Category: Life

This weekend, I did something atypical for me. I did something nice for a stranger, offering to help a fellow out when I could have done nothing. As I normally do.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m a very charitable person in an abstract way. My wife and I give something like 8% of our income to charities, more actually since a lot of those gifts are in goods that we undervalue so the IRS doesn’t make us explain why we claimed $60 for a children’s accessory that sells for $120. We’ve even endowed a freakin’ scholarship by our mid-thirties. But that’s not direct person-to-person nice.

There are people in this world who stop their cars when they see someone pulled over to the side of the road with a flat tire or something. I’m the sort of guy who passes without a glance. But that sort of conflicts with my internal characterization of myself as some sort of hardboiled stoic hero. I mean, I have the hardboiled bit and the stoic bit down, but I’ve been lacking in the heroic.

So we’re sitting in a McDonalds, and this large man comes walking through, asking all of the patrons if they drive a silver car since the car is parked too close to his car for him to get in. We finish eating, and this guy is sitting in the passenger door of a Miata parked next to us. He’s way over to the left of the parking spot, so he can’t get into the car until the silver car moves.

So I offered to back the Miata out so he could get in. He accepted, pleased to discover I could drive a manual transmission. I squeezed in, threw it into reverse, revved it high as one (me) is wont to do with an unfamiliar stick, and pulled it back enough so he could get in.

It took me three minutes to help this guy out instead of letting him sit in the cold until someone moved his or her car. But it made me feel good. Not only did I help the guy out, but I got over my inhibition to helping someone out. And I got a lifetime of wondering why a guy that big was driving a Mazda Miata in the first place.

Verizon Wireless e-mails less than 24 hours apart:

I’d better act now before the price increases again.

I have a Videocassette Recorder hooked up to my television even in 2010, and I pick old videocassettes up for a quarter at garage sales and whatnot. You can only find older films on videocassette these days, but I don’t mind. Putting the film into a media device that will actually caress the medium instead of bombing it with amplified light makes one nostalgic. Nostalgic enough to use “caress the medium” instead of tangling the tape.

Please keep me from going too deeply into the you have to savor the experience of the entirety sort of riff. I don’t don a special jacket or pour cognac to watch a film. But sometimes the experience can throw you back in surprising ways.

Tonight I watched The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear. I’m not sure if I’d ever seen the whole thing before, as the plot hadn’t stuck with me. So I put in the videocassette and was transported to different places. Not by the magic of Hollywood, but by my own experiences and memories.

The first coming attraction on this Paramount tape was for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. “I just watched that,” I thought. Well, not just. I watched it as part of a proto-bachelor weekend marathon. It was January 2007, and I was painting bedrooms in the house to accommodate my forthcoming son. My mother came in the morning to help me tape, I painted in the afternoons, and at night I watched the Star Trek films in order. January 2007 was a long, long time ago, but watching the videocassette (of course) Star Trek films didn’t seem like long ago at all.

Then the videocassette offered a preview of Regarding Henry. Harrison Ford had a pretty unlined face once. I saw the film on cable, once, at least part of it. This didn’t do much for me.

Finally, the last “coming attraction” was an advertisement for buying used videocassettes at the video store. Once, and you might not remember this, children, movies came out on videocassettes a couple months after the theatrical run closed. However, these initial offerings of videocassettes were priced for the video store, who would then rent it to you. The rental store price was something like $90, so typically for a couple months the movie was only available at video stores. After a set amount of time, the price dropped to the consumer price and you could buy a movie for $20-30.

Digression time: I once bought a copy of The Adventures of Milo and Otis for a girl at the rental price, a week’s wages almost for me. I had to special order it at Suncoast because they didn’t stock movies at the video store price. Obviously, it didn’t work out with the girl, and now that I have children, I have bought a copy of the videocassette for them. Which means I’ve paid an average price of $45.12 for these video cassettes. End digression.

So Paramount threw a sop to video stores by putting an actual commercial on the video to encourage its viewers to make their videocassette purchases of the excess rental stock at video stores. My goodness, I realize you can still buy used videocassettes at rental venues, but this is one dated commercial. One almost expects to see Pepsis and jets.

And then into the film. It’s set in the George H.W. Bush era. For those of you who cannot recollect the plot, like me in a week, it deals with Bush seeking the advice of a scientist to help determine the nation’s energy policy. Knowing that the scientist will espouse fluorescent light bulbs and solar and wind power, Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Nuclear kidnap the fellow and replace him with a stand-in who will direct the government to, I don’t know, drill baby drill or something.

You know what? In 1991, that might have been funny. The bad guys were obvious caricatures, and the proposals espoused by the right-thinking people in a slapstick film weren’t the law of the land. But now that we’re 19 years later and we’ve got low flush toilets to go with the established media conventional wisdom that the people who work in the profitable segments of the energy industry are these caricatures, it just isn’t funny.

But the political considerations and the plot of the film aside, simply watching the videocassette takes me back to a number of places and times beyond the content of the film. I don’t get that with fresh DVDs—won’t until 2025 at the earliest—and not from things I record digitally. But then I am an old schooler, someone who looks for that nostalgic kick in everything.

Almost seven years since I started the Web log, and I’ve finally moved it to WordPress.

Do you know how long I’ve been on Blogger/Blogspot? I paid $100 to Blogspot back in the day to host my blog without banner ads on the top. I posted using Blogger before Blogger recognized the concept of a post title, so many of my old posts just have the title as a line of bold text.

I posted 5000 posts on Blogspot. I’ve imported them, and they’ve come out to be a little short of that. For some reason, the first three months of the blog are missing. I’ll have to see what’s up with it.

I’m also still on the default theme as I try to figure out what I want to do with it. I’ll add a blogroll and some ads and whatnot later in the day, even as I try to work my way through 5000 (!) posts to add categories, correct links, and whatnot.

Wish me luck, and thanks for hanging around.

Things act according to their natures. The scorpion and the frog. Anyone familiar with these could have foreseen this:

One of the biggest challenges to ending the foreclosure crisis is this: A surprising number of homeowners who get their monthly payments reduced fall behind again within a year.

When borrowers get into financial trouble, lenders have several ways to help. They can offer grace periods, longer repayment schedules, lower interest rates or reduced balances.

Sadly, the problem does not seem to be merely a 20% difference in loan amounts.

Unless the people and their circumstances change, too, the problem of not having enough to pay the mortgage will continue.

I have shared triumphs like this:

And finally, after months of cajoling and correcting, I seem to have made a convert! I just edited a draft document in which the writer used the serial comma consistently throughout! Also, another one is halfway there — he seems to get the general concept, but is confused about the placement of the final comma in relation to the “and” — he writes, “thing, thing and, thing” instead of “thing, thing, and thing.” But at least now I can tell how many items he intended to list, so that’s an improvement.

I beat that into enough designers that they do it correctly, years later and in different positions. And if only one of them passes the lesson on, I’m totally reaping the Amway benefits of knowledge-spreading.

(Link seen on Dustbury.)

So this afternoon, I went into my workroom, the utility room in the finished basement, to get some supplies for an outdoor project. And I heard this strange rattling coming from the water heater or the furnace.

So I got closer, and I isolated the rattle to the water heater. Crap, I thought, I don’t know who to call when I have problems with a water heater. It’s true, I have a furnace guy, an electrical guy, and a drain guy, and I know who to look for in the white pages if I need concrete work or plumbing. But water heaters? Crikey, I don’t know who to call.

The rattling was accompanied, sometimes, by a weird trill. Almost bird like. I assumed I was hearing something else.

So I grabbed my supplies and did my outdoor chore. While outside, I heard the bird trilling that I’d heard in the basement. I didn’t hear the rattling.

When I got downstairs, I put away my gear and heard the rattling again. I moved close to the water heater to listen closely. Then, I heard the rattling and the trilling with the same locus. Essentially, the duct leading to the chimney.

Why….

I went outside and moved until I was in front of the neighbor’s house. There, upon my roof, upon my chimney, sat the neighborhood woodpecker, a recent immigrant whose better-thought-out knocking I’d heard upon trees in mornings and early afternoons for recent days. He trilled, and then he drummed upon the metal cover on my chimney, as though to challenge the other birds in the area.

Or perhaps just to make me wonder and to fret just a bit.

Transfer on Death (TOD): when someone assigns assets so that they pass onto a beneficiary upon death.

Why is it so appropriate? Because as any student of Dr. Russ Reising can tell you, tod means death in German.

Let me tell you about my mom.

You might not know this about her, but she was a Marine. Maybe you’ve never talked to her, or visited her home decorated with eagles on anchors, or come to a holiday dinner where she carved the turkey with a ka-bar, but she was, and she was rightfully proud of her service. On her way to the induction to be sworn in, she caught a ride on a fruit truck and ate seven pounds of bananas to make minimum weight. She almost did. They let her in anyway. She served her country.

She also fought for what she thought was right in her own way. As my brother and I were going through her effects, we uncovered a number of letters. My mother wrote her senators, the Secretary of the Defense, the Secretary of the Army and gave them the what-for all the time. The response letters start out form letters, but ended up by starting, “Now, Glenda…..”

She was giving. She would give you the flannel shirt off of her back, and then she’d go to her closet, her drawers, under her bed, and to that secret wardrobe in her basement to give you more. And then she would tell you she bought that shirt at a yard sale in 1988 for a quarter, because she remembered those things.

She was also a doer. I have a friend who’s Canadian, not that there’s anything wrong with that, who never met her, but knew that much about her. Whenever I’d tell him I was going to do something around the house, he’d say, “You mean you’re going to have your mom do it.” That stems from a particular incident where a thunderstorm had broken some tree limbs, and I needed to cut them out of the trees. I had a ladder, and she had a chainsaw, and together we had a solution. She came over, and I had to block the ladder to keep the 58-year-old woman from going up to cut the limbs. Maybe she wanted to protect the investment in the chainsaw. But that’s who she was. Someone who would like to help you to the point of doing it for you, and ready to do things. She refinished her basement, refinished a bathroom, and she was quietly proud of what she did.

She was a great mother; she raised the two of us on her own. She was a good sister and a great friend, who enriched us all, but some of us more than others, particularly at the Saturday night card parties.

Thank you.

---

Thanks to the Women Marines Association, the American Legion Women’s Post 404, and Marine Corps League Gateway Detachment for attending.

I also want to thank members of the Patriot Guard for escorting her to Jefferson Barracks. She lived nearby, and any time she saw them performing an escort, she would comment appreciatively.

I’m not saying I’m low rent or anything, but all the spammers are trying to sell me knockoff Timexes.

My toddler attends a preschool thing at the local religious school. I was under the impression it was a Christian school of some sort, but he came home with this idol, so I’m not sure:

I have seen that sort of thing in Lovecraftian nightmares.

I lost 1d4 SAN just looking at it.

My wife points out the Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is our age.

I guess I can go from wasting my life to wasted my life at any time.

In 1992, if you said Ice-T, the rapper responsible for “Cop Killer”, would one day appear on Sesame Street without controversy, they would have thought you were mad.

Fifteen years later, your prediction would have come true.

Want to know what to get me for my birthday? How about a Unique Cave Home from ebay?

Historic, regionally famous cave: 15,000 square feet, divided into three main chambers.

The front chamber houses the main part of the 3-bedroom finished house.

The middle chamber holds the laundry room, storage, and a spare bath. The middle chambe made a great party room. 80 feet by 80 feet.

The back chamber still has the stage where Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, Ike and Tina Turner, the MC5 and many other bands performed.

Property: 2.8 scenic, partially wooded acres provide excellent privacy and the feel of the country right in the middle of town, just several blocks from shopping, dining, and other conveniences.

Energy efficiency: Geothermal and passive solar keep the home comfortable year-round without a furnace or air conditioning. In spite of the vast size of the home, our energy costs here run about the same as they did in our 800 square-foot starter home. The home naturally stays a little cooler than the average above-ground home, but we found that we acclimated quickly and easily.

Kitchen: The kitchen is the crowning jewel of the house, with nearly 400 square feet and a floor plan that lends itself well to cooking for one person, two, or parties of a hundred guests! Some of the features include a customizable Jenn-Air cook top, two convection ovens, Kitchen-Aid triple sink, large island with secondary sink and breakfast bar, and granite tile countertops.

Occupancy: The house could still could use trim and finish in several key areas. Trim is not a safety feature and not required by code. The City of Festus granted us an occupancy permit in May of 2008, and we have been living here happily ever since.

You choose whether to hire pros to customize before moving in, or live here and take your time getting intimate with the space while making your decorating choices.

Water features: The property has at least three groundwater springs, one accessible via a cistern in the middle chamber of the cave, one that yields an average of 100 gallons a day that drips into an indoor pond in the front chamber, and one near the woods that creates a shallow pond. During heavy rain, the property gets as many as fourteen beautiful waterfalls from the cliffs.

Anyone know how much huge closing concrete doors would cost? I’d call it NOGGLAD.

Has anyone else noticed that free rein now appears more and more in print as free reign?

I’m not sure if this means more and more people are using it in reference to the growth of government and are consciously making a pun (I doubt it) or if educational standards or cultural references have obscured the horsemanship origin of the phrase.