugged in. So I set to work last night configuring it.

I’d had some dread about doing it, as with those things that you configure once every couple of years, you forget the password and have to reset it to factory defaults to get it hooked up. But I started the efforts last night, with plugging it in, resetting it, getting my Mac to see it, rifling through old Apple documents and help forums on the Web, and trying to figure out the default password or how to reset the password and not seeing the prompts on the screen that the manuals said were on the screen, and suddenly (to me), my wife revealed she knew the password since she had configured the AirPort in this very house to stream music from her Mac, although she probably only did it the once to make sure it worked.

And suddenly, six years later, I can listen to WSIE while I read.

Brothers and sisters, I cannot express how happy this makes me. It’s a taste of a pleasant period in the past, which is always more stark in relief than the pleasant things in the present which are mixed with unpleasant things in the present to kind of obscure them, at least to me.

But jazz in the living room, albeit not the locally produced and disk jockeyed jazz of the Casinoport era (the station let go its local DJs in 2009 to save money). But, ah, I can get WSIE (and KCSM, for that matter).

(Couldn’t you have just streamed Pandora through the Roku?) Baby steps into the 21st century for me. Baby steps.

(Haven’t I read this post before?) I did post a similar history when I found the WSIE live stream last summer.

I have not eaten any of my children’s Hallowe’en candy yet, although I have chewed some of the gum.

I have, however, begun to consume some of their Valentine’s Day candy from last year.

Some of those apple Now and Laters were beginning to sprout.

We don’t eat a lot of candy here at Nogglestead. And by “We,” I mean “the children.” “We” being “me” eats plenty. A year later.

I know, you’re saying, Brian J., you Lothario, did you woo that beautiful wife of yours with an awesome mixed tape back in the day?

You bet I did, son. You bet I did.

I found this in the cassette holders that adorn her office walls. The label, “Lil Didde Mix”, refers to the Didde-Glaser printing press I was operating at the time.

Something like fifteen years later, my taste in music hasn’t changed. My taste in a woman, either.

So Zero Hedge warns about the impact of changing diets on the global food supply:

Beginning with Malthus’ warning to the world and the Great Irish famine, David McWilliams (of Punk Economics) provides his typically succinct, profoundly fascinating, and graphically pleasing insights on the state of the global food economy. “What happens when hungry people panic?” is the question McWilliams poses; “they move to other parts of the world,” he rhetorically answers, adding that this could well be the story of the next 50 years on Earth as the rock of the insatiable demand of seven billion (soon-to-be-ten-billion) people smashes into the hard place of the planet’s limited resources to produce that one thing that keeps us all alive – food. The food dilemma is more complex though as it is really an energy dilemma – one that is not going away (on the downside). On the bright side, Malthus’ nightmare has yet to occur thanks to the ingenuity of humans. However, if all the world’s seven billion people consumer as much as the average American, it would require the resources of over five planet Earths to sustainably support all of us. So either the rest-of-the-world eats less to allow Americans to eat more or we are stuck! But it’s not just how much we eat, but what we eat…

They’re talking about one of those whiteboard cartoon YouTube videos which I haven’t yet had time to watch.

If only those guys at Zero Hedge made the mistake of reading the letters to the editor, where the real SCIENCE! occurs. I made the mistake of glancing at the Wall Street Journal letters to the editor page yesterday, where the normal lunacy occurs with bigger words: Organic Farms Can Feed the World:

While most studies show that certain organic crops, such as corn, would have slightly lower yields and lower total production than conventional crops, the studies also show organic farming can feed the world, and in developing countries organic methods would increase food production and self-sufficiency.

Both of these things cannot be true. Well, they cannot be true unless there’s an unspoken premise in the second that the world eat organic bean burritos per day and give up their steaks and chicken. Which is not so unspoken in other parts of the movement.

But one of the things about organic farming and sustainable living lifestyles is that people who embrace them already have a pretty high standard of living to maintain and can afford to tut-tut the people who shop at Walmart to get a bit of what they get at Crate and Barrel.

(Zero Hedge link via Instapundit.)

Working as an independent IT contractor from my house leads me to some weird weeks, such as this one, which seemed to be composed of four Mondays.

Monday: Seemed like Monday for obvious reasons, as it was a workday.
Tuesday: Seemed like Monday because the previous night saw late-running recreation, and then I had to work.
Wednesday: Seemed like Monday because it was the first workday after the break which was not a break, but other people were in the offices.
Thursday: Seemed like Monday because the kids went back to school, so I had to prepare them lunch and whatnot before they left.

Maybe tomorrow we can make it five for five. Tomorrow is Friday, isn’t it?

Children, do what the little bags inside your games say and don’t put them over your heads.

Do not do what the little bags in the games actually do:

Only the hippos can play spaceman with the plastic bags.