Category: Life

Harvey has an outdated technology check. Which of the following do you own?

As I have just cleaned out my storeroom, I know pretty well. Here’s his list, with the things I own emboldened:

1. phonograph turntable
2. phonograph turntable capable of playing 78s (Right here on the desk with my laptop)
3. 8 track player
4. cassette player
5. 5 1/4 floppy drive (Most are Commodore 1541s; I think I recycled my last PC 5.25″ as mentioned in my previous post)
6. 3 1/2 floppy drive
7. a car with a carburetor
8. a non-cable-ready TV (I am pretty sure I donated all the old Atari Party televisions before we moved to Springfield.)
9. a dial phone
10. a corded phone
11. a winding wristwatch (Although I do own a winding pocket watch and, like Harvey, a grandfather clock that requires winding.)
12. a manual typewriter (Although I do own two vintage electric typewriters, but no manual typewriters.)

Harvey asks for suggestions; of course I’d add some of the following which I own:

13. VCR (I own 5)
14. Betamax
15. Laserdisc (Added so Charles could check another list item.)
16. Atari 2600
17. Nintendo NES
18. SuperNintendo
19. Maybe just “pre-1995 computer or gaming system”

Play along.

I hereby nominate the following employees for employee of the month for July:

• The automotive service center counter man who dealt with the woman who’d brought her car in for some no cost warranty work and spent much of her time in the waiting room talking about how she has no money for a month and a half for groceries or car repairs and how she’s thinking about selling plasma or going to the local medical research firm to have herself injected with drugs for money so the local medical research firm can see how they break down in the bloodstream. Yes, when confronted with these lamentations, the salesman did not back off on his point-of-sale badgering until she agreed to put the $10 bottle of fuel system cleaner onto her store credit card.
• The local computer service employee, who told me as I dropped off old printers and desktops for ‘recycling’ after confirming via email with someone at the company that there was no charge for recycling printers that there was, in fact, a $5 charge for laser printers because they have toner cartridges in them. You know, the toner cartridges you can take to Staples and get a discount on your next purchase for recycling them there so Staples can refill them or the toner cartridges sometimes collected by schools as a fundraiser because they can recoup money selling them to ink refillers. You know, the only part in the printer guaranteed to make the recycler money–that I need to pay them to take.

Kudos to those guys for going the extra mile in a down economy for trying to squeeze blood from a rutabaga.

In the cheap ads in the back of the NRA’s America’s 1st Freedom magazine, we find this ad that juxtaposes a woman with a gun with, well, you see:

Because, gentle reader, when a relaxing moment turns into the right moment, is the object of your affection holding a firearm? If so, you’re doing something wrong.

I mean, seriously, who sees this and does not immediately think of a particular quote from the film Dirty Harry?

(Another gun-show-magazine ad with a scantily clad woman for no reason here.)

I will not water the flowers with the pressure sprayer.
Continue reading “A Sacred Vow” →

I hope this tattoo fixation in our culture has just about run its course. It was bad enough when people put cutesy little pictures you could recognize, mostly, when they ordered them inked onto their bodies. A little butterfly on the shoulder, a little flower on the ankle, a little skull with a dagger through it on the forearm, I get it. I can catch it in a glance and get the drift of what your self-image is.

But now we’ve moved into text, heaven forfend. I feel self-conscious enough when my gaze lingers on a woman’s chest just so I can read her t-shirt, but now we’ve got people putting lines of text in fancy script on their bodies. Megan Fox, for example, has a couple samples of this upon her. Matt Holiday, the St. Louis Cardinal, has some line of text running up his left arm, aligned so it’s readable when he’s stretched his arm out horizontally, such as when he’s batting. I hope it’s a taunt to the opposing player, but word is it’s a bible verse, or so I read on the Internet. I cannot read it, since he’s always fidgeting or swinging the bat when it’s on camera.

Today, at the YMCA, some dude had finished his run outside and was cooling off at a bench as we came out. He had his shirt off, and on his right torso I swear to deity he had a freaking paragraph. Some five or six lines, probably, in an italicized or right-leaning font, justified no less to make a block of text that looked like it might wrap all the way around his side from his back to his front.

Are you kidding me? What is someone seeing that supposed to do? Stop to read it, maybe put on reading glasses to do so, perhaps ask him to turn a little as one follows the words? Come on. This is trying to make it look like you have a tattoo with a deeper meaning than a picture and less passé than an oriental character that probably means something other than you asked for anyway.

For Pete’s sake, if you find a saying you like that reflects your lifestyle and ambition, get a journal with a bound cover and a nice pen and keep it there, or if you’re feeling risqué (sorry, WordPress had a sale on the character é, and I bought a bunch), write it on a notecard and tape it onto a mirror. If you’re compelled to share it with everyone, put it on Facebook where we can read it without staring or feeling creepy. If you have trouble remembering things à la (buy two és, get an à free!) Momento, get a smartphone.

Because in 20 years, your skin is going to go to papyrus, and that tattoo’s going to look like a doctor’s handwriting.

Because your car does not make as much noise as an internal combustion engine automobile, your car presents an especial danger to those with impaired sight or to those who are merely inattentive in parking lots.

To alleviate this danger, it is important that you play music very loud, preferably with the bass turned to the maximum, with your windows down to improve safety.

A pedestrian cursing your choice in heavy metal is a safe pedestrian indeed.

Thank you, that is all.

Product does not convert.

Why, you could even sell them in Dearborn, Michigan, without trouble!

What? You say this just mean that this Transformer toy does not actually transform into a truck?

What kind of Orwellian world do we live in?

“Dad, there’s a bug in my room!” my five-year-old asked.

“Was it the Soviets?” I asked.

“A Soviet?” he asked.

“The Soviets put a lot of bugs in a lot of rooms,” I said.

So now the child is not only concerned about bugs in his room, but about Soviets putting bugs in his room.

You really have to start them early if you want quality paranoia to dominate in their later years.

Scipio Africatus is a bitchin’ name for a feline.

As some of you know, I’m officially in the hopper as a potential Jeopardy! contestant for the next 17 months, 2 weeks. Someday, I might stand behind a podium with an illuminated negative score after the first commercial break, letting Alex Trebek and the audience get to know me a little better. Have you ever noticed that sometimes, the Jeopardy! contestants seem a little surprised at the thing Alex mentions? That’s because you write them down on a piece of paper before your audition. So by the time you’re on the show, a year and a half could have elapsed before Mr. Trebek brings it up. Bloody heck, I’m already forgetting what I wrote down, and it’s been three weeks since my audition.

But various alternatives are running through my head: responses I could make whatever Alex brings up. Responses like:

• Your intelligence service is very good, Mr. Trebek. I’ve never told that story before to any living person.
• Deny it. What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. That never happened.
• Burst out weeping.

Of course, that would really never happen. I would probably be vibrating like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and would have to focus too much on keeping myself together to be clever.

I’m much funnier on the Internet than in person.

I dunno why Qwest Diagnostics checked me for this:

But I’m glad to see that my occasional haruspicy cleans up well.

Upon my counter, I have a wealth that emperors and kings from centuries and dynasties past (and some present) could not imagine:

I have apples from Washington, USA; I have oranges from Florida or California, USA; and I have bananas from Costa Rica. Fresh (relatively, since the apples are from last autumn’s harvest, but they’re not dried) delicacies from the far reaches of the continent, from over 3000 miles. Genghis Khan could not have unthinkingly stocked his larder like this. Not Caesar, not Victoria, not Montezuma, and most certainly not Peter the Great. They could not have put together this collection of delicacies even for the most sumptuous feast.

Yet I can do it for a couple hours’ worth of work at a minimum wage job that does not kill a measurable percentage of its participants. Because a civilization of specialized workers exist to plant, harvest, transport, store, and sell those goods to me as commodities. Although that civilization has existed for all of my life and for the preceding generation’s, it is not a natural phenomenon and it is highly dependent upon civilized people working to their own ends.

I hope this does not become a wealth only remembered.

A sign on the window to the tiny balcony at our hotel in Kansas City:

Perhaps I’m a little unclear on the concept of door, but it seems to me that a door in use is closed since the function of a door is to partition space with a variable setting of partitioning space or allowing passage. To me, the “on” setting actively partitions the space, whereas the inactive or “off” setting, that is the setting that would exist if the door was not even there, allows passage.

Ergo, I would not think you could lock a door when it is not in use, since a door not in use is open.

Of course, it is possible I overthink things.

who looks at the Dole banana UPC sticker and sees a skull?

Or do I more obviously need therapy?

You thought surreptitious Apple iPhone location tracking was bad?

Wait until you discover automated urinal flushers are doing.

Let’s just say that not everyone gets emails about improving their manhood, Chester.

I have taken the Jeopardy! online contestant tests for a number of years now, awaiting that one night a year where I get the chance to type one or two word answers into a Flash application as fast as I can, hoping to get enough right for the phone to ring or whatever. Every time, I walked away feeling kinda dumb and doubting my own trivia mastery. When I learned that they actually provided categories above the answers (you respond with a question on Jeopardy!, remember), I thought I did marginally better. This year, when I completed the test, I upgraded my self-assessment of my performance to ambivalent.

Then I got the email.

On June 14, I will venture to Kansas City for an actual audition for the program. If you’ve read up on it, you’ll know that this involves another test, a personality interview, and maybe a mock Jeopardy! game. If I pass muster, I get thrown into the smaller pool of people who might get the chance to play on the program.

So I have a little over a month to prepare. I did, briefly, think about “preparing,” as though some program of trivia immersion would somehow make me a better contestant or a more competitive player. However, there’s just as much chance, I think, that I’d stress myself and not enjoy the coming month, so I think I’ll take it in my normal stride: I’ll alter my reading program slightly to include brushing up on some subjects, but I’m not going to study much but maybe the presidents. And hope my native trivia intelligence is enough to carry me.

Tam on compulsory government-centric compassion:

“We” are not a wealthy “society”. You and I live in a place that has some rich people and some poor people and some in-between people. “We” don’t “just have to” do anything. There may be things you need to do or things I want to do, but we aren’t part of some borg-like collective with collective responsibilities, wants and needs.

If you want to be compassionate, go be compassionate. I know that’s usually what I do when I’m feeling compassionate, not expect some entity called “the government” to go be compassionate for me. Mailing a check to the government to help the poor because you’re feeling compassionate is like handing the local crackhead a twenty to fetch you a pizza because you’re feeling hungry.

If you think something needs to be done, you should do it. You should not assume everybody else thinks the same way or that somebody else will take care of it for you.

I had a very similar conversation in a bar with a friend of mine some years back; he didn’t give to charity because he paid taxes, and that was the government’s job. Except I would expect he did not have a big Federal tax footprint based on his income when he is employed, and he’s not buying bonds.

So I expect it is with many people who favor government taking care of the needy. They want government to take care of the needy (and keep their benefits, including promised benefits intact) with someone else’s money. They want the warm-fuzzies without expenditures of their own and without having to give up any television time to work at the foodbank.

A lot of people are that way. Some people worried about the less fortunate or less responsible put their money where their mouth is and their time where the work is. But if everyone who felt compassion did, we would not need government handling it.

Unfortunately, the charities themselves spend a lot of time and effort working to get government grants, so that they can take that government money to do their good. It diminishes the charity to me if it has a large number of grant writers on staff instead of ladle bearers.

I lack a snappy conclusion. I’ll go with “a pox on them.”

That said, I do support a number of small local charities with goods donations and some with time (just a couple hours last year, unfortunately, but I have chillen). Last year, we gave about 10% of our gross income (not adjusted gross income). And we’re the heartless Republicans.

In the email box:

I’m waiting for the FTL phones anyway.

1. Don’t wear a thimble. No pain, no gain.
2. Tie threads with knots that would make Jack Aubrey proud.
3. Don’t tell anyone or allude to the fact that you’re doing mending. Dammit, you’re an American! Pretend you buy another Chinese-made article of clothing like everyone else.

Sissy.