Things I Know

The Daily News website on Friday announced that Jimmy Fallon was hospitalized after surgery. I’m just guessing here, but he was probably hospitalized for surgery and then remained hospitalized afterward. Get well Jimmy.

I hope this doesn’t happen to you. I installed the Chrome browser on a computer at work. Then I signed in to my personal Google account to gain access to my list of favorites. To be clear, a lot of those favorites have to do with my work. When I was done, I signed out of my Google account and erased my browsing history before closing Chrome, but not uninstalling it, and signing off the computer. Next time I used Chrome on that computer, without signing into my Google account, I was alarmed to see that all of my favorites, not just the business-related ones, were shown in the browser. Don’t know if I did something wrong or if Chrome is programmed to act like that, but it’s something to keep an eye out for.

“It’s a free country, which is why we should take down the flag that says it isn’t.”–Larry Wilmore.

On the other hand, when Apple removed a game from its app store because it contained a Confederate battle flag, I think they went a little overboard because it was a Civil War game. By the way, that flag which is now so controversial was not the official flag of the Confederate States of America. It wasn’t even the battle flag of all the Confederate troops. It was the battle flag for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, in other words, General Lee’s army.

Here’s a map of all the states I’ve been in, courtesy of maploco.com. I think it’s pretty impressive, considering that I’ve never had a job which required me to travel extensively. I’ve been a couple of miles from Mississippi, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but I didn’t go out of my way to cross those borders just to say I’d been there.


Create Your Own Visited States Map

Oooohhhhhh, What He Said!

I don’t have any problem with President Obama’s appearance on comedian Mark Maron’s podcast. For those who missed it, the President said, “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

I don’t have a problem with it because he’s right. It is impolite to call someone that and the fact that it’s impolite, or even the fact that we’ve elected an African American President, and reelected him, doesn’t mean there’s no more racism. Also, please note that while President Obama said an offensive word, he didn’t call anyone that.

I do have a small problem with people who say, “the n-word, the f-word or the s-word.” If we know what all of those things are, why aren’t the substitute phrases just as offensive as actually saying the words? Plus, that structure is illogical. Based on the number of pages starting with each letter in a dictionary, there ought to be two or three times as many s-words as either of the other two, but there is only one of each.

Things I Want (or Need) to Know

The late radio commentator Paul Harvey used to observe that people who did terrible things often did so to become famous. Then, he wouldn’t use their names in his radio reports. So, did you see the pictures of the Charleston mass murderer? The one that caught my eye was the scrawny kid wearing a shirt from Gold’s Gym. Since racism and anti-Semitism often go hand in hand, I hope he has learned that Joe Gold, sometimes credited with popularizing body building and the founder of Gold’s Gym, was Jewish.

You have to wonder not what, but whether Joyce Mitchell was thinking. She’s the 51-year-old former employee of New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora NY. Mitchell is charged with aiding two convicted murderers to escape from the 170-year-old prison. What positive outcome could she possibly have envisioned? I’m guessing that if they had gone together to kill her husband, the two escaped murderers would have killed her as well.

You also have to wonder whether the two convicted murderers who escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility are more comfortable hiding out in the woods and scrounging for food over the last two-and-a-half weeks than they would have been if they didn’t escape.

And, if you wonder what Dannemora and the now infamous prison are near, the answer is they aren’t near anything.

In my house, furniture like bookcases and bureaus that you place against, but don’t attach, to the wall wind up with a lot of dust on their backs. But the wall behind the furniture doesn’t have the same problem, or at least doesn’t have it any near as badly as the furniture does. Why? Is there good physics behind that?

Am I being unreasonable? I assume that any company unethical enough to violate the federal no-call law to sell me something will also be unethical in dealing with me if I buy from them.

Have you seen the TV commercials for Liberty Mutual Insurance that are shot near the Statue of Liberty? If so, what’s a torque ratio? I’ve never heard the phrase before.

Optimum cable has a very cute commercial for their multi-room DVR service about an older sister and younger brother signing a formal peace accord. Funny, but obviously fiction.

A security officer was shot and the two gunmen responsible were killed during an incident in Texas a while back at a Muhammad cartoon contest. No question that Muslims are offended by any representation, even a respectful one, of the Prophet. Also no question that in the US the contest was legal. Still, who thought it was a good idea?

Now that Heinz is making mustard, shouldn’t they change it to 58 varieties? Also, now that Heinz makes mustard, I suppose it was inevitable that French’s should make ketchup and they are.

What’s up with major league baseball players and beards? Do any of them look good?

Father’s Day

My father was a remarkable man. He shouldered far more responsibility than most people would want. As the oldest son, he shouldered it beginning when he was 10-years old and his father died. He quit school at the end of eighth grade to support his mother, brothers and sisters. He married pretty late in life and continued to support his mother until she died.

He didn’t complain when his wife spent a great deal of her time and effort caring for her father, even though it meant that they were separated by 30 miles or so for weeks on end. He gave up the job he loved, he was a cop, at my mother’s request and never had another job that was as good. I’m aware of some of the sacrifices he made for my sister and me, but I’m pretty sure I don’t know the half of it. He had an incurable disease and I think he could have survived at least a little longer, but gave up, while he was in the hospital, near the time when his hospitalization insurance expired because he didn’t want to be a burden.

He died when I was 22 years old. He didn’t get to see me or my sister graduate from college, get married or have children. He liked young children a lot better than he liked most adults. He understood that children like whimsy. He would have loved grandchildren and they him. When he was a school bus driver, he’d ask little kids on the bus questions like whether they were married and what kind of job they had, just to make them laugh and relieve their nervousness over this new thing called school.

One memory I have of him is that when we were little if we said he was handsome, he’d insist he was pretty and we’d argue about it until we were laughing.

Because he passed away before I had a family, I never spoke with him about the responsibilities he assumed every day until he died. I couldn’t ask, because I didn’t understand or appreciate them. And because we never had that discussion, I can only speculate about why he did what he did, so I still don’t understand, but I sure as hell appreciate them now. I only hope that he saw himself they way I now see him: a remarkable man.

Things I Know

Donald Trump for president will at least be interesting. I’m actually surprised he declared since he has flirted with running both for the presidency and for NY governor before. Mr. Trump certainly has name recognition, although a lot of it is negative. He may be too brash and too blunt for politics and the way he goes on the attack when anyone criticizes him suggests he may have too thin a skin. For now, I think he has very little chance of getting the nomination, but he has accomplished an awful lot being him, so I’ll wait and see what develops.

All the news from Dannemora NY about two convicted murderers escaping from the Clinton Correctional Facility reminds me of a story. Back when I was a radio reporter a convicted murderer was brought from Dannemora to NY Supreme Court in Riverhead to testify in someone else’s trial. Another radio reporter, not me, I swear, walked up to said murderer, stuck a microphone in his face and sang out a question: “How are things in Dannemora?” He sang it, of course to the tune of the Irish ballad, “How are things in Glocca Mora?” from the Broadway show “Finian’s Rainbow.” I don’t think he got any kind of answer other than a scowl and you can’t show a scowl on the radio, but we all thought it was funny.

Clinton, by the way, at 170 years old, but it is only the third oldest prison still in use in New York State. Auburn and Ossining (popularly known as Sing Sing) are older. The first state prison in New York, Newgate, built in the 18th century, was north of New York city in Greenwich Village, so being sent there was called being sent up the river. Thus the origin of that phrase. Sing Sing was built to replace Newgate, which no longer exists.

From the NY Daily News’ website a while back:

“Thomas Brennan, 25, and his girlfriend face an array of charges in connection with the death of Scott Stephen Bernheisel last month. A man and his girlfriend were arrested Sunday night in connection with the alleged murder of a man whose rotting body was discovered in a leather suitcase near Philadelphia International Airport last month, according to reports.”

They are alleged murderers, but it’s not an alleged murder: The corpse had been bludgeoned and stabbed. I know the first commandment of journalism is, “Thou shall always remember the allegedly.” Still, in my opinion, the Daily News overuses the word.

Rachael Dolezal: It would be great if what race we were never mattered, but we’re not really there yet, are we?

I like old cars and occasionally go to local show and shine events. On Friday, driving home from one, I was behind a ’57 Chevy. They don’t build ’em like they used to. Compared with modern cars, the taillights on a shoe-box Chevy are tiny, and dim. Plus, the high-mounted center brake light on newer cars does make a difference. ’57 Chevy convertibles are pretty valuable cars. If I owned one, after what I saw on Friday, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t drive it at night.

Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) sure doesn’t sound like he’s from New England.

Things I Know

Bob Schieffer retired last weekend. He’s 78 and said he wanted to go while he could still do the job. And since he can, he’s moving on to a fellowship at Harvard for the next three semesters. I hope I don’t have to tell you who Bob Schieffer is, but in case I do, he was a reporter, anchor and host of Face the Nation since beginning at CBS in 1969. Did you know how he came to national attention? He was a newspaper reporter in Dallas TX when President Kennedy was killed and it was Schieffer who interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother and drove her to the police station where her son was being held.

We’ve lost a lot of TV programs recently. Chelsea Handler, Craig Ferguson, Don Imus, Dave Letterman, Bob Scheiffer and soon John Stewart. Steven Colbert is gone too, but he’s coming back as Letterman’s replacement. Scheiffer may not have been the most entertaining, but he was the most informative and probably the most informed too.

They’re removing all the padlocks, some 45 tons of them, from the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris. About a decade ago, people started putting locks on the bridge’s railings to symbolize their love. Last year part of the bridge railing collapsed, causing authorities to decide to remove them and to revamp the bridge so they can’t be put back.

When I was in London last year, there were a few padlocks on the Millennium pedestrian bridge across the Thames too. I wondered why they were there, because I hadn’t heard of the Paris tradition. Now, I know.

Former NY governor George Pataki is never going to be President of the United States. He’s never going to be the Republican nominee for President either, despite declaring his candidacy last week.

Donald Trump isn’t either. In fact, Trump has flirted with entering politics as a presidential or gubernatorial candidate enough times that nobody should consider taking him seriously in that regard unless and until he actually does go through the process of officially declaring his candidacy.

Things I Know

My wife’s high school reunion is coming up in August. We’re going. I sent in the check and it cleared. We went to the same high school, two years apart, so unlike some married couples, there will be people I know at her reunion. In fact, there will be women I dated in high school at her reunion. Before the story I often tell about how I met my wife and noticed, by being a volunteer chauffer at a high school play rehearsal, we were introduced (and I didn’t notice) by one of my girlfriends. I like high school reunions, because I get to see some people I liked in high school and, because it’s not high school anymore, I get to like some people I didn’t like in high school too.

There was a very cute and outgoing toddler in the supermarket the other day. I remarked to his mom that all cute little kids had to step up their game thanks to Reilly Curry.

Another example of fail on the part of Amazon.com’s search function, this one particularly egregious: I searched for Samsung blu ray player and sorted it by price, lowest to highest. I wanted a Samsung because I bought a Samsung TV and think the Samsung remote will probably work well with both of them. The first Samsung blu ray player I turned up in that search was on page 255 of 291 pages of search results. I imagine it would have turned up sooner if I sorted by relevance, but I wanted to find the cheapest one and thought that would be an effective way to search. It wasn’t.

I saw a list recently on the Internet that purports to contain the top ten professions for psychopaths. There was no attribution, so I have no idea how accurate it was. However, I have held four of those ten jobs, so maybe it’s right on target.

Things I Know

Ronald Nelson, an 18-year-old high school senior from Tennessee, turned down all eight Ivy League colleges to attend the University of Alabama this fall. Nothing against the Crimson Tide, they do have a great football program, an honors college and their alma mater is the same tune as Cornell’s. Plus, my son and one of my nieces are grads. Still, the reason he said he chose Alabama is he got more financial aid and didn’t want to accumulate a huge student-loan debt. Maybe it was a sensible decision. One that wasn’t: the article I read suggested he applied to at least 14 colleges. That costs a pretty penny too.

Proms have changed a lot since I was a kid. Mine was held in the high school gym. Today, where I live, a prom must be held in a catering hall. I took my date and another couple to the prom in my car. Today, a limo is de rigueur. One school in Connecticut raised the ire of parents and students when it announced it is enforcing a dress code, but announced it a week before the prom, which is long after all the girls have purchased their dresses. The dresses are different too. Many are backless or have slits exposing a leg.

Invitations are different as well. One guy created a fictional crime scene with himself as a corpse and said he was dying to go to the prom with his girl. Another baked his prospective prom date a fancy cake with the word “Prom” on it. One more posted a video of himself skydiving, carrying a sign with the same word. At least the fad of seniors inviting celebrities to the prom seems to have passed its peak of popularity.

I attended high school shortly after the earth cooled and early in my senior year, I experienced a bad break up, so I stopped dating for a while. I wanted to go to prom, so I started again, dating two girls at the same time which was unusual for me. I asked one of them, a junior, to the prom and she said yes, but then called me and told me her parents would not let her go.

So, I asked the other, a sophomore. Did you know that the roots of the word sophomore are Greek and essentially mean wise fool? Neither invitation was elaborate. Both, in fact, were phone calls. When I asked the second girl she said, “Well, it’s about time. How many other girls did you ask before you asked me?” Since she asked, I told her, “Only one.” I have an excuse for my boorish behavior; I was a 17-year-old boy.

I don’t think a senior prom is a life-altering event, but maybe mine was. From that point, I dated my prom date exclusively for seven or eight months. During that time, she introduced me to a classmate who eventually became my wife, Saint Karen, who must be a saint to put up with me. I’ve told a different story about how I met my wife and both are actually true, because when my prom date introduced us, Saint K made no impression on me at all, but when she finally did impress me, the other girl who introduced us was also a friend I met through my prom date.

I bought my wife, Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me), a big TV for the living room. It’s a combination birthday and Mother’s Day present. Every once in a while, her birthday and Mother’s Day coincide, but not this year. Still, I don’t usually buy combo presents. But, it’s a REALLY big and therefore expensive TV. I’m considering mounting the TV on the wall, or buying a piece of furniture to put it on. Since we often watch TV in a reclining chair, the furniture would ideally be tall enough so that it appears above my big feet when I’m reclining in said recliner. If you haven’t tried to find something like that on line, you’d probably be surprised at how hard it is to find out how tall a piece of furniture is on a sellers website. Kudos to Raymour and Flanigan, a big furniture retailer in my area. You can filter their selections using a range of heights and a range of widths too.

Skelos

Newspapers reported over the weekend and this morning that Dean Skelos, indicted Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, would be ousted today from his position of power. This, after Skelos received a vote of confidence from the Senate’s Republican conference just last week.

There is, unfortunately, a lot of history with regard to indicted legislative leaders in New York, and that history suggests that Skelos’ ouster following his indictment was bound to happen. So, one has to wonder why he sought the confidence vote last week, when he had to know he would face the end of his leadership very shortly. The confidence vote just prolonged the agony and the bad publicity.

There are a couple of other things one has to wonder as well. First, why doesn’t the New York State Senate have a rule governing what happens when the Senate Majority Leader is indicted? There should be a rule. Skelos is the fifth Senate Majority Leader in a row to be indcited while in office. And, second, since five New York State Senate Majority Leaders in a row have been indicted, why would anyone want to succeed Skelos? Why are at least two people vying for the position?

Things I Know

According to several newspaper reports about the soon to be released documentary “I Am Big Bird,” Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who plays Big Bird, was supposed to be on the Challenger space shuttle that exploded killing its entire crew back in 1986. Some PR genius thought it would spark children’s interest in the US space program if Big Bird flew on the Challenger. It was only after NASA determined that the costume would not fit on the shuttle that the idea was dropped and Spinney’s place was taken by teacher Christa McAuliffe. The Challenger explosion was a disastrous setback for the space program and a tragedy for those killed and their families. Not to diminish the impact of those deaths in any way, but can you imagine the space program even continuing if millions of kindergarten kids had watched Big Bird explode, live on TV? Sometimes a PR stunt that would be good if it worked would be so bad if it failed that it just shouldn’t be considered at all.

I want to buy my wife a new TV for her birthday, but figuring out which one isn’t easy.

When I’m in the market for a hat to keep the sun off my head and face, as I am now, I’d like to know how wide the brim is and what kind of sweatband it has. Both of those things are missing from the description of most hats I see on line. I want to know about the sweatband because if it’s stiff, wearing the hat for a while will give me a headache.

Honestly people, go to the DMV, get the driver’s license booklet and review the correct way to make a left turn. If you’re in the left lane when you start your turn, you’re supposed to be in the left lane when you finish. Similarly, if you’re in the right lane when you start, you should be in the right lane when you’ve finished. If you didn’t do that on your driver’s test, that’s why you flunked.

Yesterday, I was at the intersection of two four-lane roads. The one I was on had two left-turn lanes. I was in the right-most of the two because I wanted to get all the way over to the right soon after turning. The SUV to my left made its left-hand turn across four lanes of traffic, cutting me off and all without signaling! What’s more common and what I experienced earlier in the week, was someone making a right turn across three lanes of traffic and winding up in the left lane. Again, cutting me off as I tried to make a left at the same intersection, but headed in the other direction.

Most people do this wrong. It’s wrong because the intersection can handle cars heading in opposite directions turning at the same time if it’s done correctly. But it’s done wrong many more times than it’s done correctly. In fact, I assume (and you should too) that all drivers are going to make these turns much wider than they’re supposed to. If you assume everyone is going to do it wrong, you’ll save a lot of money on collision insurance.

Things I Know

It didn’t occur to me until I saw a picture of the US Capitol being used as a backdrop on the news set at CNN, but there’s scaffolding all around the Capitol Dome and CNN hasn’t bothered to use an up to date picture. Since I noticed that, I’ve seen a lot of other articles in print and on the Internet use an older picture, sans scaffolding. The scaffolding is there because the dome is undergoing a multi-million dollar restoration that will be completed sometime next year.

My lawnmower has an electric starter with a rechargeable battery. The battery has worn out, so I opened the case to get a part number. On the battery it says BP3-12. I trotted off to the Toro dealer to buy a new one and he said he couldn’t tell what battery it needed unless I knew the model number of the mower. I don’t know where on the mower that’s hidden, but I do know it’s hidden. So, I went on line and found any number of replacement batteries based on the number printed on the battery. Instead of installing a new battery this afternoon, I have to wait till it’s delivered on Friday.

I understand that manufacturers use parts created by subcontractors, but they ought to be able to provide a replacement part based on the part itself, rather than the piece of equipment the part belongs to. I had a similar problem with an Andersen window. Took the sash balance into an Andersen dealer who told me he needed the sash, not the part. Again, I was able to order it on line based on the part.

I understand needing the VIN on a car (not VIN number, the n stands for number). Cars have lots of options and sometimes changes occur during a model year. But you ought to be able to find a replacement part for a lawn mower or a window if you have the part. You can too, you just can’t get it from a dealer.

The Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre NY has a religious TV channel called Telecare that can be found on channel 29 of my cable system. The other day, while switching from TLC to HGTV, I came across what is probably the single most boring show on TV. They had a priest reciting the rosary. I have nothing against praying, but I don’t think someone reciting the rosary is compelling television.

A 26-year-old guy from Oregon communicated on-line for two years with a 24-yaer-old Alabama woman, then moved across country to meet her for the first time and live with her. She led him outside, had him sit at a table and close his eyes, then fractured his skull with a baseball bat. She said she did it because she didn’t want to be his girlfriend.

When I was in high school, I dated a girl once or twice. I liked her, but apparently it wasn’t mutual, so when I called for a date, she had her mom tell me that she’d gone to some exotic locale with her airline-pilot father for the weekend. This happened several times before I caught on.

Either of these women could have just said no. I know I would have accepted that and I suspect the poor guy from Oregon with the fractured skull would have too.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West made Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. So, either it’s not a very serious list, or God help us it is. Which?

What happened to all-night diners. Years ago, they were ubiquitous around here. But I gave my daughter a ride to the airport in the predawn hours this morning and all the diners I encountered were closed at 5:00 AM. One of them still hadn’t opened at 6:00.

The Transportation Safety Administration announced recently that they collected $675,000 in loose change from people who forgot to pick it up or deliberately left it when they went through security at airports policed by the TSA. I have a jar on my dresser that contains my loose change. When it’s full it has about $200 in it. What size change jar does the TSA have on its dresser if it holds more than half a million dollars?

Would the world in general be a better or a worse place if when anyone lied their pants actually did catch on fire?

If polling companies are going to use computers to telephone me and conduct opinion surveys, is there a computer program I can get to answer them? Until I find out, I’ll just hang up. Also, is there a way I can get telephone pollsters to stop calling me? Some of them are really salesmen and even if they’re not, I don’t want to talk to them either.

I wonder if anyone in the world follows the oil-change recommendation on a 4 cylinder, 2008 Nissan Frontier pickup. The owner’s manual specifies 3,750 miles. Who can remember that? I do 4,000, but oil-change intervals are getting longer. I could probably easily get away with 5,000 and either four or five is a lot easier to remember than 3,750.

Why are green seedless grapes almost always more expensive than the red ones?

I’ve seen it several places, so I can’t attribute it, but it’s an important enough question I thought I’d repeat it here. If Apple or Google does create an autonomous, or self-driving automobile, will it have windows?

Things I Know

Editing just isn’t what it used to be. On its website this morning, the NY Daily News describes the Arizona cop who hit an armed felon with his patrol car as “a former NYPD veteran.” I guess the article cleared the redundancy desk at the paper, but got lost between there and the copy desk.

As you may have sumarized based on the occasional mistake I make, this website doesn’t have a copy editor, but I hope the Daily News still does. If you send me too much money, I promise I’ll use some of it to hire one.

I have to assume that Bruce Jenner wants his personal life all over TV and supermarket tabloid rags, because if he’d like to keep his private life private, he’s doing it wrong.

Northeastern University in Boston needs to find a bigger venue for its graduation ceremonies. When my nephew graduates on May 8th, he only gets four tickets for family and friends. So if a graduate has even one sibling and his mother and father have both remarried, all of their immediate family can’t see their achievement celebrated in person. On the other hand, I don’t really need an excuse to visit Boston for a weekend. I can do that anytime I want. And this proud uncle doesn’t have to sit through another two-and-a-half hours of boring speeches. There is that.

Brits are right. Americans should call soccer “football” and find another name for American football. “Running into people” is too long for a name, but I’m sure the NFL could come up with something, maybe even something starting with “F” so they don’t have to change their initials as well. After all, kicking is a very small part of American football and an integral part of what we call soccer.

There’s an ugly statue of the late TV star Lucille Ball in her hometown in upstate New York. Citizens of the town are correct that it doesn’t look anything like her. There’s a campaign on to replace it or to at least replace the head. But why now? The statue has been there for six years.

I stumbled across a website that discusses the meaning of people’s names. It said that the name Thomas means twin. My daughter said she already knew that, but what she couldn’t find is a name that means other twin. So, she thinks if you have male twins they should both be named Thomas.

Things I Know

Happy Passover to my Jewish friends and Happy Easter to my Christian friends. If you celebrate something else at this time of year, I hope you enjoy that too. In fact, I hope you enjoy them whether we’re friends or not.

With all the controversy lately, especially in Arkansas and Indiana, over how to protect a mythical baker from providing a wedding cake to Adam and Steve, there’s one thing I don’t believe anyone has mentioned. As far as I know, baking a cake doesn’t violate anyone’s religious beliefs except possibly if you’re Jewish and it’s Passover.

You’ve no doubt heard the expression, “Dirt cheap.” Lately, not so much. Amazon.com informed me recently that I can buy from them a 15-pound bag of earthworm castings (that’s worm manure to you Bunkie) for roughly $20 including shipping. I think I’ll pass.

l can’t help doing math in my head. Sometimes, this makes me notice something almost nobody else would notice. I was browsing on line to find a place I can rent next March so I can go to baseball Spring Training. One place I located rented for $149 a night or $1,100 a week. Since 9 times 7 is 63, I know the answer has to end in 3, but the question is how much am I saving at $1,100 a week? Nothing. A week costs $57 extra although I have no idea why. Seven times $149 is $1,043. Don’t think I’ll rent that one.

The warranty on any car you own is longer for certain pollution controls and safety items than it is for other things. The check engine light was aglow on my truck and after pulling the code, I took it to the dealer because it was part of the emission system. I had to sit around an uncomfortable waiting room for over three hours, but the repair was free.

In case the New York International Auto Show was expecting me today (I go almost every year, usually on opening day), I’m still coming, but the easiest way for me to get from Penn Station to the Javits Center is to walk and it’s supposed to rain. Expect me Monday when it’s not supposed to rain instead.

And speaking of rain, if April showers bring May flowers, by the end of next week, we should be ready for more flowers than you can shake a stick at. I’m not 100 percent sold on the idea that April showers do bring May flowers anyway. In my experience, April showers tend to bring mildew and black mold.

Things I Know

On this, the last day of the month, I would certainly like to see the lamb that March is supposed to go out like. But snow is predicted today in some parts of the NY Metropolitan area.

I don’t think it’s too late to snow around here once Spring rolls around because I remember it did snow during the Mets’ home opener in 1996. I should know. My daughter and I were there and we left in the second inning.

The controversy over Indiana’s new religious freedom law baffles me. Mr. or Ms. Baker, gay couple doesn’t want you to marry either one of them, they just want you to make them a cake and they’ll pay for it too. So, don’t get hitched to either of them if you don’t want to, but if you’re business is selling cakes to the public, gay people are public too.

My to do list has some things on it that are going on five years old. So, today, I’m starting a don’t do list, if I get around to it.

I hope you had a happy St. Patrick’s Day. Did you try my recipe for Irish coffee? I have it black with no coffee.

I just streamed the movie “Mr. Sherman and Peabody” on Netflix. In case you’re wondering, Mr. Peabody’s first name is Hector. It was never mentioned in the cartoons or in the movie, but it was revealed once in a promo.

Rumer Willis, Charlotte McKinney, and Michael Sam are on the new season of the TV show Dancing With the Stars, but they haven’t changed the name of the show to eliminate the word “stars.” I don’t watch it, so I don’t know if any of them have been voted off yet.

After all the negative publicity (and all the former-ness) former Congressman Anthony Weiner achieved from texting a woman named Sydney Leathers a while back, you’d think that no politician would ever contact Ms. Leathers over the Internet again. You’d be wrong about that. Just ask Indiana State Representative Justin Moed, otherwise known to Ms. Leathers as “bitchboy.”

I think Winthrop University Hospital is a bad name for a good hospital because the hospital isn’t affiliated with Winthrop University, but rather with Stony Brook University. I couldn’t find it on their website, but I presume the “Winthrop” part is the name of someone who donated a considerable amount of money toward the hospital. While the school has been around since the 1860’s, in the hospital’s defense, the school changed its name to “Winthrop University” in 1992, after the hospital assumed its present name. So, there is that.

You’re not supposed to make cell phone calls while driving, unless hands-free (the calls not the driving), I know that. But you’re not supposed to park in the right-turn lane at the exit to Home Depot to make a phone call either, even if you put your flashers on.

In most villages in New York State, the real property tax assessment roll becomes final tomorrow. That’s an April Fool’s joke if I ever heard one.

Things I Know

Amazon.com’s recommendation algorithm never ceases to amaze me. You’d be amazed too if, like me, you had purchased AC Delco 24ACD Clear Vision Wiper Blade with Wear Indicator. I usually run down to the auto parts store for those, but they were on sale. Since I bought them, among many odd things, Amazon.com has suggested that because I did, I should also purchase toilet paper (several brands), moisturizer, cleaning wipes, and gummi bears, among other things. Some of them I can understand if the algorithm picked up the word “wiper” without any context, but some of the ones I haven’t written down are beyond my comprehension.

While listening to the Moth Podcast, I learned that there is such a thing as the Astronaut Hall of Fame. It seems unnecessary to me because I think they should all be in it.

Lesson in writing from the NY Daily News website on recently: “An overweight arsonist who said his clothes were allegedly stolen at Riker’s Island is headed to prison after being sentenced Monday.” The first commandment of journalism is, “Thou should always remember the allegedly,” however, here, it’s unnecessary. As long as the man actually said that, “alleged” is redundant. I, on the other hand, tend to over-use parenthetical phrases.

Department of all-too-common mispronunciations: it’s pundit, not pundint; there’s only one a in masonry; repeat after me – – double-u, not dubba-ya; there are two c’s in Arctic and Antarctic and there are also two t’s in Antarctic; jewelry, not jew-la-ry; and of course nuclear isn’t Nuc-U-lar either. I’ve given up on February because Feb-U-Ary has been going on for so long that it’s now considered a second acceptable pronunciation. The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation has been out of print for decades, but you can still find one, even a new one. Surprisingly, right now on Amazon, a new one in paperback is much more expensive than a new one in hard cover.

And as long as I’m examining pedantry in a pedantic manner, MS Word’s spell checker thinks Antarctic should be capitalized, but doesn’t particularly care if I capitalize Arctic.

The popularity of streaming services, downloadable MP3 files and file sharing have reduced the market for music CD’s. If anyone’s wondering whether streaming has or will substantially reduce the market for movies on DVD, just check the catalogue of Oscar winner Julianne Moore. Hardly an overnight success, Ms. Moore has been in lots of movies. a few aren’t even available as DVD’s, but very few are available to stream on Netflix. So, there’s still a big market for DVD’s, especially since lots of people would rather watch a movie at home than go to a theater to see one.

I don’t usually sign Internet petitions, but I signed this one.

I suppose some Presidents’ Day sales offered substantial savings, but we only got $30 off the new sofa we bought. I’m happy for my wife though. She was satisfied with a sofa we saw at the first store we stopped in. Usually, she has to visit multiple stores before making up her mind.

I was unable to add a date to a photo I put up on Facebook because the photo is older than I am.

Disillusionment has set in because I learned that most of Munich Germany’s famous Oktoberfest is in September. Since I spelled October the German way, I would spell September the German way too, except September is both the English and the German way, although it’s pronounced differently in the two languages. Of course, March Madness lasts well into April, so I guess there’s a precedent of sorts.

I’ve been saying for years that if I should win one of those big lotteries, you know, Powerball or Mega Millions, I’d jump on the bed. I found out watching Nancy Giles’ CBS Sunday Morning report last month that there are people at a mattress factory in San Francisco who are actually paid to do that. I don’t know about you, but being paid to do it would take a lot of fun out of it for me.

Things I Want (or Need) to Know

Today is the seventh anniversary of the Sisyphus Project. I haven’t had anything profound to say in the last seven years, so why should I start now?

Another incidence of who do they think they’re marketing to. Expedia ran a commercial on Valentine’s Day showing lots of couples kissing. The ad went on to say that if you booked a room through Expedia.com on Valentine’s Day, they’d give you $50 off. My problem with the ad? The soundtrack is “This Is the Night For Love” by the Valiants. The song is 56 years old! What demographic are they trying to reach here?

I have the same complaint about the Bank of America’s current TV commercial which uses “Danke Schoen” by Wayne Newton as a sound bed. Exactly what demographic are they marketing to?

Cho Hyun-ah, granddaughter of the founder of Korean Air and a vice president of the company, was sentenced in Seoul to a year in prison because of an incident at Kennedy Airport last December. You may remember news reports that she threw a tantrum when she was served macadamia nuts in a bag rather than a dish, confronting the cabin crew and ordering the plane to return to the gate to throw one crew member off the plane. According to a NY Post article attributed to the Associated Press, “The court said Cho was guilty of forcing a flight to change its route, obstructing the flight’s captain in the performance of his duties and forcing a crew member off a plane.” I don’t think what she did was right, but I do wonder how she gets to go to jail in South Korea over something she did in New York.

Do you have a memory foam mattress? If so, do you know what memory foam remembers? I know I don’t. Nancy Giles asked that question recently on CBS Sunday Morning and I wished so fervently that I had thought of it, I brought it to you to see if we can solve the mystery together. If I thought for a moment that memory foam mattresses were digital, I’d ask what kind of memory they had, and how many MB, but I don’t.

Things I Know

If you’re off TV for six months, network executives expect the audience to forget you. I’d be more surprised than ever if Brian Williams returns to TV in his former role as sole anchor of the NBC Nightly News after his six-month suspension is up in August.

Otto Von Bismark, the first Chancellor of Germany in the late 19th century, once said, “Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made,” except, of course he said it in German. Still, I was in a market the other day that was selling sausage at $13.99 a pound and I do wonder what the hell is in that.

I’ve arrived at a new way to think of one of my pet peeves, the phrase “Very unique.” To repeat myself, unique doesn’t mean rare, it means only. So, if something is unique means there’s only one, then it follows that if something is very unique it doesn’t exist at all.

If your mechanic gets a Ferrari before you do, it’s time for a new mechanic.

Montana State Representative David Moore of Missoula made national news when he tried to get the state of Montana to outlaw yoga pants, claiming they’re too revealing. His effort failed and Matt Lauer on the Today Show said it was kind of a stretch.

An editorial in the Long Island newspaper Newsday called recently to make the New York State Legislature full-time, increase legislators salary and bar outside income as a way to fight corruption. New York State legislators salaries were last raised in the 1990’s and something needs to be done to fight corruption. Since former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was criminally charged, former Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (a Democrat) was convicted of trying to bribe his way into being the Republican candidate for Mayor of New York. Still, Newsday’s editorial board should know, but didn’t mention, that giving the New York State Legislature a raise can only be done for the next session. In other words, legislators elected last year can raise the salaries of legislators elected in 2016, but not before that. New York’s state constitution mandates that, so while it could be changed, a constitutional amendment can only pass the legislature in two consecutive sessions. Therefore, amending the State Constitution to give legislators a raise or to bar them from making outside income, would take longer.

You may have read newspaper or Internet reports or heard on TV or radio that a house trailer in Amagansett, Long Island, is for sale for $1.1 million. That’s misleading, deliberately misleading in my view. What’s for sale is the land the trailer sits on which is roughly .4 acres. The land is worth what a buildable lot in Amagansett close to the ocean is worth. It’s worth that, plus what it costs to remove the trailer. You can build a 4,000-square-foot house on that parcel. If you want the trailer, and who would, you can probably have it for free as long as you get it off the lot.

My shoulders hurt, as usual. I was wondering if I could blame the nuns I had in Catholic grade school instead of myself, but I decided not. First, they hit me with a ruler on the hands, not on the shoulders and second, I was talking.

He never worked under just one name, as some other singers have, but if you look up the name “Waylon” in Google, you get over seven million hits. The first nine, and lots of the rest, refer to Waylon Jennings. In case you didn’t know, Waylon was a protégé of Buddy Holly and was on the Winter Dance Party tour with Buddy in February 1959. Buddy and Waylon chartered a light plane from Clear Lake, Iowa to the next tour stop. Waylon agreed to give up his seat on the plane to J.P. Richardson (the Big Bopper). Buddy told Waylon he hoped he would freeze on the tour bus and Waylon told Buddy that he hoped the plane crashed. It did, in the pre-dawn hours of February 3rd, killing Buddy, J.P. and Richie Valens as well as their pilot. Years later, Don McLean wrote a song about it and called it “The Day the Music Died.” Because of his off-handed remark, Waylon felt responsible for the crash for years. He even gave up performing for a while because of it.

The Life of Brian

George Washington probably did lie from time to time. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he never chopped down the famous cherry tree or any other. But, when George was alive, there was no Internet and there were no cell-phone video cameras.

Brian Williams, anchor of the most popular network newscast for the past ten years, “misremembered” his role in flying around in helicopters in a war zone in 2003. Then he repeated what he misremembered multiple times, in public and on TV. If you are a television news anchor, you are selling a few things. The most important of these (in no particular order) are your good looks, the personality you project on TV, your ability to read out loud in a pleasant speaking voice and your credibility. Can you misremember something? Sure particularly if the something you misremember is insignificant to you. I am unsure if my wife and I attended a wedding for the woman I took to my senior prom or whether we attended a wedding of another high school friend and that prom date was a bridesmaid. If I were shot down in a helicopter though, I’m pretty sure I would remember that, accurately.

One lie diminishes Brian’s credibility. Now, everyone in the media is out looking for other lies he might have told and several media outlets claim to have discovered some. And of the some, a subset seems significant. Did Brian Williams misremember or lie about whether he rescued one puppy or two from a fire? Who cares? Did he have to be rescued from possible gang attack in a stairwell of the hotel he stayed in during Hurricane Katrina? Did he see a corpse float by the same hotel? If they didn’t happen, did he report those things on TV? Those things reflect on whether he’s a good reporter or a good story teller. We know he’s a good story teller. He’s been a charming guest on the Late Show and the Tonight Show. A good story teller has to be entertaining, but to be a good reporter, we have to be sure we can believe him.

So on Saturday, he said he had decided to remove himself from his newscast for a few days. I have no personal knowledge of this, of course, but if he did decide, I suspect it was at the suggestion of his superiors at NBC News, NBC, or even its parent company, Comcast. When that kind of suggestion comes down, there’s always the possibility that if you don’t do what’s suggested, said suggestion will be imposed upon you. If Brian’s self-imposed hiatus lasts more than “a few days” I won’t be surprised.

Have the ratings tanked in the few days since the controversy erupted? Will ratings fall off this week with Lester Holt in the anchor seat? Is there anybody else on the horizon who could quickly take Brian Williams’ place? How much money would it cost the company to keep him, vs. how much it would cost to eat his recently signed multi-million contract is a big consideration. You can also be sure lawyers for the company and for Williams are looking into how much they would have to pay him to go away.

Do I think the few days Brian Williams will be away from the anchor chair at the NBC Nightly News will be more than a few days? Yes. In fact, even if he does comeback, I believe there’s a good likelihood that he won’t continue in his current role for very long afterwards. A lot of prominent media analysts are calling on him to resign. I’m not a prominent media analyst so nobody has consulted me on the matter.

Things I Know

I neglected to mention this earlier, so pardon me, but the Sisyphus Project is copyright 2015, as well as 2008-2014.

It also contains material that may be unsuitable for adults or other people with a modicum of maturity. I should probably have warned you about that years ago.

I want to like Comedy Central’s new Nightly Show with Larry Wllmore, but whether it’s a live audience or a laugh track, they find it a lot funnier than I do.

If you are responsible for making the payments on more than one student loan through Navient, the company’s bill collector tells me it cannot split a payment. If you’re on the hook for four years of loans, and using your bank’s on-line bill pay feature, I’m told you have to send four separate payments. I berated their computer programmers and suggested they switch to Quicken, which can handle split payments. BTW, four years ago, Navient’s predecessor, Sallie Mae, could handle split payments. Progress, I guess.

Sheldon Silver is out as Speaker of the NY State Assembly and Governor Cuomo was “shocked” to learn of the charges of corruption against him. There have been questions and rumors about Speaker Silver’s possible ethical lapses and involvement in outside law firms for years. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara now says he has proof Silver accepted bribes and kickbacks. It remains to be seen whether Bharara’s proof will stand up in court, but Governor Cuomo being shocked reminds me of Captain Renault in the movie “Casablanca” being shocked that there was gambling going on in Rick’s Place.

If the reports I’ve read about the terrible train accident in Valhalla NY a week ago on Tuesday night that killed six people are true, it was entirely avoidable, and having not been avoided, the woman driver whose car the train plowed into could at least have saved herself. First, you can drive over railroad tracks, but you should never drive on to them. In other words, don’t get on the railroad tracks if you can’t proceed across the tracks without stopping. Second, if you do get stuck on railroad tracks and there is a train coming, you exit your car and run toward the train. Why? Because when the train hits your car, both the train and the car will hurl in the direction the train is going. If you run to where the train just was, at least you won’t get hit by flying debris from the collision.

In addition to the Super Bowl, Sunday’s TV programs included the Puppy Bowl, the Kitten Bowl, the Lingerie Bowl, and the Fish Bowl. My next genius idea for TV programming is the Cereal Bowl. I figure we’ll have a bowl of corn flakes getting soggy and a bowl of Rice Krispies making that noise compete against each other.

The recorded voice on the phone said, “Hello. This is not a sales call.” I can’t tell you what kind of call it was though, because that’s when I hung up.

If you are a telemarketer or a survey operator, it’s bad enough from my perspective that you’re calling me at all, but when you call, at least be prepared to talk to me. If I say to you, “You called me. Talk,” you’d better have something I want to hear and say it fast or I’ll hang up.

Things I Want (or Need) to Know

Do Jehovah’s Witnesses ever proselytize at the homes of other Jehovah’s Witnesses by mistake?

If you get a blood transfusion, do you have to bring them some orange juice, so they’ll have it to give to the people who are donating blood?

Have you seen those commercials on TV where the car salesman tells you that if you have $200 and a job, he can put you in a new car? I’m not picking on one dealer. Lots of them do it. They do it with loans that may last longer than the car does. Subprime car loans are an increasing problem that may eventually bite the economy in the ass in much the same way the subprime mortgage crisis did back in 2008. If you have a job and only $200, you don’t belong in a new car, unless it belongs to someone else.

Over the weekend, my wife was making lunch and she asked if I wanted some bacon. I found myself wondering if there are really multiple answers to that question.

I know they’re all repeats because Tommy passed away late last year, but Click and Clack on NPR’s “Car Talk” asked an interesting question recently: Have you ever seen a UPS truck legally parked? I know I haven’t.

I’m not adding to my collection of CD’s as fast as I once did, but I got four or five new ones for Christmas and when I went to put them away, my CD storage was full, again. Every time I go to Ikea to buy something else to hold them, the store has discontinued the last thing I bought. In this case, it was an inexpensive wall-mounted metal rack. You can still find them on Ebay, but if you want them, you’ll pay about ten times what Ikea used to charge for them. If demand exceeds supply by that much, why did Ikea stop making them? I think the next time I want a CD cabinet, I’m going to have to make it myself. One made of wood will be heavy enough that I should probably mount it to the wall using French cleats.

I’ve been listening to a lot of old time radio. You’d be surprised how many of the radio dramas from the thirties to the fifties are available for free as MP3 downloads. One thing strikes me. A lot of people on those shows spoke English in a way different from what you and I are used to hearing. It’s an accent closer to British English than anything I hear today. Did a large group of people actually speak like that, or was it something they affected to be on the radio?

Corruption in New York

You don’t want ANY U.S. Attorney crawling up your ass. You especially don’t want the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York there. The Southern District of New York is one of the highest profile posts in the U.S. Justice Department. Slouches don’t get sent there. And’ it’s Preet Bharara, not Preet Bahara. It’s an Indian name and it isn’t that hard to pronounce. Seriously.

New York State government, especially the state legislature, has a problem with corruption–a big problem. I hope I didn’t miss any but as far as I can recall, six members of the New York State Legislature have been formally charged crimes having to do with corruption in the last six years. The latest is Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the New York State Assembly. Silver has reportedly submitted his resignation as Speaker effective tomorrow after more than 20 years on the job, because of the charges against him. He has been accused of accepting millions of dollars from law firms, doing no legal work for the money, and using his public position to benefit the law firm and himself. In other words, bribes and kickbacks. He’s 70 and, if convicted, he could be spending the rest of his life in jail. He’s also one of the three most powerful political office holders in the State of New York, so if he tries to swing a deal, who knows who else he could bring down.

In addition to Silver, I can also think of three other former Assembly Speakers in New York and one Senate Majority Leader who have been charged with crimes, Perry Duryea wasn’t convicted, and neither was Stanley Steingut. Mel Miller was convicted of something that had nothing to do with his Speakership. Across the aisle in the State Senate, Joe Bruno was first convicted, then the law was thrown out by the US Supreme Court, then he was tried again and acquitted, but it cost him millions of dollars. Then it cost the taxpayers of New York over two million because the people reimbursed that much of his legal expenses. In New York in my lifetime, we’ve also had Governor Eliot Spitzer and his prostitute. And then there was Sol Wachtler, former Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals who did 15 months in jail because of threats he made toward a former lover.

The New York State Legislature doesn’t work like most representative bodies. It is controlled almost 100 percent by the Assembly Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader. State budget negotiations in New York don’t involve committees of both houses. They involve the “three men in a room” that Bharara referred to in his news conference. The Governor and the leaders of both houses take care of it personally and the two houses of the legislature go along with their leaders or they are disciplined.

A lot of people have been calling New York the most corrupt state in the nation. It could very well be. I don’t follow politics in other states and as far as I know, in recent experience, Illinois only had a governor who tried to sell a US Senate seat after President Obama was elected back in 2008.

I’ve spent my career as an appointed, not elected public official, but to be elected or appointed where I live, you have to be active in politics. I’ve never been in a high enough echelon to encounter any of the corruption we’ve all been reading about lately, but I guess I am a politician and I think it’s not a perfect system. There’s more than one thing that needs to change, but corruption is at or near the top of the list.

My father-in-law used to say often and loudly that, “All politicians are crooks.” That’s not true. A lot of them are really trying to improve society and a lot of them are also in it for power rather than money. I finally got fed up with with my father-in-law and told him that he was welcomed to think whatever he wanted to think, but if he said all politicians are crooks again in my house, he would not be welcomed in my house anymore. Still, it often seems as if the old joke about car dealers applies here. The dishonest ones are giving the other five percent a bad name. It’s been my contention that the American public gets much better government than it deserves or has any right to expect, considering the low level of public interest and participation.

When U.S. Attorney Bharara announced the charges against Sheldon Silver, he advised the public to “stay tuned” for further developments. Since he implied more is coming, if you’re a corrupt politician in Albany, my advice to you isn’t to stay tuned, it is to quake in your boots.

Things I Know

I have a part-time job. Most part-time jobs are a few hours a week. Mine is a few weeks a year, and a few hours from time to time otherwise. I just finished the few weeks a year, so I’m back.

Ernie Banks has passed away. Mr. Cub was the embodiment of those things we’d like to believe are right about baseball. In his honor, let’s play two.

Bullying is pretty much constantly in the news these days. Out of curiosity, I recently Googled the guy who bullied me in high school. One day, for no apparent reason, he chased me through the halls of the school. When I got around a corner, I stopped and when he rounded the same corner, he found me with my hands clenched together. He was running full-speed ahead when I hit him hard in the stomach, as if I were batting right handed. He didn’t bother me a lot after that. Unless there are two of him (and his last name is unusual), he couldn’t attend his class’s 10th high school reunion because he was doing time for selling a little marijuana–two tons of it!

My car insurance covers damage to rental cars. So does the insurance most people carry on their own cars. The only reason I can think of why you would want to buy the insurance they sell at the car rental counter is if you intended to trash the car. Last time someone asked me if I wanted to buy rental car insurance, I told the woman that if I bought it, I’d really, REALLY use it.

It’s really kind of frightening how little privacy there is in the world. Every once in a while, I try to locate someone I knew in the past. I recently located the second girl I ever dated. Women are harder to find than men, because most of them still change their last names when and if they marry. Not to narrow it down too much, Shirley is married and lives in Connecticut. I’m just proving something to myself and I’m not going to look her up. If I were ever to run into her, my only thought is I’d say I was sorry for acting like a jerk in the way I broke up with her. My only defense for acting like a jerk then is (and you have to admit it is a good defense) I was a 15-year-old boy.

A recent survey by the Oklahoma State University department of agricultural economics found that more than 80% of respondents favor a government-required label on all food containing DNA. Every living thing contains DNA. I’m telling you this because based on the result of that survey, a lot of people don’t know it.

I like the Barrett-Jackson collector car auctions. I try to watch them when televised and I’ve even been to one a few years ago. Since Speed Channel went out of business, I don’t like the TV show as much as I used to. First, having different parts of it on different channels is a pain, especially when I don’t receive all the channels. I’ve always thought it could be a better TV show if they had a few features about special cars, but they’re more likely to highlight bidders than delve deeply into a car. And recent trends toward emphasizing social media and hiring people who don’t know much about the cars for the telecast are bad. I don’t have any research to prove this, but I think people who watch this on TV are mostly interested in the cars.

You can’t tell it from shopping where I live, but you can still buy Lifesavers roll candy. Around here, they only sell the pouches of big, individually wrapped Lifesavers. If you want the rolls, you may have to order them on line.

I am not one of the 100,000,000 Americans suffering from . . .whatever: I’m one of the 300,000,000 Americans suffering from robocalls.

Woe’s Tale

Sad on-line shopping tale. I’m a photographer. A hobbyist, not a pro, but I have almost enough equipment to make a pro think I’m a pro too. One more lens and one more speedlite ought to do it. The other body I have my eye on will probably overdo it. If I ever win a big lottery, I’ll buy Canon lenses until the money runs out. And I’ll hire someone to carry all this stuff for me too.

So, I ordered a small quantity of drawstring bags on line. I want them to hold and protect things like spare camera batteries, the battery charger and wireless flash triggers. The bags come from China. It took the vendor seven weeks to ship me the wrong ones, too small and too thin for my purpose, but at least they shipped nine times as many as I ordered. There is that. It took three weeks and two email exchanges to get them to agree to ship what I actually ordered. Since the mistake was not mine, I asked for expedited shipping. They didn’t say no, but they didn’t do it either. They said expect them in six weeks. Shipping costs more than the bags, so they don’t want the wrong ones back. That would be cool except I have no use for what they’ve already sent me. Six and three and seven equal sixteen, don’t they? Three-and-a-half months for some little bags. I hope I still like to take pictures by the time they get here.

Things I Know

I don’t want to be Debbie Downer here, but if you file quarterly estimated federal income taxes, today is the deadline for your fourth quarter filing. I’ve already mailed mine. Have you?

We visited the Library of Congress in Washington DC over the weekend to see the copy of the Magna Carta from Lincoln Cathedral on display. This is one of the four copies dating from 1215 known to still exist. It’s amazing to see a written document, 800 years old. It’s displayed to protect it, but the way it’s displayed makes it hard to read and hard to photograph. Can’t read it anyway. It’s in Latin and the writing is surprisingly small.
The Jefferson Building of the Library is amazingly ornate and beautiful. It also hosted an exhibit on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was extremely informative as well. The Magna Carta exhibit closes on January 19th.

Sunday, January 11th, was a day when some New Yorkers took to the subway, wearing no pants. They did wear underwear, just no pants. I’ve been living for two weeks in this climate with no winter coat, making do with layers and a windbreaker. If I were going to ride the New York City subway sans pants, I’d pick a much warmer day for it.

I’ve never met the writer Larry Doyle. Among other things, he used to write a blog in Huffington Post, but I don’t read the Huffington Post regularly. I came across one piece of his work on a recent rebroadcast of the NPR show, “This American Life.” The episode is called, “It’s Never Over.” If you’ve ever been dumped by someone you dated and thought of as the love of your life, download this podcast, or go to Larrydoyle.com, find and read the piece he wrote in 1990 called, “Life Without Leann.” I’m sure it won’t appeal to everyone, but I found it hysterical! I found out that Larry did finally discover love with someone else. I have too.

I hate to say anything nice about Navient, but at least this month, they didn’t call me before the end of the grace period. And, perhaps, if they knew the maker of the loan was not going to pay in December, calling me before the end of the grace period was a way of alerting me so I wouldn’t pay late fees. That would probably be a good idea, but the call sounded too bill-collector for my tastes and for the fact that I wasn’t late.

Update on my jacket. The good folks at the sportswear company have agreed to send me a warranty replacement for the jacket that suffered unusual wear on the right sleeve. Mistakes happen. A reliable company deals with mistakes and stands behind its merchandise. If this one follows through (and I believe they will), I’ll let you know which company it is when I receive the new jacket.

Since it’s going to take another five to ten business days to get the coat, I am doing without a winter coat for essentially the entire month of January. Let that be a lesson to me. If another coat ever needs warranty replacement after one season of wear, I should return it in the summer, not after Christmas.

Things I Know

I would probably procrastinate if I only could get around to it. I bought a new winter jacket for the 2013-2014 season. I wanted a warmer one than I had and the new jacket was warmer, but it started to wear out in a few months. I should have tried for a warranty replacement during the summer, but I didn’t until after Christmas. I’ve always been pleased with the brand I bought, so I hope they’ll replace it, but in the meantime, it’s January and I’m cold.

I like to call the bank I deal with, “Bank of a Large and Powerful Country.” That’s not its real name. The computer program they use to answer the phone has been modified since last time I called. I don’t know when it was modified because I don’t call them a lot, but it now wastes a lot more of my time than it previously did. So, I guess that’s new and improved.

It really annoys me that when I call the bank, the phone robot tells me the balances on all my accounts. I wouldn’t mind if it asked if I wanted my balances, but it doesn’t give me a choice. This wastes time because first, they do send out statements unless you ask them not to, and second, as I understand it, a few people now have computers in their homes and this thing called the Internet, so they can look that up on line. My cable company does the same thing and it annoys me for the same reason.

But, what bothers me most about my bank, and my bank isn’t unique in this, is when I call someone at the bank who is designated a “specialist,” but doesn’t know basics about their operation. I asked a loan specialist why the balance on my home equity line of credit doesn’t go down a little more each month I make a regular payment on the same day. She said it was because of the variable interest rate. The loan has a variable interest rate, but the rate hasn’t changed so that isn’t and can’t be the answer. Whether you’re interested or not, I covered the real reason in my blog post on Friday.

I frequently berate the advertising industry for making commercials that appeal to the wrong demographic. For example, Eartha Kitt, singing a song from the very early 1950’s in French, to sell Vodka, when Vodka is associated with Russia and they probably can’t sell a huge amount of Vodka to people over 75. However, I do not do that with respect to the latest Honda commercials. Using Stretch Armstrong and Skeletor as spokesmen to sell Hondas to people in their 30’s and 40’s is positively brilliant!

Things I Want (or need) to Know

If my elf on a shelf takes a picture of itself, is that picture a shelfie?

What would you like to do differently in the new year? I think I’ll finally paint the walls in our master bedroom. My wife picked out a lovely shade of blue. I also hope to repair the back porch before I fall through. And now that I know how to build radiator covers, I have five more to create, but I’ll probably paint them instead of staining them. It’s a lot less work and I can make them out of less expensive material if I paint them.

I called my bank to ask why, if I make the same payment every month, the balance goes down some months a little less than it did the month before. Let’s call the bank, “Bank of a Large and Powerful Country.” The nice lady on the phone said it was because the loan has a variable interest rate. It does, but it hasn’t changed, so that isn’t the answer and she doesn’t seem to know it can’t be. After a few questions, we figured out it’s because the interest accrues daily. That means there’s a little more interest charged in 31-day months. My mortgage doesn’t do that, but my home equity loan apparently does. I know the people who answer the phones, even if they’re called “specialists” aren’t the highest level of the bank’s employees, but should I be concerned when I have all my money in the bank and I call up and have to explain what they’re doing to them so they can answer my question?

Should I also be concerned that changing banks wouldn’t help that situation?

Why does Flo, the advertising image of Progressive Insurance dress like a baker in all the TV commercials? I know why bakers wear white (it doesn’t show if you spill flour on your clothes), but why does an insurance salesperson need a white apron?

What is the purpose of an app that will add pictures to the contacts in your phone? If I have both a picture of you and contact information about you, wouldn’t I already know what you look like?

Things I Know

You can stop the automated “courtesy calls” from CVS drug stores by calling 1-800-SHOPCVS. I did it today and I only hope it works. After one, or MAYBE two calls, it crosses the line from courtesy to harassment. You have to listen to the whole top-level menu and then select other choices, but the option is in there.

One reason car dealers and manufacturers advertise so heavily that you should give someone a car for Christmas is that December is a slow month for buying cars, since people usually spend their money on less expensive presents.

If you got a fruitcake for Christmas, I didn’t give it to you. So, please don’t give it back to me next year.

Speaking of cake, in case you’ve ever wondered, bakers wear white because it doesn’t show flour stains. It does, however, show chocolate.

I recently made two roundtrips to Manhattan by automobile, a distance of 28 miles each way. One leg into Manhattan took about 45 minutes. The other three legs, one in and two out, took roughly one hour and 45 minutes each. I have driven to Manhattan twice in the last week. Also twice in the last 20 years. If I had to go every day, I wouldn’t consider driving.

Here’s a money-saving tip: If you have two cars and one EZ Pass, make sure you don’t leave the EZ Pass at home if you should drive to Manhattan. A roundtrip through the Queens Midtown Tunnel carries a $15.00 charge for tolls if you don’t have an EZ Pass. I hope I don’t have to explain how I know that.

We took my daughter to Manhattan to consult with a prominent neurosurgeon, Doctor Jeffrey Wisoff, at NYU. It’s easy to see why he’s prominent. He was very professional, spent almost an hour with us, went over her condition with us in great detail, and in language we could all understand. If I needed brain or spinal surgery, I would certainly want Dr. Wisoff on the list of doctors to consider engaging to do it. Our visit was frustrating, however, because our daughter’s neurologist thought her symptoms could be addressed by an operation and while nobody wants to have that kind of surgery, we were hoping Dr. Wisoff could help and he said her symptoms aren’t caused by something he can address. Now, we have to explore other avenues to try to figure out what’s wrong.

One great thing about living in the New York metropolitan area is access to some of the world’s outstanding hospitals, not one, some. You’ve got Weill Cornell, Columbia Presbyterian, NYU Langone, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Hospital for Special Surgery and many more. There are superior hospitals in other places as well, but I think New York has the highest concentration of them in the entire country, maybe the world.

Speaking of health care, my mother was the kind of person who would cancel a doctor’s appointment because she didn’t feel well.

A Season of Change

My father was sick when I got out of the Army. His illness was the reason I had been stationed thirty miles from home for my last year. That Father’s Day, my sister and I bought him a room air conditioner to help him breathe during the hot, humid summer. Father’s Day was just before I was discharged, so I didn’t have the money to pay half, so I bargained with my sister. She paid 80 percent of the price. I said I would give her enough money to make up the balance of my share before she went back to college. When the time came, I renegotiated the deal. I told her she could have the money I promised her, or if she waited until Christmas, I’d give her a TV instead. The TV cost more than twice as much as the money I owed her.

She waited.

My dad, the retired cop, was a school bus driver. But when school opened, he was too sick to work. He was 61 years old and he was dying. He was basically bedridden so I bought a TV set he could watch in his room, where the air conditioner was running to help him breathe. He did die, in October, four days after his 62nd birthday.

I didn’t want to, nor did I, forget my dad, but I changed a lot of things so remembering him and being without him wouldn’t be quite as painful. Among them I bought a new car, repainted the inside of our house, changing the color of every room, and instead of Christmas dinner at home, I took my mother, my sister and my girlfriend to dinner in a fancy restaurant on Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, I went to my girlfriend’s family home, got down on one knee in her living room and asked her to marry me. She said yes.

Since it happened at her family home, her family knew about it right away. She and I went to Midnight Mass where she held her diamond ring up to the lights to watch it sparkle and I enjoyed watching her sparkle. I’d say I enjoyed her reaction as much or more than anything else I’ve enjoyed, ever. We shared our good news with a few friends we saw at mass, but I didn’t tell my mom and my sister until the big Christmas Dinner.

My father’s slightly used TV became the one I promised my sister. I’m not sure if it was because the TV was used, but I also bought her a record player. Added to the stuff she normally carried back and forth to college in Chicago, she couldn’t carry a TV and a record player too. So, I put her, her luggage and her Christmas presents in my little car, picked up my fiancé and all three of us drove off to the windy city.

From October to December, the end of my Dad’s life to the beginning of my lifelong commitment to my wife, I don’t think I’ve ever gone through more changes in a shorter period of time before or since. But all of that is why it was my most memorable Christmas.

Things I Know

Christmas is better with little kids around. I have adult children and no grandchildren, so if kids are here at Christmas, I have to wait for them to wake up. When I first became a father, I never thought that day would come, and now that it’s here, I’m honestly not crazy about it.

I don’t really need anything for Christmas and anything I really want costs more than the people who love me can afford to give. My camera equipment is Canon and while I don’t really have a need for the $16 thousand lens, all Canon stuff is pricey.

I love my wife, Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me), more than anything and she’s in the same boat I am. Neither one of us is big on spending extravagantly on gifts. For less modest gifts, frankly, I have bought enough of them over the years that I’m really out of ideas.

Since I have adult children and no grandchildren, one thing I could use for Christmas is a new Christmas tradition.

Just for the record, when I said I wanted a Vette for Christmas, I meant Corvette, not Chevette.

I paid Navient before the penalty date and they didn’t call me again, so I didn’t call them as I said I might either, because I don’t like to be frustrated, so why should I talk to Navient if I don’t have to?

Here, by the way, is my advice to Navient, not that they asked for it. If I were the maker of a loan and the cosigner was paying that loan, on time as required, I’d send the cosigner a monthly statement to make sure those payments continued apace.

My friend and former colleague, Wes Richards, had a nice turn of phrase in his blog last week. He said the Long Island newspaper, Newsday, is a shadow of its former shadow.

Things I Know

Today’s Patti’s birthday. We dated for a while in high school and I still have a soft spot in my heart (or maybe it’s my head) for her. Even though she hasn’t done anything influential in my life since she was 17 and I didn’t appreciate it then, she really was a big influence on me and how I grew up. Neither of us wants to drop our spouse and run off together, but I do wish her well and like to hear that she’s doing okay. I didn’t remember her date of birth from when we were kids, but I asked her years ago when we reconnected as adults. She told me, but said she would not tell me how old she was. She’s roughly 13 months younger than I am. If I could subtract one from 16 to get her age when we were dating, I can subtract one from my current age to figure out how old she is now. But I promised her I wouldn’t tell her unless she asked. She hasn’t asked, so I won’t tell. Still, happy birthday Patti, and many more.

I’m on the federal do not call list. I didn’t put myself on the list because I’m gullible and want to avoid buying anything someone calls me up and offers to sell me. I did it as a favor to myself because I find telemarketing annoying. That’s true. But I also did it as a favor to telemarketers, since there is no way in hell, and no way on God’s green earth that I will every buy something from a telemarketer, so why should I waste their time either?
Peter called me tonight to try to sell me solar panels. I told him that if he could tell me exactly how many times I had asked his company to never call me again this year, I’d listen to his pitch. He didn’t even try to guess. I didn’t bother telling him that I don’t believe his name is Peter, but I don’t believe it.

I know charities are exempt from the list, but I don’t give to charities that call me for donations either. I don’t because for the most part, I don’t know if the people who are calling me are who they say they are and I don’t know whether their charities are legitimate either.

If I want to donate to charity, I research it first to see if the charity is putting my money to a use that I approve of. Mostly, the ones that do the most telemarketing spend most of their money on more fund raising. That’s not a use I approve of.

I like Baskin Robins ice cream, but the store in my neighborhood isn’t very good at making milk shakes and despite the sign behind the counter, they don’t make malteds at all. The last milk shake I bought at that store will be the last milk shake I buy at that store, but they were good about giving me my money back when I took one sip and complained.

Navient Correction

The company’s statements do list the separate address for cosigners to send payments to. I said in my most recent blog post that they don’t. It wasn’t prominent enough for me to notice it, but the separate address is there.

Pardon the Profanity, but Navient

I’ve expounded here before about Sallie Mae’s collection practices. A little while back, Sallie spun off her student loan business to a new company called Navient. What the hell does Navient mean? Did you know that people are paid large sums of money to think up company names? But I digress. In my opinion, Navient’s collection practices are just as dumb as Sallie Mae’s were.

I find myself back in the business of paying a student loan I cosigned for. The economy is still tough for some people. Don’t cosign loans. Loan companies and banks are in the business of deciding who can pay them back and who can’t. If the loan company or bank doesn’t think the person who is trying to borrow money can pay it back, they’re probably right. They are, after all, the professionals in that business.

The statement from Navient says the payment has to be received by the 18th of the month to avoid late fees. That means, in case you are slow, or Navient (which I think is probably the same thing), that the loan payment will begin incurring late fees on Friday. So, why should I rush to pay it a long time before Friday? This is a trick I learned from mortgage companies when I was a tax collector. Mortgage companies generally pay the property taxes for mortgage holders and they generally do that on or near the last day of the grace period. I have instructed my bank’s automated bill paying program to take care of it on the 15th. So, naturally, I got a robocall on the 14th.

This is annoying for a few reasons. There’s no option on the robocall to talk to a human being. The options the robocall does offer don’t fit my situation. The robocall comes at a time when I can’t call them and talk to a human being because the human beings aren’t at work today. The website they refer you to in the robocall isn’t correct, so it has to redirect you to another website. It doesn’t say so on the loan statement, but the address for cosigners to pay is a different PO Box than the address for loan makers to pay. I don’t know if that’s going to be a problem, but I’ll probably find out tomorrow. I say that because I don’t have nearly enough frustration in my life, so I’ll probably give Navient a call then.

I just hope and pray that the automated phone attendant that picks up my call doesn’t tell me my call is important to Navient, because I’m sure it isn’t.

Things I Know

Former New York Governor George Pataki is testing the waters for a Presidential run in 2016. It’s the fourth time in the past five election cycles that Pataki has done this. He sat out 2008 when George Bush ran for reelection. In my political opinion, Governor Pataki has absolutely zero chance of gaining the GOP nomination, but his chance of becoming the Republican vice-presidential nominee are about ten times greater than that.

In case you’re wondering, I do know what ten times zero is.

The Bath Bus Company in Great Britain is running an experimental bus on bio-methane, made from decomposing human feces and food waste. I’m sorry, but that gives me a mental picture of a bus in which all the seats are toilets.

If you weigh yourself on the kind of scale they have in a doctor’s office, the kind where the weights slide across a beam, you may thing the scale is accurate, but maybe it isn’t. First, when it’s set to zero, the beam has to be adjusted so it balances. Second, the post has to be plumb and the base of the beam has to be level. The scale can’t be on a carpeted surface either. The scale in my doctor’s office said I gained seven pounds in the last two weeks. To do that, I’d have to eat an additional 1,500 calories for each of those 14 days. I know Thanksgiving was in there, but still I can’t see how that’s possible. But then, I noticed from my seat on the examination table that the scale isn’t plumb and level. I probably put on two or three pounds, but not seven!

I’m starting another effort to change American culture. Let’s all get behind it. Beginning when you reach the age of 70, instead of receiving your birthday cake at a party or a special dinner, everyone should be entitled to birthday cake for breakfast. After all, 70 is getting up there and life is short so, as the saying goes, eat desert first.

I get a kick out of seeing someplace I’ve been on TV. When the “Dark Water” episode of “Doctor Who” aired recently, showing Cybermen bursting out of the doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and head south along Sermon Lane toward the Millennium Bridge was one of those times. I understand that scene is also an homage to another time Cybermen marched down Sermon Lane during a previous invasion when Patrick Troughton played The Doctor.

Now that they have legalized pot in Washington DC, the Congress has a better excuse than it has had previously.

Vaunted Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania (no not Penn State, that’s a different school) will soon offer a course entitled “wasting Time on the Internet.” Surprisingly, to me anyway. I can’t find the course available for download so it can be studied at your home or in your place of business.

Amazon.com has a new feature for members of its paid Prime service. In addition to two-day shipping, free videos and a kindle lending library, they now offer free, on-line storage for an unlimited number of still photographs. Since I have around 500 GB of pictures, I decided to try it as a backup. It’s a good deal, but I don’t like the execution. I like the large thumbnails used to display the pics, but uploading is kind of slow. Plus in Amazon’s cloud storage, the pictures are displayed by date taken or date uploaded. Nothing else. I have organized my pictures mostly by subject or event. If I could display my file storage tree on Amazon’s cloud, I’d like it better. I have a lot of pics of friends and family and I’d like to be able to locate that folder in the cloud. You can upload pictures to Flickr too (also slow) but on Flickr, you can create sets of pictures which is better. But I use Flickr for pictures I want to share, not for general storage.

Thanksgiving Advice

Thanksgiving is a time when we gather together as families to give thanks for what we have, stuff ourselves with food and, in many cases, argue fruitlessly. If, in addition to or instead of stuffing yourself with food, you overindulge in alcohol, the fruitless arguments may turn angry, or even violent.

Maybe I overdo it and maybe you can find a happy medium, but especially among family and close friends, I do my best not to argue. I have my reasons. First, I was raised in an alcoholic family. If you have an alcoholic loved one, you know that arguing with them doesn’t do a lot of good. Second, when I was 16 years old, I was in 16-year-old love with a 15-year-old girl. We argued a lot, mostly about religion. She didn’t convince me of anything, but I convinced her that she should find a new boyfriend. Third, I’ve spent a lifetime in government and politics. In my experience, arguing about politics is about as fruitful as arguing about religion. You have about as much chance of convincing me to change my political beliefs as the Jehovah’s Witness who came to my door yesterday had of converting me to her religion: none.

So, I’d suggest that for a happy Thanksgiving, don’t overindulge in alcohol and don’t let any family arguments get out of hand. If you must, you can also watch football. I know that’s what I’m planning to do, except for the football part.

Stop It! Just Stop It!

As a country, America needs immigration reform and we’ve needed it for at least 40 years. What President Reagan did back in the day helped a little, but it wasn’t enough because it didn’t do nearly enough to regulate our borders. What President Obama did on Thursday night wasn’t enough either and for the same reason.

Our immigration policy should try to keep families together and it should concentrate limited resources on deporting the people President Obama prioritized. It should also try to keep more people from coming here illegally. But the way the President moved forward pretty much guaranteed continued polarization between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. We used to have polarization within the legislative branch too, but not anymore since beginning in January, both houses will be controlled by Republicans.

During President Obama’s administration, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have distinguished themselves by attempting to cooperate and compromise. I don’t know who started it, but the fact that it’s been going on for so long means the American public should do one of several things, none of which can happen for two years.
The voting public, what’s left of it since turnout in the last election was at record lows, should either elect a Republican President in 2016, elect a veto-proof Republican Congress (both houses) or elect a Democratic President and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Perhaps President Obama thinks that by escalating the war with Congress, he can bring about the third option. If he does continue the war with Congress he will ensure his legacy as a less than effective President, perhaps the least effective since Jimmy Carter. And if that is what he’s thinking, his strategy could very easily backfire.

President Obama missed an opportunity to try to get along with Congress. The extreme members of the Republican Party need to realize that since they are no longer the minority, they have to try to govern too. They can’t just throw bombs. For example, if the first action of the Republican majority of both houses of Congress is to try to repeal Obamacare, that will fail. Over the past two years, the House has wasted a lot of time passing dozens of such resolutions which never even came up for a vote in the Democratic Senate. Republicans are a majority, but they are far from a veto-proof majority. If they retaliate for the President’s usurpation of legislative power, by trying to repeal Obamacare again, the President will veto the bill. To quote Otto Von Bismark (except he, of course, said it in German), “Politics is the art of the possible.” Recalling a doo wop hit of the 1950’s, everyone in Washington these days seems to try the impossible.

As I said, I don’t know who started it. I also don’t care who started it. But if it’s going to stop, somebody has to try to stop it and even if you agree with the President’s policy, what he did Thursday night threw an accelerant on the fire. If ours was a Parliamentary system of government, then the existing government , not the one that takes office in January, would have been turned out due to failing a vote of confidence. And it would be a lack of confidence in both parties, not one or the other.

Things I Know

A zoo in the Philippines is allowing visitors to be massaged by some big pythons. The snakes are supposedly not aggressive and the zoo management says doing this will help zoo patrons learn more about the snakes. I think I’ll just read a book, watch a documentary, or check out a couple of websites if it’s okay with you.

Two female school teachers in Louisiana are the latest I’ve read about in a disturbingly long line of teachers having sex with students. There was another one, this one male, in Brooklyn in September. Are these things happening more often or being reported more often? For the record, the most any of my high school teachers did for me in the romance department was introduce me to a Sophomore girl in his homeroom who I took to my senior prom.

Sophomore, in case nobody else has told you has Greek roots and basically it means wise fool.

The Yankees aren’t in the post season for the second year in a row. The Mets didn’t make the post season for what? I think it’s the third two-years in a row in a row. The Mets won-lost record was slightly better this year than last, five games better. But that’s nowhere near the ninety games GM Sandy Alderson said they could win this season. They didn’t fall off a cliff in the second half either and I suppose that’s a small step forward. They played mediocre baseball almost all season. They finished tied with the Braves for second place, but that’s 17 games back of the Nationals and nothing to brag about either. Some baseball pundits are saying they’re only two players away from contending. I don’t believe that, but they could break 500 next year. Hope does spring eternal.

What do we know so far that the Mets are planning to help improve next year? They’re going to move the outfield fences in again (second time since the stadium opened) to help Curtis Granderson hit seven more homeruns.

The Department of Great Lines hears from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. When the NFL’s biggest sponsor, a brewery, said the NFL needed to be more active in combatting domestic violence and child abuse, and the NFL said it is formulating new measures, Stewart said the NFL “succumbed to beer pressure.”

My memory isn’t quite as good as it once was, but if “Don’t touch my Dart” isn’t the stupidest advertising campaign I’ve ever heard or seen, it’s got to be second.

I’m building new radiator covers for my 100-year old house. I bought a pneumatic nail gun to help with the construction. I finally got around to trying it. By using it, I figured out a couple of things the instructions didn’t tell me, but I didn’t make any major mistakes. It works, and I didn’t nail myself to anything. One tip: to make attaching moldings around the edges of the opening you cut in the plywood, you used to make the cabinet, it helps to make the opening big enough to fit the nail gun into.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

I have just learned (and am baffled to know it) that you can buy camouflage lingerie. I’m baffled because if you went to the trouble to wear sexy lingerie, wouldn’t you want your significant other to be able to find you?

Since I don’t get a new cell phone every two years and since I do let my contracts expire, how come my monthly phone bill doesn’t get reduced by the amount of the cell-phone subsidy I’m not using?

If you’re old enough to remember the TV show “Dukes of Hazard,” you recognize the car in the TV commercial for autotrader.com. Did you notice they never show the roof?

Have you seen the commercial for the Infinity Q50? The one that says, “Its instinct to protect leaves you free to drive.” It’s about what they call driver assists, things like warnings when someone’s too close to the side of your car. I’m all for safety features in cars, but the commercial, to me, seems to suggest the Q50 will help you if you are a habitual distracted driver.

When hair stops growing on top of your head, why does it start growing out of your nose and ears?

Birthday Boy

Today’s my dad’s birthday. He passed away many years ago and he was born many years before that. I don’t think of him every day, but on days like today, his birthday, or next Wednesday, the anniversary of his death, I do remember him, fondly.

I told you last month that I encountered my Dad’s ghost while out driving around. My dad didn’t hear too well and he didn’t hear the clicking sound when his turn signal was on, so he sometimes drove around doing what comedian Jerry Seinfeld once described as a perpetual left.

I found another manifestation of his ghost. Here it is.

41 Olds Coupe

It’s not my dad’s favorite car, but it is very much like it, a 1941 Oldsmobile coupe. I saw this black one at a recent car show. My dad owned one of these; his was blue. He loved it too. In fact, when it died, he kept it parked at the side of the house for a couple of years, hoping to figure out a way to get it back on the road.

Structure

Have you seen the TV commercials about converting your structured settlement to cash? J. G. Wentworth is probably the heaviest advertiser in this business, it certainly is where I live, but it’s not the only company doing it. Peachtree is another, but it’s not the only one either.

If you don’t know what a structured settlement is, you probably don’t have one. So, I’ll explain. Let’s say you’re hurt in a car accident, you sue and an insurance company agrees to pay you money. To quote Doctor Evil, let’s say the amount is “One Million Dollars.” Only, let’s say they get to pay it not in a lump sum, but over an agreed period of time, perhaps 20 years. That arrangement would be similar to the way a top lottery prize is paid, only you have a better chance of being in a car crash than you do of winning Powerball or Mega Millions, so pay attention.

Why would you agree to that and why would the insurance company? Well, you might agree because you’d get more money in the long run. That may or may not be a good thing. We can discuss that farther down the page. You might also agree if it saved you money on taxes. In the first place, some settlements of this kind aren’t taxable and in the second place the calculation is more complicated than you think, so it could appear to save you money on taxes without really doing so. I could discuss that too, but I’m not an actuary and I only want to bore some, not all, of the people who read this. Last, and the reason most individuals would like a structured settlement is because you fear you would squander the money if you got it all at once. Squandering a large sum of money can be fun, but if you got the money and need it to pay for long-term medical treatment, that isn’t the time to do it. In that circumstance, a long-term settlement is probably the best thing for you.

The insurance company likes it because it costs them less money. There are formulae to calculate the present value of a future stream of income, or you can beat it to death with a spreadsheet. But if the insurance company could earn 5 percent on its money and put $1,000,000 aside, it could pay you $50,000 a year for 20 years and at the end of that time, it would still have the million dollars. To pay you that money, again assuming a 5 percent rate of return, it would only have to put aside around $625,000 to pay you over 20 years and have nothing left. But that’s not even how the insurance companies think. If they put aside $625,000 for you and the other $375,000 for themselves, again at a 5 percent rate of return, at the end of 20 years, you would have $50,000 a year for 20 years, there would be nothing left of the $625,000 set aside for generating that income because in addition to the interest, the insurance company would pay the rest of the money to you out of the principal in that account. What about the other $375,000? Thanks for asking. At the end of 20 years, that would be worth almost $948,000! Your mom was wrong about what you should be when you grow up. You should have been an insurance company.

Okay, so how do these companies that convert structured settlements to cash work and how do they make any money? I mean, they’re in business to make money, aren’t they? Yes, they are. And there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing as long as you understand what you’re doing when you do business with them. In the example I gave above, they buy the $50,000 annual income stream, or what’s left of it, for less than $625,000, or what’s left of that. The difference between what they pay you and what the insurance company put aside to pay them is their gross profit.

If you want a lot of money up front instead of a structured settlement, I suggest you take a lump sum payment instead of an annuity, even if the lump sum appears to be less money. After all, you can invest the money too. But if you’ve already opted for a payout over time, and your circumstances change, your job is to get the highest price you can for that income stream. So, go into this kind of transaction with your eyes open and go in understanding the math, or accompanied by someone who does.

Blue Cloud

In the car blog, Curbside Classics, someone started a thread of stories about running out of gas. I contributed a couple, but here’s another. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up and my parents sacrificed a lot for the kids, including sending me to private school from 3rd to 6th grades. They were generous to us, at least as generous as their means allowed if not more so.

One way my dad was generous was he let me drive his car pretty much whenever I wanted to as long as he didn’t need it for work. During the school year, he even paid for the gas I used. As I said, we didn’t have a lot of money, so when the gas gauge on our old Plymouth (is there any other kind of Plymouth but an old one?) broke, it stayed broken.

If your gauge is broken, the simplest way to handle it is to fill up every 200 miles. Most cars have a cruising range greater than 200 miles. In fact, I believe that unless you had a ’72 Buick Electra and only drove it a mile at a time in the winter, that would work. Personal experience tells me a ’72 Buick driven under those circumstances has a cruising range of approximately 52 miles on a full 26-gallon tank. I hope I don’t have to explain how I know that.

Once, I was going someplace and when I got behind the oblate circle that was the steering wheel of that Plymouth, I thought it needed gas. Dad insisted it was fine. I think he was kind of low on cash, but I didn’t push it. I got in and drove about two blocks before it ran out. If I had gas money, the Blue Cloud (it was red, but it burned oil, a lot of oil actually) still would not have made it to the nearest station.

I’m sure I was as callow as any teenager who ever walked or drove the face of the earth. But after my first year in college, I couldn’t afford a second, so I got a job in a wholesale bakery. That was hot, hard work, but it was unionized and the starting wage for someone with very few skills was quite good. The overtime was good too. I worked something like 15 or 16 months that year.

I was single, living with my parents for free and not supporting my own car. My folks wanted me to save money to go back to school and I did that. I banked at least half of every paycheck I received. But I tried to show some appreciation too. My dad was still paying for the car insurance, but I don’t think he put another dime in that car during my year in the bakery. I bought him a battery, a carburetor, a four tires. I also put a speaker in the package shelf so I could blast my tunes from the AM radio. I don’t think Dad ever needed to put gas or oil in the Blue Cloud for a year.

Other than the bank and the Blue Cloud, what else did I spend money on that year? I met this super-cute, super-nice high school senior. She wasn’t a saint yet because she hadn’t put up with me long enough, but her name was and still is Karen.

Did Ya Miss Me?

I don’t know if or when you discovered that you couldn’t access this blog. I found out on September 20th. Since then, if I tried to access the site, I got a blank page, but now, I’m back. Not only back, but I’m delighted to see that I didn’t lose any content.

I’d like to thank a lady named Leofe at my ISP’s help desk for helping get me get the blog back up. I couldn’t have done it without her. I’ve never talked to anyone with that name before but this lady certainly knew her stuff and was very pleasant about it. If I have any future tech problems, I’ll be sure to use phone support because email support didn’t work very well for me although I’m sure those people tried too.

I’m no tech genius but as far as I can understand it, the theme being used on the website became incompatible with some software update and once that happened, no more website. So, I put up a new theme. I’m not entirely satisfied with the layout yet. I’d like to return to the picture of a raven, but it won’t fit on this theme. In the near future, there may be subtle or comprehensive changes in the existing layout.

But, I am back and I will resume posting about my off-kilter view of the universe later this week.

Things I Know

Ray Rice, a professional football player, is bigger and stronger not only than the average woman, but than most above-average women too. An average man is bigger and stronger than an average woman. An average man could probably beat up an average woman anytime he wanted to. Beating someone up, man or woman, doesn’t prove who’s right or wrong: It proves who’s stronger which usually isn’t in dispute. So, a man beating up a woman is a particularly despicable form of bullying. The good thing is most men don’t only not want to beat up a female companion, they can’t want to.

I agree with the people who say the NFL didn’t take domestic violence seriously enough, but it looks like the NFL has learned its lesson. I certainly hope so.

LRD. I have named a disease that’s existed for centuries, but never had a name before. LRD of course stands for Liverwurst Reflux Disorder.

So, now NATO is going to have a rapid response force. I hope the powers that be are bright enough to figure out a path somewhere between the over-zealous mutual-defense pacts that started WWI and the appeasement that started WWII, in order to avoid WWIII.

I keep hearing that Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer. It hasn’t been warm enough this summer for it to end, so I’m not going to accept its unofficial end. In fact, I may not accept its official end either. I know I’m still wearing white shoes.

After the news reports of hackers making nude photos of celebrities public, David Letterman asked his audience if they spend a lot of time taking nude selfies. If you’re not already glad there are no nude photos of me on the Internet, you should be. I know I am. I don’t take nude selfies because I have a mirror and I wouldn’t share them if I did.

Homework: Do it.

In my misspent youth, I was a champ at avoiding homework. Mom, I did it in study hall, honest. No, I didn’t do it at all. I hated homework because I didn’t need to do any homework in grade school through high school in order to learn the material. But nobody told me what I needed to know about homework. It’s not just about learning the subject matter, it’s also about learning how to work. And, since I hardly ever did homework, by the time I got to an Ivy League University (which will remain far above Cayuga’s waters) everyone was smart, all the courses I took were hard, I couldn’t coast and I was lost. I did know that downtown was down the hill, but otherwise, lost.

Homework: Do it.

But first, did you have vocabulary workbooks in high school? I did and I hated them. I have an extensive vocabulary, but I was interested in getting an even bigger one, so whenever we had vocabulary homework, I actually did open the workbook and look at it. If I recall correctly, the senior vocabulary book was a lovely, pale shade of blue. I often had mixed feelings after looking at the homework, because I usually knew all twenty words for the week so I didn’t learn any new words (bad), but I didn’t do the homework either (good). If there was a word I didn’t know, I would look it up and copy the definition into the book, but I wouldn’t write the other 19 definitions, and I always planned to ad lib the sentence I was required to write. And I hardly ever fell back on the old standby, “The teacher asked us to spell complementary.”

Homework: That’s how I did it, if I did it.

My English teacher had a pretty good idea what I was doing and when she caught me at it, she would deduct points from the weekly vocabulary quiz. She got up to deducting 20 points, but 80 is still a passing grade, so I was cool with it. And then, shortly after the beginning of our senior year, Janet transferred into our school from Dallas TX. She came in on vocabulary lesson day , so Mrs. Teacher had Janet look on with me until she could get a workbook of her own. I opened the book to the correct, blank, page. I don’t remember the word she asked me to go over, but I picked up the book and read the correct definition from the blank page. Then, I read the sentence I had not written down on the adjacent blank page. Both the definition and the sentence were correct, but both pages were blank and Janet found that funny. She laughed.

So, Mrs. Teacher came over to see what Janet was laughing at–my blank book. Another 20 points down the drain. I told Janet that as long as she got me in trouble, she might as well go to the school dance with me that Friday night, and she did. I’d like to say it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship, but it wasn’t. Nobody’s fault, we just didn’t click. But, that’s not the reason I now advocate for homework.

To reiterate, I got into a great college and couldn’t do the work because, while I was smart enough, I had never bothered to learn how to study. I never needed to before. I dropped out of college. It was bad, but it wasn’t a total loss. I did go back eventually. I learned to work eventually too, and while I was out, I did meet my wife, so I wouldn’t change that for the world. If someone had told me back then that doing my homework was important for me in learning how to work, I don’t know if it would have helped me, but I’m telling you this story in case it does help someone else.

Things I Know

President Obama is neither my favorite nor my least favorite president. Criticizing him for announcing that he doesn’t have a plan to deal with ISIS is fair. Criticizing him for wearing a tan suit is ridiculous!

Newsmax TV is running a radio ad for a poll it’s conducting. It asks, “Can Doctor Ben Carson win back the White House from OBama?” First, President OBama won’t be running in the next presidential election. Second, While Doctor Carson has taken up writing and politics after a distinguished career as a neurosurgeon, I don’t think he has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting nominated, let alone elected president.

We have so many people in jail in this country that we really should make both mental illness and non-violent drug crimes public health problems rather than criminal justice problems. I suppose locking up a few of those people is justified, but not all of them.

While out for a drive this week, I encountered my dad’s ghost. The guy who was in front of me in traffic had his left-turn signal on for about three miles and he hadn’t turned left by the time I got around him. Wrong kind of car, but definitely my dad’s driving style.

So the fraud guy from alleged Microsoft Support (which is a scam and has nothing to do with Microsoft), called again tonight. I advised him to take a stool softener. You can probably figure out why I said that. I also told him not to call again, and didn’t say please, but I still think he will.

I know this isn’t going to stop the calls, but just to be clear, I don’t buy anything from telemarketers. Doing so would only encourage a practice that needs no encouragement. I also don’t donate to any telemarketers who call alleging that they represent charities. First, like the sales calls, it only encourages a practice that needs no encouragement, but there are other reasons too. If you call me out of the blue, I have no idea if you are who you say you are and I usually have no background on the charity. I’m not that responsive to political telemarketers or people I’m already doing business with who try to sell me more stuff over the phone. I have no trouble saying no. I just took the trouble to get on the federal no-call list because I find all these calls annoying.

Classmates.com is a little nuts in the way it markets its service. I just received an email from them asking me about a guy who started in my high school after I graduated. Don’t know and don’t care. I suspect most guys don’t know or care about guys who weren’t even in school with them. If I were running their marketing campaign, I’d ask girls about guys who graduated up to two or even three years before they did and I’d ask guys about women who graduated up to two or three years after them. If I weren’t happily married, I might be very interested in some women who graduated from high school a year or two after I did.

According to several stories I read on the Internet (so it must be true) Jell-O sales fell by 19 percent between 2009 and 2013. I bet people don’t buy a lot of Junket anymore either. In fact, I was surprised to learn they still make that.

Ray Dean, recently retired police chief in the small Long Island village of Westhampton Beach received a retirement bonus of something like $400,000. It was for accumulated, unused vacation and sick time over his 15 years in the job. He’s been criticized for that and I don’t know why. The Village mayor and trustees who entered into the contract that required these payments deserve the criticism. If someone wanted to give me an overly-generous employment contract, I’d accept it, wouldn’t you. Current mayor, Maria Moore, to her credit, says the she and the present board of trustees will make sure the next chief’s contract isn’t anywhere near as generous.

By the way, did you know that according to New York State law, if a municipality gives its police a raise, it must also raise the salary of its police chief by at least as much as the dollar amount of the highest raise given to any of the policemen? According to one interpretation of that law, you can’t pay a new police chief less than you paid his or her predecessor either. That, to use the applicable technical term, is nuts.

Attention Geico Gecko: Bullwinkle’s last name isn’t “Winkle.” It’s “Moose.” Full name, Bullwinkle J. Moose. If I ever knew what the J stands for, I’ve long-since forgotten.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Nadal Hasan, the army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood Texas in November, 2009 has written to ISIS asking to become a citizen of that group’s Islamic state. Can we now travel back almost five years and finally describe Doctor Hasan’s attack as a terrorist incident?

Isn’t the last weekend in August too early to be Labor Day Weekend?

August 20th was National Radio Day. I listened to the radio that day as I do every day. Why didn’t anyone on the stations I listened to mention that?

Would I be violating any trademark or copyright laws if I were to sell “Free Jessa” t-shirts?

Does the color of sprinkles make any difference in their flavor?

Why does Facebook think I need to see so many ads for Toyota RAV 4s?

So, I keep getting this robocall and the guy with a beautiful, sonorous, radio announcer voice that reminds me of my old friend and colleague Allen Shaw intones, “Don’t hang up! This is not a sales call.” What kind of call is it? I don’t know because that’s when I always hang up.

Who Review

I’m about as big a Doctor Who fan as anyone who doesn’t dress up in costume and attend conventions, so I watched tonight’s season’s premiere with the new Doctor, Peter Capaldi with great anticipation. I thought the acting was fine, but the script a little weak.

Every Doctor, when he regenerates emerges a little befuddled, but usually, by the end of the first episode, they have gotten themselves together. Peter Capaldi as the doctor seemed more befuddled than usual and befuddled for a longer period of time. As a result, I thought the premiere of the new season of Doctor Who was a little on the slow side. And, honestly, the dinosaur didn’t really add anything at all as far as I’m concerned.

But Clara was the real confusing one for me. During the Matt Smith era, we learned that Clara had existed through time for the purpose was of saving the doctor. She’s even shown once with William Hartnell’s first doctor. So, why was she so confused by Smith’s regeneration and so unaccepting of Capaldi as the Doctor?

I’ve been a big fan of Doctor Who since the program first appeared in America on PBS with Tom Baker as the Doctor. Like I’m sure everyone else, I like some Doctors better than others. Capaldi’s Doctor seems less approachable than either Smith or Tennant. I think it’ll take a while to warm up to him, but I’m perfectly willing to give him a chance. I do hope the next villain is more menacing and that the Doctor has a more direct role in resolving the next story arc.

Licensed to Drive

Back in June, on the anniversary of my high school graduation, I mentioned that I hardly remember anything about that supposedly milestone event. I also don’t remember the first time I kissed a girl. It must have been the first girl I dated and I don’t remember why we stopped seeing each other either. I do, however, remember taking my driver’s test; I remember that very clearly.

I was 17 and in dress rehearsals for a school play, so I had grey hair. I took the test in the family car, an ancient Dodge that can most kindly be described as a bomb! No steering wheel cover, no horn ring, no inside door panel on the passenger side, passenger door banged in, and the muffler was going, so it resonated inside the car rather obviously, even worse if I had the windows up. I had them down, all of them, in November, in New York.

Inspector gets in the car, checks my paperwork, looks at me and says, “How old are you? I told him I was 17 and since he didn’t ask why I had grey hair, I didn’t tell him. But he shoved his clipboard toward me and said, “Sign this!” so I did. Then, he noticed the steering wheel and asked if I could blow the horn. I said I wasn’t sure because I never had to. I blew it though, so he had to look for some other excuse. He noticed the absence of the passenger door panel and consequently the door handle. He asked, “How do you get out of this thing?” Wordlessly, I gave him the door handle. He didn’t ask for the handle to roll up the window, so I didn’t give him that. As I said, you could hear the bad muffler better if the windows were up.

I passed the first time I actually took the test. I always thought it was because the instructor wanted to be sure he never had to ride in that old Dodge again.

On top of all that angst, when the license came in the mail, the family car was parked in front of the house, but I walked to where I had to go that day, three miles away, because the car wasn’t properly insured for me to drive it. And the first girl I asked out once I had the license said yes, but her dad wouldn’t let her in a car alone with a boy he hadn’t met, so my dad had to drive us.

Things I Know

Don Pardo died. He was 96. Absolutely a household voice, although not a household name. Still, if you know anything at all about media, you didn’t just ask, “Don who?”

Arcadia publishing has made a success of publishing trade paperback books consisting mostly of photos of local areas. The series is called “Images of America.” The newest one is “Ithaca Radio” by Peter King Steinhaus and Rick Sommers Steinhaus with an introduction by Keith Olbermann. Ithaca NY is home of a highly regarded college curriculum in broadcasting at Ithaca College’s school of communications and one of the most professional college radio stations you’ll ever hear at Cornell’s student-owned and run WVBR. Because of that, a lot more successful broadcasters have passed through Ithaca than most radio markets of its size. I passed through Ithaca radio myself and I bought the book when it came out last week. If you worked in Ithaca radio or if you just follow the medium, I think you’ll like the book and, no, you won’t find a picture of me in it.

Two young Amish girls were kidnapped last week near Oswegatchie, NY. Fortunately, the girls’ abductors were arrested and the girls returned to their families. If like me, you’ve lived in New York most of your life and never heard of Oswegatchie, you may wonder what it’s near. It isn’t near anything.

If you’re interested in cars, as I am, you probably agree with me that the Woodward Dream Cruise and the Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance should never take place on the same weekend.

A 1962 Ferrari 250 GT which was expected to bring a record price last week sold for only $38 million. A record price for a Ferrari 250 GT, in case you’re thinking of getting one for yourself or a friend, would be somewhere north of $52 million.

Things I Know

“Never wear sandals on a farm.” –Robin Williams. RIP Robin Williams. You made everyone laugh.

Frankly both Israel and Hamas are wrong in the current Middle East conflict. I’m not going to get into which side is more wrong, but with respect to the current issue, if you’re going to sit around firing rockets at someone, you should expect them to shoot back.

James Brady, President Regan’s press secretary, died on August 4th, at the age of 73. He was gravely wounded when John Hinckley tried to assassinate Regan. Bullets fired by Hinckley hit both Regan and Brady. Brady’s injuries were permanent. I didn’t know Mr. Brady, but I did talk to him on the phone a couple of times when I worked in the House of Representatives and he worked for Senator Roth of Delaware. After his shooting, Brady worked hard for and became a living symbol in efforts to pass stricter gun control laws. RIP James Brady.

There’s a radio commercial for B&H Photo, a huge camera and electronic store in New York. In it, his co-workers are planning a “surprise retirement party” for Bob. This suggests, at least to me that in addition to the party being a surprise to Bob, his retirement is also a surprise to him.

I was watching a rebroadcast of the 2010 Mark Twain Award ceremony, the one that gave the prize to Tina Fey. Jennifer Hudson is really talented singer. Still, In my opinion, nobody but Aretha should sing “Respect.”

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

The phrase “duck-billed platypus” is kind of curious to me. Is there any other kind of platypus?

Suppose for a second, that you only wanted to eat half a package of Keebler’s Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Cookies. How would you get the plastic tray back into the bag without ripping the bag or breaking the tray or its contents? I know I could just eat the entire bag of cookies, and I am able to do that if I have enough milk in the house. However, I’m not supposed to.

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand the purpose of camouflage uniforms for baseball games. The uniforms are ugly, and besides, you can still see the ballplayers.

Why does the cost of renting a car have so little to do with the cost of the car?

I wanted to go sit on a beach for a week or two in October, but my wife can’t go with me because it’s a busy time of year at her job. I won’t go without her so the beach will have to wait. Where can the two of us go for a long weekend that’s not too far from New York City?

I don’t want to go to Florida in November because the weather can be iffy for the beach then. I would like to go in March, for baseball spring training, but vacation rentals and hotels are more expensive in Florida then. So the question would be, can we afford that?

Things I Know

Two 19-year-old junior hockey players for the US Hockey League’s Lincoln Stars were arrested because they allegedly had sex with a 15-year-old girl in a hotel room in Morehead MN, recorded event and then shared the recording. Here’s advice you may not get anywhere else. If you do commit a felony, make sure to record it and share it with as many people as possible. Be certain to post it on the Internet too. That will make it so much easier for the police to catch and prosecute you. Since I mentioned the team’s name, I should point out that the team has quite properly suspended the two players indefinitely.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of the world that when Orlando Bloom swung on Justin Bieber in Ibiza, Spain, it was international news. Because of his age and his past public behavior, I don’t expect Justin Bieber to behave like an adult, but Orlando Bloom is in his late 30’s, almost twice Bieber’s age.

So, I was looking through a bunch of books and I came across one by a professor, a woman with a very unusual first name. How unusual? I’ve only met or heard of one person in my entire life with that name. We went to school together from third to sixth grade. So, I Googled the author. Then, I Googled the first name. The first nine results for the name were the author. One of those turned up an email address. I dropped her a line. She answered. Yup, it’s her. I doubt we’ll ever get together, but it’s nice to know that one of my old classmates has had a successful career in academia.

Based on my experience riding in cars, both as a parent and as a child, “Don’t make me come back there,” is among the very best advice I’ve ever received or given.

Saint Karen (my wife who must be a saint to put up with me) received a mailing from Barclay’s Bank, offering her a black Visa card. Said Black Visa Card is made of stainless steel (patent pending, believe it or not). Since most cards are now swiped or used on line and not imprinted, I don’t know how important that is. I do know if I were a merchant, the black one wouldn’t impress me. It has some benefits that are good if you travel a lot and have a lot of problems while traveling, a lot. But the interest rate is nothing special and it has an annual fee of $495! So, thanks, but no thanks.

The nice thing about getting robocalls on my cell phone is that I can (and do) hang up on them without even answering them.

Some wag on TV said there’s a new word, precrastination, that means getting something done too early. Procrastination never made me any money, so I’m coining another new word: amateurcrastination.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

I’m an adult male. I graduated from college more than a decade ago (a lot more) and I have never played basketball in a way serious enough for me to have a team uniform. I went shopping for shorts recently. I wanted two kinds, running or workout shorts for the gym and cargo shorts for the street. Would it be too much bother for clothing manufacturers to include the inseam length on men’s shorts? To me, shorts that hang below my knees are longs and I don’t like to have to hold every pair to my waist in a nearly fruitless quest to find shorts that are shorter than longs.

Hanes now sells underwear in resealable bags. Why?

Hanes isn’t the only company that now makes underwear without tags, but it’s the only company I’ve seen make a big deal of it in TV commercials. In the commercials, Hanes claims it’s done away with annoying tags. I am not a garment-industry insider, but tags in underwear have never annoyed me and I suspect the real reason for the trend away from tags is it makes manufacturing underwear slightly less expensive.

Have you see the latest TV commercial for Subway’s pulled pork sandwich? Extra pickles, sure, but who the heck puts lettuce on a pulled pork sandwich?

Why is it necessary for people to set off firecrackers on the 4th of July? I think aerial fireworks are beautiful, especially the biggest shows like the one Macy’s puts on each year, but what’s the deal with firecrackers? To me, all they do is keep people awake and scare dogs. Also, get off my lawn!

Why are Social Tea cookies so expensive and how come they never go on sale?

Wal Mart is running TV ads touting its “all natural” steaks. Fine. As opposed to what? Those plastic steaks that all the other big box stores and supermarkets sell?

Pope Francis excommunicated the Mafia. Makes sense, but how come it didn’t happen a long, long, long time ago?

A Prescription for Disaster

Honestly, I’m grateful to have good health insurance, incorporating a good prescription drug plan. I realize a lot of people don’t have that. My wife has an identical plan. Each of us gets family health insurance through our employer. So in one instance, my insurance is too good because I have two accounts.

We switched prescription drug providers in January and the new one has a slightly smaller benefit in that if you get a prescription for a maintenance drug (one you’re supposed to take every day) you’ve never taken before, they send you a 30 day supply instead of a 90 day supply. I suppose this makes sense because if you have unbearable side effects, you won’t have to thrown away a lot of medicine. It does cost me a little more for a new drug though because they charge me a co-payment for each prescription filled, not for the number of pills I receive.

But my problem is that with two accounts all my prescriptions seem to wind up being new whether they are new or for drugs I’ve taken for anywhere from three to 20 years. Let’s say I take Victoza for diabetes and I’ve been taking it for three years. I’d prefer to take no drugs at all, but I am a diabetic and I don’t want to die so Victoza isn’t the only prescription drug I take every day. I got a 90 day supply of it in April and my doctor wrote a replacement prescription in July. They decided to fill the replacement prescription from my other account and charge a co-pay for 30 days worth instead of 90 days worth. In the case of Victoza, the co-pay is substantial so doing this raises their costs and my costs too.

They’ve also started giving me incorrect information about the problem. They told me my doctor wrote a prescription for a 30-day supply. In fact, they told me he wrote two prescriptions for a 30 day supply. No he didn’t. I asked them for a copy of what he sent them. They sent me one prescription for a 90 day supply, but they now insist it’s a new prescription, so they’ll only give me 30-days worth. I’ve spoken to at least seven customer service representatives Some of them have promised to clear it up. Some of them have actually helped me for one prescription. Some of them have told me things that just aren’t true. Are they lying? Maybe, or maybe they’re just repeating misinformation someone else put in the computer. In my career, I’ve had more than one job where being correct is not an acceptable excuse. It’s frustrating, believe me, but it doesn’t compare with being insured, being right and having that not be an acceptable excuse either.

I’m currently experiencing this problem with two of my medicines. I’ve experienced it with other medicines too, just not right now. I can only think of three possible explanations, but I hope there are others. My three are jaw-dropping incompetence on the part of everyone I’ve dealt with at the mail-order pharmacy, deliberate fraud, or a combination of the two. If they were jaw-droppingly incompetent across the board, I figure they would have hired someone who could solve the problem, just by mistake. I was told on July 8th that one of my problems would be straightened out and my doctor was told on July 17th that the other one would also be fixed. Sunday night, according to their website, the first problem is more messed up than ever. I’m scheduled for two renewals on Wednesday. The second problem isn’t even in the pipeline.

While they have yet to solve the problem, they finally did cause me to lose my temper on Thursday. I’m not proud of myself, but I certainly feel I had plenty of justification. Sisyphus would understand. He wouldn’t approve, but he would understand. Looks like I’m going to have to call them again. I dread that. Exactly what I’m going to call them this time, I haven’t decided yet. I wish SSG Mebane was still around. My old drill sergeant could certainly think of something creative to call them. He thought of enough creative things to call me when I was in Basic Training.

I’m not going to give up. I have written to the chairman of the NY State Senate’s Health Committee. If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll check in with the consumer reporter for one or more of New York’s TV stations and also shame them by name right here in this blog. If you’ve read this blog for more than say four days, you may already be able go guess. Right now, if the readership of this blog is in the single digits, the digit I have reserved for my mail-order prescription provider is a middle one. Maybe two middle ones.

Things I Know

I just dare CVS Caremark to send me a customer satisfaction survey.

It’s not that I want to talk to telemarketers, live or robocalls. I don’t. But, if you’re not ready to talk to me when you call me, don’t call me. I’ll say hello once and hang up if nobody says anything back. I’ll also hang up as soon as I determine that it’s a telemarketer on the other end of the line, but first, I’ll tell them not to call me again.

With Bastille Day just passed, I was disappointed to learn that people in France don’t call it that. They call it La Fête Nationale (National Celebration) and commonly le quatorze juillet.

I had a dream that if I ever won a big lottery prize, I’d buy all the seats at Citi Field for one game and attend a major league ball game by myself. However, with as bad as attendance has been at Citi in this baseball season, I would no longer have to do that to do that.

The Mets played very well in the last week or two before the All-Star break, so I hope they don’t live up to their long history of fading in the second half.

I’d seriously like it if you could sort music libraries in iTunes by more than one category. For instance, it would be good to sort the song list first by artist and then by song. You could do that in MusicMatch a hundred years ago, so iTunes should be able to catch up.

Public Ridicule

Did you ever hear of Andrew R. Rector before the last week or so? Probably not, unless you watched the April 13 baseball game between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Rector is a guy who fell asleep in the stands. His image was broadcast that day, but unless you already knew him, you didn’t learn his name.

That name came up because this is the month in which Rector filed suit in New York State Supreme Court, seeking $10 million in damages from ESPN, Major League Baseball and the Yankees. I heard he sued the ESPN announcers, John Kruk and Dan Schulman too, but the article in the NY Times didn’t mention that, so maybe what I heard was wrong. Rector was mocked on Twitter, on Youtube and in other Internet venues, but unlike the bar in the old TV show “Cheers,” everybody didn’t know his name.

But they do now. The Streisand Effect is what journalists, public relations professionals and Internet wags call it. The Streisand Effect is when someone tries to censor, or block, or remove something from the public record (especially the Internet) and instead, the effort to remove it attracts attention to it. It’s named after famed entertainer Barbara Streisand who tried in 2003 to have certain aerial photos of her Malibu beachfront home removed from the internet by suing for $50 million. I know Wikipedia isn’t always an authoritative source, but according to Wikipedia, before the lawsuit, fewer than 4,000 people had seen the pictures on the Internet. Afterwards, more than 400,000.

If you’re interested and haven’t looked at the NY Times website too often, you can read about the Rector lawsuit here. The article says Rector claims people made fun of him everywhere he went because he was shown asleep at the game. In my opinion, the lawsuit will cause Mr. Rector to be ridiculed much more than his falling asleep did. If he was teased about that, no doubt the teasing had died down since the incident happened in April. Filing the lawsuit dragged the whole thing back into the public consciousness and Identified him by name to the public at large. His name hadn’t been widely known before. While I am not a lawyer, I firmly believe the lawsuit should and will be dismissed as frivolous. For just one thing, why is he suing the Yankees? They made stadium seats comfortable enough to sleep in, that’s true, but they won the game, 3-2, so they at least tried to keep Rector awake.

Things I Know

The phrase “The Fourth of July,” and the phrase “Independence Day” have the same number of syllables. If we could get everyone to call it Independence Day, we could change it to always have a three day weekend out of it.

At the end of June, General Motors announced another 7.6 million cars. The General has now recalled 28 million vehicles since January 1 of this year. That’s more cars than it sold in the past seven years combined. If this trend continues much longer, the General will run out of cars to recall that it manufactured. I predict when that happens, General Motors will start recalling Fords and Chryslers too.

Gold dust plants are susceptible to fungus. I didn’t know that until all the ones in my back yard started turning black while I was in Europe.

I’ve been listening to downloads of an old-time radio called “Broadway Is My Beat.” I don’t know why I like it. I’ll give it a slight break because the show, from the early 1950s predated the Miranda decision, but there’s almost no correct police procedure in it, beginning with the fact that before NYPD headquarters was at 1 Police Plaza, it was on Centre Street which is way downtown, not on Broadway between Times Square and Columbus Circle. Plus, very few people in New York used florid language like that in New York City in the early 1950s and I’m pretty sure not a single one who did was a police detective lieutenant like the lead character in the show, Danny Clover.

Twitter, with its 140 character limit, gave me the idea for a website where everything had to be a haiku. But someone else had an idea for haiku.com before I did. It’s not exactly restricted to haikus, but it’s similar to that.

Now that July is here, I suppose it’s time for end of summer and back to school sales.

The Mets are now 10 or 11 games under .500. And while we’re contemplating that, let’s remember that they usually fade in the second-half of the season.

Primarily Speaking

So, after the Congressional primaries are over, in New York’s 4th CD, it’ll be Democrat Kathleen Rice vs. the former Chairman of the Nassau County Legislature, Republican Bruce Blakeman. Since leaving the legislature a long time ago, Blakeman has made two unsuccessful runs for higher office. I have no inside knowledge of this or any other race, but at a guess, I’d say Blakeman’s name recognition is much lower than Rice’s.

The seat is already in Democratic hands. It’s open because nine-term incumbent Carolyn McCarthy is retiring. Voter enrollment leans Democratic too, but it is winnable for Republicans because the number of voters who aren’t registered in one party or the other is larger than the difference between Democratic and Republican tallies. At this point, and without the benefit of polling data, I’m guessing that Blakeman has to be considered the underdog.

While I’m sure the local GOP hierarchy would be happy to gain the seat in Congress, I don’t think Republican powers that be would be unhappy if Rice won this election. Why? Because that would mean an election for Nassau County District Attorney unencumbered by a three-term incumbent. As a general rule, incumbents have a built in advantage when seeking reelection.

Republican primaries are pretty unusual in New York, but this year, not so much. On Long Island’s east end, Republican State Senator Lee Zeldin defeated insurgent George Demos to win the GOP nomination in the 1st CD. He now faces an uphill battle against six term Democratic Congressman Tim Bishop in the fall. Because Zeldin is now a two-term State Senator, he ought to do better than he did the first time the two squared off in 2008 when Bishop beat the then novice by 50,000 votes. Still, as the race begins I’d call Bishop the favorite.

Upstate, in the 22nd CD, Republican State Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney didn’t duplicate Dave Brat’s surprise win against Eric Cantor in Virginia. Like Brat, Tenney is more conservative than the incumbent she challenged. Republican Congressman Richard Hanna outpolled Tenney 53-47% . A six point difference isn’t considered particularly close. The 22nd CD covers eight counties in the Syracuse area. There is no Democrat running in the November election, so Hanna’s primary victory is tantamount to election.

In New York City, 22-term Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel claimed victory in an Democratic Primary against challenger, State Senator Adriano Espiallat. The City Board of Elections hasn’t declared a victor because absentee and affidavit ballots have yet to be counted. Unless you were in the North Korean Army during the Korean war, if you’ve ever met Charlie Rangel, he has charmed you. Once one of the most powerful men in Congress, Rangel’s influence has diminished as his later years have been marred by ethical problems. The ethnic nature of his district has also changed. Once almost exclusively African-American, Hispanics now make up the majority of the voting population. If Rangel is reelected, he is expected to wrap up his career and not seek reelection in 2016.

If you live in New York and like primaries, there are still lots of possibilities. Party nomination for state offices are up for grabs in September.

Graduation Day

I’m pretty sure today the anniversary of my high school graduation. I won’t tell you which anniversary. It was supposed to be such a milestone event in our lives and I’m not even 100 percent sure of the date. I don’t know about you, but I remember hardly anything about mine. I don’t remember a heck of a lot more about my graduation from college. High school graduation day was hot and sunny and by the end of the ceremony my face was the same red color as my mortar board and gown. The last graduate to walk got a huge round of applause because he was last, so it was over.

Do you remember anything your graduation speaker said? I don’t. I do know he went on to a distinguished career in education, but his reputation was tarnished by scandal years after he passed away.

I remember a little more about the party my family had afterwards than I do about the ceremony. I can describe in great detail what my girlfriend wore to that party. I wonder why that sticks in my mind. We broke up before the end of the year. I also remember what she and her parents gave me as a graduation present, a Bulova watch, and an extremely generous present it was too. The only other present I remember came from my Aunt Mary. It was a Dopp shaving kit.

I was disappointed, but it wound up being so practical, and so useful over such a long time that I gave my son something similar when he graduated from high school, and I explained why. He didn’t say, neither did I, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t any more enthusiastic to receive a shaving kit for graduation than I was.

Things I Know

I get in trouble for nothing a lot. Since it happens frequently, I’m going to try to figure out how to get paid for it.

Insomniac that I am, I often go to bed hours after my lovely wife. This means I occasionally change for bed in the dark and Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) leaves my night clothes on my pillow. Since I only need my glasses to find my glasses, I usually put them in the same place every night, on top of my armoire. Recently, I couldn’t find my glasses and Saint Karen found them in our bed. That means I took my glasses off while changing, laid them on the mattress and didn’t put them where they belong. It also means I was lucky I didn’t crush them in my sleep. More importantly than either of those things, it clearly means I shouldn’t go to bed when I’m tired.

I wondered why Bruce Blakeman is running TV ads for New York’s fourth Congressional District so far away from the general election. Then, I realized, voters in the 4th CD, NY are looking forward to the rarest of rare events, a Republican primary. It’s tomorrow, June 24th.

“All dictators should know a rigged election should be like a pleasant spring day — high 60’s, low 70’s.” –John Oliver

I have a scar a couple of inches long on my forehead. It’s there because the doctor cut off something else that used to be there. But when anyone asks me what the scar is from, I tell them it’s from my lobotomy.

I was unable to stifle ambition, so I dragged out my step ladder and changed the two burned out bulbs in the overhead fixture of our upstairs bathroom. Each bulb costs $7. Hopefully they’ll last a while. Now, it’s a lot easier to read in the bathtub than it was yesterday. It’s still difficult to read in the shower, but not because it’s dark in there. It’s not.

Going to the gym is good for something. A few years ago, I couldn’t lift my biggest room air conditioner, the one for the master bedroom into the window. Now, I can.

The community in which I live stopped paying to allow residents to carry their own trash to the local dump. I used to like to dispose of building debris from my remodeling projects that way, but now that I can’t, so I should probably sell my pickup truck.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

The Kentucky Derby is 1.25 miles. The Belmont is 1.5 miles. The Preakness, the one in the middle of the quest for the triple crown, is shorter than either at 1.1875 miles. I’m no expert at horse training or horse racing. Still, I can’t help wondering if winning the triple crown would be easier or harder if the races got progressively longer. In other words, if the Preakness was 1.375 miles, would it help or make things more difficult?

Who’s idea was it to design one of my room air conditioners so you can’t remove or install the air filter while the unit is in a window?

When Kim and Kanye got married last month, why did Kim get top billing when at least Kanye has some talent?

The display on a cell phone is programmed to tell whether you’re holding the phone horizontally or vertically, right? So, why can’t they make a cell phone that won’t record video in portrait (vertical) mode? Or at least one you have to override in some way in order to record video that way.

Whatever happened to Bill? We’ve had the same phone number in our last two homes. We like it and when we moved nearby, we kept it. We used to get calls all the time looking for Bill. We believe the reason is that Bill’s phone number was one digit different from ours. But it’s been quite some time since we’ve received one of those calls. Did Bill move away? Did he pass away? Did he just get tired of getting a lot of wrong numbers looking for me and change his number? I’d like to know.

Cesar Alvarez, 26, a male high school teacher in the Bronx, NY, was arrested after he took a 16-year-old female student on two dates during which he reportedly plied her with alcohol. The girl’s parents complained when she came home drunk. What I don’t understand is why didn’t they complain when she went out with her teacher, who is ten years older than she is?

Things I Know

I just watched the Johnny Depp Lone Ranger movie. I don’t think it’s supposed to be a comedy. I suppose that’s good since it’s not funny. But the one funny thing about it is it’s not good either.

If you have a good camera, you probably don’t need to bring a tripod on your European vacation, unless you want to take really sharp pictures of landmarks at night, or include yourself in the pictures. The places you would like to take pictures indoors with a tripod probably won’t let you take pictures with or without one, so you can save a kilogram or two and leave the tripod home.

If you have a big boy camera and a big boy flash unit and you bring them to a wedding, bring extra batteries for both to the wedding too. I knew that before, I just didn’t do it in Bulgaria.

Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) and I were walking through first class on the way to our seats in a lesser part of the plane. This particular plane had those little compartments in first class that embrace one or two seats and keep the well to do from having to share an armrest. Some of the seats face the rear of the plane and my wife, who is prone to motion sickness, said she wouldn’t want to fly facing backwards. So I told her she was exceptionally fortunate that she didn’t marry a rich man.

Want to lose about five pounds? Go to Europe for two weeks. That’s what I did. A lot more walking than I’m used to and way fewer snacks between meals.

My friend Wes Richards claimed recently in his blog that the most important sentence ever written in the English language could well have been “See Spot run.” If he has a point there, it isn’t his only one. You can find his blog by Googling, or even Binging “Wessays.”

If I understand correctly, Sears and Land’s End finalized their divorce in April. However, I was in a Sears Store in Garden City NY in early May and they have a bigger display of Land’s End clothing than I’ve ever seen before, especially women’s’ clothing. Also, as of this writing, if you mail order something from Lands End, you can still return it to a Sears store if you need to send it back. For the record, my wife ordered a dress that didn’t fit. Sears took it back with no problem of any kind.

I recorded 700 Sundays, the Broadway one-man show starring Billy Crystal the last time it was on HBO. When I watched it, he said something I found really profound about meeting and beginning to date his wife. “You never let ‘The One’ get away.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard better advice in my life.

To me, it just makes sense that the bigger the coin is, the more it should be worth. But, before I get on England about that, I have to get on the US for its coinage that doesn’t work that way either. However the British could help us tourists out a little bit. Since I am unfamiliar with their coinage, I would have found it helpful if the value of each coin was listed on both sides.

Memorial Day 2014

I took this picture at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington VA about a year and a half ago. To me, it’s a fitting reminder of exactly what we’re supposed to pause and remember today.

Unknown for Blog

Comment Policy Change

I don’t know if I changed it inadvertently, or if the folks at Word Press did during one of their software updates, but until today, you had to be a logged in user of Word Press to comment on the Sisyphus Project. However it got that way, you no longer have to log in to post a comment. The comment block does require some information, including an email address that won’t be published. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to be a real email address. I’m absolutely sure I won’t be verifying them.

I hope this will increase the number of comments and commentators.

All comments are moderated because I don’t want you to know how much money my friend’s cousin made last month working part-time from home on her laptop. A panel of moderators has been carefully selected by me. It is my blog, you know. This panel consists of me. All decisions made by the moderators are both arbitrary and final.

I’ve Been Traveling in Europe

I always wanted to say that, but now that I have, it seems kind of stuck up, doesn’t it?

Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) and I went to London and then on to Bulgaria. The new masthead on the blog is a picture of one of the legendary ravens of the Tower of London. Chris Skaife, the Yeoman Warder who served as our tour guide, is also the master raven keeper at the Tower.

Chris Skaife for Blog

According to tradition, if the ravens leave the Tower, the British Monarchy will fall and so will Britain. Chris claims that his official title is Raven Lunatic. I swear. He said that. And, if you look for him, he does have a Twitter account, @ravenmaster1.

More later, but I was in Europe just long enough to become unaccustomed to the time zone for the Eastern United States and I haven’t been back long enough to become re-accustomed to it.

Things I Know

Rarely will an incumbent politician run attack ads against his or her opponent, especially very early in the campaign. It helps the challenger gain name recognition and implies that the incumbent takes them seriously. Some PAC is running ads attacking Rob Astorino, the Republican nominee to face Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic incumbent governor of New York. And it’s even stranger because Astorino is about 30 points behind Cuomo in recent polls.

it was really bush league for Yankee fans to boo Robinson Cano roundly during every plate appearance of his first trip back to the Bronx since signing with the Seattle Mariners. The Yankees weren’t willing to match what the Mariners paid Cano. The difference between the two offers was in eight figures. Even if you were as rich as a Major League Baseball star, you wouldn’t leave that much cash on the table either.

It’s hard to keep the story of the racist owner of the LA Clippers basketball team straight when the owner and the NBA commissioner are named Sterling and Silver respectively.

Talk about disillusioned, according to this this, Murphy didn’t formulate Murphy’s Law.

Kudos to the NY State Department of Taxation and Finance. I got my state tax refund in fewer than two weeks after I filed. The IRS is no slouch either. I received my federal refund before the end of April as well.

When I drive a car regularly, after a while I cut a hole in the driver’s side floor mat because of the way I move my feet while working the gas and brake pedal. You can’t buy just one floor mat though, so if I want mine to match, I have to buy two for the front and one for the rear. That can cost $150 or more. Being cheap, I took the mat to an upholstery shop and they’re sewing a heel pad on just the driver’s side mat. They’re doing it for a lot less than $150 too.

If I call my bank with questions about my accounts, they ask me a bunch of security questions. All of the security questions except one would be available to someone who found or stole my wallet. The one that isn’t is, “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” They have my wife’s maiden name wrong.

When CD players were first introduced, many of the early ones had a random play feature. Consumers didn’t like that because a random selection could play the same song more than once before all of them had been played. Really random is hard to achieve, but that’s beside the point in this instance. CD makers retooled and came up with a shuffle program. It would play all the songs in a different order each time, but it wouldn’t repeat any of the songs until all of them had played. I have a 10 CD player in my old minivan. It plays all the songs before it repeats, even if you shut the car off from time to time. To get it to reset, you have to play all the songs or remove and reinsert the CD magazine. I bring this up because iTunes shuffle button seems to play some songs more than once before playing all of them. ITunes says shuffle, but appears to means random. It would be both nice and not much of a software problem if you could choose between random and shuffle.

I recently had minor surgery on my forehead under local anesthetic. My wife, the lovely Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me) told the women she works with that on the occasion of that surgery she felt comfortable calling me a numb skull.

The doctor’s office had a lot of storage compartments labeled with what they contained. One of the compartments was labeled Xylocaine. That reminded me of two things: I’d still wonder how they come up with names for all these drugs; and I did once meet famous jazz musician Lionel Hampton.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

So, since Catholics traditionally name their children after saints, will we now have a rash of boy children named John XXIII and John Paul II?

Have you seen the HGTV show “Love It or List It?” Do you think Hillary will ever learn to add some extra money to her budget for contingencies?

When did they stop having a children’s section, complete with a matron, in the movie theater?

Recent headline on the NY Post website: “Columbia Student Reveals Secret Life as a Male Gigolo.” Other than male gigolos, is there any other kind?

And, here’s another one: “Flier busted at Newark airport with Soviet-style AK-47, ammo.” Aren’t al AK-47s Soviet style?

When I buy a new cell phone for $200, with a new, two-year contract, part of the cost of the phone is built into the contract, right? So, how come you don’t get a price reduction if you don’t get a different phone when the contract is up? Why doesn’t at least one carrier offer that as an option as a way to lure in new customers?

Do cell-phone processors “wear out” shortly after you’re eligible for an upgrade? My Droid X is an antique, I grant you that, and it sometimes takes more than a minute to connect and place a call, although the rest of the phone works fine. When that happens, I empty the cache and it helps for a while, but the guy in the Verizon store told me it’s because the processor is wearing out. I did political public relations for more than 20 years and so I’m an expert in bullshit, but even I am not sure if bullshit is what I was hearing from the guy at the phone store.

Things I Know

I shouldn’t be, but I am astonished at the news coverage People Magazine is receiving for naming the most beautiful woman in the world. Actress Lupita Nyongo is beautiful, but who’s most beautiful is a matter of personal preference and the whole idea is too trivial to deserve all the ink and all the electrons it’s getting.

Even banks don’t make much money on the float anymore. My school taxes are due by May 10th. My bank pays them through my mortgage escrow. My bank sent in the payment on April 9, a full month early.

I appreciate credit card loss and fraud prevention efforts. However, when I call my bank, all the security questions they ask me would be available to anyone who found or stole my wallet.

Also regarding credit card security, I can use my credit card in any other business I’ve ever encountered, twice in one day, but I can’t use it to get gas for both cars at the station nearest my house on the same day.

Had a couple of ultra-sound tests aimed at reducing the risk that I’ll have a stroke like the one my friend had recently. The tests got me thinking, tinnitus is bad enough, but you’d be hard-pressed to hear anything else if you could hear your blood circulating inside your body.

It’s bugged me since I bought my new laptop in December that when I plug in my earphones, it pings and puts a dialogue box on the screen telling me I plugged them in. Today, after four months, I finally figured out how to stop that.

I like old cars, I’ve been to one Barrett-Jackson auction and I watch them on TV when I can. Usually, I record them and watch later because I can’t sit in front of the TV all weekend. I don’t like the company’s new TV deal. They used to be on Speed Channel, but that was taken over by Fox Sports and the auctions now move around from Fox Sports 1 to Fox Sports 2 to the National Geographic Channel. First, I don’t see why these auctions fit with the rest of the programming on any of these channels and second, I don’t get Fox Sports 2.

TV production of Barrett-Jackson auctions hasn’t improved with the new deal and there is room for improvement. They could do a better job photographing the cars, an occasional short feature on a car or a car owner wouldn’t hurt either. They also need to work harder on incorporating social media. And, while April Rose is pretty, I think pretty is her major contribution to the event.

Hanging around for hours while what the surgeon cut out goes to pathology and before he or she finishes the operation is both annoying and boring, well, maybe tedious is a better word than boring, but the concept behind Mohs surgery is a clever idea and if it keeps my skin cancer from recurring, I’m all for it.

Don’t Die If You Can Help It.

I’ve known a lot of people for a long time. Like most of us, people have drifted in and out of my life. Nobody can keep everyone they like close to them for their entire life. I know I haven’t been able to. I’ve located some old friends and tried to rekindle relationships. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m no stalker, but these are people I like. I want them in my life if they want me in theirs.

My longest-tenured friend almost died last week because he’s a monumental idiot. I want to use stronger language than that, but friend. I say longest-tenured because I have friends who are older than he is, but he and I have never lost touch since we first met and we’ve known each other so long, neither of us can remember meeting for the first time. I’m guessing we met at a school bus stop in middle school.

I love the guy like the brother I never had. I was best man at his wedding. He would have been best man in mine, but he was in the service and couldn’t get there. We’re not as close as we once were because we’ve lived a continent apart, pretty much since he got out of the Navy and I got out of the Army. Still, when he’s called me up and asks me for something, I’ve always done it and I can’t conceive of him asking me to do something I wouldn’t do. Unlike some of my crazy relatives, he’s only called me in the middle of the night once and he was sober when he did it.

He had a stroke. No, I don’t know how big it was, but even a small stroke is a medical emergency. It’s not just a sprain and it won’t buff right out like a scratch on your car might. If you think you had a stroke, get to the emergency room. If your wife thinks you need to go to the emergency room, go to the emergency room. If your daughter who is close to graduating from nursing school thinks you need to go the emergency room, go to the emergency room. These are the people who love you most. They have your best interest at heart even if nobody else does. It’s probably a bad idea to drive yourself and you may not be able to handle a car, but get to the emergency room.

He didn’t ask for my advice and he didn’t follow his wife or daughter’s advice until it was nearly too late. He did survive the emergency craniotomy. It was needed to stop the bleeding in his brain and it was performed in a community hospital because taking him to the nearest big university hospital would have killed him. He now has a plate in his head. My dad had a plate in his head almost a hundred years ago. That’s well-established technology. He’s home now and recovering slowly.

I haven’t really got an ending for this, but I’m glad as I can be that this wasn’t the end of him.

Things I Know

Since the final four is nigh, perhaps this is the best time to remind readers you can’t go swimming in a basketball pool.

If you eat too much comfort food, it’ll make you uncomfortable.

I was really disappointed when I found out eating Thin Mints won’t make you thin. I ate them all anyway.

The phone rang. I answered it. The recording said, “Hello, this is a courtesy call from CVS Pharmacy. To continue, press any key.” I pressed the disconnect button and it didn’t continue, so that wasn’t true.

We keep our money in a big bank. Let’s call it “Bank of a Huge and Powerful Country” shall we? That’s BHPC for short. In reading Internet articles, I sometimes see stories of bad customer service involving them, but I’m usually quite satisfied, especially with my local branch. However, the credit card division is a little wonky. My pet peeve is that I can go to the grocery or the Home Depot twice in one day and charge both trips on my credit card, but I can’t buy gas for both of my cars on one day at the station nearest my house. I have to use different credit card accounts for that.

Anyway, I’m going out of the country soon, so I called BHPC and asked if they had cards that work out of the country and don’t charge a foreign exchange fee. They do. They said they’d send me one and told me when. I said I’d buy the tickets from here to out of the country before that with my other card. Then I did that and BHPC turned down the charge. Ticket broker sent me an email instructing me to call them and straighten it out. The email didn’t include that company’s hours of operation, so naturally I called three minutes after they closed.

Spring is here and glaciers have receded from around my Long Island home. When they did, I found two home-delivered newspapers, one from February 3rd and one from the 13th. The snow blower found another one, so I have no idea what the date was on that one.

I am in favor of instant gratification in certain circumstances. I’m even willing to pay a reasonable premium for it. The “right-now fee” for USB cables is too high though. I went to several stores on Friday and Saturday. They all asked for about $20 for one USB cable. You can buy one for two dollars or less from monoprice.com. I decided I could wait.

On “Face the Nation” recently, US Secretary of State John Kerry used a great word I’d never heard before, kleptocracy. I knew what it meant the moment I heard it (which is what makes it a great word); government of thieves. He used it to refer to the recently ousted government of Ukraine. And it’s not new word either. The dictionary I consulted said it was first used in 1819.

On an episode of “Ask This Old House” I saw a month or two ago, Tom Silva showed a homeowner how to get an over-sized box spring upstairs. He cut the bottom frame of the spring in half and folded it. I prefer the method I used in my first apartment on the second floor of an old house. We took out a second floor window and brought it in over the porch roof.

I am suggesting a new medicine. Since everyone now talks about flu-like symptoms instead of the flu, we should have flu-like shots instead of (or in addition to)flu shots. I had it all last week and now I feel like I should get a refund for my flu shot. I still have a cough so bad that I pulled a couple of muscles coughing. The rest of my symptoms have gone, but I still have to cough, only now it hurts, a lot. If you’re going to pull a muscle coughing, pull a back muscle. You can lean against a wall when you cough and that helps some. Quite naturally, I pulled a front muscle and I haven’t discovered anything to ease the pain of that.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Did you watch the opening pitch of the Major League baseball season from Australia? It came a little after 4:00 AM where I live. Because the game was in Australia and because I know about the coriolis effect, wanted to see if curveballs break the other way south of the Equator.

You know what nunchucks are, right? I do too, but whenever you hear the name, don’t you get a picture of a chain holding two rulers together?

I was really, really sick for pretty much all of the past week. So were my wife and daughter. Maybe I brought it home from my recent road trip to Ithaca, NY. Now, I find myself wondering, can we all get a refund for our flu shot?

Does Jimmy Fallon’s audience always shriek “Wooooooo” instead of cheering or applauding? I hope not because it hurts my ears.

If the man of the house doesn’t watch much television, does he still get to control the remote?

What happened to the proposed NFL rule change to prohibit football players from using the “N” word on the field? And isn’t the NFL the league that’s brewed controversy because one of its owners refuses to consider changing the team name many people also regard as offensive?

The $400 Million Plan

I have maintained for years, some of them right here, that nobody should make serious plans for winning a big lottery, the reason being that your chances of winning aren’t serious unless and until you win. Instead, I advocate making silly plans for winning the lottery.

Powerball tonight is $400 million, so we need a new silly plan. We have one and not a moment too soon! It’s from my daughter who says if she wins she’ll use at least part of the money to establish a charity to assist destitute Nigerian princes. This is the same young lady who says if she wins she may send out for a pizza.

It’s really nice when you see yourself reflected in your children. Me, I’m still fixated on jumping on the bed. However, if she wins or if I do, you may never read it here. If I had $400 million, the one thing in the world I would not try to acquire is notoriety.

Things I Know

Two of the nation’s largest cable providers are merging when Comcast acquires Time Warner. A company spokesman will come to your house to explain the deal a week from Tuesday, sometime between 9 AM and 7 PM.

US Olympic skier Gus Kenworthy found five stray puppies at the Sochi Winter Olympics. He’s trying to arranging to take them home to Colorado with him. You may have heard that Olympic organizers were euthanizing Sochi’s stray dogs. Instead, they should have just given one to each Olympic athlete.

Let’s say you get a phone call and there’s nobody on the end of the line, but if you wait 10 or 15 seconds, someone picks up. A computer is calling your phone number because it anticipates that the person who’s making all these annoying telemarketing calls is about to finish with his or her previous victim. It improves their efficiency and allows them to annoy more people per hour. If a telemarketer calls me before they’re ready to talk to me, I hang up, This is actually more efficient, because if they call me when they’re ready to talk to me, I have to wait for them to talk before I hang up.

Not only does the groundhog always see his shadow because of TV lights, but it’s cold around here for more than six weeks after groundhog day. It’s cold in Pennsylvania where the official groundhog is located longer than that too.

I believe gossamer toilet paper in public rest rooms is a bad thing. Ultra narrow toilet paper is something else we should all band together to battle to the death.

An important new medical study has proven that eating a lot eggs does not increase your risk of heart disease. But, all the bacon you eat with those eggs will do you in.

Sometimes luck trumps stupidity more than once in the same driving situation. Last summer, I was headed south on a two-lane road. An idiot kid on a bicycle was headed north in the middle of the southbound lane. I slowed to a crawl. At the last minute, he turned to his left and rode by my passenger-side door, while flashing me a gang sign. He sure showed me, didn’t he? At the same time, the guy in the Chevy Suburban following me sped past me on the right shoulder. I wasn’t signaling a left turn: there wasn’t any place to turn left. Both the kid and the driver were lucky they didn’t create a kid-and-bike sandwich on two trucks with no mayo. If somebody slows down in front of you for no apparent reason, perhaps there is a reason and you just can’t see it.

Snow plows are typically wider than the trucks they’re installed on. I was reminded of this last week when I was almost hit head on by a snow plow. The truck was in its lane, but the plow was considerably over the double yellow line.

“Procrastinate now, don’t put it off.” Ellen DeGeneres said that in a recently rebroadcast TV special and it’s still good advice.

Things I Want (or Need) to Know

The Super Bowl is over and pitchers and catchers report this week, so can we start talking about baseball now? And, no, I don’t want to talk about college basketball in the meantime.

What do you call Tater Tots once they grow up?

If my neighbor’s dog wanders near my property line, is it okay if I bark at the dog?

We’re going to Europe this Spring. So, this raises two questions. How much additional camera gear can I buy using the trip as my excuse before my wife has a fit? And how much of this new camera gear can I get her to carry? After all, I’m about maxed out myself. I could easily spend another $3,000 to $6,000 on more camera stuff and spending more than the cost of the trip wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility.

Could a Tyrannosaurus Rex pick its nose?

If not, did they pick each other’s noses?

If it’s possible to be prone to infection, is it also possible to be upright to infection?

Things I Know

We’ll have six more weeks of winter. The groundhog always sees his shadow because of TV lights.

I hope you know that the people who phone you claiming to be from Microsoft Support are really scam artists. You have my permission to hang up on them. Anyway, Gary from the so-called Microsoft Support called last week. I told him I was glad he called because it gave me the chance to ask if he had accepted the Lord, Jesus Christ as his personal God and Savior. He asked me what I was talking about. If he doesn’t know, I sure don’t, so I hung up on him.

Since I’m not a football fan, I’ll be so glad when the Super Bowl is over.

Justin Bieber should be embarrassed for his recent run in with the law in Miami. First off, you should never drink and drive. You might spill it. Second, street racing is very dangerous and you shouldn’t ever do that either. But if I ever get picked up for speeding in a Lamborghini, you can bet I’ll be driving a hell of a lot faster than the 60 mph the Bieb was accused of driving in Miami.

If you buy a Dell computer from any other company but Dell, the first thing you should do is register it on line and check when the warranty expires. I recently bought two Dell computers. The first one broke in three weeks. That happens, but it was both new and out of warranty. I sent it back to Amazon.com and they were great about it, so great that I bought another Dell from an Amazon seller and the warranty on that one started three weeks before I bought it. Dell customer support adjusted it for me, but Dell ought to find a way that it doesn’t need adjusting. Either that, or it should stop selling computers through third parties.

I’ve got to say this computer came with less bloatware than I’m used to seeing on new PC’s.

However, attention Dell: I know I plugged in the headphones. Stop warning me about it.

Also, attention Microsoft: I stopped some programs in the start menu from launching when they want to; Windows didn’t. So, warning me about that way too many times is annoying, not helpful. And that’s an annoyance Microsoft has gone back and added to versions of Windows earlier than 8.1 I’m not sure how many earlier versions, but as far back as Vista anyway. At least give me a check box that says don’t show this to me again.

I’m getting used to Windows 8.1. It boots a lot faster than Vista did, that’s for sure. I know there’s a screen with all the apps on it, but I’d still like the restored start menu to contain a list of installed programs. I know I can get rid of the lock screen too and I plan to look up how to do that soon. This is not a telephone, it’s a laptop.

Microsoft will let you remove software like Office from one computer and install it on another, but the third computer, they don’t like so much. Understandable. So, when my first new computer lasted less than a month, I had to call them to install Office on my replacement. They let me. They let me with so little hassle that they didn’t even ask me why. So, if they’re not going to ask you why, I don’t think they should make you call at all.

A company called Cyberlink has a media suite that wound up on my new laptop. It might be good. I don’t know. But it bothers me to buy it frequently during my free trial period. It was doing that every time I booted my laptop. So, I went into my startup menu and found five Cyberlink programs set to start every time the computer does. I disabled them all. If it still finds a way to annoy me every time I start the computer, I’ll uninstall them all. Aggressive sales tactics like that can be self-defeating. They certainly are if you try them on me.

Catching Up

Amazon.com refunded my money for the computer that didn’t have a warranty as it said it would. On the day I received the credit, I bought another computer from Amazon. I couldn’t get exactly the same model, but I bought one similar. I hope this one has a warranty. One thing you can say about them is their reputation for stellar customer service seems to be deserved.

If you haven’t received a Christmas card from me yet, you probably aren’t going to get one.

Take down your Christmas lights. You were supposed to turn them off on Tuesday.

In addition to the Sisyphus Project being copyrighted 2008-2013, it’s also copyright 2014.

Shopping for Tech

Before I get down to the reason for this post, I’d like to observe that this is the 500th post to the Sisyphus Project since we began in 2008.

We now return to our irregularly scheduled program.

I don’t think I’ll mention the computer company because it was much easier to contact the merchant than to try to get around the computer company’s website.

I bought a new laptop computer from Amazon.com. It came on December 3rd and I liked it until December 23rd when it started randomly crashing. The crashing got worse until Thursday, December 26th when it crashed and wouldn’t restart unless I “refreshed” Windows. Doing that took hours and wiped out all of the programs I installed after I got the machine.

After refreshing, it crashed again and wanted me to refresh again. So, I went to the computer company website and entered the number on the bottom of the computer to get warranty service. However the website told me that the new computer I’ve had for 23 days is out of warranty. Boo for the computer company.

But, hooray for Amazon.com. Kudos too, if I ever figure out what a kudo is. I contacted Amazon and they issued me an RMA. The new laptop goes back as soon as I figure out a way to delete the confidential information I had put on it in the past three weeks.

Things I Konw

Speaking of Clarence and Dudley as I was yesterday, the same child actress played the little girl in “the Bishop’s Wife” and Zuzu of petals fame in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

The weatherman got our hopes up needlessly last night. It snowed for a little while, but just flurries. Nothing stuck. If you live on Long Island and want a White Christmas, my advice is, listen to the song. Drifters or Bing Crosby, doesn’t matter to me.

Dear Santa, when I said I’d like a couple of CD’s for Christmas, I meant the kind with money in them, not the kind with music on them.

CBS News’ Charles Osgood has a beautiful voice and an engaging on-air personality. He either is one himself or employs top-flight writers on both radio and TV as well. And occasionally he proves on CBS Sunday Morning that he can also play the piano. But with all that talent, he demonstrated once again on the Sunday before Christmas with his rendition of “The Christmas Song” that one thing he can’t do is sing.

Plus, “The Christmas Song” is the wrong thing for anyone to sing. Nat King Cole recorded it four times, so as far as I’m concerned, “The Christmas Song” by Nat King Cole is the fourth best Christmas record ever. And third, and second and first too.

Not being able to sing is the only thing I’m confident Mr. Osgood and I have in common.

While I wasn’t sure if yesterday was Seasons Eve or Holidays Eve, I am sure today is Christmas Day. So, if you’re British and you celebrate Christmas, have a happy one. If you’re not British and you celebrate Christmas, have a Merry one. If you don’t celebrate Christmas at all, or if you do, I also hope you have a happy and healthy New Year.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Is today Holidays Eve or Seasons Eve? Which ever it is, I hope you have a happy one.

While watching traditional Christmas movies I find myself wondering, do all angels have odd names like Clarence and Dudley?

I don’t really consider “Bells of St. Mary’s” to be a Christmas movie although it is traditionally shown at this time of year. If you recall, Sister Benedict is found to have TB and they decide to send her to the desert. That’s what they did before antibiotics were widely available. But still, didn’t they know that TB was contagious and transmission was airborne by the time the movie was made? I ask because Sister Benedict continues to interact with the kids for a while before she leaves the school.

I almost feel bad for the people who call me telling me they’re from the Windows support center. How awful must your life be if you work in a call center in India, presumably for the Indian minimum wage if they have one, and all day long you call people and try to get them to bite on what you know is a fraud? I keep telling them I know it’s a fraud and they keep calling back.

I also ask them if they know how many hits you get on Google if you use it to look up the following three words, “Windows, telephone and scam.” Last time I looked them up it was about 58 million.

McDonald’s is switching to another brand because the new head of the Heinz ketchup company is a former top executive of Burger King. I didn’t know there are other brands of ketchup besides Heinz, did you?

Isn’t sleeping in the top bunk bed dangerous? I mean, doesn’t it leave way too much room for monsters under your bed?

GPS units are amazing, but one thing I don’t understand: Why does mine want to send me home a different way than it took me to my destination?

Since young and tongue rhyme, why aren’t they spelled similarly?

Since slaughter and laughter don’t rhyme, why are they spelled similarly?

The word “wound” has two meanings, so do lots of other words, but why is this one pronounced differently depending on what it means?

Things I Know

Our new daughter-in-law and our old son sent us a lovely Christmas centerpiece. We’ll have it on the table at Christmas dinner.

A Wal-Mart worker in Deerfield Beach Florida shot up the car of a second Wal-Mart worker when the second worker was chosen employee of the month. Either that explains why he wasn’t selected in the first place, or ensures he won’t be selected next month either: maybe both.

My wife has decided to establish a telephone call center here in America and have it specialize in making annoying telemarketing calls to people in India.

This led me to plan a directory of the names and addresses of local Jehovah’s Witnesses so the rest of us can go to their homes and knock on their doors at inconvenient times.

Here’s why non-Yankee fans don’t like Yankee fans. The Yankees offered Robinson Cano somewhere between $160 and $175 million depending on which source you read. The Seattle Mariners offered Cano $240 million. And some idiot Yankee fans calling sports talk radio stations criticizing Cano for not signing with the Yanks. How can he go wrong? He gets all that extra money and an extra month off since the Mariners don’t usually work in October.

An atheist doesn’t believe in God. A big box retail store doesn’t believe in closing, at least not during the Christmas season.

Since Hanukkah and Thanksgiving took place at the same time this year, a wag suggested that we should all eat latkes instead of turkey. Not possible. There’s no such thing at a leftover latke. Not even at my house and I’m not Jewish.

According to the Fort Myers News Press, the human cannonball with the Cole Brothers circus retired after his final performance on December 1st. In other words, he was fired and then he quit.

Things I Know

We have one more thing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Our son got married recently. We hope our son and our daughter-in-law remain thankful for each other for the rest of their lives together.

Thanksgiving and Hanukkah coincide this year. It won’t happen again in my lifetime and according to most sources I’ve seen, it won’t happen again in the lifetime of anyone on the planet. I’m glad that Thanksgiving and Yom Kippur never coincide. Imagine having to gorge yourself and fast at the same time.

No news is good news, unless you have to report the news on a holiday.

Andersen windows are a plus if you’re buying or selling a house. I have them in my house. Renewal by Andersen is the replacement company that specializes in installing them. I think the installation company is related to the manufacturer, but I’m not sure about that. They have a commercial running that says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that no matter where you live the temperature is unlikely to reach -20 degrees. Then it says the windows are tested from 180 to -20 degrees. But honestly, there are plenty of places in this country where the temperature does hit -20 degrees. I’ve been colder than that in upstate New York and in Chicago and believe me I’m never going to do it again. The record low temperature was recorded in Antarctica and it was -128.5 degrees! There is, however, no place where the outdoor temperature hits 180 degrees. Not even close. The recognized world record highest temperature is 134. There was a higher reading taken in 1922 in Libya, but it was later determined that the reading was inaccurate. So, while I’m convinced that Andersen windows are quality products, that commercial doesn’t convince me of anything.

The Google doodle for Thanksgiving is proof positive that there’s a lot more bandwidth than there used to be. It’s both animated and accompanied by a soundtrack. I didn’t time it, but it must be a minute or more long.

Big brother may not be watching me, but Google certainly is. On my birthday, the Google doodle on my computer (and I presume only on mine, not yours) was a birthday greeting to me.

Laptops are harder to repair or upgrade than desktop computers. On my laptop, the hard drive is nearly full, the CPU is frequently computing at or near its limit, there’s one balky key on the keyboard and the left mouse button went out yesterday. So, now I have to decide whether I get a new laptop on Black Friday or on Cyber Monday. I also have to decide what kind and that’s hard because various trade surveys disagree about which are the most reliable makes. And, I hope I still have my disks for MS Office.

Things I Know

There are two big historical events to remember next week, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the 50th Anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. I was going to call it “The Kennedy Assassination, but his brother Bobby was also killed by an assassin so there were two Kennedy assassinations.

If you get a call from a guy with an Indian accent who uses an Americanized name like Jack or Roger and he tells you he’s from Microsoft Windows Service Center, or some other official sounding group, it’s a scam. Don’t fall for it. I just put the words “windows phone scam” into Google and came up with 58.7 million hits. I told the latest one that if he knows what is happening with my computer he must be with the NSA and that I’m running Linux so leave me alone. Maybe that will stop the calls. Nothing else has.

If you head west across the George Washington Bridge and intend to pick up NJ Route 4 West, your Garmin Nuvi will tell you that exit 72A is on the left, even after it’s on the right. So watch out, or you’ll wind up in Oakland, California when all you want to do is go to Paramus, New Jersey.

Also, someone ought to tell the lady inside that little GPS on my dash that the “W” in New York State Route 9W doesn’t mean the road heads west. It means the road is on the west side of the Hudson River. So, its name is Route 9W, not Route 9 West.

If I were in charge of the world, the New York State Thruway and the Northway would be I-95 because they head north and south. The road that heads east and west through Connecticut would have another name, maybe I-80, since it doesn’t go north and south. It’s confusing because east-west interstate highways are supposed to end in zero, like I-40, I-80 and I-90. So, the phrase, “head west on I-95” if used for any extended period of time, ought to be an oxymoron, except there’s Connecticut and part of Rhode Island too.

Things I Know

My family drinks a lot of soda. We usually buy two-liter bottles of brand name soda (Saint Karen favors Coke and I like Pepsi, so we buy both) and we only buy it on sale. How much is a lot? We’re not going to drink all of it soon, but we currently have something like 21 gallons in the house.

In New York State, it’s a little known fact that it’s illegal to park within 15 feet of an intersection. I know this fact is little known because it may be the single most violated law in New York. One of the largest groups of offenders is school crossing guards where I live. Many of them park so close to the intersection that you can’t see around them to be sure it’s safe to proceed.

When it comes to insomnia, I much prefer difficulty falling asleep to difficulty sleeping through the night.

The strangest license plate I’ve seen in quite a while was a white Cadillac CTS 4-door station wagon with the NY license plate “COUPE.”

Since I bought a GPS, I find myself driving around, not following its directions, to see if I can get it to lose its temper and start screaming at me. And speaking of a GPS, don’t store an address in yours under the name “Home.” If you do and someone steals it, they’ll think you probably have other valuable electronic devices and they’ll know where you live too.

Groupon stopped sending me email offering me discounted stuff. I don’t mind because they never sent me anything I wanted to use, but I didn’t even notice when they stopped. This leads me to believe that email isn’t a really good marketing tool, except for the fact that it’s virtually free.

Speaking of email marketing, I believe CVS drug stores should be allowed to give people six-foot-long register receipts or tons of emails, but not both. I also find courtesy robocalls from CVS to be annoying rather than courteous.

Things I Know

If you plan on going trick or treating this Thursday and taking your dog with you, please do me two favors. Don’t feed your dog chocolate. Believe it or not, chocolate is poisonous to dogs. If they get enough, it can make them very sick or even kill them. And also, please don’t dress your dog up in a costume. I can’t imagine they like that.

I used to live about 30 miles from where I live now and when I moved, I didn’t change dentists. If I drive from here to the dentist, I pass a lot of things named after dead people. On that particular route, I knew (or at least met) all the dead people stuff is named after. I view this as encouraging because I’m still here even though they’re not.

Attention Amazon.com: If I buy a bottle of oil specially designed to lubricate paper shredders, the most likely reason for that purchase is that I have a paper shredder, not that I think I might buy a shredder. Therefore, it isn’t really necessary for you to recommend about 50 different shredders to me. Please stop it.

I seem to be harping on Amazon searches and recommendations. I think I’ll restrain myself on those topics at least for a while.

Jet Blue has a new TV commercial. At least it’s new to me. It touts the fact that they give you a full can of soda, instead of pouring a half can into a plastic cup as so many other airlines do. Okay, but I’ve never been denied a full can on another airline if I ask for it. The last time I flew from San Francisco to New York I flew Delta and got two cans of soda. I don’t think any airline lets you keep the cans and turn them in for a deposit though.

I am so old I remember when headlight lenses were made of glass and you didn’t have to polish them from time to time so they’d be clean and/or transparent enough to let the light shine through. In fact, I’m so old I remember when replacing a headlight cost less than my local car wash charges to polish one for you.

I used to think and I’ve said on this blog previously that the monorail that takes you around San Francisco International Airport is free to users. It’s not. Last time I was there, I rented a car. Various taxes and fees on the car added an astounding 46% to my bill. Twenty dollars of that went to pay for the monorail.

While I was on vacation, I splurged and bought a GPS. I certainly don’t need one where I live because I know the area as well as anyone, but on the West Coast, it was a Godsend. When I fly into SFO if I head north, I’ll come to the Golden Gate Bridge eventually. With the GPS, I arrived at the Golden Gate directly. Big difference! It’s not perfect, but it is surprisingly accurate. One thing I noticed though is there must be some margin of error for the altitude readings. Government flood maps say my house is 15 feet above sea level. The GPS says 28. Out west they occasionally have an altitude sign along the highway. The GPS didn’t agree with any of them, but was never off by more than one or two-hundred feet. And, of course the biggest advantage of a GPS over a map is you never have to re-fold the GPS.

Things I Know

We vacationed recently in California. We flew into San Francisco, rented a car and headed for South Lake Tahoe and the surrounding area. Yes, we hit Donner Pass and yes we crossed the border and visited Carson City NV.

In the area we traveled through, a majority of the people observe the speed limit pretty closely. This is unsettling to someone who’s used to driving in New York and New Jersey.

If I lived in a tourist area of California I wouldn’t trust the pedestrian in crosswalk laws as much as they do, because I’d assume there are too many out of state drivers for that.

Pretzels are more available in South Lake Tahoe than they are in Sacramento.

I couldn’t find rye Triscuits, Social Tea cookies or Good and Plenty candy in South Lake Tahoe. They have other kinds of Triscuits and the other things may be there, but I couldn’t find them.

Raley’s supermarket had some gorgeous looking fresh peaches, so I took a chance and tried them. But, it was late September, so they were mealy.

Every supermarket I’ve ever shopped at in California is nicer than any supermarket I’ve ever shopped at where I live.

The view of Emerald Bay from the overlook on Rte 89 is about as pretty as anything I’ve ever seen.

I told my daughter I had an idea to open a fast-food, Mexican restaurant in the area and call it Tahoe Bell. Someone thought of that joke before I did. A little way out of the town, headed toward Placerville, there is a place called the Tahoe Bell Grill.

Considering my destination, I thought it would be funny if the rental car company gave me a Chevy Tahoe, but they gave me a Ford Explorer. I liked it except for the MyFord Touch which is too complicated to use while driving if you’re not familiar with the car.

I’m not the only person who does this because at Taylor Creek Recreation Area near Lake Tahoe, I saw a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “I put ketchup on my ketchup.” But it did make me realize that, in addition to putting ketchup on my ketchup, I also put ketchup on my t-shirts.

Back on the East Coast, it would cost me $169 plus tax to have Verizon visit my home to repair a telephone wiring problem inside my house. This was a powerful incentive for me to learn three things: Home Depot has the best price in my area for surface-mounted modular phone jacks; my house is old enough that the red and green wires are still line #1; and yes, I do remember how to do that myself after all.

On CBS Sunday Morning, they recently did a piece about the comic Billy Crystal. In it he said that if there is a heaven, when he dies, he and his wife will be the age when they first met, she will walk by in a bikini and they can start all over again. I like that. But I don’t know Billy Crystal’s wife, so I’ll be very happy to settle for mine.

Having someone come in to refinish the hardwood floors in your house is more work than moving. Why do I say that? In each case, you have to move all the furniture out of the area. But when you move from one home to another, you have a moving van to put the furniture in. And when you’re done moving from one place to another, you don’t have to vacuum everything in the house, including the ceilings and the windows. But the floors do look nice.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

It’s been far too long since I posed a bunch of questions that need asking here, so:

Is there such a thing as a closet claustrophobic?

I went for a physical and wound up wondering how I can tell whether the doctor is caring for my health or just running up the bill. They rolled in an EKG machine. Okay, but I had that done in June and asked the other doctor to report the results to this one. They wanted blood. Okay, but I had that done last month, so I brought in the lab results. They read the three pages and wanted more tests. They also urged me to get a whole lot of other tests. I do have diabetes, but I see a specialist for that, so I tend to think some of the tests this doctor wants are really overkill, but I have no way of knowing.

The BBC announced during the summer that actor Peter Capaldi is the twelfth Doctor in the long-running series “Doctor Who.” But there have been 17 other actors who played the Doctor on television, three of the additional five served mostly as fill-ins for the prime doctors, but two of them (John Hurt and Toby Jones) appear to be future doctors. One, Peter Cushing, is famous for appearing in horror movies, played the Doctor in a couple of bad 1960’s movies. How come none of them count?

Don’t you just hate it when you call to make an appointment, get a recording, the recording tells you to call back during regular office hours and it is regular office hours?

“In” is a prefix that reverses the meaning of the word it precedes, right? So, famy must be a word, mustn’t it? I’ve heard of infamy, but I’ve never heard of the word famy. Have you?

Since an abductor is a muscle in your leg, why is kidnapping someone called an abduction?

Now that the guy who founded Amazon.com bought the Washington Post, how soon before the newspaper will be delivered via UPS and frequently in too large a box? Also, will same-day delivery cost extra?

In my continuing quest to improve the English language, shouldn’t the word “Swedish” have two e’s in it?

Reach Out and Touch

Rent-a-car

Are new cars too complicated to give to car rental customers? The question lept to my mind when I rented a car in San Francisco last week. Travelocity had a really good deal going on the Ford Edge, so I rented one for our trip through Travelocity, but from Avis. Of course, when I got to SFO, Avis didn’t have any Ford Edge’s, but Nancy at the rental counter came through for Avis with flying colors. She gave me a Ford Explorer. Not having the car you thought you reserved is an industry-wide problem, not one unique to Avis. The Explorer was, as you can see from the picture I snapped, black. It had a grey leather interior. It didn’t have every option Ford offers, but it had plenty. It had a proximity key. That’s a thing that looks like the power door lock key fob on your old car. The difference is when you get into the car with the proximity key in your pocket or purse, you just step on the brake and push the start button. I didn’t know that. I needed a guy from Avis to show me how to start the car.

It had MyFord Touch. That’s Ford’s touch-screen operating system. It’s complicated. When we started out, I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the radio. After driving from San Francisco to Sacramento with a side trip to Sausalito, I stopped to work it out. Don’t you dare work it out while you’re driving. That’s got to be even more dangerous than texting behind the wheel. I’ve read that the system crashes more than it should. It only crashed once for me. But it’s so distracting that you might crash if you’re not careful. Time was when you turned the radio on and adjusted the volume with a knob. You could change stations with a knob too, or push a button to scan for stations. Those functions are now on a touch screen and they’re not on the top level menu either. Same thing with the heat and A/C. All the controls are on the touch screen device and none of the settings I wanted are on the top level.

A lesser version of the entertainment system has a mini stereo plug so you can plug any kind of MP3 player into the radio and use the car’s speakers. The upgraded system this car had comes with USB inputs, RCA inputs (including video) and an SD card reader. But if you get that, you lose the mini stereo plug. The inputs are in a cubby hole at the junction of the dash and the console and the cubby has a door on it. The inputs are sufficiently inaccessible that you really shouldn’t try to use them while driving either. I didn’t ask Ford, but they may think that’s a safety feature. It’s not. Most people who rent cars are unfamiliar with the controls of the cars they rent and people will try to use those inputs while driving. It’s human nature. Plus, when you do stop to figure them out, that cubby isn’t illuminated, so a flashlight will come in handy. I have a little one in my camera bag. You can ask to borrow it if you want. I won’t lend you mine, but you can ask. You can’t even slip that SD card into the slot by feel, or get it out either, at least not easily.

While we stayed in Sacramento, I managed to get the radio presets to display four stations I like there. When in the Lake Tahoe area, I relied on an SD card for music. On the way back to San Francisco in the pre-dawn hours to catch an early flight, I wanted to listen to KCBS for traffic reports. I had, by that time, learned how to tune the radio directly to a station I hadn’t pre-set, but doing it while driving felt dangerous to me, so I had my wife do it. I lost count of how many times you had to touch the screen to get to that station. It was at least five and maybe as many as eight. For me to do it would have required stopping or having an accident.

I think the self-cancelling turn signals were computer-controlled too. Although they worked by the traditional lever rather than by the touch screen, in nine days I never did get the feel for the difference between signaling a turn and signaling a lane change. I was also unable to get the windshield washer to work. I’m not sure if that was because I couldn’t figure it out or because the car was out of fluid.

I believe Ford has had this system for three years now. I’m sure they’re working on making it more driver-friendly. It’s pretty logical. I was able to figure out most of what I needed to know without consulting the Explorer’s 586 page owner’s manual. But there are many functions I’d like to perform while driving that struck me as dangerous to do at 65 mph when you had to look and not work by feel.

I shudder to think how much more complicated the car would be if it had built in GPS. I brought my own and Ford isn’t the only company with computer problems. When I mounted my GPS, plugged it in and turned it on at SFO, the GPS thought it was still in the New York metropolitan area. Therefore, its directions to the Golden Gate Bridge were shall we say unnecessarily complicated.

I’ve just spent six paragraphs complaining about an electronic systems in a car so complicated that the car has a 586 page owner’s manual. And I really liked the car. It was quiet, roomy and comfortable. I loved the back-up camera. It has a warning system to tell you when you get too close to whatever you’re backing toward. Even though it’s pretty damned big, it carved the corners quite well in the winding road between Placerville and S Lake Tahoe. It wasn’t over-powered. Even though it was big, it averaged 21.6 mpg over roughly a thousand miles of driving. I left it at SFO thinking Avis had done me a favor giving me what must be a nicer car than the one I reserved. The difficulty I had with it was Ford’s fault, not Avis’. If I owned one, I’d probably love it in a week or two once I had the MyFord Touch set up to my liking, but trying to pick one up at an airport after lunch, hop in it and do 200 miles in it before dinner, that I didnt like so much.

I wasn’t about to sit in a garage and read a 586 page book before I started the car. In fact, I was on vacation, so I wasn’t about to read any 586 page book once I got off the coast-to-coast flight. While you could download the book to read on the plane, that isn’t really practical, because while you know what kind of car you hope you’ll get at the rental counter, I have never gotten what I asked for when I made a reservation.

Maybe what we need is a car designed only for the rental market. It could and should be simpler than what’s available to people who buy cars or lease them for an extended period of time. If you have followed my blog for any period of time, you know I want to call it an “Or Similar.”

Think Silly

I’ve mentioned before that people who make serious plans for winning huge lotteries annoy me. Why? I mean, after all, I buy lottery tickets myself. But I realize how bad the odds are and I understand that buying a ticket doesn’t make any significant difference in your odds of winning. I mean 0 in 175.2 million and 1 in 175.2 million are very close to the same thing. Unless, of course, you do win.

I use the opportunity to win (minuscule as it is) as a way to amuse myself. Mostly I tease my wife, Saint Karen, (who has to be a saint to put up with me) about how cheap I’d be if we won. At one time we lived in an apartment and our upstairs neighbors were noisy. My plan if I won at that time was to send the neighbors on vacation so we could have a little peace and quiet.

But with Powerball at something like $400 million tonight, and Mega Millions roughly $145 million since nobody won last night, I have just come up with a new way to be silly about plans to win. Yes, I will still jump on the bed because that would be fun and I could afford to replace the bed which would clearly break if I jumped on it. However, here’s the new part: If I win Powerball tonight, I will take a small part of the money and put it in a trust fund to guarantee the payments in perpetuity. Then, I will make the necessary arrangements so that when I pass away, I can be buried in a rented tuxedo. That’s it, dear reader. Now, it’s your turn to come up with a silly plan. If you do, I’d welcome your comments.

Buy a ticket or not, as you please. But if you do buy a ticket, make a silly plan. Buying a ticket is really entertainment, not investment. Now, if either you win or I do, then and only then it’s okay to come up with a serious plan to make sure you don’t run out of money and even to make sure that some of the money does good in the world. Just don’t make those serious plans until you win. And, if you win and still want to jump on the bed, take it outside first. I wouldn’t want a newly minted multimillionaire to hurt or kill himself by hitting his head on the ceiling.

Things I Know

We just booked a flight and a condo rental in California because our son is getting married to his fiancé (who else would he marry anyway?). The wedding is at the end of the month. Among the reasons I rented this condo is the on-line listing told me it has a king-sized bed and three televisions.

The first time I flew in a plane that offered extra legroom for a fee, it was Jet Blue and it cost $15 per seat. I’m tall while my wife and daughter aren’t. Still, for $45 for the three of us more comfort to me on a cross-country flight was worth it. This time, while searching for a flight, I checked both Delta and Jet Blue. The going rate seems to be around $90 per seat now. $270 for three of us so I can have extra legroom is more than I’m willing to pay.

I haven’t had enough summer yet! But while I may be in a distinct minority among American men, I have had more than enough football.

It’s already September, so eat fresh peaches while you still can.

I don’t know how long this has been true, but you can buy Ikea Swedish meatballs frozen in a pouch. Yet, the lingonberries and the cream sauce come separately and you have to put them together yourself.

From where and how much it hurt, I thought I had partially torn a tendon in my knee on Friday during the strenuous activity of stepping out of my truck. However, it’s getting better and tendons don’t do that, so I guess I just pulled a muscle.

The plural of man is men. Right? Anyone who has ever served in the U.S. Army, and I suspect in any other branch of the US Armed Forces as well, knows that the plural of “men” is “mens.”

I don’t like to bring up phlegm, but that’s another English word whose spelling needs to be revisited.

The Rigors of Travel

We don’t travel a lot as a family, but when we do, I like to stay in a suite hotel or in a rented vacation home or condo. The Internet has made vacation rentals a lot easier with sites like Homeaway and VRBO. But these sites don’t allow me to filter the results the way I want to.

If you rent a room in a hotel, the first thing they tell you is what size and how many beds you have. Two queen-sized or one -king sized bed are a couple of examples of what’s available. For a condo or vacation home rental, if the size of the bed is there at all, it’s buried. But most of the condos and homes I’ve seen have one queen-sized bed in the master bedroom. The place we rented in Florida last year didn’t have a king, but it did have two queens which is almost as good.

Every hotel I’ve ever stayed in has heavy drapes or window coverings that allow you to keep the room dark enough to sleep in. I’ve seen lots of rentals that have blinds or shades, but no drapes at all. I guess it’s one less thing to dust, but I’d like to stay asleep for a while when I’m on vacation. We even rented a cabin in Tennessee once where the bedroom was a loft and there was a huge wall of windows bringing in the morning sunlight, right in your eyes.

Most hotels these days have flat-screen televisions too, but not all of the rentals do and a lot don’t make it clear. Or if they are equipped with flat-screen television, they haven’t updated the pictures to reflect that.

If you want to rent me a condo or home for my vacation, I’d like a website that offers more filters. I want to know what size the beds are. If there’s more than one bathroom, is one en suite? How many TV’s are there, what type, what size and where. I want flat screens with one in the living area and one in each bedroom please. I also need to filter the search results based on whether there’s Wi-Fi and whether there’s access to a hot tub or pool. And can I please filter for things I don’t want as well?

No smoking is a must for me. Stale tobacco smoke is the only thing I can always smell. If I’m swimming laps in a public pool, I can even tell if the person I’m swimming behind is a smoker. Is your rental pet friendly? It’s not that I’m not, but I don’t know what the dog or cat did, where it did it, or how well it was cleaned up. I’m not quite as reliable at smelling cat pee as I am at smelling stale smoke, but it’s pretty close. So, please don’t let me bring the dog or cat I don’t have.

And, since I am frequently unfamiliar with the places I visit, I’d like to know roughly where the unit is located. I can get a hotel’s address pretty easily, so knowing where the rental unit is before I book counts a lot too.

Why has this all come up at this particular time? Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) and I will be traveling to Lake Tahoe pretty soon. I don’t think it matters much whether we’re in Nevada or California. The lake isn’t that big, so we can go from one state to the other rather quickly. I’ve checked maps and flight schedules so I can tell you that Lake Tahoe isn’t particularly easy to get to from where we live. But, it will be worth the effort.

Why are we doing this? Our son, the lawyer, is getting married. We’ve met the bride to be last year and she seems very nice so we’re quite happy to welcome her to our family. We will signify that by actually showing up for the nuptials. Our adult daughter will be there too.

Our son is older than I was when Saint Karen and I tied the knot, but he does take after me in at least one respect so I hope his bride takes after his mother too. We already like her, no doubt, but we don’t know the bride to be well enough to know this going in. Nevertheless, I hope he’s marrying a saint just like I did. You see, I’m pretty sure she’ll have to be a saint to put up with him too.

Things I Know

Anthony Weiner, in case you haven’t heard, is a candidate for Mayor of New York. Do you think that Sydney Leathers isn’t attractive enough to risk a career on? Do you believe Olivia Nuzzi, the former campaign intern who wrote a damaging article for the NY Daily News should have honored her non-disclosure agreement? Should Barbara Morgan have watched her mouth when talking to a reporter? Is Huma Abedin, Weiner’s wife, enabling his behavior? Do you believe Abedin should stand by her man or divorce him? Whatever your opinion is about Weiner sending pictures of his penis to women, both while he was in Congress and since he resigned after his behavior made him famous as the peter tweeter, let’s all try to remember that candidate Weiner’s behavior is the worst part of this scandal and that the women surrounding him don’t really deserve to be savaged by the media.

The newest TV commercial for Swiffer cleaning products is pretty insulting to older people if you ask me.

According to Buzz Aldrin (who should know) a Saturn V rocket’s mileage on takeoff was 7 inches per gallon. Since what made Mr. Aldrin an historic figure happened a long time ago, perhaps I should explain that Mr. Aldrin was the second human being to set foot on the moon.

Things I Know

It turns out I’m probably already eligible for sainthood. I thought you needed three miracles, but you only need two.

We already knew that Kim and Kanye named their child “North” to go with Kanye’s last name of “West.” So, I was hoping that Kate and William would name their new rugrat “Chrysler” to go with their last name of “Windsor.” For a future King of England, George is so unimaginative. He’ll eventually be George VII. Even King Corey or King Jody would be better in my opinion.

I had a remarkably unpleasant experience with the Bank of America’s World Points credit card reward program. When I complained, the program’s representatives didn’t help me, but promised to refer my problem to the bank for response within 48 hours. I didn’t get any response so I don’t know if the customer service rep that made the promise actually referred me as she said she would. A week later, I called the Bank of America’s customer service number (as opposed to their travel reward number) and a representative there named Claire was extremely helpful and resolved the issue to my satisfaction. There are two lessons to be learned here: check elsewhere to see if the reward deal your credit card is offering is actually a good deal; and if you are unsatisfied with the first response to your complaint, escalate.

Nobody goes to Boy Scout camp for the cuisine and I lost three pounds just by being there for five days last week.

It was very hot in Rhode Island last week. Sleeping wasn’t unbearable though, because I kept the windows open and the walls too. And also because I didn’t bring my zero-degree mummy bag to camp.

I suggest that Classmates.com revise the way it tries to drum up business. From time to time the website sends me emails about the activities of both men and women who graduated from high school before I did. I’m not interested. I might be interested in the activities of women who graduated from my high school a year or two after I did though. I’m not super-interested because I married one of those. And women might be interested in what’s up with men who graduated a year or two before they did. Maybe even three years would work.

If my suggestion on this or any other matter makes you money, post a comment here and I’ll get in touch to tell you how to send me money.

Things I Know

I’m off to summer camp for a few days, but I have to find a new doctor. When I show up at my doctor’s office in shorts and a t-shirt announcing that I’m there for my summer camp physical, I don’t even get a chuckle anymore.

Paypal sent a guy in Pennsylvania a statement saying he had over $92.2 quadrillion in his account. That’s a lot more than the World Bank estimated the entire world economy was worth in 2012, so it was probably a mistake. Too bad, because the guy said he had a good plan for the money. He said he’d pay down the US national debt and then buy the Philadelphia Phillies if he could get a good deal.

I know Bill Cosby has an earned PhD in education. However, he’s a comedian and his recent appearance on the Today show had nothing to do with his academic discipline, so when the Today Show cast called him Doctor Cosby throughout the interview about his internet survey of favorite sweaters, it just sounded odd to me. I always thought that other than MD’s, DO,s and DDS’s, one didn’t use the term “doctor” outside the university or college setting.

If you are impeding the flow of traffic in the left lane on an interstate highway, move to the right or speed up, but not both.

Most cars today have cruise control. If you’re on a limited access highway and traffic is light enough to safely permit its use, please use it. I want to maintain a steady pace and I hate having to speed up and slow down because people who have cruise control don’t use it where appropriate.

There must be 20 resistance exercise stations at the gym I use and no two are the same. I’d guess that the vast majority of people who use each of those machines do something other than what the directions say.

I’m also doing cardio on an elliptical trainer. My goal is to become so fit that they can’t get my pulse high enough during a stress test. I believe I have a long way to go. I’m not even sure the goal is in sight. The peculiar thing about the exercises is that when I stop for a few days, the inactivity hurts my cardio fitness much more than it hurts my strength.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Have you ever experienced anything “express” on or even near the Staten Island Expressway? I only ask because I didn’t again today.

If checkout time at my hotel is 11:00 AM, why does the free wifi expire at 6:08 PM?

Since the use of air conditioning became widespread, has any hotel or motel anywhere in the world been built with a quiet HVAC system?

I like to go to major-league baseball games, but usually go to only one a year because they’ve so expensive. A seat in the upper deck costs more these days than a field box seat cost 20 years ago. I went to one recently which made me wonder once again, why do they even bother with batter’s boxes? The first right-handed batter in the first inning obliterated the back line in the batter’s box. After that, if the umpires enforced the rule about batter’s boxes, every right-handed batter would have been out on every ball put in play because every single one of them had his right foot out of the box. Left-handed batters tended to stand farther up in the batter’s box because they want to eliminate an extra step or two when running to first base.

Have you ever done something advertently?

If you say or do something only once, is that dundant?

Whatever happened to velour upholstery for cars? On the other hand, I recently sat on velour upholstery in a tour bus.

And while I’m remembering days gone by, whatever happened to brown cars? Not UPS-truck brown, you understand. I’m talking about metallic shades of brown, bronze and copper. In fact, what happened to colors on cars altogether? Most of the cars I see around here these days are black, white, grey or silver.

Since the word “upholstery“is spelled with an h, why isn’t it pronounced the way it’s spelled? You know, why isn’t it pronounced ufolstery?

Sword? Board? Since both words are pronounced similarly, why are they spelled so differently?

Things I Know

I sometimes marvel at the possible contacts Linked In comes up with. I haven’t even told Linkedin.com that I’m married, but the last time I looked, the business networking website suggested I might know my wife’s boss. I also received an invitation to connect from a guy I haven’t contacted since the mid-2000’s and before that we were both beginning our careers. Of course, I accepted. My very favorite recommendation was they thought I might know the woman I took to my high school senior prom.

A man in Somerset England robbed another man who installs security cameras for a living, with predictable results.

I don’t think I’ll go see the new Lone Ranger movie, but from the reviews I’ve read, it should be viewed with giblet gravy and cranberry sauce.

There’s a report today that Tom Seaver will throw out the ceremonial first pitch at next week’s All-Star game in Citi Field. Really? Was there another candidate?

Before balloting was closed off, I decided I would vote for my favorite players for the MLB All-Star Game which is now a week away. But they want way too much information about me at the MLB website, so I passed.

I can get my annual car inspection anytime during the month when the old sticker expires. However, if I want my health insurance to pay for an inspection of me (read a physical), I have to wait the entire 365 days.

I wish people on TV would stop saying it’s hot when it isn’t. It was humid on Sunday in NY, but the temperature was in the low 80’s. An overnight low of 99 in Death Valley is hot: a daytime high of 81 or 82 in New York isn’t.

I’ve never had a job where I got scheduled performance reviews. I think I’d like one though. Nobody likes criticism, but everyone needs to know where they stand. If a boss doesn’t like something about the job you’re doing, it’s difficult to correct it if you don’t know what it is.

Health insurance eligibility is now sufficiently complicated that even my health insurance carriers can’t tell their employees which one takes precedence.

I’m teaming up Coinstar and Amazon.com to painlessly fund my music collecting. If I get an Amazon gift e-card instead of cash, Coinstar doesn’t charge a fee for counting all the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters in my jar. When the jar’s full, it’s always over $100. If I got a bigger jar, I’d have trouble carrying it. So, I got an Amazon e-card for redeeming my pocket change and spent some of the money on CD’s and some of it on camera accessories.

In the area where I live, various supermarkets frequently put small cans of tuna fish on sale. They never discount the big cans. So, if you buy tuna on sale, it’s always cheaper per unit to buy it in small cans. Also, your cell phone probably contains a calculator. Use it while grocery shopping.

Things I Know

I like to take pictures. Sometimes, I take good ones, like the one at the top of this blog. I took that. I’m trying to learn Photoshop Elements 11. I have the software and I have a book. I’ve looked up tutorials on youtube.com too, but I’d like to find a tutorial that would take you through the program while beginning at a place that will allow you to start editing photos right away. That way, you don’t forget the first thing you learned while picking up the seventh. I’m open to suggestions.

By the way, the biggest step you can take to gain a reputation as a good photographer is to not show anyone your bad pictures.

If you live on the west coast, the nearest Dunkin Donuts store is not in Missouri anymore. It’s in Salt Lake City Utah.

If I ever open a funeral home, I’ll call it Mammoth—that’s Mammoth Undertaking.

I didn’t watch the Discovery Channel while Nik Walenda was wire-walking across the Grand Canyon. It was a risk-reward thing for me, as it was for Mr. Walenda. Of course, for him, the potential for both risk and reward were much greater. I would have hated to see him die on live TV, but I would have been only mildly pleased to watch him succeed, so I didn’t watch. But one thing I did like: during the crossing, someone tweeted that not only did the video remind him he was afraid of heights, it also reminded him that he was afraid of widths.

I don’t follow professional hockey at all, but congratulations to the Chicago Blackhawks on their Stanley Cup victory. The NHL has the coolest sports trophy tradition ever, though. Each player on the winning team gets custody of the cup for a while. They can take it home, or take it out to parties, just to show it to their friends. I imagine you could score a free beer or two if you showed up at the local sports bar with the Stanley Cup.

There’s an old joke among IT workers that if you search Google for the search term “Google” something awful will happen. You’ll break the Internet or send Google into a programming loop from which it cannot exit, or get a screen of death in some color other than blue. None of those things will happen, but you will get over 10 billion hits, so don’t do it unless you’re looking for something to read for several lifetimes to come.

Speaking of the dreaded blue screen of death, it’s been about a year-and-a-half since I looked for the t-shirt on etsy.com and progress has been made. You can now buy on etsy, and maybe elsewhere too, “Blue Screen of Death” T-shirts in 18 colors (it used to be 14) but still only three (it used to be three) are shades of blue.

And, it’s been a lot more than 18 months since I’ve seen a real blue screen of death in its native habitat. Do you think they are extinct?

Remember when M&M candies advertised that they melt in your mouth, not in your hands? Well, now Hershey’s has a product called Air Delight and Hershey’s advertises that it melts fast while you’re eating it. I wish somebody would make up their mind.

Things I Know

If you think you can get a carpet cleaned, ripping one up after it’s been on the floor for years and years will convince you otherwise. Last one I ripped up had at least enough dirt under it to fill a good-sized flower pot.

I was looking at car rentals on Priceline.com, a company that could stand to update its website. According to Priceline, examples of a premium or luxury car in my neighborhood include Mercury Marquis, Lincoln Town Car and the ubiquitous “Or Similar.” Fine, except I can’t think of any other large, rear-wheel drive, American-made cars that haven’t been manufactured in two (Town Car) or three (Marquis) years.

So it has been proclaimed throughout the land that Kim Kardasian’s daughter is named North West. At least the child won’t grow up directionless. It has also been proclaimed that her nickname will be Nori. Perhaps that will be reconsidered since Nori is Japanese seaweed.

My wife, Saint Karen, who has to be a saint to put up with me, can blink, but she can’t wink. She can stick out her tongue too, but she can’t roll it.

I’ve seen Home Depot stores all over the country. Most of them have overhangs at the front of the store. Generally, the stores keep shopping carts and hand trucks under the overhang. Not the one where I usually shop. They keep gas grills, plants, sheds, etc., under there and they take up dozens of parking spaces in the lot storing the carts. They use enough of the parking spaces this way that it’s getting to be a hassle to shop there.

Flickr was recently revamped. I’d like to suggest another improvement. You can drag and drop pictures from your computer to your browser to upload them to Flickr. I’d love it if you could drag and drop pictures within Flickr to rearrange them both in your photo stream and in your sets.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

If I were in charge of Microsoft Excel, I’d make the height and width of the cells in the spreadsheets in the same units. Then, if the column width was 6 and the column height was 6, each cell would be square. It’s so logical I wonder why Microsoft doesn’t do that.

Shouldn’t we say “mathematic” (no “s”)? I mean we use the word as singular, not plural.

Here’s a question for car companies. You’ve already designed the hook that’s over the back window so it won’t accept a coat hanger. Why don’t you just eliminate the hook on both sides of the car and make yourselves maybe an extra dime of profit? I know you wouldn’t make the car a dime cheaper, so I didn’t bother to suggest that.

Do you like to stick your head out the window of a moving car? Neither do I, so why does your dog like it so much?

If I can find and buy a race horse named “Nobody,” can I clean up on stud fees when nobody wins the Triple Crown?

When toddlers try on a new (for them) curse word for the first time, they always pronounce the word clearly and use it in the correct context. I wonder where they get it from, don’t you?

Why is it you can modify some Facebook posts, but only delete others?

Where did I leave my car keys? No, really. Exactly where? I know they’re in the woods somewhere near Stony Point NY and I know I’ll never find them, but those car keys and those remote key fobs are mad expensive—more than a subsidized smart phone.

Things I Know

If you net $370.8 Million in the Powerball lottery the way Gloria MacKenzie did, I imagine it would be pretty hard to squander that much money. However, if you’re 84, as Gloria MacKenzie is, I think you should try hard to do so. Mrs. MacKenzie lives, or maybe used to live in Zephyrhills, FL, which is near Tampa. Her son is from Jacksonville, which isn’t near Tampa. Her new attorneys are also from Jacksonville. That leads me to speculate that she is probably relying at least in part on her son to help her plan for the money. I say more good luck to her and to anyone she chooses to be generous to as well.

When my wife heard that the winner is 84, she said, “I hope she has a lot of relatives.” I said, if she didn’t before, she probably does now.”

My daughter deserves to win the big prize in a lottery because she has a good answer to the news conference question, “What are you going to do with the money?” She says she’d reply, “Well, I was thinking about getting a pizza.”

News that the current director of the FBI is retiring soon lead me to wonder how much the FBI director earns. He is a public official, so his salary must be a public record, but in the few minutes I’ve spent looking for it, I couldn’t find it.

“Anyways” isn’t a word.

I get more and more junk mail, or if you prefer direct marketing mailers, that are too thick to put through even a pretty good shredder without opening them. I even got one recently that had two paper clips in it to prevent me from shredding it. Okay direct marketers, you win. I’ll open your junk mail before I shred it, but you still can’t make me read it.

I emailed Linked In, the business networking website, with a suggestion for change. I got two responses, one quickly and the other 13 days later. Neither one was anything more than generic and neither one gave me any confidence that the website will adopt my suggestion.

A guy came up to me in the library the other day and said hi. I had no idea who he was. I may have mentioned that I have a terrible memory for names. My wife tells me I learned her name the third time we met. Turns out the guy who said hi is the man I sold my old Chevy to something like 25 years ago. The car served him well until he wrecked it four years later. So, he didn’t remember me for doing something awful to him. I was flattered and said so.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Yanira Maldonado, a 42-year-old Mexican-born American citizen, was released from jail in Mexico on Friday. She was charged with smuggling drugs after 12 pounds of marijuana was found under the seat where she was sitting on a bus. Her release came after surveillance video of the bus station showed she wasn’t carrying a package when she boarded the bus. That’s fine, but why did it take a week to look at the video?

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is running for reelection. Have you seen his campaign commercials? If you’re the incumbent and if you’re ahead in the polls, isn’t it unusual to attack your opponent by name, especially six months before the election? Doesn’t that contribute to her name recognition and put her on a more equal footing with the governor in the mind of the public?

Have you ever named your car? My sister used to call our old Jeep “Jeepy Girl.” Not sure why. I have only named one car, a clapped out Plymouth we called “Blue Cloud.” The car was red, but it burned A LOT of oil.

If you sign up for a cell phone contract and get a new phone, the cost of the phone is subsidized, right? So how come if you let the contract expire and don’t renew or get another phone your monthly bill doesn’t go down once the subsidy for your old phone is paid off?

How do Linked-In and Facebook decide who they suggest I might know? I haven’t shared my contacts with either one. Both thought I might know the woman I took to my senior prom. That was a long time ago and while I’m grateful that she’s one of the people who introduced me to my wife, I really only see her at my wife’s class reunions. Linked-In recently told me I might know David Einhorn, the billionaire hedge fund guy who is probably most famous in this area for trying to buy into the NY Mets. I was in a group of 20-25 people introduced to him at a ball game, but I wouldn’t say I know him and I’m a thousand percent sure he wouldn’t say he knows me.

Things I Know

You can freeze cream cheese, but I don’t recommend it because it louses up the texture.

While Spring cleaning and before you take everything in your attic and garage to the curb or to the dump, you should know that a working 1976 model Apple 1 computer was auctioned recently for 516,000 Euros which translates to about $668,000. My mom probably threw one of those out along with my comics and my Lionel trains.

Internet advice can be funny. I was reading camping forums to find out how to repair the netting on my tent. I left the tent in my garage over the winter and despite the fact that it doesn’t look like an acorn, squirrels nibbled on it. Someone on one of the forums suggested I could repair the holes in the netting by using small patches made out of squirrel pelts.

Because I went to a meeting on Wednesday morning, I wasn’t home when the Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by. I respect their religious beliefs; I wish they respected mine and left me alone after a few polite no’s.

I hate to watch really dark movie scenes on TV. Generally when that happens I can’t see much.

A newly released scientific study proves conclusively that anything anyone enjoys is harmful either to the person who enjoys it, whoever provides it, or both. Moreover, having made that determination, no more scientific studies need be conducted ever.

I was going to start a Twitter account to promote this blog but the twitter handles Sisyphus and Sisyphusproject are taken although neither one is used very often (like in years). I can’t complain though. I have a Twitter account I only use to sign into a couple of websites I visit frequently.

Amazon.com’s search function continues to puzzle me. I searched for Canon Lens under electronics, sorted them by price highest first, and the third item that came up was a Leica lens. I searched for a particular song with a two-word title under MP3 music. The first song title was the 107th item on the list. Amazon does many things amazingly well, but its search function continues to be weird and unsatisfying.

Mother’s Day

If you’ve complimented or flattered me by reading all, some, or most of what I’ve written on these pages over the past five years, you may have noticed that I’ve fondly remembered my father on Father’s Day. You may also have noticed that I haven’t done the same for my mother on Mother’s Day.

Still, I hope you have fond memories of your mother. Even better, I hope your mom is still alive and you can tell her you love her. And, if you have a mother or if you are a mother, I hope you have a happy Mother’s Day.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

What should I get my wife for Mother’s Day? Frankly I’ve run out of gift ideas, not just for that but for anything. To balance things out, I’ve run out of gifts I want to receive as well.

When Queen Elizabeth dragged Prince Charles with her to the ceremonial opening of Parliament on Wednesday, my daughter wanted to know if it was bring your children to work day in Great Britain.

Is Martha Stewart being paid for looking for a date using Match.com? The website has experienced tons of publicity and a surge in membership, so I assume so, but if she is being paid by someone other than the Today show when she appears there to promote the search, I think it should be disclosed.

Why are there no B batteries?

I always confuse the word artisan with the word artesian. So, sometimes I wonder how cheese could ever be able to come out of the ground without benefit of a pump, or with for that matter.

Where did I park my car?

Don’t you need a gun and a mask to charge that much for a new ignition key and a new remote for your car? Admittedly they weren’t new cars, but I’ve owned more than one car that cost less to buy than the dealer wants for a new key and fob for my five-year-old truck.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

I’m all for recycling plastic, so why can’t they make the little numbers inside the triangles on the bottoms of the plastic containers big enough to read?

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend and a dog is man’s best friend. Is that unfair to men or women?

Every spring I wonder, shouldn’t the plural of crocus be croci?

Do you understand the show “Deadliest Catch?” I don’t. When I was growing up, nobody wanted to catch crabs.

Isn’t that Marshall Efron doing the voice of the cartoon general in the TV commercials for The General Insurance?

Why is my kitchen exhaust fan just as noisy on low speed as it is on high?

Are pancakes really so hard to cook that we need the Flip Jack pan?

Why are we supposed to tip the newspaper delivery guy? When I was a paper boy, I bought papers wholesale and sold them for list price. A tip, if I got one was a little extra for the convenience of getting the paper delivered to the door. These days the newspaper delivery person is an adult working from a car, very early in the morning. And, the cost of newspaper home delivery is higher than the price printed on the newspaper. So, they’re being paid more than retail for their service, right? Therefore, why are we also supposed to tip?

Things I Know

If you absolutely need to be miserable for three or four minutes, it’s really, really hard to beat a George Jones song. If you don’t like country music, that may not matter to you. If you do like country music, you already know they held his funeral at the Grand Old Opry, you could watch it live on more than one cable channel, stream it on the Internet, or listen on satellite radio. And the place was packed!

Evidently, the people who programmed MS Word aren’t big fans of country music. I say that because they think “Opry” is a misspelled word.

Don’t turn left off a busy main street into a side street if there’s no room to pull all the way out of the intersection.

If there’s a long line on the street waiting to turn right into a fast food drive-in window or a carwash, you have no business trying to turn left to cut that line.

If there’s a left turn lane on a ground-level street or a deceleration lane on a highway, please get all the way into it before turning. I just hate it when people hang the rear of their car out of those lanes so as to both occupy the turn or deceleration lane and also block the free flow of traffic.

Using the word magniloquent to describe someone’s speech or writing is in and of itself magniloquent.

Things I Know

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the Boston bombers’ mother says she regrets ever moving her family to the United States. We regret it too.

When I met my wife’s parents it was no big deal. She was still in high school. I went to their house to pick her up and take her to a movie. We said hello. If you start dating someone as an adult it can be more momentous. My son is going to meet his girlfriend’s parents and it involves a trip to where they live in Europe.

I was talking to a psychiatrist I know the other day and he said that the bombing at the Boston Marathon and the positive test (possibly a false positive) for the deadly poison Ricin on mail to the President and a US Senator were crazy. He should know, right?

The proliferation of fees in the airline industry continues. My friend Wes Richards has now proposed a fee-collection fee. Just brilliant! I fear Wes will now become the head of a major airline as a result and if the fee-collection fee gets implemented and Wes gets royalties for this idea he will soon be the only person able to afford to fly commercially.

Myself, I’m working on the fi-fo-fum fee.

If you use Facebook, you know that every once in a while your news feed will say one of your friends commented on an issue and so did 415,773.134 other people. Fine. But if you’re interested in what your friend said about that issue, you might click on it. And there’s no way you can find your friend’s comment among the 415,772.134 others. If you click on one of those through your friend, I think Facebook should take you to the page, but highlight your friend’s comment.

Our obsession with celebrity has gone too far. It’s been reported, far more widely than necessary, that when pop star Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank house while in Amsterdam on a European concert tour earlier this month, he signed the guest book, “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.” In case you’re not a young teenage girl, a beleiber is someone who’s a fan of Justin Bieber. Some people went nuts criticizing the kid. Maatje Mostart curator of the museum didn’t. She retained some perspective. While acknowledging that the remark was insensitive, she said, “He’s 19. It’s a crazy life he’s living, he didn’t mean bad… and also it’s nice that he made the effort, he didn’t have to come.” That’s about the size of it and that’s about the amount of coverage this gaffe deserves.

Things I Know

If someone tells you this April 15th is the 100th anniversary of the federal income tax, that’s not exactly true. The feds have been collecting income taxes for the past 100 years, but first, there was also an income tax during the Civil War and second, in 1913, your federal income tax deadline was March 1st, not April 15th.

I understand that telling a prospective employer what you make on your current job is a stronger bargaining position than telling them what you made on your last job. Still, I went on a job interview recently where the salary offered was well below the pay grade of the responsibility of the job opening. So, I withdrew myself from consideration. I’m willing to work for less than I used to make, but not for less than what the job typically commands.

The NY Post website on Wednesday had an article headlined, “One-Third of Air Force Including Blue Angels Grounded by Sequester.” Okay, except the Blue Angels are the Navy’s aerobatics team. The Blue Angels have been cancelled too, but the Air Force’s aerobatics team is called the Thunderbirds, so the headline should have said something about the Thunderbirds and so should the article.

If you have a car with a keyless entry system, don’t lose your keys. At the dealer, the remote for my truck costs around $100 without programming. I’ll be searching on Ebay in the next few days for a cheaper solution. Not only the remote. The key also has a transponder and has to be programmed to the car by a dealer or a locksmith with a reasonably expensive piece of equipment to do the job.

How come Jay Leno calmed down about being replaced by Jimmy Fallon? Money is my guess.

Like a lot of people, my garage is full of junk and I can’t park a car there. So, I don’t go into it much in the winter time. I went in on Saturday. I knew the car wasn’t parked there. I didn’t know the dead squirrel was, but now I do.

Apostrophe Catastrophe II

For reasons I can’t explain, when the most recent update of the blogging software I use stripped some, but not all the apostrophes from the entire five years of the blog, it stripped out some, but not all of the quotation marks in the blog as well.

The last time I wrote about this, I said there was a limit on how far back I could go and edit the blog entries. I have discovered, however, that the most recent update of the blogging software also removed the limit on editing. So, I can now go back to the very beginning to correct and edit entries. I can go through all five years of entries and correct them for proper use of apostrophes and quotation marks after all.

Since I can, maybe I will. But, don’t count on it happening quickly.

Things I Know

I just figured out how to improve U.S. relations with the People’s Republic of North Korea. America should set up a good barber school in Pyongyang. Let’s face it, Little Kim’s haircut won’t win a prize anytime soon.

The actor Daniel Craig, famous for playing James Bond, made a seven-minute appearance at the NY International Auto Show during press previews on Wednesday. He arrived at the Javits Center in a Land Rover, on behalf of that company, stayed for 7 minutes and didn’t say a word. He was reportedly paid one million dollars. I could never do that. Nobody who knows me thinks I could possibly go seven minutes without uttering a word.

So I was watching a show called Prime Nine on the MLB cable channel and it was about what the show’s producers consider the nine best seasons of all times for individual pitchers. Of course, one of the nine was Sandy Koufax in 1965. The film clip they showed was of his perfect game in September and calling that game, 48 years ago, Vin Scully. Other than Koufax’s performance, what’s remarkable is Vin Scully. If you had gone back another fifteen years, a Dodger film clip might have had Vin Scully doing play by play. If you get one from next Monday or later, it might still be Vin Scully, but the chances are lower because Mr. Scully doesn’t do every game anymore. He still does home games and a few road games in states neighboring California. And, he is 85 years old!

Verizon wireless sent me an email suggesting I spend $4.99 on two cleaning wipes for my cell phone. That’s not going to happen.

Things I Know

50’s and 60’s singing idol Bobby Rydell was a no-show for his appearance at Dick Fox’s Doo Wop Extravaganza at the NYCB Theater in Westbury NY last night. Jay Black, former lead singer of Jay and the Americans filled in for him. According to the concert’s MC, Emil Stucchio (who is also lead singer of The Classics) Rydell had open-heart surgery earlier in the week. Rydell, who is 70 years old, had a double organ transplant last summer, receiving a liver and a kidney. I hope Bobby Rydell makes a complete and speedy recovery.

Note to doo wop singers: If you didn’t have THAT operation when you were nine years old (and aren’t you glad you didn’t?) you can’t sing falsetto at 70 or 60 or even 50. Hire a woman to sing the high notes.

Occasionally, someone says something extremely profound about something else that’s not profound at all. Case in point, Smokey Robinson, legendary lead singer of the Miracles on early group harmony: “When you learn a Moonglows’ record, you learn the background vocals before you learn the lead vocals.” Smokey said that on the recently rebroadcast PBS special “Doo Wop Discoveries.” True. I know when my son was a toddler, if he sang along with some music I was playing, he’d sing the harmony parts. And I also know I love me some Moonglows’ records.

“The National Association of Realtors supports maintaining homeowner tax incentives.” If this ad’s purpose is to convince Congress, or to convince the general public, I think it’s an awful ad. Do you know what they’re talking about? I don’t think many people do. “Homeowner tax incentives,” means you can deduct the interest you pay on your home mortgage from your income taxes. Whenever Congress talks about closing loopholes in the tax code, that’s one of the issues they’re addressing. Are you more interested now? I thought so. And you would have been more interested earlier if the ad explained that.

Every once in a while you run across some really strange pricing. Here are two examples.

First, if you ride a bus in Nassau County NY, you can pay with a lot of coins or you can pay with something called a Metro Card. The fare, in coins, is $2.25. On the card, it’s $2.50! I know that acquiring and carrying 18 quarters for a daily, round-trip commute is a bit of a burden, but I can’t see why anyone would use the card.

Second, we use a lot of ketchup in my house. My daughter puts ketchup on baked chicken and I put ketchup on ketchup. Since we use so much, we buy a lot. Recently, in the supermarket, a humongous bottle of brand-name ketchup (is there more than one brand name of ketchup?) cost $6.49. What do I mean by humongous? 1.43 kg. Strange pricing was in effect, so two humongous bottles held together by a white plastic thingy cost $5.99. Which should I buy, one for $6.49 or two for $5.99? Not $5.99 each, $5.99. Oh the stress of making decisions.

Apostrophe Catastrophe

I’m at least as smart as the average person and since I possess a master’s degree I’m reasonably well educated. Still, I do make mistakes; everybody does.

I haven’t, however, made as many mistakes in the use of apostrophes as there are in this blog. I usually write it in MS Word, then cut and paste it into the blog. When I do that the blog software sometimes indicates spelling mistakes involving apostrophes. In the past I haven’t corrected those and they have appeared as I intended them to when I make blog posts. While my blog has its own domain name, the ISP I use runs blogs through WordPress software. I presume WordPress uses a different character for the apostrophe than MS Word does. Since the recent WordPress upgrade, a lot of my apostrophes have mysteriously disappeared. This isn’t going to work. I will not pay ransom for any of my missing apostrophes, not even the ones I love most.

There’s a limit on how long after posting I can fix mistakes so at this point I won’t go back and try to fix all the apostrophes I’ve accumulated over more than five years of blogging. I know there’s no such word as whos and when I wished our Irish-American President a happy St. Patrick’s Day, I wrote it as President O’Bama, not President OBama.

Since I’ve discovered this problem, in the future I will correct the blog entries for apostrophes once they’re imported from MS Word. So, please forgive the apostrophe stupidity you may encounter if you read previous blog posts. A few of the mistakes are probably mine, but most of them have been injected by the most recent upgrade to WordPress. We will now move forward and not look back at catastrophic apostrophic mistakes.

Calling the Bank

I have a problem and I’m pretty sure it involves either information downloaded from my bank or the software I run on a PC that uses that information. You see, when I download bank information it shows up on my PC with check numbers attached, even if the transactions aren’t checks. Moreover, the inserted numbers don’t necessarily relate to each other or to existing numbers for transactions that are checks.

I have another problem with my bank. When I use Google Chrome, I can’t transfer money from one account to another.

About the first problem, I’ve called the bank and the software company and each blames the other. When that happens, I get frustrated and give up until I have another problem. I called the bank about the second problem and decided to address the first again for probably the fourth or fifth time.

The first lady I talked to in customer service was very nice and she asked an intelligent question. She wanted to know whether I could transfer money between accounts if I used another browser. I tried it and the answer was yes. So, I had a work-around, but the customer service rep wasn’t able to solve the problem if I use Chrome. Next, she put me on hold to talk to another customer service rep about the download v. software problem.

The bank, by the way, has a problem too. Both when I called in the first place and when I waited on hold for the second rep, I learned that my call is important to the bank. I also learned that even though my call is important, they don’t hire enough customer service reps to answer calls promptly, even if you are a preferred customer and call on the preferred customer special telephone line.

The second lady was also very nice and also unable to solve my problem. I still wind up with transactions that have check numbers even though they aren’t checks. However, unlike the people I’ve talked to in the past at the bank or the software company, this lady opened a case, gave me a case number and said someone will call me back. I hope so and we’ll see.

While I was on hold, waiting for the second rep and listening to awful music at extremely low fidelity, I figured out the answer to my first problem for myself. Is there anything I do differently, I asked myself, when I use Chrome as opposed to the other browser? Yep, there is. In Chrome, I’m running an anti-tracking extension called DoNotTrackMe. So, I shut it off and, lo and behold, I could transfer money again. Frankly, I’m surprised that the extension prevents me from transferring money between accounts, but doesn’t prevent me from accessing the bank website or any other functions of my accounts, but that is the way it works.

Solving the problem by myself makes me feel better about myself, but also makes me a little less confident in my bank.

Things I Know

Happy to be back. Did you miss me? I did.

Apparently, the blog was down for the past couple of days because WordPress which supplies the software this blog uses, was updating its programs. I don’t know what happened to the old layout and I don’t have time to mess with a new one right now, but I will fix it soon, I promise.

Things I Know

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. On the holy day, you may wish to try my recipe for Irish coffee. I recommend drinking it black, with no coffee.

Just to restate my Irish qualifications: My dad painted the first legal green line up Fifth Avenue for a St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Before New York City took over, a bunch of guys got drunk and painted the line green on a voluntary basis. I once met one of the guys who used to do that too.

And I also wish our Irish president, Barak O’Bama a happy St. Patrick’s Day.

I don’t believe I have any particular influence in local politics, but the Sisyphus Project hereby endorses Robert T. Kennedy for mayor of Freeport NY in the election to be held on March 19th. I recommend his running mates, the Unity-Home Rule candidates on Row B as well. As far as I know, most villages in New York State hold elections for mayor, trustee and village justice on the third Tuesday in March. So, if you live in a village in New York State and if your village is having an election on Tuesday, please vote. Turnout in these elections is usually low, so your vote means more in these elections than it does in Presidential elections.

I hope Pope Francis is successful in leading the Catholic Church more in the direction of helping the poor. I also hope he cracks down even further on child abuse among certain members of the clergy.

My wife made sauerbraten and potato pancakes for dinner. She told our daughter that if there were any potato pancakes left over, she’d freeze them. Our daughter replied, “Mommy, you’re cute.” She had a point. There weren’t any potato pancakes left over. I’ve never seen, or even heard of leftover potato pancakes, have you? And, if there’s even a smidgen of justice in the world, there is no such thing as leftover potato pancakes. Nor, should there be! Actually, our daughter has two points: Mommy is cute too.

If the Girl Scouts find this out, they’ll probably raise the price of their cookies, but some commercially baked cookies sell for more in your supermarket than the Girl Scouts charge for their cookies. However, I think packages of grocery-store cookies generally weigh more than packages of Girl Scout cookies. If Social Teas weren’t the most expensive cookies I like, I’d probably eat a couple of boxes of them a day!

Speaking of Girl Scouts, they almost made a terrible mistake. They only tried to sell cookies to my wife, not to me. However, I tracked down a Girl Scout and managed to buy another five boxes of Thin Mints.

Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea went exceptionally well since shortly after he returned to the USA North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, threatened a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

One of the biggest questions of 2013 so far is who’s baby is going to get more publicity when it’s born, Kate’s or Kim’s?

I’m not a big fan of reality TV and I’ve never seen the show “Fashion Star,” but I did see Nicole Richie on “Today” this morning. I know her father is famous and that she and Paris Hilton became famous for being famous, but how can she be a featured player on a TV show if she’s as inarticulate and stammers as much as she did on “Today?”

Why did Jody Arias take the witness stand in her murder trial? She’s the 32-year-old Arizona woman accused of stabbing Travis Alexander multiple times. The NY Daily News reported, “Prosecutors claim she killed Alexander in a jealous rage, stabbing and slashing him 27 times, slitting his throat and shooting him in the head.” She says self-defense.

It’s almost never a good idea for a defendant to take the witness stand because it allows prosecutors to ask questions on cross examination that would not be permitted otherwise. Based on news reports, I don’t think she’s helping herself and she’d stand a better chance with the self-defense claim if Alexander hadn’t been stabbed 27 times. Generally, a lot of stabs and/or a lot of shots indicate rage was an element of the crime.

On the TV show “

“Pawn Stars,” I think I saw someone pawn something once, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone buy anything at the store. Still, the time Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) and I drove past the store in Las Vegas, there was a line to get in, so someone must be buying their stuff.

Whenever there’s a big storm, the weather forecasters on TV keep talking about “The Eurpoean model.” Who is this European model? Heidi Klum? And why would a European model know anything about meteorology.

Things I Know

The TSA announced new rules about knives on planes. The new rules take effect on April 25th. Most of the reporting I’ve read said it’ll be okay to bring your Swiss Army knife on a plane after that date. However, if you read deeper into the articles they say the maximum length of a blade allowed will be 2.36 inches. I have a Swiss Army knife. If you measure only the sharp part of the blade, it’s about a tenth of an inch too long. If you measure the entire part that sticks out of the handle, it’s even longer. So be careful taking your Swiss Army knife on a plane, even after 4/25. Also, I wondered who has a tape measure you can use to measure 2.36 inches, but I’ve decided they really mean 6 cm.

If you subscribe to Norton Internet Security, you may want to turn off the automatic renewal feature. Norton told me when my subscription was due to expire, but they charged me for a renewal more than two weeks before the expiration date. Also, shop around. You can get their product (which I have used for years and like) a lot more cheaply than the price they sell it to you for. If you should have a problem, Nathan, the chat guy on Norton’s website is a computer, not a person. I contacted the company through Facebook and their Facebook team consists of real people I found very helpful.

Obviously, the Dolan family that owns Cablevision is a lot more skilled at making money than I am. They’re worth billions of dollars because of the company Charles Dolan founded. However, the current TV commercial for Cablevision’s Optimum cable service is exceedingly dumb. If you don’t live in an area served by Cablevision, the commercial claims that Optimum’s 800 number is so similar to the 800 number of singer Michael Bolton that Bolton is getting a lot of calls meant for them. Why would Bolton have an 800 number? Why would he make it public? And, why would he ever answer a publicly known 800 number himself?

I missed National Banana Cream Pie Day which was March 1st, but I have big plans to make up for that.

I’m glad I only learned that March 3rd was the date of the World Naked Bike Ride after it was too late to participate because it’s way too cold for that in early March where I live.

In this economy, someone must have money. I was at the Garden State Mall in New Jersey and I know they’re building a parking garage in part of the parking lot, but the rest of the lot was jammed, in the early afternoon on a weekday.

I believe it’s true throughout New York State and know that on Long Island most village elections will be held on March 19th. There are fewer than two weeks to go. Vote early, vote often and vote for the candidate of my choice.

I haven’t done a blog item on things I want (or need) to know in quite a while. I have to work on that.

Things I Know

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Sisyphus Project. If, like my friend Richard (formerly from New Jersey) you have been with us from the beginning, or very near the beginning, then you may be a glutton for punishment, but you have my sympathy.

When a movie star on the red carpet at tonight’s Oscar award ceremony is asked, “Who are you wearing,” just once, I’d like her to say, “It’s from the sale rack at Kohl’s”. I didn’t have that desire until Nancy Giles planted it in my mind when I watched her commentary on CBS Sunday Morning today.

I listen to the radio more than most people. I keep it on all night and listen on a pillow speaker when I’m having trouble sleeping, which is most of the time. I just bought a new one; a Sangean CL-100. I’ve only had it for a couple of nights, but so far, so good. I live in an area with lots of radio stations and it picks up the ones I like. On the first night, the display was too bright, but that’s adjustable. I don’t need the weather radio feature unless I move to Florida. That might happen if I can convince my wife, Saint Karen, who must be a saint to put up with me. I thought about buying a radio that would accept SDHC cards and play the music or podcasts on them. But this radio is less than half the price and it does have an auxiliary input, so I can make it play music from my MP3 player or my phone. The clock on mine doesn’t seem terribly accurate, but it can reset itself from information broadcast by many radio stations. My biggest problem so far is that the display isn’t large enough for me to read it in the middle of the night without my glasses.

The Sangean replaces a teenage Grundig Yachtboy 400. I like one thing better about the Sangean. It has a much lower center of gravity so it’ll be harder to knock over at night. But if the Yachtboy was still being manufactured, I’d buy another one. The Yachtboy is a good receiver and very sturdy. I’ve owned it since around the turn of the 21st century. I’ve dropped it several times. Two of those drops submerged it in water. After it dried out and I replaced the batteries, it worked just fine. It still works just fine except for one important thing: the earphone jack is now intermittent. So, if I want to listen to the radio all night, I can’t rely on a pillow speaker. Therefore, the Yachtboy gets retired to a secondary roll.

Things I Know

If you agree to sign a nominating petition to get some candidate on the ballot, please print your name legibly. I know nobody has a legible signature these days, but apparently the majority of people can’t print legibly anymore either. If you attended the same grade school I did, I can assure you that Sister Mary Knucklebuster wouldn’t be pleased and neither would Atilla the Nun.

Got a call Friday night from a woman claiming to work with (not for) National Grid. She was intent on asking me if I heated my home with natural gas, so intent that she asked me again after I answered the question. The way she acted, I smelled scam, so I insisted she get to the point. She insisted on sticking to the script so I hung up. Sounded like a scam call to me and there are two I’m aware of. In one, they ask for your social security number and bank routing number so they can enroll you in a program where the feds will pay your heating bill. In the other, they want to give you a new account number and a new place to send your payments. Don’t fall for either. Never give personal information (especially personal financial information) to someone who calls you out of the blue and verify by contacting the company yourself if someone calls and wants you to send your money to a new place.

The recently-completed, much-publicized python hunt in the Florida Everglades yielded only 68 snakes. Either pythons are less of a problem in the Everglades than people thought, or they’re very good at hiding.

Cable TV’s Biography Channel ran a show about Shirley MacLaine. I watched because she’s the only movie star I’ve ever talked to. I did that during Senator McGovern’s campaign for President. She was an active supporter and sometimes campaigned with the candidate. The show said she’s 5′  7″ tall which surprised me so I looked it up and several other sources agree. When I met her, she struck me as tiny, but I guess I was so taken by her approachability and genuineness that I must not have noticed that she was standing lower down a slope than me, or maybe I was on a curb and she was on the driveway.

I stumbled upon an Internet list of the 16 most stressful airports in the USA. I’ve flown in and out of 11 of them, so I guess I have some catching up to do.

I like my orange juice with pulp in it. I thought only kids who are picky eaters liked it strained, but I’m almost certainly wrong. I base my judgment on the stock at local supermarkets. I was in one last week that only had strained juice. OJ with pulp wasn’t even for sale. Of course, I prefer chocolate bars with no almonds in them and there, I’m in the minority as well.

“Women have to grow up because guys need some kind of adult supervision.” Dick Summer said that and I think it’s kind of profound.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

I understand the need for security with respect to credit card accounts. I even appreciate it. Still, why can I use the same Visa credit card account twice in one day at the Home Depot a mile or so from my house, but my wife and I can’t fill up our cars at the gas station three blocks from our house on the same day?

Since preposterous is a word, why aren’t posterous and postposterous words as well? And yes, I know that posterous is a website that was sold to Twitter and is closing down in April, but it’s still not a word and that’s preposterous.

In real estate, why do short sales take a long time?

The spam filter on my blog bounced a comment from one-third of my commenters (Richard formerly from New Jersey). Therefore, I shut off the spam filter. So, now I get spam comments. You don’t see them because the comments are moderated. For your comment to appear here, it has to meet two requirements: no spam; and no flaming. Why do the spam comments show up in posts I made months or even years ago? Is it just to create mischief? It doesn’t seem to me that most people who visit blogs go through all the back posts in order to find spam.

When’s the last time Paris Hilton was in the news? I don’t want her back, I just wonder.

Happy New Year

Why were they talking about Chinese New Year this morning on Channel 2 in NY? I know the festival lasts two weeks, but wasn’t the actual date of the Chinese New Year last Sunday? In any event, when you write checks from now on, be sure to write year of the snake, and to stop writing year of the dragon. And, have a happy new year.

Things I Know

Another tremendous product idea to serve a desperate need: teeth blackener for snowmen.

Naming blizzards is lame, unless it’s a Dairy Queen blizzard of the month. I have enough trouble remembering when the blizzard of ’78 happened. I’ll never be able to remember when Nemo hit.

Whenever I see one of those cable shows about ancient aliens or aliens yet to come, I’m reminded of the old “Twilight Zone” episode in which the pretty assistant runs up to the ramp where her boss, Mr. Chambers, is getting on a flying saucer and she tells him that the alien book, ‘To Serve Man,” is a cookbook.

On the other hand, we already know there is no intelligent life on this planet, so we might as well look for it elsewhere and consequences be damned.

Speaking of extraterrestrial life, there’s an alien-invasion movie called “Battleship” all over cable this week. It came out last year and it’s kind of fun. It’s not great, or believable, but it’s kind of fun. One of the viewer-reviewers on Netflix said the movie had great special effects and a script written by a six-year-old in crayon. That’s pretty accurate. No explanation about faster-than-light travel or faster-than-light communication, or the aliens blocking some kinds of wireless communication, but not all, or getting here and planning to rely on our equipment rather than theirs to call home, or sending only five ships to conquer a planet, or how a screw-up who broke into a convenience store and got caught can join the Navy, become an officer, continue to screw up and still get promoted twice in a relatively short period and in peacetime. There’s more to object to in the plot, but the special effects make the movie and in the end, the senior citizens come through, the humans win and the hero gets the girl so like I said, kind of fun. Let’s call it two stars (out of five), okay?

I didn’t have any further problems with the old Toyota’s thermostat. I had my friendly neighborhood mechanic change it, so the only problem I have is paying the bill.

Oh, and saving the best for last, happy Valentine’s Day. I’m sure that as long as I continue celebrating them with my wife all of mine will be happy.

Spring Training

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It’s Spring Training, so pack up your Slinky and send it to Arizona or Florida. Of course the good folks in Port St. Lucie Florida have changed the name back to Traditions Field because Digital Domain went bankrupt last year about the time I took this picture. Since Baseball causes warm weather, Spring Training is a great sign. Once the games come on the radio, drive around with the game on and your car windows down to help spread the warmth north more quickly.

Are They On Drugs?

So, toward the end of last year, my wife and I got new cards from our health insurance for our prescription drug benefits. We also got a lot of literature from the same program and I thought the literature said we weren’t really eligible for the new program.

So, I called the program and on my first call, they said yes we were eligible and no, we weren’t eligible, at the same time. That’s both answers in one call. Last week, I called again and was assured by a very nice lady that we were eligible. So, this week, I went on line and tried to change my profile with the mail-order pharmacy we use so that it would be consistent with the new plan.

The on-line system didn’t mind my name, but it didn’t like my birthday, my prescription benefit member number, the prescription number, or my relationship to myself. Now, I could live with it not liking the member number and the prescription number, but I’m almost certain that my birthday hasn’t changed and that I’m still related to myself in the same way I have been since I was born.

In previous phone calls I’ve been given yes and no as answers in the same phone call and just yes. Today, I talked to Sandy and learned that Sandy isn’t a bad word. I kind of thought it was because the floods last October devastated a neighborhood only a few hundred feet from where I live. Sandy said no, neither my wife nor I are under the new plan. We’re both under Saint Karen’s old plan (she has to be a saint to put up with me). So, if you’re keeping track, that’s one yes, one no, and one yes and no. Being under my wife’s old plan is a change too because before this she and I had separate old plans.

Without a request from me or any notice to me, all of my prescriptions were transferred to my wife’s plan. There’s really no challenge in making me confused, so there’s really no reason anyone should try.

I hope that it’s all straightened out now, but last week, I also ordered a couple of prescriptions from a local drug store under the new plan. So, I also kind of hope what happened today is wrong. We’re fortunate in having good prescription drug insurance, but we seem to have four plans between us and the trick is figuring out who pays what.

Are you confused too? Then, you understand perfectly and my job here is done, except for one last thing. Sandy said that according to her computer our prescription drug insurance doesn’t expire until 2099. I hope we don’t either.

Things I Know

Ancestor doesn’t mean the same thing as descendant. They’re opposites, or antonyms. Your relatives who came before you, like your father and grandfather are your ancestors. Your relatives who come after you, like your children and grandchildren are your descendants. Lately, I’ve been seeing the word ancestor used to mean both far too often, especially with respect to the recently discovered remains of England’s King Richard III.

If a TV show I’m watching comes out with another story about Manti Teo’s fake girlfriend, I change the channel. But this coverage has given me an idea. I’m going to keep a list of TV news stories that I don’t consider news. If the list gets long enough soon enough, I might even post it here. Stay tuned.

I thought there’d never be a harder car thermostat to change than the one in a 1986 Ford Taurus. It’s hard because it goes into the block horizontally so it’s hard to keep everything in place while you bolt it down. But there is at least one harder one and it’s on my 1991 Toyota Corolla. First the drain plug for the radiator is inaccessible: you have to remove a plastic cover in order to get at it. Second, it’s very hard to drain the radiator without getting antifreeze up your sleeve. Third, the housing for the thermostat is shaped so that you can’t get a 12 mm socket wrench to sit on it well enough to use a socket wrench to loosen the bolts and remove the housing. Then, I had to go get a haircut. So, if there are additional problems with the thermostat, I’ll let you know once the project resumes.

If you’re driving 30 mph slower than the flow of traffic in the middle lane of a limited access highway, you’re definitely causing a traffic jam and you might cause an accident. The accident you cause might even be fatal to you! Don’t just pull into the right lane, get off that road as soon as you can and drive on one where you’re more comfortable keeping up with traffic. That thought occurred to me when I nearly rear-ended the driver of a very slow-moving gray Toyota last week.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Has the Super Bowl pre-game show started yet?

It’s not football, but are you on Team February or Team Febyouary?

Are garbage trucks designed to maximize the noise they make?

I have never seen the TLC reality TV show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” but I have seen the promos and they make me ask, is it shown with subtitles?

There’s a book called “Dreams of My Real Father” that claims President Obama’s real father was a poet named Frank Marshall Davis. The book also says that Mr. Davis was a communist and that the President’s mother posed for nude photos some of which were published in fetish magazines. The book is controversial and you can find lots of material on the internet claiming to debunk it. I don’t know whether anything in the book is true, but if Mr. Davis was President Obama’s father, that would be proof positive that the President wasn’t born in Kenya. Wouldn’t it?

Do you think real estate in New York and San Francisco is expensive? Have you heard about the guy in Paris France who lived in a 17 square foot apartment with a ceiling slanted so he couldn’t stand up everywhere in the room? The rent was 330 Euros or about $442 a month and he lived there for 15 years before running afoul of building codes that say an apartment must be at least 97 square feet and have a shower.

Someone has asked you at some time to “keep an eye out” for something or someone, haven’t they? But, if you actually did take your eye out so you could keep it out, wouldn’t that make it harder (rather than easier) to see?

Things I Know

I know a lot of businesses were hurt very badly as a result of Hurricane Sandy. One company, however, is reaping lots of benefits: Pain-In-The-Ass Inc., makers of robocalls.

Some newspaper websites have links at the end of their articles. Some of the links are to other articles in their paper and some links are even sponsored. So that’s how I noticed that there is a lifestyle website called mydailymoment.com. I suppose some people will find it interesting, but I didn’t. However, it did leave me wondering if there is a website called mydailymovement.com for people obsessed with their colons and GI tracts. Thankfully, no.

It should be obvious to any professional writer that I write this blog solo, with no independent editor. I make the occasional mistake and once in a while I repeat myself without realizing it. I also repeat myself deliberately. You try writing a blog for going on five years without ever quoting yourself. The reason I bring this up is if you use WordPress to produce a blog you can’t edit the entries forever. I don’t know how far back you can go, but I wasn’t able to correct a mistake I made in an entry from three or four years ago. An editor would have caught it when I wrote it, but it took me a while.

Hey, maybe if I hit a big lottery jackpot I’ll hire an editor for my blog.

In New York State, most village elections are pretty sedate. Some candidates run unopposed. I think I remember a story about a guy who won because he wrote his own name in and nobody else bothered to vote. I’m not sure that was in New York. However, the election on March 19th in New York’s second-largest Village, Freeport seems like it’s already contentious. It’s been in the newspapers and on TV already and nominating petitions don’t have to be submitted for another week or more.

Barrett-Jackson did sell that 1953 Willys Jeepster at their auction in Scottsdale AZ. They never responded to my email claiming there is no such thing and I didn’t hear what they said about it on TV because I didn’t see it sold on TV. I’m recording the auction so I can fast forward through the parts I don’t care about. It saves a lot of time over watching all the extensive coverage in real time. If you like cars, you have to go to that auction at least once in your life.

If you can’t fly around on a broomstick, but you play Quidditch anyway, you are definitely a nerd. Or, maybe not, if you’re too stupid to be a nerd.

Comment Policy

If you have your very own blog, here’s something to watch out for. It may take a while because I’ve had my very own blog for almost five years and this just happened to me.

I don’t do anything to publicize my blog because I pay for the bandwidth myself, I don’t want to pay more, and I write this more to entertain myself than for any other purpose. Nevertheless, the number of hits I get each month has continued to grow. It’s now around eight thousand. Also, the first time I ever Googled the phrase “Things I Want (Or Need) To Know,” I got 8 hits. Most recently, I got 899,000. I’ve even had one re-post that I’m aware of.

I am entertaining myself, I have a few readers and I’ve had three legit commenters (I’d like more). Two of them are friends who also blog. In the third instance, I stayed at a nice hotel in South San Francisco, not far from SFO, two or three years ago and while there, I lost the battery cover off a radio I travel with. I asked the nice people at the hotel to look for it and if they found it to return it to me. They looked for it, found it and returned it. I went into my blog, said thanks and said they were nice people. I got a comment from management thanking me (more proof that they are in fact nice). Oaf that I am, I managed to delete that one instead of posting it. Sorry about that.

It’s been a while since I last talked about how I handle comments. Recent developments dictate that I do it again. Last week, I got two complimentary comments from people who seemed to speak English as a second language. They seemed odd, because the comments were very general and came in response to something I wrote 14 months ago. Still, I published them. Who likes compliments? I do. Who knows the difference between compliment and complement? Not me, so I look it up each time I use either one. Now, I think that perhaps those two comments last week were from a spambot trying to see if the comments would be posted. If I’m wrong about that, I’m sorry and I will continue to publish comments similar to those.

The software I use to post this blog gives me a good idea where the hits come from and I’ve known for a while that some of my hits are from spambots. Why do I think that last week’s comments may be fake? Because after I posted them, I got another bunch of comments, all of which seemed like spam. So, I didn’t post those. If I should ever receive a comment that seems like Spam rather than spam, I won’t publish that either, but I reserve the right to eat it.

If you read my blog, enjoy it or hate it, agree with it or disagree with it, feel free to comment. I doubt that I’ll edit your comments although I won’t allow flaming. I know that spambots don’t actually read blogs, but just for the record, all comments on this blog are moderated. If a comment seems like spam to the panel of judges I use to vet these things, it won’t be posted. The panel of judges consists of me. Decisions of the judges are arbitrary and final: It is, after all, my blog.

Things I Know

You’re thinking Miss America shouldn’t be from New York; she should be from some southern state. But it’s okay. The new Miss America, formerly Miss New York, was raised in Alabama.

New York City may have the strictest handgun control laws in the entire USA, but cannon control is a different story.

I guess Barrett-Jackson isn’t going to change the listing on lot 849 for their auction that starts today in Scottsdale AZ. It’s for a 1953 Willys Jeepster and there isn’t any such thing. They do have a picture of it up now and they didn’t acknowledge my email about it. But on another auction site, the sellers explained that it was first sold and titled in 1953, hence the appellation. I don’t know when the car will go across the block, but I’d like to hear what they say about it on TV. Maybe I’ll try to record the entire auction. I can’t sit there and watch it all as it happens. I went once, a few years ago, and had a great time. It took me two days to see what I did see and I could have stayed another day, but just going was one of the many things Saint Karen puts up with in order to be married to me. Putting up with me so well and for so long is what qualifies her for sainthood in my book.

I won’t be hurried through my doctor’s appointment because you’re 15 minutes late for the first appointment of the day. I was on time and I didn’t overbook. So, don’t try to rush me through: I won’t stand for it.

So, I went to the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan the other day. Actress-comedian Whoopi Goldberg narrates the sky show these days. I wondered why. She reads fine, but she’s not acting really and she’s not funny in it. Maybe, because I was once air talent, I found myself distracted by the fact that she has an accent and a slight sibilant s (but I suppose the sibilant could be caused by the microphone). As much as I like her in other roles, I thought a more experienced narrator would be better at narration. My wife suggested that perhaps she was chosen because she played a character named Guinan in the Star Trek Next Generation TV series. Maybe.

If you go to the sky show at the Hayden Planetarium, you will be impressed, but don’t sit in the front row unless you like having a crick in your neck. The visuals are spectacular, but I found the sound track too loud.

The planetarium is attached to the American Museum of Natural History. Mike, a security guard at the American Museum of Natural History is the most gregarious and friendly guy I’ve met in a long time. I enjoyed talking to him.

I have to imagine that when the Museum of Natural History was established museum exhibits were quite different. I say that because a different building would make it a lot easier to take pictures of the exhibits, especially the dinosaur skeletons.

I haven’t been there in a long time and the T-Rex skeleton is now a lot less imposing in stalking mode than it was when they had it reared up at full height.

I go to Manhattan maybe once or twice a year, so I don’t use the subway much. I expected that when I went up to street level at the 50th Street stop I’d be at 50th Street, but I wasn’t. I was at 48th St.

More and more of the websites I visit have autoplay videos on them these days, and I HATE autoplay videos.

I have a great idea for a new reality show on the Travel Channel. I don’t have a title for it, but the idea is you have a bunch of contestants cook for Andrew Zimmerman (the host of “Bizarre Foods”). Whichever contestant cooks food that Zimmerman eats the most of (or likes the best) gets eliminated, until the last contestant standing is the winner.

My blog received a nice comment from someone this week. I wasn’t certain what prompted it though because it was attached to a blog entry from over a year ago. If you have a comment, I’d like to hear from you too.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

When do you take down your Christmas decorations? Or do you leave them up all year?

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This year, trying to look organized, I took ours down on January 7th. Yes, I am bragging.

Have you seen the TV commercial for Progressive Insurance where a guy is juggling three chain saws? Would it surprise you if Progressive doesn’t issue policies that cover chain-saw juggling?

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” So how come you start losing strength many years before you die?

Have you heard the radio commercial for ROKU, the inexpensive device to make your TV Internet enabled? My daughter has one and she likes it. I have nothing against the device, but I think the commercial is strange. It suggests you should sit around and watch TV while other people achieve important things. Is that a selling point? And anyway, some of the things they suggest others will achieve have already been achieved. Mars rover? Been there, done that. Battery-powered battery charger? The have those. I can even charge my cell phone from my laptop.

Veal, meatball and chicken Parmesan. Why are they called that when they have Mozzarella cheese melted all over them, not Parmesan cheese?

Speaking of cheese, since the people who make Cheez Whiz spell cheese the way they do, why do they spell whiz correctly?

Things I Know

I’ve already alerted Barrett-Jackson about an error on their website for their upcoming Scottsdale AZ auction, but I thought I should alert you as well. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no such thing as a 1953 Willys Jeepster. They have one listed as lot 849. That might explain why there’s no picture of the vehicle on the website. So far, Barrett-Jackson has neither changed its website nor acknowledged my email. This particular car was sold at the Silver Car Auction in Reno NV last August where they also listed it as a 1953, but in the text of the ad, they also called it a ’48 and said they were calling it a ’53 because thats when it was first sold. I still say fewer than 20,000 were made between 1949 and 1950 and the last ones were sold as ’51 models. I also still maintain there’s no such thing as a 1953 Willys Jeepster. I wonder if the owner is really selling this car at Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale. There’s no picture on the Barrett-Jackson website and the car is also listed for sale in another company’s auction in Palm Springs in February.

Since I’ve ranted in this space before about strange choices in music used to produce commercials, let me say here and now, if I made Cheez Whiz, I’d hire Carla Thomas to sing in my ads.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. The light switch just inside the door to my den has always been hard to locate in the dark. Today, I installed a switch with a little light inside of it. It’s so easy now. Problem solved.

If I ran amazon.com, I wouldn’t know what I’m doing, but in my opinion, whoever put together their search function doesn’t either. I searched the recommendations they made for me for computers. I got only 15 items, one of which was a netbook. None of the other recommendations were computers of any kind and the netbook was #6.

Another issue with Amazon.com’s search function. I looked for electric can openers. I sorted the results by average customer review. Only one item on the first page was an electric can opener. Two of the first three listings wouldn’t open cans at all.

On the other hand, some Amazon.com customer reviews are absolutely priceless. You’ve got to check these reviews out: hilarious!

Hormel, makers of Spam the meat (or is it meat byproduct?), has announced plans to buy Skippy peanut butter, not a jar, the whole company. That makes me afraid you’ll soon be able to buy pre-made peanut butter and Spam sandwiches in your local supermarket.

You’re not supposed to pay retail for camera equipment and hardly anybody ever does. Nevertheless, if you own even a semi-elaborate camera, you’ll never have any trouble coming up with ways to drop several hundred dollars.

There’s a running joke in my family about plot development. Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) likes soap operas and I don’t. Sometimes, we’ll sit in the living room and she’ll be watching a soap while I’m ignoring the TV and surfing the Internet. Someone on the soap will ask another character in what some would call a very dramatic manner (but I call over-acting) why they did something. I’ll look up from my computer screen and say, “Plot development.” Over the years, my whole family has come to give those two words as an answer to why lots of things are going on either in entertainment or in real life. One of the soaps did it again and I said, “Plot development,” again and then I said that just once I’d like a character on a soap opera to say, “Plot development,” too right there on the TV screen, during the show and without breaking character. We both think that would be funny.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

This isn’t a question, but since it’s my first blog post of 2013, the Sisyphus Project is copyright 2008-2013.

Is there a way to get a refund for unused credit from Google Voice? Most Google Voice services are free, but there’s a small charge for overseas calls. From where I live to Shanghai, for example, costs two cents a minute. When my son and daughter were in Shanghai in 2009, I paid ten dollars in advance for the charges I would incur. But I didn’t use it all up before they both came back. So Google Voice has had a small amount of my money for a year and a half. I’d like it back, but if there’s a way to get it, I couldn’t find it. I’d even be happy if I could transfer the credit to Google Music.

If someone wants a new car at Christmas time, can they get anything they want, or does it always have to be a Lexus?

Have you seen the new commercial for the Google Chrome web browser? As a music bed, it uses Louie Lymon & the Teenchords’ recording of “I’m So Happy.” If you were 15 when that recording was made, you’re 72 now. It makes me wonder again about the science of advertising, because I I’m guessing the music bed distracts at least some older people who might otherwise pay attention to the commercial and I also think it might make some younger people change the channel. So, I repeat a question I’ve asked before in similar circumstances: who exactly are they marketing to anyway?

Did you get what you wanted for Christmas? The instructions for the elaborate flash unit my wife bought me are 39 pages long. I have some reading to do.

Around this time of years, the military sends video recordings to TV stations of soldiers from the station’s areas who are stationed in a war zone and sending holiday greetings back home. Some stations run them and some don’t, so you may never have seen them. All the ones I’ve seen this year address their families and wish them “happy holidays.” I have no objection to that phrase. I celebrate Christmas, but you can celebrate whatever you want and I hope you both celebrated and enjoyed. However, if you’re speaking directly to your family, shouldn’t you know what holidays they celebrate? If you do, why not be specific?

Things I Know

Happy New Year.

I’m enjoying the special New Year’s Eve programming on Speed Channel: a rerun marathon of last January’s Barrett-Jackson classic car auction.

When I wished Rachel from Card Holder Services would stop calling me, I should have been more specific. Apparently there’s a new woman voicing the robocalls, and what I really meant was I wish nobody from Card Holder Services would ever call me again.

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has a new, heavily advertised movie opening soon: It’s called “Last Stand.” In it, he plays a sheriff. I can’t be the only person who hopes there’s a British guy somewhere in the movie who keeps calling him governor.

I had a problem with a Sansa Clip Zip. It started acting unpredictably with a micro SD card in it, differently depending on which card. The folks at Sansa were pretty good about taking it back and replacing it.

I’m making a lot of progress: I used to just have trouble going to sleep, but now I also have trouble staying asleep.

Facebook recently suggested I might know Olivia Newton John: I don’t. I understand that some of the recommendations are based on career or mutual friends, but I have no idea where that one came from. Maybe left field.

If you want to keep your sliced lemons and limes from turning brown, try rubbing the cut surfaces of the citrus with the freshly cut surface of an apple.

Christmas Presents

This Christmas, I got a Canon 430 EX II flash to go with my semi-fancy Canon DSLR. I also have two zoom lenses for the camera. The reason all this is just semi-fancy is I have a semi-pro camera body, not a super-duper one. It’s not the best Christmas present I ever got; maybe it’s second though. First, is the joyous reaction I got from my wife on Christmas Eve so long ago she wasn’t my wife and she hadn’t even been canonized as Saint Karen yet (she has to be a saint to put up with me).

I got her an engagement ring and while she was not surprised, she was thrilled. I wasn’t surprise either, when she said, “Yes.” And I don’t know if I was delighted or thrilled; maybe both. The reason I say she was thrilled is we went to midnight mass and she sat in church, holding the ring toward various light sources to see it sparkle. I was thrilled watching her sparkle too.

I don’t really remember being overjoyed at receiving any toy from my childhood, but I do remember two Christmas presents I wanted very much, one of which came as no surprise and the other of which was both great and awful.

No surprise: I wanted barbells for Christmas. I thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that I could and would use them to turn myself into a sleek, muscular specimen. My dad had what we now call COPD, a very bad case of it. He couldn’t do much in the way of physical labor. My mom came home one night and asked me to bring a box from the trunk of her car into our house. The box was no bigger than a foot on a side, but it was the heaviest thing you can imagine in a box that small. What’s that? Weight plates for a barbell set. It’s not easy to gift wrap the bar for a barbell set, but my help wasn’t needed to get that into the house. Still, if you should receive a one-cubic foot box that weighs 100 pounds or so, it’s probably plates for a barbell.

Great and awful: At a time when very few people had home tape recorders, my Uncle George had a nice one, and, he let me use it when I was at his house. But, he lived 60 miles and three tolls from me and I was too young to drive. I wanted one of my own. I told my parents that while Uncle George’s recorder was a good one, newer models of the same brand had a reputation for unreliability. But I was a teenager, so what the heck would I know? My folks bought me a tape recorder, the unreliable model of the same brand Uncle George owned. When I opened the box, the case was cracked. It did work, but the case was cracked. I got the cracked piece replaced, but my machine was at least as unreliable as its reputation. I had it repaired again, and again, and again until I got tired of the effort and became a broadcaster so I wouldn’t have to pay for tape recorders anymore.

I hope you were pleased with whatever you got for Christmas, or at least pleased with the thought behind it. The thought is, after all, what counts. I also hope you have a great New Year celebration. I won’t be in Times Square on New Year’s. When my dad was a cop, he hated that duty so much he passed that distaste on to me and I’ve never had any desire to go.

Things I Know

Click this link and scroll down the page past the wrist watch to see a mechanical worm made in 1820 which sold recently for about $415,000!

You should leave your Christmas lights up until the 12th day of Christmas. No cheating and taking them down this week or on New Years Day.

Some year, I’ll put up my Christmas lights (or at least test them) in time to get replacements for the ones I discover aren’t working well anymore.

One of the reasons I like the movie “Miracle on 34th St.” so much is that as a kid I wanted a fire truck that squirted real water too. I remember looking at one in a toy store, but I don’t remember if I ever got one.

One of the reasons I dislike the colorized version of the movie “Miracle on 34th St.” is that the colors are too warm. Another is that there are places in the movie where the interior shot is in color, but you can see through the window that a black and white world exists outside.

I found out when I plugged in my Christmas lights that both electrical outlets on my front porch were dead. When I went to replace them, I also discovered that the circuit breaker labeled by my electrician as controlling the outside outlets doesn’t control them. I don’t know what that one does, but the one labeled “Living room ceiling fan” does control the outside outlets. It also controls the living room ceiling fan and frankly, that surprised me. So don’t depend on the labels, test the circuit too.

If you are replacing GFCI outlets, you will probably need to reset them after you turn the power back on and before they start working. That bit of information may save you from a panic attack some day.

It would be nice if you could replace a light switch or an outlet using only one screw driver. I needed three different sizes for my GFCI’s.

As long as we’re talking electricity, I had a three-way CFL bulb in the lamp where I usually sit to read. It’s been crackling for a few minutes when I turn it on for months now. Today it stopped doing that when it burned out and tripped my #5 circuit breaker. That breaker also controls the TV in my living room, so I don’t know if Ralphie shot his eye out this year or not.

Those CFL bulbs, by the way, don’t last in my house anywhere near as long as the literature suggests they should.

Patti celebrated her birthday a week ago today. She’s one of two girlfriends I had in my youth whose birthday I recall. Well, I was 19 when I started dating my wife, so one of three. I remember Patti’s because of difficulty. Her birthday is a week to the day before Christmas. When I was 16-years old, I had to come up with two presents for a 15-year-old girl in one week. Difficult!

Cookies

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I don’t do elaborately decorated Christmas cookies. Chocolate chips are fine for me. My recipe for holiday turkey is obviously a joke, but my recipe for chocolate chips isn’t. I start with the recipe on the back of the package of Nestle’s chocolate morsels. The recipe calls for 3/4 cups of white sugar and 3/4 cups of light brown sugar. Instead, I use 1-1/2 cups of dark brown sugar. If I have it in the house, I’ll add a tablespoon of heavy cream to make the end product more chewy.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

In the wake of the horrendous school shooting in Newtown CT., can we please concentrate on the innocent children and the heroic school personnel who lost their lives like Dawn Hochsprung and Victoria Soto? I’d like not to direct any attention or notoriety toward the shooter who probably did what he did at least in part to spread his name all over the world.

When children play with their food, do they keep score? If they do, who wins more often, the kids or the food?

Have you seen the Capital One commercial with the little girl who doesn’t want fifty percent more cash? How did they get any child that age to say yes so many times?

You never got that pony for Christmas and you never will because how can Santa possibly gift-wrap a pony?

I’ve told you some of my Christmas stories over the last several years. Do you have any you’d like to share? Or Hanukkah stories, or Festivus stories, or stories from any other holiday that’s celebrated this time of year?

Are what used to be known as broken families now the norm? Basically all of the made-for-TV Christmas movies I’ve seen this year are about single moms, widows, widowers, orphans, etc., and none of them about what we used to call nuclear family.

Things I Know

On Saturday, December 15, 2012, I watched a TV commercial that informed me there are 12 shopping days left until Christmas.

I hate to disagree with Michael Jordan, but tags on my Hanes underwear never annoyed me.

Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus isn’t a Christmas song, but it’s played a lot around Christmas time. As a teenager, most of my friends were in the high school chorus, so I can’t listen to it without hearing the following three words, “Brillo soap pads.”

Bumper sticker seen on a Cadillac Escalade: “Support your local repo man, miss 2 payments.”

Never one to go out of my way to catch the latest releases, I watched “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” (both parts) recently. I saw them on TV, not in a movie theater, but large parts of the movies were so dark that I couldn’t really see what was going on and might as well have listened to them on the radio. I guess I’ll have to read the books if I want to understand what happened.

So, Billy uses his Dell Ultrabook to take a picture of the sky and sends Charlotte the jpeg as a present for the holidays. He also sends a recording of his voice saying, “Happy holidays Charlotte.” First, I know it’s the thought, not the gift that counts, but sending your girlfriend a jpeg as a present is mighty cheap. Second, if you were dating Charlotte, wouldn’t you know whether she celebrates Christmas, Hanukkah or Festivus?

Alabama did win the SEC football championship (of course), so the Crimson Tide will face the Fighting Irish in the BCS championship game on January 7 and my son was wrong, the Tide’s season didn’t end with the Texas A&M loss. This is a tough one. My grandmother was one of those Irish immigrants who rooted for Notre Dame even though she never went to college and didn’t even know anyone who went to Notre Dame. I do know two Notre Dame graduates, however, my son and one of my nieces are Alabama alumni, so Roll Tide.

The Inflationary Blueberry

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If just one blueberry costs $2.79 at my local greengrocer, think how much a whole pie will cost. This kind of pricing makes me glad I have six blueberry bushes in my back yard, but the price of berries will probably go down before my bushes start to bear fruit again next July.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Who is this Fiscal Cliff guy who’s mentioned in every TV newscast these days and why is everyone afraid of him?

What do you want for Christmas? Or since it starts this weekend, what do you want for Hanukkah?

At Christmas time, the airwaves abound with commercials where someone says, “He went to Jared,” when some guy buys some romantic jewelry for his girlfriend. Okay, but wouldn’t, “He went to Tiffany’s,” be even more romantic?

There’s another TV spot for TD Ameritrade, an on-line stock broker. The commercial, apparently designed to appeal to active adults, features a sky diver. It also features a music pad that comes from a TV show from 1955, once again prompting the question: what demographic are they trying to sell to anyway?

While walking along the sidewalk the other day I passed a tanning salon. In the window, they had a big poster of a pretty young woman in a white bikini getting a spray tan. If you wore a white bikini to get a spray tan, wouldn’t it stain the suit? And, if the spray tan doesn’t come off of you in the ocean, would it come out of the bathing suit in the wash?

Why does Bed Bath & Beyond even put expiration date on those 20%-Off-One-Item coupons they distribute everywhere? I used one on Tuesday that expired about 19 months ago.

Did you hear about the terrible crash between a parade float and a freight train in Midland Texas in November? Several people on the float were killed. I don’t know what other contributing factors were involved, but it serves as a reminder that you should never pull on to railroad tracks if you don’t have room on the other side to move off the tracks immediately.

Rutgers has agreed to join the Big 10 athletic conference, becoming its 14th member and raising the question, isn’t it time for the Big 10 to change its name?

Things I Know

I visited the Victoria’s Secret store at the local mall today. It’s very economical to shop there because if I buy a present for my wife, it’s also a present for me. They had Christmas music blaring in there. I complained twice to the young sales clerk waiting on me about how loud the music was, but I don’t think she could hear me.

There must be a couple of new people here once in a while because the number of hits on the site is increasing slowly, but steadily. So, in case the newbies are wondering what the hell I was talking about in my most recent diatribe about Powerball, I’ll explain. When lottery prizes get big a staple of TV news coverage is to interview people as they buy tickets and ask them what they plan to do with the money. Everyone has plans to give it away. Nobody should think about that because the odds of winning are so bad buying a ticket doesn’t really improve your chances, unless, of course, you win. So, when a lottery prize gets huge, I think up silly stuff to do with the money if I win. Freeing the shopping carts is my latest silly idea; nothing more and nothing less.

I heard on the news today that your chances of winning the big Powerball prize are smaller you’re your chances of winning an Oscar. And you’re not an actor, so those chances are remarkably slim.

Since Kansas State and Oregon both lost their football games two week ago, Alabama is #2 in the latest college football rankings, back from #4 when the Tide lost to Texas A&M three weeks ago. So, perhaps my son was wrong that the Alabama season was over (meaning they had no chance to play for the BCS championship. It depends on who wins the SEC championship game.

I’ve never seen it done, but I believe it’s at least theoretically possible for someone to buy a week’s worth of groceries in a supermarket without ever blocking an aisle or having their path through an aisle blocked.

They ought to make shoes for mowing the lawn that are absolutely smooth on the bottom. Then, if you stepped in something, you would just wipe it off instead of digging it out of the tread on the soles of your sneakers or work boots.

Hostess brands going out of business makes me a little sad. No more Twinkies, no more Hostess cupcakes (well, no new ones anyway. The ones that exist are rumored to last forever if nobody eats them) and no more Wonder Bread. And, no more jobs for over eighteen-thousand bakery workers. I never made them, but the only union I ever belonged to was the American Bakery & Confectionery Workers Union. There is so little about that Union on the Internet that I have to assume it went out of business a long time ago. That’s okay because I retired at age 19 and if I had to find my card so I could go back to work, I couldn’t if my life depended on it. It’s hard work under bad conditions. I worked at it for one year and I can tell you, you don’t ever want to catch bread coming out of the oven in five-loaf pans.

So, around my birthday, someone called from the life insurance company that holds my policy. She said it’s been a long time since anyone has reviewed my policy with me and she’d like to come by when it’s convenient within the next couple of weeks. I said, “I’m really not interested in a sales pitch unless it will save me money,” and she hung up.

I saw a TV documentary recently about prohibition. It struck me as extremely similar to our modern day drug wars and just as futile. According to CBS Sunday Morning, 100-million people in the USA admit having tried marijuana and in Colorado on Election Day, more people voted to legalize pot than voted to reelect President Obama.

New Powerball Plan

One of the supermarkets in my town does something that really annoys me. They have a right to do it and I have a right to be annoyed. It doesn’t annoy my wife, so she shops there a lot more than I do. You need a quarter to use one of their shopping carts. They’re chained together and it takes a quarter to release one cart from the next one. It doesn’t cost a quarter, because you get the coin back when you chain the cart back up.

It cuts down on cart theft and frees the store from paying someone to retrieve the carts strewn all over the parking lot, but I dump all of my change into a jar on the dresser, so if I have to go to that store, I have to remember to get a quarter. Either that or I have to go to the service desk at the market.

Why do I bring this up at this time? Well, nobody won Powerball last night, so the next drawing will have a potential grand prize of something like $325-million. Since I’m annoyed about needing a quarter at the supermarket and since the Powerball prize is $325,000,000, I have synthesized a new plan if I should win the big prize.

I still know how unlikely it is that I’ll win, I’ll still jump on the bed if I win and I’ll still try to put that huge check in the ATM, but I’ll also go inside the bank, get a crate full of quarters and head for the annoying supermarket’s parking lot, where I’ll liberate all the shopping carts! Free the shopping carts!

Thanksgiving

What are you thankful at Thanksgiving? I’m so thankful for my family that I don’t usually get much beyond that. This year, I’m also thankful that we came through Sandy with a lot less damage than some people who live only a couple of blocks from me. I’m also thankful that we’ve been able to help that situation at least in some small way.

As I mention frequently, I love my wife and when we were married, I figured she probably wasn’t perfect, although the very few and very small ways in which she isn’t perfect hadn’t manifested themselves yet. Here’s one: I would still have married my wife if I knew she doesn’t like and won’t prepare giblet gravy for Thanksgiving. I like it, but I like her a whole lot more, so I endure. Whether you like giblet gravy or not, you probably know what it is. However, have you ever wondered where the word comes from? I have and finally got curious enough to look it up.

The website alphadictionary.com speaks thusly about the origin of the word “Giblet.”

“Today’s word is a slightly smoothed version of Old French gibele “ragout of game” (today gibelotte) derived from gibier “wild game”. French gibier originated in Frankish, an old West Germanic language. In Frankish gibaiti “falconry”, was a prefixed form of the word meaning “bite” and the origin of English bite. (Gibaiti has a prefix similar to that in German Gefängnis “prison” from fangen “to catch, capture”.) Another word related to bite and gebaiti is bait, the only thing many of us think giblets are good for (Let’s all show the giblets to thank Laurie Hynes for seeing the fascination in this easily overlooked Good Word).

This concludes both the public-service and the educational portion of your holiday weekend. You are now free to return to football. I won’t join you, but I won’t try to stop you either.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Why didn’t the FBI remove boxes of potential evidence from Paula Broadwell’s North Carolina home before the Petraeus scandal became public, instead of waiting until the Monday night after?

President Obama said there’s no evidence that General Petraeus’ affair with Paula Broadwell jeopardized national security. If that’s true, then even if the administration wanted him out, why did they make him jump under a bus as he left? And don’t we have something more important than that to take up half the network TV newscasts for a week?

If I don’t order something, under every business law I’m aware of, I don’t have to pay for it. So, how come I have to pay for a text message that someone sends to me, but I didn’t ask for?

Have you seen the new J C Penney TV commercial using music by T-Rex? The band broke up 35 years ago when the lead singer died. The song, “Bang a Gong,” is 40 years old. All the models in the commercial are at least ten years younger than the band or the song. Exactly what demographic is that commercial aimed at?

Do you think they’ll ever finish the New Jersey Turnpike?

Have you seen the Capital One commercial with the little girl who doesn’t want fifty percent more cash? How did they get any child that age to say yes so many times?

Why does my phone say, “Droid,” every night around 7:00 PM? Is there any way I can stop it from doing that? It used to do it around 8:00 PM, so how come Verizon Wireless didn’t switch that computer to standard time?

Also about my phone: if I let the battery die completely, plugging it in to charge it doesn’t allow me to use the phone right away. I have to get the battery up to five percent charge before it’ll work, even while plugged in. Why?

Last month, the History Channel ran a show called “101 Gadgets That Changed The World.” How can one take this program seriously when #87 was the Ginsu knife and the wheel, the lever and the inclined plane aren’t even on the list?

Things I Know

I hope Paula doesn’t boil the bunny; Jill too.

One headline in Tuesday’s Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, says, “Fiscal Cliff Will Test GOP Resolve on Tax Hikes.” No it won’t. Stalling legislation will no longer work to stop any and all tax hikes because if nothing happens, everyone’s taxes will go up in January. So now, some sort of compromise will have to happen so only somebody’s taxes go up, not everyone’s.

Hardly anyone has said something that should be obvious about the storm damage Sandy inflicted on Long Island. I don’t care what happened. If 90 percent of your electric distribution goes down over an area as big as Long Island, there’s something wrong with the way your distribution system is designed and built and it needs to be hardened. That’s especially true since much more than half of it was repaired last year in August.

It will surprise me if any member of the LIPA board of directors survives this fiasco. The chief operating officer has already announced he’s leaving at the end of the year. Same thing for the long-term survival of LIPA itself. Sandy came 14-months after Irene and it doesn’t look like LIPA learned a damned thing.

My son is a University of Alabama alumnus. After Texas A&M’s football team beat the previously undefeated and previously #1 ranked Crimson Tide, he said, “Our season is over.” I thought to myself that it sounded like the typical attitude of a New York Yankee fan and then I remembered my son is a New York Yankee fan.

About Love

Ancient Egyptians, as you may know, worshipped the sun god. They didn’t know that too much sun is bad for you. We didn’t know that either until late in the 20th century. In fact, we thought that sunlight was good for you and too much sunlight gave you a sunburn which was benign, other than the fact that it made your skin peel and boosted the sale of Noxzema. The product still exists. Now its sold only as a skin cleanser and I’d bet they don’t sell as much per capita as they once did.

Fair-skinned people my age usually got sunburned both regularly and frequently. When I first went to a dermatologist about what my skin has become, he asked if I’d ever had a bad sunburn. I consider this a dumb question to ask someone my age and with my complexion, so I asked him if he’d ever seen the Woody Allen movie, “Sleeper.” He asked why, and I said, “Remember when he woke up, he discovered that everything he had thought was good for him was bad for him and vice versa? Well, my parents wouldn’t let me inside in the summertime. Of course I’ve been badly sunburned and more times than I can count.”

So, over the years I’ve had more than one skin cancer (fortunately no melanoma) and I have a bunch of blemishes that the dermatologists assures me will turn into skin cancer if I don’t do anything about them. Because of my history, I believe him and Wednesday, I left the house early to go to his office and get a treatment that helps eliminate these blemishes. The treatment, however, makes the person treated unusually sensitive to light for about two days.

How is that about love? I’m not capable of thinking about much of anything for a couple of hours after I wake up, so I didn’t think much about my impending light sensitivity Wednesday morning except to bring a hat and I set that hat out the night before so I wouldn’t have to remember it in the morning. I returned from the doctor’s office after my wife left for work. Before she leaves, she always opens all the blinds and shades to. “let in some light.” But, when I returned from my treatment every shade, every blind and every drape in the whole house was closed. She thought about me and took care of me, without my even asking. She does it if I do ask too. I do the same for her.

So the mere fact that she puts up with me isn’t the only reason I sometimes refer to her as Saint Karen. Sunday was the anniversary of the first time we met that I noticed although she is quick to tell me that we met twice before that. I bought her roses. I like to observe the date in addition to remembering our wedding anniversary which was last month.

Things I Know

The Long Island Power Authority says if the predicted Nor’easter does hit the area on Wednesday there may be more power outages. I thought every tree on Long Island that could fall down did fall down during Sandy.

If there’s ever another storm as big as Sandy, maybe I will evacuate when a mandatory evacuation order is issued.

The storm made a lot of homes on Staten Island and in Long Beach and Freeport uninhabitable. If you can donate to a charity that is helping people in this predicament, please do so.

The fact that New York’s Holland, Midtown and Brooklyn Battery Tunnels all flooded does make a whole bunch of disaster movies a little more believable. I read that the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was flooded with 43-million gallons of water. I wonder how they know that. I also wonder how much water the Holland and Midtown Tunnels hold. I also saw a report that the NY Subway was flooded with 400-million gallons and considering the size of the system, that seems like it might be low to me.

Although the community in which I live was clobbered, our beloved mayor sent out a robocall from the Emergency Management Director saying power would be restored by 10 AM Saturday. That was wrong. There are still lots of people without power. I live in a part of town that wasn’t flooded and consider myself fortunate that my power was out only 93 hours.

Years ago, radio comedians Bob & Ray had fake commercials for Quagmire Corporation, manufacturers of mud. I’m starting a new fake company: Pain-In-The-Ass, Inc., manufacturers of robocalls.

I’m on the federal no call list which, judging from the number of annoyance calls I receive, is toothless. These calls are apparently so cheap that it doesn’t pay Pain-In-The-Ass, Inc. (manufacturer of robocalls) to stop calling people who hang up on them every time, but hanging up is about all you can do to defend yourself.

Today I got a call in Spanish. I know a few words of Spanish, but the recording didn’t use any of those. At the end of the message a voice in English came on and said,

‘To repeat this message, press any key.”  If I understood the message, I would be unlikely to understand the tag line and vice-versa, so that call made no sense at all to me.

If you follow this blog, you know that I call my wife Saint Karen because she must be a saint to put up with me. For our wedding anniversary, I bought her a sterling-silver Saint Karen pendant. She laughed. I like the sound of her laughter.

Sandy

Did you miss me? Sandy didn’t. So, why didn’t I leave? Why didn’t the people who drowned in their houses on Staten Island leave? Frankly, I think hysterical TV news coverage is at least partly to blame. It’s like the old fable about the boy who cried wolf. When the wolf finally showed up, nobody believed the kid. I understand that the news media have to say it might be bad because that’s better than saying, “Oops, that was bad,” but unless it is bad this time, nobody will listen next time. I do think, however that people will listen the next time a big storm heads this way.

I’ve lived through lots of mandatory evacuations before without leaving. I lived through this one too. I didn’t send my family to safety. I didn’t even move my cars although there are places near where I live where you should move your cars if it gets cloudy. Like all the other times, it turned out I didn’t have to, but Sandy was a one-of-a-kind storm and a lot of people who never evacuated before should have this time. Sandy’s winds weren’t sustained at hurricane force by the time she reached New York, but the flooding in Staten Island, downtown Manhattan and on Long Island was unprecedented. I don’t understand all the reasons, but she did come on shore at high tide and full moon and from the east, not the south. That last is important because the direction of the storm pushed more water into Long Island Sound, Great South Bay and New York Harbor than past experience would have suggested was possible. Plus Sandy moved more slowly than a lot of hurricanes and SHE WAS HUGE! About 800 miles wide instead of the 200 or so that’s more normal for a hurricane. Usually a hurricane blows through in a few hours and the weather afterwards is great. Sandy took quite a while to get through the area and the weather still isn’t wonderful. Winds didn’t die down to normal levels until five days after the storm.

People don’t move because they’ve been through what they think they’re facing before, because they don’t want to encourage looting, and because they think they can prevent or fix some of the things that could go wrong. I didn’t leave because, in addition to those things, conditions around my property are a little different than they are for most people around here. Fifteen feet above sea level isn’t a hill anyone would notice, but the Great South Bay knows it’s there. Also, no trees nearby are large enough to fall on my house. Most property south of Merrick Road in Nassau County, NY, is subject to flooding, mine isn’t. So, when the county executive says everyone south of Merrick Road, get out, I don’t. I realize he can’t specify the flood line street by street, and I think I’m an exception to that rule. You only had to try to get gas around here since Wednesday to know that almost everyone thinks they’re an exception to some rule.

I have a gas stove, a gas water heater and a wood stove big enough to heat my entire house. I’m now kind of low on firewood, but with all the trees down around here. I imagine there will be no shortage of firewood anytime soon. I don’t even own a generator although that may change. The house I live in is over 100 years old. I’ve lived in it for more than 20 years. and I’ve never been without power for more than a day. This time, it was four days without lights, central heat, phones, and Internet. Usually floods come within half a mile or so of my house. This time, it was two blocks. We have had two storms of the century in two years. If we get another one next year, I may actually heed the cries of wolf and evacuate.

Things I Know

Don’t walk around outside in the hurricane-force winds of Hurricane Sandy or any other big storm. It’s not that the wind is blowing: It’s what the wind is blowing.

Advice for surviving the storm: You might be able to read a book by candlelight, but you can’t charge your Kindle with a candle.

Many years ago I made a parody radio commercial for an election campaign. It was a joke. We didn’t actually put it on the air. But I think people are running commercials just like it now, only for real. My parody said, “Vote for me because my opponent is a son of a bitch and I’m a really swell guy.” I worked in that field for many years, but I’ll be so glad when the election is over.

I don’t check the statistics on this blog often. In fact, I hardly ever do, but I’ve recently learned that I’m up to about seven-thousand visitors a month. That’s pretty good considering that I’ve never done anything to promote the Sisyphus Project. If anyone other than Richard cares to comment on anything we write here, commenting is encouraged.

At any given moment, lots of people who are in Washington D.C. are tourists. It’s reasonable to assume that most of those will probably want to leave sooner or later. In order to facilitate leaving, especially for those people headed north, I strongly suggest that a few additional signs directing drivers to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway would be most welcomed. There are a few signs on the road I was driving, but the signs ran out before I got to where I was supposed to turn.

Also for the tourists in DC, illuminating the exit signs in the I-395 tunnel and repainting whatever it used to say that was once painted on the roadway there would probably help the flow of traffic too.

I recently returned from Florida which I determined suffers from an over-abundance of traffic circles, or as they call them, “roundabouts.” However, traffic circles in Florida work the same way they do in most of the civilized world. In our nation’s capital, there is a traffic circle that interrupts the ride from Arlington National Cemetery to the Memorial Bridge and onward to the Lincoln Memorial. In that traffic circle, cars entering the circle have the right of way over those vehicles already in the circle.

My hypothesis that everybody drives 75-miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike whenever traffic conditions permit seems to have been bolstered. I was doing 75 in a 55 zone and a state trooper came up behind me with his red and blue lights on and then passed me. Being passed by a cop car when you’re speeding is one of the best feelings in the world.

I am every bit as ashamed of the Boy Scouts of America for covering up adult leaders suspected of child abuse as I was for the Catholic Church doing the same thing for priests. When confronted with evidence of child sex abuse, the correct response is to report it to the authorities and press for prosecution. I am concerned about the release of all these records though for one reason: perhaps a few of the allegations are unfounded.

Bad PR move on the part of Delta Airlines. Five passengers traveling from New York City to Albuquerque NM via Atlanta were late arriving at the gate for the Albuquerque flight because the flight from New York was late. The plane was still at the gate and Delta would not open the doors and let them board. Why was it a bad PR move? One of the five was famed author of books for teens, Judy Blume, who happens to have something like 75-thousand followers on Twitter.

I always say that if you live long enough all prices become ridiculous, but I don’t think that’s the reason I’m not looking at either of the $61,000 used cars currently for sale at the dealership nearest to my house.

One more thing about driving a convertible. For obvious reasons, the only tool you would need to steal something out of the passenger compartment is a utility knife to cut the top if it’s up. The Chrysler 200 convertible I rented recently had a trunk release button on the dashboard, no key needed. So if you don’t need a key to get into the trunk either, don’t leave anything of value in the car period.

On HBO the other day, I saw a documentary called “41.” It’s about former president George H.W. Bush. In the documentary, he seems like a very decent man. I had the pleasure of interviewing President Bush on TV for an hour before he was President, when he was Chairman of the National Republican Party. At that time, all those years ago, I got the same impression.

Steak bones splinter easily, so I carefully chew the meat off the steak bones myself instead of giving them to the dog. Hey, someone has to make the sacrifice.

Money laundering is illegal. Even so, I doubt that I’ll get in trouble for the 45 cents I mistakenly put through the washing machine this afternoon.

While in Viera, Florida a couple of weeks ago, I came across a car which was oddly decorated in red, white and blue, including a decorative plate where the front license plate would go if they had those in Florida. The plate said, “American Patriot.” Because the car was made in Korea, I found it ironic that the Mr. American Patriot’s car was a Hyundai.

Poetry

Thoughts on Driving North on the Jersey Turnpike
With Apologies to Joyce Kilmer and Ogden Nash

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I think that I shall never see
A service area lovely as a tree
Even if it’s named after me

EDITOR’S NOTE: I know I’ve put this poem in this blog before, but I didn’t have the picture then.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Can anyone tell me when the Yankees were last swept in a post-season series? I don’t recall. It was probably the 1963 World Series which was worse because it was the World Series, not the ALCS. I’m actually quite surprised that even though he’s been dead for quite a while, we haven’t heard from George Steinbrenner about this. George must be spinning in his grave. Am I right?

You’ve cleaned out the lint filter on your clothes dryer, haven’t you? So, have you ever wondered why your clothes don’t eventually disappear if you put them in there often enough? And, since they don’t, where does all that lint come from anyway?

While watching the Washington Nationals and the St. Louis Cardinals play game five of their division series last Friday night, I thought of something I should have asked about years ago, many years ago. Why do the Cardinals’ road uniforms include blue hats? Have you ever seen a blue cardinal?

Why does Advair runs commercials in which the medicine to ease breathing difficulties talks about employing a bronchodialator? I know that’s the right word and I know it’s not missing a letter “i”, but whenever I hear it, I can’t help wondering why I would need medicine to make my horse open wider.

Things I Know

I like baseball more than the next guy, but baseball games from noon to almost 1:00 AM on Sunday, with one of the games starting at 9:00 AM local time for fans of the Oakland A’s is a bad job. I didn’t even realize that the noon game was being played. The other games overlapped each other too. Playoff games take longer than regular season games and both MLB and the TV programmers know that so Sunday’s schedule was terrible.

The schedule for the first round playoffs is also terrible. The team with the home-field advantage doesn’t get that advantage until what might be the deciding game at which point, to take advantage of the home-field advantage, they have to win three in a row. I’m guessing, however, that fans of the Oakland A’s are feeling better today about home-field advantage than they were on Sunday night.

I have another great idea for a new invention with no idea how to invent it: tomato slices that stick to bread, so they won’t slide out of my sandwich and on to my lap while I’m trying to eat my sandwich.

The cell phone company known as Sprint is offering handles as phone numbers. In addition to your number, you’ll soon be able to register a handle which will connect with you if someone dials ** and then your handle. So, for example, if your name is Catherine, you might be the first to register **Cathy. I’m sure that the handles **Maybe and **Ishmael will be among the first handles snapped up.

Eat bacon while you can still afford it.

Several towns on Long Island either have or are considering outlawing planting bamboo. It’s really very invasive, so that’s probably a good idea in a suburban setting. I wouldn’t mind if they outlawed Wisteria too. We were in Florida a couple of weeks ago and saw some things that would no doubt terrify those same Long Island town boards: bamboo plants that grow something like 20 feet tall.

Back from Florida, I’ll be happy not to see any traffic circles, or as they call them roundabouts, for a while.

My Google Voice number doesn’t play well with my cell phone. Why? Because when I forward a call to my cell phone, Google Voice wants me to press a number to receive the call or send it to voice mail and when my cell phone receives a call, it doesn’t bring up the dial pad.

I never argue with anyone about religion or politics. Here’s why. When I was sixteen-years old, I was madly in love with a 15-year-old girl. We argued a lot, mostly about religion. She didn’t convince me of anything: I convinced her to find a different boyfriend. There are a few things it’s extremely hard to change someone’s mind about. Politics and religion are two of them.

It’s a little over four months until pitchers and catchers for my Mets. Late in the 2012 season, they announced they would retain their manager and all of their coaches. I hope they do not also retain their entire major league roster.

Car Rental Again

I didn’t say it outright, but in my blog on September 28th, I implied that I’d consider a Camaro convertible more similar to a Mustang convertible than the Chrysler 200 I received when the rental car company said they offered Mustang convertibles or similar. I’ve educated myself a little more and while I don’t consider the Chrysler and the Mustang very similar, I can see one key factor that makes the rental car companies regard the Mustang and the Camaro convertible to be dissimilar. The Chrysler is a little less costly than the Mustang: the Camaro is more expensive than the Mustang. If you were the car rental company, which one would you consider similar to the Mustang? Yeah, if I was the car rental company, I would too.

I’ve got to say also that in that price range you can argue none of the few convertibles made are very similar to each other.

I didn’t single out the car company I rented from, because I consider the dissimilar-similar exchange an industry-wide problem. If you searched my blog for the term, “or similar,” you’d see I’ve ranted about that before. However, I did post on the rental-car company’s Facebook page that while there was nothing wrong with the Chrysler, I considered it inferior to the Mustang, not similar.

Did you know that if you post on a merchant’s Facebook page and they respond, you have to go back to look for the response? Facebook didn’t tell me that the company had responded, so it took me a while to realize it had. Their social media team invited me to email details which I did on Friday.

On Saturday, I heard from a manager for the company. We had a good phone conversation. I didn’t expect any refund or free ride the next time I travel. I did accept the car and drove it about a thousand miles in a week after all. He did agree with some of the points I made and also said that in the future if I’m dissatisfied with what I’m offered I should ask for a manager. He even gave me his contact information so I can ask for him if I travel to Orlando FL again.

My son has a different strategy with car rentals and he worked briefly for Enterprise some years ago. He says when he travels he reserves the least expensive car available. He calls it “four wheels and an air conditioner.” He figures they won’t have many of those and chances are they’ll have to give him a free upgrade.

While I didn’t single out the company that says Chrysler convertibles and Mustang convertibles are similar I was impressed with the way that company’s Facebook page works and with the way I was listened to and treated on the phone by that manager in Orlando. So, I should single out the company that performed the good customer service. It was Alamo. I don’t always rent from the same company, but I have rented from Alamo before in several locations across the country. With the kind of customer service I received this time, I will probably do so again.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

I’ve been saving up some of these questions for a while because I’ve been on vacation.

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Is it alright to buy odds and ends separately, or can you only get them together?

After doing the laundry, I wondered why some of my underwear comes out of the dryer right side out, while none of my wife’s does.

With topless photos, bottomless too or so I’ve heard, of the Duchess of Cambridge all over the Internet, one has to wonder about the state of security for the British royal family. If a photographer sitting in a tree or by the side of the road can capture photos like that, what’s to stop a sniper similarly situated from killing Prince William?

Insurgents in Afghanistan have said they’re trying to kill or kidnap Britain’s Prince Harry. Why does he have to be in Afghanistan in the first place? And, since he is, why isn’t his location being kept secret?

The Today Show had a big feature on Justin Bieber which made me wonder, if instead of Justin, his mom had named him Bucky Bieber, would he appeal to a much older demographic? And would he be known for his teeth rather than his hair?

Dina Lohan, Michael Lohan, Lindsay Lohan. Why does anyone pay any attention to any of them?

Things I Know

Having recently returned from the American south, I’m reminded that “y’all” is not the plural of the singular “you.” As you know in English, “you” is both singular and plural. Unlike what some southerners claim, “y’all” is the singular form. The plural of “y’all” is “all y’all.”

Here are a few things I didn’t get around to posting earlier because I was on vacation.

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Returning home on Southwest Airlines, the flight attendant said that if there was anything she could do to make the flight more comfortable we should ask. So, I asked her to make the plane a few feet wider.

Twenty people were trapped for hours on a ride at Knott’s berry Farm in California earlier this month. It was the second time in two weeks that the ride got stuck. If I ever get stuck on a ride like that for four hours, nobody better stand under the ride. That’s all I’ve got to say.

Almost everyone who pays attention to world events has heard of the film, “Innocence of Muslims” because it supposedly supplied the spark that ignited riots in the Middle East, one of which resulted in the death of four US diplomats, including our ambassador to Libya. If it weren’t for the riots, almost nobody would have heard of the film. I also find it too much of a coincidence to believe that the riots on 9/11 were inspired by a film nobody heard of.

Just because Mitt Romney’s fund-raising letters are too thick to go through my shredder unopened is no reason I should read them after opening them and before shredding them.

It is a word! I’ve never seen or heard it used before. Even if it didn’t exist, it is implied by the word impervious. The word is “pervious.” It means permeable, something that will absorb water or allow it to pass through. I saw it on tcpalm.com, a news website of Scripps newspapers covering the southeast Florida area known as the Treasure Coast.

Rent and Bait and Switch

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Car-rental companies are the worst bait and switch people I’ve ever encountered. I’m not going to specify the company, because in my experience, they’re all like this. I reserved a Mustang convertible (or similar). I even paid in advance so you might think that I’d get preferential treatment, but no. I got a Chrysler 200. Now that car is better than the last Sebring I rented. It’s got a smoother engine and it doesn’t shake as much on rough roads. But I don’t consider it similar at all.

The base model Chrysler is $800 cheaper than the Mustang, MSRP. It’s heavier, but it has a four cylinder engine as opposed to the Mustang’s six. The Chrysler has about 57% as much power, it’s a lot slower, and it gets slightly worse gas mileage too. It’s hard to believe the Mustang has worse rear seat legroom because the Chrysler doesn’t have much. I wouldn’t be able to sit in back if someone as tall as me was driving.

Worse, the company was willing to rent me a Camaro hardtop for $15 a day more than the 2012 “Or Similar” convertible they did have for me because the Camaro is a premium car, implying that the Chrysler isn’t. Now, I’d consider that if it was a V-8 with a manual transmission, but it was a six with a slushbox. I do think the Camaro is pretty similar to the Mustang, except that it’s $15 a day extra and it isn’t a convertible, but they did have some of those.

In fact, I don’t think they had any intention of providing me with a Mustang this week and I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten the car I reserved. Last year in San Francisco, I wanted a big Caddy sedan for its big trunk’s ability to contain and conceal the stuff my son brought home from China. I got a Lincoln Town Car which is about as big, but the Town Car was really out of date technically to such an extent that Ford stopped making them at the end of that model year. Before I got the Town Car, they offered me a Caddy Escalade. I don’t want an SUV on vacation because I want to keep my stuff out of sight in a car’s trunk and an SUV doesn’t have one of those. Twice I reserved Jeep Grand Cherokees (not on vacation and in places I wanted four-wheel drive). On one of those occasions, I got a Chrysler Pacifica (not four-wheel drive) and on the other I got a Subaru Outback (four wheel drive, but smaller). Once I reserved a Chevy Blazer and got a smaller Mitsubishi SUV. I reserved a Nissan Altima and was offered a Dodge Magnum. The Altima’s a sedan. The Magnum is a station wagon. That time I complained and got a Honda Accord. Again, they told me it was really an upgrade. So I guess they think that on a rental car a trunk is an upgrade. By the way, I’m not saying I have anything against the other cars. I’m just saying I don’t consider them similar to what the rental company advertised.

At least the Chrysler 200 (as inferior as I consider it to the Mustang) is the same body style. I’d really like to know the ratio of advertised cars to ‘Or Similars” in each rental car fleet. I doubt that my rental car company of choice had any Mustang convertibles at the Orlando International Airport. Have you ever gotten the rental car that was advertised to you?

Things I Know

I’ve heard that this is the first years there will be no political speeches at the September 11th memorial ceremony at Ground Zero. Good.

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I just learned that I once knew President Kennedy’s Harvard roommate. I also learned that the man passed away eight years ago. I went to elementary school with his children and I knew him a little when I became both an adult and a broadcast reporter. He was active in local politics and government. He was always very gracious to me and the only problem I ever had with him (since I was his children’s contemporary) is that he called me Tommy on the air.

The most interesting man in the world has more than one Facebook page. Seriously! If you go on Facebook and look up that phrase, you come to a Facebook page and there’s also a separate one under Dos Equis beer.

One-A-Day vitamins sells a product called Vita-Crave. It’s a chewable gummy vitamin. The label recommends you take two a day, which I find somehow counterintuitive.

“A pedestrian is a man with two cars, a wife and two teenagers.” –George Romney (Mitt’s father)

Cans of white, high-gloss enamel exterior paint are my new screwdrivers. I’ve already told you I own dozens of screwdrivers. I discovered today that I have three gallons of white, high-gloss enamel exterior paint. I won’t be buying anymore at least for a while.

By this weekend, I should be finished with a five-gallon bucket of tan paint I bought a while back. I’m never buying another five-gallon bucket of paint. Yes, it is a little cheaper than buying five one-gallon cans, but five gallons of paint are too heavy to lug around comfortably.

Things I Know

I have been a fiscal conservative for all of my adult life. I believe there are more fiscal conservatives in the Republican than in the Democratic Party. I also believe there are more people who have no regard for science in the Republican than in the Democratic Party and that both disappoints and disturbs me. As the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.”

Thanks to MLB TV, I am reminded that Vin Scully still sounds great. Maybe he’s lost a step, but he is 84 years old.

Jerry Stiller is in a TV commercial for Capital One Bank. In it, he says, “Instead of earning bupkus, your checking account could be earning five times the national average.” Jerry, five times bupkus is still bupkus.

The latest TV commercials for Walgreens Drug Stores claim that Charles Walgreen invented the chocolate malted. Wow. To me that’s a lot more impressive than creating a nationwide chain of drugstores. I wish I could be remembered for creating the chocolate malted, or even the coffee malted, which is also pretty damned great, as is the vanilla malted. I’ll certainly be remembered for consuming more than my fair share of all three.

I also wish I had created reality TV. I mean, I said, “Oh my God,” many times before the phrase became a staple of television programming.

Some things bother me a little about home improvement TV shows. On the show “Hideous Houses,” I’d suggest that the product placements from Sears are a little heavy handed. I lost count of how many times they mentioned Sears; beginning with the large, portable shade structure they erected to shade the work area. It says Sears on it in huge letters.

On the same show, the designer is painting without covering her long blonde hair or removing her dangling earrings. She’s also painting in a nice sweater, good black slacks and knee-high, high-heeled boots. The clothes I wear when I paint are basically indistinguishable from paint.

On the other side of the coin, I saw a “Property Brothers” show in which the producers blurred out the Chevy bowtie emblem on the grille of the Chevy (I think it was a Traverse) belonging to the property owners. Once I noticed the bowtie blurred out, I paid attention to that instead of paying attention to the show. I don’t know why they do that. Some for-profit college ran a commercial a while back that blurred out the Ford blue oval on the grille of an SUV and that also distracted me from the message of the commercial.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

“The Blues Brothers” was on cable this morning. Just how many full-sized Dodge four-door sedans were harmed while making that movie anyway?

Has America really aged so much that the Fonz has replaced Fred Thompson as the spokesman in ads for reverse mortgages?

Why does the dentist give kids lollipops? Is it to ensure future business?

Have you seen the TV commercials that say there are lots of jobs in cyber-security so you should earn a degree completely on line from the University of Maryland University College? My daughter suggests that with such a name, perhaps the University of Maryland University College also offers a program where you can earn two degrees at the same time from the University’s Department of Redundancy Department and that for each degree you can both major and minor in redundancy.

I’ve read recently of several arrests for kiddie porn. It’s good that the cops are finding these despicable people. But how do the despicable people find each other? I’m not going to try to Google, “buy kiddie porn,” and the town where I live, but I presume the cops are doing that all the time as one way of looking for them.

In need of some fast food, I went to Arby’s. The woman behind the counter gave me a selection of sauce packets. My wife, Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me), knowing that I don’t care for horseradish sauce, appropriated the packets of Horsey Sauce that I bought home. So I asked her, “Other than our lifetime together and all the times I’ve said it, what makes you think you can just take anything that belongs to me and use it as you please?”

Were you glued to the TV during the Olympics? I know that’s the only way I would have watched the whole thing.

If you never know, why do we even have schools?

Are mums for sale in the supermarket the first sign of autumn?

Moon Man

RIP Neil Armstrong. He died at the age of 82. He was the first human being to set foot on the moon and so he was once the most famous person in the world or on the moon. But that was so long ago that when he died way more than half the people alive on earth were born after he did it. At one time everybody knew who he was, but when he passed away, most obituaries I saw took considerable space to describe who he was and what he did. At one time, that would have been completely unnecessary.

I was a reporter when it happened and when I was, this is the only press kit I ever kept. I still have it.

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Things I Know

With Tropical Storm Isaac becoming stronger, churning in the Atlantic and headed first for Haiti and then for the GOP Presidential Convention, I’ve said for years that the best way to survive a weather disaster is to watch the Weather Channel, find out where Jim Cantore is and be someplace else. Matt Hardigree, writing on the website Jalopnik.com, has a more nuanced approach, but ultimately agrees with me.

Roker-Cantore Coverage Scale

Some Local Reporter On National News , all is well, relax.
Al Roker, minor inconvenience, you’ll be fine.
Jeff Morrow, better start moving stuff off your porch
Stephanie Abrams, things are getting serious
Mike Seidel, uh oh.
Jim Cantore, prepare your body for the Thunderdome

Just as I returned from the pizzeria and set foot on the porch, my daughter came downstairs and opened the front door lending credence to her claim that she’s gifted with P.S.P.: Pizza Sensory Perception!

Prince Harry should know (and so should you) that if you don’t want naked pictures of yourself on the Internet, you shouldn’t get naked when there’s a camera (or phone which is the same thing) around. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if there are more pictures of naked people on the Internet than there are people.

I usually recommend removing one’s foot from one’s mouth before shooting one’s self in the foot. In Representative Todd Akin’s case, however, I’ll consider amending my position. “Legitimate rape,” indeed. President Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as one of our greatest presidents. He said a lot of smart things. This is one of them: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

Things I Know

I have to take issue with what Brian Williams said on NBC Nightly News when Phyllis Diller died. There was nobody like her even after she came along.

In case you missed the news, eating eggs is bad for you again. I’m beginning to think the Woody Allen movie “Sleeper” was more than satire when he woke up and everything that everyone thought was bad for you when he fell asleep was now considered good for you.

Soon, very soon, Nike will be selling LeBron James sneakers for $315 a pair. I believe that if I had that kind of money to burn, I’d get more satisfaction from burning it.

Public Radio is apparently trying to attract younger listeners. While listening to “Car Talk” on Saturday, I heard a promo for a show called “WTF.”

I am totally disinterested in football, so it should come as no surprise that I’m already really tired of news about football on radio, TV, and in newspapers. And, we’re still in preseason!

I really like baseball, but it should also come as no surprise that I’m really tired of hearing about the Mets too. I suppose I should be satisfied with what the Mets achieved in the first half of the season, since everyone (me included) thought they’d be awful all year. But, if we can only have one good half season, just once I’d like to see them be good in the second half.

With all the seeds each sunflower produces, it’s kind of amazing to me that sunflowers haven’t taken over the universe.

I cheat during public TV pledge week. I DVR any pledge programming I’m interested in and fast forward through all the pledges. One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on TV was when Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street declared that pledge breaks were his absolutely favorite TV shows.

I’m sure there are non-franchise carpet cleaners who do a good job and there are probably also franchise carpet cleaners who don’t. But I had Stanley Steemer in to clean the carpet in the bedroom today. They showed up when they said they would, did a good job, did it quickly and left.

I saw a blog post criticizing GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan for calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme, while he also attended college using Social Security survivor’s benefits. There are plenty of things to agree or disagree with Paul Ryan about without attacking straw men. He was entitled to those benefits because his father died when he was 15. Social Security was less of a Ponzi scheme 25 years ago than it is today. And there is one significant difference between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme: Social Security is legal. But anyone who thinks there’s a Social Security Trust Fund is delusional. If you are retired now, you have probably already collected what you paid into the system. People who are working now are paying for people who are retired now. People are living longer, a lot of people are out of work right now, the general population isn’t growing all that fast, but thanks to the post World War II baby boom, the population of retirees is. Sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me. Ask an actuary, if you can afford that. Actuaries are paid very well. There are lots of issues to talk about in the presidential campaign. Could we talk about those instead of doing this?

Things I Know

I hope my bank pays attention to this. I have Internet service. When I call you, I don’t want to know my balance. I can get that on your website, or from any ATM. I don’t want to pay you over the phone either. I can also do that on your website. Good website, by the way. When I call you, I have a problem I can’t resolve that way and I need to talk to a person. Please put me through to a person, or at least let me talk to a banker.

A week or two ago, when the Powerball drawing was for a $212-million first prize, I won! I only won $4, but I’m not going to let that ruin my life. I didn’t win the $337 million drawing this week, so don’t call me asking for money.

Clearly, the cost of doing business has nothing to do with the price of a car rental. As another part of looking into taking a vacation I found that a $20-thousand car costs about $25 a day where I want to go. A $40-thousand car costs more than four times as much. My problem with rental car companies is they don’t guarantee the type of car. I might lay out the money for a Mustang convertible, but they think a Sebring convertible is similar and I think a Camaro is.

My doctor was less than a half hour late for my appointment today. That’s not good, but it’s not awful either. I contributed to him being later for patients who came after me. He was in the mood to talk about politics and I indulged him.

I wish I had my camera at the beach the other day because while walking along the waterline, I saw two young women in different locations wading in the surf while yakking away on their cell phones. It would be funny if they were talking to each other.

Here’s a product recommendation. Nobody’s paying me for it and it doesn’t do you any good because they don’t make it anymore. I have a Grundig Yachtboy 400 radio. Maybe it’s 15-16 years old and it was a very expensive radio when I bought it. The company that now sells Grundig radios bought the brand when the company that used to make them went out of business, so I don’t know whether current radios are as good. However, I’ve dropped this thing several times and I’ve managed to sink it in water twice, once in a bathtub and once in a pail of water. It still works.

If you drop any electronic device in the water, take it out right away, remove any batteries (they’re ruined) and cover the device in uncooked white rice. Leave it alone for several days. The rice will absorb moisture and maybe it will help save the device. But maybe it won’t.

Rambo III is a very weird movie when viewed today, considering what’s happened in Afghanistan since the movie came out 24 years ago.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

My friend Richard once tried to figure out what he could search for that wouldn’t return any results on Google. That leads me to wonder what’s the largest number of results possible if you search Google? I searched Google for the phrase “Things I Want (Or Need) To Know.” While I got almost 400-thousand hits, the ninth one wasn’t about this topic in my blog. I also searched Google for the word Google and got almost 14-million hits. I was kind of worried that searching Google for Google might break the Internet.

If Curiosity is on Mars now, can it still kill cats here on Earth?

Why can’t the TV-content producers, cable-TV companies and the DVR companies get their act together so that when you use the program guide to set the DVR to record something, the DVR doesn’t cut off the beginning, the end, or both?

If my doctor’s office called me yesterday to remind me that I have an appointment tomorrow, would it be rude for me to call my doctor’s office today to remind the doctor that he has an appointment tomorrow too? I mean, I’m not the one who forgets these things.

How do you throw away a garbage pail?

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Mayflower Movers is running a TV ad in which they specify that one of the services they offer is to provide “portable containers.” Isn’t that redundant? If the container isn’t portable, isn’t it called a building?

USA 156, Nigeria 73 in Olympic basketball. There are several questions we can ask here.

Was it sportsmanlike for the US to run up the score THAT much?

Does Nigeria have any business sending a basketball team to the Olympics if they’re that outmatched? Based on that match, I was going to question whether basketball should even be an Olympic sport, but subsequent games have been more evenly matched.

Why does anyone watch the opening ceremony for the Olympics? I’ll admit there might be elements of it that are interesting to someone. The speeches, for instance, are probably interesting to the mothers of the people who make them, but on the whole I find the ceremony boring. Plus, don’t we already know that Greece finishes first in the parade, thereby winning the gold medal in parade?

I lost a tiny MP3 player. It’s tiny; it’s easy to lose even though it’s red. Plus, I’m good at losing things. Whenever I lose something, my wife, Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) asks me where I had it last. This always annoys me. It’s one of the few things she does that annoys me. Why? Does she think I haven’t asked myself that question? And, if I knew the answer to that question, whatever I’ve lost when she asks it wouldn’t be lost. Would it?

Is a 4G phone heavier than a 3G phone? Shouldn’t it be?

According to Louis Freeh’s investigation, Graham Spanier, Joe Paterno and other former high-ranking officials at Penn State covered up a child sex abuse scandal to preserve the reputation of the university and its football program. That’s worked out really well, hasn’t it?

I found the MP3 player. It was in the last place I left it. But, I found it by looking for it, not by remembering where I put it. If I could remember where I left stuff, I’d never lose anything, would I? As an aside, I discovered this week that I have another utility knife. This one’s blue. I think thats seven, but frankly, I’ve lost count.

Things I Know

I didn’t watch the Olympic 200 meter butterfly on TV. I figured it would scare me because even Mothra wasn’t that big.

Who wins an Olympic event or the most Olympic events has nothing to do with whether one country is better than another. The older I get the more homerism on the part of the TV coverage bothers me.

The eight badminton players who were expelled from the Olympics were trying to win the whole tournament. If the rules of a tournament make it advantageous to lose a game or match in quest of overall victory, there’s something wrong with the rules, not with the players and coaches who understand the rules.

There’s also something wrong with the rules for the overall title in gymnastics. If there are 24 spots in the finals, they should go to the 24 best performances leading up to the finals and not be limited to two people from any given country. If the preliminaries don’t determine who’s in the finals, why have preliminaries?

Chick-Fil-A. The guy who runs this company is against gay marriage. He’s entitled to his opinion, even though I don’t care who you marry. People who disagree with his politics are entitled to spend their money elsewhere. They’re also entitled to organize opposition if they wish and as long as it’s peaceful. Likewise, people are entitled to organize support. But when government leaders say they’re going to keep that or any other company from locating in their areas because of its owner’s political beliefs, that’s wrong. Maybe it’s not unconstitutional because the first amendment applies to the federal government, not local zoning boards, but it’s still wrong and against everything America has always stood for. Love who you want, eat what you want is my position.

A tourist from Spain was brutally attacked this week by a man wielding a hammer while sitting in Manhattan’s City Hall Park at 3:00 AM. I can appreciate that someone from Spain, whose body clock is on Spanish time, would be wide awake at 3:00 AM New York time. However, if you are a tourist anywhere in the world, you should find out whether an area is safe before being out and about at 3:00 AM. I don’t think I’d walk around in my suburban neighborhood, let alone in a New York City park at 3:00 AM.  Very few good things happen anywhere in public places at 3:00 AM.

More Taxes

I got a letter from the IRS. Ominous, I know. I made a stupid mistake on my tax return, filed an amended return, sent them more money and, as a result, I owed them some (but not a lot of) interest. They wanted me to pay them 4 cents more than they wanted me to pay them last month, because, according to them, I didn’t pay them last month. But I did. I paid it right at the deadline, due to my incompetence, not due to trying to earn more interest on the money in my bank account. I really don’t have that much money in the bank and interest rates are awful these days. I don’t think you can even measure the interest I would have earned over that short period of time on $15.00. When I pushed the deadline, I did have the envelope hand-cancelled at the post office just to be sure I was okay.

Automated phone attendants are machines designed to let a computer give you information you didn’t really need while keeping you from talking to a human being who could help you, for an extended period of time.

I was impressed that the notice from the IRS was dated a week after I received it. Even though I don’t think they mailed it next week, that’s still really efficient.  The automated phone attendant was impressively efficient too since it kept me from talking to someone who could help me for about half an hour. It did tell me the waiting time would me more than 15 minutes, so that was right too. I would, however, have chosen different music to play in my ear over a low-quality phone line, and if I had it to do over again, I’d call from a speaker phone.

But, eventually, through perseverance, and a sore ear, I got to talk to a very pleasant woman at the IRS. She gave me her name and ID number. I was surprised that she gave her name because I’ve worked in a couple of local tax offices where the people who answered the phone wouldn’t. They didn’t want people coming over to their houses and harassing them.

Anyway, the pleasant woman looked up my account, confirmed that they did receive the payment and said the notice must have crossed with the payment in the mail. She also said I do not owe the additional four cents. I, of course, wrote down her name, her ID number and the date and time she told me I was good to go. There are bad apples in any bunch, but this woman is positive example that negative stereotypes of civil servants are anything but universally applicable

I understand the IRS deals with a stunning number of people, so I’m not really kvetching too much about the long wait to talk to someone who could help. The point I’m making is the pleasant woman who could help did help. So, thanks to her and to the IRS. I’m not going to share her name with you, but if anyone from the IRS is reading this and contacts me, I’d certainly identify and praise her through official channels.

Things I Know

If you get a phone call and there’s nobody on the other end of the line for several seconds, you’re being called by an automatic dialing system that tries to anticipate when the human caller will be available to annoy talk to you. Unless you enjoy receiving telephone sales calls, you can probably hang up any time that happens.

Figuring out how to repair the flush valve on my toilet isn’t satisfying for all the water I’m saving. It’s better because I didn’t have to call and pay a plumber. To paraphrase the credit card ad, $7 to fix the toilet, priceless!

Nothing against plumbers though. I call a good one when what needs fixing is beyond my skills. And that good plumber is very odd. He returns phone calls and shows up pretty much when he says he will. He still charges a lot. I said he’s very odd, not weird.

$6.90 for returning deposit soda bottles and cans: at five cents a pop, or soda, or beer, that’s 138 cans and bottles. Either I have to take them back more often, or it’s a good thing I own a truck.

The only attention I ever pay to professional or college football is when my son’s alma mater wins a national championship (as in the last two years in a row, Roll Tide!). I played as a kid, but stopped when the other kids started getting as big as me. That being said, the NCAA penalties against Penn State hurt an awful lot of people who had nothing to do with the child sex abuse scandal at the University and nothing to do with covering it up either. The guy who did the crime is in jail. One of the cover-up guys (according to Louis Freeh’s investigation) is dead. Others have lost their jobs. I don’t know if they’ll be indicted, but they probably will be sued and so will the university. As a result of the lawsuits, I hope the victims are compensated and I hope that compensation helps them. I approve of all that punishment, but what the NCAA did hurts the university, hurts students who play other sports that cost more than they earn, hurts other programs paid for from football profits and it hurts the local economy too because a lot of people who have been going to games won’t go, won’t stay overnight, won’t eat in local restaurants. You get the idea.

And, while I’m happy that my son’s happy if Alabama wins, all of the SEC schools are among the colleges and universities I believe value football more than they should when compared with academics.

If your insomnia is as bad as mine, you may have seen the show “Comics Unleashed.” Judging from some of the topical jokes it’s in reruns on Channel 2 in New York after Craig Ferguson’s show. If you’re looking for a good laugh, there’s really no need to see it though.

I’m kind of stoked that I could buy repair parts for an Andersen window more than twenty years old. Still, newer ones are a lot easier to take apart than that one is. I took it apart, fixed it and put it back together again, but if I took it apart another time or two, I’m pretty sure I’d break something. You expect product designs to improve and in the case of Andersen windows, they have. The old one I just fixed used balances and one of them broke after close to 25 years. The new ones don’t use balances and it’s a lot easier to remove the sashes than it used to be.

Twenty-one people were treated for burns on their feet after trying to walk on hot coals following a program by motivational speaker Tony Robbins. If twenty people ahead of me got burned trying to walk on burning coals, I would get out of the line myself. But that’s just me. It probably wouldn’t even take twenty.

I’ve often wondered how kids survive between the time they stop being cute and the time they start being bigger than we are. This answer from the website jezebel.com may explain it. I believe a man named Doug Barry is the author although I’m not entirely clear on that because the article I lifted the answer from is an aggregation of news items from elsewhere. “. . . they say your brain releases crazy chemicals after you have kids to keep you from eating them when they get too heavy to carry and there aren’t any mastodons to hunt.” I think that’s sarcasm, but it sounds like a real possibility to me as well.

Tax Everybody

President Obama has once again proposed eliminating Bush-era tax cuts, this time for people who make over $250,000 a year. There’s plenty of room for agreement or disagreement. Yes, the government spends a lot more money than it takes in. You would too if you could print money legally. So increasing the government’s revenues would help the situation, but raising taxes on those making over $250,000 while it would increase revenue would not offset deficits. In other words, taxing the so-called rich would not raise enough to pay for all the things we’re already spending money on. Yes, many of the $250,000 income earners are small businesses that can create jobs if their profits aren’t taken in taxes, but have you seen the job creation numbers recently? Job creation is very slow. And yes, there are plenty of things you or I may think the government wastes money on, but your lists and mine are probably different and the federal government wouldn’t be spending the money if someone didn’t want it to.

Then, there is the question of whether $250,000 a year is actually rich. I’d certainly feel better off if my family income was that high, but I don’t think I’d feel rich; upper middle class, probably, but not rich. On the other hand, I live in one of the most expensive areas of the country, I have high property taxes, and a significant mortgage payment. If your house is paid off and you live in a low-cost-of-living area, then $250,000 a year would put you on easy street.

No matter how much sense I make, I’m not going to resolve the issue here, so I won’t try. It’s an issue that will be argued endlessly between now and the November election. What I am going to do is muddy the water because I can, by talking about the other end of the spectrum.

It’s already true that way fewer than half of the people pay more, way more than half the taxes. Is that fair? Well, way fewer than half the people have way more than half the money, so maybe. And those people with a disproportionate share of the money can use some of it to buy political influence. Some of them do just that. But the people who have less than half the money are in the majority, the overwhelming majority, in fact. And the overwhelming majority can vote for its self-interest if properly motivated. That’s why certain people are screaming about class warfare.

One statistic that has come up in the tax argument really troubles me. Only 51% of the people in this country actually pay any federal income taxes. A few of the people who pay little or no federal income taxes are rich. Most of their income comes not from salary, but from investments, and they pay capital-gains taxes, the theory being that low tax rates on capital gains encourage investment and investment encourages the economy to expand.

A lot of the people who pay no income tax at all are not rich by any means. Still, it disturbs me that almost half of the people don’t pay any federal income taxes. It would disturb me a lot more if more than half didn’t pay.

Paying taxes does make people feel more a part of the government and the overall society. Not paying taxes does alienate people from those feelings. We’re already at a point where far too many people feel civic virtue isn’t a virtue and that civic responsibility isn’t their responsibility. Someone go look up the contributing factors to the fall of the Roman Empire. You’ll come across the Latin phrase, “panem et circenses,” or its English translation: bread and circuses. I think we as a society are tottering on the edge of that cliff and I don’t want America as a society to fall over or worse, jump off.

So, whether we wind up increasing taxes on the rich, I propose we tax the poor, but because I used to be a PR guy, I am not going to call it that. I’ll call it, “Tax Everybody.” Seems fair, right? No matter who you are or how much money you have, man, woman, child, citizen, resident alien, undocumented or illegal immigrant, if you’re here on April 15th, under my proposal, you have to cough up at least $5. I’d call it a minimum income tax, except we already have one of those and it doesn’t apply to everyone even though you might think it would. I propose that you have to pay this whether you have any income or not.

I don’t have sufficient information to calculate whether that would raise enough money to pay for the things we’ve already bought for ourselves or obligated ourselves to pay for. I suspect it wouldn’t, but we do know taxing the rich won’t take care of that either. However, instead of barely half the people paying taxes, everyone (or more likely almost everyone by the time Congress gets done with it) would pay at least a token amount so everyone would be a little more connected to civic life.

Maybe it would help restore civic virtue and civic responsibility. Maybe it would cause more people to look to themselves to pay for their own bread and their own circuses. Maybe it would only set the doomsday clock of the collapse of America back a few seconds, I don’t know. When my kids do something that isn’t working, I always suggest they try something else. What we as a society are doing isn’t working, so all I’m doing is suggesting we try something else. I don’t think it could hurt and it might help. So whether we wind up raising taxes on the rich or not, I suggest we tax everybody.

Sheer Irony

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I know everything at the ballpark is expensive, but $15 for a Po’ Boy sandwich at Citi Field strikes me as ironic. I’d say it’s delicious irony, but it’s ballpark food.

Update: My son reports in from another dimension and advises that, “It’s called a Po’ Boy because at those prices it makes you Po’.” That pretty much covers the name, doesn’t it?

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

There’s a pool company on Long Island called “Brothers 3 Pools” that advertises heavily on cable TV. In the ads, a young woman urges you to remember, “My uncle makes them: My father sells them.” Okay, but what does the third brother do? She’s been keeping us in suspense for years.

My friend Wes Richards asked the following question in his blog recently (see my blog roll to get to his blog) and since I want to know the answer too, I repeat it here: If you throw your hat into the ring, it means you’re in it to win it. If you throw your towel into the ring, it means you quit. If you throw a white terry cloth hat into the ring, does it mean you’re in and out at the same time?

Khloe Kardashian has a new baby named Penelope. That raises the question, how can you possibly pronounce the name Penelope as if it started with the letter K?

Why do dogs LOVE air blowing in their faces?

Google Voice is, among other things, an inexpensive and practical solution to making overseas calls from the USA. I used it frequently last year to call my son when he was in China for three months. But I haven’t used it for that purpose in over a year and I don’t know anyone else who’s overseas right now. Does anyone know how I can get a refund for the $3.82 in credit that remains in the account? I’d even be satisfied if I could use the $3.82 to buy music downloads from them.

If cows could laugh, would milk come out of their noses?

Nobody but the security guard works the graveyard shift at a cemetery, so why do they call it that?

Things I Know

Depending on whose count you believe, Republicans in the House have voted to repeal Obamacare 31 or 33 times. They know the bills they keep passing will not pass the Senate unless the next election changes the composition of the Senate. Whether you approve of Obamacare or not, the Republicans in the House of Representatives are not impressing me by taking over 30 votes on legislation they know won’t pass the Senate. I think they’re turning off a lot more people than they’re impressing at this point, including people who agree with them about Obamacare.

You can buy malted milk powder on Amazon.com, either Carnation or Horlicks. Hell. You can subscribe to malted milk powder on Amazon.com, so you don’t even have to remember to reorder it.

Now, if you could subscribe to chocolate ice cream through Amazon.com, you’d really have something. What you’d probably have is chocolate soup, because the delivery company would most likely leave the ice cream to melt on the porch.

I’ve talked before about the concept of a material difference in accounting. If you’re short a few pennies or even a few dollars (like three or four) on a very large amount of money, it’s not a material difference, so it doesn’t matter. Remember that two-billion-dollar trading loss J P Morgan reported a while back? Today the bank reported that the loss is actually $5.8 billion. That IS a material difference.

I don’t have to go to a podiatrist often, which is good because when I go, it’s usually for an ingrown toenail and the podiatrist pulls a sliver of my toenail out with a pair of pliers. The doctor does use a local anesthetic which is also good because it only leaves me thinking what an effective form of torture pulling your nails out would be, not experiencing it first-hand. Still it’s bad because injections of local anesthesia are especially painfully for me.

Bob Kane was the artist who first drew the comic book hero Batman. I went to grade school with a girl who claimed she was related to Mr. Kane. I believed her because she knew who Bob Kane was even though she was a girl and because she had a pencil drawing of Robin signed by Bob Kane in her wallet.

I’ve been calling my wife Saint Karen for quite some time now on the theory that she has to be a saint to put up with me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but you can buy a Saint Karen pendant or medal. I’m going to do that, but not just yet. However, if you have need of a Saint Karen medal or pendant, please know that you should shop around. The price for what appears to be the same sterling silver item varies by a couple of hundred percent. The gold one costs about twenty times as much as the silver.

This is not a complaint about Andersen windows. It’s a complaint about a different guy. I like the windows enough to buy lots of them (I’m pretty sure I have 18) for the house I own that didn’t come equipped with them. However, I needed new balances for the oldest one I have. I think it’s the only one that uses balances. A local dealer gave me some hints for taking apart the window and told me he could order the necessary balances if I brought in the old ones or if I provided the information on the lower corner of the window pane, plus the size of the sash. Very helpful. I took the old balances in and talked to a different guy at the dealer. The different guy told me he could only order the balances if I brought in or measured the sash. That’s not what the helpful guy said and you can order them with the old balance’s part number if you know about the Internet. I told the different guy I could order them no problem on the Internet. He was not moved. So, that’s what I did. They cost less and came in only two days. I’m sorry helpful guy wasn’t there. I would have paid a little extra for that kind of customer service. But if you want to charge more, you can’t have different guy not doing what helpful guy said.

Things I Know

Ocean Home Magazine has just come out with what it calls the 25 most desirable oceanfront homes currently for sale in the USA. I do know a couple of people who might be able to afford one of the homes on the list, although certainly not the most expensive. One in East Hampton is two blocks from the ocean. Is that cheating? The one in Alaska overlooks Cook Inlet. Since I can’t afford it, I don’t even have to politely decline because I hate to be cold. I do like to look and if you don’t mind drooling on your computer keyboard, you might like looking too.

Teva sandals stink! Otherwise, they’re great. I’ve been wearing rubber Tevas like the current Hurricane model at the beach and for other outdoor activities for years and years. The ones I have on now are about seven years old so they last a long time. I have plantar fasciitis, and my podiatrist thought I was crazy when I told him that my beach sandals are among my most comfortable shoes. But the rubber gives a little while still having good arch support. Teva advertises that the sandals have a zinc-based anti-microbial technology. I thought the zinc stuff wore out and that’s why the sandals stink, but I’ve been reading up on it. Turns out you should wash them even scrub them much more often than I have. I’m going to try that because other than the fact that they occasionally smell, I love Teva sandals. Don’t throw them in the washing machine though.

On the 4th of July, two women in East Farmingdale NY were seriously burned when aerosol cans stored under their barbecues exploded. I wouldn’t have been that concerned about aerosol cans, but the barbecue I own has a cabinet under the burners and by design, you’re supposed to keep a 20 pound propane cylinder in there. I did that. Once! It gets really hot in that cabinet. Now, I don’t keep anything in it. In fact, when I buy my next barbecue, I’m going to see if I can find one without a cabinet beneath the fire. The cabinet adds to the expense of the barbecue and I think it’s too hot to use for storage of anything flammable.

On the evening of the 4th, a 34-foot cabin cruiser capsized in the Oyster Bay-Cold Spring Harbor area of Long Island’s north shore. Three children trapped in the cabin drowned. Police say they’re investigating whether the boat was overloaded. I’m no expert, but with 27 people on a 34-foot boat, I imagine it must have been. Even if it was overloaded, other factors could also have contributed to the tragedy.

On the 20th, I’m going to see my first Dodger game in 55 years when the Dodgers play the Mets at Citi Field. No, I don’t think they’re going to come back, but I do want to assure everyone that I won’t root for them.

If you have a Facebook application on your smart phone, under certain circumstances, Facebook will populate your phone’s address book with the names of your Facebook friends and with any contact information they’ve supplied to Facebook. This is not necessarily a good thing since I almost butt-dialed someone who lives in Brazil the other day.

When my son was in China, I got a Google Voice phone number and used it to chat with him. Now, I use it less often and have it set to forward any incoming calls to my cell phone. That’s why I was glad my cell phone was off when someone I’ve never heard of called my Google Voice number the other day at 5:30 AM.

The city council in Houston TX recently passed a $5.00-per-person fee for patrons of strip clubs. Wags are calling it a pole tax. The money is being earmarked to clear a backlog of something like 4,000 unprocessed rape kits. Pursuing rapists is something police everywhere ought to have the resources to do, but I’m unaware of any evidence that suggests strip clubs cause rape.

If my wife and I could learn to fight with each other often enough, we could probably stop paying for all the cable TV channels that run reality TV shows.

I have a solution for the programmers who work on MS Word’s grammar & spelling checker as well as for speakers of English. MS Word can’t discern a correct usage of the word its or the contraction it’s. So, it almost always labels their use wrong, even when it’s right. I suggest that all English speakers be like my Irish grandmother and use the contraction t’is instead of it’s. ‘T’is can’t be confused with it’s. Of course, the substitution would bring into common use the contraction t’isn’t, which is the only contraction I can think of that has two apostrophes in it.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

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Do you realize that the phrase “Independence Day,” and the phrase, “The Fourth of July.” have the exact same number of syllables?

Do you also realize that if we could get everyone to call it Independence Day we could have it on a Monday every year?

Andy Griffith passed away at the age of 86. The actor was best known for his role as homespun sheriff Andy Taylor on the 60’s “Andy Griffith Show.” He also starred in the successful TV series “Matlock.” RIP Andy. But did you ever wonder why he had such a strong southern accent while Aunt Bea, Opie and Barney Fife didn’t?

Why do they call it the Albert Einstein College of Medicine? The school’s website describes Professor Einstein as, “The renowned scientist and humanist.” True. Professor Einstein is no doubt one of the most prominent scientists in history. But he was a theoretical physicist whose discoveries had little or nothing to do with medicine. I don’t think he was wealthy enough to endow the college and it’s associated with Yeshiva University while he was a professor at Princeton. So, why do they call it the Albert Einstein College of Medicine?

Have you read Rielle Hunter’s book, “What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter and Me?” I haven’t. It’s been described as a tell-all book: I’m waiting for her “I’m never going to say another word” book myself.

Things I Know

All of a sudden today, I noticed orange links in my blog, links that were also underlined in orange. They were ad links. At first I thought they were put up by my web host, but that’s not the case and the links probably didn’t appear in your browser becaues they were put up by an application that wound up on my computer. The application is from yontoo.com. Don’t know where it came from, but at least it uninstalled relatively easily.

Latest rumor I’ve heard is that Ann Curry is being paid $10,000,000 to leave the Today show. She’s supposedly owed $20,000,000 on the remainder of her contract, so they’re still talking. I’ve never been paid anywhere near $10,000,000 to go away, and I believe I’m a lot more annoying than Ann Curry. I’m not even sure Ann Curry is annoying at all.

Government geeks like me know that initiative and referendum is a process whereby voters can petition to have a direct vote on certain matters the legislature either didn’t pass or wouldn’t consider. Under this procedure, decisions are often based on emotion rather than fact. That’s why I’m proud of the citizens of North Dakota who voted this month not to make property taxes unconstitutional. North Dakota’s economy is thriving right now, so they don’t really need property taxes that much at present, but the responsible citizens of North Dakota know they might need them in the future, so they didn’t outlaw them.

On Cable TV, the Speed Channel is rerunning a show called “101 Cars You Must Drive.” The show”s about four or five years old. Some of the cars are interesting, but you really don’t learn much about any of them. One of the cars on the list is GM chief stylist Harley Earls 1950 Buick LeSabre concept car. The name was used on later production Buicks and some style elements of that car were seen in later GM production cars too, but there’s nothing special about the way it drives, and they didn’t drive it.

The dermatologist I go to has an aesthetician attached to his practice. I know it’s not, but I can’t help thinking thats a person who’s licensed to tell me what’s pretty, and what isn’t.

I learned this week that someone I know is related to Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. We’re not close. I didn’t know about the relationship when I saw them recently, so we didn’t talk about it. And, I don’t want to say anymore because I don’t want to identify them. But it is a small world.

I would pay an insignificant amount of money for legal DVDs or on-line streaming of Hoppity Hooper cartoons.

You would think that streets named First Street would be more common than streets named Second or Third Street. According to the National League of Cities, you’d be wrong about that.

Things I Want (Or Need) to Know

What does the monster in the bedroom closet have nightmares about?

Why do they have a sign at the eastbound entrance to the Verrazano Bridge saying how long it’s going to take to get across? First, the sign isn’t correct. Last time I crossed it said 9 minutes and it took 24. Second, once you get to the sign, there’s really nothing you can do about it but go across the bridge anyway.

If they want a sign telling you how long it takes to cross the Verrazano Bridge, shouldn’t it be on the Jersey Turnpike west of the Goethals Bridge so you can make a meaningful decision?

Don’t you just love it when you get to the head of a traffic jam and there doesn’t seem to have been anything causing it?

How come New York City radio station traffic reporters ignore Staten Island?

Why do they even bother to have speed limit signs on the New Jersey Turnpike? As far as I can tell, most traffic goes about 75 mph whenever traffic conditions permit, no matter whether the limit is 65, 55, or even in work zones where it’s 45.

Has anyone ever pawned anything on the TV show Pawn Stars?

Did you know that if you have a Facebook account, you also have an email address ending in “@facebook.com”?

Did you ever use your email address ending in “@facebook.com”?

Do you know anyone else who uses such an email address?

If someone is running a robocall operation, can they tell if the people they call always hang up on them? Do they know what percentage of the people they call listen to the entire message? Do they cull their call lists based on that information? Do they even care?

Father’s Day

Nobody’s perfect, not even mom and dad, but I believe every child deserves two parents who never do anything they believe in advance will hurt their children. I had one parent like that, my wife had two, and I believe my kids have two as well.

I told you my favorite Father’s Day story three years ago, but I’m going to repeat it right now.

It’s an image that my daughter gave me a while ago. She said that when she was a toddler, she thought she was very strong because she could push open some really heavy doors. She learned later that I was standing behind her and reaching over her head to help her push.

That’s what daddies do, isn’t it? We help our children to do what they have to do. Sometimes we do it out in the open and sometimes, as in opening those big, heavy doors, we do it behind their backs, or over their heads, or both. Sometimes, we have to resist the temptation to do it for them. We have to let them do it for themselves, so they can grow up.

My dad was a very smart, and very uneducated man. Why was he uneducated? Obligation. It seems to me his whole life was about obligation. I know he sacrificed his childhood for his mom, brothers and sisters. He quit school to support them after eighth grade because his father died three years earlier. He didn’t marry until he was 38 years old and when he did, he and my mom continued to support and live with his mother. I never knew my dad’s mother and she only knew I existed, but never saw me. She died three days after I was born.

He retired as a police officer as soon as he was eligible to, in order to please my mother, not himself. He took real pride in being a cop. He kept his uniforms in a wardrobe in the attic until he died. We threw them out after that. My son has his police night stick, the one made of teak wood so it won’t float. It won’t break if you hit something with it either. My son also has his police tie clasp. My sister gave it to him, and he wore it when he was admitted to the bar.

He sacrificed a lot for his kids too, including sending me money that he needed himself when I was a freshman in college. This grade-school graduate had two kids. Both of them have master’s degrees, but he died before either of us graduated from college. He never met any of his four grandchildren. When it looked like my son would be left-handed, it made me pine for my dad who was a lefty too. He liked little children a whole lot more than he liked most adults. His grandchildren all went to college too. One of them has a post-doctoral education.

My dad has been gone for a long, long time. Sometimes I miss him a lot more than you would think after all these years.

My father-in-law was a special guy too. Virtually every teenage boy is interested in one of only two things, and I don’t give a damn about football.  He welcomed me into his home and was nice to me when I took an interest in his seventeen-year-old daughter who would one day be canonized as Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me). If all my in-laws ever did for me was allow me to date their daughter, I could never repay them. They did so much more and wouldn’t let us even give them gifts, let alone try to repay them. They welcomed me into their family and were far nicer to me than most of my blood relatives.

Both my father and my father-in-law are dead, but I remember them and I remember that I was blessed in the father department.

Things I Know

Ithaca NY is still gorges, as the T-shirts say, but because of a rash of suicides on campus more than a year ago, Cornell installed high fences on all the bridges over the two gorges that border the university’s main campus. Plus, the gorges themselves are fenced and locked because trails that used to allow hikers to descend into the gorges haven’t been maintained and have become dangerous. If I lived there, instead of just visiting as I was last weekend, I’d be happy to join a volunteer trail maintenance crew. The gorges are still gorgeous! In local stores you can still buy a lot of beautiful photos shot in Fall Creek and Cascadilla Gorge, but you can’t go into the gorges to take your own pictures anymore, at least I couldn’t find a way to do so from the Cornell campus.

The steepest path up Libe Slope on the Cornell Campus is the one that tops the hill behind Morrill Hall. I was reminded of that because I took that path on Saturday. I didn’t like climbing that hill as a freshman. At my age, I am happy I still can climb it.

I was watching a documentary about dinosaurs on the cable Science Channel and in my opinion, anyone who narrates a TV documentary in English ought to be required to pronounce the word “Arctic” as if it had two “c’s” in it because it does. Similarly, such a narrator ought to be required to pronounce the word “Antarctic” as if it had both two “c”s” and two “t’s” because it does and neither pronunciation is that hard, really.

Anthony Bourdain has announced that he’s moving from the Travel Channel to CNN. Good, because I sometimes watch the Travel Channel.

There’s a TV commercial for Netflix. It features a beaver with a British accent. Instead of compelling me to sign up for Netflix, it impelled me to ask whether beavers are native to Great Britain. Ten, or even eight, years ago, the answer would have been no. The ones that were native became extinct some time ago. However, since 2005, there have been a handful of efforts to repopulate Great Britain with small colonies of Eurasian beavers. I wasn’t interested enough to try to find out whether those efforts are successful.

I generally don’t use apps on Facebook because they allow the owner of the app a lot of access to your data. There’s one called profile view. When you sign up, it requests permission to access your data. There are two choices: allow; and disallow. If you click the disallow button, it just brings you back to the choices. It doesn’t take you back to your Facebook home page.

Barbara Streisand has scheduled two shows in Brooklyn in mid-October. The first one reportedly sold out in minutes, hence a second. Nothing against Ms. Streisand, but I think nobody should buy tickets to any performer’s show once that performer has concluded his or her farewell tour.

In commenting on the Zuckerberg-Chan wedding recently, I joked that they apparently waited until they were sure they could afford it. I am not a lawyer, but someone on TV suggested that they may have waited until he was a multi-billionaire and she was an MD so that neither her degree nor his billions would be community property.

Note to the guy in the navy blue Honda sedan: If you keep driving ten miles under the speed limit on the Wantagh Parkway, you’re going to be rear-ended and possibly killed. Also, navy blue is a nice looking color on a car, but you don’t see them very often.

And note to the woman in the gold Honda Odyssey at the Ramapo Service Area on the NY State Thruway around 4:30 PM Sunday. Stopping your minivan so that you made it hard for other cars to get past you while, at the same time, blocking two handicapped parking spaces was the most boneheaded driving event I saw while traveling from Thursday to Sunday.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Since it’s Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, shouldn’t she be all sparkly? I mean, cherries jubilee is full of cherries, isn’t it?

Do you ever wonder if the British media are as excited over Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee as Katie Couric was during her ABC 20/20 special on the event?

If MS Word’s spelling and grammar checker can’t determine any proper use of the contractions it’s and its’, why do they flag them all as wrong?

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Groupon recently sent me a discount offer for bikini wax. That made me wonder why would anyone need or even want a shiny bikini?

Has anyone ever been arrested for touching a child appropriately? Of course not! I’m not making fun of a problem, I’m making fun of the way we describe a problem. Sex abuse and especially child sex abuse is very serious, so serious that I think euphemisms like “inappropriate touching” are really out of place.

Why are there so many different ends on USB cables?

Onions and garlic are in the same botanical family, right? So, how come onions don’t have any effect on vampires?

Things I Know

In his May 12th blog, my Internet friend Dick Summer tells a story he’s told before about how his wife bought him a new pair of swim trunks because she didn’t want to be seen in public with him anymore when he wore the Speedo he has had most of his life. It reminded me that I got a Speedo when I was 17. It was navy blue when I got it. It was kind of sun-faded brown when it disappeared from the pool locker room when I was 34. Did my wife, Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) take matters into her own hands at the pool on that awful day that my Speedo disappeared?

We’ve only met once, but I consider Dick a kindred spirit because each of us has an off-beat sense of humor, each of us is very well aware that we’ve married above our station in life, and each of us is unabashedly in love with his wife.

I recommend that right-handed people buy sleeping bags with the zipper on the left and vice versa. I’m right handed and it’s easier for me to zip a bag whose zipper is on the left. I own four bags, not because I lose them but because I use them for different purposes. This past weekend, I used the only one I have with its zipper on the right and was reminded again of how much better I’d like it if I remembered my recommendation when I bought it.

Among life’s frustrations, I’ve never used the Blockbuster Video app on my Android phone, I can’t delete it, and now it’s bugging me every day because it needs an update.

Speaking of which, if you buy a new computer, and it comes loaded with bloatware, you can delete it. With an Android phone, it’s not a question of “if.” Android phones do come loaded with bloatware,  a lot of which you cannot delete. Bad. For the uninitiated, bloatware is software you don’t want, and didn’t order that comes loaded on your new computer from the factory. It’s there because the software publishers pay the computer manufacturers to put it there as a form of advertising.

I don’t know or care whether the actor John Travolta is gay. Having said that, a lot of the reporting surrounding a lawsuit claiming damages because Travolta allegedly harassed men sexually while they provided massage services is deeply disturbing for its ignorance of proper English usage. Attention copy editors everywhere (professional writers too): There’s no such thing as a male masseuse and the phrase “male masseur” is redundant. By definition, a masseuse is female, a masseur is male. Plus, in either case, I believe the preferred phrase these days is massage therapist.

I don’t think President Obama’s position on gay marriage has evolved over his presidency. He favored it as a State Senator. When he ran for President four years ago I believe he held off on saying so because he didn’t want to alienate those people against gay marriage who would otherwise vote for him. I also believe that his recent announcement that he now favors gay marriage is a deliberate distraction from what should be the main issue. Let’s face it: The 2012 presidential election should hinge on the same issue the 1992 presidential election did: “It”s the economy stupid,” or maybe that should be, it’s the stupid economy.

Just for the record, I think all governments should stay out of everyone’s bedroom as long as what’s going on in there is consensual. If two gay people want to get married, it doesn’t bother me in the least.

Sometimes I just don’t understand Amazon.com’s search function. I am considering purchasing a new laptop computer because a couple of keys on the one I have now have become unreliable.  Even if I fix the keyboard, my current laptop’s hard drive is nearly full, and it only has 1 GB of RAM. I searched Amazon’s category “computers & accessories” for the word “laptop.” When sorted for average customer review, the first laptop computer was listed on page seven of the search results.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan got married over the weekend. They’ve been together a long time, but last week, she became a doctor, and he became a multi-billionaire, so I guess they waited to get married until they were sure they could afford it.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Even if you use Facebook, and I do, why would you buy the stock when it’s trading at THAT MANY times earnings? I’m not saying the stock won’t be successful, just that it strikes me as extremely overpriced. If it’s going to be worth that stock price, they’ll have to operate a lot more aggressively to increase their earnings enough to justify it.

Did you read about how a CIA drone was used to attack and kill Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, an Al Qaeda leader on the FBI most wanted list who was reported planning a new and improved underwear bombing attack? Honestly, I don’t understand underwear bombing. How are the 72 virgins who’ll greet you in Paradise going to do you any good if you’ve blown off your private parts?

If Google succeeds in its current effort to develop a driverless car, will someone riding in the car still have to have a driver’s license?

Why is it that soda, or pop, or soft drinks, or whatever they call it where you live is sold in two-litre bottles while milk and orange juice are sold by the half gallon? And with ice cream and a lot of other goods being sold in smaller packages at no reduction in price, do the bottlers of soda realize that switching to a half gallon bottle would effectively raise the price?

Things I Know

There’s an old science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke called “Childhood’s End.” It’s about the human race evolving to another state, not about you and me reaching adulthood. Then, there’s the news today that Maurice Sendak has died. Talk about the end of childhood.

One of the biggest problems with politics and government in America today is that people accept and excuse certain unacceptable or inexcusable behaviors depending on whether those behaviors come from a politician they agree with. If any office holder does something another office holder of a different political party also did while in office, one can’t be wrong and the other right. In the same circumstances, they should both be judged the same way.

I will allow though, that if your public stance on any issue, when compared to your private behavior, makes you out to be a hypocrite, that makes whatever you’re doing worse, whether your private behavior is legal or not.

A guy test driving a white Ferrari California worth about $200,000 and considering buying it launched it into San Francisco Bay on Saturday afternoon. Even though I’m not a Scooby Doo fan, I’m strangely compelled to say, “Ruh oh!”

Every parent makes mistakes. It’s one of the things that keep psychiatrists and psychologists in business. Every child deserves to have two parents who never do anything they know in advance will be bad for their child: We don’t all get that. The reverse is true too, by the way. Parents deserve children, especially adult children, who don’t deliberately hurt them either. In any event, I hope your relationship with your mom is good enough that you can sincerely wish her a happy Mother’s Day on Sunday.

My wife, Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me) celebrates her birthday this week which means that there are times her birthday and Mother’s Day occur on the same date. I learned when her birthday is shortly after we started dating, but it didn’t occur to me that I’d have to buy two presents very close together or on the same day until our first child was born. It doesn’t matter though; she’s worth it to me. So, officially and for the record, happy birthday Saint Karen. I’ve said that on lots of occasions (all of them her birthday), but I’ll never be able to say it enough times to suit me.

BTW, I call my wife Saint Karen as a tribute to her patience with me. Calling her that got me curious as to whether there was a real Saint Karen. I’ve found several brief references saying there is a Saint Karen who is the patron saint of love and marriage. Although there’s almost no detail on her life and with no feast day listed, I find it appropriate that Saint Karen would be the patron saint of love and marriage since I love my wife and I’m married to her. I searched the website www.catholic.org and didn’t find a Saint Karen listed. I know that the name Karen and the name Catherine or Katherine come from the same root and I know there’s at least one Saint Catherine so I’m not worried. And there’s a website called www.saintkaren.com. It’s related to a performance artist who goes by that name. That’s a different Saint Karen though.

Things I Know

In a currently running Allstate TV commercial, Dennis Haysbert, the announcer, says, “Emily’s just starting out, and on a budget. It’s like a ramen-noodle-every-night budget.” That’s a really strict budget! Ramen noodles every night I could understand, but only one?

Mercedes Benz is running commercials on radio and TV featuring young children saying that when they grow up they will take over their parents’ certified pre-owned (used, but with a warranty) Mercedes Benz. I guess Mercedes has data showing that owners keep the cars long enough to pass them to children, but it surprises me. I do keep cars until they die (one of my cars is 21 years old), but I would have guessed that someone who buys a used, late-model luxury car would be less likely than I am to keep that car until the bitter end.

I had to laugh at Speaker of the House John Boehner when he suggested President Obama was playing politics with a bill to keep interest on student loans low. He was right, because Republicans in the House and GOP presidential candidate Romney want to keep the loan interest low too. The difference is in how each party proposes to pay for it. The reason I had to laugh at Boehner’s remark is he proposed paying for it in a very political way himself; by taking the money away from the President’s health care program.

There’s a bill in Congress to allow people who borrowed money under student loan programs to get out of the loans if they declare bankruptcy. Students, don’t get your hopes up about that bill passing. However, if it does, you’re still stuck if your parents cosigned the loan. If you go bankrupt, the maker of the loan will just go after your parents.

I’m reading a book called “Dewdroppers, Waldos and Slackers” by Rosemarie Ostler. It’s about slang in the 20th century and it’s also about 10-years old. Someone familiar with my interest in language bought it for me as a gift. Part of it is like a dictionary and part of it is narrative. No book fewer than 250-pages long can be comprehensive. I’m not finished with it, but so far I have two complaints. It doesn’t give the definition of “Waldo” I expected to see, a machine to manipulate objects as described in Robert Heinlein’s novel, “Waldo.” I wouldn’t complain about that except the word is in the title. And while it does mention the word “Funk,” it doesn’t include its definition as a kind of music. George Clinton would be disappointed. Speaking of Mr. Clinton, he’s bringing Parliament Funkadelic to Huntington, New York’s Paramount stage this weekend. If you like the funk, perhaps you should check it out.

Based on the recommendations it offers me, Amazon.com seems intent on selling me music that’s 10-20 years newer than the things I like best.

The makers of SDHC memory cards appear to be obfuscating how quickly they’ll write data. First, they print the class information in very small type on the label or the package. Second, you can buy cards that claim to far exceed the spec. I bought a micro SDHC card that says it’s class 6. That means it can write 6 MB/second. The package says it can write up to 30 MB/sec. Granted there are two asterisks after that figure, but I can’t find the footnote they refer to. I know there isn’t any class 30, but there is a class 10. If I manufactured cards that were better than class 6, I’d call them something better than class 6 and charge more than a class 6 price for them.

There are lots of radios that offer docking and charging for Apple phones, and some that offer an external input jack so you can play your Android or Windows phone. There are even MP3 players and phones that will play external memory cards. I’d certainly pay for a radio that would also accept and play an SDHC card. I could load it with music I like instead of the music they now play on the radio.

I bought a Sansa Clip Zip which is a very small MP3 player. I like it except for two things: It’s so small I misplaced it within five days of buying it even though I got a red one; and you can’t play it while it’s recharging. So, I can’t plug it into my car radio and recharge it while I’m driving and listening to my tunes.

Things I Want (or Need) to Know

Right now, my daughter is watching an MTV show. As far as I can tell, it’s called “Ridiculousness.” It’s a show consisting of lots of clips of people hurting themselves while doing dumb things. There’s also a small panel, members of which laugh at the clips. Why is this funny?

If eight hours is considered a healthy night’s sleep, why don’t I ever sleep more than six, no matter how tired I am or how late it is when I go to bed?

Don’t banks make money on the float anymore? The bank that holds our mortgage paid our school taxes three or four weeks before the due date. If I were a stockholder, I’d object to paying early.

Don’t you just love it when you pull up in the left lane behind a car stopped at a red light, and after the light turns green the jerk driving puts on his left turn signal? I know I do.

Why do they call it “rush hour” when it’s anything but?

Did you ever clean the lint filter in your clothes dryer? Yeah, me too. So, why don’t your clothes eventually disappear if you always put them in the dryer?

Let’s say someone calls me on my Google Voice phone number, and I have it set to forward calls to my cell phone. If I don’t answer, which voice mail service does it actuate, Google Voice, or the cell phone? Here’s one I’ll find out soon. If someone texts me on my Google Voice number, and that number is set to forward to my cell phone, will the cell phone provider charge me for receiving the forwarded message? I don’t like texting because it costs the recipient money, so I don’t have a texting plan.

Things I Know

President Obama appeared early Wednesday morning on a special Jimmy Fallon show at the University of North Carolina to jawbone Congress because if Congress doesn’t act, the interest on many student loans will double in July. Especially with interest rates on just about all other kinds of loans at record lows, this makes sense. What nobody mentioned on the show is that this is one issue on which Mr. Obama and his Republican opponent in the November election, Mitt Romney, agree.

I’d say this no matter what candidate or office holder appeared. When President Nixon appeared on “Laugh In” saying, “Sock it to me,” it was entertainment even though it may have benefitted his campaign by making Nixon seem more human. When President Obama or any other official or candidate appears on an entertainment show to campaign on issues almost no entertainer is equipped to do anything but a softball interview. That serves the official’s purpose, but it doesn’t contribute much if anything to advance public dialogue.

According to the Associated Press today, “President Obama will headline his first re-election rallies next week, marking an important turning point in the race for the White House, as Republican nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney intensified efforts to unite his party, and raise money for the battle ahead.

“The president will hit the campaign trail with back-to-back rallies May 5, in Ohio and Virginia, according to an Obama campaign official who requested anonymity to speak ahead of the campaign’s formal announcement.”

His appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show at the University of North Carolina and a number of his earlier appearances have sure seemed like campaign appearances to me.

Pete Fornatale died this week. I’m told he had a brain aneurism. He was a pioneer in the area of free-form rock FM radio in NY. I only met Mr. Fornatale once. My impression and the impressions of others who actually knew him was that he was a decent man dedicated to his craft and someone his friends and family will miss.

Bob Allen died this month too of pulmonary fibrosis. He lived in the shadow of the World Trade Center when it came down, and Bob blamed the debris plume for his disease, although he was also a heavy smoker for much of his life. Bob was a news broadcaster in Albany NY, on Long Island, and elsewhere. Unless you get to the top, doing that is a tough way to make a living. Like many who practice that trade or profession, Bob went into political and governmental public relations to better support himself and his family. Funeral arrangements, if any, were private so his family didn’t hear from the many people whose lives and careers he affected in a positive way. I’m one of those people. He was associated either directly or indirectly with almost every full-time job I’ve had since I met him, and I miss him.

It’s too bad we can’t find a cure for natural causes. A lot of people die from that every day.

Things I Know

Happy birthday to our son (it’s tomorrow). He’s visiting for the weekend with his girlfriend. It’s the first time we’ve met this young woman, and she seems very nice.

I fixed the toilet in my upstairs bathroom this week. I’m no expert, but every home toilet I’ve ever seen was designed to be repaired by someone who’s left-handed. If a manufacturer comes up with a toilet whose riser tube goes into the bottom of the tank on the right side as you look at it, I’ll be their customer for life.

You can buy a replacement fill valve for this toilet from the toilet manufacturer’s website for just under $20.00. The part, however, isn’t made by the toilet manufacturer. It’s made by a company called Fluidmaster which makes lots of replacement parts for toilets. A Fluidmaster fill valve costs less than half that from Lowes, Home Depot or your local plumbing supply house. I didn’t shop extensively for mine, but I did shop and I paid $8.00 for the one I bought. I got the “Pro Series” valve. I think they call it that because there are no instructions provided with it. But, it’s an easy repair so if you pay attention to the way the old one was installed, the new one should not cause you any problems.

Before Dick Clark became synonymous with New Years Eve, big band leader Guy Lombardo had the most popular annual New Year’s Eve TV special. When Guy Lombardo died, New Year’s Eve survived. If the Mayans were right about December 21st of this year, then Dick Clark’s death is the first step toward fulfilling the Mayan prophecy that the world will end before next New Year’s Eve. RIP Dick.

The best quote I’ve heard lately comes from conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin. Speaking on Don Imus’ radio and TV show, Levin said, “I’m annoyed at most people.” If you’ve ever listened to Mr. Levin’s show, you find that statement completely plausible.

If you need a lift, try this: go to Youtube and search there for the phrase “baby giggles.” That ought to help.

And speaking of giggles, Merle, and Patricia Butler, a retired couple from Illinois were identified recently as having purchased one of three winning tickets in March’s $656 million Mega Millions lottery. The amount of that lottery jackpot seems to change every time I read or hear about it. Merle said that when he told his wife they won, she giggled for about four hours. Seems reasonable to me. You haven’t heard who the other winners were because some states don’t require you to make your identity public in order to claim the prize, so the other two winners didn’t. That seems reasonable to me too. I’d much rather be rich than rich and famous. Just being famous would be awful because if you’re famous, you need some money with which to buy privacy.

Things I Want (or Need) to Know

Have you seen Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people? Not a very serious list, is it?

Fifty years ago, you’d see stretched passenger cars or station wagons like this, called airport limos, around big airports and certain resorts.

airport limo

This one is a 1960 Chevy. The website where I first saw the photo said the car is rated to carry 18 passengers, but eight doors implies four bench seats which would mean it holds only 12. That is, of course, unless the station wagon before it was stretched had a third row seat. If that’s the case it probably holds 14 people. Still, that made me wonder, how many clowns do you suppose it would hold?

Do your kids take “English Language Arts” in school? What the heck is up with that? Is it an effort on the part of schools to give teaching English a higher status? To me English Language Arts is just poor English. The term doesn’t do anything more to describe the subject than the term English does. So, English Language Arts lends obfuscation to the subject, not clarity.

Which came first, the refrigerator or the magnet?

Would noise-cancelling headphones do anything for my tinnitus?

The expression “head over heels in love” has recently come to bother me. If by “over” you mean above, then my head is almost always over my heels, except while I’m sleeping. So, is there really anything special about being “head over heels in love?”

Have we really sunk so low as a society that the question of whether and/or how Kim Kardasian acquired a hickey is worthy of network TV news stories? Yeah, we have.

During the run up to last month’s $640 million Mega Millions prize drawing, I kept hearing how much worse the odds were of winning the lottery than say being struck by lightning or eaten by a shark. This led me to ask, what are the odds of being struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark?

Things I Know

Yes, the Titanic sank 100-years ago today, and it’s one of those rare instances when practically unlimited wealth didn’t save everyone. More poor people died than rich ones, but not everyone rich survived. The richest person to die was John Jacob Astor IV. Isador Straus, one of the founders of Macy’s Department Store also died on the Titanic, as did his wife, Ida, who reportedly refused to get aboard the lifeboat without her husband, saying they had lived together, and would die together.

I believe I’ve mentioned before that my great aunt won a newspaper essay contest years later with a first-person account of being on the Carpathia, the first ship to arrive on the scene and rescue survivors. She did come to the USA on the Carpathia, just not on that voyage.

All the news today is about the anniversary of the Titanic disaster, but do you know what else happened on this date? Abe Lincoln stopped breathing. He was probably brain dead as soon as he was shot the night before, but he was declared dead after sunrise the next morning.

The guest room is getting closer to being ready for guests, which is good because we’re getting guests on Thursday. It’s painted now. I’m putting things back where they belong. I’ve moved most of the furniture, but the bed gets reinstalled last. I even got a new TV to replace the one that fell off the bed where I put it while I was moving the furniture it usually stands on. The old TV weighed 73 pounds: the new one, 11.

Update: I wound up taking the TV to the dump because nobody stole it from the back of my truck, even when I left the truck parked at the railroad station all day.

I saw this phrase elsewhere, liked it and hereby appropriate it for my own: I am a reluctant adult.

Things I Know

Rick Santorum has dropped out of the quest for the Republican nomination for President. We should all resist the temptation to say he aborted his campaign.

The Today Show touted a new, revolutionary treatment for cellulite. When I heard that, I couldn’t help thinking it involved spinning the patient around, but I was wrong.

It costs $15 to get into the New York International Auto Show. It cost a lot less when I first started going, but when I first started going I was 12.

I usually think that Geico Insurance’s TV ads are clever, but neither the insurance taste test nor the pig does it for me. BTW, if you type the word Geico into MS Word, the spellchecker thinks it’s wrong however; one of the things it suggests you might mean is gecko. I swear! Try it!

I’ve been told that those wild onions that grow like weeds in your yard (because they are weeds in your yard) aren’t edible. That seems like a terrible waste to me.

Tom Bergeron, or someone who writes scripts for “Dancing With the Stars” watches “Doctor Who.” How do I know? On last Tuesday’s show, Tom allowed that, “Fezzes are cool.”

When the Message Isn’t the Message

A long time ago, a smart man named Marshall McLuhan became well known when he said, “The medium is the message.” Maybe the medium is the message, but I’m quite certain that, at least in once case, the message isn’t the message. Facebook wants me (and you too, if you have an account) to get an email address that has the suffix @facebook.com. They sent me a message telling me that. I can skip the message, but I can’t delete it. Same thing for text messaging: they want me to turn it on, but while I can skip the message I can’t delete it.

I think the fact that I can’t delete one or the other of these messages is the reason that my phone alerts me that I have a new message on Facebook whenever I pick it up and turn it on. I don’t really need alerts from my phone telling me I have new messages on Facebook when I don’t. It’s kind of like when the phone rings and you pick it up, but there’s nobody there: annoying. Usually, when the phone rings, and there’s nobody on the line someone is using a computer to make a massive number of calls, and the computer guesses both how long the caller will be talking to the person before you and how long it will take you to answer the phone. If it guesses wrong on either point, when you answer the phone you get a dead line.

You may ask why I don’t turn on text messaging in Facebook, and why I don’t get a Facebook email address. I just don’t want to. The only text messaging service I use (and I use it infrequently) is the one that goes with Google Voice. Why? It’s free to the person who receives the message. Text messaging costs your cell phone company virtually nothing, but they charge you to get the message, not to send it. Yes, I could get cell phone service with unlimited texting, but I don’t like typing with my thumbs, and I don’t see any need for something faster than email.

I don’t need a Facebook email address because I already have too many email addresses. I have two from my ISP, two from Gmail, one from Yahoo, and one from work. I suppose I could have one from at least one of the colleges I’ve graduated from too. I also have too many more to count. Why is that? I own three domain names. The hosting company allows me 5,000 discrete email addresses for each of those. Among the three domains, I’ve assigned four email addresses, two to me, one to another member of my family and one to someone unrelated to us. So, I have 14,996 discrete email addresses left to assign. If I assign them all to me and if I’ve counted correctly, I can have 15,004 email addresses without accepting Facebook’s offer, or hitting up any other free email provider. Can you say “@aol.com” boys and girls? If 15,004 email addresses aren’t enough for me, I actually have an infinite number of unassigned email addresses. Any email sent to any of my domain names that isn’t already assigned gets forwarded to the existing account I’ve designated.

I don’t object to Facebook offering me an email address, but once I’ve ignored or skipped that message, I do object to Facebook nagging me about it.

Things I Know

It’s a good thing I didn’t win the Mega Millions lottery drawing on Friday. If I had won, I planned to deposit the check through the ATM at my local bank in an effort to figure out the largest transaction an ATM will handle. I’ve since learned that the huge check they present at the award ceremony is too wide to go into the little slot in the ATM, and if you fold it up it’s too thick to go in.

Three winning tickets were sold so the $640 million prize will be divided into three parts, one for each ticket. If any of the winning tickets came from office pools, those parts of the prize will be divided even further. That division is the first time I can remember the word only applied to the phrase “$213 million.”

According to Yahoo News a guy in Kansas named Bill Isles was struck by lightning last Thursday while buying tickets for the record Mega Millions jackpot, or shortly after buying them. Reports vary. Bill didn’t win so I guess the old adage is proven: You stand a better chance of being hit by lightning than winning the lottery jackpot. At least in Kansas you do.

I forgot something in my plans to win a big lottery jackpot. If I win, I will stop buying lottery tickets. It really is a sucker bet.

Without the Internet, I’d know that the CRT TV I dropped and broke the other day is heavy. Thanks to the Internet, I know it weighs 73 pounds. It’s in the truck and I’m taking it to the dump later this week, unless someone sees it and steals it for me.

Form really does follow function sometimes. When you look at a tiger, nobody needs to tell you it’s a predator.

Sure There’s No Chance, but What If You Did Win?

First prize in Friday night’s Mega Millions drawing is now projected at $540 million. That’s up from the $463 million first projected when nobody won the big prize in the last drawing. That number is the total of all annuity payments if you take it over the years. If you take a lump sum, it’s only about one-third of that, once all taxes (not just the withholding part) are taken care of. One hundred eighty million dollars, net after all taxes, taken as a lump sum, is still pretty damned lumpy. So a question around the water cooler this week is: “What would you do if you won?”

In accounting, there’s a concept called a material difference. In the example above, if the prize was actually $179,999,999.99, instead of $180,000,000.00, the missing penny wouldn’t make a material difference and you could ignore it. The odds of winning are about one in 175 million. So, you probably don’t need a plan any more than I do. I don’t expect to win. That would be a sign of mental illness that would probably go unnoticed by friends and acquaintances given all the other signs I have scattered around. Nevertheless, I can afford it and it amuses me to think about it, so I do buy the occasional ticket, I do check the numbers and I do have plans.

So many people have grand plans for who they’d give money to. Me? I’d keep it.

I’d try my best to collect anonymously and I’d hire a PR firm to keep my name out of the media as much as possible. I’d much rather be rich than rich and famous. I’d move, of course. I’d get a new, unlisted, phone number, and hook my present phone number up to voice mail or an answering machine. I’d also pay a lackey to delete all the messages without listening to them.

I’d jump on the bed. When I was a kid, I liked jumping on the bed, but my mom yelled at me that I’d probably break it. I’m now big enough that I’d certainly break it, but jumping on the bed was fun, and even though I would break it, with $180 million in the bank I could afford at least one other bed.

I’d take the check to the ATM at my local branch bank, and deposit it. I’ve always wondered what the biggest transaction an ATM machine can handle is, and it would be my chance to find out.

My wife, Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me) always says if she won, she’d throw away all of her clothes and go shopping in a sheet. So, I would buy a sheet, and hire a limo with a uniformed chauffeur to deliver said sheet to her at her job. I’d call my boss and tell him I’m not going to be at work today because I’m rich. I’d call in rich every day until I stopped laughing uncontrollably every time I did it. I’d install a video camera near the entrance to my former job so every morning I could record people I used to know heading to work. Then I’d watch it if I felt like it. I probably wouldn’t feel like it, but it would be nice to know it’s there.

With oil prices what they are today, I’d turn up the heat a little and go for a long drive in my truck.

I’d most likely buy a new laptop since the “b” key on this one is ecoming unrelia le.

I’d announce that I’m thinking of running for some important public office, but I wouldn’t run, and I wouldn’t think about running either. I’d just like to make a few people nervous.

I wouldn’t buy a car that screams, “I’m rich,” unless it also screamed “and you can’t catch me.” However, if I won on Friday night, I would be at the Barrett-Jackson auction in Florida next week, my wife would have at least one much newer car than she owns, and I would own a handful of much older cars than I now have.

My new house would have to have a porte-cochere, an indoor pool, a hot tub and anything my wife wanted. A porte-cochere, in case you don’t know, is a covered entryway that allows you to drive your car to the front door in the rain, get out and go inside without getting wet.

I’d buy some more music because once in a while my wife says to me, “Don’t you have enough music?” and I say, “No.” I’m sure you’ll agree with me that seven-thousand songs aren’t really enough.

I’d go on a little trip designed to see all major league baseball teams and every major league baseball stadium this summer. I’d take four more trips in order to determine which waterfront restaurants I liked best on the east coast, the gulf coast, the west coast and in Hawaii. I don’t think I could accomplish the last four by the end of this summer though.

There must be something else I’d do too, but I don’t need to come up with everything by the drawing Friday night at 11:00. I’d welcome suggestions on what to do, but not if they include giving money to or investing money in the suggester.

Finally, I want you to know I’d throw a huge party: I don’t want you to think you’ll be invited: I won’t guarantee I’ll show up either, but I do want you to know I’m throwing a big party if I win.

Things I Know

If every man, woman, and child in the United States was in one lottery pool for tonight’s Mega Millions drawing, and if we won, we’d each get a little over one dollar, before taxes! If I win, I’m going to take the check to the ATM at my local bank branch. I’ve always wondered what’s the largest dollar transaction those machines will handle.

Which reminds me, I was going to say ATM machine, but that would be redundant. The M in ATM stands for machine.

Actually, Mega Millions tonight is so much money that if you’re the only winner, you can have your newly-hired flunky ask that the president of your bank stop by your house, pick up the check, and deposit it for you.  He or she will probably do just that.

If you’re ever down in the dumps, and need a little lift, go to Youtube and put the following three words, “dog,” “soldier,” and “reunion” in the search box. You’ll get about a zillion videos. Or, for both dogs, and beloved family members, try www.welcomehomeblog.com. The videos may make you cry, but you’’ll feel a lot happier too.

Here’s a disturbing trend. When I bought my current shredder, it was powerful enough to shred most credit card offers and other junk mail without me having to open the envelope. I’ve had the shredder long enough for postal rates to go up substantially, but the credit card offers are getting thicker, and I now have to open most of them before shredding them.  I still don’t read them though.

The people who hold my mortgage confused me this month. Confusing me is such a small challenge that I don’t know why they bother. They sent me a statement telling me that my mortgage escrow was going up. I don’t like that, but it’s really no surprise. They also told me I have a shortage in my escrow account. That’s an annual event too because they won’t listen to me. I’ve tried, believe me. They included the shortage in the new monthly payment, and in the same envelope included a bill for the shortage. The way the whole thing is worded, if I didn’t pay attention I would have paid both. If I did pay both though, I probably wouldn’t have an escrow shortage next year.

Rue Britannica

The recently announced death of the print Encyclopedia Britannica reminds me I’m long-overdue for a confession. No, not my Easter duty, although that’s overdue too, but a confession of a different sort.

I haven’t worn a pocket protector since the Jurassic period when I found a girl willing to date me. I’m not a three-pen nerd like my friend Richard (not Feder) from New Jersey (not Ft. Lee), and now improved with an additional state. In my formative years, however, my recreational reading did include encyclopedias. Dictionaries too, I’m afraid. I even have my green CRC book of reference math tables around here somewhere. It’s with my slide rule, I’m sure: I can probably find both if I look hard enough. In case you’re wondering, of course, the green book has my name on the cover in gold leaf.

That is my confession. I was one of those nerdy kids who chose volumes at random, let them fall open where they would, and read articles, tables, etc., about whatever popped up. I read those articles whether I was interested in the subject or had even heard of it before the book popped open. And that’s important!

News reports suggested that the printed, leather-bound volumes of the Britannica became obsolete due to the Internet, particularly due to Google, and whatever search engines Google’s success haven’t driven out of business yet. That seems to be the case. I haven’t verified this independently, but I read that fewer than nine thousand sets of the Britannica sold in the last year for which figures are available. How many door-to-door salesmen could make a living on nine-thousand sets of encyclopedias?

The Internet is better at finding stuff you are interested in than the print version of the Encyclopedia Britannica ever was. Even Britannica still exists on the Internet. The world-wide web has its faults, though. Anyone can say anything, anonymously, without checking a single fact and without editing of any kind. So, if you want to rely on the Internet for information, you’d be smart to cross-check it with numerous sources. Directed searching is great on the Internet. Cutting and pasting are a lot easier for the fledgling elementary-school researcher than plagiarizing by hand ever was. You don’t even have to thumb through a bunch of pages to find stuff. Since you don’t have to thumb, you won’t come across anything interesting that you weren’t looking for.

That’s where the Internet isn’t better than an encyclopedia. If you can use it to surprise yourself as easily as you could use an encyclopedia, I haven’t discovered how yet. Even if you use a news aggregator to comb the web for all the stuff you’re interested in, it won’t find a single thing you might be interested in if only you were already aware of it. So the randomness of stumbling across something new, and interesting while browsing an encyclopedia is gone at worst or just invisible so far to me at best. That’s why I rue the passing of the printed Encyclopedia Britannica. I don’t roux its passing though because the leather covers would make the sauce I created using roux Britannica awfully lumpy.

Things I Know

Tuesday, not the day pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training, is the real first day of Spring, so happy Spring everyone.

I was trying to figure out how to support the new chandelier for my dining room while I wire it, and attach it to the ceiling, so I did a Google search for instructions. The almost universal advice from all across the Internet was to get someone else to hold it. My problem is I’m tall enough and strong enough to hold the chandelier, and I know how to wire it: my wife isn’t, isn’t, and doesn’t. The bracket that comes with many ceiling fans has a hook on it that you can use to support the fan while wiring it, but the bracket that came with my chandelier doesn’t. Maybe I’ll buy a fan bracket, and see whether I can hang the chandelier on that while I wire it.

Speaking of brackets, for several years I’ve noted that March Madness now spills over into April. I’m going to take that trend even farther and set an example by being mad all year long. You may ask yourself if by mad I mean angry or crazy. The answer is both.

I agree with almost everyone else who said for Rush Limbaugh to personally attack law student Sandra Fluke was wrong. That being said, there is no constitutional right to go through life unoffended although a lot of people seem to think there is one.

I’ve spoken before about how I buy a hand tool, lose it, buy another one, and then find the first one (and then rinse and repeat), so it came as no surprise to me that I now own at least 26 screwdrivers. That’s not counting those little jeweler’s screwdrivers. I have two complete sets of those, one in a black case, and one in a red case.

The Mega Millions jackpot on March 20th is $241 million. I’ve read that many lottery winners squander their prize money. In the extremely unlikely event that I win $241 million, I’m going to try to squander it.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

How did you observe Pi day? You know, 3/14, the day that celebrates the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter which is about 3.14. That’s why it’s observed on 3/14 you see. I celebrated it with vanilla ice cream on top. Evidently enough people celebrated by going to www.piday.org to learn more about pi that when I tried, the page wouldn’t load.

If it were daylight savingS time, wouldn’t it also be eastern standardS time?

How can something be both new, and improved? If it’s really new, it hasn’t had time to be changed (in order to improve it) yet, has it?

Did you see the video on the Internet of two cute penguins on a Delta Airlines flight? Don’t those penguins have to be able to fit underneath the seat in front of their owners?

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Can’t you be against the government paying for everyone’s birth control without calling anyone a slut or a prostitute?

Some ultra-conservatives are arguing that birth control shouldn’t be widely available no matter who pays for it. I haven’t talked to Bill Baird in a very long time, but wasn’t the issue of contraception settled in this country in the 1970’s? If you don’t know who Bill Baird is, look him up. He must be close to 80 years old and March 22 is the 40th anniversary of a US Supreme Court decision involving him. Baird is both a birth control, and an abortion advocate. I know people who agree with him on one, but not the other.

I agree with those who say that the personal attack Rush Limbaugh leveled on Sandra Fluke was wrong. Still, which amendment to the US Constitution is the one that guarantees that nobody will ever be offended? I missed that one.

Why do they call them ticker-tape parades, when they don’t even have ticker tape anymore?

Do dead possums ever play live?

Does the tooth fairy ever take somebody’s dentures by mistake?

Things I Know

If you are an adult male wearing a tuxedo on stage at the Oscars or any other award show, and you wear a hat on an indoor stage, you are calling attention to your baldness, not disguising it.

My son got a job three months ago, so I can tell the economy is improving, but it isn’t improving fast enough. Therefore, I’m appalled that birth control has become a major campaign issue. I wish all the Republican candidates for President would take a page from former President Bill Clinton. Republican candidates, repeat after me (and after President Clinton too): It’s the economy stupid.

Right after I commented that Congress hadn’t dealt with the expiring payroll tax rate reduction, they did. I believe the two events are unrelated. I don’t believe any member of Congress has read what I write since I stopped working for Congress during the second half of the twentieth century.

For various reasons I won’t go into, painting the inside of my house is taking a lot longer than I anticipated. Except for minor touch ups, I have now finished the dining room. I have a little electrical work to do, mostly involving selecting and installing a light fixture.

Today the dining room: Tomorrow the guest room.

One thing I’ve learned is that for a typical do-it-yourself paint job, buying paint in five-gallon buckets is a bad idea. Latex paint is heavier than water so, including the bucket, and the lid, I estimate five-gallon buckets of latex paint weigh 55-60 pounds. If you don’t think that’s heavy, try lifting one, and try pouring from one without spilling anything. Plus, if you don’t use it up quickly, theres more space inside the partially filled bucket for dry flakes of paint to form, then drop into the paint, and mess up your nice, smooth finish.

I don’t know for certain that the New York State Real Property Tax Law is the worst one in all the fifty states, but after working with it again last week, I find it hard to believe it isn’t.

I wrote a lot of stuff about the Grammy Awards, but I didn’t get around to posting it. It’s no longer germane, so I won’t post it. Once you die, your situation hardly ever changes, so I think that coverage of the death of an important celebrity, and Whitney Houston is just one example, is usually overblown, especially if said celebrity dies on what’s known in the business as a slow news day. It went so far, and was in such bad taste that I even saw an article that speculated on what actor would get the kind of publicity Whitney Houston’s death got if said actor died right before tonight’s Oscar awards.

I’m not terribly interested in the Oscars, because I believe the last movie I saw in a theater was about Rocky and Bullwinkle. I am, however, looking forward to Spring Training baseball games on the radio. Among the things I find most relaxing is washing, and waxing the car while listening to a baseball game on the radio. Once baseball games are on the radio you can hasten the change of seasons by driving around with your car windows down, and a game on. Spreading the baseball around helps spread the warm weather baseball causes around too.

Friday was the fourth anniversary of this blog, but I didn’t have anything profound to say about it, so I didn’t say anything about it. Perhaps, despite my best efforts, I am maturing at least a little. On Tuesday, I will probably not have anything profound to say about Leslie’s birthday, but I will pause, and remember. I can’t remember people’s names, but humiliating moments in my life are easy to recall, no matter how long ago they happened.

Things I Know

I hope now we can start talking about baseball. Nine days to pitchers, and catchers.

If Jeremy Lin is going to insist on being the newest NBA sensation, he needs to learn to speak into the microphone at news conferences.

The Giants won the Superbowl.

I don’t think they even have ticker tape anymore, so I recommend they change the name of ticker-tape parades.

Sir Paul McCartney has been one of the most famous people in the world for 48 years now. He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 9, 2012.

Attention State of California: Yes, I would like your 214-page vacation guide; no, I won’t give you my phone number. You don’t need it to send me the guide, but you won’t send it to me if I don’t supply it. I won’t supply it, hence no vacation guide for me.

We’ve already established that I need five utility knives, and four retractable metal measuring tapes for me to know where at least one is at any given time. I recently established that I need two saws of the kind you use to cut holes in wall board to know where one of those is. Right now, I know where both of them are. I needed to cut a hole for an electrical box and couldn’t find the first saw. No wonder. It was in a storage box in the attic, not on a pegboard in the basement where it belongs.

Here’s another tip about what are called old-work electrical boxes. You need a level to cut the hole because you dont want the box to be crooked on the wall. If it’s new work, the wall studs should be plumb, and square.  You attach the boxes to the studs before you install wallboard, so you need a level to install the wall, but not to install the electrical boxes.

Repainting my dining room reinforces what I already knew: The people who lived here before we moved in couldn’t mud wallboard very well. I don’t know why, but I can’t do it anywhere near as well as I once could either.

Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever found a home repair the former owners of my house did that was done correctly.

My cell phone only works from the battery. If the battery dies and you plug it in to recharge it, the phone still doesn’t work until the battery has achieved a specific level of charge. It won’t work if it’s plugged in and the battery’s removed either.

Speaking of batteries, it wasn’t a dead one of those that kept me from starting my Toyota. I couldn’t jump it to start it either. When I get it to run, I’m going to sell it. It’s a low-mileage Corolla. But since it’s 21-years-old, the low mileage is 152-thousand.

Some battery chargers you can buy for cars won’t charge the car’s battery if it’s completely dead. It needs a little charge in it or some chargers won’t work at all.

Last Saturday in this space, I mentioned that I hadn’t heard of Congress discussing extending the reduced rate for social security payroll taxes again even though it’s due to expire at the end of this month. I heard about it this week. Same story as last time.

That Inconvenient Dedicated Tax

Since it is now early February, everyone who gets a paycheck has gone through at least one pay period under the reduced social security tax the congress passed and the president signed just about as late as possible in late December. Reckless is a good way to describe how the US Senate, and the US House approached extending that payroll tax reduction

During the debate, the Republicans in the House were correct that a two-month extension was no way to deal with tax policy, but voting against it would have been incredibly bad PR, so they acquiesced. Now, a little over a month later, we have a little less than a month to do it again. Have you heard any talk about another extension? Neither have I.

FICA is what the government calls it instead of Social Security tax. It stands for Federal Insurance Contribution tax. Reducing that tax was a bad idea in the first place. I know it was intended to fuel the economy by putting as much as $40 per pay period into lots of people’s hands, but let’s face it, $40 a paycheck is not a huge amount of stimulus.

Reducing the income tax would not have worked in the same, simple way because a lot of people don’t pay income taxes, but everyone who works on the books does pay the FICA, or Social Security tax. Cutting that tax was a bad idea because it’s the only tax dedicated to paying for Social Security benefits, and Social Security is severely under-funded if it’s going to meet the obligations we don’t even need an actuary to see coming.

Dedicated taxes are the ones that any government passes for a specific purpose. The FICA tax to pay for Social Security is one. The federal tax on gasoline is another as are lottery proceeds earmarked to support education as New York and some other states do. Dedicated taxes are good politically because they are more palatable to the electorate than most other taxes. Would you pay a gasoline tax to have a good interstate highway system? How about a Social Security tax to provide retirement and disability benefits? Or your local government may tell you it has to raise property taxes to hire more cops, and firemen or to avoid laying off the ones you already have.

So what’s the problem? Needs change and so do the sources of the taxes. At first, the gasoline tax went to pay for federal highways like US 1 and US 101 or interstate highways like I-95 and I-5. But when most of the highways were built, the tax collected too much money. Did Congress reduce the tax? No. It siphoned some of it off to pay for mass transit, and for highway maintenance. Then, the gasoline crisis hit so people bought more fuel-efficient cars. Even though gas prices went up, tax revenue went down. That’s why there are some in Congress now trying to come up with a way to charge us by the number of miles we drive each year, rather than by the amount of gasoline we consume.

In the case of Social Security, when the program started in the thirties as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, most people died before or just after they reached retirement age, there were a lot fewer people in the USA, and the ratio of workers to retirees was a lot higher than it is now. Today, we have twice as many people in the USA, a larger percentage of them than before are retired versus still working, and far too many are unemployed, so they’re not paying either.

In other words, expenses have grown much faster than revenue, and every projection shows that trend will continue. Therefore, both houses of Congress, and the President in their extremely finite wisdom, teamed up to cut the tax without cutting the expenditures or providing another way to pay for Social Security. What would your family’s balance sheet look like if that’s the way you ran your finances?

To make up for difference, the government prints more money. If each of us did that, we’d go to jail, but it’s legal for Uncle Sam. The reduced payroll tax may stimulate the economy. It doesn’t look like it from where I sit, but maybe it does. Printing more money does cause inflation. That’s down the road a bit folks, but it’s coming, trust me. When inflation does arrive, it will wipe out either all or part of the stimulus that the Social Security tax cut is creating, if it is creating one which is arguable.

I’m against dedicated taxes in general, but I’m against lowering this one in particular because even before it was lowered, it didn’t bring in enough money to pay for the programs it was already supposed to pay for. You may have noticed through all of this that I haven’t mentioned the so-called Social Security Trust Fund. That’s because there isn’t one. All of the Social Security taxes go into the general treasury.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

When I read that CBS is resurrecting the show “Person to Person,” it led me to wonder if they’re resurrecting Edward R. Murrow too.

Have we reached the point in this country where you have to cheat on your spouse in order to run for public office? If so, that’s one more reason I’ll never run.

Attention iTunes programmers: I don’t want the program to automatically download anything, so how (other than giving the program the information it wants) can I stop it from asking me twice to sign in every time I open the program to listen to some music?

When I turn on my Android phone, it says “DROID!” quite loudly in a strange voice that sounds as if it might be machine generated. Does anyone here know how to turn that off? The voice, not the phone. I know how to turn the phone off. I thought maybe I could replace the sound file that generates the word with a sound file that’s silent, but I can’t locate the appropriate file.

Since they have Caterpillar earth-moving equipment, why have I never seen any Moth or Butterfly earth-moving equipment? It seems as if it would be a natural progression to me.

Has the TV Show “Cheers” really been off the air for so long that when you hear that song on TV, you think of State Farm Insurance and not the show?

Grey Goose Vodka is now running a TV commercial that uses the song “C’est Ci Bon.” The song is over 50 years old and, like its title, the entire lyric is written in French. This makes me wonder what demographic Grey Goose intends the ad to appeal to when vodka is generally thought of as Russian, and advertisers typically want to appeal to an audience fewer than 54 years of age because advertising agencies think older people aren’t influenced very much by commercials.

Things I Know

As she resigns from Congress today, and we honor Rep. Giffords for her courageous battle to recover from the gunshot to her head, let’s also take a moment to remember the other victims, the ones who died, like the little girl, the man who died shielding his wife, the young man from Rep. Giffords’ staff, all of them.

I’ve been to Las Vegas twice. I’m not a big drinker, I don’t gamble either, but I like the shows and the fancy hotels. One thing I like that surprised me is the fancy bathrooms in the nicest hotels. It’s not that I spend a lot of time in them; it’s just that the bathrooms in most hotels aren’t all that nice at all so the ones in the large strip hotels look even more extravagant than they are by comparison.

My latest genius entrepreneurial idea is as follows: a service that will deliver prepared meals to people trapped in the waiting rooms of orthopedists.

I’ve seen a couple of rants recently against touch screens in cars. This reminded me that I wanted to rant about the same thing. Why? Because you have to look at the touch screen to use it, and while you’re looking at the touch screen, you can’t be looking at the road. I don’t think the head unit in my truck could do quite as much if it had to rely on buttons, but I would like to return to buttons for radio presets.

Last weekend, a Boy Scout troop I’m associated with went camping. When we returned to our cars, someone had written a racial epithet in the snow on the windshield. It doesn’t matter what camp because I’m sure that the camp staff didn’t do it, and the council that runs the camp didn’t condone it either. I emailed the camp’s Scout Executive about the incident, and received an appropriate reply. The funny thing is when I first emailed the man through the Boy Scouts’ email server the software wouldn’t even accept the complaint because I used the verboten word. So I had to complain a second time without being as specific about what happened.

I don’t know if I like that or not because I’m generally against censorship. I know the Boy Scouts of America don’t approve of the word, and that’s good, but they didn’t use it and I only used it to complain about it.

It was such a hateful and ignorant thing to do that the only thing that encourages me about the person who actually did it is that he spelled the word right.

I read that Kim Kardashian has an Internet search alert that tells her whenever her name appears on the Internet. So, Kim honey, if you read this enjoy. It doesn’t say anything bad about you. It doesn’t say anything good either, but it doesn’t say anything bad.

I have commented before on some of the surprising words that are included in MS Word’s dictionary, even proper nouns like Mandelbrot and Asimov. I’m happy to report that MS Word doesn’t recognize Kardashian as a word.

Things I Know

In case you didn’t think so, and since I forgot to mention it for two weeks, the Sisyphus project is also copyrighted 2012.  All rights continue to be reserved.

At some time in the history of television, some show business professional fortunate enough to win an award must have made an entertaining acceptance speech. However, while flipping in and out of the Golden Globes, hoping to see Ricky Gervais say something really inappropriate, I can’t think of one tonight.

As long as I’m talking about award shows, if you win an award, and you’d like to thank someone, don’t tell us that you’d like to, just thank them. Telling us you’d like to thank them takes three extraneous words that someone else has surely already said.

Every politician, or almost every one, knows that if you try to thank everyone, you’ll forget someone. That’s why most of them don’t try. Actors, directors, producers, etc., should know the same thing.  I hope they do know it someday.

I’ve known for a long time, and said here before that the older you get the older both young and old get. I’ve also said that growing older means having to explain things to grownups. Last Thursday night, I hung around for a few hours in Midtown Manhattan with a group of students who now attend a university I once attended. As I left that party, I realized that the older you get the MORE stuff you have to explain to grownups.

It didn’t surprise me to find out there is a place in midtown Manhattan called “Peep World” (and while I didn’t go inside, I don’t think it sells baby chicks). Since I walked past it on Thursday night, if my reader needed to know where it was, hypothetically of course, I could now tell him or her.

I thought it only got as windy as it was here on Friday and Saturday on days I put those lightweight plastic garbage cans out on the curb to blow away, but Friday and Saturday proved to me that I was wrong about that. The cans apparently don’t cause the wind after all.

I may be the last person in the world to do this, but I finally programmed my telephone for a personal ringtone. It took me a while to realize this, but personalized ringtones are actually useful as well as, of course, annoyingly cute. If you’re in a room with a hundred people, and you hear a noise, you’ll know either the phone call is for you or Doctor Who has just shown up in his TARDIS.

Oh God! Not only does the spell-checker in MS Word know how to spell TARDIS, it knows it’s an acronym, so every letter should be capitalized.

If she hadn’t died in 1971, Toughie Brasuhn would be 88 years old on Tuesday. If you don’t already know, you don’t care, so there’s really no need to look it up. But I thought to look it up because I couldn’t sleep last Tuesday morning and at 1:00 AM, modern-day Roller Derby was on Cablevision Channel 22. They didn’t say, but I’m pretty sure it no longer comes from the 69th Regiment Armory.

Kodak

I must be prescient: I do know how to spell it.

The weekend before Christmas I attended the graduation at Cornell where my niece received what she earned, a BS degree. I met her roommates, one of whom is an optical engineer, and is thinking of going to the University of Rochester because she says it has an excellent graduate program in that field. I asked her if she thought the university would be able to continue to afford that program if Kodak went bankrupt. I still don’t know the answer to that question, but we may soon find out. Not quite three weeks later, the Wall Street Journal said Kodak is preparing for, and may soon declare bankruptcy.

Kodak is a company that didn’t react quickly enough to changing technology. You may think I’m talking about digital cameras, and I am, in part. However, years before digital cameras, Fuji mounted a challenge to Kodak in manufacturing photographic films. Kodak’s lack of reaction to Fuji eventually meant that Fuji film first became the equal of Kodak and then better than the photographic pioneer’s products.

I hope that somehow Kodak can still pull things together. Its downfall is really too bad. Not only has the company been a major employer in Rochester, it’s also been a marvelous corporate citizen, contributing to many, many good causes in that part of New York State.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

What’s your New Year resolution? My New Year resolution is not to make any New Year resolutions. That’s been my only resolution for a long time now, and I have no trouble keeping it.

Do Orthodox Christians celebrate New Year’s Day thirteen days later than the rest of us too?

It didn’t take Verizon Wireless very long to back down from that two-dollar charge for making one-time payments on line, did it? I believe they can hear us now, don’t you?

Have you seen the TV commercial for a product called Hot Booties? They’re slippers and the soles that contain linseeds. According to the spot, you put them in the microwave oven, and when you take them out they keep your feet warm. The commercial even shows steam rising from the fresh-out-of-the-oven Hot Booties. That leads me to ask, do they come with their own dedicated microwave?

When it comes right down to it, aren’t we all feckless? I mean, do you know anyone who owns even one single feck? Feck actually was once a word (it could be a noun or a verb), but most references list it as obsolete now.

Just exactly how American is apple pie anyway?

Have you seen those battery-operated finish nailers? The ones you can use without an air compressor? Did you know they cost at least as much, if not more than a compressor, and a nailer?  Since you don’t have to lift up the compressor every time you drive a nail, the cordless ones are heavier than the pneumatic tool, and therefore more tiring to use too.

Things I Know

Have a happy New Year everyone: That’s New Year, not New Years.

My dad retired from the New York City Police Department when I was six years old. Even at that young age, I knew he detested dealing with the drunks while he was on duty as a uniformed cop on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. At that very young age, his hatred of New York City’s iconic New Year’s Eve celebration impressed me so much that even when I was a teenager, I never wanted to be in Times Square on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop from what used to be the NY Times building.

I occasionally comment on this blog about the correct way to handle crisis PR. If you want to see how to bring the entire Internet down on your head, then handle the crisis PR yourself and do it horribly wrong, Google either of the following two terms: “Paul Christoforo,” or “Ocean Marketing.”

One thing that will happen in 2012 is the beginning of the end of incandescent light bulbs. They use a lot more energy to produce light than some newer technology does. On the other hand, they’re a lot cheaper to buy than the new technology. It’s not against the law to buy or use them, but it’s against the law to make certain wattage incandescent bulbs going forward.

Judging by what I’ve seen this week on TV, we’re going to have to deal with a lot of “documentaries” about the Mayan calendar that stops on December 21st, 2012. Lots of people have predicted the end of the world and nobody has been right so far. I predict that trend will continue, so when I take down my Christmas decorations next week, I’m going to put them away, not throw them away.

If I can’t figure out how to stop Google Music from launching when it wants instead of when I want, I’m going to delete it from my computer sometime in January.

Even though the post office raised the first class postage rate to 45 cents, they raised the rate for post card stamps from 29 to 32 cents. This means that the post office remains one of the few American institutions that continue to push for the use of pennies.

I think we could do away with pennies, nickels and dimes. About the only thing I’ve bought with a quarter recently was time at a parking meter.

There are two ways to be a successful broadcaster. Either learn the craft and do it better than anyone else, or do something compelling and entirely different from anyone else. In the second category was New York broadcaster Lynn Samuels. Lynn had a grating voice and a strong New York accent, both antithetical to the usual standard for broadcasters, and in a time of conservative talk radio she was a liberal with a decidedly independent stance. With that against her, she was smart, honest, funny, and well worth listening to. She once broadcast on WABC radio in New York, and was most recently heard on Sirius satellite radio. Lynn died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve, long before she ran out of things to say. Sad.

Rachel Redux

And before I get started, let me say that I’m surprised MS Word’s spell-checker doesn’t recognize the term redux. I mean the MS Word spell-checker knows Mandelbrot, so why not redux?

I heard from Rachel again around 2:40 this afternoon. You know, the robocalling voice from Cardholder Services. Honey, if you’re reading this, I’m not falling for it. I won’t buy anything from you, or anyone else who tries to sell me something over the phone. If you buy something from these people, it only encourages a practice that needs no encouragement.

The rest of you, just haven’t done enough to stop this since I first posted about Rachel on December 15th. If you need more ideas than I suggested previously, try signing on to www.youtube.com and searching for telemarketer. There, you will find numerous recordings of Tom Mabe’s classic telemarketer prank. Mr. Mabe has made at least two CD’s of calls from telemarketers who then received his off-beat reactions. The classic prank involves Mr. Mabe telling the telemarketer that he’s called a crime scene, the guy he wants to talk to has been murdered, and the cop he’s talking to is going to call him in for questioning.

Since I have a terribly bad memory for names, another one I found on You Tube amused me a lot. The recipient of the call engaged the telemarketer for a few moments and then told her, that he had a bad memory and had forgotten why he called her. If you want a good laugh, Google the term “telecrapper 2000.” That’s where I found the particular You Tube video, and other funny things too.

I had a telezapper when they first came out, but it died in a few years, and I didn’t replace it. They’re still available, but there are also more sophisticated robocall blockers available now. I haven’t tried it, but I’ve read that pressing the # key sometimes causes telemarketing systems to drop your number from their call list.

And here’s a warning. On the weekend before Christmas, I stayed in a Hilton Hotels property, in this case, a Homewood Suites. I liked the hotel a lot, but from my experience since then, and from the things I’ve been reading on the Internet if you stay at a Hilton property, it appears you’re likely to get called by Hilton’s “Grand Vacation Club” which sells timeshares. I’m on the federal no call list which kind of tells all telemarketers that I’m not interested. Yet, one of the exemptions to that no call law is for people who have a business relationship with you. Hilton seems to interpret this as meaning that if I stayed in their hotel they have a relationship that allows them to call me and try to sell me a timeshare. The lady asked me if I was married, single or cohabiting. I said yes. She asked me again and I asked her why that was any of her business. She said she wanted to provide me with a trip to Las Vegas. I told her I am not interested. If that doesn’t work, I can always call the Homewood Suites I stayed at, and tell them they have a relationship that enables me to never patronize Hilton hotels again if they keep calling.

While I have had the same telephone number for more than 30 years, in the future, I’m going to give all businesses my Google phone number so that I can filter their subsequent calls.

Whether its a robocaller or a human telemarketer, I know that telemarketing provides jobs. However, the very concept is annoying, and an invasion of privacy. So I urge you not to buy anything from telemarketers, and either mess with them, or do what you can to block their calls, or all three.

Things I Know

Christmas is great, but it’s even better when there are young children around to enjoy it with.

I’ve bought my wife, Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me), a lot of nice presents over the years, and a few silly ones. I told you about the chocolate turkeys I once got her for Valentine’s Day, but Christmas reminds me of more. Once, I rented a present. I bought a VCR and rented the video tape of a movie she liked. I presented the rented movie wrapped up as a gift. When I bought a new garbage can at Christmas time, I put it next to the tree as a present for her. Of course, I put all of her other presents, nicely wrapped, inside. This year, for Christmas, I got her a new squeegee. She keeps one in the car to wipe dew off the windows when she goes out in the morning, but the one she has is old and grungy. So, I bought her a new one, and because she’s short, I got her one with a longer handle. How do you gift-wrap a squeegee? I don’t know, so I just put a red bow on it and put it under the tree. She laughed and making her laugh was my own present to myself.

By the way, I think the secret to our long, successful marriage is I don’t leave and I don’t let her leave either.

I have to apologize to my daughter. She got me what I asked for this Christmas, a lens hood for a new lens I bought for my camera. Unfortunately, I wrote down the wrong model and it doesn’t fit the right model, so one of us will have to take it back and exchange it for the right one.

I read a few months ago that public schools in lots of states are no longer teaching cursive writing or script as it’s sometimes called. The idea is that very few people use script for writing anymore. I think they’re right. Except for signing my name, I think the last time I wrote in script was last year when I filled out Christmas cards. Hand writing them this year seemed strange, and my handwriting has never won any prizes, but with lack of practice, it is getting worse.

Winter started the other day so it is now appropriate to look forward to both spring and baseball spring training: February 18th is the first day for pitchers and catchers to work out for at least two major league teams, the Twins and the Cardinals. That’s fewer than two months, so let the countdown begin!

The wood inside the walls of my 103-year-old house (lath, beams, rafters, studs, headers, etc.) is so hard that I can’t drive screws into it without pre-drilling them. I’m painting the dining room and before applying the paint, I have to fix the nails that have popped out and repair any cracks too.

I’m kind of out of practice at using Spackle or other wall repair compounds. If I was as good as I used to be, this would be going a lot faster.

When placing doors, windows, molding, etc., you should always leave yourself enough room to get the necessary finishing tools like wallboard knives, and paint brushes next to them to take care of the exposed walls. I already knew that, but I didn’t do that.

For some places, like behind the toilet, the best way to protect what you don’t want to paint is plastic food wrap.

I have a ten-foot-tall holly at one corner of my house. I planted it there when it was a foot tall to become part of my Christmas decorations. I light it like a Christmas tree. I’d post a picture, but I haven’t pruned it in the last couple of years and it’s not very cone-shaped right now. I have a 15-foot-tall holly in my back yard. I found that when it was tiny, growing as a weed under one of the shrubs next to my house. So, if there’s one thing I know how to do, apparently it’s how to grow holly. I guess there’s a future waiting for me as a holly farmer if I choose to pursue it.

I’ve mentioned before that the spelling and grammar checkers in Microsoft Word have no idea how to discern the correct use of the word “its” and the contraction “it’s.” Today, I suggest that Microsoft programmers either get a clue about that or stop trying to make the distinction at all. To be of some help, “it’s” is the possessive form and means belonging to it, while “its” is the plural of it. That was my weak attempt at a joke. I know both of the definitions I just provided are wrong.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Is the world really going to end this time next year, or did the Mayans just go out of business (due to a hostile takeover by Spain) before they could publish a sequel to that famous calendar?

Can somebody please explain to me why some of the packages I order on line sit around my local post office for two days before they’re delivered? According to the tracking data they provide, a package I ordered arrived at my local post office on Monday and was slated for delivery on Wednesday.

There is a small community off Rte 17 in upstate NY called Fishs Eddy. I’m reminded of it because I drove past it over the weekend. Shouldn’t it have an apostrophe in its name, or another “e?”

If you’re in the express checkout line at the supermarket, do you mind if the person in front of you has more than the approved number of items? I hate it! If I ran a supermarket, and you got on the line with too many items, I’d check out the number allowed, and tell you to go stand on the line again.

If you were looking for a recipe for Sushi, would you find one in a cookbook? I mean Sushi isn’t cooked, right?

Do on-line merchants start their post-Christmas sales after Christmas, or after they can no longer guarantee delivery of presents by Christmas?

I’m pretty sure we won’t have a white Christmas on Long Island, but if it stays as warm as it has been for much longer, do you think we can have fresh, home-grown tomatoes?

Things I Know

This is the ugliest carpet I’

I contend that the ugliest rugs in the world can be found in hotel hallways. I think it’s probably because a pattern like this will hide dirt, and stains pretty well.

I visited Cornell University over the weekend to see my niece graduate. I also picked up a new Cornell sweatshirt (I now have three, two reds, and a blue). My wife said I’m not allowed to wear the new one while painting the house. I also picked up a new Cornell tie to replace the gravy-stained one. It would have been cheaper to order both over the Internet from the campus store, but I was proud to see my niece graduate, and we all had a nice time.

While we were in Ithaca, I took my wife to see the local Wegman’s Supermarket. Now, she wants to move upstate, not to Ithaca, to Wegman’s.

You’ve lived with an interior paint job for years, and think it looks fine. They, you decide to repaint the room, just to change the color, of course. The walls are wrecked! I have a couple of days of Spackling to do in my dining room, and hope I can finish painting it before Christmas.

I capitalized “Spackling,” by the way, because it is a trade name, and it has so much of the market the company is probably in danger of losing the trademark. And, yes, I did use Spackle for my Spackling job.

I hate everyone who is more organized than I am. In other words, I hate almost everyone.

The lady in front of me in the express line at the supermarket must have had close to 100 items. For one thing, she practically bought out the canned cat food line. Hey, it was on sale. I know it doesn’t work, but I still wish something awful would happen to people like that who abuse the limits in supermarket express checkout lines.

Usually, when someone says an investment lost money, they mean that the investment isn’t worth what it once was. In the case of MF Global, apparently the now bankrupt investment firm really did lose $1.2 billion. My best guess: somebody or a bunch of somebodies stole it. I don’t think you can have $1.2 billion in bad bookkeeping. If you have that kind of money, you’d hire accountants who are too good to lose $1.2 billion, in other words, you’d hire virtually any accountants who hadn’t done time for embezzlement.

If they really did lose the money, my wife is very good at finding my stuff, and I’m sure she would be willing to look for the money for a percentage of what she finds.

Anne Coulter turned 50 recently. For those of you befuddled by Ms. Coulter, it helps to remember, she’s not a political commentator; she’s a performance artist.

If you are walking around the supermarket, and chatting a mile a minute with nobody near you, many people will think you’re on the phone if you’re wearing a Bluetooth headset. However, I’ll still think you’re talking to yourself, and you’re nuts.

Rachel from Cardholder Services

I have a theory that Rachel from Cardholder Services isn’t really working for a company called Cardholder Services, and she isn’t working for a telemarketing company calling on behalf of that company either. I think Rachel is working on behalf of telephone companies to encourage people to buy caller-ID services.

Rachel has called me three times in the past two days. I’m not that starved for human contact: It’s a Christmas present I really don’t need. I’m a little surprised that when I Googled “Rachel from Cardholder Services” I only got 42,400 hits. I’m not surprised that when I looked through the first two pages of the Google list, I didn’t find anyone praising her, and expressing the joy they feel whenever she calls (and she does call frequently). I find it hard to believe that annoying the vast majority of potential customers is an effective marketing strategy, but I guess it must be or they wouldn’t keep doing it.

I know being on the federal no call list doesn’t work to stop the calls. I know talking to a representative, telling them I’m on the federal no call list, and asking to be removed from their list doesn’t work. I’m told that dropping your land line doesn’t work either because they do call cell phones although that’s against the law too. I know selecting #2 so they won’t be calling me again doesn’t work. I’m told that if you talk to them, and ask for the contact information so you can send them a don’t call letter and begin suing them results in them hanging up on you although I haven’t tried that yet. I’ve heard the Federal Trade Commission got a multi-million-dollar judgement against the people they think are doing it, and that hasn’t worked either.

As 2011 comes to a close, I have a long list of people I’d like to annoy in 2012. Does anyone here know how I can contact Rachel? She must work inexpensively because I’m sure the number of people who buy Cardholder Services services is very low compared to the number of annoying phone calls she, and the company she works for place. Seriously, I’m plenty annoying on my own when I want to be, and if I’m not annoying enough, I’m related to more than one lawyer so I can always call on family for help. But I would like to stop Rachel.

So, here’s my suggestion with props to www.419eater.com. That website began as a way to go after the Nigerian email scam that tried to convince naïve people that a Nigerian government official or banker needed their help to smuggle money out of that country, and that the emailer was willing to share large amounts of money with the gullible subject in order to accomplish this. They now go after other scams too. The person or people who run that website, and the people who send suggestions to them share ways in which they waste the time of the Nigerian scammers. By the way, I don’t even know if the scammers are Nigerian. I only know they say they are. They may not be. They’re scammers after all. Reading 419eater.com is entertaining. People trying to waste scammers’ time can be very creative. 419eater.com, however, deals mostly with email scams, not annoyance phone calls.

Let’s waste Rachel’s time and the time of her cohorts who pick up the phone if you press the right button. Press the right button to talk to a representative. Be cordial. Engage the person on the other end of the phone. Ask them if they know that George Washington wasn’t born on his birthday. See if you can get them to send you something in writing or give you a call back number so you’ll have more to identify them when you file a formal complaint with the FTC. If they ask how you are, tell them you have terminal cancer, or that although the doctors amputated your leg, it still feels like it’s there, and it still hurts. Tell them that your children are being really nasty to you, and trying to rob you of your millions, or that your dog just died, and you’re really, really sad. Tell them you have to talk quickly or the attendant at the mental hospital will make you hang up the phone. Maybe even breathe heavily into the phone, but don’t descend into obscenity-laced ranting. Don’t threaten them either. I believe obscene phone calls and threats of violence are illegal, and you don’t want to break the law yourself. Ask them to hold on for a minute while you go answer the door. Tell them you’re glad they called because it gives you the opportunity to ask them if they’ve accepted the Lord, Jesus Christ as their personal God, and Savior. Be creative folks. I can’t think of everything.

In other words, waste their time. Instead of hanging up every time they call, see if you can get them to hang up every time you call. If it takes them ten minutes to deal with everyone they call, and nobody buys what they’re selling, they’ll have to stop eventually. I’m depending on you dear readers. And if that doesn’t work, maybe we can get anonymous or 4chan to take thwarting Rachel from Cardholder Services on as a cause.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Is “bookkeeping” the only word in the English language with three double letters in a row?

According to the Wall Street Journal, Sears Holdings Corp. owner of Sears and K-Mart lost $421 million in the quarter ending October 31st. Some retail analysts think the company is planning to milk its stores, sell its respected brands, and then sell off the real estate, and get out of retail. If Sears does go out of business, what happens to the lifetime guarantee on all my Craftsman tools?

How did Santa handle the naughty, and nice list before we had computerized databases, and tracking cookies?

Can you remember the last time you chewed gum? I can’t remember the last time I did.

Has any supermarket anywhere ever had 2-liter bottles of Coke, and Pepsi on sale the same week?

Do you think my wife will buy it if I tell her I need a compressor, and a couple of nail guns to build radiator covers and book cases? More importantly, will she let me buy the kit?

Are there really very few people who want bubble lights on their Christmas trees? The reason I ask is that the replacement lights are getting harder, and harder to find. The hardware store down the street used to stock them, but stopped two years ago, and bubble lights burn out faster than any other Christmas decoration I have.

Things I Know

I don’t suppose it’s national news, but there’s a cheating scandal over SAT scores here on Lawn Guy Land. Some high school students supposedly paid some college students to take the exam for them. As I understand it, one of the fraudulent test takers received several hundred dollars to achieve a combined score of 1,920 out of 2,400 on the test. As I figure it, that’s a solid B. I got 1,500 on the test when the highest possible score was 1,600. I’d be happy to take the test for others except for two things: I’m too old to pass for a high school student; and taking the SAT for someone else is a felony, at least where I live.

In the last item, MS Word’s grammar checker objected to my use of the contraction “it’s,” but would have allowed me to substitute “it is.” Sometimes it tells me both “it’s,” and “its” are wrong, but it has never told be both are correct.

It’s a little early to conduct the voting, but the current TV commercial for Fruit of the Loom t-shirts has to be considered a front runner for stupidest commercial of the year.

Pillsbury is advertising its cinnamon rolls on TV as containing Cinnabon cinnamon. That’s fine, but on those rare occasions that I go to Cinnabon, it’s not for the cinnamon, it’s for the gooey, sticky white icing.

Speaking of cinnamon, I’ve been experimenting with adding it to my oatmeal. I got up to two heaping teaspoons full, and I could barely taste it. At that rate, I don’t think I’ll continue to raise the stakes.

Thinking I would like it, my daughter bought me a geek present from a vendor on Etsy.com. I do like it, so I was looking through the website for something else and found a “blue screen of death” t-shirt. As one more proof that there’s always someone who doesn’t get it, the shirt comes in 14 colors, and only three of them are blue.

Vacuum cleaner is a peculiar term, because a vacuum is clean by definition. However, vacuum cleaner or shop vacuum for home use is a very simple tool, usually easy to repair. My wife’s family kept an upright Hoover going for 40 years or more. I had to clean the powered beater bar on the carpet attachment for our canister vac yesterday. Two things about repairing a vacuum: it’s handy to have a second vacuum around so you can clean up the mess you find inside the one you’re fixing, and keep that mess from getting all over the house; and if I didn’t have the manual for mine, I would never have been able to take it apart without breaking it.

I usually lose paperwork, so when I buy any appliance, if it has a manual, I try to download it to my computer. I haven’t lost the computer yet, and while I have had a couple of hard drive failures over the years, I back up pretty regularly, so it hasn’t been a problem.

We don’t use our formal dining room a lot, but we used it for Thanksgiving dinner. It was the first time since I reupholstered the dining room chairs. I didn’t just change the fabric; I also replaced the seat cushions with thicker, softer ones, and replaced the plywood base of one of the chairs. What an improvement! Not only are the chairs much more comfortable, but the new fabric looks really classy. Additionally, I treated the chairs with Scotchguard so they ought to be stain resistant as well.

Thanks

On this great American holiday, Black Friday Eve, what are you thankful for this year? I’d really like to know.

Here are a few of the things I’m thankful for.

My son started a new job and I’m thankful for that: So is his mother and so is he. That’s as it should be. Everyone should have parents who wish them nothing but the best. I had one of those; my wife and my kids were fortunate enough to have two.

The son also earned an LLM degree last May and his mother and I got to go to California and see it.

Our son traveled to China to pursue that degree and our daughter went to China to visit him, so they both got to see more of the world than my wife and I have. Good for them.

Not only am I older than my father ever was, but now, my sister is too. We’ve both lived longer than he did. After all these years, I still miss him more than I would have thought if I had ever thought about that before he died. I really wish that he could have known his grandchildren and that they could have known him.

I’m thankful that one of his grandchildren, my niece, is graduating from Cornell in December. It’s a great school and graduating is a tremendous achievement and something that I didn’t achieve when I had the opportunity. Cornell would have taken me back when I got out of the Army, but by then I knew I wanted to marry Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me) and everyone I knew at college had graduated. So, I went to work instead and graduated from a different, and lesser college, later.

I’m thankful that Saint Karen does still put up with me after all this time. I have never done anything smarter than marrying her and there’s very little chance I ever will do anything smarter. In fact, I’m a lot more likely to win a big lottery than I am to do something smarter than marrying Saint Karen. I’m thankful that doesn’t bother me at all.

Thanks to my son, who contacted him a couple of months ago, I’ve reconnected with another old friend from college. The next time we’re in California, or next June when we are both supposed to attend a reunion in Ithaca NY, we’ll probably get to see each other and I’m looking forward to that.

I’m thankful that we can still afford some of life’s little luxuries. I bought my wife a new TV and myself a new telephoto lens this year. With that lens, maybe I can get better pictures of my niece’s graduation than I did of my son’s most recent one.

I’m thankful for the pumpkin pie baking in the oven and the wonderful aroma that causes throughout the house. And that aroma makes it difficult for me to continue to think about what else I’m thankful for although I’m sure there’s a lot more. And the fact that there is a lot more to be thankful for–I’m thankful for that too.

Things I Know

Since Thanksgiving is only two days away, as a public service, I’m republishing my recipe for roast turkey. Clean, wash and season the bird as usual. Stuff it with unpopped popcorn. Put the bird in the oven at 350 degrees. Baste every fifteen minutes with Wild Turkey bourbon. When the bird blows up, throw it away and drink the gravy.

Here’s how I hung a shelf that has those keyhole things on the back to hang over screws driven into the walls. If the walls are made of wall board, you have to drive the screws into the studs or use wall anchors. I drew a level line on the wall with a pencil where the shelf goes and on that line, I put a mark showing where the center of the shelf will go. I put a wide piece of masking tape on the back of the shelf, covering the keyhole slots. I put a mark on the tape at the center of the shelf. I punched small holes in the masking tape where the screw heads go into the keyholes. Then, I removed the tape and put it on the wall along the level line with the center mark on the tape aligned with the center mark on the wall. I put screws through the holes, then after testing for fit, I tore off the tape and hung the shelf. You can’t see the pencil lines I drew because they’re behind the shelf. If you would see the pencil line, put masking tape on the wall and draw the lines on it, then remove it when you’re done. I do it that way because the holes that go over the screw heads tend not to be at an easy to measure distance from each other. On the shelf I measured today, the holes are 23-and-7/16 inches apart. If I made shelves to he hung over those keyhole things, I’d put the keyhole things on 16-inch or 24-inch centers, so you could hang them on the studs.

Most people hang pictures too high on the wall. Having learned that lesson, I usually hang pictures half way between my eye level (I’m tall) and my wife’s eye-level (she’s short). It works for us. However, if you hang a picture directly over the sofa, make sure you hang it high enough so nobody will hit their head on it. Unless you have really tall friends or an extremely tall couch, hanging the picture so the bottom of the frame is four feet from the floor ought to be plenty high enough. You might even be able to go a few inches lower than that.

I’m so happy. I thought I had left the proprietary battery charger for my DSLR camera in some hotel room and was about to buy another, but before I did, I made one more sweep through the house and found it. The brand-name charger costs around $60.00 and while there are off-brand chargers that are much cheaper, the reviews say they are inferior.

I also ordered a new telephoto lens for my DSLR camera, although it hasn’t come yet. It’s a good thing the new lens has image stabilization because a 250 mm lens on a cropped-sensor digital camera is equivalent to a focal length of over 400 mm on a 35 mm film camera. That’s a really long lens to try to hand hold. So, without image stabilization, you’d either have to use a very fast shutter speed or a tripod to get pictures that aren’t blurry.

Amazon.com comes up with some interesting suggestions of things for you to buy based on what you’ve already bought from them. But their system isn’t perfect. First, they sometimes recommend the same thing more than once. Second, they recommend something based on what you bought from Amazon and you don’t need those things because you already bought them. One example: I bought my daughter a point-and-shoot camera before she went to China. Since then, Amazon has recommended a lot of point-and-shoot cameras. Third, I already know I want the things on my wish list; Amazon doesn’t have to recommend those to me. And fourth, they tend to go overboard, especially on music, DVD’s and books. If I bought the Bear Family CD box set for a particular artist, they might recommend everything else the artist ever recorded. But if I bought the Bear Family boxed set, I already have everything they ever recorded. Bear Family CD collections are the most complete collections in the universe. Yesterday, I made the mistake of telling Amazon that I owned a couple of books they suggested by sci-fi legend Robert A. Heinlein. Today, they recommended I buy everything else by him. I did that, years ago. I have read everything I’m aware of that he ever wrote.

I don’t recommend wearing any kind of pants with text on the posterior. Especially avoid the word “ultimate.” Last week at the gym I saw a woman who wore pants that dubbed her glutes, “Ultimate Style.” In the first place, you’re not ever going to be in a position to tell if your glutes are ultimate. That’s up to someone standing or walking behind you to both observe and judge. In the second place, hers weren’t. Mine aren’t either and never will be. To be fair to her, she was exercising a lot harder than I was in order to try to reach ultimate style status.

I found a site that’s supposed to tell you of other, similar sites. It’s www.siteslike.com. I tried it on my blog and while I didn’t go through all 595 it suggested, I found the few I did check baffling. I think it checks only for key words or key phrases.

I wear eye glasses. I’m not crazy about them, but I don’t see well and do get headaches if I don’t wear them, so I do. Similarly, I see more doctors and take more medicine than I’d really like to. I’m not crazy about that either. Whenever I go to a doctor, I bring a typewritten list of medicines. The list also helps me track changes in my meds since I save those lists on my computer. The doctor I went to this week has been accepting the lists for 15 years, but now he wants the list handwritten on a form of his design. He told me he couldn’t read something I’d written. I didn’t snap back that nobody wanted the typed list.

You’ve got to admit there’s a certain irony in a doctor complaining that he can’t read your handwriting.

The doctor I went to this week also has a new form that asks, among other things, for your race. I didn’t fill that in. The secretary who reviewed the form asked me if I wanted to. I said no for three reasons. First, it’s nobody’s business what race I am. Second, they have choices on the form that aren’t races: European isn’t a race. And third, I have lots of freckles and polka dotted isn’t a choice.

Things I Know

If you’re looking for an extravagant Christmas gift for that special someone, I suggest a couple of pounds of lamb chops or veal cutlets. They’re extravagant enough that you would hardly buy them for yourself, but as a gift, it’s under $50, so not too bad. Of course, you can’t mail them to someone overseas, but you could gift wrap them and take them to someone, telling them to either open them right away or put the package in the freezer until they are ready to open the gift.

I know it got good reviews on Amazon.com and average reviews on IMDB.com, but I hate the made-for-TV movie “Single Santa Seeking Mrs. Claus.” The plot is thin, and the lead actors, Steve Guttenberg, and Crystal Bernard, while good in other roles are horribly miscast in this story. Since the Hallmark Channel on cable is rushing the season a little, and running a lot of Christmas movies this weekend, I checked, and the good news for me is that this movie doesn’t appear to be scheduled anywhere on broadcast or cable TV this Christmas season.

A Christmas movie I do like, “Love Actually,” is on the ABC Family Channel next weekend.

So, I was watching a TV documentary about the Roman invasion of Britain when the commercial break came up and on came an infomercial. Attention TV execs: When you do that, I change the channel and don’t change it back.

Deep fried turkey was a fad a few years ago. If you’re a little late on fads, look for some fried turkey video before you give it a shot. State Farm Insurance produced a couple of videos with William Shatner and there are a couple of videos on line from Alton Brown of the Food Network too. Brown goes so far as to rig a makeshift crane to lower the bird into the oil. Shatner, who has a good sense of humor about himself, takes the self-immolation route. If you deep fry a turkey wrong, there’s a good chance you’ll burn yourself or your house down.

I bought a couple of pairs of jeans today. I’m at an awkward stage: I’m losing weight and between sizes, but since the smaller size is still too small, I bought the larger ones. It’s getting too close to my birthday and to Christmas for me to be buying myself a lot of other stuff.

Please contact your congressman civilly and ask him or her to oppose HR 3035. It’s a bill that would allow people and companies to make a lot more annoying calls to your cell phone, including a lot more robocalls. If my congressman or anyone else’s congressman reads this, for what it’s worth, I’m against it and if it passes, I’ll only be giving people my Google Voice number. My Google Voice account is already set to go directly to voicemail and then email me about it. I just won’t respond to the emails from the robocalls.

I received a travel brochure for a 10-day trip to Ireland from a group affiliated with a college I once attended. It sounds lovely, but including airfare and incidentals, I figure it would cost around $8,000 and I don’t want to spend that kind of money on a vacation unless, of course, I win the lottery.

Here’s my latest idea for a good invention: a remote trouble sensor (blue tooth or wi-fi) for bottle deposit machines. The supermarket where I take most of my deposit bottles has machines that fill up with crushed bottles or just break too frequently. When it happens, I have to go into the market, find the person who takes care of that, and go back outside, frequently to the end of the line. It makes the three or four dollars I get from taking the bottles back totally not worth my time. A remote could be placed in the store where the person who’s responsible could see it and respond appropriately.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Why did my endocrinologist’s office call me yesterday and again today to remind me of my appointment with him next week? After all, I’m not the one who has been late for any of the appointments, so I’m not the one who needs reminding. To be fair to him though, he still isn’t good, but he has gotten better at appointments in the past two years or so.

What did people use to distract cranky babies before we had car keys? And what are we going to use once proximity starting fobs become widespread?

Would the dog like it if I licked its face?

Don”t you wonder why outlook and look out don’t mean the same thing? Especially after what Yoda did to grammar.

The most recent chapter in the Lindsay Lohan story is that she was released from her 30-day jail sentence in a few hours because of prison overcrowding. After all the times she’s been slapped on the wrist, can she possibly have any respect whatsoever for our legal system? Hell, she’s been slapped on the wrist so often that she must think someone’s trying to find a vein and give her a blood test.

What’s the difference between Lindsay Lohan and Rick Perry? According to Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, Lohan can finish a sentence in four-and-a-half hours.

If the world is my oyster, am I the oyster’s world too?

Things I Know

If you’ve read this blog for any time at all, you know I don’t curse much. However, if you are the Jerry Sandusky who is the former defensive coordinator for Penn State football, and if you did what you are accused of doing to young boys, you are a sack of shit. If you did it because you are mentally ill, you are a sick sack of shit. If you are one of the university officials accused of perjury to cover these reprehensible deeds, and you did that, you are a lying sack of shit.

I may have to reconsider what I just said because it wasn’t a very nice thing to say about shit.

I never thought I’d say it, but hooray for Star Jones. On Today this morning, she criticized the graduate assistant who allegedly saw Sandusky raping a young boy and didn’t do anything, but tell his boss. She’s the first person on TV or radio I’ve heard criticize that man’s actions, and the question she asked is exactly what I’ve been wondering.

I’d like to spend part of the winter in Florida. As I’ve said before, I don’t like to be cold. So, I’ve been looking on line for vacation rentals, and becoming frustrated by the lack of pertinent information. I know about the communities I’d like to visit or I can find out about them easily enough. I want to know about the property itself. Tell me where the property is located, what size the beds are, how many TV’s and what level of cable service, whether there’s Internet service, whether there’s a pool, and hot tub. A lot of that information isn’t provided consistently. I want to see the property too, but don’t put pictures on the website if the pictures are years old, and they say so. I saw one place with pictures dated 2004. Fail!

I went to college with a guy I know is a real estate broker in southwest Florida. Maybe I’ll call, and ask him for advice even though we haven’t kept in touch.

Hearing that Michelle Duggar is pregnant with her 20th child reminds me of the old nursery rhyme that I believe was first told by comedian Andrew Dice Clay:

There was an old woman
Who lived in a shoe
She had so many children
Her uterus fell out.

Things I Know

Happy birthday Chevrolet. The company was formed on November 3, 1911, so it’s 100 years old now.

I’m not a big college football fan, but as far as I’m concerned the college national championship game (I know there isn’t one) will be played in Tuscaloosa Alabama this Saturday. And while I’m not going to be on the edge of my seat, enough members of my family went to Alabama that I hereby say, “Roll Tide.”

We celebrated our wedding anniversary recently. The day before, my wife, Saint Karen (She has to be a saint to put up with me) made my favorite meal which is Swiss steak prepared according to her recipe. The next leftover night I had the last of the Swiss steak while she ate some of the things left over from our dinner at a fancy restaurant we went to on our actual anniversary. She asked me to save the remaining sauce so she could freeze it. I was kidding, but I said I was planning to pour it over ice cream, because it is that good.

In addition to taking her to dinner, I gave her some lingerie in a hard-to-find style she likes. I also ordered a new flat-screen TV for her, but it came early and it was too big to hide, so I gave it to her last week. Nothing has changed in the past year: marrying Saint Karen is still the smartest thing I’ve ever done.  The smartest thing she’s ever done is not say what the smartest thing she has ever done is.

I took my wife out to dinner twice last week, so she’d better not expect a present on my birthday.

I have no serious complaints about Cablevision which supplies both cable and Internet to my home. It does cost a lot, but at some point in your life all prices become ridiculous. They do rely too much on automated phone attendants though. Overnight from Monday into Tuesday, something happened to our service. When I woke up Tuesday morning, all of my cable boxes were rebooting, and I wasn’t connected to the Internet. I called them about the Internet, and got a phone attendant. The problem with that is the attendant basically walked me through the following: Unplug your router and your modem; plug them back in; if that doesn’t work, call us back. The bigger problem is that one sentence of advice took more than five minutes to administer.

From the department of improved products comes Cabot acrylic deck stain. When my front porch was rebuilt, I used oil-based Cabot deck stain on it and liked it; so did “Consumer Reports.” Last time I repainted it I used Cabot acrylic deck stain and didn’t like it. The color was the same, but the acrylic came out with a really glossy finish and it was slippery too. I repainted it again this week and used the acrylic again because to go back to the oil stain I’d have to sand off the acrylic. The acrylic stain has been reformulated. It didn’t dry shiny this time so I like it much better than I did the first time I used it.

Linzer

linzer3.jpg

My friend Richard (not Feder) of New Jersey (not Fort Lee and now,improved with at least one other state) loves Linzer Tortes. These Linzer Tarts are not completely authentic and they are mass-produced, but I wonder if Richard knows about these. Since Entenmann’s products are widely distributed, they might do in a pinch.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Do people or companies that place robocalls get a report telling them how many of the people who receive calls hang up as soon as they determine the nature of the call? If they do, I want to know what percentage of robocall recipients listen to the entire call, and what percentage of recipients does not.

I know that political ads, and charities are exempt from the federal no call list, but if I’ve gone to the trouble of getting on the no call list, what makes you think I’d welcome your exempt calls either? Whatever makes you think that, by the way, is wrong! In fact, this week I called my state senator’s office, and politely told the woman who answered that I believe the senator is overdoing the robocalls.

The word “nosey” has an “e” in it, right? So shouldn’t the word “noisy” have one too? And since Halloween has just passed, let me say that “scary” should have an e in it too.

When was the apostrophe dropped from Halloween?

Bouillon cubes I understand, but why do they call it cubed steak?

The electrician I called is so late for his appointment now that I think he may be a doctor too. Would it be wrong to call two electricians, and tell the second one to show up to get lost?

Lindsay Lohan was reportedly paid a lot of money to pose naked for Playboy magazine. Who cares? About Lohan or about Playboy?

Things I Know

A Stony Brook University Professor, Fred Friedberg, has received a $600,000, two-year grant to study home-management techniques for chronic fatigue syndrome. When I was in college, I had a couple of professors who could alleviate chronic fatigue with their lectures which put people to sleep. But that’s not a home-management technique, so I suppose it won’t be covered in the study.

The word “microcosm” exists. So does the less-often used word “macrocosm.” But I’ve been unable to find any use of “cosm” as a word. Strange. Using Google, you can find several places that use “cosm” as an acronym though.

I knew about East Orange, South Orange and West Orange, NJ, but until I went and looked it up, I was unaware that just plain old Orange NJ exists too. There isn’t, however, a North Orange, NJ.

I’m very impressed with Sta-bil, the fuel stabilizer. Two years ago, I didn’t run my pressure washer until it ran out of gas before storing it for the winter, but I did put Sta-bil in the gas tank. Even though I put pump antifreeze in the pressure washer, the pump went bad, but in the summer of 2010, I had it fixed. I didn’t use it last year though because I had shoulder surgery and couldn’t pull start it. This week, it started right up on two-year-old gasoline! I’m sure there are other products like Sta-bil, but I’ve tried this one, it works great and I’m going to go buy more.

I have to buy more because there’s no Sta-bil preserver. According to the product label, Sta-bil expires two years after it’s opened.

The odds of winning either Powerball or Mega-Millions is in the range of 200-million to one. Your mileage may vary. Buying a ticket for every drawing, 104 tickets a year, doesn’t improve your odds enough to notice. Buying a ticket for every drawing and living to be around 2,000,000-years old would improve them a lot more.

Having just done it, if you live in a house with lath and plaster walls, I don’t recommend hanging your new flat-panel TV on the wall. The instructions say you have to attach the mount to a stud. Finding studs in lath and plaster isn’t easy. Electronic stud finders are useless. I found mine with a drill. I had to drill about a dozen holes and probe those holes with a wire coat hanger to do so. But the TV is up now and it looks great.

There is a business in Bellmore NY called the Bare Naked Bakery and Café. I haven’t been in there yet, but it does give me the mental picture of formerly naked people made by the health department to dress in head-to-toe hairnets. That image may be enough to keep me out of the place.

It’s supposed to be nice for the next few days, so I’ll probably be staining the floor of my porch.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Threatening a country with military action is called saber rattling. So, is threatening to attack someone’s computer or internet connection or network infrastructure known as cyber rattling?

If, as reported on the news Monday, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have received $300,000 in donations, are they keeping it in a bank?

I bought a TV from Amazon.com. Now, when I sign in and look at my recommendations, the list contains a lot of TV sets. Is this normal? Does it work? The same thing happened when I bought a camera from them. It annoys me. Does it happen to you and if it does, what do you think about it?

So, I was in the store buying a lottery ticket (because I could use $124 million). The store also sells loose candy (a much better bet), and the guy in front of me ordered a small bag of jelly beans. That prompted me to ask if he could sing the “Jelly Beaner” song from Romper Room. He couldn’t, but the lady behind the counter looked at me as if I was weird. Can you sing it?

What will society be like in a few years if children who are watching reality TV now think “Jersey Shore,” “Bridezillas,” “Real Housewives,” and other shows of that ilk represent both normal behavior, and the way they should act?

Some years back, the word geek became common in the English language. I’ve always wondered if all the nerds who existed at the time were grandfathered in, and automatically became geeks too. Someone told me recently that the word “nerd” was created by Dr. Seuss. Did you know that? I didn’t.

Was the copywriter for the latest Dos Equis beer commercial on the track team at some point in his or her life? I think the writer is or was a shot putter and I’m not being politically correct here. Women do throw the shot put; it’s an Olympic sport for women. The reason I say that is the most interesting man in the world bowls overhand. That’s a shot putter’s joke, a really old shot putter’s joke.

Things I Know

Even more than you know, I wish everyone who is professional enough to be paid for being on TV, and/or radio would stop forever saying the word like. “Dancing with the Stars” is particularly egregious in this matter.

I don’t usually watch that show, but I’ve noticed that a lot of the music they use is too old to play on most radio stations.

All of the participants in the baseball league championship series are located in the central time zone. That certainly makes it easier for their fans to stay up long enough to see the end of the games.

If someone tells you they can’t hear you, try this: cover your mouth with your hand, turn away from the person you’re talking to and speak more softly; you’ll find out as I have that doesn’t work!

Blackberry email service had multiple outages in multiple places in the last week. First, for something so vital to the company, it amazes me that Blackberry doesn’t run a completely redundant system so that if part of it fails they could activate a switch, and keep on keeping on. Second, if your company is thinking of switching to another device because of this system-wide failure, you should know this: The phone directory app that came with my Android phone only sorts entries by first name, not last name, and not company name. To me, this means I have to use the search function to find an entry for almost anyone whose first name isn’t Abe. Very un-business like!

If you have an Android phone, and you are a geek, check out an app called LHSee. It allows you to view in real time what’s going on at the Large Hadron Collider over in Switzerland.

It used to be a lot easier to set up a TV set, but that’s the trade off because today’s sets can do a whole lot more than the old ones did. The one I just bought for my wife, Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me) is right now streaming Netflix. I’m sure it can do a lot more too. Unless it dies prematurely, I’m sure we’ll like it a lot.

Most people still work Monday to Friday during the day. So, we have to go to bed on Sunday night early enough to be able to get up, and go to work on Monday. That’s why it has always baffled me that late-night TV and radio shows generally broadcast overnight Monday-Tuesday thru overnight Friday-Saturday. Five in a row beginning on Sunday night-Monday morning makes more sense to me. There is at least one radio show that does follow that schedule. It’s Red Eye Radio with host Doug McIntyre.

In my continuing quest to improve the English language, I propose that we change the word palindrome so that the word that means palindrome is a palindrome.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

I’m not trying to be snarky here; I really want to know what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are trying to accomplish. I haven’t heard any goals articulated, have you?

Did you watch the first round of the baseball playoffs on TBS? I have older TV’s; no high definition ones and I can’t read the graphic on the upper right of the screen telling you what inning, what’s the score, and how many outs there are. I can’t read it even if I get close enough to see the pixels in the cathode-ray tube. Can you? I can read it on a high-def set though. I know that because the tire store where I bought a pair of tires today had a high def set in the customer waiting room. How soon do you suppose it will be before you have to buy high definition TV’s to see what’s on the screen properly? Analogue CRT sets are already obsolete; how soon before they’re unusable?

If laughter is the best medicine, why did my health insurance turn down coverage of my tickets to a comedy club?

The phrase “one another” recently caught my eye. What’s the maximum number of anothers you can have in one place at one time anyway?

Did Nancy and Sir Paul choose to get married on John Lennon’s birthday, or was it just a coincidence?

Things I Know

RIP Steve Jobs.

I am extremely saddened that the “establishment media” thought it important on Wednesday to discuss whether Nancy Grace farted on “Dancing With the Stars” Tuesday evening.

There is a movie about to go into theaters called “Real Steel.” It’s supposed to be about robots that fight each other. My daughter said it should be called “Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots: the Movie”

If I ever get one of those Ford Raptor muscle pickup trucks, I’m going to check with DMV to see if the vanity license plate VELOCI is available.

When I was a child, people went to movie theaters to see movies (or to make out). You paid the adult admission price at 12-years old, but had to sit in the children’s section until you were 16. I always told the ushers that if I was adult enough to pay the adult admission price, I was also old enough to sit in the adult section. If that wasn’t good enough for them, I maintained, they could refund my ticket, and I would leave. They only made me leave once.

My wife, Saint Karen (she must be a saint to put up with me) likes TV a lot more than I do, and watches a lot more of it than I do too. I’m thinking of buying a high definition TV for her for our anniversary. And, no, I’m not buying it for me to watch football. I don’t watch football, and neither does she. Although, she will occasionally check the score on University of Alabama is playing football because our son is an alumnus.

If anyone has a more romantic suggestion for an anniversary present for Saint Karen, I’m open to it. Last Year, I bought her a ruby pendant and took her to Las Vegas for a week.

I think my daughter was kidding when she asked if I knew that the guy who does all those TV commercials, especially for Ford, is also a baseball shortstop.

I learned a new medical term today. The dentist told me I have an “incipient cavity.” That means he thinks one is forming, so he’ll look for it at my next regular check up.

I’d much rather go to the dentist than to the doctor. It hurts more, but the dentist is much better at being on time.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Denmark has passed a so-called fat tax on food that’s high in trans-fats. Haven’t the Danes heard about Danish pastry?

TV networks that air football games usually schedule them for three hours. On CBS, for example, the late-afternoon football game is scheduled to air from 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM. During the football season, the news magazine 60 Minutes always airs late. There must be statisticians around who know that a one-hour football game takes more than three hours. Why don’t the networks schedule the games to air for at least as long as the median football game takes to be aired?

I heard audio clips of President Obama’s speech last month before the Black Congressional Caucus’ annual dinner. Where did he get that accent? Wasn’t he born in Hawaii?

Do you think Jennifer Lopez has ever driven a Fiat 500 anyplace except in the TV commercial she does for the car?

Night games in the MLB division championships are scheduled for first pitch at 8:37 PM eastern time. I know they want the audience in middle and western time zones to be able to see the first pitch, but don’t you think it would be nice to schedule the game so people on the east coast can see the last pitch?

I wanted to marry my wife, not her hand, so why did I ask for her hand in holy matrimony?

Do you have a Google Voice account? It’s pretty amazing really. One of its features is if you get a voice mail message, you can set your account to email you a computerized transcript of the message. Wouldn’t it be even more amazing if the emails you got were coherent? I don’t get a lot of emails this way, but for the ones I have received, I’ve been able to figure out what phone number to call back, but not a lot more.

Things I Know

I’ve got a great idea about what President Obama should do:  He should pick up the bullpen phone and bring Mariano into the game.

There are two reasons you can’t let sleeping dogs lie, or tell the truth:  Dogs can’t speak any language people can understand; and they’re sleeping.

I’ve had it with all the changes in Facebook.  I think they should slow the pace of their changes.

Andy Rooney wasn’t on the season opener of 60 Minutes for the first time since 1978.  Now, CBS has announced that this Sunday will be Andy’s final “regular” appearance on the show.  They didn’t say he retired or that he was forced out, although either is a possibility since he is 92-years old and his act seems to appeal more to older rather than younger viewers.  Who knows?  Perhaps CBS has initiated a late-retirement program and Andy decided to take advantage of it.

On the Smithsonian Channel’s program “Aerial America,” the narrator talked about a monastery near Carmel California that houses nuns.  Then it isn’t a monastery, is it?  Monasteries house monks.  Nuns live in nunneries or convents.  These days, some also live in private residences, rather than communally.

Not that you asked, but here’s another progress report on remodeling our house.  All the living room walls are now coated with one coat of beige paint.  My wife accepted my desire for beige.  You see, if we decide to sell this house before it needs to be painted again, I wont have to paint it again if it’s a nice neutral color.

If Warren Buffet thinks he doesn’t pay enough taxes, there’s nothing to prevent him from donating something to the government to make up the difference.

Occasionally, in the middle of the night, I dream that the door bell is ringing.  When that happens, it always wakes me up.

I have to laugh whenever I hear teachers’ unions talk about class size.  From first to third grade, I went to Catholic school.  We didn’t have small classes.  We didn’t have teacher’s aides.  We did have 65-kids in a class, one nun with a ruler establishing, and maintaining discipline.  Her name was Sister Mary Knucklebuster.

I had a crush on a pretty little blonde girl in my first-grade class.  She sat by the classroom door because her surname was near the beginning of the alphabet; I sat near the windows because my name was near the end of the alphabet, so we never met.

Here’s to horticultural success.  Last fall, I bought a couple of pots of mums to put on my front stoop.  When the flowers fell off, I divided the plants into several pieces and planted them in the bed in front of my porch.  They survived and within the last few days, they’ve started coming into bloom.

On the agriculture front, I had more limited success.  My crop of tomatoes tasted good, but a lot of them were ruined by blossom-end rot.  When I clean up the beds soon, I’m going to till some gypsum into the soil.  I’ll do it again in the spring before I plant and that ought to prevent the same thing from happening next year.  Maybe I’ll plant some winter rye too.

One of my trellises broke this summer though, so I’ll either have to fix it or try a different kind.

Next summer, I’ll also have to be more vigilant because this year, the birds got to my blueberries before I could.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • So the last two of the three of the young hikers arrested for spying near the Iraq-Iran border two years ago have been freed on $500,000 “bail” each.  I’m pretty sure each of them has every intention of skipping bail.  But nobody paid any ransom, so it’s okay, right?

  • I hate being cold, so why do I live someplace that’s cold for more of the year than it is hot?

  • Have you ever walked along a beach that is just covered with shell steaks?

  • Is there any other kind of cold than a miserable one?  I don’t think so.  That’s the only kind I’ve ever had, and I had one starting last Thursday.  Unless a new symptom presents itself tonight or tomorrow, I think I’m getting better now.

  • I’ve lived in a lot of places, so I’ve probably painted the inside of more houses, and apartments than most amateur house painters. That makes me wonder why I knocked over a bucket of paint today when I was trying to paint the walls, not the floor?  I’ve never done that before.

Things I Know

  • When I first heard that Tareq Salahi had reported to police that his wife, Michaele, might have been kidnapped, my initial reaction was the two of them were such publicity hounds that perhaps authorities ought to look for her on a balloon in Colorado.  But no, she just left him for another guy.

  • If beating a dead horse doesn’t work, a typical reaction from many government types is to add more dead horses.  President Obama’s jobs bill is pretty much more of the same as the stimulus cargo (it was too big to be a package) of a couple of years ago.  Plus the President wants to pay for it with new taxes, so one of two things is possible.  Either the President doesn’t remember the battle over extending the national debt ceiling earlier this summer, or he’s introduced the bill believing it will not pass the House and intending to campaign against the Republican majority as being against jobs.

  • I believe both parties want to create jobs, but each thinks that what they’re doing is right, and what the other party is doing is counter-productive.  That’s why it’s so hard to get anyone to compromise on this issue.

  • Whether you approved of Bill Clinton as President, you’ve got to admit he is, and was a master politician.  He ran once on the slogan, “It’s the economy stupid.”  So, on the theory that imitation is the sincerest form of imitation, a candidate for President, either Republican or Democrat may be able to win next year’s election simply by running on the slogan, “It’s the jobs, stupid.”

  • I will now be cold, probably until sometime in late April, or early May.  I hate being cold!

  • I found another store, this one a supermarket, within a couple of miles of my house that sells Good & Plenty candy.  But the market only sells the six ounce boxes, not the eight ounce bag.  At least, if I had the box, I could pretend I’m the engineer on a steam engine, like Choo Choo Charlie used to do.

  • In the same supermarket, a one-pound bag of pretzels costs $3.29.  I maintain that if you live long enough, all prices are ridiculous.  I don’t think I’m there yet, but I remember when steak cost less than that.

  • I’m doing my part to increase consumer spending.  I rolled up all the coins in my change jar, cashed them in, and injected $85 into the local economy.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Are there any other Word Press bloggers out there who can tell me how to reset the time on the blog?  I only ask because I posted my piece on 9-11-11 very early in the morning, right after midnight, but the blog software decided for me that I posted on 9-10-11, making my references to “today” seem a little silly.

  • Did you know that if you buy them from Amazon.com, you can subscribe to Good & Plenty candy, and then they’ll send you more at specified intervals?  Subscribing to candy appeals to me a great deal more than subscribing to magazines does.

  • You’ve got a lot of holes in your head and so, of course, do I.  There’s your mouth, your nasal passages, your sinuses. and in my case, the large space where a normal person would have a brain.  Because of something called head resonance, your voice sounds different to you than it does to anyone else.  That’s why someone who hears their voice recorded for the first time may be surprised, and think the recording doesn’t sound like them.  To overcome head resonance, radio broadcasters often wear headphones, and turn them up quite loud so they can hear what they really sound like.  I did that when I was on the radio.  I think that’s at least part of the reason for my hearing problems.  I have tinnitus, so if there’s a lot of background noise, I have trouble understanding what people are saying to me.  Since I know I have minor hearing problems, this leads me to ask you, do you have trouble understanding the actors on BBC TV programs?  I often do, and it’s not because of the accents.  I think the background music is too loud, and some of the actors’ speech sounds muddy to me.

  • Why would you quit cold turkey?  I look forward to the day after Thanksgiving so I can make myself a delicious turkey sandwich on rye with mayo and cranberry sauce.  Just for the record, I like hot turkey sandwiches with giblet gravy too, but I prefer those on white bread.

  • I don’t understand this kind of marketing, do you?  I never subscribed to “Rolling Stone Magazine,” but somebody sent it to me anyway.  Rolling Stone did ask me to renew, and I didn’t do that either, but I’m still getting the magazine.  I understand the logic behind a free sample, but how does one make money by giving away the product, and continuing to give it away once the user refuses to pay to continue receiving it?

  • Having confessed my fondness for the British sci-fi TV show Doctor Who, I’ve never understood the following:  Why doesn’t the Doctor’s miraculous sonic screwdriver (which disrupts things electronic and mechanical) disrupt Daleks or Cybermen?

9-11

You just can’t avoid all the TV shows, and newspaper articles about 9-11 today and leading up to today, the tenth anniversary of the worst attack ever on American soil:  Nor should you.  Thousands of victims and hundreds of heroes died that day. Uncounted others risked their lives, and/or their health in the days and months afterward removing the rubble from the wrecked World Trade Center.  That’s not even counting all the US military men, and women killed, and wounded in subsequent action against Iraq, and Afghanistan, and we should count them.

I’m going to raise an issue that I haven’t seen raised before.  It appears to me, based on the reporting I’ve seen, some of the ceremonies surrounding the annual commemoration of 9-11 are keeping the early stages of mourning alive in some of the survivors of those killed.  In other words, I suspect that some of the remembrances have kept people from getting to the point where life can go on instead of helping them to reach that point.

I hope I’m wrong and if I’m right, I don’t know what to do about it.  We should remember the heinous attack.  We should honor the heroes.  I just don’t know how to move the ceremonies more toward remembering, and more away from mourning, but after ten years, I suggest that people smarter than I am ought to be thinking about how to do that if they aren’t already doing so.

I’ll be participating in one of the ceremonies today, a small one at a local church.  I’ve had no part in planning the ceremony, so don’t know whether it leans toward remembrance or mourning.  We all need to concentrate on the bad things about our enemies who did these awful things.  We also need to concentrate on the good things we remember about those who are gone.  Nobody should try to get over their deaths, we should never forget.  But in addition to remembering, we should do whatever we can to help the living get on with living.

In the days to come, as well as remembering 9-11, it would be a very good thing if we could remember and even recapture the spirit of national unity that filled the country on 9-12-2001,  and for a long time afterward.

Things I Know

  • My wife, Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me), and I must be the only people for miles around who like Good & Plenty candy:  You know, the pink & white sugar coated licorice.  I say that because there’s only one store within a couple of miles of my house that sells them, and when I buy the last package, it takes them a while to restock.

  • Whether you approve of Texas Governor Rick Perry or not, your Social Security taxes do not go into an account to pay for your retirement.  People working now are paying for the retirement benefits of people who are retired now, so in that sense, Governor Perry is correct that it is a sort of Ponzi scheme.

  • If President George W. Bushs niece, Lauren, married designer Ralph Lauren’s son, Richard, she’d be Lauren Lauren, and that’s what she did.

  • If you are remodeling and staining rather than painting the woodwork, don’t install (or let a contractor install) said woodwork before mudding and sanding the wallboard.  If you do, you’ll only have to stain it a second time after it’s installed.

  • My neighbor across the street has a large, beautiful crape myrtle.  It started blooming in mid August.  Because I like his so much, last year I bought one too.  Imitation is the sincerest form of imitation, I always say.  I believe mine is a slightly different variety because it burst into full bloom this past weekend.  My crape myrtle isn’t as big as my neighbor’s is, but I am very satisfied with the way it looks and the way it’s growing.

  • I heard that older women dress too young because they copy the way their daughters dress.  That’s ridiculous!  My wife doesn’t own even one black t-shirt with Rob Zombie’s picture on it.  I do have one black t-shirt, but it has two big eyes in a yellow circle and says, “Moon equipped” on it.

  • I think I was wrong about how many utility knives I need to own before I can be sure I know where at least one of them is at all times.  I thought the number was four, but I recently discovered that I own two green ones, so now I think the number is five.

  • The Town of Smithtown Long Island has passed legislation to make residents contain bamboo on their property.  In case you’re not aware, bamboo propagates with runners, is extremely hardy and difficult to contain or eliminate.  The Town of Islip is considering doing the same thing.  Maybe they should both get some pandas.

Things I Know

  • To all of the idiots out there (not just Michelle Bachman) who think that natural disasters like the eastern earthquake and Hurricane Irene are God’s way of trying to tell us something:  God is more interesting than the “Most Interesting Man in the World” from those clever beer commercials.  If God wants to tell us something, and requests airtime from all the networks, He’ll get it, when he wants it.  Plus, if God wants to tell us something, and get it across immediately, He can just tweet it.

  • First, President Obama decided to address a joint session of Congress at the same time as the next scheduled debate for Republican presidential candidates.  House Speaker Boehner suggested the following night.  Then President Obama agreed to the following night but reassured the nation that he will be done speaking before the first NFL football game of the season kicks off at 8:30 EDT.  Personally, I don’t have a conflict since I don’t plan to watch the debate, the speech, or the football game.

  • I’ll become interested in the 2012 presidential race when one of two things happens:  when it becomes interesting; or when it becomes a whole lot closer.

  • During August, I attended two information sessions on New York State’s recently enacted two-percent tax-levy cap.  That thing is going to be a whole lot of fun!

  • My cable provider just started providing BBC America.  Good!  I’m about as big a fan of the British sci-fi series “Doctor Who” as anyone who doesn’t collect memorabilia, go to conventions, and dress up in costumes, but if BBC America is going to keep showing episodes three times a day, I don’t think I’m going to be able to keep up.

  • Doctor Who fans who do collect memorabilia, go to conventions and dress up in costume are generally called Whovians, but I think it would be funnier to call them Whoers.

  • I got another good idea for a business.  It’s a combination coffee house and comedy club.  I’m planning to call it “Brew Ha Ha.”

  • If you have any age on you at all, one thing that has improved a lot in your lifetime is adhesive or glue.  Why is it better?  A far greater degree of control over how well it sticks.  For example, toilet paper.  There was a time when the end of a roll of toilet paper was glued down so securely that freeing the end resulted in destroying a lot of the product.  Recently, preparing a roll of toilet paper for use has become much easier because the glue they use these days is nowhere near as sticky, but I encountered a retro roll today.

  • And speaking of toilet paper, softness is a very useful trait to have in toilet paper up to a point, after which it becomes a real problem.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • I keep hearing commercials (or maybe they’re public service announcements) on radio station WFAN for the Jerry Lewis Labor-Day Telethon.  It was all over the place when the Muscular Dystrophy Association split with Jerry who raised over a billion dollars for them since the telethon began.  Have they made up?  I know there was one report, later retracted, in the Las Vegas Review Journal that they had, but I’m still under the impression that Lewis is no longer in the picture, so why are they still using his name on the telethon?

  • Is your power back on yet?  I hope so.  Luckily for us we never lost ours during Hurricane Irene.

  • I understand that the entire power grid is outdoors (the part that is indoors belongs to the people who own the buildings) and that Hurricane Irene was as big as or bigger than Europe.  What I don’t understand is hasn’t it been outdoors since electricity became commercially available?  And weren’t there storms outdoors when electric companies started doing business too?  I know putting the electric power lines underground is more expensive than putting them on poles, but in the name of reliability, shouldn’t they do that, at least in the places subject to big windstorms like hurricanes, nor’easters and blizzards?

  • Rolls of toilet paper with no cardboard tubes in the middle are probably good for the environment as long they continue to unroll smoothly when you need them to.  But how does the manufacturer know that doing away with the tubes saves enough cardboard in a year to fill the Empire State Building twice?  And is that measurement taken with flattened or uncompressed cardboard tubes.

  • By the way, do you know what those tubes are called?  They are doot-doots.  The name comes from the first little kid who pretended such a tube was a musical instrument, raised it to his lips to pretend to play it and said, “doot-doot, doot-doot, doot-doot.”

  • Since they rhyme, why aren’t nude and glued spelled consistently?

MMMMMMMMM, Bacon!

I believe I’ve accurately quoted Homer Simpson there in the title.  When I called recently for resealable packaging of God’s perfect food, bacon, my friend Richard (not Feder) of New Jersey (not Fort Lee) asked why I want such a thing and I replied because I can’t eat a pound of bacon at a sitting anymore and if I did my cardiologist would have a heart attack.

Let’s face it, anything that tastes as good as bacon is bad for you.  If cigarettes carry a warning label, bacon should too.  As I’ve opined before fresh strawberries and fresh peaches are notable exceptions, but it’s a pretty good general rule that tasty food and healthy food are inversely related.   One of the running gags in the comic strip “Zits” is that 15-year-old Jeremy can eat prodigious amounts of any edible thing he finds.  That’s funny because in many circumstances, it’s true.  I started life at two feet tall and weighing almost eleven pounds.  I was the biggest baby born in a large Manhattan hospital that year and until I stopped growing while others continued to, I was always extremely large for my age.  I was the tallest kid in my sixth grade; there wasn’t even a taller girl, and if you remember sixth grade a girl is usually taller than any of the boys.  That’s because girls mature relatively early and boys never mature at all.

I’m still above average in both height and weight, just no longer extremely so.

My cousin and I were the two largest kids our age we knew and when we were together, nothing edible was safe from our grasp.  At a barbecue when we were about 14, the two of us teamed up to eat a dozen hamburgers, and a dozen ears of corn.  Lettuce, tomato, butter, salt, and ketchup were also consumed of course, maybe onions, pickles, potato salad, and cheese as well.  We could have eaten more, but they ran out of food.  And I could do that without his help.  Once, while staying at another aunt’s house (not my cohort in gluttony’s mother) I had a half dozen eggs and a pound of bacon for breakfast.  I had some toast too, but not a whole loaf; I left room for the bacon.  So I know from trial and error that I could at one time eat a pound of bacon at a sitting.  It’s not bragging if you can back it up.

I met my friend Richard (not Feder) when we were freshmen in college he was and remains larger than I am so I suspect his eating habits, and mine were similar as he grew through high school. Since Richard asked why I wanted a resealable package for bacon, I’m willing to allow that he may still be able to eat a whole pound at a meal, and therefore see no need for my proposed invention.  I know that no linzer torte is safe within his reach.  In fact, I know that Richard (not Feder) roams the countryside seeking out the elusive best linzer torte ever.

When I was say 16 or 17, I enjoyed a snack as I arrived home from a hard day of talking in class and avoiding homework.  To me, a snack might be something like a ham sandwich and a quart of milk.  In those days, I would also consider liverwurst, roast beef and several other cold cuts acceptable substitutes for ham.  I still like liverwurst, but I only like it once in any given day, so I don’t eat liverwurst anymore.  Let’s face it:  if liverwurst doesn’t repeat on you, it certainly repeats on me.  My mother should have known better than to assert that I’d spoil my appetite for dinner, because as a teenager, food never did spoil my appetite.

Not only can I no longer eat as much as I used to, but I also take a medicine which has as a side effect reducing my appetite.  That’s both a blessing, and a curse, but it is why I need bacon to come in a resealable package.

Things I Know

  • I want one of those reverse 911 machines like the ones my local mayor and county executive used to annoy constituents through the long hurricane weekend.  After the recent hurricane, I have a list of people I want to telephone and order to get out of town.

  • We were ordered out of our home, but we didn’t go and neither did any of our neighbors.  My house has been here for over 100 years.  I have checked the flood plain map.  We’re not in the 100-year or the 500-year flood plain, and even if we were, we haven’t lived here for 500 years, but we have lived here long enough to know that our storm drains don’t back up.  So we remained right here, unscathed.

  • Hurricane Irene, in all her fury, knocked a few twigs out of the 40-foot oak tree in front of my house.  Bully that she was she also knocked down a blueberry bush and a two-foot tall mountain laurel in my back yard.

  • We had it very easy in Irene, no flooding, no property damage, never without power, phone service, cable or the Internet.  If you are still without power, and will be for the rest of the week, or if your home was flooded or your boat is in someone else’s front yard, it’s no laughing matter, I know.

  • One of my friends had both his blog and his personal website go down during the storm.

  • Since at least one of the supermarket tabloid gossip rags has a cover story every week about singer/actress Beyonce being with child, I suppose it was only a matter of time before at least one of those stories was true, even if being true was an accident, or the unintended consequence of making stuff up.

  • Congratulations to the impending parents, and I predict the baby will be named Babeyonce, or possibly Irene.

Things I Know

Where I live, public officials are using reverse 911 way too much.  That’s the computer program that allows you to feed recorded information by telephone to people within a geographic area.  Where I live, they’re using it beyond information dissemination to the point of self-promotion and dissemination of conflicting and even wrong information.

  • I predict a significant increase in the birth of girls named Irene on the east coast of the United States in late May of 2012.

  • As far as I know, this is serious as opposed to being a joke.

  • Don’t make kissing your spouse or significant other routine.  Kiss them frequently of course, but put some passion into it at least once in a while.

  • I was in Queens, having lunch with an old friend from college when the earthquake hit on Tuesday.  We didn’t feel a thing and we weren’t even drinking.

  • I’m pretty sure that someone could make a resealable package for bacon if they set their mind to it.

  • If you coat steel with zinc, you make the steel rust resistant.  However, if you leave a galvanized garbage can sitting in your compost pile for twenty years, the bottom of the garbage can will compost too.

  • In case you’ve wondered how you can throw away a garbage can, I solved that one by taking it to the dump myself.

  • A hurricane is coming, so go to the store and stock up on milk and bread so you can pass the time making the traditional cream of bread soup.  That recipe isn’t original with me.  I got it from the late and very much missed Newsday columnist Ed Lowe.

  • I really believe a hurricane is coming.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been up on the corrugated metal roof of my garage adding screws to keep it in place after my wife got home from work Friday.  I don’t like to crawl around on the garage roof when nobody else is around.  I’d much rather have someone available to call 911 in case while falling off the roof I  break enough bones that I can’t call 911 myself.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Was hurricane iRene something Steve Jobs thought up before he stepped down as CEO of Apple?
  • With a hurricane churning up the east coast, I want to know where Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel is.  He turns up at weather disasters with such regularity I am beginning to believe he causes them.

  • I saw a five-series BMW driving five miles per hour under the speed limit on the New York State Thruway on Thursday.   Doesn’t the factory have people they can send to confiscate a BMW from a driver like that?

  • Are you one of those annoying people who will swerve across lanes of traffic, cutting people off, because your highway exit came up unexpectedly?  That’s not cool.  It’s even less cool if you;’re driving a tanker truck like I saw in Ramapo NY yesterday.

  • To me, people who walk or drive behind cars or trucks as they are backing up fall into a special subcategory of jackass.  Why do you do that?  Don’t you know it’s dangerous?  A lot of cars and trucks don’t have great visibility to the rear while backing up.  Mine doesn’t, and I have three mirrors and a back-up TV camera.  If you had to back my truck out of a parking space, I bet you’d never walk or drive behind a vehicle as it is backing up again.

  • To the guy driving the silver Honda Odyssey in the left lane and the center lane and sometimes both lanes at the same time of the Cross-Bronx, Vehicle-Storage facility so slowly that everyone was passing you:  Don’t you think you should sober up before taking your family for a ride?

  • Former Met and Phillies outfielder Lenny Dykstra was charged in Los Angeles with exposing himself to women who answered an employment ad he posted on Craig’s List.  If the charges are true, does that mean he’s running for Congress?

  • When I see a commercial for the prescription drug Lyrica, I can’t help pondering whether it helps you write better songs.

  • The new FM news station in New York, WEMP had a promo on yesterday about “weather whenever it happens.”  Weather happens all the time, so what the hell does that mean?

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • My son the lawyer emailed the head of the California office of a large international law firm and asked for an informational interview.  The gentleman graciously agreed.  Do you suppose his willingness to see my son had anything to do with the fact that he and I were friends in college?  In any event, the guy apparently lied through his teeth about me.  My son said the first twenty minutes of their talk was about me and that all of the stories he told about me were good!  Can you believe that?

  • Have you seen the TV commercial for Direct TV that uses an Asian actor who calls himself a whale (as in the Las Vegas term for a big-spending gambler)?  If I were Asian, I believe the stereotypical portrayal of the Asian guy in that commercial would offend me.

  • What kind of minerals do they use to make mineral spirits?  I only ask because that stuff is expensive.

  • Why do you need a prescription for a mammogram?  If your insurance had two requirements, I think we could get by without prescriptions for mammograms and slightly reduce the cost of health care.  The insurance could pay for mammograms once a year and require that the results be reported to your primary care doctor, thus eliminating one doctor visit, or at least one point of contact with one doctor.

  • Why does everyone in town get to pay to fix the road in front of my house, but if the sidewalk breaks, I have to pay for that all by myself?

Things I Know

  • Anyone who knows me and is nice to one of my children because of it gets special thanks from me.  So, thanks the gentleman who took ninety minutes out of his busy day last Thursday to talk to my son and give him some career advice.  I always liked the guy and his family.  I like him even more now and because we live 3,000 miles apart, we haven’t seen each other in many years, but I think I’d better make a trip to correct that oversight.
  • The most brilliant marketing award for August and probably for the decade of the tens goes to Abercrombie and Fitch which issued a news release last Tuesday saying they have offered to pay Mike Sorrentino, known as “The Situation” on the TV show “Jersey Shore,” not to wear clothing from their company.  It’s brilliant marketing because it got a lot more press than paying him to endorse their clothes would have.
  • Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, was famous for saying, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”  My grandmother would have said, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anyone, don’t say anything at all.”  As of today, I’m more inclined to follow my grandmother’s advice, but I bet Alice was a lot more fun than granny.
  • Because I’ve been painting the inside of my house, I’ve spent more time moving my hammock so I could mow under it this summer than I have relaxing in the hammock.
  • The philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it.”  If that’s true, then President Obama ought to study President Carter.   A good man, although misguided in some issues I think, Carter is widely regarded as a much better former President than President.  Why?  Because he wasn’t a strong leader.
  • I told my wife that if she ever says to me:  “Honey, I’ve got something to tell you, but I can only tell it to you on the Jerry Springer Show,” I’m not going on the show with her.
  • Here’s a way for a bike rider to get him or herself killed, but with the caveat that it’s not 100 percent reliable.  I was headed south on Rte 111 in Islip, NY.  A kid was riding his bike north in the southbound lane, not on the shoulder.  He flashed me what I assume was a gang sign and gave me the choice to stop or run him over.   I stopped, in traffic, on a state highway.  I already had an accident recently.  Having demonstrated his power over oncoming traffic, the kid swerved to pass me on the passenger side of my truck.  At the same time, the idiot in the Suburban behind me decided to pass me on my right.  The kid narrowly escaped becoming a bike-rider sandwich without mayo, mustard or ketchup, and when I say narrowly, that’s exactly what I mean.
  • Here’s proof some people have too much money.  It’s a good TV show, but come on, $700?  And you thought I was going to complain about the 1957 250 Ferrari Testa Rossa prototype that sold for $16.39 million at the Pebble Beach auction Saturday night, including commission.  No, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • I wonder what the cause of Michelle Bachmann’s public gaffes is.  Her latest faux pas was to wish Elvis Presley a happy birthday, not on his birthday (which is in January) but on the anniversary of his death.  She’s achieved too much in life for me to think she’s a complete moron, but if the gaffes were poor staff preparation, I have to think the responsible staff member would have been fired long ago.

  • When we pulled up the wall-to-wall carpet in our living room we found hardwood floors that were once very nice and are now badly stained because of various things spilled on the carpet over the years.  This led me to wonder if they make a carpet pad that won’t let spills through to the floor underneath.

  • If you like doo wop music, did you know that Little Anthony’s first name isn’t Little?  It’s Jerome.

  • The music I like is old enough that some of it isn’t available as an MP3 download so I still buy the occasional CD.  When I look at a CD to buy on Amazon, the website only shows the first twenty tracks unless I click a second link.  There are even a few CDs there where the website doesn’t have a track listing at all and some that show who wrote the song rather than who sang it.  Why wouldn’t I want to see all the tracks on a CD the first time I look it up?

  • I was delighted to be able to download the long-lost instructions for my ten-year-old cordless telephone system.  However, if I store it on my computer under its original file name, do you think that’ll be of any help the next time I need it?  The original file name of the downloaded instructions is PP_S2730_Cr_D57ACF1985235D4D9A0FA6E26EDB871C.pdf.  Just me,  but I would have thought Sony 2730 Cordless Phone Manual.pdf would have been a more helpful name, so I renamed it.

Things I Know

  • I think of Fitch Ratings as #3 in the financial ratings business behind Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s.  So it’s no surprise to me that when Fitch maintained its rating of United States debt at AAA, it made a lot less news than when Standard and Poor’s dropped it a notch.
  • President Obama’s bus tour:  perhaps he’s planning to become a country singer rather than run for reelection.
  • If he’s not embarking on a career in country music, I think the President’s bus tour is wholly political.  I have read, however that it’s being billed to the taxpayers as an official government function.
  • Even though I’m on the federal no-call list, I keep getting calls from a company that identifies itself over the phone as “Card Member Services.”  All I know about the company is that it wants information I wouldn’t give over the phone to anyone who calls me cold (beginning with my outstanding credit card balance), it cares nothing for the federal no-call list and there are lots of websites carrying complaints about them calling despite being told not to.  Those things taken together make it sound suspicious to me.  Today I told their representative who identified himself as Sean not to call me again.  I also made a list starting with today of the date and time of the call and beginning with that notice, I’m going to complain to the Federal Trade Commission every time they do call.  If you wish to do the same about this company or any other, the link is: 
  • https://complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx
  • I don’t have any stock, but I do have more CD titles in my house than Best Buy does at my nearest store.  Of course, CD’s are nearly obsolete by now, so that’s almost like saying I have more vinyl titles than Best Buy does, which is also true.
  • Unsolicited email must be an effective marketing tool, and I know it costs hardly anything.  I can tell both of those things because of the huge quantity of unsolicited email I receive every day.  It just annoys me.  Case in point:  I bought a couple of good-quality faucets from an online retailer.  I get a lot of email from them.  I have five faucets in my home.  All of them are good quality and relatively new.  I doubt if I’ll ever buy another faucet as long as I live here.  People who sell faucets probably don’t do a lot of repeat business, except with plumbers and contractors.  Those emails don’t convince me to do anything but delete them.
  • If I ever get a kitten, I believe I’ll name it Caboodle.
  • I mentioned a while ago that we got some strawberry ice cream that had strawberry swirl in it rather than whole strawberries or chunks of strawberry.  I have an ice cream maker so I looked up some recipes for strawberry (sans swirl) ice cream.  Lots of them recommend that you puree the strawberries and refrain from putting chunks of fruit in the ice cream because the berries will freeze and the texture will be unpleasant.  Having been raised on Breyer’s strawberry ice cream, I like the chunks.  But I thought strawberries must be getting expensive, and I was right.  The Breyer’s strawberry ice cream we had last week had almost no chunks of fruit in it.  My solution to strawberry ice cream with no pieces of strawberry in it is to have the ice cream with slices of fresh strawberries on top of it.  That works nicely, trust me.

Things I Know

  • Standard and Poor’s has reduced the United States’ credit rating from AAA to AA+.  That’s still pretty good unless your country’s currency is the standard for international trading, which the dollar is, but maybe not for a lot longer.
  • The rating company said part of the reason it made the rating reduction was the bickering and brinksmanship on the part of the White House, Senate and House.  So, naturally, reacting to this news, the Democrats and Republicans blamed each other.
    • Well, I answered my own question about what I considered premature back to school sales.  School started the first week in August at least in some parts of Georgia and it starts this week in Florida.

    • Encouraging news:  when I went to the store, a little boy was standing near his parents’ car and without being told, he got way out of my way as I pulled in to park.  On the other hand, three adults walked behind my truck as I was backing out. 

    • Summer is over.  On Friday, I was at Home Depot and they had a big rack of flowers for sale in front of the store; a big rack of mums!

    • While I was at Home Depot, the skies opened up and we had a cloudburst.  After I paid for the stuff I needed there were lots of people standing under the overhang at the front of the store.  But I’m not water soluble, so I walked to my truck, and came home.   I wouldn’t do that around here in February, but it is August so I might as well enjoy it.

    • I’m pretty sure now that the format problems I’ve encountered with this blog are due to the fact that I’ve been posting to the blog using more than one Internet browser.

    • I know I’m part of a very small minority of US men here, but I don’t like football.  I understand it, I even played it badly as a kid, but I don’t like it.

    • I don’t like reality TV either, nor do I understand it.

    • I didn’t have to empty the attic entirely to have the electricians do away with knob and tube wiring.  I did get most of the stuff out though.  Before we put anything back, my wife, daughter, and I have agreed to throw away a few more things that are still up there and to throw away some stuff rather than take it back upstairs.

    • Progress report on the remodeling:  I’ve painted the ceilings in the hallway, foyer, one bedroom and the living room.  I’ve installed the pot lights in the hallway and the ceiling fan in the living room.  I had an electrical inspection, but have to be re-inspected because I took down some of the ceiling fixtures so I could paint.  I’ve put them back, so I’m ready for another inspection.  I have also stained all the woodwork that needs staining, but I have to put urethane or varnish on it to finish the job.  Once that’s done, I can paint the walls in every room except the kitchen and the two bathrooms.

    • We pulled up the carpet in the living room and found lovely, inlaid hardwood floors.  They’re badly stained and need some minor repair though, so I’m getting a floor finisher in to tell me if they can be saved.

    • The thing that’s going to take the most effort is paying the electrician.  With all the knob and tube wiring we found and replaced, that bill comes to around $4,000!

    • The Lowe’s I was in last week had a deal going where they would install overhead light fixtures throughout your whole house for $249.  That doesn’t include the cost of any new wiring.  I have six overhead light fixtures in my house and I’d replace them myself before I’d pay anyone $249 to do it for me.

    • I love to go to the beach and I have a pass to get into the beach for free, but I’ve only been once this year.  I’m going to fix that this week.

    • You’ve probably read that all-time record high temperatures were reported in various places across the USA something like 9,000 times in the month of July.  But I also read a story in the Las Vegas Review Journal kind of complaining that it hasn’t reached 110 degrees in Las Vegas even once this summer.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • How much extra would light fixtures, covers for wall switches, outlets and etc. cost if they made the screws that come with them just a quarter-inch longer?
  • Did you read as I did that in 43 states now grade-school students are no longer required to learn cursive writing?  The theory is that everyone either prints or uses a keyboard now.  I suppose this means that once the few people with legible signatures die, nobody will be able to read anyone’s signature anymore, unless it’s a big “X.”  But the other big question is who will they get to write on birthday cakes?
  • Why do we need vacuum cleaners?  Isn’t a vacuum already clean?  And aren’t the vacuum cleaners we already have misnamed?  Aren’t they really suction cleaners?

Shouldn’t a salt bagel have more salt on it than this one does?

Things I Know

  • Once upon a time, I could care less about hockey.  Then I realized the implications, so I did care less.  Now I couldn’t care less about hockey, so I voted no on the $400 million bond issue to build a new Nassau Coliseum as home for the NY Islanders.
  • At Houlihan’s restaurant in Westbury NY, there’s a sign pointing to “additional parking for Houlihan’s,” and that additional parking is closer to the entrance than any of the other spaces are.

  • There’s an ad on TV, seeking plaintiffs for a lawsuit regarding surgery using trans-vaginal mesh.  The announcer says the phrase “trans-vaginal mesh” several times and each time he does, I can’t help thinking of the musical round we used to sing when we were kids.  It went, “George Washington Bridge, the George Washington Washington Bridge.”

  • While painting the inside of my house, I’ve been watching a lot of true crime stories on TV.  But I hate suspense, so as soon as they mention the murder victim’s name, I put it into a search engine to see whether they’ve caught the killer.

  • Here’s an update on my plans for a band called, “Flu-like Symptoms.”  We’re going to be really, really bad.  That way, I can be the lead singer and that way, when someone says they’re suffering from flu-like symptoms, everyone will think it’s us.

  • Glucose is not just a sugar, it’s also a carbohydrate and all carbs are important to diabetics, not just glucose.  This is true because most other carbs convert to glucose to one degree or another in the body.  If you look at sugar-free foods, that can be misleading.  Many of them are higher in carbs than foods with sugar.  Some of them have sugars other than glucose in them.  I saw a sugar-free iced tea powder that was loaded with dextrose and dextrose is a sugar.  I got an ice cream freezer, thinking I’d make sugar free or lower sugar ice cream.  A lot of the so-called sugar-free recipes I found called for agave nectar and that has more fructose in it than high-fructose corn syrup does.

  • I think they still have push-to-talk cell phones, but I haven’t seen one in a long, long time.

The Coliseum: Thumbs Up Or Down?

I don’t know what to tell you about the vote tomorrow to allow the County of Nassau in suburban New York to borrow up to $400 million to build a new Nassau Coliseum as home for the NY Islanders, concerts, trade shows, etc.  I doubt if I’ll make up my mind until I’m in the voting booth.

First, the vote is advisory.  There are an awful lot of details that haven’t been worked out.  Revenue projections look pretty rosy to me.  We’ll get around 800 new and badly needed construction jobs, but the county is laying off civil-service workers and they need jobs too.  The bond issue, if approved, will raise County taxes more than the two percent allowable under a new state law.  The Nassau Interim Finance Agency is skeptical too because, frankly, Nassau County government is broke.

I don’t buy the argument that a new arena will make the Islanders a better team.  The place wasn’t run down in 1984 when they stopped winning Stanley Cups and they haven’t won one since.  Plus, a new arena hasn’t helped the Mets much, has it?  Of all the major professional sports, hockey draws the fewest people and when the NHL locked out its players in the 2004-2005 season, I’m told Coliseum revenues hardly noticed it.

They say we’ll lose 2,000 jobs if the Islanders leave and the Coliseum closes.  Most of them are part-time and low-paying yet a job’s a job, especially with the economy the way it is now.  I’d hate to lose any.  They say we’ll have 3,000 permanent new jobs at a new arena, but that includes the 2,000 jobs they have now and is based on a projection that the Islanders will come close to selling out every home game.  I don’t know if they ever did that, even when they were winning those four straight Stanley Cups.   

I don’t care about hockey.  The only sport I follow is baseball:  I’ve been there for other things, but I haven’t been inside the Nassau Coliseum for any sporting event since the Chinese ping pong team was there almost forty years ago.  I would like a place nearby to go for home shows, auto shows, concerts and other big shows. 

I think our taxes will go up whichever way the vote goes.  Building a new arena will cost us and so will closing down the existing Coliseum and not replacing it.  So, I guess I’m sitting on the fence (which is uncomfortable) and when I jump off tomorrow, whichever side I land on will be uncomfortable too.  Sometimes if you’re hurting either emotionally or economically you go out and spend some money you don’t have on a treat for yourself in an effort to feel better.  Maybe that’’s the mindset that will decide the question.

Polls are open from 6 AM to 9 PM.  The date was selected to ensure a low voter turnout in the hope that special interests (or stake holders, depending on whether you agree with them or not) will decide the issue.  If you’’re neither a special interest nor a stake holder and you vote anyway, perhaps the people will actually decide the outcome.  I know I’ll vote; I just don’t know how yet.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Have you seen the promo on NBC for its upcoming series “Prime Suspect?”  The reason it caught my attention is the music in the promo is the song “Mr. Sandman” as sung by the Chordettes.  That song was published and recorded by the Chordettes in 1954.  Not just the song, but that version of the song, is almost sixty years old!  TV is advertiser driven.  Most advertisers want their ads to appeal to people under 54 years old because of the belief that older people are not swayed very much by commercials.  So, why does the promo for “Prime Suspect” use music designed to appeal to people who are about 70 years old?
  • The way TV news went overboard about the recent heat wave makes me wonder if people really tune into the networks’ evening newscasts to find out that it’s hot.
  • Is it autumn already, or did the extreme temperatures last week cause all the sycamore trees around here to turn yellow and start dropping their leaves?
  • The word “elderly” ends in “ly” so why isn’t it an adverb?
  • Now that the last one has landed for the final time, I know all the NASA space shuttles are going to museums, but where are the giant crawlers that take the shuttle and its rocket from the assembly building to the launch pad going?  Wherever it is, I’m sure they’re going there slowly.  I mean, they’re called crawlers, not runners, right?

Things I Know

  • A paper from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has concluded that time travel is impossible.  That’s going to put a damper on a lot of my recreational reading.  Actually, fiction about time travel has changed over the years.  It used to focus on the grandfather paradox and now it focuses on what’s called alternate-universe theory.  My very favorite paradoxical time travel story is one called “All of You Zombies,” by Robert Heinlein, one of the greatest science fiction writers ever.  I also love “The Immortal Bard,” by Isaac Asimov, because I came across it when I was in ninth grade.  It’s not paradoxical, but I love it because it pokes fun at English teachers, and my ninth grade English teacher read more into other people’s writings than I was (and still am) quite sure they ever intended to put there.
  • Roberto Alomar didn’t get into the Baseball Hall of Fame because he was a NY Met.  When he came to the Mets, he got old, all of a sudden.  But before that, he was a great second baseman and based on his record before he got to NY, he does deserve to be in Cooperstown.
  • Shutting down the manned space flight program will do bad things to the economy in certain parts of Florida and Texas, but I’ll bet you our taxes don’t go down at all, unless we’re the people who wind up without jobs because of it.
  • It’s too late for what already exists, but I propose going forward that the color of all clothing be descriptive.  I get that sage is green and khaki can come in different shades of tan.  All of that is fine, but the people who make Under Armor clothing make shorts in a color called “bureau.”  I don’t know what that is, and I bet the only people who do work for Under Armor.
  • I hadn’t seen it before, but here’s another way to make the payments on a car lease look much smaller than they actually are.  No money down and X amount per month, let’s say $69 for example for a compact car.  But there’s a 25-cents-per-mile charge for each mile driven.  Twelve thousand miles a year, which is about average, would make the lease cost an additional $250 a month.
  • My dermatologist gave me a simple suggestion on how to decide whether I need sunscreen.  If my shadow is taller than I am, it’s okay to go without.
  • You never ever need to shovel two feet of 100 degrees, so I will deal with this and not complain until it’s cold enough to snow.
  • I got a Groupon offer for up to 88 percent off on laser hair removal.  It didn’t seem like much of a bargain to me since I’m at least 88 percent bald already.
  • Amazon.com has a recommendation feature.  Sometimes it’s ingenious and sometimes it’s annoying.  One annoying thing is that when you sign in it asks if you want to see your recommendations.  If you say yes, it shows you some of them and you have to click on another link to see them all.  If I want to see my recommendations, I want to see all  of them.  Second, it sometimes recommends what I just bought.  For example, I just ordered supplies for my ink jet printer and Amazon’s recommendations now include ink for my printer, starting with recommendation #2.  I don’t need it because I haven’t run out yet, and I won’t order any at least until the ink I ordered Friday arrives.

Things I Know

  • A ten-year-old boy, Patrick Hannon, from Huntington, NY, died last Saturday at Camp Yawgoog, a big Boy Scout Camp in Rhode Island.  There was no foul play suspected.  Patrick, who had only been a Boy Scout for a few months, apparently died in his sleep, perhaps of an undiagnosed heart condition.  One week at a time, I’ve probably spent close to six months at that camp.  My heart and my prayers go out to Patrick, his family, everyone who loved him, the other Scouts in his troop, and the adult leaders.  I’m sure the boys, leaders, camp personnel, camp medical staff, and emergency responders from Hopkinton RI did everything they could to save him.  His parents, whose grief I can only imagine, asked that instead of flowers, people send donations to the Catholic Home Bureau, or the Boy Scouts.  Nobody expects a ten-year-old boy to die, and in the face of such tragedy, I can’t help thinking what incredibly gracious people his parents must be to honor their son’s life by asking for donations to charity.
  • Even if you think Casey Anthony got away with murder or manslaughter or negligent homicide, that doesn’t give you the right to threaten her life.  Prosecutors failed to prove their case.  She wasn’t found innocent; she was found not guilty.  If anyone takes matters into their own hands, they will be just as guilty as they think Casey Anthony is. 

  • Today on Today, a report that told us men like women’s breasts.  No, really?  Today, and for the rest of the week on Today, reports that it’s hot outside.  It gets this hot every year; get over it!  Next week on Today, a series that concludes water is wet.

  • Over the years, newspaper comic strips have gotten smaller, and smaller, making them difficult to read in the papers.  I read a lot of newspapers from around the country on line and very few of them even bother to link to comic strips on the Internet.

  • I already knew what to do if I win the lottery during the winter; I’ll turn up the heat in my house.  If I win in the summer, I decided this week that I’ll buy a good seat to a Met or Yankee game.  I went to see the Mets play last Friday night.  I sat in the upper deck and it cost me over $80.  I went by myself, so I couldn’t average the $19 parking fee over a bunch of people.  One reason it cost so much was I was thirsty.  I bought three large sodas, and they cost $5.50 each.  I like to go once or twice a year, but I fear I’ll be priced out within the next few years.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  •  What’s with all the back to school ads and sales?  Where I come from, summer vacation isn’t half over.  School got out at the end of June and doesn’t start again until the Wednesday after Labor Day.  It isn’t even the end of July yet.
  • Prunes come from plums, right?  So how come pruning and plumbing have nothing to do with each other?

  • If the cat’s got your tongue, who’s got your brisket and your pastrami?

  • Returning to the word shebang, have you ever seen more than one shebang or is there only one in God’s creation?  If I’m more interested in shebangs than you are, though.  My blog isn’t ratings dependent or advertiser supported and it is, to refer to the beginning of this sentence, my blog, so I have editorial control.

  • I asked before if shebangs were indivisible:  I wonder now if they’re visible.

  • If there is more than one, do shebangs exist in various sizes or are they standardized? 

  • If they aren’t standardized, do you suppose that somewhere, there’s a physicist working on the big shebang theory?

  • You can find a treatise on the phrase whole shebang here.

  • Somebody who is reading this blog must know more about poetry than I do.  I know Ogden Nash wrote a book called “You Can’t Get There from Here.”   I swear he also wrote a poem that started like that, but I can’t find one in either of the Nash anthologies I own.  Can anyone reading this point me in the right direction, or assure me that I’m wrong in remembering the poem?

HHR Road Test

While my truck was in the body shop, I rented a Chevy HHR.  It’s supposed to look like an early Chevy Suburban, only much smaller.  It was okay, but I wouldn’t buy one.  The A-pillars are too thick and the windshield is too low.  It’s peppy enough and I suppose it gets decent, although not great gas mileage, at least compared with my Nissan Frontier. 

It’s interesting to look at, but form doesn’t really follow function in this case.  I own the Frontier, and a Chrysler minivan.  I chose the HHR, in part, because it looked like it could carry a lot of stuff like my other vehicles can, but the HHR only seats four and it really can’t carry nearly as much stuff as even the minivan.

The thick A-pillars make it hard to see left and right.  The too-low windshield is bad for star gazing, and at an intersection if you pull up too close to a stoplight, it’s very hard to see the light change.  You can’t see either end of an HHR from the driver’s seat either.  As you drive, and park it, you will get used to how big the vehicle is, but if you rent a car, you’d like it to be something you don’t have to get used to.

Many cars today have air dams under or as part of the front bumper.  These are often so close to the ground that they scrape on curbs and on those concrete barriers that stop you from driving too far into the parking space in front of the one you’re in.  The HHR is that low to the ground in front too.  Low air dams are supposed to improve mileage a little at highway speed.  In addition to scraping, the HHR’s low front end is body colored, in the case of my rental, white, so it’s easy to get it all scraped up and when it is all scraped up, it looks it.

The center console isn’t very useful.  It does have cup holders in it, but they are too far back to reach comfortably if you’re the driver and they’re too shallow.  If I had something in the cup holder, I worried that it would spill.

I had to read the owner’s manual to figure out how to open up the hatch.  The release is hidden under the trim over the light that shines on the rear license plate.  And the owner’s manual doesn’t explain that very well either. 

A lot of people who rent cars are business travelers, even if I’m not.  A lot of them own smart phones or some other kind of MP3 player, and so do I.  If I ran a rental car company every one of the cars would have a radio that let you play your own music on it.  Maybe they don’t get a lot of complaints about that, but it did bug me that I couldn’t listen to the music I always carry with me.  I’d rather have that ability than a trip computer which my car did have.

My collision insurance paid for part of the rental.  I agreed to pay an additional $7.07 a day.  I had the car for 11 days.  They wanted to charge me $77.79!  Where did the extra two cents come from?   They didn’t know, but they did adjust it when I pointed it out.

So that’s my review of the Chevy HHR.  And there’s one thing strikes me about the review:  Except for the visibility problem, nothing that diminished my appreciation of the vehicle had anything to do with driving it.

Thngs I Know

  •  Happy Bastille Day everyone.
  • A Marine Sergeant made a Youtube video inviting actress Mila Kunis to the Marine Corps Ball.  She said on TV that she would go.  Then Billy Bush reported on his show that she apparently  has a conflict because of the shooting schedule of two movies.  Going would be excellent publicity for Ms. Kunis, so I predict she will manage to adjust her shooting schedule.  After all, Marines have shooting schedules too, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but some of them manage to attend the Corps’ annual birthday bash.
  • A  large portion of the home improvement we’re doing has now been completed.  A large portion of the painting has  only just begun.  That part is my responsibility.
  • I mentioned a short while ago that we were disputing who caused the accident in which I was involved last month.  That’s not really accurate.  I don’t think it was anyone’s fault.  If it was someone’s fault, it would be a deliberate, not an accident.
  • Phone Apps must be profitable.  Amazon.com suggests more apps to me than it does music, and I buy more music, a lot more music.
  • I don’t know if it was someone from the company, a cold-calling broker or a scammer, but despite the fact that I’m on the federal no call list, a telemarketer tried to sell me stock this week in Spectrum Blue Steel Corp.  It’s a Philippines-based green energy and waste management company trading on the German stock exchange.  I don’t know anything about the company, so I passed.
  • Still, I may not be the best person to give investment advice.  I am the guy who asked a couple of years ago if gold is such a good investment, why were companies spending so  much money on TV advertising to sell the gold they have to you and me.  Gold is probably double what it was when I said that.

That Ball

There are no Major League baseball games on the afternoon after the All-Star game, so let’s talk about the baseball that took place last weekend.  Let’s talk about the baseball that represents Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit. 

How much money Christian Lopez would have realized if he sold the baseball Derek Jeter sent into the stands with his 3,000th hit is speculation.  However, it would have been in cash and he could have used some of the cash to pay the taxes on the part he got to keep.  He also could have used some of the cash for anything he wanted, not just for going to more Yankee games.  Considering what the Yankees charge for tickets, the season tickets for the rest of the year that they gave him could wind up costing him something like $15,000 in taxes.  But that’s also speculation, depending on how much money he makes and what deductions he’s entitled to.

I’ve said before that the only thing I know about Economics is that I went to high school with a man who grew up to be a prominent Economist.  That’s not quite true.  I know about marginal cost too.  That’s the cost to make one more of something, once the fixed costs of making any of them are out of the way.  So, since the Yankees aren’t selling all their tickets, if they give a few they didn’t sell to someone like Christian Lopez, the marginal cost may be less than zero.  I say that because if Mr. Lopez and/or his friends and family do use the tickets, he and they will probably visit the concession stands, and buy some things the Yankees can sell to a free seat, but not to an empty one.  Yet, Mr. Lopez will have to pay taxes on the retail price of the tickets.

So, the seats are worth something, but they are probably worth less than the ball would be worth on the memorabilia market, and Mr. Lopez will be penalized for his altruism by our tax code.  Similarly, the ball is worth something to Derek Jeter, but I’m guessing it is worth less to him than it would be to someone who can’t do what Jeter did, but can pay for memorabilia.

What I don’t understand is the idiots calling sports-talk radio stations insisting that Lopez is a chump, and that Jeter should cut the guy a six-figure check.  The ball may be worth six figures to Joe Schlub who is rich, but would rather be one of the biggest stars in baseball (in which case, he’d still be rich, maybe richer, but he’d also be famous, own a huge waterfront house in Tampa and be dating actress Minka Kelly).   Mr. Schlub can’t be Jeter, but he can own a small piece of the man’s achievements if he pays enough money.  Not only can Derek Jeter be Derek Jeter, there’s nothing Schlub or anyone else can do at this point to keep him from being the Yankees’ star shortstop. 

Jeter might like having the ball, but if it were on the market for six figures, I’d be awfully surprised if Jeter wanted it that much.  Christian Lopez did something nice for Derek Jeter.  People do nice things for celebrities all the time.  So, even if you do think Christian Lopez is a chump for giving the ball that represents Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit to Jeter, don’t beat Lopez up for it.  The IRS will take care of that for you.  Your taxpayer dollars at work.”

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Have you ever seen something less than a whole shebang?  I’m talking about a partial shebang or a segment of a shebang or are shebangs indivisible?
  • The boys who were signed up to go to Boy Scout Camp with our troop next week cancelled out.  How long do you think it would take the camp to notice if the scoutmaster, and I went anyway, without any kids?

  • Do you need a lot of upper body strength to run fast?  I only ask because world-class sprinters, and hurdlers all seem to have heavily muscled chests and arms.

  • How many cable TV channels would go begging for programming if Bill Kurtis (who narrates a huge number of documentary and true-crime shows) ever decided to retire?

  • The strawberry ice cream we bought last week contains “strawberry swirl” rather than strawberries.  I’m guessing strawberry swirl is cheaper than strawberries, even now, when fresh strawberries are in season.  My question is why are they allowed to call it strawberry ice cream if it doesn’t have any strawberries in it?

  • I have an ice cream freezer.  Does anyone have a good recipe for homemade strawberry ice cream?

  • When did they stop calling them grammar schools?  I think they stopped calling them that because they stopped teaching grammar in them.  I received an email note from my beloved niece yesterday.  In the note she used the words “I” and “me” consistently wrong.  And she’s not in grammar school.  She’s going to graduate from a storied Ivy League institution in December.  If you have the same problem, I is a subject, me is an object.  I did something.  Something happened to me.  Easy, see?

Things I Know

  • I think Casey Anthony might make a living after she gets out of prison by doing porn, but my son suggests a nationwide chain of Casey Anthony Day Care Centers. 
  • I have ethics and journalistic principles:  Nancy Grace has a TV show plus lots and lots of money.  Let that be a lesson to you.
  • In Indiana earlier this week, a guy spent $85,000 on a never-titled 1979 Pontiac Trans Am with only 6.7 original miles on the odometer.  It was sold from a family-owned dealership that closed after 80 years in business.  I’m betting GM is happy that its new car warranties are for a certain mileage or a certain period of time, not whichever one is greater.  Otherwise, they’d have to honor a warranty on a 32-year-old new car.
  • If you want to see a brand-new 32-year-old car, hop on down to your local Lincoln dealer and get a salesman to show you a new, 2011 Town Car.
  • I’ll call my new rock band, “Flu-like symptoms.”  I figure I’ll get a lot of free advertising from TV commercials for prescription drugs.
  • I’m just about the only person who knows that my initial impulse is always to have a terrible temper and a terrible tantrum too.  I want to yell and scream at people, and I do yell both very, very loud and extremely rarely, mostly when it’s time to make a lot of noise at a Cub Scout meeting.  I don’t do it elsewhere because I grew up in a family where lots of adults were more than willing to give me “something to cry about.”  I had a calm, rational discussion with the contractor remodeling my house today.  Monday will begin the twelfth week of our three-week project.  I’m responsible for one week delay when I was on vacation and unplanned, but necessary electrical work probably extended the project by two weeks.  Still, the contractor is way behind.  Calm, and rational discussions usually work better, and since I’m not a dentist, pulling teeth to get the thing done seems out of the question.  Besides, if calm, and rational doesn’t work, I can always scream and yell later.  But it’s kind of hard to back down from yelling and screaming if that’s where you started.
  • The calm, rational discussion is having some good effect.  The contractor sent someone around on Friday who worked diligently all day and made some significant progress on the small things still needing attention.  I hope we finish this phase Monday.
  • On the Tonight Show, Jay Leno was going over some funny pictures, ads and errors from newspapers in a feature he calls Headlines.  One was a picture of a guy making chili in a toilet bowl.  I thought, that’s eliminating the middle man!

The Extremely Important Call

I had a car accident.  I’m not going to discuss whether it was my fault or the other guy’s.  That’s in dispute.  Nobody was hurt, both cars were damaged, but the air bags didn’t go off.  Neither vehicle was totaled, but mine cost around $2,000 to repair. 

The other guy’s insurance company sent me a letter asking that I call them.  I did, last Friday.  I learned that my call is extremely important to them.  It wasn’t important enough to hire enough people to answer promptly, but it was important.  They wanted me to talk to their adjuster, but there wasn’t one available, so they said one would call me back.  One didn’t.  I waited until Wednesday to call them back, because I didn’t expect them to call me over the holiday and I wanted to give them the chance to call Tuesday.  They didn’t.

When I called back on Wednesday, that call was important to them too, but still not important enough to hire enough people to answer it promptly.  I was shocked when I selected the menu choice to leave a message and I got a real person, not voice mail.  She still didn’t have an adjuster available, but said one would call me back.  One hasn’t.

I don’t really want to talk to them; they want to talk to me.  Nevertheless, I have made two good-faith efforts to call them back.  Both of my efforts were extremely important to them, but not important enough to answer the phone promptly and not important enough to have someone call me back, even though they said they would.  The call was their idea; I’m helping them out by calling and they’ve assured me twice that it’s extremely important to them.  I have tried (twice) and I’m not calling them again unless, of course, they return the call when I’m not here.  I mean, after all, their call isn’t extremely important to me.

Casey at the Bar of Justice

“Casey Anthony did not murder Caylee,” her attorney, Jose Baez, said after the jury returned a verdict of not guilty of the main charges against the 25-year-old single mother.  If I have to explain who Casey is, and who Caylee was, you stopped reading before you got this far.  We all have to accept the verdict, but the most plausible explanation of what happened is that Casey did kill her daughter.

None of the jurors would talk to the media, and only one alternate juror did.  He said the prosecutors didn’t prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.  I guess that’s what all the jurors thought because there was no long holdout.  The verdict came back in relatively short order. 

I didn’t follow the trial closely, and I only watched Nancy Grace’s show on Headline News last night to see if her head would explode.  It didn’t, but if Casey Anthony didn’t murder Caylee, why is Caylee dead?  Since there is a difference between murdering, and killing, did Casey kill her, or will she be following in the tradition of O.J. Simpson, and spend the rest of her days looking for the real killer?  The theory that the defense put forth, that Caylee drowned and her grandfather staged the event to look like a murder rather than an accident, falls somewhere between improbable, and impossible.  Let’s settle for pretty far-fetched, shall we?  Then, there is the fact that the defense didn’t provide any evidence that its theory might be true. 

The jury didn’t say Casey was innocent; it said she wasn’t guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  Casey cried and hugged her lawyers.  George and Cindy, her parents, and Caylee’s grandparents, did not rush to embrace their daughter though.  They gathered themselves together, and left the courtroom.  George, at least, knows whether he staged an accident to look like a murder, and if I was a juror who saw George, and Cindy’s reaction after the verdict was announced, I might wish that there was such a thing as a do over.

Things I Know

  • America is celebrating the Fourth of July with the traditional Twilight Zone marathon.  In case you’ve been away since the middle of the last century, ““To Serve Man”” is a cookbook.
  • It was 118 degrees in Phoenix AZ on Saturday, a record-breaking temperature for July 2.  I’’ve never been too hot, but I’’ve never been THAT hot either and THAT hot might do it for me.  However, it is a dry heat!
  • I saw an episode of ““Animal Cops Houston”” where they were sedating a full-grown tiger.  The announcer said they wanted to make sure the tiger wasn’’t playing possum.  Uh, no.  You wanted to make sure the tiger wasn’’t playing tiger!  Possums aren’’t entirely harmless, but playing possum would be a lot less dangerous than playing tiger.
  • State Farm Insurance Company’’s Parsippany Auto Claims Central has a mailing address in Ballston Spa NY.  Why does this amuse me?  Ballston Spa NY and Parsippany NJ are about 150 miles apart.  Lots of companies name businesses or offices for the place they’’re located.  This doesn’’t work out really well after the business or office moves. 
  • I make one exception to this principle.  If I had a business, I’’d like to open an office in the Village of The Branch, NY (it’s east of Smithtown), for obvious reasons.  There’’s no post office for Branch NY, but you could still call it your Branch office, even if it was your only office.
  • There was a heart-warming story on the news about a special welcome home ceremony at Islip’’s MacArthur Airport for a soldier returning from Afghanistan or Iraq.  It reminded me of when I returned home, not from a war zone, but from basic training.   I lost something like forty pounds in basic, so when I got off the train in Hicksville, in uniform, my girlfriend of nearly two years (now my wife for many times that long) didn’’t recognize me, and walked right past me.

Things I Know

  • If you fly an American flag this Fourth of July weekend, please do it right.  If you fly various flags, including an American flag, Old Glory should be on the left as you look at them.  If you hang the flag, either horizontally or vertically, the field (blue part) should be on the left too as most people look at it.  A lot of people display a hanging flag incorrectly.
  • William C. Routenberg was arrested in Florida and charged with murder after police dug up his girlfriend from a shallow grave in his backyard.  On the one hand, murderers should realize that if  a body is found in your backyard, you are the first, and most likely suspect.  On the other hand, Mr. Routenberg, 35, has a 21-year record of horrible, criminal behavior including raping three minors that suggests there should have been a way to lock him up permanently long before this.

  • With all the promotion its stars, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are doing, I suspected that cranberry sauce and giblet gravy might be required to watch the movie, “Larry Crowne.”  The reviews I’ve seen range from mediocre to bad; I haven’t seen even one that raves about it.  I like Hanks and Roberts though, so I’ll probably watch it when it comes to cable.

  • I was wrong.  It is possible to have too much money.  At the recent Barrett-Jackson auction in Orange County CA, someone paid $198,000 (plus a 10% commission) for a 1963 VW bus!  It was a 23-window bus, but still.

  • I doubt that Hugh Hefner of Playboy magazine fame is going to imbue yachting caps with cool by wearing one frequently when he’s photographed.  His cap looks silly to me.  I live in a boating community and nobody I know has both a boat, and one of those white or light blue hats with the image of a life preserver on the front.

  • It was widely reported as news that Kim Kardashian had her ass x-rayed to prove it’s not enhanced with surgical implants.  I find that a profoundly sad commentary on the state of journalism today.

  • The school year is over, so I’m going outside to play for the next ten weeks, unless of course I find something more profitable to do.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • With the imminent arrival of the Fourth of July, have you been to the beach yet?  I went today and the Atlantic off Long Island was much warmer than I expected it to be.

  • I don’t get Pippa Middleton.  I have nothing against her.  I recognize she’s attractive and understand that she and her family are wealthy, but why is she now a celebrity?

  • Come to think of it, why are Prince William, the Duchess of Cambridge (not Princess Catherine, not yet anyway) or any other member of the British royal family celebrities in the United States?  I know British royalty had celebrity status here hundreds of years ago, but didn’t we fight and win two wars with the British to get out from under the British royal family?

  • Why is Bristol Palin famous, and can we do anything about that?

  • Has Charlie Sheen calmed down, or are we now completely bored with him?

  • I wonder how many people who are now adults, but were raised with Cabbage Patch Kids, have the word “Xavier” tattooed somewhere on their bodies.

  • My daughter asked me the other day if you get hearing aids from sharing loud music with intravenous drug users.  She must get it from my wife, Saint Karen (who has to be a saint to put up with me), because I’m obviously completely normal.

Things I Know

  •  If you’re very good at paying your bills on time, make a mistake, and miss a payment, your credit card company may be willing to waive the interest and penalties if you ask nicely.  I just got that courtesy from one of my banks.  I don’t know how often you can do that because I’ve done it way less than once a year.
  • It’s not a good thing if the people at the auto body collision shop remember your name.

  • My daughter bought a Kindle and I downloaded the Kindle application for my PC.  I’ve used it to read a few books from the Guttenberg Project for free.  Kindles, Nooks and other e-readers, if successful, will put a big dent in the sale of book cases.  And that’s their biggest advantage.  You can store a lot of books in electronic form in a lot less space than paper requires.

  • There are a lot of e-books available for free, but most of them aren’t the kind I read.  I think most of the ones I do want to read are too expensive as e-books.  If I can buy a 500-page paperback book for $8.00, an e-book should cost less than that.  But a lot of e-books only cost a dollar or two less than the hard cover version.

  • The two biggest problems with electronic books:  books now require batteries or AC power; and if you like to read in the bathtub, as I do, it costs a lot more if you drop your e-reader in the tub than if you drown an $8.00 paperback book.

  • I read that romance novels are about the most popular kind of e-books because people can read them without the embarrassment of those lurid covers.  If that’s true, perhaps Barnes & Noble should rename its e-reader from Nook to Nookie.

  • The “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials for Dos Equis beer are very clever.  Two of the traits of this man that particularly amuse me right now are:  both sides of his pillow are cool; and objects in his mirror appear exactly as they are.

  • We are about two months into a three-week remodeling project in my house.

  • An electrician who’s also a carpenter would do less structural damage than an electrician whos only an electrician, in an older house.  The electrician rewiring the second floor of my house carved up the attic floor with a reciprocating saw.  I asked him why he didn’t use a circular saw.  He said he had a reciprocating saw.

  • The floor in my attic is ¾ inch plywood covered by ¼ inch luan plywood.  No, I don’’t know why they did that.  The carpenter said if they had cut away a good section of the luan and then a narrower section of the ¾ inch plywood, they could have reused most of the flooring instead of having to buy more to patch it.

  • While drilling through a sill plate to snake wires, the electrician accidentally drilled a hole in my roof.  To his credit, he did tell me about it and said his company would pay to repair it.  If you install a new roof on your house, save a few extra shingles in case you need to repair it later.

  • I saved a few pieces of siding too, but I’m having a hard time storing the siding and may have to give that up.

  • I can’t begin to calculate how much money my wife has saved us over the years by refusing to buy either Coke or Pepsi unless they’re on sale.  Sometimes the sales are up to 50% off, and where I live, one or the other is  on sale every week.  

No Laffing Matter

The guy who murdered four people during a drugstore robbery in Medford, Long Island last Sunday, walked away, according to Newsday, with ten thousand addictive narcotic pain pills.  I gathered from what I read that these pills are oxycodone, hydrocodone or substances related to them.  In other words, they’re strong, highly addictive, narcotic pain killers that are popular among drug addicts and relatively expensive when purchased on the street by junkies.

Three days later, twenty Suffolk County police gathered outside a house, burst in and captured a suspect, David Laffer.  They also arrested his wife, Melina Brady.  Laffer had facial injuries when police brought him out of the house.  Police said he resisted arrest.  The crime was so heinous that if I were one of those cops, I would have prayed that he resisted arrest, so it’s probably good that I’m not a cop.  If they got the right people and it certainly looks like they did, then the Suffolk police force did an excellent job and deserves commendation.

News reports say Brady gave police useful information about the case.  As she was being transported from police headquarters, she told reporters that Laffer did it for her and she was sorry.  That certainly makes everything better, doesn’t it?

Let’s assume for a minute (and I don’t) that everything she said is true.  Then her husband killed four people while robbing a drug store of so many addictive pain killers than the two of them couldn’t use all of them themselves.  He did it for her and she threw him under the first bus that came along.  More than they can use themselves is important here because depending on what ten thousand stolen pills were and how strong, they could have what cops like to call a “street value” of over $100,000!

Who knew you could rob a drugstore of that much money?  Junkies!

Why would someone gun down four innocent people when they didn’t even resist the robbery attempt?  That’s a question I can’t answer.  It certainly didn’t help the apparent murderer evade capture.  In fact, four murders made tracking him down a much higher priority, and probably made nailing the guy happen a lot faster than it might have been if he’d stopped at robbery.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Five days before their scheduled wedding, Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner, 85, announced via Twitter that his fiancé, 25-year-old Crystal Harris had a change of heart and the wedding is off.  If those two crazy kids can’t make it, is there any hope for the rest of us?
  • Was the whole thing a publicity stunt?  She did back out when it was too late to change the July issue of Playboy which features her, semi-nude on the cover, as the new Mrs. Hefner (or so I’m told).  I read that the magazine now has a “Runaway Bride” sticker on the cover.

  • I didn’t tangle up my 100-foot-long outdoor extension cord before I put it back in the garage, so how come it was tangled when I got it out again?

  • If I did tangle it up before putting it away, would it be tangle-free when I needed to use it again?

  • Blinds to Go is a chain store that makes blinds and other window coverings to custom fit your windows.  I’ve bought a lot of things from them over the years.  I guess they don’t have appointments at Blinds to Go because while I’m punctual, not many other people are.  However, when dealing with Blinds to Go, the waiting time is horrendous so, couldn’t we at least call ahead to be put on the waiting list the way you can at Outback Steakhouse and a lot of other restaurants?

  • Why did Rep. Anthony Weiner hold a news conference to resign?  It was bound to be impossible to control.  He could have just sent a letter (which hadn’t been received as of noon the day after the news conference) or resigned on a Youtube video.

  • I don’t have Sirius or XM.  Did Howard Stern use any of the questions he sent an idiot member of his staff to that news conference to yell on camera on his show the day after?

  • Have you seen a map of New York’s ninth CD?  It would astound Elbridge Gerry!  And why would anyone want to run in a special election there, since it is rumored that the current ninth CD will be eliminated when they redistrict for the 2012 Congressional election?

  • Why is there confusion about Elbridge Gerry’s name?  He was a pretty famous guy:  gerrymandering was named after  him and he served as a member of the Continental Congress; delegate to the Constitutional Convention; signer of the Declaration of Independence; governor and U.S. Vice President, but I’ve also seen his first name spelled “Eldridge.”

Things I Know

  •  Crystal Harris, 25, and Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner, 85, are no longer headed to the altar.  Hef tweeted that Crystal had a change of heart.  I would have thought Hef more likely to have a “change of heart” as in transplant.
  • The word “small” has 66-percent more letters than the word “big.”

  • If you waste any time at all browsing the Internet, you may have come across one or more of the websites purporting to be the last page of the Internet.  Some of them are funny, but I don’t think anyone has it right.  I believe that if anyone does reach the real last page of the Internet, the results will be similar to the ending of Arthur C. Clarke’s Hugo Award-winning short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” which ends, “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

  • If you haven’t read this classic Clarke story, look it up.  The entire text is available on line.  You’ll probably love the ending.   He wasn’t kidding when he called it a “short story:”  It really is very short.  And the story is almost 60-years old, so a little historical perspective is needed.  When it was written, taking a computer to a monastery in Tibet involved enormously more work than stuffing it in your backpack and hopping a jet.

  • Rep. Anthony Weiner hasn’t gone away yet, but I’m still hoping.  On Sunday, new pictures were (okay, I can’t resist a bad pun and there really isn’t any point in any other kind) uncovered.  They depict a partially clothed Rep. Weiner standing in the House gym, grabbing his crotch.  Perhaps, in those pictures he’s expressing a desire to become a big league baseball player.

Things I Know

  • It disturbs me when someone defends a public figure’s actions based on whether they agree with that public figure politically.  Some things are morally wrong and some things are factually incorrect, whether you are liberal or conservative.
  • House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Steve Israel and Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz all released statements (within minutes of each other on Saturday) exhorting Rep. Anthony Weiner to resign.   The statements came after Weiner announced he was asking for a leave from Congress to get treatment for his Internet escapades.  Said escapades have been so widely reported, I have no need to repeat them again.  I have no personal knowledge of these events, but I suspect Weiner decided to seek treatment after he learned that the statements from House Democratic leaders were coming.
  • I served on Congressional staff for five years and I’ve never heard of a formal leave of absence from Congress.  There might, however, be such a thing.  I served there a long time ago.
  • I read a lot of science fiction and alternate history.  I like far fewer movies and TV shows in those genres than I do books.  However, I just saw “The Man from Earth,” written by Jerome Bixby.  I wasn’t familiar with this movie or his books, but I liked the movie and I’m going to become familiar with his books.  The movie is anything but action-packed; in fact it’s basically a conversation lasting an hour and a half.  It’s a movie that works if you buy into the premise.  There are holes in the script’s logic and devout Christians may very well find it offensive, but I found it thought provoking and I’m going back to the Netflix website to give it three or four stars out of five.
  • June is when fresh strawberries abound.  That reminds me that when my son was a very small child, he knew that food grew on farms or in gardens and he had heard New Jersey called the “Garden State.”  He decided that when he grew up, he wanted to be a farmer in New Jersey.  I asked him what he would grow and he said “strawberry ice cream;” he became a lawyer instead.  If he had developed a plant that grew strawberry ice cream, you can bet I’d have lots of them growing in my garden right now.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  •  Do you think that if Rep. Anthony Weiner had covered himself everyone else wouldn’t be covering him?
  • When Sarah Palin made her idiotic statement about Paul Revere warning the British, did anyone consider that perhaps she had confused Revere with Mark Lindsay?  That used to happen a lot as I recall.

  • Does it disturb you (as it does me) that you see gasoline below $4.00 a gallon as a hopeful sign for the economy?

  • Perhaps Harold Camping was right after all.  Do you think the Rapture might actually have happened last month, but that too few people were faithful enough to go directly to heaven, so nobody noticed?

  • There’s a new TV show called “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.”  It bills itself as looking at the secret world of gypsies.  But how secret can it be if it’s on TV?

Things I Know

  • I’m not catching up with the Times, the Times is catching up with me.  The NY Times recently reported that blister packs or clam-shell packaging is going out of favor because it wastes oil.  I suggested this should happen in this very blog  almost three years ago.

  • Yes, there is someone who enjoys the 90+ weather we’ve had the last two days:  me!  I have arthritis and I don’t ache as much in warm weather.  I call this warm rather than hot because I have been to the central valley of California.

  • I took advantage of the weather and went to the beach.  The water was cold and full of seaweed.  Several kinds of gulls were on hand, but the rest of the sea birds haven’t turned up yet.  Or maybe they haven’t terned up yet.

  • “When I throw rocks at sea birds, I leave no tern unstoned.”  Ogden Nash.

  • If I were in charge of the beach I go to, I’d build a bench or two where the boardwalk meets the sand, so you could sit down and brush the sand off your feet before donning your sandals.  That way, the combination of sand and sandal straps wouldn’t irritate your feet and you wouldn’t risk splinters by going barefoot on the boardwalk.

  • To me, the taller and thinner a young woman is the more flattering a bikini looks on her.  That surprises me a little since all other things being equal I find petite women the prettiest.

  • I don’t care for tattoos at all, but judging from today’s sample at the beach a lot of young women do.  In fact, I believe I saw more tattoos on women than I did on men this afternoon.

  • I don’t want to rush from here to August, but I did plant tomatoes in my garden.

  • I never want to rush past June because of fresh strawberries.  I bought three pounds yesterday.

  • I hereby declare my pea crop for this year a failure.  I sowed 36 plants.  Three came up and bugs got them.

  • Twenty people in a workplace pool recently won over $200 million in the Powerball lottery.  If you take the cash instead of the annuity and pay all the taxes, you net about a quarter of what the lottery says the jackpot is.  Therefore 20 people won $50 million or so, net after taxes.  In other words, they won $2.5 million apiece.  If some of the winners are relatively young, they can’t stop working.  At today’s interest rates, the younger ones shouldn’t even do anything extravagant.

  • So you won $2.5-million and people think you won $200-million.  Still, if it happened to me, I wouldn’t let it ruin my day.

  • This does demonstrate that you should join any office lottery pool.  In the extremely unlikely event that your coworkers win, you don’t want to be the only one left on the job.

  • Sixteen-year-old Eduardo Vanegas-Fuentes fell into a cesspool in Farmingville NY recently.  His friend, Edgar Calderon-Castro, 19, bravely, futilely and fatally jumped in to try to save him.  You probably can’t rescue someone from a cesspool without special equipment.  Here’s why.  In addition to being filled with exactly what you think it’s filled with, a cesspool almost certainly contains a high level of methane gas.  You can’t breathe methane.  So, even if you can swim and think you can save your friend, tragedy for two is a likely result as it was in this case. 

Weiner’s Wiener Redux

First, and to be totally honest, I need to issue a clarification.  There was once a photograph (the old kind on film) of me in my underwear.  It wasn’t a close up of my crotch, so I stand by my original statement and I doubt very seriously that the picture still exists.  In fact, it may not exist by unanimous request of those few people who saw it.  The photo in question was snapped years ago, during an Army field exercise.  I was stripped down to my underwear while being put through a situation designed to give young soldiers a little taste of what being a prisoner of war would be like.  I thought then and still believe that being a prisoner of war for real is a lot more unpleasant than that exercise was.

If you remember, a few days ago, I advised Congressman Weiner to tell the truth, or a plausible story that couldn’t be proven false.  When I did that, the story I suggested allowed for unseemly pictures of him and while I didn’t insist that he sent the picture in question, his actions to that point convinced me the picture was of him and I allowed that he could have sent it as well. 

Now, of course, there are two questions:  “What?” and, “Was he thinking?” The dance marathon Rep. Weiner engaged in while skirting the question of whose picture was it, does make the story he told on Monday, June 6, completely believable.  So, whether he ever learned of my advice he is now following it, even though he’s following it way too late.

As for Mr. Weiner’s likability affecting the eventual outcome, well, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi did call for an investigation by the House Ethics committee.  I’ll leave it to you to form your own opinion as to whether “House Ethics Committee” is an oxymoron.

I’m pretty sure I would never vote for a candidate for Congress if I knew in advance that he or she was that stupid.  And kids, if you’re reading this and thinking of adults in your life who have told you that sexting is bad, let this be a lesson to you:  If you do engage in sexting, it can turn out badly.  And, once more with feeling, what you put on the Internet may be personal, but it isn’t private.

Weiner’s Wiener

Yeah, I had to comment on this, but at least I spelled Weiner right, and wiener too.

It appears to me Congressman Anthony Weiner is ignoring any advice he’s receiving with respect to crisis-management PR.  Either that or he’’ doing just the opposite of what he’’ been advised to do just because he likes to be contrary.  He’ clearly made matters a lot worse by handling it about as badly as possible.

I don’’ believe the chick who received the now famous crotch shot is his mistress.  If I had a mistress, I know I wouldn’t want her to be 3,000-miles away.

On the other hand, I do know, with certitude, whether there are any crotch shots of me in existence (there are none).  Furthermore, I would expect a US Congressman to keep better track of that sort of thing than I do.  So, Congressman Weiner’s behavior has made me think the picture of a cotton-covered bulge is of Congressman Weiner’s wiener.  By the way, his PR people didn’t advise him to use the word “certitude.”  If they thought about it, they advised him not to.

I’d say “on the other hand” again, but I don‘t have three hands.  I have no idea whether he posted the picture on twitter, but he could have.  Congressmen, especially New York Congressmen do strange things sometimes.  I give you Rep. Lee and Rep. Massa as examples.

If I were Rep. Weiner I would have gone with the truth, or a plausible story that could not be proven false, gotten it all out at once in hopes the story would only last through one news cycle, apologized for what I did, what I didn’t do as well, and then attempted to move on.  I’d say something like, “Hey, I was a single man until I married last year at age 45.  There could be inappropriate pictures of me floating around.  I don’t know, but if there are, I regret them.  I didn’t send the picture in question; my Twitter account was hacked.  I’m turning the whole matter over to the appropriate law enforcement authorities.  And, while I didn’t send the picture, I do apologize for all the commotion it has caused.”  

Bill Clinton survived in large part because he’s likeable.  Eliot Spitzer didn’t survive because he’s not likable and his public persona made what he did seem extra hypocritical.  Weiner is closer to Spitzer than to Clinton on the likable scale.  But he is a Democrat, and Democrats are much less likely to resign over something like this than Republicans are, because Republicans generally seem more hypocritical to their constituents when they eschew family values.

Only time will tell whether Congressman Weiner is kicked out of THE House or his house, or which one happens first.  But if either of those things happens you’ll hear about it on the 24-hour Weiner’s wiener cable TV channel.

And I haven’t called this Weinergate because I’m really sick of adding “gate” to the end of words to create a “clever” name for a scandal.  A lot of adults don’t know anything about Watergate because it happened before they were born.

Things I Know

  • I would have thought an organ grinder was a machine to destroy musical instruments or a device used to make pate, instead of being a street performer with a pet monkey.

  • Harold Camping, the wing nut who told us the Rapture would occur a week ago Saturday has recalculated.  He now says the world will end on October 21st.  My wedding anniversary (and my wife’s too) is October 24th.  Notwithstanding what Mr. Camping has predicted, I think I’ll buy my wife an anniversary present.

  • We’re remodeling again.  This time, we’re doing more rewiring than in the past.  To accomplish that, the electricians need access to the attic.  Really, they have to pull up part of the attic floor because it’s easier to repair than cutting into the bedroom ceilings.  I’ve climbed the stairs dozens of times and my feet hurt, but in doing so, I found the pocket knife my dad carried for many years and gave to me when I was about ten.  I thought I lost it at summer camp in Rhode Island years ago when I was a Scoutmaster, but it’s been sitting in a box in my attic for almost twenty years.

  • A lot of stores have paint on sale over Memorial Day Weekend.

  • One good thing that happened while we were in California:  at home, our crape myrtle awoke from its winter of slumber.  They’re pretty, but they start growing later than any other plant on my property.

  • Reading the Sky Mall catalogue on a recent cross-country flight led me to wonder if the website www.uselesscrap.com was available.  It is, but you can’t just register it for a couple of bucks; someones trying to sell it at a premium.

  • It’s rained so much on Long Island this spring that my lawn goes to seed in about four days which is more often than I mow it.

  • The night we arrived in San Francisco and the night before we left, we stayed at a hotel called the Inn at Oyster Point.  It’s a beautiful location overlooking a marina on San Francisco Bay and it has a fireplace in every room.  But the staff is its greatest asset.  Staff members are friendly and eager to help.  I lost the battery cover off a small radio I carry around.  I called the hotel the day after I checked out; they found it and mailed it back to me.  So kudos to Nicole and anyone else involved in that recovery.

  • I bought my wife an iPad for her birthday.  I had a hard time connecting it to my home wireless network, but finally figured that out; my password is complicated enough it’s difficult to type on a touch pad .  One thing I don’t like; it takes a long time to synch my music collection, especially since it’s already on there.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • The sign in my doctor’s office says, “Please refrain from cell phone use.”  But you can only see the sign as you’re leaving the office, so does that mean the doctor only wants me to use a cell phone while in his office, and nowhere else?

  • Should I plant tomatoes this year?  My back yard is fungus central and it’s rained so much I wonder if it’s worth it or if they’ll come up covered in black spots and die as soon as they rise out of the ground.  It’s also been a cool spring which is why I haven’t planted them yet.  Tomatoes like the soil to be warm.  I have some tomatoes growing from fruit that fell off the plants last year, but they’re plum tomatoes I planted by mistake.  Plum tomatoes are good for sauce, but I wanted to plant cherry or grape tomatoes which are better for eating right off the vine.

  • Tumultuous.  Is there another word in the English language that uses the letter “u” four times?  I can’t think of one, can you?

  • On the front passenger seat back of an empty minivan in McDonald’s parking lot today, there was a woman’s blouse with a bra on top.  I’m pretty sure there’s a question I should ask here and I have no idea what it might be.

  • Not only did the Lincoln Town Car I rented recently have an obsolete radio, Ford doesn’t offer a built in GPS for it either.  I know Ford is phasing this car out, but putting an up-to-date radio and a GPS in the hole in the dash requires no engineering at all.  They could use the head unit from another Ford product or get one from an after-market radio maker.  I can’t understand why they don’t do that, especially since a lot of Lincoln Town Cars are sold to car services and their drivers would probably enjoy a better head unit and find a GPS very useful as well.

Things I Know

  •  I am not making deliberate and frequent changes to the typeface in this blog.  The software the blog publisher uses seems to be doing that unbidden by me.  If I figure out how to stop doing it, I will stop, even though I didn’t start.
  • We’re returning home from vacation in the morning.  The weather in San Francisco and Sacramento wasn’t too nice this time, or last time either.  Next time, I think we’ll make a point to travel to sunny California, instead of the California we’ve been visiting.
  • During our vacation, both my wife and I were under the weather.  It seems strange to me that when we’re fully recovered, we won’t be over the weather.
  • If you are renting a car in San Francisco, please be advised that gasoline at the stations nearest San Francisco International Airport costs almost fifty cents a gallon more than gasoline a mile or two away.  My mama told me, “you’d better shop around.”
  • To me, the worst thing about California is that I can’t stay here long enough to get used to the three hour time difference between here and where I live.  I hate waking up at 3:00 AM and there aren’t many places open for breakfast in Sacramento at that hour.  I know one place on 16th Street that’s open all night, but I tried it for breakfast once and didn’t care much for it.
  • Note to TV news directors in Sacramento:  when I’m watching the local weather forecast, I’d also like to know what the outdoor temperature is now.  Even if the forecast is recorded, you could display it as a graphic on the screen.
  • On this trip, I learned that there’s no proof Mark Twain ever said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer in San Francisco.”  It’s funny and it’s true, so that’s probably why people think Twain said it, but he didn’t publish it, so there’s no proof that he did.
  • This week, that bogus quote is also true in Sacramento, which is particularly startling to me since I was here three years ago at this time of year and it was over 100 degrees.
  • Traffic in Sacramento is weird because streets switch from one way to two way or the other way around.  I could drive to where my son lives by heading west on H Street, until H Street becomes one way headed east.  A lot of streets in Sacramento are like that.
  • Toddlers never try to avoid tripping you; they depend on you to avoid stepping on them.  It seems a dubious survival strategy to me, but you have to admit it has been largely successful for millions of years so far.  
  • The power seat in the Lincoln I’m renting slides as far back as it will go when I shut the car off.  I suppose the people who designed that feature did so to make it easier to enter and exit the vehicle, but I don’t like it and wish I could disable it.
  • The original platform on which the Lincoln Town Car is based has been updated, but it started 32 years ago.  I’ve only rented one twice and each time, I did it because I needed a sedan with a cavernous trunk.  It seems to me the interior hasn’t been updated very much since the last time I rented one which was probably more than 20 years ago.  On this one, some of the buttons on the dash board are concealed by the steering wheel and the bottom of the dash is way too close to my knees.  Those are two things I think they could have fixed in all that time.
  • Our son is considering relocating from Sacramento.  I like the area, but I’ve seen all the local tourist attractions because we’ve visited him here several times, so maybe that’s a good thing.
  • From the “stating-what-should-be-obvious department” comes the sign on the wall next to the hot tub at the hotel where we’re staying:  it says, “Danger.  No diving.”  There’s another sign too.  It warns that there are, “No lifeguards on duty.”  I said it’s a hot tub, not a pool, didn’t I?
  • We had a cute and EXTREMELY PERKY waitress at the restaurant Saturday night.  As an aside, hello Kayla.  But because of my bad head cold, I was really in no mood for EXTREMELY PERKY.
  • The hotel I’m using near San Francisco International Airport overlooks a marina on San Francisco Bay.  It’s very nice, but with a little more attention to detail, it could easily replace Rice-A-Roni as the San Francisco treat.
  • The desk clerk at one hotel told me the newspaper in the lobby was complementary.  I read the entire thing and it didn’t say anything nice about me or my wife.  I’d say that’s one problem with homonyms, but one definition of homonym I read said that they sound the same AND ARE SPELLED THE SAME, but mean different things (I thought they just had to sound the same).  By that definition, complimentary and complementary aren’t homonyms, are they?  I wish they were, because any time I want to use either one, I have to look it up to remember which spelling carries which definition.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  •  When I graduated from high school, the last name of the last person who walked across the stage to receive a diploma began with the letters “Zw.”  Clearly, the order was alphabetical.  I attended a law school graduation on Saturday and I have no idea how they determined the order in which they called the grads, but it certainly wasn’t from A to Z.
  • I know Ford is planning to discontinue the Lincoln Town Car after this year and after it has been in production on a similar chassis for roughly 32-years.  Still, couldn’t they update a few things without a major investment in engineering or tools?  Ford does make a transmission with more than four gears for that engine.  Using it would improve the vehicle’s mileage.  And it wouldn’t take any engineering at all to substitute a more sophisticated radio in that hole in the dash, would it?  I mean, the only way to listen to an MP3 in that so-called luxury car is with ear phones on the MP3 player you bring with you.
  • Do you need a lawyer with an LLM in transnational business and some experience in China?   I’d be happy to pass along your inquiry to the lawyer I watched receive that degree on Saturday.  Comments in this blog are moderated, so your contact information won’t become public if you contact the Sisyphus Project in regard to this matter.
  • The curb strip in front of my house is 45 inches wide.  Most if not all of the curb strips in my town are about the same width.  My power mower cuts a 21-inch swath; that”s fairly common for a home lawnmower.  A 45-inch wide curb strip doesn’t take 2.14 passes with the mower to cut, it takes 3 passes.  How much imported oil could we save if all the curb strips took only two passes to keep tidy?
  • By the way, shouldn’t a power mower cut power and not grass?
  • During remodeling currently taking place at my house, we’ve discovered some knob and tube wiring.  The house is over 100-years old.  Almost any knob-and-tube wiring still in service is heavily overloaded.  For that and other reasons, it’s a fire hazard and I’m replacing it.  To do so, I have to give the electrician access to part of the attic.  The question is exactly how much of the junk in my attic do I have to move out of the attic to replace the wiring?
  • There are two other questions as well.  Will my wife and children let me throw some of that stuff out?  And if I can dispose of enough junk will the house stay on its foundation or will it float off like a giant hot-air balloon?
  • Does anyone here have an effective strategy for quickly adjusting to a three-hour time zone change?  I find myself going to bed very early by California standards, waking up for a few hours about three hours after I hit the hay, then going back to sleep until 6 or 7 in the morning.  It kind of works, but not effectively, and I’m in California just long enough that while I haven’t adjusted completely to the time zone shift, I will have to do some adjusting again when I get back to New York.

Things I Know

  •  The Delta Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport is enormous.   It’s actually two or three terminal buildings linked together.  It’s a good thing I brought my backpack; we must have hiked half a mile from the curbside check in to the gate where we caught our plane.
  • The food places that appealed most to me aren’t in the highest traffic areas of the Delta terminal.  That said, in my opinion, no place that sells pre-made sandwiches in cellophane or plastic wrap can be considered “gourmet.”
  • It’s bad enough that some restaurants and restaurant chains limit themselves to Coke or Pepsi, but not both.  If they sell Pepsi at the Delta terminal in Kennedy airport, I couldn’t find any.  They don’t have it on the planes either and the Coke they do have comes in cans you don’t have to take back for deposit.
  • They’ve remodeled Delta Gate 22 since the last time I was there.  Lots of the seats are now at desks that have iPads and power outlets available for passenger use.  That’s fine, except there aren’t nearly enough seats for passengers waiting to board planes and there isn’t room around most of the seats so you can hold on to your luggage.
  • Delta boarded our flight from the front to the back.  Since airlines (not just Delta) started charging for checked baggage, people have been bringing as much stuff as possible into the cabin and stuffing as much as possible into the overhead bins.  Our seats were in row 30.  My backpack went into the overhead in Row 42.  So, I suggest they board flights from back to front.  That way, when they run out of space over your seat, the extra stuff has to go toward the front of the plane.  If you make it to the back to get your stuff, you won’t make it back to your seat until people in front of you exit the plane.
  • The lead cabin attendant said he was being assisted by three other “absolutely fabulous cabin attendants.”  So, he was implying that he’s “absolutely fabulous” too, right?  If you don’t blow your own horn, you won’t be violating any municipal noise ordinances, I always say.
  •   I could be wrong, but it seems to me you don’t have to walk nearly as far at SFO as you do at JFK.  However the car rental center at SFO may possibly be in Nevada.  It’s really, really far from the terminal.  At least the train ride over there is free.
  • I guess Alamo and National are the same company now.  I rented a car from Alamo and got one from National.  Once again, I got an “or similar.”  I don’t recall ever getting the car the rental car company advertises.  This time, I reserved a Cadillac DTS or similar because I wanted a sedan with a cavernous trunk.  My wife and I are on vacation and we’re picking up our son who’s been overseas for three months. 
  • The “or similar” turned out to be a Lincoln Town Car.  It’s okay; it has the three-Hoffa trunk that I need, but Ford’s phasing that model out and it’s technologically behind the times in even simple ways.  Ford has a sophisticated entertainment system in Fords, but this Lincoln didn’t have it and the owner’s manual doesn’t say it’s even an option.  It doesn’t play MP3 CD’s or have an auxiliary input for an iPhone or a Droid.  I’ve got thousands of songs on my phone, but I can’t play them in my rental Lincoln.
  • I have more trouble than I should finding my way around the San Francisco peninsula.  We’re staying at a very nice place on the bay, near the airport, but it wasn’t easy for me to find it.
  • I call our airport car service guy my almost cousin because his uncle dated my mother in high school.  Taking a car service to the airport is a luxury, but not really that expensive if you are going to be away for a week or more.  It costs me about twice as much as driving to the airport and putting my car in long-term parking and the extra convenience is well worth it.
  • More, as the trip continues.

Things I Know

  • The USA should have filed an environmental impact statement before dumping Osama Bin Laden into the ocean.

  • I read that Ford Motor Company sold fewer than eight thousand Lincolns in March.  When at the NY Auto Show, last month, it occurred to me that Lincoln has gone the way of Mercury and you know what happened to Mercury (they don’t make them anymore).  All the Lincolns I saw at the Auto Show were obviously badge-engineered.  They are clearly based on Fords.  They mostly look like Fords with different grilles and fancier interiors. 

  • Lincoln has manufactured some of the most beautiful and some of the ugliest cars ever made (in my opinion of course).  I hope they find their niche again and become something more than uber-Fords.  If not, I fear that Lincoln will be out of business within a few years.
  • We’re doing some repairs and interior remodeling in our house.  Nobody should live in a house while it’s under construction and this is the second time we’ve done it, so you’d think we already knew that.
  • We’ve lived in this house for 20-years and neither the home inspection we had before we bought it nor any of the electricians who’ve been in since found any active knob and tube wiring in it.  But the electrician who is here now did and we probably have to rewire the entire second floor.  Expensive, sure, but it is a fire hazard so it has to go.
  • In addition to the construction, my wife and I are getting ready for a trip to California next week.
  • One of my favorite ways to relax is to soak in the bathtub while listening to the radio and reading a book.  Last week, I knocked my 13-year-old portable radio into the tub.  I dried it out with a hair drier and then my wife left it in the sun for a couple of days.  It works again!  Mostly.  Although you can’t get this particular model anymore and I was wrong when I bought it to think  I’d listen to a lot of shortwave, I’m hereby impressed with my Grundig Yachtboy 400 and even more impressed with the fact that I don’t have to buy another radio.
  • On May 1, I may have found the most expensive 87-octane gasoline in New Jersey.  In case that’s what you’re looking for, it was in Hibernia, just off I-80.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • I wonder why I’m thinking of weddings today?  I don’t know why the blog software says I posted this on April 28th.  I posted it at about 1:00 AM on the 29th.
  • How can anybody seriously say that Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton is the “wedding of the century” when the century is only a little over ten-years old?
  • I’m sorry, but I just can’t picture William and Kate and all their royal friends doing the electric slide.  Can you?  And if they don’t do it, are they considered officially married?
  • I’m thinking that catching at least a glimpse of “THE WEDDING” today will be unavoidable (even if you’re not interested, and I’m not) if you’re anywhere near a TV.  What do you think?
  • Last week, on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams showed a darling snapshot of our President as a child with his mother.  In it, he was dressed in a pirate costume.  Williams said that President Obama is the first former pirate to be elected President.  How does he know that?  Perhaps there’s an historic photo of another President in a pirate costume.  And what about all the Presidents who served before photography was invented?
  • Are there any rules for pushing a shopping cart around the supermarket?  Are you supposed to try to block the intersections of all the aisles?  Is the objective to run head-on into any cart coming in the other direction?
  • If you want to join the mile-high club, does being in Denver, CO, or Laramie, WY, count?

Things I Know

  • President Obama finally released his long-form birth certificate.  I never thought he wasn’t born in Hawaii.  I believed he wasn’t born at all.  But seriously, the President has nobody to blame but himself for keeping this non-issue alive for the last three years.

  • I know it’s an odd notion, but I believe parts that must be replaced during the useful life of any machine ought to be reasonably easy to replace.  The most recent thing I encountered that doesn’t meet that standard is the belt on my family’s upright vacuum cleaner.  It’s not easy to replace; it’s barely possible to replace.

  • As is my habit, I went to the NY International Auto Show last Friday.   I didn’t want anything I could afford and I couldn’t afford anything I wanted. 

  • When I claim, as I do from time to time, that I know the worst joke in the world, not everyone asks me to tell it, but nobody I’ve known for more than a few minutes argues that I can’t possibly.

Things I Know

  •  I’m beginning to think that President Obama wasn’t born at all, let alone born in Hawaii.
  • Not only do you have to pay your income taxes by the middle of April (usually the 15th, but this year the 18th), but the middle of April is also when I have to start mowing my lawn.  Wild onions start growing prolifically long before that, which wouldn’t be so bad except that they’re not edible.
  • Sometimes, when you can’t sleep, there’s an unusually good movie on late-night TV.  Saturday night into Sunday morning, there was “Bedazzled,” the original with Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, not the awful remake.  If you haven’t seen it, watch it.  If you have seen it, watch it again.  I’ve seen it many times and I pick up something else funny every time I do.
  • Like many cell phones you can buy today, mine is also a powerful computer, a camera and several other things I can’t think of right now.  I set it up to use my home Wi-Fi network.  The instructions say that using it that way shortens the time before your battery needs to be recharged.  They aren’t kidding.  I should probably plug it in if I use it that way.
  • Diversity at work:  in my local Waldbaum’s supermarket, the two African-American ladies in front of me in the checkout line bought two boxes of lasagna noodles and two boxes of matzos.
  • Notwithstanding what it says on the supermarket receipt, I remain unconvinced that I really saved $28 on only 16 items at the supermarket.
  • Speaking of supermarket receipts, I find them very confusing.  If soda is on sale for 99 cents a bottle, the market should ring it up for 99 cents, not for $1.89 with a 90-cent credit somewhere further down the bill. 

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Have we had more gales since the beginning of last winter than we usually do?  It seems like we have to me.
  • Who decided that standard saw horses should be as short as they are (I believe 32″)?  I’m staining porch flooring in preparation for repairing my porch, and if I didn’t have a couple of really tall saw horses (37″), I’d be crippled right about now, instead of just aching.
  • If you’re wasting something expensive, do people still say, as my mother used to, “Do you think that grows on trees?”  Lumber is so expensive these days; you’d think it doesn’t grow on trees.
  • Did you hear the latest commercials for Dodge cars and SUV’s?  They have a tag line:  “We are Dodge.  We are never neutral.”  What does that mean?  Is every new Durango delivered with a broken transmission?
  • I read an article about security measures hotels take to keep people from stealing towels.  Could someone please explain to me why anyone steals hotel towels?  If stealing is wrong doesn’t work for you, they’re too small and too thin for me to want them.  I need two or three to get dry after a shower; the ones they distribute at the hotel pool are even worse.
  • A sixteen year old girl survived a plunge from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.  The news story I read was dated April 18th, but didn’t specify whether the incident happened Monday or Sunday.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it wasn’t clear whether the girl jumped or fell from the bridge.  Suicide is a serious mental health issue; so is attempted suicide.  I don’t mean to make light of either, but how exactly do you fall from the Golden Gate Bridge unless you’re rebuilding it, painting it, or changing the light bulbs?

Things I Know

    • Now that it’s April and the sun is getting stronger, I think it’s time to tell everyone that when my daughter was a toddler, she called the unguent that one applies in order to avoid sunburn “sun scream.”

    • As things begin to bloom around here, I wish I had enough room on my property to plant a magnolia tree.

    • Abner Doubleday is famous for something he didn’t do.  He’s alleged to have invented baseball.  But he did do something that went down in history.  Doubleday was the artillery officer at Fort Sumter SC 150 years ago, so he directed the first union shot of the Civil War.

    • Nine, possibly ten bodies have been found along Ocean Parkway in the area between Jones Beach and Gilgo.  And we thought that area was interesting when Robert Matheson was trying to save the OBI.

    • I spent most of last week in Albany, NY.  Well, Colonie, actually.  On the way there, I took a side trip to Cooperstown.  Yes, I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame.  I go there as often as I can.  I first went about six years ago and liked it so much I became a subscribing member.  But this time, I finally got to the Farmers’ Museum when it was open and I saw the Cardiff Giant.  The giant was a big hoax in the second half of the nineteenth century.  Uncovered in 1869, by 1870, it was such a successful hoax that famed showman P.T. Barnum had a replica made.   Then, Barnum displayed the replica and said his was the original and the original was a fake.  When the Cardiff Giant was uncovered, there were people who identified it as a fake right away.  Still, seeing it in the museum on RTE 80 in Cooperstown, it’s hard to believe that anyone ever fell for it.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • If you enter your PIN number in the local ATM machine, do the two redundancies cancel each other out, or multiply?

  • I heard a song by the 60’s British Invasion group, Herman’s Hermits.  It made me wonder why hermits would get together for the purpose of making recordings.  Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of being hermits?

  • As part of the observation of National Library Week, I read to two classes at a grade school.  Were there really pretty teachers when I was in elementary school?  If there were, I was totally oblivious to beautiful women at that stage of my life.

  • Whats the most important thing you learned in school?  The reason I ask is I just realized the most important thing I learned in school had nothing to do with academic subjects and I didn’t learn it from a teacher.  The most important thing I learned in school is you can’t make someone love you if they don’t want to.

  • A TV commercial touts the benefits of the Bell & Howell solar animal repeller.   It says if you use the product, there’s no need for cruel traps or toxic poisons.  I couldn’t help but wonder what a non-toxic poison would be like. 

Things I Know

  • I’m off to Albany NY for the rest of the week where I’ll be doing one of the things I do best:  talking. And before anyone else says it, if the truth be known, I’m a little bit off all the time.

  •  If the planets align properly, I’ll visit Cooperstown on Tuesday too.  I really like the Baseball Hall of Fame and if I can get there Tuesday, it looks like I’ll finally be able to visit the Farmers’ Museum.  Last time I was in Cooperstown the Farmers’ Museum was closed for the season, but it opens April 1st.  I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember to see the Cardiff Giant.  I just like hoaxes, that’s all, and the Cardiff Giant is an historical hoax.

  • Somebody has me on the wrong mailing list.  I keep getting offers to buy or rent property in the palm resort in Dubai, you know the one for rich people that’s built on artificial islands that look like a palm tree when viewed from the air.

  • I’m not saying anything about the awful accident and the young man who was hit and subsequently died was apparently a fine person.  Nevertheless, the website of the NY Post on Friday, April 2 around 9:30 PM said:  “Bronx High School Student Critically Injured After Being Struck By Train.”  Wrong!  Wouldn’t “Bronx High School Student Critically Injured When Struck By Train,” be more correct?   I mean it would be really weird, if a train hit you, nothing happened, but after that you got seriously hurt.

  • Snooki, it was recently reported, was paid $32,000 to speak at Rutgers University.  Toni Morrison, a Nobel-prize-winning author will get $30,000 to speak at Rutgers next commencement.  Dean Wormer was wrong.  Not only can you go through life fat, drunk and stupid; you should.

Things I Know

  • Let’s all cheer!  It’s opening day of the baseball season.  The weather is crummy in New York, so I don’t know if they’ll get the whole Yankee game in, but they’ll try.  It did snow at Shea Stadium on opening day in 1996.  I left during the second inning.  I like baseball, but I’m not stupid.
  • If you heard that Hailey Swindal, who sang the National Anthem at today’s Yankee game is George Steinbrenner’s granddaughter, you probably expected her to be an inadequate singer.  That’s what I expected, and I was wrong.
  • In case you need reminding, the last two words of the Star Spangled Banner are “Play Ball!”
  • March 31, is World Back Up Day.  It’s supposed to encourage you to back up important files from your computer.  If your computer hard drive fails, it feels really good to know you have a complete back up of all your data including family pictures, music, financial data, work-from-home files, you name it.  I know firsthand because I had a computer hard drive fail during warranty so I didn’t replace it myself.  When the tech asked me what I wanted to do about it, I said, “Whatever you want.  I have a complete back up from yesterday.”  Talk about smug!
  • March 31st is also Robert Bunsen’s birthday.  If the German chemist was still alive, he’d be 200 years old today.  Who is Robert Bunsen you ask?  Well, he invented the Bunsen cell which is a kind of battery.  He also discovered the elements cesium and rubidium and he lost an eye in a laboratory explosion.  But if you think the name sounds familiar, it’s most likely because he invented the Bunsen burner, probably still found in every high school and college chemistry lab.  And he didn’t patent it either.
  • Seven people won the $319 Million Mega Millions Lottery in an office pool.  Usually, there are eight people in the pool, but the eighth guy said he wasn’t feeling lucky that day and declined to participate.  Turns out he was right.  He wasn’t lucky that day.
  • If you’re buying portable audio video equipment, here’s a suggestion:  what kind of battery the thing uses ought to help you decide which one to buy.  I have a four-year-old portable DVD player.  I just bought a new, proprietary battery for it.  The battery cost $90 and was very hard to find.  The whole device cost roughly $200 new, including the battery.  A high-capacity battery for my laptop computer is in the same price range.  If you can find something with a non-exclusive battery (and good luck doing that), it ought to be cheaper to replace.  If not, you may want to look up the cost of replacement batteries for the device you’re considering and buy the device with the least expensive replacement batteries.
  • I just figured out something I should have discovered right after we got our first dishwasher.  If you eat bran flakes for breakfast (or at any time of day for that matter), you should rinse out the bowl and put it in the dishwasher or you should put it in the dishwasher right away and put it through its cycle right away too.  What you should not do is let that residue dry until it’s like concrete and then try to wash the bowl.
  • One of the great things about being an adult is that Gym isn’t a required subject for me anymore.
  • My daughter is leaving China to come home at 10:00 tonight our time, or 10:00 tomorrow morning in Shanghai.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Did you win the $319 million Mega Millions Lottery last night?  I won three bucks, not $319 million, but I’m not going to let it ruin my day.  Not recently, but I have bought lottery tickets at the store in Albany, NY, that sold the one winner.  It’s close enough to the Governor’s mansion that it’s possible Governor Cuomo bought tickets there.  Maybe he won.  He could use the money to help balance the New York State budget.
  •  I think we all know by now that DVD’s are copyrighted, so can’t we please start making some that either don’t have the annoying notice at the beginning, or allow you to skip it?
  • Musician Sammy Hagar announced last week that he had been kidnapped by aliens.  This lead me to wonder why aliens never seem to kidnap the world’s leading intellectuals.  Or is it that the leading intellectuals who are kidnapped by aliens are smart enough not to tell anyone about it afterwards?
  • Why does my cable TV box go into power saving mode at 1:30 in the morning unless I press one of the buttons on the remote between 1:15 and 1:30?  Can I shut that feature off?  I’m often up at 1:30 AM and it’s annoying.
  • Is going to the gym good for you?  The reason I ask is that most of the people who go to the gym near where I live, including me, are overweight.

Things I Know

  • I haven’t heard from my kids since my daughter arrived in China on Wednesday to visit her brother.  I’ve heard that there is trouble with email traffic between hear and China, so that’s probably the reason.  I’ve also heard that the Chinese government is deliberately slowing down such traffic, especially gmail traffic.  I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know my son is using a gmail account.
  • Mega Millions is $312 million (or so) tonight.  I know the odds are something like 175 million to one against, but I play anyway.  Why?  I pay taxes on some things that amuse me, but the lottery is the only tax I pay that amuses me all by itself.  Knowing better than most people how small my chance of winning is, I like to tease my wife about how cheap I’d be if I won, and that running joke with my wife amuses me too.  A Mega Millions ticket is also cheaper than a lot of other things that amuse me.  If I buy a ticket in the upper deck, and go to a baseball game by myself it’ll wind up costing me $60 for the ticket, parking and food as opposed to a buck for the lottery ticket.  My trip to Las Vegas last October cost a lot more than that; so did tickets to the shows, and restaurants we patronized while we were there.
  • And speaking of major league baseball, opening day is less than a week away
  • My wife, Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me), came home today and told me she had signed up for the office lottery pool.  This makes sense, because in the extremely unlikely event that they do win, why would she want to be the only one left in the office
  • I told Saint Karen that all she has to do to join my personal lottery pool is remain married to me.  So far, so good.
  • I absolutely hate people who make grand plans to give away huge sums of money before they win the huge lottery.  Because I know how little chance I have of winning, I have a much simpler plan.  If I win, I’m going to keep it.
  • Anyone who bemoaned the passing of fifties music from commercial radio should take note that sixties music is also disappearing slowly from the airwaves.  It was inevitable.  The reason is that advertising professionals believe older people are less influenced by commercials.  Radio is funded by commercials, so the people who buy the commercials want to reach a younger audience they can easily convince to buy their products.
  • If you like music, you should collect what you like.  That way, it won’t bother you a lot when the music you likes isn’t played on the radio anymore.

Things I Know

  •  Tina Adovasio’s, bruised body was found last week in a wooded area near the Taconic Parkway in Westchester County, New York.  This week, police arrested her estranged husband for the murder.  According to the NY Post, she told her divorce lawyer that if something happened to her it was her husband who did it.  This isn’t the first time a woman has turned up dead after telling people her husband might kill her.  If you think your husband might kill you, leave!  Maybe even leave, and hide.  If you leave, and you’re wrong, no harm done; if you leave, and you’re right, no harm done either.
  • One thing we learned from the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear accident in Japan is someone needs to make the biggest possible diesel generator that can be transported by helicopter and some of them need to be available to power cooling systems at nuclear plants in the event another one (or four or six) suffer(s) catastrophic failure.
  • My daughter is spending about three hours in Tokyo’s Narita airport on her way to Shanghai, China.  The plane from New York to Japan flew a great circle route that took it over Siberia.  The plane’s route was, however, careful to avoid North Korean airspace.  Smart!
  • Unless it’s specially designed for that purpose, a photocopier generally doesn’t copy photographs very well.
  • You can use duct tape for a lot of things, but you shouldn’t use it to seal ductwork.  There’s a special metal tape for that and it works much better.  Duct tape will dry out and become useless if you use it to tape ducts.

St. Patrick’s Day

I don’t make any effort to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day.  If I have something to wear, I do, but I don’t make a special effort.  I have other credentials:  My father painted the first legal green line up Fifth Avenue in New York City for a St. Patrick’s Day Parade.  My father joined the New York City police force in 1931, so the legal green line hasn’t been there forever, although I knew another guy who used to get loaded with his buddies and they painted the green line on a voluntary basis before the city took over the task.

Sometimes I wonder if St. Patrick ever visited Long Island because there are no poisonous snakes here either.

I’ve driven to Albany on St. Patrick’s Day in a blinding snow storm that also had thunder and lightning associated with it.  There may have been another one, but I don’t remember a St. Patrick’s Day with weather as beautiful as today is in New York.  It’s sunny with a high near 60 degrees.

Have you heard the radio commercials for Guinness Breweries in which they brag that the founder signed a nine-thousand year lease on the brewery hundreds of years ago?  I wouldn’t brag about that.  It was a terrible business decision.  If the founder of Guinness Brewery expected the company to be there for nine-thousand years, he should have bought the place.

If I were a drinking man, I’d probably drop by Guido’s Irish Pub on Wantagh Avenue in Wantagh, NY today for a wee drop.  I’ve never been there.  I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but the name, which I’ve mentioned before, fascinates me.  I bet they get customers who see it driving by, stop, go in and ask, “What the hell is with the name of this place?”  Someday, I may even stop in there and ask that question, but if I do, I’ll also ask how many times they’ve heard the question before.

My son has a St. Patrick’s Day story that will last him his entire life.  In 2011, he celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by lifting a pint in O’Malley’s Bar in Shanghai, China.  I asked him if they have a St. Patrick’s Day parade there, but I haven’t heard back yet.  One place there is a parade that you might not think of is Savannah Georgia.  In fact, the parade in Savannah is a very big deal from what I’ve heard.

Doug McIntyre said on his overnight radio show this week that St. Patrick’s Day is the only ethnic holiday he knows of that reinforces ethnic stereotypes.

If you’re into Irish coffee, or even if you aren’t, you might enjoy my recipe.  I suggest you try your Irish coffee black, with no coffee.

Things I Know

  • No blarney, honest:  You can look it up on Amazon.com or someplace else on the Internet if you don’t believe me.  There’s a CD called “The Best Bagpipe Moments Ever.”  I know you won’t believe this part, but there are 35 songs on it!  I only bring it up because St. Patrick’s Day is Thursday.
  • In the old days on the old sod, fighting Irishmen (is there any other kind?) used a type of bagpipe called the Great Irish War Pipe to scare opponents on the battle field.  It worked then; it would still work today!
  • Since Lent started last Wednesday, I guess Easter-Bunny hunting season is officially under way.  You can get your Easter-Bunny hunting license at any chocolatier.
  • Here’s how to make the NCAA basketball tournament finish faster, maybe even in March:  Make the Big East Tournament one of the brackets.
  • Until there were railroads, people used to have to live near rivers because they were the only reliable means of transportation.  However, if you move to Wayne New Jersey these days and are surprised when the area floods, you haven’t been paying attention and it’s your own damned fault.  Or maybe it’s your dammed fault.  I don’t know which.
  • Beware of spell checkers.  A landscaper with customers in our neighborhood passed out good looking, professionally printed cards looking for costumers.  I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want someone to dress his crew and him in fancy clothes.  Perhaps he’s really looking for customers and relied too much on a computerized spell checker.
  • Our son will be in China on his birthday, so before he left, his mother gave him his birthday present.  Our daughter is going to China in less than two weeks to visit her brother and before she leaves, her mother is giving her a birthday present too, even though she’ll be back home three months before her birthday.
  • And speaking of birthdays, March 15th is my oldest friend Jeff’s birthday.  How old are Jeff and I?  I am not going to tell you, but I will say that neither of us can remember when we met and became friends.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  •  I wonder if I can get my wife, Saint Karen, to find the hour I plan to lose tonight?
  •  Did you hear about this study?  Then shouldn’t I be a lot healthier than I am?  The guy who came up with that study must have been in a lot of trouble with his wife or girlfriend when he thought of it.
  • If gasoline keeps going up as fast as it is these days, how soon will it be before someone comes out with a car that runs on computer printer ink?
  • Where does the tooth fairy get all the money she leaves under kids’ pillows in exchange for their baby teeth?  I’ve never heard of her having another job, have you?  And she’s not on the new Forbes Magazine list of the richest people in the world.
  • Supposedly, we have illegal immigrants or undocumented aliens (depending on your political viewpoint) because they do jobs Americans don’t want to do.  So, how come they don’t serve on jury duty?
  • You can’t get prune juice by squeezing prunes, can you?
  • If people want low sodium food, I have no problem with providing it, but isn’t salt the idea behind pretzels, potato chips, French fries and salt bagels?  Making those available with reduced salt is fine with me, but why have they stopped making the kind with a lot of salt?
  • This blog is produced using Word Press software.  Does anyone know if there’s a way to eliminate drafts (other than weather stripping, I mean)?  If there is, I can’t figure it out and I have two draft blog items I’d rather delete than publish.
  • National Ravioli Day is March 20th.  So, perhaps someone can explain to me why a restaurant in Naples FL is celebrating on March 21st.
  • Homonyms are words that are spelled and pronounced the same, but mean different things.  Ripe is a homonym.  If something smells ripe, its spoiled and not fit to eat, but if a fruit is ripe, that’s the best time to eat it.  How do you tell what the meaning is?  Context.  It’s been a long time since I took grammar.  Is there a name for words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and mean different things?  I think the people in charge of English should eliminate all but one of those words and let context tell you which of the multiple meanings the one word left carries.  I think two, too, and to are the most common examples, but I was reminded of this by compliment and complement.  I knew the two meanings and the two spellings, but I have to look them up to be sure which spelling goes with which meaning.   What’s the point?  Why don’t we get rid of one and pick the other?

The Last Parking Ticket Update

The defective parking ticket wasn’t defective enough for me to beat the rap, so I paid the fine last week.  I asked if I could get the 40% discount from the parking amnesty program I whined about in January.  Nope.  I had to pay full price.  I invested the $25 fine over the past nine months though, so at one percent interest, I earned an additional 18 cents!

Lost

Right now, I’m looking for a rented DVD and a pair of ear buds.  If I didn’t have to replace many things I’ve lost over the years, I’d probably be much better off financially, unless of course I lost the money I paid to replace things instead.

There are at least two kinds of people in the world:  people who lose things; and people who find them.  I’m the first kind, and my wife, Saint Karen (she has to be a saint to put up with me), is the second.  In some ways, that makes us complementary.  I lose it, and often, she finds it.  In other ways, it makes us completely incompatible.  I lose something.  She becomes exasperated and says, “Where did you have it last?”

Then I say, “If I knew the answer to that question, it wouldn’t be lost, would it?”

This exchange is usually followed by an interlude of silence.  Often, my wife then finds whatever I lost.  Here’s an example of how this costs me money.  I couldn’t find my set of three chisels, so I borrowed a set of three chisels from my sister and lost one of her chisels too.  Then, I found my chisels (all three of them), but not the one of hers I lost.  So, now I have five chisels and had to buy another set for my sister because if I gave her one of mine and two of hers she wouldn’t have a set and if I gave her my set I wouldn’t have a set.  I hope I get the new set to her before I lose those chisels too.

Some things are easier to lose than others.  I researched utility knives and retractable steel tape measures.  I need four utility knives and three tape measures to know where at least one of each is at all times.  I’ve occasionally known where all four utility knives were at the same time (not now though), but I’ve never been able to find the third of my three tape measures, so maybe I really only need two.

When I really want to keep something and ensure that I dont lose it, such as my spare set of glasses, or the keys to my other car, I usually put it in my truck.  I’ve owned about a dozen cars or trucks in my life and I’ve never yet lost one of those.  I also took the loyalty cards I get from supermarkets and other stores, put them on a key chain together and keep that key chain in my truck too.  None of the stores that have issued loyalty cards to me are close enough to walk to.  So, if the cards are in the truck, I’ll have them with me when I need them.

Sometimes I kid Saint Karen and say she hides my things and then finds them so I’ll think she’s indispensable.  That’s useless.  I already think that.   When I hear about a business that has lost literally tons of money, I think they should hire her to look for the money because she’s exceptionally good at finding the stuff I lose.

Things I Know

  •  My oldest friend sent me an email about International Disturbed People’s Day.  Somehow, I feel I should receive not an e-mail, but an invitation, an engraved invitation.  The e-mail was funny, but I looked and couldn’t find any agreement on the exact date on which the event is celebrated.  I find that disturbing.
  • Department of things I hope nobody buys:  The Kate Middleton doll being sold by the Franklin Mint for $195.00.
  • The Mets are apparently unfamiliar with Abbott & Costello.  They have a shortstop in their training camp named Hu.  Everyone who is familiar with Abbott & Costello knows Hu should be on first and I Don’t Give A Darn should be the shortstop.
  • If you apply for a visa to visit China from the United States, the application asks for your marital status.  One of the choices they give you is “spinster.”
  • The government of China, from time to time, blocks access from within the country to certain Internet sites.  Facebook is one of them.  Expatriates call this action the great firewall of China.
  • My son reports that there are tons of restaurants in Shanghai that serve American takeout food, but none of them are staffed entirely with American waiters.
  • World traveler that my son is, he also reports that the McDonald’s Restaurant in which he dined in Shanghai doesn’t put salt on the French fries.
  • The five-second rule is bogus.  You know.  That’s when you drop some food on the ground and eat it anyway because it wasn’t on the ground very long.   Who says it’s bogus?  Dr. Roy M. Gulick, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medical College.  As quoted in the NY Times on February 28th, he said, “Eating dropped food poses a risk for ingestion of bacteria and subsequent gastrointestinal disease, and the time the food sits on the floor does not change the risk.”
  • When Duke Snider died, not only did Newsday publish a picture of the Duke in a right-handed batting stance (in an era of switch hitters, Duke was a devout lefty hitter), but the Daily News published an editorial cartoon of Duke in heaven in which he had a glove on his right hand while he was catching a ball.  In baseball shorthand, when he was playing, Duke would have been described as “bats left, throws right.”  In Duke”s heyday, neither paper would have made either mistake, but the Dodgers have now been in LA longer than they were in Brooklyn, and Duke lived so long that nobody at either paper knew the answer without thinking about it.
  • I have a Canon Pixma MP980 printer.  It’s a wonderful device, except that the ink is more expensive than even gasoline, and it uses a lot of ink quickly.  Since it cleans its heads every time you print anything, it will use all of your colored ink even if you only print in black and white.  Canon makes a combo pack of four of the six ink cartridges you need for this printer.  You also need a gray ink cartridge the same size and a larger black cartridge.  I always wondered why they didn’t include the gray cartridge with the other four the same size and now I know.  There are Canon printers that use the four cartridges in the combo pack, but don’t need the gray one.
  • My wife’s latest theory is that light-weight, plastic garbage cans cause wind storms.

The Mistake And The Fix

Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, had a really great subscription deal and advertised it on TV.  If you signed up for a one-year subscription and paid in advance, you got the paper for $3.99 a week and you got a $100 gift card.  This made the net cost of daily home delivery roughly the same as the cost of buying the Sunday paper at the newsstand.  I watched this commercial many times before I decided to call on February 26th.  Never one to do anything at the first minute, my timing was impeccable, because the offer expired two days later.  During my call, I thought I ordered the paper.  I gave them my address, my credit card number and everything.  At the end, I asked when the subscription would start.  The lady on the phone said she didn’t know, but would have someone call me.

I thought they might begin it on the first day of a week, as the Daily News had when I ordered a home delivery subscription from them.  Therefore, I thought the subscription was most likely to start on February 27th or March 6th.  As I found out later, Newsday starts your subscription the very next day.  Nobody called me back and I didn’t get a paper.  So, on March 6th, I called and asked why my subscription hadn’t started.  After researching it, the nice lady I spoke to said I had only inquired about a subscription, not ordered one.  She offered me the subscription without the gift card, which would have made the net cost to me 93% higher.

On the 6th and again on the 7th, I argued that if Newsday or its agents made a mistake, the paper should stand by the original offer.  On the 8th, the nice lady in circulation called me back and said that Newsday would honor the offer.

Everybody makes mistakes.  I certainly do.  The test is what you do when you learn you’ve made a mistake.  I’m sure I did order the paper on the 26th; Newsday isn’t as sure as I am.  But today, the nice lady in circulation, called me back and said Newsday would honor my order, start my subscription tomorrow and send me the gift card in a couple of weeks.

So, kudos to Newsday for rectifying a mistake and kudos to the nice lady in circulation, whose name, by the way, is Diane.

Rental Rantal

At first I didn’t understand the car rental business.  Now, I think what they do is deliberate.  You can make a reservation for a rental car, but they don’t ask you to pay for it.  When you make a reservation, the company tells you that you’ll get x kind of car, “or similar.”  They have a strange definition of similar.  They have strange definitions of intermediate, standard, premium, etc. too.  A few years ago, I rented an intermediate SUV and got one that the automotive press called a compact SUV.  I was recently looking at intermediate sedans for an upcoming trip.  One company offered me a Toyota Corolla as an intermediate.  My Corolla certainly isn’t intermediate.  Is yours? Three years ago, I wanted a sedan.  They didn’t have what I wanted and the “or similar” turned out to be a Dodge Magnum.  I wanted a sedan, because I had luggage and didn’t want it out in plain sight.  I didn’t consider the Magnum similar at all.  It’s a station wagon with no way to conceal your luggage.  I held out for a sedan and while I didn’t get the one I thought I’d get, I did get one.  On my first trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, I reserved a Jeep Grand Cherokee and they offered me a smaller Jeep Liberty at the same price.  I balked and they gave me a Chrysler Pacifica which they said had all-wheel drive, but didn’t.  In Colorado and New Mexico, I arranged for a Grand Cherokee and wound up with a Subaru Forester, which does have all-wheel drive, but doesn’t carry as much.

I’ve also noticed that some car rental companies advertise cars that are no longer made.  What’s an “Or Similar” if the rental agency says they rent Pontiacs?  A DeSoto, or a Studebaker?

All of these charming quirks in the car rental process are apparently designed so they can up-sell you.  They don’t have any incentive to have the car you didn’t pay for.  They have described the cars they do have in terms that make each category sound better than the cars are, and worse than the average consumer or the automotive press would understand.  You have shopped for the car on line, and you have set expectations for the car, and the price.  You are tired and cranky after a long flight.  You want to get out of the airport and either down to business, or off on vacation.  They offer you less than you expected.  You don’t want to go to all the other rental counters to stand on line, and shop for something better.  So you pay more to get something you do find more acceptable.  Heads they win, tails you lose.

One thing that might help is if some auto maker produces a car so expensive that no car rental company would consider having even one of them in stock and calls that car the “Or Similar.”  If that happens, the rental agencies will have to stop this substitution nonsense, or at least spend some time and effort making up a new term.  Instead of calling the cars they really do rent the “Or Similar”, maybe they could call it the “Misleading Business Practice” instead.

Things I Know

  • So Duke Snider died Sunday The Dodgers left Brooklyn so long ago and Duke lived to be 84, so very few people in this area cared very much.  And Newsday published a picture of the Duke, batting right handed for God’s sake!
  • How has baseball changed?  Duke was #8 on the all-time homerun list when he retired, with 407.  He would have hit for more, but when the Dodgers moved to LA they played in the Coliseum which was 425 to center and 440 to right center.  The Duke wasn’t a dead pull hitter, but even down the line in right, it was 395. 
  • Tuesday, March 1, is National Pancake Day, in honor of which IHOP is giving away a free short stack between 7 and 10 AM at participating restaurants.  But they are asking people to contribute some money to a worthy charity they’ve designated.   Check a local IHOP for details.
  • #1 son has arrived safely in Shanghai China, found the studio apartment he rented, and started work on Monday morning.  He reports that the car horn is the official noise of the city.  Shanghai is ten hours ahead of where he lives, so he’s pretty jet lagged right now.  I understand that plum blossoms are considered very pretty in China in the spring; prune blossoms, not so much. 
  • Prunes, by the way, are among my very favorite foods.  This can be either a blessing or a curse, but never both at the same time.
  • In the news recently, there was a heart-warming story of an 82-year-old woman from Memphis TN, Jean Wilson, who had a pizza delivered to her home every day.  Ms. Wilson lived alone; she fell in her home, and couldn’t help herself for three days.  She was rescued by a Domino’s Pizza delivery driver, because she ordered from Domino’s every day for three years, and the driver became concerned when she stopped.  My daughter works in a government office.  One of the clients there is an elderly woman who goes to church every day.  If that lady doesn’t show up at church for any reason, the pastor goes to visit her.  So you could eat a more varied, and balanced diet than Ms. Wilson has, yet still have someone watching your back.
  • I doubt that anyone influential in US military policy or foreign policy on the east coast of Africa reads this blog.  However, in case someone does, please Google the following phrase:  “Stephen Decatur, Jr.”  That should be all the guidance American foreign policy requires with regard to Somali pirates.
  • They had a mullet toss over the weekend in Matlacha Fl.  The fish, not the haircut.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Today is the third anniversary of the Sisyphus Project.  As I stated at the beginning, I’m doing this to entertain myself:  So far, so good.  After three years (and without making any effort to analyze what’s most popular and why, or to promote the thing), I get between four and five thousand hits a month.  I’m aware that figure doesn’t mean four-to-five-thousand individual readers.  During that time, as far as I know I’ve been linked in one other blog and I’ve attracted two commenters.  One of the commenters is an old college buddy, and fellow blogger.  So, if you haven’t chosen to comment in the past, why are you reading it?
  • If four Americans were murdered by Somali pirates, why were only two Somali pirates killed when the Navy boarded the captured yacht?
  • Why do we say, “Going to hell in a hand basket?”  The prevailing theory is that they used hand baskets to carry the heads of people executed by guillotine.  But a hand basket doesn’t seem like an effective way to get anyplace to me.
  • February 18th was National Drink Wine Day.  Just February 18th?
  • Did you know there’s now an iPhone app to tell you where to buy Girl Scout Cookies?  That answers my recent question about how retired and jobless people can get their fix of Girl Scout Cookies.
  • The New York City Health Department has developed an app for iPhones and Androids.  The app tells the user where to go to get a free condom.  If you can afford a smart phone, why can’t you do your part to reduce government spending and buy your own damned condoms?
  • Were you surprised to learn there’s also a phone app for Catholics to help them with confession?  As I understand it, the app doesn’t grant absolution, but it’s supposed to help you keep track of your sins.  Keeping track of your sins seems a little obsessive-compulsive to me.  How does it strike you?
  • If the word “Google” is used as a verb, should it still be capitalized?

Things I Know

  • You never see Charlie Chan movies anymore.  These are movies and before that books about a fictional, inscrutable Chinese-Hawaiian detective.  First, the movies are very old now and viewed in today’s climate of awareness, their stereotype of Mr. Chan is no doubt offensive to many, many people.  I’m reminded of them today because Chan referred to his oldest son as “#1 son,” and my #1 son leaves in the morning on a three-month internship for his Master’s Degree in International Law.  Where’s he going?  Shanghai, China. 
  • I preferred when Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays (except of course when I lived in Richmond VA where Lincoln’s birthday wasn’t celebrated) were observed to the current practice of a generic President’s’ Day.  In the first place, I’d much rather have a three-day weekend in August than in February.  Additionally, on generic Presidents’ Day, someone might celebrate William Henry Harrison, Warren G. Harding, Chester A. Arthur, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson or U.S. Grant (as President, not as an army general) by mistake.  I may have left someone out, but my list isn’t designed to be all-inclusive.
  •  Arianna Huffington was paid something like $315 million by AOL for her Huffington Post website.  Many of the blogs on that website are written by bloggers who are not paid for their efforts.  I bet they’re thrilled.
  • I hereby suggest that the NY Mets move the TV broadcasts of their games this year to the Oprah Winfrey Network.  Why?  The Mets stand a chance of becoming a win-free team this year.
  • Along the roads I normally drive, the last cars blocked in by the post-Christmas snow storm have finally melted out of their winter cocoons.  We did have more snow today and there’s more scheduled overnight tonight too.
  • One of my thumb drives survived a trip through the washer and drier, but I don’t think I’ll try it again.
  • Natalie Munroe, a teacher in Bucks County PA, has been suspended and new reports suggest she’ll probably be fired because she wrote a blog called “Natalie’s Hand Basket,” in which she complained about the students she taught.  But, she wrote it anonymously and she didn’t identify the students by name either.  However, and I can’t stress this too much, people:  Anything you put on the Internet is public.  

Things I Know

  • Pitchers, and catchers are reporting all over Arizona, and all over Florida this week.  Spring training is here and spring is nigh.  Check your local listings for time and station.  The first game I’m interested in is February 26th.  The games don’t count, but you have to watch or listen, because baseball causes warm weather, and the broadcasts help the warm work its way north.
  • The latest Easter Sunday can possibly be is April 25th.  This year, it’s the 24th.  So you still have some time to renew your license and get your equipment in order before Easter-Bunny hunting season starts.
  • Thirty days have September, April, June and November.  All the rest have 31 except February which has 417 or in leap year, 418.
  • When people retire, resign, or otherwise leave certain categories of job, they often say they are doing so to spend more time with their families.  I have learned that spending more time with your family is overrated.  My wife told me it is.
  • Let’s see, we have Lincoln’s Birthday, Valentine’s Day, Washington’s Birthday (both of them) and Presidents’ Day.  I’d gladly give up one or more February holiday in exchange for one in August.  In fact, I’d gladly give up February in exchange for pretty much nothing at all.
  • Google isn’t omnipresent yet.  In the short while I’ve been using the Chrome Internet browser, I’ve found a handful of sites that are incompatible with it.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Who won the puppy bowl?
  • More importantly, who won the lingerie bowl?  I mean it was all over the news who won the Super Bowl, but the outcomes of the other two contests got no coverage at all.
  • I’m listed on Linked In, which is a social network for business contacts.  The site has been guessing at people I might know, based on the information I’ve given it, and apparently based on information I haven’t given it too.  I have no idea how it makes these guesses.  I’d like to know.  It even suggested last week that I might know a woman I met yesterday.
  • How much money can the people who make Eskimo Pies and Klondike Bars possibly be saving by omitting the stick?
  • Why doesn’t the pop-up blocker on my computer work on newspaper websites?
  • I’m cleaning up my basement.  Do you think it’s alright for me to throw away my installation floppies for Windows 95?
  • How desperate for circulation are newspapers?  I bought a one-year, pre-paid home delivery subscription to the NY Daily News today for $52.  The newsstand price is $4.50 a week.
  • During a recent job interview, my cell phone fell off my belt.  New cell phone, new case, new clip, but still, it isn’t the first time it’s happened.  Does anyone make a good system for clipping your cell phone to your belt?  I’d keep it in my pocket, but I have enough snapshots and videos of the inside of my pocket.

Things I Know

  • It was cold enough the other day that I found myself wishing there was something called longer johns which would, of course, be warmer than long johns.
  • Facebook keeps telling me that two of my friends in particular have used its friend finder to locate people they know on Facebook.  First, there’s no way I’m going to turn Facebook loose on everyone in my e-mail list and second, one of the two friends Facebook is touting as actively using friend finder is also actively dead.
  • I’m teaching a class soon.  To that end, I would buy a package of 4 x 6 file cards for my notes.  However, my local office supply store, Paper Fasteners, sells 4 x 6 file cards five packages of 100 wrapped together in one package of 500 and I don’t think I’ll use 500 file cards during the rest of my life.
  • If you do use file cards to keep your notes, number the cards in case you drop them.
  • No matter what baseball team you root for, pitchers and catchers take the field one day next week.
  • Mets Spring Training games televised on SNY this year will be broadcast in HD.  Unfortunately, this year’s Mets will still be playing in them.
  • In case you’ve ever wondered why there’s a South Oyster Bay Road in Syosset and Plainview New York, but no Oyster Bay Road or North Oyster Bay Road, here’s the answer.  Many, many years ago, what’s now Jackson Avenue in Syosset was called Oyster Bay Road.  I don’t know when it changed or who the road is now named after, but that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Things I Know

  • It’s Super Bowl Sunday, so I have to remind you of the following; please don’t tell your daughters that all men are interested in only one thing.  It isn’t true!  A very few of us don’t give a dam about football.
  • I installed the Google Chrome Internet browser.  It’s a lot faster than Internet Explorer.  It’s a little different too.  One of the differences is I have to remember the sign-ons for any web sites that had cookies in my other browser.
  • A lot of people think some of software features, and code that developers have patented are silly, and I do too.  One example:  what are called favorites in IE are bookmarks in Chrome and a couple of other browsers I’ve used too.  I can deal with that.  But the bookmarks are in the upper right hand corner of the screen and I’m having trouble adjusting to that.
  • BTW, I think calling the new browser Chrome is very misleading.  It is neither shiny nor yellow!
  • My wife has ordered five boxes of Girl Scout cookies.  They ought to last a day or two.
  • It was Conan O’Brien who recommended that if the government of Egypt wants people to stay home, and not do anything, Egypt should turn the Internet back on.
  • I keep hearing about the Muslim Brotherhood in connection with the current unrest in Egypt.  For some reason, anything called a brotherhood sounds sinister to me, probably because I read the comic strip “The Phantom” as a kid and the Phantom was always beset by the Singh Brotherhood, which was a fictitious, evil crime syndicate.

NIFA

Nassau County, NY, is a place where a lot of people have a lot of money.  It’s one of the wealthiest counties in the United States.  Nassau County government spends a lot of money, so much, that it has gotten in financial trouble in the past.  This resulted in creation of the Nassau Interim Finance Authority.  Last week, the NIFA board voted 6-0 to take control of Nassau County’s finances, as required by state law if its budget deficit exceeds one percent. 

A budget is out of balance if revenues exceed expenses or if expenses exceed revenues.  In the first case, the people who created the budget are happy.  They have money left over at the end of the year.  In the later case, they have year left over at the end of the money, and to quote Rocket J. Squirrel, “That trick never works!”

NIFA says Nassau’s new budget is a case of the second case.  The people who serve on NIFA’s board have pretty strong financial credentials.  You are qualified to render an opinion on the budget:  It’s a free country, and we have freedom of speech here.  The NIFA people are qualified to render an opinion too, and unlike most people, they know what they’re talking about.

I know what I’m talking about too.  My first exposure to municipal budgets came when a radio news director who was about to hire me gave me a municipal budget the size of the Manhattan telephone  book, and asked me to write a 40-second story about it.  The test was designed to find out if I knew that a 40-second story was about ten lines of copy, that a budget has a summary page, and a budget message.  That’s where you look first to find out how much taxes are going to go up.  Do they ever go down?

Later, I made municipal budgets for a while, and analyzed them for a bigger while.  I once interviewed for the position of Nassau County Budget Director, but didn’t get the job.  I’ve never created a budget as big as Nassau County’s, but any budget input I’ve ever seen from an elected official wanted to pump up revenue projections, and minimize predictions of expenditures.  The website thinkgeek.com sells a t-shirt that says, “2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2.”  That seems to be the mantra of many elected officials who direct preparation of municipal budgets.

NIFA has given Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano until February 15th to come up with a plan to handle the deficit.  Mangano has said he’ll sue to keep NIFA from controlling the County.  The Long Island newspaper Newsday has reported that Mangano might need NIFA approval to hire a lawyer to do that.

So, is Nassau County’s budget out of balance?  NIFA says it is; Mangano says it isn’t.  Each has a vested interest, no doubt about that.  Let me be clear that I have not reviewed Nassau’s current budget.  Still, my educated, but uninformed opinion is that it’s much more likely to be unbalanced than balanced.  Who’s responsible, the current Republican administration, the previous Democratic administration, or the Republicans who were in power before that?  The answer is a simple yes.  Elected officials of both parties in Nassau County have been giving away the store for so long, I can’t imagine there’s any store left.

Things I Know

  • If I had a life that resembled in any way the life that Charlie Sheen reportedly lives, I’d like to live it for a long time, rather than all at once.

  • You never have to shovel a heat wave.

  • We’ve had so much snow around here that I ran out of chocolate chips and couldn’t bake homemade cookies during the latest storm.

  • Where I live, they start selling Girl Scout Cookies next week!

  • We’re a little over two weeks to pitchers and catchers.

  • The Mets signed another sub-.200 career hitter.

  • It was only a matter of time.  Someone turned up nude photos of Betty White.  About 70-years old!  The photos are about 70 years old; they aren’t nude photos of Betty when she was 70 years old.  If you want to see them, they’re all over the Internet.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Where I live, they sell Girl Scout Cookies in February, but Girl Scouts don’t go door to door, their parents sell them at work; so how are all the retired or  jobless people around here going to get their Girl Scout Cookie fix?

  • Is it too late to plant bulbs?

  • Could I just get the certificate of authenticity and skip all the authentic crap infomercials sell along with the certificates?

  • How come the abbreviation TV is capitalized, even when the word television isn’t?

  • Could we possibly make the Golden Globe awards as irrelevant as the Miss America pageant has become?

Things I Know

  • Barrett-Jackson, the car auction company, sold a Pontiac ambulance from the early 1960’s at its Scottsdale AZ auction on Saturday for $120,000.  Why so much?  It’s alleged to be the ambulance that carried President Kennedy’s body after he was assassinated.  Why so little?  The vehicle’s provenance is disputed.  There’s credible evidence it’s not the same ambulance and that the real one was destroyed.  Someone, commenting on the website Jalopnik.com, discussing signs of wear on the paint wrote “petunia,” when they should have written “patina.”

  • Lying face-down on the floor doesn’t give you cancer, so its prostate cancer, not prostrate cancer.  Even the spell checker in MS Word knows that, and I heard the error on TV last night.  Notwithstanding that, if you Google “prostrate” the first entry is about elevated PSA and all the ads relate to prostate cancer, not worshipful adoration.

  • In case I’m too subtle for any of my readers, whenever I use the phrase, “Our beloved mayor,” in this blog I’m being sarcastic.  If that changes, I’ll let you know.

  • My recovery from shoulder surgery must be going great.  The surgeon just postponed my most recent follow-up visits for the second time. 

  • It wasn’t intentional and I just noticed it today, but on December 17, in this blog, I used the words two, too and to in the same sentence.

Parking Ticket Redux

Remember this?  I had almost forgotten because it’s kind of insignificant and kind of long ago too, but I was reminded today.  How?  I got a letter from a collection agency hired by the municipality in which I reside.  The collection letter said our beloved mayor had created an amnesty program for people with unpaid tickets.  Our beloved mayor’s name goes on all municipal letters, as if everything was his idea.  As an aside, I think he’s carrying this advantage of incumbency thing too far. 

For your information, “Parking-ticket amnesty program” is government speak for, “Hey, we’re really getting desperate for money around here.”  The letter said if I paid right now, I could get a 40-percent discount.  But wait!  There’s more!  It said if I didn’t pay, my car could be immobilized with what used to be called a Denver boot.  The letter didn’t say “Denver” though, so maybe “Denver Boot” is a trademark.

First reaction:  hey, if they’re giving a 40-percent discount on illegal parking, maybe I should take advantage of it and go park illegally.  That’s the proper reaction to a sale, isn’t it?  Instead, I got in my car and went right to the courthouse.  Why?  I was annoyed because the letter implied to me that I had ignored the parking ticket, but I didn’t; I blogged about it.  I also returned it with my not guilty plea in June.  I appeared for my calendar call on September 8th too.  After that appearance, I predicted that I would have to decide what I wanted for my birthday and for Christmas before they called me back for a trial.  I even said getting a trial date would take so long I might die before the trial of the century.  I was right about birthday and Christmas presents, and I did well on both occasions, thanks.  I hope I was wrong about dying before the case comes to trial.  I don’t know yet, because the case hasn’t been scheduled yet. 

I went to the courthouse because I thought maybe they sent out a trial notice, I didn’t get it and therefore I actually was a scofflaw, although an inadvertent one.  Nope.  They’re so desperate for money that they’re offering amnesty to people whose tickets are still going through the system.  How about speeding up the process a little?  That would bring in some revenue too and maybe without a discount.  I got the ticket in early June and it’s now late January of the following year.  Plus, when I went to court in September, they already knew I plead not guilty.  So it would have saved time if someone was empowered to deal with the ticket then.   If I lost then, I would have paid then.  I have no plans to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the case develops further, dear readers, you will be the second to know.  After all, if I don’t learn about it first, I can’t write about it and post it here.

Things I Know

  • Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. has had more than his share of talent, success, and medical problems.  He announced Monday that he’s taking another medical leave, his third.  Mr. Jobs has a right to medical privacy, but he’s such an integral part of Apple’s success, I believe he should be as open as possible with his stockholders.

  • Fewer than four weeks to pitchers and catchers now.  If the Jets hadn’t beaten the Patriots on Sunday, sports-talk radio could move on to discussing what star pitchers the Yankees should acquire in order to achieve their God-given entitlement to another World Series championship.

  • At this point, it doesn’t look like there’s any real purpose to talking about the Mets’ prospects for the 2011 season.  They do seem to be cornering the market on reclamation projects, but that’s about it.

  • To answer my own question, we don’t have two kinds of mini USB plugs.  One of them is called a micro USB plug.  Nevertheless, the only reason I can see for having both is to sell more cell-phone chargers and connecting cables.

  • Rep. Giffords, while still in the ICU, reportedly gave her husband a neck rub.  Please join me in praying that her recovery continues to be amazing and goes on to become complete.

  • Sometimes we learn things on TV that probably shouldn’t be general knowledge.  I learned, for instance, that if you’re going to shoot someone in the head, you have a better chance of killing them or causing devastating brain damage if you shoot from side to side rather than from the front or back.

  • When I wrote speeches for local government officials, I wrote short ones.  To my mind, almost all speeches by government officials (The Gettysburg Address is an exception) are too long.  That said, the only thing wrong with President Obama’s speech in Tucson is that it was too long.  I did think the audience hooting and cheering to all elements in the program including the Presidents speech was more appropriate to a pep rally than to a memorial service though.

  •  Clearly bad people as well as good people die too young, so while I like the song, Billy Joel was wrong about that.  Still, former Newsday columnist Ed Lowe died on Sunday at age 64 which was far too young.  And he went through medical hell before it died, including a massive stroke and liver cancer.  Many people loved Ed, respected him, considered him a great talent, or some combination of the three.  I didn’t know him well enough to love him, but I fit comfortably into the other two categories.  The only thing I can think of that’s good about what happened is hundreds, if not thousands of people took the time to let him know they fell into some or all of those three groups before he left us.

  • I have created a closed loop, and hope I can eventually extract myself from it.  Like everyone else on the planet, I have a gmail account.  Unlike many of them, I never used it.  So, in case anyone ever figured out my correct gmail address, and wanted or needed to contact me, I set it up to forward to an email account I do use.  Then, I bought a Droid phone.  For the uninitiated, Droid phones link most easily to gmail accounts.  So, I set up the other account to forward to my gmail address so I could see my email on my phone.  Now, I have to delete things constantly to stay on top of the two email accounts endlessly forwarding everything to each other.

  • I’m looking for a reliable way to convert movies and TV shows to MP4 files so I can watch them on my new Droid X phone.  If anyone reading this has a good method, please feel free to let me know what it is.   If it’s free or if the trial version is free, even better.

  • I’m also looking for a better way to handle podcasts on the phone.  If I use the built-in music app, I have to use proprietary software to load the files, or re-sync the SD card.  Since I have four thousand songs on the phone, re-syncing takes a while.  If I use a file manager to play the podcasts, it calls up the music app to do it, but I can’t then do something else (such as look at a map), and have the podcast keep playing. 

  • I’ve had the fancy head unit in my truck since July, and still haven’t figured out how to turn it entirely off without using the ignition key to do it.  I know it always has to draw a little power to preserve the memory.  I’m talking about turning it off to the extent of no sound and no video.

  • I’ve been leaning against a heating pad for two weeks, and my back still hurts.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Do the people who wrote the contact app for Android phones also have a white-pages phone book in which all the entries are sorted only by first name?

  • There are a few apps on my new phone including one video game that I don’t want, but don’t seem to be able to delete.  Any suggestions?

  • I’m admittedly late to the party with this one, but I do wonder why Elizabeth Edwards leaving her cheating husband, John, out of her will was considered news?  To me, it would have been news if she left him in the will.

  • Hugh Heffner, and Crystal Harris?  A friend of mine once got divorced because her husband was cheating with a woman half their age.  She asked at the time, and I think the same question is relevant here, “What do they talk about afterwards?” If my math skills haven’t deteriorated too much, he’s more than three times her age, closer to four!

Things I Know

  • Since I haven’t mentioned it before, in addition to previous copyright notices, this blog is copyrighted 2011 too.

  • You can thank me for the iPhone on Verizon.  I bought a Droid from them last week.

  • My new cell phone came with a Kindle app.  So I was looking around this morning for things I could download for free.  I started on Amazon.com, of course, because they sell Kindles.  So that’s how I came to know you can download the federal budget to your Kindle.  And, it’s free!  Manufacturer of sleeping pills will of course be devastated.

  • Brian Williams isn’t very funny on the NBC Nightly News, but on the late-night talk shows, he’s hysterical.

  • As long as I’m being a TV critic, I think Lester Holt’s on camera persona is as good as or better than anyone at NBC.

  • Stop the presses.  Bret Favre, the Vikings’ quarterback has announced his retirement.

  • For the fourth time! 

  • I would have thought an NFL quarterback has enough women hitting on him that he never has to hit on anyone, especially women who work with or for his team.

  • Even if you thought they were jokes, if nobody laughs, you explain them, and still, nobody laughs, then they weren’t jokes after all.

  • After January 6th, it’s appropriate to take down your Christmas decorations.  In fact, it’s recommended everywhere, and may be required in certain home-owners’ associations. 

  • February 13th is the day pitchers and catchers report to spring training this year.  March 31st is opening day.  So far this off season, the Mets haven’t done much to make me excited about either date.

Rep. Giffords: My Two Cents

Comedian Ron White has a routine in which he says you can’t fix stupid. Despite advances in medical science, there’s a lot of crazy you can’t fix either. So Jared Loughner is under arrest, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is in critical condition, in a medically induced coma after undergoing radical brain surgery, a federal judge, a beautiful little girl who was interested in government, and four other people are dead. One of the victims, 76-year-old Dorwin Stoddard, died shielding his wife. Obviously, he embodied the cliché, and loved her more than life itself. I bet she felt the same way about him, and that right now, she wishes she was killed to spare him. I’d like to think that my wife, and I would try to shield each other in an event like that, but I’m a lot bigger than she is, and she couldn’t win the fight to get between me and danger no matter how hard she tried.

The massacre saddens me, and so do the reports of people in government, politics, and media falling all over themselves to blame everyone in the world except Mr. Loughner.

One of the dead people is Gabe Zimmerman, thirty-years old, and engaged to be married. He was the community outreach director for Rep. Giffords. That strikes home for me because when I was 30, I had a job very much like his. I did community relations, and community outreach for a member of the House of Representatives. I did it for five years.

Was it dangerous when I did it? No and I’m betting that getting killed on the job was the last thing that Gabe Zimmerman ever thought might happen when he worked for Congress. In fact, it may have been the very last thing he ever thought of at all. The only time in five years that I thought my job with Congress was dangerous was when a guy came into the district office about a problem he had while working for the post office. One of the reasons he had a problem with the postal service is he threatened to bomb the place. After speaking to him, I recommended that we never bring a guy who threatened to bomb anyplace into the office again.

I used to bring my pre-school son with me to events sponsored by my boss. Being there began his interest in government. An adult now, he worked for the courts for some years, and is now a lawyer in California, enrolled in a Master’s of Law program and planning to take an internship at a law firm in Shanghai, China in the spring.

Did you see nine-year-old Christina Green’s father on TV? She became interested in government during the last Presidential campaign. She was recently elected to the student council at her elementary school, and went to the event on Saturday to meet Rep. Giffords. Because President Obama sparked her interest in government, her father said through tears that he took some comfort in the fact that the President mentioned her by name in his initial statement. Just how remarkable is the human spirit that a man can find any comfort at all after his nine-year-old child has been senselessly murdered? How can your heart not go out to that family, and the others who suffered in this tragedy?

The rush to politicize this awful thing by some people on the left, and some on the right too, troubles me a lot. Rep. Giffords is a Democrat. President George H.W. Bush appointed federal judge John Roll who was killed. Presumably Judge Roll was a Republican. I think we can all agree that Jared Loughner is a troubled wack-job, but apparently a non-partisan troubled wack-job. There’s proof, if we needed any, that non-partisan doesn’t necessarily mean good.

Some of the things that pass for news coverage have to strike you as odd if you think about them, such as wall-to-wall cable news coverage of a minute of silence. I think we all know what a minute of silence is like. And here’s my advice to the two members of Congress who said they will carry concealed handguns from now on: shut up!

I don’t own a handgun. I haven’t carried one at work since I left the Military Police. When I did carry one at work, I never had any desire to shoot anyone, and never drew the weapon from my holster except for target practice or to lock it up. That said, if I did have a concealed handgun, that’s what it would be, concealed. You would never see it or hear about it until just before I shot you. Since I have no desire to shoot you (or anyone else for that matter), you will never see the gun I don’t own. Handguns are tools, and the specific purpose of a handgun is not to demonstrate how macho you are.

This doesn’t seem to be a political event, so let’s stop politicizing it. It does seem to be the demented act of someone who gave lots of warning that he was at the very least troubled. You hear that a lot. You heard it about the two kids at Columbine. You heard it about the shooter on the college campus in Virginia, and the one at the Army base in Texas. So, instead of playing the blame game, maybe someone could give some thought to identifying, and helping some of these troubled people to cut down the chance of stuff like this happening again.

And, let’s pray for Representative Giffords, for the other people who survived, for the innocent people who were killed, as well as for the families, friends, and loved ones of all of the above. It couldn’t hurt and it might help.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • New governors are taking office all over the country.  There’s Brown in California, Cuomo in New York, and Scott in Florida, just to name  three.  The election in November was called a gubernatorial election, so why are the new officials called governors, not gubernators?

  • I got a new cell phone, one with a touch screen.  Now, where do I get some inhumanly skinny fingers so I can type accurately on it?

  • Other than to promote the sale of cell phone chargers and USB cables, why do we have more than one kind of mini USB plug?

  • They’ve agreed to go forward with a universal cell-phone charger in Europe.  How come we can’t have the same thing here?

  • I know what caused five-thousand birds to fall out of the sky in Arkansas:  gravity.  The real question is why they died.  Plus, I’m more worried about what happened to the hundred thousand fishes now sleeping with the fishes.

  • While I’m at it, why do they spell Arkansas that way, and since it ends in “S” is there another one? And since they spell and pronounce Arkansas the way they do, how come they do pronounce the last “S” in Kansas?

  • “S” is the most common consonant in the English language.  Consequently, the “S” key on a computer keyboard frequently wears out before anything else.  You can get a new keyboard for a desktop very inexpensively, but how old does a laptop have to be before fixing that problem doesn’t make any sense?

  • A man in North Fort Myers, FL was arrested after he threatened his neighbors with a club when they looked at his Christmas lights.  Then why put up the Christmas lights if you don’t want anyone to look at them?  And would it surprise you if I told you that law enforcement officials said alcohol was involved?

  • When the National Weather Service issues a blizzard warning, what are they warning the blizzard about?

Things I Know

  • My father was a police officer in New York City.  He hated being on duty in Times Square on New Year’s Eve so much that I never felt any desire to go to the big event.

  • In case you’re planning to miss the weekend “Twilight Zone” marathon on SyFy channel starting Friday, let me remind you (or inform you) that it’s a cookbook.

  • December is National Tie Month.  Of course it is; twenty percent of all ties are given as Christmas gifts.

  • I’m not on the selection committee, but I believe the person who invented the brownie sundae deserves a Nobel Prize, even if they have to come up with a new category.

  • A slow news day and an impending snow storm are a powerful combination.  So are a slow news day and the aftermath of a big snow storm.

  • Attention dogs:  I’m so sure I would hate dragging my bare belly through the snow that I’ve never tried it.

  • While I was snowbound, I decided to bake chocolate chocolate chip cookies.  I found a recipe on the Internet.  It was a good decision.

  • I’m pretty sure my son the lawyer is joking.  He said he wants to sue the TV show “Dog Whisperer” because the guy never whispers to the dogs.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Snow preparation?  Let’s see, I got bread and milk, backed all the cars into the driveway, bumper to bumper, got out the snow shovels, the soft push broom and the rock salt, brought around some firewood, located the hot cocoa mix  and took some butter out of the fridge so it will soften and we can bake cookies.  Did I forget anything?

  • Did you ever think you’d live long enough that you’d have to wait for your children to get up on Christmas morning?

  • Did you get what you wanted for Christmas?  I got a lot of what I wanted, so I’m good.  But when I said I wanted a couple of CD’s, I didn’t mean the kind with music on them; I meant the kind with money in them.

  • Why do they call it Christmas shopping when nobody buys Christmas?

  • With oil prices as high as they are, when is Santa going to leave coal in your stocking only if you’re good?

  • Why do dogs enjoy snow so much?

  • If your doctor says you can’t shovel snow anymore, is snow removal covered by your health insurance?  How about if you use a participating snow-shoveling provider and make the co-payment?

  • This morning a couple of the Sunday TV news shows did roundups of all the famous people who died during 2010.  What will they do if someone else famous dies between now and Friday at midnight?

Things I Know

  • I’d praise Congress for finally passing medical aid for first-responders at the World Trade Center after 9/11 except for that one little word:  finally.  You see, 9/11 happened nine years, three months and almost two weeks ago.  Now to be fair to Congress, it didn’t become obvious for several months that working on the pile that once was the World Trade Center was making people really sick.  Also to be fair to Congress, the date on which the Zadroga bill passed was 3,389 days after 9/11!  Disgraceful!  Michael Daly, writing in today’s New York Daily News, called the US Senate, “Last responders.”  That pretty much sums it up. 

  • My son took me on the behind-the-scenes tour of Citi Field last Sunday.  It was a disappointment.  They wouldn’t show us the Francisco Rodriguez Memorial Holding Cell.

  • On the Sunday before Christmas, Charles Osgood performed “The Christmas Song” on his excellent TV show, “Sunday Morning.”  We already knew he had a beautiful speaking voice and now we know he can play the piano.  I deliberately chose “performed” rather than sang, because as talented as Mr. Osgood is, he can’t sing.  Neither can I.

  • By the way, if you aren’t Nat King Cole (and he’s dead so nobody is), from my point of view there’s no use singing that song.  It’s already been sung as well as it can possibly be sung by Mr. Cole.

  • Former radio personality Dick Summer has a blog and a podcast.  The other day, Dick thanked his wife for not making him grow up.  I knew I hadn’t grown up, but it never occurred to me to thank my wife for not making me, or at least not trying to make me.  Dick’s right; thanks honey.

  • I found out that the kind of sleepwear my wife likes is called a sleep shirt.  A night shirt is a little different.  She likes them in silk and I also found out that the only place I could locate that sells them is out of stock until next June.

  • Country music star Shania Twain is engaged to be married.  Her former husband left her for another woman and Shania just became engaged to that woman’s ex-husband.  Now, that’s what I call a country song!

  • Snooki and JWoww of “Jersey Shore” fame are reportedly looking to buy a house in E. Setauket, NY.  Whew!  I don’t live in E. Setauket.

  • The loose cushions you often see on couches and chairs are called throw pillows.  It’s a great name for them because when I sit on a couch or chair that has a throw pillow on it, I throw it someplace else, or at someone.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Heroes show up when they’re needed.  Right away!  Sometimes without anyone calling them.  So why is Congress taking so long to come up with health care for the first responders and construction workers from the nine-eleven attack at the World Trade Center?  They may vote on the Zadroga bill today.  I think they should have passed something like this years ago, when it became obvious that the pile made a lot of people sick.  What do you think?

  • Maybe it just happened.  Maybe I didn’t hear about it when it did happen, but do you know you can now get a Sponge Bob Chia Pet?

  • What are steamed clams angry about anyway?  And are steamed vegetables angry about the same thing?

  • The speed of sound is roughly 768 mph.  It varies depending on the humidity and what the sound is traveling through.  Of course, it moves 20 mph more slowly through highway construction zones.  But it leads me to wonder, how fast is silence?

  • Would you save some time if you went Christmas returning this week instead of next week?

  • Chrysler just trademarked the name “Cuda.”  Do they know they haven’t made Plymouths in something like ten years?

  • There’s a TV show on cable called, “I (Almost) Got Away With It.”  The title kind of spoils the suspense, don’t you think?

Things I Know

  • You would think that since I don’t have a job I’d be able to get my Christmas cards in the mail in plenty of time.  If today counts as plenty of time, you’d be right.

  • A while back, I mentioned that only one recipe for sugar plums I found on the Internet contained plums.  CBS “Sunday Morning” had a story about Christmas pudding which many people (including my grandmother) call plum pudding.  I couldn’t find a recipe for that which contained plums either, but I did find an explanation.  When plum pudding was invented, “plum” is what they called a raisin.

  • My grandmother’s presentation of a flaming plum pudding was considered a highlight of Christmas dinner at her house.  Personally, I can’t stand it.  But I hate fruitcake too, and to me, the two seem closely related.

  • We must really have a messy house.  Our son is visiting from California and he took it upon himself to clean off our kitchen table.

  • I saw my next door neighbor run outside in her pajamas to deal with her dog.  I would never do that; it’s not a good look for me.

  • I know I’d enjoy a big Lego set for Christmas.  That’s why my contribution to the Marine Corps Toys For Tots program this year was a Lego set.  Not as big as I’d like to have or to contribute, but I can’t afford a set that big.

  • They say bacon makes anything better, but Papa John’s is advertising “double bacon pizza” on TV, so maybe not.

  • This morning, I saw on TV a commercial offering me a $200 value for just $19.99 plus shipping and handling.  I thought to myself, either the shipping and handling is a bitch, or somebody’s not telling the truth.

  • We went to a wake last night for a man who’s related to some of my relatives, but not to me.  This led to a discussion of what we’d like our own funerals to be like.  I said I’d like to be buried in a Chevrolet Aveo and on that Aveo, I want a sign.  The sign should say, “I was wrong; I would be caught dead in this thing.”

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Now that Hanukkah is over, I wonder, is there any such thing as a leftover latke?  I don’t celebrate Hanukkah, but I do celebrate latkes and there is certainly no such thing as a leftover latke at my house.

  • Why are there multiple ways to spell Hanukkah, but only one way to spell Christmas?

  • The Jets had their asses handed to them in their game against the Patriots and again in their game against the Dolphins, although on a lesser scale.  What sense is there in that expression?  Didn’t they already have their asses?

  • Have you noticed the language surrounding the debate on income taxes?  All tax rates are temporary and subject to change.  So, even though the law authorizing the current tax rates is about to expire, if you let it expire, that’s a tax hike.  Of course, if you continue to spend like a drunken sailor while continuing the current tax rates, that increases the national budget deficit and the national debt too.

  • Why is there a “b” in the word “doubt”?

  • Do you think Dr. John belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?  I understand he is much more popular in New Orleans than he is nationally, but if regional popularity is a criterion, I think there are lots of doo wop artists who should have been considered before the good Doctor.

  • Is it cold enough for you?  It’s way too cold for me, but I haven’t been too hot yet.

  • There’s been a rash of drunk drivers on Long Island headed the wrong way on local streets and major highways.  Local governments are trying to figure a way to combat this problem.  How about making everyone drive on the left side of the road?  If you can’t beat them, join them.

Things I Know

  • I hope that Elizabeth Smart is as together as she appeared to be when she faced the media after her kidnapper and rapist, Brian Mitchell, was convicted last week in Utah.

  • The approach of Christmas reminds me that choir is another English word that ought to be either spelled or pronounced differently. 

  • If I had invented the language, the word for syllable would be only one syllable long.

  • In this holiday season, you’ve probably heard someone extol the benefits of either keeping Christ in Christmas, or putting the Christ back in Christmas.  There is some logic in my daughter’s thought process.  Not a lot, because she is related to me.  Since both Christmas and Easter contain elements unrelated to divinity, my daughter thinks we should take the Christ out of Christmas and out of Easter and have a holiday devoted to Christ and nothing else.  No Christmas trees, no gifts, no Easter Bunnies or bonnets.  I suggested we have that holiday in August.  We need at least one holiday in August and we really don’t need more than one in either November or February.

  • Nothing makes me appreciate 40-degree weather more than 15-degree weather.

  • You have to feel sorry for Howie Rose who does play by play for both the Islanders and the Mets.

  • Back in July, I wrote that I consider it unlikely that I’ll ever drive on I-95 through Nebraska again.  I know I-95 doesn’t go through Nebraska.  I meant I-80, but my fingers weren’t thinking when I typed that.

  • I don’t think I’d like to be a taxidermist, because if I was and someone told me to stuff it, I’d have to do it.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Have you ever negotiated the intersection of Jericho Turnpike and the Cross Island Parkway in Bellerose, in any direction?  Who thought that intersection was a good idea?

  • You may remember that, “Reach out and touch someone,” was the signature advertising slogan of communications giant AT&T back in the early 1980’s.  I wonder if the TSA has to pay royalties to AT&T.

  • During this holiday season, can we at least let the operators who are standing by sit down?

  • Have you seen the TV commercial for Jarred Jewelers extolling the virtues of the Pandora Bracelet?  The product could be great, I don’t know, but in my opinion, Pandora is a terrible name for a gift.  How would you like to receive a gift with a name associated with all the trouble in the world?

  • There’s also a TV commercial telling you that you can now get a great deal on the Mercedes you’ve always wanted.  Can I really get deal on a 300 SL gull-wing coupe from the 1950s?  If so, I’ll have a red one and a silver one thank you.

  • How did my children manage to grow to adulthood, when I haven’t matured much at all?

  • If the leaves didn’t fall, the trees would probably break under the weight of snow.  I know that.  But why do they have to fall in my yard?

  • Have you made out your Christmas list yet?

  • My wife told me she heard on the news that German scientists now claim that people who tell awful jokes are suffering from a mental disorder.  In the first place, I’m not suffering from telling awful jokes; my wife is the one who suffers when I do that.  In the second place, she knew it from the very beginning, so why did she go out with me in the first place?

Things I Know

 

  • Run for your life!  The Weather Channel’s disaster guy on the spot, Jim Cantore, is at LaGuardia Airport tonight.  That’s uncomfortably close to where I live and I’ve always found it prudent to be somewhere Mr. Cantore isn’t if I want to avoid storm damage. 

  • If anyone who reads this blog celebrates the festival of lights, Happy Hanukkah.

  • I read that the anchors and weatherman on the CBS morning news are being replaced.  Sometimes it’s been a quality show, but it’s never been a ratings success.  In fact, what CBS should have done decades ago was to admit the program was a mistake and bring back Captain Kangaroo.  But the captain has passed away, and his audience has grown up, so that won’t fix it now either. 

  • My friend Richard (not Feder) of New Jersey (not Fort Lee) has come up with a new word and until he came up with it, I didn’t realize how much it was needed in the English language.  The word is chocolack.  Of course, that means a lack of chocolate.  In order to make sure that never happens, we need a word for it and Richard has provided it.

  • I found a bunch of recipes for sugar plums on the Internet.  There’s no agreement on exactly what goes into them except for one thing:  only one of the recipes contains plums.

  • I was driving behind a Nissan Maxima over the Thanksgiving weekend with the license plate Phakakta.  That isn’t the right way to spell it, which may be why it made it through the censorship computer at the New York DMV.  Either that or they don’t employ enough landsmen at the DMV to catch it.

  • On Black Friday morning (but at 7:30, not at 3 or 5 AM), I shopped at my local Staples and my local Home Depot.  Each of them was very crowded with employees who were apparently on hand to help all the customers who hadn’t show up yet.

  • Attention Coach Sabin:  a great defense doesn’t blow a 24-point lead.  It pains me to say it, of course, but congratulations to Auburn for winning THE GAME.  Today, the NCAA said it can’t prove that Cam Newton knew his father was shopping him around, so he can play in the SEC championship game.

  • It may have been a rerun, I don’t know, but on Sunday’s edition of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,”  host Tom Bergeron mentioned that it was the program’s 21st season.  Frankly, I’m astonished that there are enough uninjured crotches left in the United States to sustain another season of that show.

  • Freeport High School’s Red Devils won the Long Island Class I Championship football game over the weekend.  Freeport’s good, but come on, William Floyd.  No championship game should be decided by 28 points.

 

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving.  What are you thankful for?  I am spending the day today with a woman I took to her high school senior prom.  I’m thankful for the fact that I’ve spent about sixteen thousand days with her so far.

We’ve all heard about Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and many people know Sarah Hale campaigned to make Thanksgiving a national holiday beginning in the 1840’s.  Did you know it didn’t become a national holiday  by law until 1941?  Before that, Presidents issued proclamations.  I thought you might enjoy President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation of Thanksgiving in 1863.

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

Things I Know

  • George Pataki was on MSNBC this morning.  It sure sounded like the kickoff of his presidential campaign.  The man hasn’t been Governor of New York for four years, but he can still dance around a question with the best of them.  In my opinion Governor Pataki is not nearly conservative enough to win early Republican presidential primaries.

  • Mike Barnacle, TV commentator and newspaper columnist, asked today if you’d rather be felt up or blown up.  Well, the answer is obvious, but still, when I was a kid, Mike, neither one was a choice at the airport.  So, civilization is in decline.

  • The last time I took an airplane, I wanted to buy something useless from Sky Mall.  The next time will probably be because I’m very, very lonely.

  • At the American Music Awards, Justin Bieber said “We’re all here because of Michael Jackson.”  Uh, no, Justin.  You may be here because of Michael Jackson, but my kids are here because of the Flamingos and the Moonglows.  I can’t ask my folks, both of whom are deceased, but I believe I’m here because of Vaughn Monroe.

  • I am now three years older than my father ever was.

  • One of my adult children bought me a Rat Fink T-shirt for my birthday.  I love it.  But the only place I ever get any reaction when I wear it is California.

  • I spent a good part of today raking leaves in my back yard.  I bet that even though I’ve done that, next summer my backyard will still be fungus central for my roses and lilacs.

  • One of my friends had a colonoscopy.  I know it’s a bad pun and I love bad puns, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask him how everything came out.

  • While on vacation, we saw the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas.  We’ve also seen the Eiffel Tower at King’s Dominion amusement park in Virginia.  I hear there’s one in Paris France too.  Maybe it”s a franchise.

Room For Improvement

If you think your vote isn’t important, consider this:  in New York, three state senate seats and two congressional districts are still up for grabs and the election was three weeks ago.

One of the reasons for this is that when an election is very close, the absentee ballots, which are on paper, become very important and must be scrutinized and counted carefully.  Another reason it’s taking so long is that New York’s new voting system, using computers, isn’t anywhere near as modern as it could be.  Under the previous system, we had those old-fashioned, mechanical voting machines.  You pulled the handle and the curtain closed.  Then you pushed down a bunch of levers and the machine counted your vote mechanically.  When the polls closed, the people who supervise the polling places opened the machines and read the totals on the mechanical registers inside.  They wrote the numbers down and then telephoned the numbers to the board of elections.  Later, the machines were transported to the Board of elections in case there were irregularities.  One way discrepancies arose is that someone writing down the numbers at the polling place, or at the board of elections might transpose the numbers.

Political party committeemen also called or took the numbers to each party’s election headquarters. 

Except for absentee ballots, and emergency ballots where there were problems, the old mechanical system didn’t have any paper ballots.  The new system is computerized.  Do you vote on the computer?  No; of course not.  Everyone now votes on a paper ballot.  The paper ballots then get scanned into the computer.  Computers, we’ve all been told, are supposed to eliminate paper.  That isn’t always so, especially in this case.  In addition to everyone using a paper ballot now, local boards of elections are required by state law to print far more ballots than anyone reasonably expects them to use.  This has got to cost millions of extra dollars statewide.  There isn’t a lot of privacy under the new system either.  There’s no curtain you get to vote behind, for instance.  Also, the paper ballots have to be preserved in case there’s a problem.  

Do the computers in the polling places tally the votes?  Yes, they do.  Do the computers report the results to the board of elections electronically?  No; of course not.  The same hand-written reports used under the old system are still the way the elections results get reported.  So the same errors can be introduced in the same ways.

With appropriate security, I suppose it’s now possible to report the results electronically and tally them electronically too.  Then, the results could be displayed in real time on the board of elections website and anyone could log on at any moment to see the progress of the voting once the polls close.  In New York, the polls close at 9:00 PM and with appropriate security we ought to know the results in almost all elections statewide, before midnight.

Couldn’t someone highjack an election by hacking some computer somewhere?  I suppose so, but these days computer security is good enough that multi-national corporations and individuals like you and me trust our money to the computerized banking system. 

One reason people don’t trust government is because they think whatever the government tries to improve will take longer and cost more than it did before.  With respect to our new voting system, it appears they’re right.  If there’s one thing New York’s new voting system has in abundance, other than paper ballots of course, it’s room for improvement.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • More than 1,000 people in Haiti have died in an outbreak of cholera which has hospitalized over 14,000 people.  There are half a million people in Haiti who are homeless since last winter’s earthquake.  Many of them live in refugee camps with little or no clean water and little or no way to handle the sewage.  That’s a recipe for a public health disaster if ever I heard of one.  The US has yet to allocate as many resources as it might because the Haitian government is incredibly corrupt, so a lot of the money wouldn’t go where needed.  It kind of makes you wish you could relocate the entire country, doesn’t it?  Can anything really be done to help Haiti?
  • According to the website of the British newspaper “The Guardian,” Paul and Rachel Chandler ‘free and safe’, say officials in Somalia after spending more than one year in captivity.”  I’m happy the Chandlers are safe, but because of the incredible lawlessness there, I didn’t think they had officials in Somalia, did you?
  • Does this seem strange to you?  Every radio station I ever worked at had a general manager; not one radio station I ever worked at employed even a single general.
  • If we lose an hour in the Spring and get it back in the Fall, without any interest at all, how exactly does daylight saving time save anything?
  • Have you seen the TV spot for maxmyspeed.com?  If they’ve invented time travel, I think they should come right out and say so.  Don’t you?  It’s either that or their advertising agency doesn’t understand math very well and that’s not a good thing for a technical company.  One of the actors in the commercial says that maxmyspeed.com has increased the speed of her computer by 100 to 150%.  If your speed increases 100% from what it was before, that means it now takes 100% less time than it once did or no time at all.  If it increases 150%, it takes less than no time; you’ve invented time travel!  Am I missing something?
  • Why would anyone want a Labrador Retriever?  In the first place, how could the dog bring Labrador here, and secondly, if it did, what the heck would you do with it?

Things I Know

  • The Rockettes’ annual Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall begins today.  I guess that really kicks off the holiday season.

  • The Aston Martin DB5 from the James Bond movies sold at auction for $4 million.  You know, it’s the one with the ejector seat and all the cool weapons.  Since I don’t have $4 million, I’m trying to figure out how to install missiles and machine guns on my 1991 Corolla. 

  • I took two long airplane trips in the last week.  I didn’t want to go anywhere, but I had an overwhelming desire to buy something useless from Sky Mall.  Then I found out that Sky Mall has a website.

  • They have Mexican Coca Cola thats made with sugar, not corn syrup.  I knew that.  My son says hes had some and he prefers it.  I learned in Las Vegas at an Albertson’s supermarket that they also have Mexican Pepsi like that.  The bottles are shaped differently too.  I just didn’t try it.

  • The day they allow people to chat on cell phones while the airliners are in the air will be the same day that cell-phone suppositories come into universal use.

  • It seems odd to me that there’s at least one reality TV show that takes place in Las Vegas.

  • I’m not going to give away the ending, but in the “Cirque Du Soleil Zumanity” show, they have a contortionist who can do pushups while on his back.  Just watching the guy made me think I’d need another shoulder operation and I’ve already had three.

  • Somebody needs a dictionary.  The top ten floors in the hotel where I stayed are labeled penthouses.

  • To be tourist friendly, the Las Vegas strip area could stand a few more street signs.  One thing I’d like to know is which streets cross Las Vegas Blvd at street level and which ones go over or under it.  Another, is that all the properties should have their building address displayed.  I can find the casinos without building numbers.  It’s locating stores, restaurants, etc. that’s a problem.

  • The big, destination resort casinos on the Las Vegas strip have so many things, but I couldn’t find one with an indoor pool.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • He was so dominant during the playoffs leading up to the World Series that I have to ask, what happened to Cliff Lee?

  • Did you vote yet?

  • Why are people cynical about elections?  Do you think it might be because everyone who ever ran for office promised to fight for lower taxes and people’s taxes hardly ever go down?

  • Did you see John Stewart’s rally to restore sanity?  His closing speech raised a serious question:  What’s worse, the light at the end of the tunnel is an on-coming train, or the light at the end of the tunnel is just New Jersey?

  • Why is there a Secretary of the Interior, but no Secretary of the Exterior?

  • Pontiac is no more.  GM’s franchise agreements with Pontiac dealers expired on November 1.  Who’s going to build excitement now? 

  • My car has something called a stability control.  Why would I want to control stability?  It’s instability I should be trying to control, isn’t it?

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Have you tried to sign up for MLB TV because Fox pulled the World Series from Cablevision in a fee dispute?  I did.  I can’t figure out why, after taking my money, MLB decided that I’m blacked out and wants my credit card information again so they can straighten it out.  How does that help, if they already have that information and already got it wrong?

  • I wonder if the hotel I stayed in last week thinks it’s fooling anyone by designating the top ten floors of the place penthouses.

  • A teenaged boogie boarder was killed recently in a shark attack.  I’ve seen on TV that many scientists believe that sharks attack surfers and divers because they mistake them for seals.  I’ve also read that sharks see in color.  If both of those things are true, why does anyone wear a black wetsuit?

  • Sears and Kmart (same company) have revived lay away plans for shopping.  Lay away laid low once credit cards became ubiquitous.  Do you think that letting people pay over eight weeks will make that big a difference in their sales?

Things I Know

  • I said two or three years ago after visiting Lake Placid NY that my travels would be more enjoyable if Ben & Jerry’s was open for breakfast.  I haven’t revisited Lake Placid since then, but at the Jet Blue Terminal at Kennedy Airport on Thursday, Ben & Jerry’s was open for breakfast!  Haagen Dazs in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas isn’t though.

  • President Obama visited Las Vegas again today (third time) to stump for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  I suppose the President and his advisors know that there is early voting in Nevada, so some of the people he hopes to convince have already voted.

  • According to news reports this week, Osama Bin Laden is living in relative comfort in a house in Pakistan.  If we can’t blow him up with a predator drone, we should at least get his bank to foreclose on his mortgage.

  • I’m in Las Vegas where I walked through the New York New York casino today.  In the place, they have a food stand called “Stadium Snacks.”  Comparing the prices there with the prices at Citi Field and Yankee Stadium, I have to say the prices at Stadium Snacks are nowhere near high enough, and Stadium Snacks is the only place I’ve found in Las Vegas I can say that about.

  • I don’t patronize pawn shops, but the only one I’ve ever seen a line outside is Gold and Silver Pawn Shop on Las Vegas Boulevard.  That’s the one the TV show “Pawn Stars” is about.  We didn’t stop, get on line and go in.

  • You can’t argue with the sign on a souvenir stand that says, ““If It’s In Stock, We Have It.”  However, before I’d agree that the particular store is the world’s largest souvenir stand, as another of its signs claims, I’d want to measure South of the Border.

  • The economy in Las Vegas is among the worst in the country.  New unemployment figures say it’s 15% in Vegas.  Starbucks seems to be doing just fine though.  I’ve seen more than one Starbucks in more than one of the casinos I’ve visited so far.

  • I’ve been in communities with smaller populations than some of the big Vegas hotel-casinos.  I’ve been in lots of communities like that.

  • For Halloween, I don’t recommend going out as Lady Gaga in a raw meat dress.  There are probably dogs in your neighborhood and that could get ugly.  If you’re flying someplace, I don’t recommend bringing that dress on the plane as carrion luggage either.

  • If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Ginny Thomas, wife of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week, it’s don’t leave a voice mail message if you don’t want that message plastered all over the news.

  • Texas wins.  If San Francisco wins too, we may never get Channel 5 back on Cablevision, or the Fox station in Philadelphia either (I think that one is Channel 29).

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Other than bringing a 19-year-old story back to life, what was Ginny Thomas thinking when she left a voice mail message for Anita Hill asking Professor Hill to apologize to her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for accusing Judge Thomas of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearing in 1991?

  • According to NBC News this morning, Professor Thomas turned the call over to the FBI.  Other than bring a 19-year-old story back to life, why did she do that?

  • Mark Teixeira isn’t the only player I’ve seen sliding into first base this year, but what the heck is up with that?  For those who don’t follow baseball, you can run faster than you can slide and the first baseman only has to step on the bag, not tag the runner on his way to first base.  Since there’s no need to evade a tag, there’s no need to slide and Teixeira strained his hamstring on the play, although not necessarily because of the slide.

  • Do you think they’ll ever finish Kennedy Airport?  Or LaGuardia?

  • Is there any candidate for any elected office anywhere in the country who hasn’t promised the voters that he or she will “fight” for something?

  • I keep wondering why Carl Paladino, Republican candidate for governor in New York shot himself in the foot while he had both feet in his mouth, instead of firing either before he put them in or after he took them out.

  • Does Jimmy McMillan, the candidate New York governor of the “Rent Is Too Damned High Party” think that beard is attractive?  I’m disillusioned with him, by the way.  Did you know that he doesn’t pay any rent?  He does maintenance on the Brooklyn building he lives in rather than paying money to live there and that’s been going on since the 1980’s.

  • Do you think that TV executives are longing for the ratings winner that a Texas v San Francisco World Series won’t be?

  • If there is a Texas v San Francisco World Series, will anyone but football Giants fans in New York care that Fox has pulled channel five in New York from Cablevision in a dispute over fees?

  • My wife and I got married after the World Series.  This year, the Series starts after my anniversary.  Do the people who run Major League Baseball know that it is possible to have a Minnesota v Colorado World Series?  Both the Twins and the Rockies play in outdoor stadiums, not under domes.  Do the powers that be at MLB know that a November game in either of those cities could be cancelled because of a blizzard?

Things I Know

  • After watching paid political announcements for the last couple of weeks, I have the impression that the Albany Insiders are some kind of professional sports team.

  • Fodor’s “Las Vegas 2010” travel guidebook informs us that there are some gambling resorts with pools where topless sunbathing is permitted.  The book explains that these pools have cover charges and that just struck me as funny.

  • At 3:00 AM recently, the HUB cable channel broadcast the pilot episode of the early 90’s TV show, “The Wonder Years.”  I DVR’d it and just got around to watching it.  In fact, they’ve started running the whole series.  What an outstanding show, from the first episode to the penultimate one.  In the last episode, they graduated from high school, she moved to Paris to study art and they never saw each other again.  In real life, I think one of them would have pursued the other, even if it meant Kevin went to Paris to surprise her and found her with someone else.  The show that seemed so real to me for so long would have seemed more real if, at the end, it blew up and didn’t fizzle out. 

  • I understand that people like iPhones because of all the cool things they can do, but judging by the trouble I have hearing my friends with iPhones when they call me, they aren’t that good at making clear and uninterrupted telephone calls.

  • I don’t know that anyone is right in the current dispute between Cablevision and Fox TV that will deprive me of National League playoff action until I go out of town, but I hate missing the games and I hate it when Cablevision changes my preferences on my cable box from their end and without my permission too.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Is the outcome of New York’s gubernatorial election a foregone conclusion?  And has Carl Paladino damaged his own cause badly enough to also hurt the cause of Republican candidates for offices like State Senate, State Assembly and Congress in New York?

  • Brett Favre is, after all, a quarterback, so you’d expect him to make passes.  Still, if you were the recipient of unrequested pictures of a  guy’s private parts, would you be impressed enough to date him?

  • Okay, but would you bring him home to meet the family? 

  • My wife and I are going on a trip soon, but since I’m not working, I can’t really call it a vacation, can I?

  • I saw former US Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao on TV recently.  I believe she was raised on Long Island.  If she were interested, Secretary Chao would be a formidable US Senator.  She doesn’t live in New York now as far as I can tell and she is married to Kentucky’s Senator McConnell, but I wonder why New York Republicans can’t run someone like her for public office instead of some of the candidates they do have.

  • Esquire Magazine called Minka Kelly the sexiest woman in the world.  I’d be interested in knowing how that was determined and whether Derek Jeter objected to the selection process.

  • October is breast cancer awareness month.  People wear pink ribbons, race car drivers appeared at an event with pink cars and many newspaper comic strips were printed in pink rather than in full color.  Lots of other PR events have or will occur.  Encouraging people to get examined for breast cancer is a good thing.  I say people, by the way, because men get breast cancer too, although not as frequently as women do.  Encouraging research on breast cancer is also a good thing.  However, did you know heart disease is the leading cause of death among women?  February is heart disease awareness month in case you were wondering, but the media I notice seem more aware of breast cancer awareness.

Things I Know

An announcer on the NLDS Cincinnati v Philadelphia series was talking about a player who had some treatment from a man who is a masseuse.  Good luck with that.  A masseuse is, by definition a woman.  A masseur is a man who provides massage therapy.

  • I hope Conan O’Brien’s new show on TBS is funnier than the promos they’re running for it during the baseball playoffs.

  • I went to a retirement party at a catering hall last week.  Two of the tables had signs on them that said, “Reserved.”  I didn’t sit there because it was a party and I wanted to be boisterous.

  • I’m sad to report that a talented man I’ve known almost forever, but not very well, has cancer and the type of cancer he has, liver cancer, is never good news. 

  • I don’t like to go to public places that consider themselves so fancy they need a men’s room attendant.  There are lots of things I’m happy to pay someone else to do for me because I don’t know how, it’s too hard for me, or I don’t have time.  Getting myself a paper towel doesn’t fit in any of those categories.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Why the controversy?  Katie Perry was wearing SOMETHING.  Elmo was naked!

  • Does anything happen to Pontiac Michigan now that GM has stopped making Pontiacs?

  • According to the radio spot, a Visa prepaid debit card keeps you from spending more than you have.  Doesn’t cash accomplish the same thing?

  • If you ever meet anyone from MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show could you please urge them to take turns speaking?  They talk all at once and I can’t listen all at once.

  • Where did the phrase “red-letter day” come from?  I know some calendars print holidays in red so they stand out, but wouldn’t those be red-number days?

  • The Travel Channel had a bunch of shows about Las Vegas, one of them about high rollers.  If you can afford to gamble one to five million dollars in a weekend, what is the attraction in winning or losing?

  • I went to a retirement party where several people presented the retiree with “tokens” of their esteem.  In this day and age, wouldn’t a Metro Card of their esteem be more useful?

Things I Know

  • Rick Lazio has backed out of the Conservative Party nomination for governor of New York.  It now appears that Carl Paladino will get the Conservative as well as the Republican line.  If that happens, I think the Conservative Party will get the fifty thousand votes it needs to survive.  There’s always a chance, but Paladino still looks unlikely to wrestle the governorship from Andrew Cuomo.

  • Just so we’re clear, I think selling two-dollar bills two for ten dollars plus shipping and handling is a great idea.  I also think buying two-dollar bills two for ten dollars plus shipping and handling is absolutely moronic!

  • A po’ boy sandwich at Citi Field costs $14.00.  I didn’t have one, so I don’t know if that’s delicious irony, or just plain old ordinary irony.

  • My shoulder is getting better.  I started physical therapy today.

  • I am not sure the surgeon really is a doctor.  He is very good at being on time for appointments in his office.  I had a 10 AM appointment recently.  When I got back into my car, the clock said 10:13.  Remarkable!  Plus, my next appointment is on a Wednesday and I thought all doctors were required to play golf on Wednesday.

  • Just for the sake of closure, Winnie Cooper did give birth to a healthy baby boy and she didn’t name him Kevin.

  • Upon watching “Dancing With the Stars” it occurred to me that most radio programmers would think a lot of the music on that show is too old to play on their radio stations.

  • The prospect of genetically engineered salmon must certainly lead to genetically engineered bagels too.

  • I’ve read lots of personal ads, chiefly from women, saying they like long walks on the beach.  I’ve also been to the beach, and there aren’t as many people walking at the beach as you might think.

  • I paid extra money for extra legroom on a flight my wife and I’ll be taking soon and now I’m questioning whether I should have done that since neither one of us has any extra legs. 

New York’s Silly Season In Full Swing

Is Ed Cox the Manchurian Candidate?  After reviewing the results from New York’s Republican primaries, you’d have to at least wonder if Cox, who is the Chairman of the New York State Republican Party, is a secret agent of the Democrats.  Consider the following.

Cox backed Democrat Steve Levy for the Republican nomination for Governor.  The state GOP convention ended with Rick Lazio as the party’s designee.  Then Buffalo real estate developer Carl Palidino mounted a primary and Carl won the  nomination by an almost two-to-one margin.  To make the Republicans’ prospects for a November win even less likely, Lazio did hold on to the Conservative nomination and the Democrats named Andrew Cuomo as their candidate.  Cuomo is the popular State Attorney General.  Since his father was governor, he has an important political name.  He also reportedly has a $25 million bankroll ready to spend on his candidacy.

Not only are the Republicans chances of winning the governor’s mansion slim, but the Conservative Party has to pull fifty-thousand votes for governor to continue to have a place on the ballot.  After being in existence since 1962, the Conservative Party may soon cease to exist in New York.  Is it any wonder the Conservatives paid for commercials endorsing Lazio in his Republican primary race against Paladino? 

Similarly, the Republicans gave their party designation for the US Senate seat currently held by appointed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to Bruce Blakeman, a Manhattan lawyer and the former presiding officer of the Nassau County legislature.  Blakeman finished third in the primary to Joe DioGuardi.  Gillibrand was an unpopular choice within her own party when Governor David Patterson (who also wasn’t elected to the position he now holds) appointed her last year to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat when Clinton was named US Secretary of State. 

DioGuardi seems like a fine guy and his daughter was a judge on American Idol, but he is 70-years old, he last served as a Congressman in 1989 and he’s run several unsuccessful campaigns for Congress since then.  Despite national polls that suggest President Obama is unpopular and Republicans will probably score gains in both the House and Senate, if Mr. DioGuardi wins in November that will be counted as an upset too, a huge and very unlikely upset.

State GOP Chairman Cox couldn’t even deliver the Republican nomination for Congress on Long Island’s east end to his son, Christopher.  Chris Cox finished third in a three-way race.

Democrats did cleanse themselves of two stains on their party’s ethical record.  Hiram Monserat, expelled from the State Senate after being convicted of assaulting his girlfriend, and Pedro Espada, whose health-care clinic is under investigation, both failed in their efforts to get on Row A for the November election, but Cox and the Republicans didn’t have anything to do with that and the GOP is very unlikely to win those seats in November. 

Congressman Charlie Rangel was renominated in New York City though, despite the fact that he faces trial in the House of Representatives on ethics violations.  That should come as no surprise.  Unless you are a North Korean Army veteran about Charlie’s age, if you’ve met the man, he has charmed you on a personal level.  I know he charmed me when I met him many years ago.  Plus, his opponents couldn’t agree, so five of them split the anti-Charlie vote, such as it is.

The economy is in the toilet.  Most Americans think President Obama isn’t doing a good job of taking care of that.  New York State Democrats had several scandals over the last two years too.  National polls indicate Republicans will gain seats in both houses of the Congress, but on the state level in New York, this year looks pretty dismal for the GOP.  And it’s worse than that. 

Unless Republicans can retake the New York State Senate, now barely controlled by the Dems, one-party control in New York will extend not only to the state government, but also to the process of redistricting Assembly, State Senate, and Congressional seats.  That redistricting will take place next year and if the Republicans in New York have no voice in that, they will have no voice in much of anything else in the Empire State for at least ten years.

Here are two possible scenarios that are ugly for someone.  If Rick Lazio doesn’t actively campaign for governor and the Conservative Party doesn’t garner fifty-thousand votes in the gubernatorial election, no more Conservative Party.  If Carl Paladino says something so outrageous that his campaign explodes or implodes, it’s at least theoretically possible that the Conservatives would finish second and the Republicans third.  If that happens I’m sure the GOP will pull fifty-thousand votes and continue to be a political party, but if that happens, the party will also be relegated to line C rather than line B on voting machines statewide.  Moreover, if the Republicans are no longer the second vote getters in New York’s governor’s race, they will no longer get any patronage from local boards of election throughout the state.

Is Ed Cox responsible for all of that?  Certainly not.  I don’t mean to imply it’s all his fault, but he can’t be held accountable for his role in it either.  You see, the State Chairman of the Republican Party serves for a fixed term.  So despite the disaster that is the New York GOP this year, unless Mr. Cox wants to leave office early, nobody can force him out until the end of his term.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Did Bristol Palin really dance to the song “Mamma Told Me Not To Come?”

  • Why do sidewalks exist?  In my neighborhood, everyone walks in the middle of the street.

  • Why do we even have the term “correctional facility?”  It’s eight syllables instead of one or two.  How ambiguous are the words “jail” and “prison?”

  • The sign in the window of the Frederick’s of Hollywood store in the nearby shopping mall said, “Take an additional 50% off.”  I thought, “I’m in favor of that.”  Then I wondered, “Don’t you think that would be a great slogan to put on a T-shirt?”

  • According to their commercial, the New England Mint is selling two-dollar bills, two for ten dollars, plus shipping and handling.  Why didn’t I think of that?

  • President Obama said recently that Republicans are treating him like a dog.  What’s wrong with that?  Do you treat your dog well or poorly?  Many people treat their dogs better than they treat any person, don’t they?

  • Criminally annoying?  I have no doubt that Snooki is annoying, perhaps even to the point of criminality, but the idea of criminally annoying seems very vague to me.  Where exactly is the line you have to cross to be criminally annoying?

Things I Know

  • Attention politicians:  in Tuesday’s primaries in New York, I’m not going to vote for anyone whose campaign robocalls me this weekend, or Monday or Tuesday.  I know campaigns are exempt from the federal no-call statute, but if I went to the trouble of getting on the federal no-call list, it means unsolicited telephone sales calls annoy me.  And as soon as I realize I’m receiving one of those annoyance calls, I hang up.

  • I found our wills and some other important papers that were missing and I told my wife she has to be much more careful about putting those papers at risk by doing things like letting me touch them.

  • A while back, I made reference to a man from Jensen Beach FL. charged with child pornography who claimed in his defense that his cat downloaded the images without his knowledge by walking across his computer keyboard.  To update, he gave up that ridiculous defense and pleaded no contest.  According to the report I read, he was sentenced to more than 12-years in prison.

  • The Orange County FL Sheriff’s office blew up a toy pony found near the Waterbridge Elementary School in the Orlando vicinity because the pony was deemed suspicious.  If you are aware of your surroundings, you probably saw the video.  It was a false alarm.  I’d much rather have a false alarm than have a law enforcement officer injured or killed by a real explosive device.  Still, I would have been amused if the toy pony was stuffed with Trojan condoms.

Freedom of Speech

Terry Jones, that pastor with the bad moustache and roughly fifty followers in Florida who wants to burn copies of the Quran over the weekend isn’t important enough to get the attention he’s receiving.  He’s heard from the President, the Secretary of State, the commanding general in Afghanistan, the Pope, the President of Pakistan and who knows how many other world figures.  It’s gotten so bad that if he doesn’t burn the books, some idiot attention whore will. 

Some Muslim organization (I didn’t hear which one) announced that if he burns 200 Qurans, they’ll give away 200,000 copies.  That’s an appropriate response, a good way to counter this idiocy.  Completely ignoring the guy would be better.

There’s no question his proposed action is protected by the US Constitution; the federal government can’t interfere.  But there was a time when burning books was associated with censorship, not freedom of speech.  Nazis did it, for instance.  It’s fiction, of course, but read “Fahrenheit 451.” 

Many people don’t understand the First Amendment.  It keeps the government and nobody else from interfering with your right to speak out.  If you say something your boss doesn’t like, unless you have a contract or there’s a union involved, the boss can fire you for it. 

One of the people who doesn’t understand our US Constitution is the Interior Minister of Pakistan, A. Rehman Malik.  First, the USA isn’t in Pakistan so he doesn’t have any jurisdiction, but he asked INTERPOL to prevent Terry Jones from burning the Quran.  On the other hand, perhaps Mr. Malik does understand and just said what he said to score political points in Pakistan.  Maybe he learned to do that from watching US politicians cavort on cable TV news.  Obviously, INTERPOL doesn’t have any jurisdiction when a US Citizen does something in the US, but when did the Interior Minister of Pakistan last get news coverage in media all over the United States?

In grade school and in high school, students hear that the USA is a democracy and that means the majority rules.  It isn’t so though.  First, the USA isn’t a democracy, it’s a representative republic.  Moreover, the US Constitution with its bill of rights, is meant to ensure that the majority doesn’t run roughshod over minorities.  So, let’s all try to remember that the only kind of speech that needs the protection of the First Amendment is unpopular speech.

The Parking Ticket

I got a parking ticket last June for an expired parking meter at the library closest to my house.  I’m fighting it–on a technicality.  It takes a long time to fight a ticket here and it’s a colossal waste of time.  I suppose it’s a colossal waste of money too, but except for the share of my tax bill that goes to supporting the court, it’s not my money.  If I have to pay the fine, of course, it will be my money.  They could, if they wanted to, make it take less time and cost less money, but I suspect a lot of people pay unjust and/or invalid tickets rather than going through the process because it takes too long and costs them missed time from work to boot. 

It just occurred to me that if they posted a list of what various infractions cost, they might get even more people to choose saving time over saving money.

I was able to plead not guilty by mail, but one indication of how long it takes is the calendar call was this morning.  June, July, August, September.  See what I mean?  By the time this landmark case is adjudicated, I’ll certainly have to decide what I want for my birthday and for Christmas and, who knows, I might even die by then!     If I win and if I could do a cost-benefit analysis, it might be a Pyrrhic victory, but I don’t have anything better to do and I do feel like being pedantic.  I almost always feel like being pedantic though, so that’s nothing new.

This ticket was issued literally behind my back.  I went to the library to talk to someone who works there.  When I arrived, he was standing in the parking lot.  I parked the truck in a stall, got out and talked him for about three minutes, maybe four.  I was going to say I leapt out of the truck, but I don’t want to exaggerate here.  While I was standing maybe three parking spaces away from the truck, the parking agent came by and left me a ticket. 

I know it’s hard to judge intent, but for all she knew, I might have been asking my friend for change.  Even if I went inside to get change, I would have gotten a ticket by the time I came back out to feed the meter. 

One thing I hate about parking meters where I live is that they still require coins.  There are places where the parking meters take paper money and even credit cards.  Every night when I empty my pockets, I put my change in a jar on my dresser. I’m sure a lot of people do that.  Right now, I have over $100 in that jar.  I don’t like the weight of the coins in my pocket and it takes longer to dig change out of my pocket than it does to get change from a cash register.  I suppose I could dig the change out when I was waiting to pay, but I live in New York, where the sales-tax rate was apparently chosen to make the tax due impossible for a taxpayer to calculate in his or her head.

The court already knew I plead not guilty, so I thought I could take care of this today.  Wrong!  The attorney representing the municipality called my name and asked me what I wanted to do.  I said I wanted the ticket dismissed because it was defective on its face (I have lawyers in the family).  The ticket was issued to a “Suburban;” I have a truck.  Everywhere in the country, a Suburban is a hulking, enormous passenger vehicle from Chevrolet.  In New York, it is also a class of vehicles characterized by seats or removable seats (fold-down seats count too) in the rear.   All station wagons used to be registered as Suburban in New York, but I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw a vehicle with Suburban plates on it.  No seats, no place to install seats, so I have a truck.  I also have a DMV title and a picture that show it’s a truck.  I showed them to the municipal lawyer.

All that the attorney said was he would schedule me for a trial.  I’ll get a letter.  Based on the time between the ticket and the calendar call, notice of my trial date may come in the form of a Christmas card.  Will my ploy work?  Who knows, but it’s like I said:  I don’t have anything better to do and I do feel like being pedantic.

Things I Know

  • Labor Day can only be one day later than it is this year.  People usually don’t get interested in elections until after Labor Day.  The NY State primaries are a week from tomorrow.  With eight days to go, I predict very little interest in these primary elections.  Part of that is the calendar, part of it is the only interesting race for Democrats is the race for the Attorney General Nomination.  Part is the only statewide office Republicans seem to have any chance of capturing is Comptroller.

  • I couldn’t believe it.  On the Friday before Labor Day and the TV show “Extra” was billboarding a story on what Jerry Lewis’ next project is.  Next, they’ll be telling us the sky is blue and water is wet.

  • When I was young, lots and lots of people watched Jerry Lewis’ Labor Day telethon and it wasn’t the only telethon around.  Now, I find that hard to explain.  Jerry and his telethon have raised millions and millions of dollars for worthy causes, but the show is very inexpensively produced, full of mistakes since it’s live (or at least large parts of it are), and I find it boring.

  • I think a woman tried to pick me up at the beach the other day.  Nobody tries very often, so I’m not sure.  She came over and said she wanted to say hello because she came there often and saw me there frequently too.  It was my second time ever at that beach, but I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I didn’t tell her that.  I’m both too heavy and too married for someone to pick me up easily though, so I spoke with her for a minute or two and then I left.

  • Nude beaches need, but don’t have, editors.  I wasn’t at a nude beach, but that thought occurred to me because I was at a beach.

  • On a beautiful, sunny afternoon at the beach, I miss listening to Dan Ingram on the radio more than I do the rest of the time.

  • Talk about a guy being trapped.  They held a prayer vigil for those miners trapped in Chile and one of the trapped miners wives showed up.  So did his mistress.

  • My wife usually finds the things I lose.  But she lost my keys to one of our cars.  However, she didn’t lose any points doing that, because she found them too.  They were in the tote bag she carried when we went to the hospital to get my shoulder fixed.  I drove there and she drove home which is why we had my keys as well as hers on that trip. 

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Once it becomes apparent that a storm (hurricane or blizzard) isn’t going to be as bad as we thought it might be, could we please, please cut back a little on the TV news coverage?

  •  So now there’s a TV show about a guy who eats nothing but cheeseburgers?

  • And how can his wife possibly not know that the guy doesn’t eat anything else but cheeseburgers?

  • The History International cable TV channel broadcasts one hour on weekday mornings in a language other than English.  The language is Spanish, but that’s not material to the conversation.  First, why one hour a day?  Second, how come the commercials during that hour are all in English?

  • What do they do with half a billion eggs recalled because they might be contaminated with salmonella?  I’m sure they don’t put them back in the chickens.

  • Is there a US Post Office anywhere in the country that was built with adequate customer parking?

  • Do you suppose that the guy in the maroon Maserati convertible with NY plate “PP DOC” is a urologist?  I guess a supporter of one of many deposed Haitian presidents is also a possibility, but it’s a bigger stretch, don’t you think?

  • How come sleep apnea is in my spell checker, but Maserati isn’t?

  • The sign on the door to the men’s locker room at my local pool says, “All patrons must be fully dressed before leaving the locker room.”  Is this really a problem?  I mean seriously?

Things I Know

  • Hurricane Earl is churning up the Atlantic.  Current projections say it will be within 150-miles of where I live by Friday of Labor Day Weekend.  So, I’m implementing my patented hurricane survival strategy:  I’ll watch the Weather Channel, find out where Jim Cantore is, and if he shows up anywhere near me, I’ll go somewhere else.

  • Roger Clemens was once a great major league pitcher, a starting pitcher.  He was indicted Monday for allegedly lying to Congress.  So, depending on the outcome of his trial, he may soon be headed for the pen.  Not the bullpen, the penitentiary.

  • I’m not big on August because football starts up, buying good fresh peaches becomes a chancy thing and cold weather is nigh.  But it is over 90 again, I can still nap in my hammock, I believe I’m going to be a guest lecturer in college once school us under way, and there are fresh tomatoes in my back yard.  So, it’s not all bad by any means.

  •  “The obvious solution to that is heated scrubs.”  Attention MS Word’s grammar checker:  “solution” is the subject of the previous sentence.  As used in the sentence and despite ending in the letter “s”, “scrubs” isn’t really a plural noun anymore than “pants” is.  So this sentence is correct.  Leave me alone.

  • I used more pain pills after this operation than I did in 2003, but the pain pills I got this time weren’t as strong and I stopped using them 48 hours after the operation.

  • In case there are any second graders reading my blog, here’s a hint.  I don’t know why this is, but the tooth fairy usually pays better at grandma’s house than at home.

  • Anesthesia makes it harder for a patient to urinate.  Pain medicine makes it harder for a patient to defecate.  Still, I suppose exploding is a very rare side effect of rotator cuff surgery.

  • I saw a TV commercial for ITT Tech, a private, for-profit college.  In the commercial, the guy who is telling what’s supposed to be his story and his family (they may be actors for all I know) were hand-washing a late model Ford Edge.  The Ford blue oval on the car was blurred out.  Once I noticed that, I didn’t pay any attention to another thing the commercial said.  I spent my time wondering why the commercial’s producers would do that.

  • Based on the theory that where there’s smoke, there’s cannabis, it may be inevitable that one day one of the drug-filled purses that seem to surround Paris Hilton may actually belong to her.

To Quote ET, “Ouch.”

If you have to go to the hospital, I suggest outpatient treatment if at all possible.  They don’t keep you overnight, you get to go home for dinner and you get to sleep in your own bed.  They don’t get to wake you up in the middle of the night to take your blood pressure and a blood sample (but not at the same time) and if you don’t stay, it removes two of the most annoying things about being in the hospital, daytime TV and hospital food.

I consider myself to be in pretty good health, but I’ve been in three hospitals in the last three years.  Clearly, I should have purchased the extended warranty on myself and just as clearly, it’s too late now.  Two of those visits were for repairs rather than for illness, which is why I still regard my health as generally good.  All three hospitals had severe parking problems.  All three were under construction.  All three are still under construction.  Is there a hospital anywhere that isn’t under construction?  Is there one where it’s easy to park?

Long Island Jewish Hospital has valet parking for those who wish to take advantage of it.  It’s still not easy though.  They don’t have enough room to leave the cars or enough valets to park or retrieve them quickly.  There is a charge for the valet parking, of course and it also costs four dollars an hour to park there without a valet.  So, if you’re a visitor, you fork it over, but if you’re a patient and either you or your insurance company is spending thousands of dollars a day, they do validate parking.  I think that’s nice, but it also strikes me as funny for some reason.

I had rotator cuff surgery recently and as one of my friends suggested, I hope to be rotating and cuffing like I used to pretty soon.  I recommend you do everything you can to avoid injuring your dominant-side arm.  And, no, I will not now become a starting pitcher for the Mets.  Starting pitching is the least of their problems and if I were pitching for them it would be the most of their problems instead. 

What is it about hospitals that allows doctors to be on time within their walls, but nowhere else?  I think they have these procedures very early in the morning so that you’ll be half asleep and they can save money by using a little less anesthesia.  I had some trouble with the anesthesia the last time I had surgery on my shoulder.  This anesthesiologist spent some time with me talking to me about the problems and reassuring me.  I wound up telling him that he was the doctor and as long as I had told him what my issues were, I’d trust him to use his best judgment and his skill.  That turned out to be a good decision in this instance.  We both learned from my previous experience.  I had less trouble this time.

Why is it so cold in the hospital?  The last operation I had was in December, so I thought they were conserving energy, but this one was in August, so that’s not the case.  I told my surgeon I heartily approved of the heated hospital gown they gave me.  He said he was jealous because he was too cold too.  The obvious solution to that is heated scrubs.  I wonder if someone’s working on that.  If you’re interested in the concept of heated hospital gowns, search the Internet for “Bair Paw.”

I don’t know how I could have done this without my wife.  I’ve thanked her over and over, but I’m now thanking her in public.  She’s not as confident of her driving ability as she should be, so I had to figure out how to get to and from the hospital on local streets, but she got me there and back safely.  She worried about me and I hate to make her do that, but it’s proof of how much she loves me.  I feel the same way about her and I don’t need any proof, so I still hate to make her worry about me.  I worry about her too.  When I spent more time than expected in the recovery room, I wanted them to tell her I was okay.

She got me medicine, got me food, cut up my food so I could eat it (I bet she thought she was done with cutting up other people’s meat).  She bought ice packs and brought them to me, changed dressings and helped me dry off after I showered too.  In other words, she did everything I needed and most of what I wanted, and thought up some stuff to do for me that I hadn’t thought of too, just like she always does, only I needed more than usual. 

Although I deserve very little of the credit, I am getting better.  So far, most of the credit goes to the doctors, nurses, technicians and other staff at the hospital and to my wife.  Soon, I hope to add physical therapists to the list.  Like so many other things in life, I don’t like physical therapy, but I know it’s good for me.

Things I Know

  • The meek will inherit the earth and one won the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Florida too.

  • I’m still having trouble typing after shoulder surgery.  I hope to expand and expound on that experience shortly.

  • They have heated hospital gowns now.  I approve.

  • I think we’ve probably already had our last 90-degree day around here for this year.

  • Imagine how many chickens there are in this country if the FDA recalled half a billion eggs and there are still eggs available.

  • This year the Mets are different.  Instead of an end-of-season collapse, they collapsed right in the middle of the season.

  • I went to the Mets game against the Phillies a week ago Friday.  They won, but they had three players with sub-.200 batting averages in the lineup, so it was no surprise they scored only one run.  I went with a college alumni group.  I didn’t know anyone there, but still had a nice time.

  • However, parking is $19 and the food I had (not a lot of food and I don’t drink beer) cost more than the ticket. 

  • In the Mets team store, you can buy a toaster that puts the Mets logo on your breakfast toast.  Seems redundant; the Mets are already toast.

  • If you don’t stop breathing when you are asleep and snoring, you may not want to tell the hospital you snore during pre-surgery screening.  Sleep apnea is a serious problem.  For one thing, it increases your risk of strokes, but my wife says I don’t stop breathing.  I told the pre-surgical screening I snore.  They sent me for a sleep apnea test which also said I don’t have it.

  • By the time I’m old enough for Willard Scott to wish me a happy birthday on TV, Willard will be too old to do it.

Things I Know

  • I’ve passed my pre-surgery screening, so I’ll be having rotator cuff surgery on Thursday.  And no, I won’t be pitching in the majors next season.  I don’t have a screwball; I am one.

  • Steven Slater:  Admit it, if your job had an inflatable emergency exit slide, you’d probably have used it with a lot less provocation than he allegedly had.  The problems I have with Mr. Slater are:  he could have had the offending passenger arrested, instead of having himself fired and arrested; and it’s looking more and more as if the story he told wasn’t true.

  • I’m not an Obama supporter, but I don’t care where the first family vacations.  I don’t even care whether they pay any part of the cost of the trip themselves, since their part is so much less than the actual cost because of who they are.  It’s impossible for any member of the first family to travel anywhere without extreme security.  They can’t fly commercially.  Mrs. Obama’s first-class tickets to Spain would probably have cost between $5,000 and $10,000.  The plane they used costs more than that to operate per hour.  If they pay what the trip would cost a private citizen, that’s still a small portion of the cost.  And the President and his family aren’t elitist, no matter what they do.  They are the president of the United States and his family; they are elite. 

  • Which leads me to the Boy Scouts at their National Jamboree who booed a video message the President provided to be played as they gathered.  They booed because past presidents have showed up in person.  And they were wrong to do it.  A Scout is courteous and Obama is the President.   On the other hand, before the criticism of the Scouts gets too severe, let’s remember that none of them were as old as 18.

  • Christine Romer leaving Washington as head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors gives me a chance to rant about something I hate.  I have no objection to gender-neutral titles such as “Chairperson,” but to me, a “Chair” will always be a piece of furniture.  We already have way more ambiguity in the English language than anyone needs.  I particularly object to that example because I can’t think of a terrible pun that makes it worth keeping.

  •  If I had to rely on the smell of the plant’s leaves to decide whether to eat a plant’s fruit, I would never eat a tomato.

  • It wouldn’t occur to me to eat microwave popcorn either based on the way it smells while it’s cooking.

  • If stupidity had more consequences, we’d have less stupidity, or at least it would manifest itself less often.

  • And speaking of that, the person who was appointed in my place to one of the jobs I was qualified for and did do, called me recently to ask me a question about something he should know.  I answered his question.  In trying to drum up a conversation with me (something I was not all that interested in having), he asked me if I’m bored.  I’ve known about sensitivity training for some time; now I know there must also be insensitivity training.

  • It also seems to me that people who’ve had insensitivity training include those who want to build a mosque in a building that was hit by debris when those two planes were crashed into the World Trade Center in 2001.  I know they have the right, and that unpopular actions are the only ones that need defending, but they could easily build someplace a little farther away from ground zero.

  • Here’s another phrase that belongs in popular use:  Dust Rabbits.  A commenter who styles him or herself as “S” on the website consumerist.com, says Dust Rabbits are more feral and less cute than dust bunnies.  The phrase does fill a need.

Things I Want (Or Need) to Know

  • I’m having ambulatory surgery next week.  Wouldn’t it be easier on me and the doctor if I stayed still during the whole operation?

  • I was cruising the real estate listings and found one that said the property in question had a pedestal tub.  This prompted my wife to ask if it also has a claw-foot sink.  I think not.  The house is probably too new for that; a Jacuzzi sink, maybe.

  • I found another one that said the property’s master bedroom had two sinks and a separate tub and shower.   It didn’t say whether the master bath had a king-sized bed, but I do wonder.

  • Sometimes homonyms raise questions.  I’ve seen things that are so bad they could be considered wholly shit.  I could understand holey shit, especially if dung beetles have been at it.  But how would holy shit be any better than or different from secular shit?

  • Have you seen the Geico commercial with former major league pitcher Randy Johnson?  Apparently he does have a sense of humor.  I didn’t hear of him displaying that when he worked in New York.  Did you?

  • What’s the right way to pronounce Colorado?  I learned how to pronounce Nevada when I went there (not the way I’’d been pronouncing it, by the way).  However, even though I’ve been there too, I’ve heard Colorado pronounced two ways and don’t know which one most people who live there use.

  • If there’s Sunday Night Football, even exhibition football, can being cold be far behind?

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Is it just a coincidence that the New York State Legislature passed the last elements of one of the latest state budgets on record during International Clown Week?

  • What have we come to as a country when nine people were killed at a beer distributor near Hartford CT and it’s reported on TV as the country’s worst workplace shooting rampage in nine months?

  • How old are all of us getting?  Winnie Cooper is pregnant.  At least Danica McKellar is.  Danica is the actress who played Winnie Cooper on the TV show “The Wonder Years.”

  • Do Nissan Armadas float?

  • Minnesota Vikings QB Bret Favre was reportedly retiring.  Then he was reportedly not retiring.  Isn’t that the third time in three years for each?

  • I read a story about another coffee shop that features scantily clad baristas.  It’s not the first one; in fact I’ve even heard of a topless coffee shop.  However, it started me wondering about other occupations.  If a female psychotherapist treated her patients clad only in lingerie, would the garment she wore be called a Freudian slip?

Things I Know

  • Sidney Harmon bought Newsweek for a dollar.  Not one copy of the magazine, the whole company.  I know you can get a back issue for $8.95, and I think the newsstand price for a single copy is $5.95, but no newsstand in my neighborhood carries it.  That sounds like a much better deal than it is because the magazine is hemorrhaging money and in the deal, Mr. Harmon assumes the magazine’s debts too.  But he”s a billionaire, so he probably knows something I don’t.

  • I read this morning that there are 667-thousand millionaires in the State of New York.  That certainly makes me feel like a loser. 

  • I couldn’t believe it.  During Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, they had a show called “Great White Shark:  Uncaged.”  At the beginning of the show, they actually had a warning on the screen, “Do Not Try This At Home.”  Don’t worry; I’m not even going to try it in the ocean.

  • You folks aren’t doing your part.  I’ve been trying to introduce a new phrase into the English language.  I’ve asked you to help spread it around and I still haven’t heard anyone else use it yet.  You know what A.S.A.P. means, right?  I’m still trying to replace it with M.S.T.P., much sooner than possible, and I need your help.

  • I learned from seeing a picture of Chelsea Clinton walking down the aisle with her father that she’s considerably taller than I thought she was.

  • Ed Lowe, a man I used to see frequently when I was a reporter and a man whose work I still admire believes that being crazy isn’t a problem; it’s a solution to a problem.

  • It disturbs me more than a little that if I say “Snooki,” you probably know who I’m talking about.  It disturbs me even more that when I say “Snooki,” I know who I’m talking about.

  • I’ve never met the woman, but it appears to me that the shirt Snooki was wearing last Friday when she was arrested is redundant.

  • Things were going so well, but now I’m regretting that I have a ticket to the Mets-Phillies game a week from Friday at Citi Field. 

  • Some of the things I write here are expressions of frustration, hence the name of the blog.  Sometimes I’m talking about what interests me.  A lot of the time, I’m trying to be funny.  Sometimes I’m just trying to get what’s on my mind off my chest.

Things I Know

  • Weather people have been talking about relief from the hot weather.  Excuse me.  I consider the summer heat to be relief from the cold weather, and the heat is just fine with me.  I’m not going to paint the south side of a house black when it’s 95 degrees and sunny, but I like the heat.  I won’t begin complaining about the weather until late September or early October.

  • People are occasionally confused (and so is my spell checker) about the proper use of the words it’s, and its.  Here’s something you don’t have to be confused about:  its’ isn’t a word.

  • August is National Peach Month.  I find that peculiar because the peaches I buy in the market near the end of August tend to be mealy and very unappetizing to me.

  • It’s also National Goat Cheese Month.  I don’t have any opinion on that one.

  • I’m reading a biography of George Armstrong Custer, but there’s not a lot of suspense in it.  I’m getting near the part where Custer encounters Sitting Bull and all of his colleagues, but I don’t find myself wondering what’s going to happen.

  • Here’s another useless fact I’ll never forget:  By the time of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Custer was going bald and he no longer wore his hair down to his shoulders.  Regardless of what you’ve seen in the movies, Custer’s hair was very short when he was killed.

  • If you’d like to sleep soundly throughout the night, a two hour nap at 8:30 PM is probably not your best course of action.

  • The sign of our country’s shrinking vocabulary is in the window of a deli in Great Neck, NY.  It says, “No loitering or hanging out.”

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • A nine-year-old boy was left alone and unsupervised for nine hours at an airport in Chicago after a United Airlines employee forgot about him.  If you leave your own or someone else’s nine-year-old alone and unsupervised, especially in a very busy airport, even for a lot less than nine hours, shouldn’t police and child-protective services be investigating?

  • Did I misunderstand, or is BP really planning to send Tony Hayward to Siberia this winter?  Isn’t that a little harsh?  Even for the outgoing president of BP?

  • A British car insurance company called “Sheila’s Wheels’ (I swear, that’s the name) reported that in 2009 men filed 16.4 percent more accidents during the summer than they did the rest of the year.  The reason, according to the company is the male drivers were distracted by women in skimpy outfits.  We needed a study to tell us that?

  • I got an envelope in the mail the other day.  On the outside were printed the words, “Do Not Bend.”  Did they mean the envelope, or me?

  • Gold is a commodity.  So what’s with all the TV commercials urging people to buy gold from one company or another?  Shouldn’t cost per transaction and customer service be your major considerations?  And if gold is such a great investment, why are these companies so anxious to sell theirs to you and me that they advertise on TV?

  • My Lipitor-chip cookies are doing really well, so what do you think of my latest idea for a business venture, toupees for bald eagles?

  • Who would have thought I could get an awful bagel in Great Neck NY?

  • Ripped and torn mean the same thing, right?  If my body is ripped (and it never has been) then I have an over-abundance of clearly defined muscles.  But the rotator cuffs in both of my shoulders are torn and that isn’t good; it means I need surgery.  Whats up with that?

Things I Know

  • The people of Bell, California had every right to be outraged at last night’s city council meeting over the enormous salaries that the city manager, police chief and part-time city council were being paid.  However, there would be no need for outrage if the people of Bell, California had been properly vigilant in the first place.

  • Tony Hayward is out as head of BP, by mutual consent, according to the announcement.  We had mutual consent when I was on the radio too; the boss said, “You’re fired,” and I said, “If that’s the way you feel about it, I don’t want to work here anymore.”

  • I used to think I was obnoxious, but nobody ever paid me anywhere near $18 million to get lost.  Not only would I have gone away for much less, I have.

  • The Wall Street Journal reported a list of the executives who earned the most money in the decade.  However, since there was no year zero, the decade isn’t over until December 31 of this year.

  • I just got an e-mail from a concert venue in Florida, Ruth Eckerd Hall, telling me how to log on to my account.  Okay.  I went to Ruth Eckerd Hall once for a concert and I had a good time; my wife enjoyed it too.  But it was years and years ago, maybe nine. 

  • My nose isn’t itching enough today, so I’m going for an MRI.  If they’ll play the music I bring, I pick Gregorian chant.  It’s calming and soothing and the lack of any strong beat counters the awful racket the machine makes.

  • The last time I went for an MRI on my shoulder, the tech told me to stop moving.  I told him I was just breathing and if I didn’t need to breathe, I wouldn’t need the MRI either.

  • When the Mets lost seven of nine on their disastrous, just concluded road trip, I thought perhaps they had been assimilated by the Borg.  But then they lost two more and now I’m not so sure.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • “Oliver Perez got out of the inning.”  When is the last time you heard those five words in that order?  But then Ollie gave up a homer in the bottom of the 13th and the Mets lost another one on this debacle of a road trip.

  • Twitter, not only why, but why 140?

  • Have you ever screamed for ice cream?

  • If you’re trying to get on an Interstate Highway, the people already on the highway should let you in.  However, you don’t have the right of way in that situation, so before you pull out into traffic, could you at least look?

  • Will they ever finish I-95 just east of New Haven?

  • Have you noticed how many men appear on TV wearing suits and dress shirts that don’t fit?  If there’s a gap between your suit collar and your neck, your suit doesn’t fit.  If you can stick two or three fingers between your neck and your shirt collar, your dress shirt doesn’t fit either.

  • Mike Taibbi reported on Christmas-in-July sales for the Today Show this morning.  It’s a ploy by retailers to boost summertime sales.  That’s fine for little kids, but what the hell am I going to do with a stocking full of coal in the middle of summer?

  • Why do I watch the Today Show regularly when I find fault with it almost every time I do?

  • My wife wonders if the whale that attacked that sailboat off South Africa has read Moby Dick.

  • Shouldn’t August be National Cicada Month? 

  • If it’s a “rare and potentially devastating eye infection” shouldn’t Channel 4 in New York tell us about it right now, instead of making us wait until Monday night at 11:00 PM?

Things I Know

  • Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a previously unknown henge monument near Stonehenge in Great Britain.  They haven’t decided what to call it yet.  I’m looking forward to the day when archaeologists discover a henge monument featuring movable panels that control movement between the pillars.  That one, I want to be the first to suggest, should be named Doorhenge.

  • Speaking of henge monuments, I consider it unlikely that I’ll drive on I-95 through western Nebraska again, so I’m disappointed that I didn’t go to Carhenge which is about 30 minutes north of that highway, when I had the chance.  But when I was there, I forgot it was nearby.

  • The Today Show informed me today that if I travel to Santa Barbara California, I can sleep in a tent starting at $135 a night.  It’’s a very fancy tent indeed, but come on!  I own a tent that cost less than that.

  • I’m fairly sick of people running for high public office by claiming they’re not politicians.  Carl Paladino in New York and Linda McMahon in Connecticut are the two most recent egregious examples in the area where I live.  If you are running for Governor or US Senator or any other high office, you are, by definition, a politician.  If you’ve never been elected, you’re not yet a successful politician and you may be an outsider, but you are a politician.  Since politicians must build consensus, by the way, being an outsider hardly ever gets things done.

  • Carl Paladino’s radio commercials, as he seeks to become New York’s Governor, are running too close together on some stations I listen to.  I assume he’s buying run of station spots which allow the station to schedule the commercials at its convenience.  You can buy commercials that run at fixed times or within certain parameters, but run of station is cheaper.  The Paladino campaign has bought enough of them on some stations to really annoy at least me if not everybody who listens.

  • To the rude woman driving the maroon Nissan Altima with Maryland plates:  if you had let me off the Southern State Parkway, instead of blowing your horn and cutting me off, there would have been more room for you to drive on the Southern State Parkway.

  • I know nobody goes to Boy Scout Camp for the cuisine, but this year was especially ridiculous; I lost about five pounds in five days at camp.  I have every confidence I’ll find them again.

  • If I hadn’t seen them both written out, I’d think Crepe Suzette and Crape Myrtle were either both food or both plants, depending on which one I heard of first.

  • I am in favor of a federal law to require reality TV shows to contain at least five percent reality.

  • I’m also in favor of a law that requires stores to sell things at list price at least five percent of the time before they can advertise that item as being reduced from its regular price.

  • I’m no anthropologist, but I imagine that in ancient cultures where virgin sacrifice was in vogue, it encouraged premarital sex.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • What’s wrong with the voters of New York?  Sienna College conducted a poll while I was in the woods last week.  Seven percent of the voters gave the New York State Legislature an A based on the way they’re handling the state budget and only 47 percent gave the legislature an F.  We are in danger of having the latest budget in state history.  I would have thought everyone would flunk them.

  • The new DVD AV receiver I just bought for my truck has a safety feature that keeps you from watching DVD’s while you’re driving.  I know there’s a way to bypass the safety feature, but why would anyone try to watch a DVD and drive at the same time?  I mean wouldn’t you miss a lot of what’s on the DVD, or hit a lot of what’s on and near the road, or both?

  • Why do the Mets let Mike Pelfrey pitch in the daytime?

  • Shouldn’t a trauma center be where you go to get hurt?

  • Why do they call it rush hour?

  • Why is Lindsay Lohan still famous, and is there anything you and I can do about that?

Things I Know

  • I’’m now up to about five thousand hits a month on this blog which would amaze me except that about 20 percent are from a Russian search engine and I have no idea why that is.

  • I bought a fancy new radio for my plain new truck.  Well, it’s a lot more than a radio, but it fits in the hole my old radio left in the dash.  It’ll play music off a flash drive or an SD memory card.  But it takes about three minutes to load either one which is a major pain. 

  • Fortunately, I got it in time for my annual sojourn in Rhode Island.  There isn’t a lot I like on the radio between here and Rhode Island.

  • I have about 2,700 songs on one 8GB thumb drive, but I don’t think I can listen to all of them between here and Rhode Island unless I make 21 round-trips.

  • It’ll play DVD’s too.  The box calls it a DVD AV receiver.  I’ve also heard them referred to as head units.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Why don’t giraffes get fat?  I mean, have you ever seen a fat one?

  • Most of the Chinese takeout restaurants near where I live have a sign that says “Chinese food to take out.”  A new one opened.  Its sign just says, “Chinese to take out.”  Doesn’t it sound like that one is running a dating service instead of a restaurant?  I know they’re not, but it does to me.

  • Should I be perplexed or impressed?  I made a terrible pun, which is the very best kind.  The pun was deliberate and it was spelled correctly too, but MS Word’s spell-checker still didn’t like it because it was the wrong word.

  • Speaking of contextual spell checking, MS Word’s spell checker tells me takeout is one word, but apparently only if it’s used after the word Chinese.  When did that happen?

  • What the hell is a “crazed sex poodle?”  I can imagine what a sex-crazed poodle would do, and I know who the “crazed sex poodle” is alleged to be, but what the hell is a “crazed sex poodle?”

  • Would anyone watch beach volley ball on TV if the women wore something other than bikinis while playing?

  • Time Life is selling a music collection called “Pop Memories of the 60’s.”  The infomercial has a kinescope of Patsy Cline singing “Crazy.”  I’ve seen that clip before and in it everything looks tilted to the right.  Next time someone uses it on TV, could they please digitize it and straighten it up?

  • My local Pathmark supermarket chains its shopping carts together.  To separate them, so you can use one, you need a quarter or a special token.  You get the quarter back when you put the cart back.  Why do they do this?  If I wanted to steal a cart, twenty-five-cent deposit wouldn’t keep me from doing it.  Getting my quarter back wouldn’t make me return the cart either if I was at the far end of the parking lot and it was raining.  But due to ever-increasing prices, we don’t need coins very much anymore and I seldom carry a selection.  If I don’t have a quarter, the shopping-cart deposit would keep me from shopping at that store.

Things I Know

    • This morning, the TV weather guy was talking about temperatures in the “low 100’s.”  Now, I like hot weather more than the next person, but there aren’t any low 100’s.

    • Kendra Wilkinson, Hugh Hefner’s former girlfriend, and reality TV star was on the Today show today.  She was so inarticulate she said “you know” twice in the same sentence.  So, I turned it off even though I don’t know.

    • I’ve confirmed something I’ve suspected since I bought it a month ago:  it would be easier for me to wash out the bed of my pickup truck if I had a hill on which to do it.  I can, however, get the water out by putting the tailgate down, backing up fast and then jamming on the brakes.

  • I recently heard a college president on TV refer to something as very unique.  The only thing that is very unique is my pet peeve.  Very Unique is its name.  Unique doesn’t mean rare; it means only.  With the lone exception of my pet peeve, theres no such thing as very unique.

  • I just entered the Bulwer-Lytton writing contest, you know, the one for awful writing.  I figured I had at least a fighting chance.  But I received an acknowledgement from the contest for my e-mail entry.  The acknowledgement said, “Your submission has arrived and will receive the treatment it deserves.”  I was afraid of that.

Bulwer-Lytton

The results of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest are in.

This didn’t win:

“The life-saving salve had not arrived to help Dr. Sybil Carter dress the mutant killer bee wounds because landslides blocked roads, the rivers were jammed by earthquake debris, and even the jungle foot paths were clogged with dead bees and their victims, yet without the medicinal unguent, many more would die, so reluctantly giving in to her promise never again to speak to her aviator ex-boyfriend, she picked up the radio and begged him to fly in the ointment.” 

David K. Lynch Topanga, CA

This came in second:

“Through the verdant plains of North Umbria walked Waylon Ogglethorpe and, as he walked, the clouds whispered his name, the birds of the air sang his praises, and the beasts of the fields from smallest to greatest said, ‘There goes the most noble among men’ — in other words, a typical stroll for a schizophrenic ventriloquist with delusions of grandeur.”

Tom Wallace, Columbia, SC  

In my judgment, both are better than the winner, but I’m not a judge.  However, for 2011, I am a contestant.  Inspired by this year’s results, I have entered the contest.  I’ll let you know if I win.

Tonight, we will follow a long-standing family tradition.  I’ll read the annual winners to my wife until she begs me to stop.

Things I Know

  • According to today’’s Ft. Myers News-Press, July is National Hot Dog Month, National Ice Cream Month and National Blueberry Month.  Of course it is.  According to my research on the Internet, it’’s also National Beer Month.  As far as I can find out, there isn’’t any National Soda Month, but National Iced Tea Month is June.  Today is National Ice Cream Soda Day, but so is July 20th.  Two national days is pretty impressive, but I say give ice cream sodas a whole month too.

  • I miscalculated.  I thought I had been in 30 of our United States, but a recount reveals I’’ve been in 31.  I’’ve never driven in Texas, but I have been there three times.  If I was willing to drive a half hour or so out of my way to say I’’d been in a state, I could also have visited Michigan, Wisconsin and Mississippi and I would have been to Colorado seven years earlier than I actually got there.

  • I knew a guy who drove all the way across the United States on Interstate 80 and forgot he was ever in Indiana during the trip.  I understand, completely.

  • The FDA has announced that airline food can make you sick.  Your tax dollars at work!

  • If you would like a free transcript of the Sisyphus Project, it’’s already written down; just cut and paste it.  In doing so, however, please keep in mind that the Sisyphus Project is copyrighted 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Things I Know

  • Can’t be late for my nephew’s high school graduation tonight.  He’s the fifth kid through the line.

  • On the NPR program “All Things Considered” last week, New York Governor David Patterson said that on Planet Albany there is no gravity and light bends around the capital.  To digress; I think, but am not sure I got every word right, so I didn’t put quotes around what I believe is an accurate quote.  We now return to the point I was trying to make.  Huh?  Albany is a strange place and New York State government and politics are even stranger, but if I remember what I learned in Physics, the fact that light bends around something is proof that there is gravity.

  • Here’s a solution to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that’s so obvious, I wonder if it’s already been suggested.  If it has, the following just demonstrates that great minds think alike and so do I.  The separate shipping and handling is going to cost a lot, because we have to send Vince with them, but I propose we send a whole bunch of Sham Wows to Louisiana and send Vince along with them to show those people from BP how to use them to mop up spills.

  • Okay, I’ve given you my solution to the Gulf oil spill.  Here’s comedian Lewis Black’s:  he thinks the United States of America should invade BP.

  • My wife gave me a shopping list and asked me to go to the local Pathmark Supermarket.  I did.  When I got home, she said she was surprised I was able to read one particular item on the list.  So was I.

  • One reason I say the weeds are winning the battle of the back yard is that I have two one-foot-high weeds growing through a crack in the floor inside my garage.  I know I have to mow the lawn or hire someone to do it, but I draw the line at mowing the garage!

  • It’s going to be a bad year for my blueberry crop.  I neglected the bushes last year and this season, they’re infested with scale.  I have a few blueberries ripening now, but the plan is oil spray, fertilizer and wait until next year.  Maybe I’ll buy some more bushes too; I only have seven.

  • One thing that will help blueberries thrive is don’’t let newly planted bushes bear fruit the first year.  Another is water them enough.  If the bushes are stressed for moisture, they take it from the berries and you don’t want to eat blueberry raisins.  They are surely among the sourest things on earth.

  • I’m going to the doctor this week for my physical for summer camp, but when I show up in his office in a t-shirt, shorts and sandals, and say, “Hi, I’m here for my physical for summer camp,” nobody laughs anymore.  I have to find a different doctor so I can return to getting a laugh when I use that old joke. 

  • I saw a young woman the other day who had small, triangular patches of sunburn near her shoulders.  I wondered what she could have worn that allowed her to get sunburned like that and then it hit me:  not odd clothing, uneven application of sunscreen. 

Update and Elaborate

My sister remembers the priest who administered last rites to my father a little differently than I do.  She says the priest assured us that because he had last rites, my father would go to heaven upon his imminent demise.  Maybe, but I still didn’t find it comforting at all; it enraged me actually and it took considerable restraint on my part to eschew attacking the guy.  My father was a good man who, throughout his life, embraced obligations a lot of people (maybe most people) would walk or run away from.  She thinks, and I agree that if there is a heaven, our father made it with or without last rites.  In fact, he didn’t receive the sacrament the second time he was at death’s door, the time he went through that door.  Frankly, I don’t find any comfort in what a lot priests and ministers say on the occasion of someone’s death.  If God wanted to call a person to Him for reasons we don’t understand, why don’t good people live longer than bad people?  And why doesn’t He forget someone every once in a while?

Fathers’ Day

I saved my father’’s life once and Father’s’ Day is a good day to tell you about it.  To be accurate, I extended his life by about ten years, but I had no way of knowing how long when I acted to save his life. 

Have you ever done anything to damage your lungs?  Sometimes I think my dad never did anything that wasn’’t damaging to his lungs until he was 52 years old.  He was a kid before there were such things as antibiotics and he had TB as a child.  I’’m not sure if anyone even knew he had it at the time, but his father died of tuberculosis when he was ten years old.  Back then, if your dad died and someone said to the ten-year-old kid, “”Now you’re the man of the family,”” they meant it.  So my dad quit school at the end of eighth grade and went to work to support his mother, brothers and sisters.  If I recall correctly, he had six siblings.  His family wasn’’t close when I was a kid and I had aunts and uncles I never met.

Before my dad became a cop at the age of 25, he did many things to earn money.  One job he held was steamfitter.  That’’s essentially a plumber who works on steam lines rather than water lines.  There was asbestos all over the place, but nobody knew it was bad for you.  As a cop, he directed traffic at the Holland Tunnel before anyone thought of putting pollution controls on cars and trucks.  I don’’t know how long he smoked at least two packs of Camel cigarettes a day, but he did that for as long as I knew him to that point in his life.  Nobody knew inhaling car fumes was bad for you either and if there were people who knew that cigarettes caused lung diseases and cancer, they hadn’’t bothered to tell the general public yet.

So, my dad had emphysema and he had it so bad that he was on his back in bed, unable to work and attached to an oxygen tank.  He had it so bad that they called the priest to administer last rites.  My sister was eight, I was twelve and neither of us was allowed in while the priest administered the sacrament, but afterwards, he took my sister and me to the front steps of our house and told us that our father was going to die, but it was alright because he had last rites.

Beating someone to a bloody pulp is an experience I’’ve managed to avoid, but I never wanted to more than I did at that moment.  At twelve, I was already bigger than the average adult male, bigger than that priest too and I really can’’t remember why I didn’’t punch him with all my might.  I wanted to, but I didn’’t.  Maybe it’s because, although I knew I would feel much better if I did that, I thought everyone else would feel a lot worse.

Afterwards, I sat in our living room, alone, with the blinds drawn, in semi darkness.  I guess I was waiting for what the priest said was about to happen.  My father came out of the bedroom (it must have been a tremendous effort for him) and picked up a pack of Camel cigarettes from the dining room table.

I can only remember screaming at my father twice.  I’’m about to describe the first time.  As best I can recall, here’’s what I screamed at him:  ““If you’’re going to do that, take them inside with the oxygen, blow yourself up, and stop making us watch you kill yourself slowly.””

He stood motionless for a few seconds, put the cigarettes down on the dining room table and went back into the room, with the oxygen tank, but without a cigarette, and without a word.  He never had another cigarette; he said he never lost the desire for them, but he never had another.  You wouldn’’t believe how fast his health improved, and he lived for another ten years.  Before the oxygen tank, he couldn’’t walk from the house to the car without stopping to catch his breath.  Within a week or so after cigarettes he could go for a walk around the neighborhood for the pleasure of doing so.

I performed two miracles that day.  I didn’’t beat the priest within an inch, plus or minus, of his life and I screamed my father in to giving up cigarettes.  If I recall the requirements correctly, I only need one more miracle to qualify for sainthood.

Nobody’’s perfect.  We all make mistakes, but I believe the best you can ask of any father is that he never does anything he knows will be bad for his child in the long run.  My dad didn’t have a father like that, but I did and I hope my children do too. 

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Did you see Cody Gifford doing a film review segment on the Today Show, during his mom, Kathie Lee’’s last hour on Friday?  Even allowing for the fact that it was his first appearance, he was still awful.  His report was full of clichés and vocalized pauses and his mom, as she always has, did her very best to embarrass the poor kid.  Incidentally, her best efforts to embarrass him are extremely good. 

  • Senator Brown’’s daughter, Ayla, is on CBS TV, but it’’s the Early Show so almost nobody sees it.  Luke Russert, the late Tim Russert’’s son is a correspondent for NBC news.  Jenna Bush Hager, President Bush’’s daughter is on the Today Show and now, so is Cody Gifford.  When did network news become a haven for the children of politicians and the children of people who already work in network news?  Plus, it almost seems like a requirement that they be either horrible, or at least so inexperienced that they get on-air network exposure long before they’’re up to the task.  John Cameron Swayze was one of network TV’s first anchormen.  His son, Cameron Swayze is also a broadcaster; a good and well respected broadcaster.  And Cameron Swayze eschewed the famous last name for many years because he didn’’t want people to think he got where he did because of his dad rather than because of his own talent and hard work.

  • I read that a local TV station took a poll and determined that eighty percent of New Yorkers think our new license plates are ugly.  That figure seems low to me, very low in fact.  How about you?

  • Having declared Cooper’’s Beach in Southampton the best beach in the country, does Doctor Beach realize how much it costs non-residents to park there for a day?  Last time I was at Doctor Beach’s second-best beach, the north public beach on Siesta Key off Sarasota Fl., parking there was free.

  • How are old people going to get around in Florida once Ford stops making the Mercury Grand Marquis?

Things I Know

  • In the battle of my back yard, the weeds are winning.

  • The other day, I saw a woman wearing a U.S. Polo Association polo shirt.  This didn’’t surprise me; I didn’’t expect members of that association to wear t-shirts.

  • A court in Ohio says a business in Ohio can sue someone who doesn’’t live in Ohio over comments made on the Internet.  It could get pretty expensive for the Internet poster if he or she has to go to Ohio to defend him or herself, especially if they go to Ohio on Interstate 80 and drive a little above the speed limit once they get there.

  • I enjoy riding around in boats.  I’’ll go for a boat ride with almost anyone, as long as they don’’t make me fish.

  • I build some new trellises to grow tomatoes.  They look purposeful.  I’’ll let you know how well they work.

  • I don’t like to climb into the bed of my new pickup truck to reach things that slid toward the front while I was driving.  Therefore, I’’m carrying a rake around in the bed of the truck.  The rake rattles as it slides around in there, so I’’m looking for a better solution.

  • I’’m cleaning out my basement, a process which may take years.  In the process, I found my wife’’s driver’s license from 14 years ago.  I guess it was there because we didn’’t own a shredder then.  When you see someone every day, you don’’t notice changes very often, but she has changed quite a bit.  I’’ve probably changed a lot more than she has and not for the better.  I still love her and fortunately for me, she still loves me too.

  • In case you’’ve never thought about it, hormones are clearly much stronger than the human race’’s instinctive fear of cooties.

  • If you don’’t want to know the answer to a question, don’’t ask.  If you’’re holding a public hearing (say before Congress or some important body) the general rule about not asking doesn’’t hold.  For public hearings, don’’t ask unless you already know the answer to the question.

Update

General Motors received more reaction  to its effort to eliminate the name “Chevy” than it has to any Chevy since about 1966.  So the company backed down, rescinded the memo and invited its customers to continue to love Chevies and hopefully to resume buying them in large numbers too.  Either that or  some member of the corporate brain trust went outside their headquarters building, looked near the top and saw that the big blue letters don’t say “General Motors;” they say “GM.”

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • The brain trust that runs General Motors wants to do away with the name “Chevy.”  Isn’’t that one of the most recognizable product nicknames in the world?  They want people to say “Chevrolet” instead.  They want it so badly that they sent a memo (not a memorandum) to the employees of the Chevrolet division telling them not to refer to the cars as Chevies anymore.  Do you suppose they wrote the memo on a PC or a personal computer?  Or did they use a Mac or an Apple Macintosh?  While they were working late at night to do this, if they sent out for food to sustain them, were they eating KFC?  Were they drinking Coke?  And do they know that a lot of their cars, not just Chevrolets, have a little logo on them that says GM, not General Motors?

  • Isn’’t the trend in language to shorten words and names, not to make them longer?  If GM wants to keep one brand name, they should keep Chevy, not the name of a now obscure, long deceased, Swiss-American race car driver who sold his company 95 years ago, way too early to make much money for himself.  And while I’’m at it, they should keep GM, not General Motors. At least that’s what I think, don’’t you?

  • Why do teenage girls scream hysterically about Justin Bieber?  I saw him on TV and he didn’’t scare me at all.

  • How many #3 leaders of Al Qaeda have been killed now?  I’’m thinking five.

  • In ancient Egypt, among those who worshiped the sun god, was their list of rules for personal conduct called the tan commandments?

  • Clean as a whistle?  Just how clean is a whistle anyway?  When you blow into a whistle, I think you probably can’t help spitting into it at least a little at the same time.  Clean as a whistle?  EEEEWWWWWWW!!!!!

Things I Know

  • I’’d probably buy more cars if I didn’’t have to deal with car dealers while doing so.

  • The man who styles himself Doctor Beach has declared Cooper’s’ Beach in the Hamptons the best beach in the country with Siesta Beach off Sarasota FL coming in at #2.  I live on Long Island and on a summer holiday weekend, I believe it would take me less time to get to Siesta Beach than it would to get to Cooper’s’ Beach.

  • I live on Long Island and I’’ve been to Siesta Beach many, many times, but I’’ve never been to Cooper’’s Beach.  There’’s always a first time.

  • At some point, they should have put another east-west road on the south fork of Long Island.

  • I’’ve owned my cell phone for two years so it’’s out of contract and that means it’’s cheaper for me to get a new cell phone than it is to get another battery for the one I already have and the one I already have works just fine, except the battery won’t hold a  charge anymore.

  • To the teenage girls who camped out in Rockefeller Center since Wednesday to see Justin Bieber perform Friday on the Today Show, if you haven’’t showered or bathed in two days, he’’s probably not interested in you.

  • Slaughter and laughter are two more words that should either rhyme or be spelled differently.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Memorial Day is on Memorial Day this year.  How often does that happen anymore?

  • Sarah Ferguson:  Isn’’t influence peddling a crime in Britain too?  And how much influence could Prince Andrew have to be worth that much money?

  • On your half birthday, do you get to be half your normal age for the day?

  • I lost one of my clevis pins and have to get another one.  Why do I even know they’’re called that?  And why are they called that when they aren’’t used to attach anything to your clevis or to attach your clevis to anything else either? 

  • A little research can spoil a joke.  While I use clevis pins to secure my backpack bag to my backpack frame, it turns out a clevis pin certainly can be used to attach a clevis to something else after all.

  • Next question:  How come I knew about clevis pins, but not about clevises?

  • Why is it that the word “own” has the letter “w” in it but no “w” sound, while the word “one” has the “w” sound, but no letter “w?”

  • Which is more awesome, fantacular or spectastic?

  • Shouldn’’t Jehovah’s Witnesses have to go to work on Wednesdays instead of ringing doorbells in my neighborhood?  And so many families in my neighborhood have two wage earners that I can’’t imagine ringing doorbells mid-week works very well.

  • Is it just me, or would you also expect the Ramen noodles to be in the Asian food section at your local supermarket?

  • And what was the Coke salesman doing that there was not one ounce of Sprite, or one bottle or one can, on the shelf at my local supermarket at 11 AM on Thursday morning preceding Memorial Day Weekend?

Shopping For Cars

I’’m in the market for a late-model used car or pickup truck.  Many trucks these days are very car-like, so I could go either way.  I’’ve decided that more people would buy cars and trucks if they didn’’t have to go to car dealers to get them.  It’’s certainly a major reason I don’’t buy them very often.  I hate haggling with car dealers. 

Let’’s face it.  Enough of them are scum that it taints the whole market segment.  Let’’s face it too, enough customers walk away feeling swindled that most consumers have no scruples when it comes to deceiving the car dealer.  Plus, it’’s one of the biggest purchases we’’ll ever make and I don’’t think many people go back to the same salesman at the same dealership over and over again.  There isn’t a lot of repeat business.  Car dealers aren’’t generally looking for a win-win situation.  They haggle over cars several times a day.  I do it once every ten years or so.  Who has more experience?  Who’’s more likely to win?

I want a different vehicle, but I don’’t need one, so despite the best efforts of car salesmen, I will not be rushed into a purchase.  I won’’t spend that much money on impulse either.  I found a pickup.  It looks clean, doesn’’t seem to have much mileage on it, has part of the new-car warranty still in effect and seems not to be priced too much over what I want to pay.  The color isn’’t obnoxious either. 

The ad said, “Must close today.”  No I mustn’’t.  The salesman asked me, ““If I offered it to you for $5,000, would you buy it today?””  Sure!  I could make over 100 percent on that deal.  But because I could make over 100 percent on that deal, the car dealer won’’t sell it to me for that price and we both know it. I took it for a ride.  I still liked it, so I went to do some research. 

I would have to pay for a Carfax report, but I found the AutoCheck report on the dealer’s website and that looked clean.  Both my mechanic and Consumer Reports think this make and model is more reliable than average.  The blue book value is okay and maybe I could talk them down a little. 

I talked it over with my wife.  She looked exasperated and said, “”Do what you want.””   Every married man knows what that means!  And, did I mention that the car dealer has an F rating from the Better Business Bureau?  I know, a lot of them do, but it’’s still a concern.  So I wandered around to other dealers with better ratings and discovered that a lot of car dealers advertise trucks (cars too I suppose) they don’’t have, hoping to reel you in and switch you to something else.

Then, yesterday, I decided to enter into negotiations.  I called the dealer.  They sold it.  There will be others; I know that, but still. . . .

Maybe next time I’’ll ask the car salesman what I have to do to get them to sell me the car today, other than offering to buy it for twice what it’s worth, of course. 

Update

The people of our beloved village, by voting in yesterday’s school election, rejected the advice of our beloved mayor both on the school budget and on candidates for the school board.  They rejected his advice overwhelmingly, two-to-one on the budget and more than that on the candidates he endorsed.

School Election Today

In almost all school districts on Long Island, voting on the school budget and on candidates for school board takes place today.  If you are eligible to vote, please do so.

Our beloved mayor thinks the people of our beloved village ought to vote against the school budget because in his judgment the school superintendent makes too much money.  All school superintendents on Long Island receive extremely generous salary and benefit packages and ours is nearer to the bottom than the top.  If you are eligible to vote, please do so.

All school superintendents on Long Island, including ours, work under employment contracts, so even if the school budget is defeated, it won’’t affect the school superintendent’s salary and I have to assume our beloved mayor knows that.  If our beloved mayor knows that, his position is a text-book example of demagoguery.  If you are eligible to vote, please do so.

I’’m told (but don’’t know for sure) that our beloved mayor objects to the school superintendent’s salary at least in part because it’’s almost twice what our beloved mayor makes.  Our beloved mayor is elected; the school superintendent isn’’t.  School board members are elected and don’’t receive any salary at all while our beloved mayor’s salary is in six figures.  If you are eligible to vote, please do so.

Things I Know

  • I’’ve said before that the smartest thing I’ve done was marry my wife, but I have no idea what the second smartest thing I’’ve ever done is.  Over the weekend, one of my friends suggested that’s because I’’ve only done one smart thing.  She could be right!

  • There is no better indication of just how true Murphy’s law is than the way the NY Mets are playing; not just true, profound.

  • It must be painful to be a NY Met right now too, but at least they’re paid well for it.

  • Once called “Little Orphan Annie,” the newspaper comic strip “Annie” is being cancelled by its syndicator, Tribune Media Services, effective June 13th.  In Annie the strip, Annie the character is currently tied up and gagged in the trunk of a stolen car driven by a professional killer.  I hope they don’’t kill her off when the kill off the strip.  Tribune Media Services handles fewer than two dozen comic strips.  I hereby nominate three more for them to cancel:  “Brenda Starr,” “Dick Tracy;” and especially “Gasoline Alley.”

  • My daughter told me that Miracle Gro™ is just dehydrated Miracle Whip™ dyed green.  Sometimes I worry about the child, but it struck me as funny, so sometimes I worry about me too.

  • I appear to have been wrong about one thing at least.  I said I’’d probably blog more while I’’m temporarily retired, but it was nine days between the two posts before this one. 

  • Here are two things I’’ve learned about having a job:  jobs do give some structure to your life and maintaining the structure requires more effort if you don’’t have one; and it’’s easier to be lonely if you aren’’t working and those around you are.

  • Suggestion:  Let’’s change the name of one of the patrols in my Boy Scout Troop.  They are currently the Eagle Patrol, but I think the Wander-Off Patrol would be much more appropriate. 

  • I have so many wild onions in my back yard, I’’m thinking of giving my yard a name:  Vidalia Farms.  That was supposed to be a joke.  I’m aware that the wild onions that grow in people’s yards around here aren’’t edible while Vidalia onions are delicious.  I’’m also aware that Vidalia Farms™ was registered as a U.S. trademark earlier this year.

  • I used to think the slowest elevator in the world was in the old Nassau County Executive Building in Mineola NY.  I may be wrong.  Evidence gathered last weekend suggests it’’s the elevator in TGI Friday’s in Times Square in Manhattan.

  • I’’m suffering from adult onset.  Not adult onset diabetes, just adult onset.

  • They now make at least two MP3 players with an AM radio in them.  I bought the less expensive of the two; it came on Wednesday.  So far I like it except for two things:  it doesn’’t handle play lists and it doesn’’t let you play your music in random order.   It’’ll do, but it could be much better.  On the plus side, it has a much better radio than any device I’’ve ever owned that is that small.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • “Law and Order” has been cancelled.  This leads to two questions.  All of them or just the original?  And, does that mean NBC is cancelled too?

  • There is a page on Facebook promoting the “shitload” as a standard unit of measurement.  It has almost a million fans.  Is that necessary?  Isn’’t it already a standard unit of measurement?

  • This blog isn’’t suitable for adult audiences, because it’’s childish, not obscene.  Which reminds me, why don’’t childish and childlike mean the same thing?

Things I Know

  • Most terrorists know this or I wouldn’’t point it out:  you’’re supposed to steal the vehicle you use to make a car bomb.

  • The Feds are investigating Wall Street at least in part because of the way complicated and risky financial instruments known as derivatives have been traded.  Derivatives have caused troubles before.  Orange County California went into Chapter 9 bankruptcy in the mid 1990’s because of its treasurer’s trading in derivatives and the treasurer went to jail.

  • There are so many geese on Long Island I don’’t see how we can legitimately call them Canada Geese anymore.

  • It’’s “moot point,” not “mute point.”

  • There is a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike named after the poet Joyce Kilmer.  It’’s in East Brunswick Township.  That’s in case you didn’’t get my blog item entitled “Nash, Kilmer and Me.”

  • Somebody I know told me the other day that somebody we both know had “”terrible gas.”  I suggested that there is no other kind.

  • I am less inclined to buy a Ford Ranger pickup truck than I once was.   I’’ve determined that in the state where I live (semi-conscious state) the vanity license plate “LONE” and the vanity license plate “KEMOSABE” are both taken.

  • Manholes are round so utility workers can’’t drop manhole covers into them by accident and so vandals can’’t do it on purpose.

  • It’’s chipotle, not chipolte, and I heard a chef say it wrong on TV last week.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Did Meredith Vieira really say what I thought I heard her say during the driving simulator segment on the Today Show this week?  I guess she did.  They edited it out of the west-coast rebroadcast of the show.

  • When some people suggested boycotting Arizona over its new law regarding illegal aliens,  the folks who make Arizona Iced Tea were quick to tell us that Arizona Iced Tea is made on Long Island.  So, where is Long Island Iced Tea made?

  • I’’ve noticed that the titles of many popular songs are in the form of questions, so when I want to pad my “Things I Want (Or Need) To Know” blog items, I will, from time to time, use one of those song titles.  Here’’s another one:  “Do you wanna dance?”

  • Leading up to the first Saturday in May, when I hear someone ask, “Who do you like in the Derby?” I can’’t help wondering why a horse would wear a hat.

  • Did you pull any pranks on May Fools’ Day?  I find you surprise more people pranking them on May 1st than you do on April 1st.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

 

  • Are the 33 people who work for the SEC, and were accused of viewing and/or downloading pornography on government-owned computers really that stupid?  If you work in a company or government that has an IT department, somebody besides you can see what you’re doing on the computer provided by your employer.  And what about management?  There’’s software available to block such sites.  And one guy reportedly did this eight hours a day.  If the guy didn’’t do any work and his managers didn’’t notice, maybe both should be canned.

  • Where are my car keys?

  • The OEM replacement blade I bought for my Toro lawnmower is called an Atomic blade.  That would explain James Arness and the giant ants running around in my backyard, however, it raises two questions.  Is an Atomic lawnmower blade even safe?  And if it is an Atomic lawnmower blade, why do I have to put gasoline in the mower to get it to work?

  • I’’ve noticed that the titles of many popular songs are in the form of questions, so when I want to pad my “Things I Want (Or Need) To Know” blog items, I will, from time to time, use one of those song titles.  Here’s another one:  Are you experienced?

  • I believe this needs explaining, but I’’m not sure what question to ask.  While driving through Wantagh NY, I saw a tavern named “Guido’’s Irish Pub.”

 

Things I Know

  • As I travel through life, I occasionally learn that someone I’ve known for a long or short time is a much better friend than I ever thought they were.  It’s one of life’s nicest feelings and I felt it again this morning.

  • I made a mistake posting this and it made it to the Internet as a blog item entitled “Things I Know” with nothing under it.  I often feel as if I don’t know anything and when I feel like that, I may be correct.  But I restored the body of the text.

  • Flowering trees sure brighten up the landscape at this time of year.  Since I don’’t suffer from hay fever, I’’m in a better position to enjoy them than many people.  Cherry trees, pear trees and the magnolias are welcomed signs of spring.  I’’d like a magnolia tree, but they grow so big I have no place to put one on my property.

  • If you’’re in the New York area and want to see something beautiful, I recommend the cherry trees at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  I haven’’t gone in years, but if I recall correctly, they’’re at their peak around Mother’’s Day, maybe a little earlier this year because April has been so warm.

  • I went to Long Island Radio and TV day recently at C.W. Post College.  Saw a few people I haven’’t seen in years.  I enjoyed it a lot.

  • My daughter thinks Toyota would have fewer problems with sticking accelerator pedals if they didn’’t pack them in cotton candy to protect them during shipping.  My daughter is a little strange.  She must get it from her mother.  God knows I’’m completely normal.

  • I didn’’t lose my job exactly.  I know where it is, but if I go there, I don’’t have a key anymore to get in, and someone else is doing it.

  • The New York Society Library claims President George Washington never returned two books he borrowed and, therefore, owes about $300,000 in past-due fines.  I know, and the library should know, that there’s a statute of limitations on uncollected debts.  If that statute of limitations hasn,’t changed since President Washington borrowed those books, then the statute of limitations expired before General Washington did.

  • When I was in the Army, they asked me if I wanted to volunteer to go airborne.  I told them I would never jump out of a perfectly good airplane.  I still feel that way.

Nash, Kilmer and Me

I like Ogden Nash’’s poetry.  I like it primarily because it’’s funny and silly too.  So, last week, which was National Library Week, I read some to the fifth-grade students at the East Street School in Hicksville NY.  Joyce Kilmer, another poet, once wrote a poem that began:  “”I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. . .””  In order to avoid having to look it up, I’’ll spare you the entire poem.  Inspired by Kilmer, Ogden Nash wrote:

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed unless the billboards fall
I’’ll never see a tree at all

Inspired both by Kilmer and Nash, I wrote a poem many years ago that I’’ll reproduce here for your enjoyment.  You didn’’t think I was sensitive enough to be a poet, did you?  The name of my poem is, “”Thoughts On Driving On The New Jersey Turnpike With Apologies To Ogden Nash And Joyce Kilmer”.”

I think that I shall never see
A service area lovely as a tree
Even if it’’s named after me
 

Which Is It?

I wasn’t reappointed to my job last week.  So, should I consider myself retired or unemployed?  I’m leaning toward unemployed because it’s simpler and it’s better motivation to find another job.  For the time being, at least, I am both retired and unemployed.

Retired does have its benefits.  My pension is better than unemployment benefits would be.  And, I don’t have to go to work.  There is that.  As long as I am retired, there are things I don’t need at all or need much like suits, ties, dress shirts, dress shoes and socks in any color but white.  Some people have jobs that don’t need those things either, but my jobs did require them.  If I’m retired and don’t need all those things, the local dry cleaner may need to lay someone off.  Since I don’t need to rush out of the house in the morning, I have lots of time to make breakfast so the local deli may have to drop someone from the early morning shift too.  I don’t need the refrigerator I kept plugged in at my office.  I don’t need the untold cans of Diet Pepsi I consumed daily.  I can drink my Pepsi from a glass or cup that I filled from a big bottle at a lower cost per ounce. 

Speaking of drinking, I have a friend who told me when he retired he threw away his coffee maker.  Why?  It gives him the impetus to get dressed, and go out of the house to buy a cup of coffee each morning.  I don’t drink coffee.  I like the taste, but it gives me heartburn.  I do drink iced tea and being retired (or unemployed) gives me more time to home brew my iced tea.  I like it with lime juice.  Scurvy isn’t going to be a problem.

If I’m retired, I don’t need a job because I have high-speed Internet service at home so I don’t need an employer to provide that and now that I’ve got two hammocks, I do have someplace to go other than an office, at least until it gets cold again.

I’m not going to play golf.  First, Governor Patterson raised the price a lot at public courses in New York and second, my wife doesn’t want me to play a round.  I’ll probably go to the beach though, despite the fact that it costs more too.

There are things I do need in retirement.  I bought a few new paint brushes.  I’m going to finish painting the inside of the house.  I might pick up a used pickup truck.  That would make it a lot easier to take the junk I’ve accumulated over 19 years in this house to the town dump.  Last summer, I started cleaning out the garage, but stopped when I realized it was filling up faster than I could empty it.  A truck might help me speed up the emptying process enough so that I can stay ahead of the filling up process.  Either I’ll get a pickup or a convertible.  One of my friends has an old convertible for sale.  It has low mileage so even though it’s old it’s in pretty good shape and because it’s old, it’s cheap.  If I find a cheap enough truck, I may get both.

Those are just some of the things I need and don’t need if I consider myself retired.  Here’s why I’ve decided to consider myself unemployed.  It’s much simpler.   If I do that, I only need one thing:  a job.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Why did you leave your last job?  The new mayor said he was going to appoint his own person (not me) to my job.  I said, “If that’’s the way you feel, I don’’t want to work here anymore.”  Mutual agreement; I left mine by mutual agreement.

  • According to the website of the St. Petersburg Florida Times, Hellas Restaurant in Tarpon Springs Florida has a nine-legged octopus.  Wouldn’’t that make it a nonapus?

  • One of the little kids in cartoonist Bill Keane’’s ““Family Circus”” on Easter Sunday, while coloring Easter eggs, asked an important question:  who colors the jelly beans?

  • Is a dentist really a doctor?  I respect their knowledge and skill and all.  The only reason I ask is I’’ve never dealt with a dentist who was always horribly late for all of his or her appointments.

  • That big storm a couple of weeks ago reminds me to ask, where does wind go when it stops blowing?

Job Statistics

Federal job statistics released Friday say more than 162-thousand jobs were created in March.  Then, there’s my job in April.  I’m retired, effective today.  I don’t want to be, and when I find another job, I intend to stop, but we had a change of administration last year where I live and work and although I survived last year, I’m appointed, not protected civil service.  Today is appointment day and I’m not reappointed.  I had to retire in order to protect pension and other benefits.

I’ve been an appointed public official for most of my adult life.  During that time, I’ve switched employers and jobs, but I’ve never had even one day of unemployment.  Arbitrary replacement isn’t unusual among those of us with appointed government jobs or among broadcasters which is what I used to be.  But no unemployment at all is unusual in either field.  I survived the vagaries of broadcasting and I’ll survive this too.

I’m not sure of everything I’ll do while I look for work.  Although I have been described by a taxpayer as, an adult with a responsible job, I’ve never really known what I want to be when I grow up.  I’ve just gone through life trying my best not to grow up.  I always say getting older is inevitable; maturing isn’t.  Yet, despite my best efforts I know I have matured somewhat.

During my hopefully brief retirement, I will probably blog a little more.  I’ll certainly paint the inside of our house.  It needs it.  I was wondering what I’d do for frustration while I’m not working, but I do root for the Mets, so that’s not going to be a problem, especially this year.

Weight is easier to find than to lose.  Work is just the opposite.  I’m willing to travel as part of my new job.  I’m looking for work:  full-time; part-time; fill-in; freelance; even consulting.  I’ve suggested I’d become a sarcasm consultant, but I was being sarcastic when I said that.  I’d like to go back into government finance.  I enjoy that work about as much as I enjoyed broadcasting and more than I enjoyed public relations.  I imagine I’d enjoy it even more if I worked for someone who took my advice.  I wouldn’t mind teaching a college course or two.  I’ve done that before as well.    Every political candidate I ever did radio commercials for won and I am available for voice-over work, but isn’t everyone?

If it’s legal and doesn’t require a license I’ve probably done it.  I did something that did require a license too and I had one.  It doesn’t require a license anymore though and my license expired long ago.  I think the FCC still issues third-class radio telephone operator’s licenses, but if it does, you need it to work on a ship and don’t need it to work at a commercial radio broadcast station anymore. 

I haven’t timed my retirement very well.  Last week, Governor Patterson sharply increased the fees at state-owned golf course and beaches.  This week, I have a medical test and a dentist appointment and next Monday, jury duty.

Crisis PR and the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church needs to do one of two things.  It has to get better crisis PR people, or if it has good crisis PR people, it needs to follow their advice.  Crisis PR advice isn’’t hard.  There are only five steps:

·        Recognize the problem

·        Acknowledge the problem

·        Apologize

·        Say what you’’re going to do to fix it

·        Do it

Taking the advice, however, is hard.  Nevertheless, once you have recognized that pedophilia is a problem (and there should be no argument:  It is) follow the five steps above.

One more thing:  It is now the twenty-first century.  The Protestant Reformation established during the sixteenth century that clergy are subject to the laws of the government.  So, if the Church has a pedophile on its hands it should report that person to the civil authorities and allow that person to be prosecuted.  The same holds true for anyone who discovers pedophilia, not just the Catholic Church.  Pedophilia must not be tolerated under any circumstances. 

Don’’t hide it either.  Hiding it makes it appear to anyone who knows about it that you do tolerate and condone it.  Tolerating and condoning pedophilia are two things nobody should do.  The Catholic Church and anyone who claims to represent it must never minimize it either.

It’’s alright with me if the Church loves the sinner, but it absolutely must hate the sin.  So, any priest who has been found to be a pedophile must be prosecuted in the secular justice system and must face the consequences.  The church should also help and make amends to any victims. 

After all that, if the pedophile is released from prison and the church wants to help him, it’’s okay with me.  It can help him (house him away from temptation and get him psychiatric treatment for example) without allowing him to resume his ministry and without his having any contact with children.

I say him, by the way, because all of the incidents I’’ve read about within the Church involved priests, not nuns.  If there are or were any nuns involved in such reprehensible acts, then my advice on how to deal with the problem remains the same.

I don’’t mean to suggest that pedophile clergy within the Catholic Church are the norm.  I’’m sure the overwhelming majority of priests do not do these horrible things.  But if the Church hides these things it puts all priests under a cloud of suspicion very few of them deserve.

All of what I’’ve said is true whether Pope Benedict knew about those deaf boys in Wisconsin, or not, and whether he swept something under the rug, or not.  I have no idea whether he did know or did sweep.  I hope he didn’’t know, and didn’’t sweep, but if he did, he should be treated as if he were part of the problem, because if he hid those things he is part of the problem.

Things I Know

  • As I was walking out of the deli near my house, they were watching ““Good Morning America”” which was airing a story on orthorexia.  I had to go look it up because I didn’’t think it could possibly be an obsession with eating Ortho lawn care products.  I was right.  It isn’’t.

  • I was at the Baseball Hall of Fame last week.  I like it so much I’’m a subscribing member.  I recommend it if you can find it.  Cooperstown, NY is a pretty place, but it’’s not very easy to get to.  A bunch of people were standing around a TV laughing at Abbot & Costello doing their ““Who’’s on First”” routine.  Anything is new if you haven’’t seen it before.

  • If the people who run the Baseball Hall of Fame really believed that Abner Doubleday invented baseball, he would have a plaque in the Hall and he doesn’’t.

  • I want to see the Cardiff Giant.  I don’’t know why.  I just do.  But I’’m being thwarted.  It’’s at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown.  Until last Friday, I never got to Cooperstown early enough in the day to see both the Hall of Fame, and the Farmers’’ Museum.  I always opted for the Hall of Fame.   Last week, I got there early enough to do both, but the Farmers’’ Museum was closed for the winter, and not scheduled to reopen until tomorrow.

  • The show “”Ghost Hunters” on cable’s SyFy Channel would be interesting if they’’d find Zuul or Gozer or something, but right now I find it boring and don’’t understand why anyone watches.

  • I saw what’’s supposed to be a ghost once.  I didn’’t get close, but I did see it.  It was a red light bobbing along railroad tracks in North Carolina.  It’’s supposed to be the ghost of a guy named Joe who was on a caboose and lost his head in a train wreck in the 1800’s.  The light is supposed to be Joe looking for his head.

  • The Mets #2, 3 and 4 pitchers all have high ERA’s and losing records in Spring Training.  I root for them and I hope I’’m wrong, but I don’’t foresee good things for them this year.  The baseball season starts for real Sunday night in Boston.

  • Element #112 has been officially named Copernicium, after the famous astronomer.  When Tom Lehrer wrote his famous Elements song, there were only 102.  I think it’’s time for an update, but Tom’’s going to be 82 on April 9th and he doesn’t perform anymore, so I doubt that an update is forthcoming. 

Things I Know

  • 13 days to baseball games that count.  Call me a reactionary, but I believe the first game of the major-league baseball season ought to be played in Cincinnati, on green grass, In the middle of the day, and the middle of April.  I’’m also a realist, and so I believe that will never happen again.

  • MS Word’s spell checker doesn’t include the word Cincinnati.

  • On This date in 1991, we moved into our house. 

  • On TV recently, I saw a commercial for the Dogpedic dog bed which is made of memory foam and has, according to the spot, a “custom, non-slip bottom.”  I found myself wishing I had one of those–not the dog bed—, the custom, non-slip bottom.

  • Andrew Cuomo is running for Governor of New York; he just hasn’t said so yet.
  • If you develop a reputation for sarcasm, you can say almost anything.
  • I told my friend Richard (not Feder) from New Jersey (not Ft. Lee) that I’’m having trouble thinking of things to be frustrated about.  This blog is, after all, the Sisyphus Project and I need some frustration to complain about in order to continue writing.  He suggested that I’’ve already found a really big and inexhaustible source of frustration:  I root for the Mets.

  • Once in a great while, I see another driver do something so stupid near me that I pull over, stop my car, get out, and check to see if my car is still visible.  So far, it always has been, but you never know.

Some Thoughts About St. Patrick’s Day

  • On March 17th, there are only two kinds of people in the world:  those of us who are Irish; and those of you who wish you were.

  • My grandparents all came from County Limerick and County Mayo.  So I qualify, okay?  In fact, I’’ve never made a point of wearing green on St. Patrick’’s Day because it’’s that obvious.  And, if it weren’’t that obvious, two of my uncles were named Cornelius and Robert Emmet.  Moreover, one of my aunts and one of my uncles were born on March 17th.

  • When I was a young child, my grandparents and their relatives from the Old Sod used to say things like, “Up Limerick,” and “Up Mayo.”  We kids thought it really funny when someone from County Down arrived and yelled, “Up Down!”  I always wondered, but never found out exactly where County Yours is.

  • If you asked my grandparents what nationality they were, any of the four of them would have told you (in a brogue, of course) that they were Americans.  If you asked their children what nationality they were, all of them (in a New York accent, of course) would have told you they were Irish, not Irish-American, Irish.

  • My mother’’s father came to the USA, like many immigrants, through Ellis Island.  He is the only man with his name who is listed in their records as a woman.  This proves that clerical errors are nothing new.

  • My mother’’s mother couldn’’t show me how to write anything in Gaelic because when she was in school, teaching Gaelic was forbidden by law.  I can say, “”Kiss my ass,”” in Gaelic.  In fact, it’s the only thing I know how to say in Gaelic, but I can’’t prove it here because I can’’t spell it.  I’’m not convinced anyone can spell anything in Gaelic or Welsh either for that matter

  • The Irish invented bagpipes as a military weapon, to scare people:  it works.

  • My father was in the crew that painted the first legal green line up New York’’s Fifth Avenue for a St. Patrick’’s Day Parade.  A bunch of guys got drunk and did it illegally for some years before the City of New York adopted the custom.

  • Family lore says one of my great aunts won a newspaper essay contest by writing a first-person account of being on the RMS Carpathia when it was the first ship to arrive on the scene as the Titanic sank.  She did come to the USA from Ireland on the Carpathia, just not on the trip when the ship rescued survivors from the Titanic.

  • My wife makes soda bread every year.  She’s not the only baker of soda bread who doesn’t like caraway seeds, but because she doesn’’t, I don’t get any caraway seeds in mine.  She got her recipe from someone who must have been much wealthier than my mother’’s mother was.  Hers is rich and very good, but I don’’t think it’’s too authentic.

  • I recommend drinking your Irish coffee black, with no coffee.

  • I contend that vendetta is a Gaelic word, not an Italian one.  After all, how many Italian people do you know who’’ve been fighting the same losing war for more than 900 years?  How many Irish people do you know like that?

  • I didn’’t kiss the Blarney Stone; we had a meaningful, long-term relationship.

  • Blarney is a much nicer word than bullshit.

NCAA Tournament

Here’s my idea on how to speed up the whole NCAA basketball tournament and maybe fit all of March Madness into March next year.  Just make the Big East tournament one of the brackets.

Thar She Blows

A nor’’easter is a vicious Atlantic coastal storm with high winds and lots of rain during which, because of the storm’s rotation, the winds over land are generally from the northeast.  Or, a nor’’easter was Saturday, Sunday and to a lesser extent, today.

Why was this one bad?  Well, we had more snow than average in February, and then we had a little warm weather which melted all the snow and softened the soil.  Next we had a lot of rain which softened the soil, and wind gusts at hurricane velocity that helped all those trees to go over.  Upstairs, my 100-year-old house shook noticeably in the wind.  It didn’’t feel as bad on the ground floor.  Seventeen foot waves were reported on Long Island’s ocean beaches.  I sometimes wonder who”s crazy enough to measure those.

Saturday night was a really bad time to be a pine tree on Long Island, or trapped beneath one.  Several people in the metropolitan area were killed by falling trees during the storm.  That, of course, is no laughing matter.  I also saw a Toyota that collided with a tree, but it appeared to be the tree’’s fault.  Another thing about nor’’easters, unlike hurricane, these babies stay around a while.  Saturday was the worst of it, but it’’s not supposed to be nice until Tuesday.

One day, in my high school physics class, I leaned too far back in a chair and fell backwards.  Everyone laughed at me and the teacher said, ““Tell us about center of gravity.””  When I see so many trees on the ground, I’’m reminded of that and marvel that all the trees don’t come down.  A 50-foot-tall tree might have a root system 12-feet around and nowhere near that deep.  It’’s kind of marvelous that all the roofs didn’’t blow away too.  Part of my garage roof went.  It’’s a corrugated metal roof and I managed to find it, but it was bent and partially torn.  I’’ve spent high five figures with one contractor over the past two years and he was nice enough to send someone over so I didn’’t have to climb on a wet roof in a brisk wind. 

If I want a permanent repair, I’’m going to have to go much farther because that kind of metal roofing isn’t available anymore.  The insurance adjuster is coming, but I don’’t know when yet.

I’’ll hold the big piece of aluminum trim in my back yard for a while in case someone wants to come looking for it, but I don’’t know who yet either.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • How did my empty garbage can wind up on the curb?  I don’’t think the wind blew it there.  And if the guys who collect the garbage don’’t leave the cans in the street, two to three feet from the curb, they’’ll get fired.

  • Explain this if you can; I know I can’’t.  I left my home in the morning, drove south on a two lane road to the nearest traffic light and stopped because it was red.  I activated my left turn signal to indicate that I intended to turn left when the light turned green.  A woman in a big, black SUV headed south toward the light on the same road.  My car is easy to see; it’s big too.  Yet she stopped to my left, headed south in the northbound lane.  I couldn’t see if her turn signal was on, but I really hoped she didn’t plan to turn right.  The light changed and she turned left.  Whew.  She didn’t expect me to turn with her because she turned into the extreme right lane.  She was in such a big damned hurry that she went one block and parked.  I proceeded to the nearby neighborhood deli, parked and checked my turn signals to see if they were working; they were.

  • The Marriage Ref:  didn’’t the prime time Jay Leno show teach NBC that to succeed, a comedy show should be FUNNY?

  • Someone on TV advised me that I would want to stay glued to my television set.  I never wanted to be glued to my TV set in the first place, so why would I want to stay glued to it?

  • I should have thought of this myself, but former radio personality Dick Summer did.  How can you possibly go to rehab if you’’ve never been to hab?

  • If you’’re out of context, where do you get more?     

  • Charlie Rangel stepped down temporarily as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.  I can’’t recall anyone stepping down from a committee chairmanship in Congress temporarily and getting it back.  Can you?

  • If super model Naomi Campbell’’s behavior is as bizarre as news reports, and police records would have you believe, my daughter wonders if it’’s because she’’s hungry all the time.

  • I’’ve noticed that the titles of many popular songs are in the form of questions, so when I want to pad my Things I Want (Or Need) To Know blog items, I will, from time to time, use one of those song titles beginning with this one:  Why don’t we do it in the road?

Politics in New York–Spelling It Out

New Yorkers, these days, are wishing they lived in New Jersey or Illinois.  The state Democratic Party is plagued with a Congressman accused of sexually harassing his male staff, another Congressman who has been in charge of writing tax laws who apparently didn’’t pay his taxes, a Governor who quit in disgrace after his involvement with prostitutes became public , another Governor who may be involved in trying to suppress domestic violence charges against one of his closest aides, and a State Senator who was expelled from the Senate after he was charged with slashing his girlfriend with broken glass.  Polls suggest the last guy has a shot at returning to the Senate when the special election is held soon. 

Have I left anything out?  Oh, yeah, Democrats control the Governorship, both houses of the State Legislature.  The Comptroller and Attorney General are also Democrats and the budget, which is due in three weeks, currently carries a projected $9 billion deficit.

Most disturbing of all, the New York State Republican Party is in such disarray that it doesn’’t seem to be able to use any of that to its advantage.  In fact, at this moment, the Republicans are talking about two possible candidates for Governor, an investment banker (not America’s most trusted or admired profession these days) and a Democrat.

Procrastination Problem

Former Arkansas Governor and candidate for the Republican nomination for President Mike Huckabee has a five-minute daily radio commentary program.  In New York it’s broadcast on WABC radio at about 5:55 AM.  This morning, Governor Huckabee informed his listeners that next week is National Procrastination Week.

No it’s not, Mike.  As already reported in this blog on Wednesday, National Procrastination Week is this week, March 1st to March 7th.  However, I don’t think anyone will mind if you don’t get around to celebrating it until next week.

Patterson

I’ve been an appointed public official for more than half my life.  While I’m much more interested in government than in politics, I admit that makes me a politician.  Before I started in government, I reported on it.  After I started, I got a master’s degree in it.  I’ve taught it in college too.  I read about government on my job and in my spare time.  I don’t play golf at conferences; I attend all the sessions.  I’m something of a policy wonk, especially when it comes to property taxes and other government revenue.

Elected officials, and some appointed ones too, seek publicity.  So, when one of them is unethical, dishonest, immoral, does something illegal, or all four of those things, he or she deserves to get more publicity than someone who has spent his or her life out of the limelight.  I don’t know if there are more dishonest politicians than any other profession, but that publicity sure makes it seem as if there are.  And it reflects on all of us.

How much does it tear down everyone’s reputation?  Well, my late father-in-law, a good, decent, kind, and generous man, used to sit in my home and opine that all politicians are crooks.  He did that often enough that I became fed up.  Finally I said to him, “You can think anything you want to think, but if you say, ‘All politicians are crooks’ in my house one more time, you will no longer be welcomed in my house because I’m a politician and I’m not a crook.”

In my varied career I’ve done public relations and any competent PR person would advise a client to never frame an accusation.  Someone must have advised former President Nixon not to say things like, “I am not a crook,” but this was a private conversation among family.  I didn’t say it in front of cameras or microphones.  Until today, the fact that I said it was never in print either.

I believe my father-in-law never stopped thinking that at least the vast majority of politicians are crooks.  I don’t think he ever slipped up and said something like that in my presence again either.  I told you he was good, decent, kind, and generous.  I would not have wanted to grow up in that family.  I could never have married my wife if I did.  But if I had grown up in that family, I might be able to do a better imitation of normal than I can today.

So now we come to New York State government and the Governor of New York.  Mr. Patterson, there are negative stories about you in the news media every day.  All of them are about unethical behavior attributed to you.  Some of the accusations, if true, are felonious.  The last I heard, three top officials in your administration have resigned in the last week or so.  One of them may be implicated; the other two cited personal integrity.

Political capital is the sum of a leader’s various abilities to influence the course of government and political action.  Some of it is the ability to direct money, but there are many other aspects including charisma, respect, voter support in your last election, current support as judged by polls.  It’s a long list.

Governor Paterson, you have no more political capital.  You’ve squandered all of yours.  Your supporters’ strongest argument for you to stay is you’re going next January anyway.  You’re reinforcing the stereotype and giving the rest of the politicians a bad name.  I think you should go now.

Things I Know

  • This is National Procrastination Week.  Somebody’’s doing their job; I didn’’t find out until late Wednesday night. 

  • The website of “one of the country’s leading public relations and communications firms” (according to the firm itself on that very website) advises us that its training in public speaking can help people with their annunciation.  It really is a successful PR firm, so apparently they rely too heavily on computerized spell checking.  As far as I know, they mean enunciation.  Also as far as I know, the angel Gabriel is heaven and earth’’s only specialist in annunciation.  This firm couldn’’t have done PR for Gabriel.  It hasn’t been in business long enough for that.

  • The apple tree in back of my aunt’’s house was easy and fun to climb.  The pear tree in my back yard isn’’t.  If I was a lot younger, it still wouldn’’t be.

  • According to Garrison Keillor, March is the month designed by God to show people who don’’t drink what a hangover is like.

  • According to Rush Limbaugh, “Everybody should love baseball.”  If everybody did love baseball, I’’d have a hard time getting a seat for the game.

  • This morning on the Joe Scarborough radio show, one of his guests was Rafraf Barrak, an Iraqi woman whose story is told in a new book, Saved By Her Enemy.  She worked as an Iraqi-English translator for NBC news.  Since she is a native of Iraq, I expected her to speak English with a pronounced accent, but she sounds like a native speaker of English.  She even used the word “like” excessively, as if she were born in the United States within the last thirty or forty years.  I haven’’t read it, but based on the interview, the book sounds interesting.

  • In the classic book “1984”, George Orwell predicted the end of privacy, through interactive cable TV, although that medium had not been invented when he wrote the book.  I’’m sure Cablevision and WABC TV both have valid points and invalid ones too in their battle over fees and rights, but it really gripes me that Cablevision has reset my cable boxes so when I turn on the TV, I get their diatribe against WABC TV, even though I don’’t want it.  I set the boxes again so they turn on to whatever channel I was watching when I turned them off.  We’ll see if that sticks.

  • I was watching the closing ceremonies for the Winter Olympics.  I don’’t know why.  They were boring.  All of a sudden, the ceremonies were interrupted by this new show called ““Marriage Refs.””  After only a few minutes, I realized I didn’’t have enough giblet gravy or cranberry sauce to continue watching that turkey.

Snow and Panic

NY TV weather people are doing a pretty good job this month of explaining why it’’s hard to determine how much snow we’re going to get.  New York City and Long Island are frequently places where snow storms change course.  Of course, how much they change course influences how much snow we get.  So, Northeast New Jersey got clobbered today and Long Island got rained upon.

In case you’re wondering, here’’s why the New York Metropolitan area goes into panic mode when we get a particularly large snowfall for this area,, but a snowfall that wouldn’’t be considered large someplace else, like Syracuse, for instance.

Incidentally, there is no snowfall on record anyplace in the world that would be considered unusually large in Syracuse.  If you don’’t know it, Buffalo NY has a well-deserved reputation for getting a lot of snow, but Syracuse gets more. Buffalo has Lake Ontario to generate what’’s known as lake-effect snow.  Syracuse has two lakes and needs a better PR person so that snow in Syracuse can achieve the fame it deserves.

Long Island doesn’t usually get a lot of snow.  Typically there are a few snowfalls a year and the most we get here is something like 3-6 inches.  If you left it alone, it would go away by itself in two or three days.  Every municipality in the area has the equipment necessary to deal with 3-6 inches of snow.   The trains and busses have no trouble running through 3-6 inches of snow either.

Rarely, we get what we would consider a lot of snow.  Say a foot or two.  Is that a lot of snow for Syracuse NY, or for Truckee, CA?  In a word, no.  A few years ago, the emergency preparedness people on the California side of Lake Tahoe warned the locals not to go cross-country skiing because of too much snow.  How much did they consider too much?  They were worried about skiers tripping on the overhead power lines that were buried in the snow!

In the days when a Buick was really a Buick, I owned a Buick Road Monster station wagon.  It was called a station wagon because it was big enough to tote around a train station or a radio station (exaggeration).  It weighed 5,300 pounds.  It ran on ambulance tires.  If you only made really short trips in the winter, say a mile or less, it got roughly two miles per gallon (no exaggeration).  Even with its 24-gallon gas tank, cruising range wasn’’t its strong point.  We bought it when our first child was born so we could carry around everything we had for the kid instead of just everything we needed.

Once, here on Long Island, we had a snow storm after which I had only a vague idea where this monument of a car was.  When I started digging for it, I wasn’’t sure if I’’d find the Buick, or someone else’’s car.  Eventually I did locate it.

For a storm like that, no government on Long Island has the proper equipment to get rid of the snow.  Why?  It’’s a two or three times in a lifetime event.  If the government bought the big stuff, the next time they needed it, said equipment would be rusted, rotted or both, definitely inoperable and uneconomical if not impossible to repair.   On I-80 west of Laramie WY, they have devices that look like railroad gates to close off the Interstate when they expect a lot of snow.  Here, we don’’t.  Does it snow a lot in Laramie?  Well Laramie is at seven thousand feet and the mountains that surround it are the Snowy Range.  That’’s a hint.

Additionally, a lot of Long Islanders are parochial people.  They’’ve always lived on Long Island and don’’t go someplace else very often.  Many of them don’’t know how to drive in a lot of snow.  Even if we do know how, a lot of us don’’t get much practice.  I could have gone anyplace in the snow this month if I was able to convince everyone else to stay home.  But since I couldn’’t, I was afraid for my life and I stayed home through the worst of it.  In Fayetteville, NC, they get even less snow than we do.  I don’’t know if they still do this, but I saw them load up a street sweeper with hot water and use that to get rid of the snow.  Only it stayed cold enough for the hot water to turn to ice.  If you didn’’t get too near the road, watching those people drive in those unfamiliar circumstances was hilarious, as long as they weren’’t crashing into something you owned.

So snow that wouldn’’t scare someone in Syracuse, NY or Truckee, CA causes panic here on Long Island.  Panic over something other people consider normal isn’’t that unusual.  Have you ever watched TV news in Los Angeles on a day when they get a couple of hours of rain?

Instead of relying on people who know how to drive in a lot of snow and equipment that can handle it, we rely on one important fact of life: snow melts.

Things I Know

  • Today is the second anniversary of the Sisyphus Project.  If I’’ve ever said anything profound here, I assure you it was unintentional.  I can’’t guarantee profundity will continue to be unintentional, but that’’s my intent for now.

  • I threw out the bagels that were left over from the weekend.  It’’s rumored that David killed Goliath with a two-day-old bagel.

  • If I didn’’t like doo wop music, I might never have learned that sympathy is a five syllable word.

  • Sometimes I’’m unable to listen to Prairie Home Companion on NPR on Saturday at dinner time.  When that happens, I can catch it later at night if I stream a public radio station farther west.

  • Loving someone a lot more or a lot less than they love you is a recipe for disaster.  At least it was the two times I cooked it up.

  • Both of my shoulders have been surgically repaired.  I should have bought the extended warranty.  One of the repairs lasted about a year and I think I loused the other one up on Friday when I slipped on the ice and grabbed on to a car in a futile attempt to keep from falling.

  • If you can afford to donate 2 million Canadian dollars to charity so you can have lunch with Warren Buffet, you probably won’t benefit from Mr. Buffett’s advice as much as someone who doesn’t have that kind of money would.

  • Heads up for the gullible.  Besides this one, I own two other domain names that end in .org.  Today, I received an offer to buy one of them as a .com name for “only” $99.  I’’m not going to, but out of curiosity, I checked on line to see if I could buy the domain name for less.  There were lots of places I could find it.  Only checked one and they wanted $8.95 for a year.   So if someone tries to sell you a domain name, look elsewhere to see if their offer a good deal.

Things I Know

  • Tiger Woods didn’’t hold a press conference today.  He issued a statement and made a short video or a short film or both.

  • A woman I know has a much better idea than Sally Field for fighting osteoporosis.  She makes her Bloody Mary and her Screwdriver using calcium-fortified juice.

  • Spring Training is good for two related reasons.  Baseball causes warm weather’ and you can’t have Spring Training without spring.

  • Pitchers and catchers reported this week.  In the Mets case, maybe only one pitcher.  Okay, two pitchers.  They have one fine starter and one fine closer too.

  • I claim to know the worst joke in the world, but I won’’t tell it unless someone tells me one almost as bad that I haven’’t heard before.  However, when I assert that I know the worst joke in the world, nobody who knows me has ever said anything meaning, “”You couldn’t possibly know the worst joke in the world.”  Some of my friends have asked me, “”What is it?”” though. 

  • This is what I know about economics.  I went to high school with someone who grew up to be a prominent economist.  That’s it. 

  • I’’m not buying a new lens for my new camera if the lens costs more than both of my cars are worth.  I probably will, however, buy a flash that costs twice as much as I made in a week when I got married.  I just did buy a star filter.  It’’s one of those things that causes rays to emanate from bright lights in a picture.  I want to use it to take pictures at night after a snow storm, so even though I hate winter, I hope it snows again.  If it doesn’’t, I’’ll go to a night baseball game this summer and take pictures of the stadium lights using the filter.

  • I learned yesterday that I know someone who is related to the president of a major league baseball team.  I’’m trying to figure out a way to capitalize on that.  My cousin met Peter O’’Malley once, but that doesn’’t help much because I wouldn’’t root for the Dodgers if you paid me, O’’Malley doesn’’t own the Dodgers anymore, and my cousin told Mr. O’’Malley he wasn’t a Dodger fan because they abandoned him in New York when he was a little kid.  Good for my cousin!

  • It’’s almost the end of winter and I came up with an idea for a wintertime business.  When it snows and the owner of a parking lot doesn’’t get it cleaned out, the lot gets icy and the ice is bumpy.  How about if we buy a Zamboni ™ and use it to smooth out the ice in parking lots for a fee?  As an aside, when the ice surfacing machines at the Winter Olympics broke down, they were widely reported as Zambonis™ but they weren’’t.  In fact, Zamboni™ came to the rescue.  It’’s not any ice resurfacing machine, it’s the leading brand of ice resurfacing machine and they didn’’t start out using them at the Olympics, but they switched to Zambonis™ when the machines they were using couldn’’t do the job.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • This week was the one-year anniversary of the national economic stimulus cargo (it’s too big to be a package).  Has your economic been stimulated lately?

  • I read about a survey that said eight percent of Americans think Congress deserves reelection.  That seems high to me.  What do you think?

  • My doctor told me not to shovel snow.  So, shouldn’’t hiring someone to do it be covered by my health insurance?

  • Sarah Palin’s hand writing isn’’t very easy to read, is it?

  • Have you ever caught any fish with baited breath?

  • When Don Imus reads commercials for appliance and electronic retailer PC Richards, he emphasizes that the company has been in business for 100 years.  I’’ve shopped there, and been satisfied, but does being in business for 100 years count for that much in that field?  I mean, 100 years ago were they selling big-screen TVs, sound systems, computers, air conditioners, microwave ovens, refrigerators and dish washers?  

  • When is a bargain not really a bargain?  Do you think it’s when the $9,200 lens for my new camera is on sale for $6,140?

Things I Know

  • Here’s another free marketing idea, this one for Apple Corp.  They should take up medical research with the goal of developing artificial human organs.  They should develop a device to allow blind people to see.  They can call it the iEye.

  • Thursday night, around 9:45, the phone rang and my wife answered.  The caller said she was calling long distance conducting an opinion survey.  My wife said, “Do you know it’s 9:45 at night?”  The caller replied, ““What kind of question is that?”  First, it wasn’t a rhetorical question, lady.  And second, we’re taking a survey too.  You don’t have to get snippy about it.

  • So they are trucking snow into Vancouver for the Winter Olympics.  Can this be a surprise?  I mean Vancouver is hardly the snow capital of Canada.

  • St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village was once one of New York City’’s premier hospitals.  My mom graduated from its nursing school.  It’s sad to think St. Vincent’s may go out of business.

  • A car is approaching you at a right angle and that car does not have a stop sign at the intersection where you are stopped because you do have a stop sign.  Do not proceed and cause the other car to jam on its brakes and screech to a stop.  The other car has the right of way.

  • I thought I had a job interview this week, but unless I blew the guy away, that’s not what it turned out to be.  His staff didn’t tell him why I was there and didnt give him the resume I sent in.

  • The TV show “Lost” doesn’t stretch credulity.  It smashes credulity into itsy bitsy, teeny, tiny pieces.

  • If anyone thinks money will solve all their problems, I offer two examples to prove it’s not so.  Abraham Shakespeare was murdered after winning $30-million in the Florida state lottery.  And Cameron Douglas, whose father and grandfather are world-famous movie stars, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for drug dealing.

  • I don’t think money would give me a problem-free life.  But most of my current problems are money related, and it would be nice to try some new problems for a change.

  • The word “February” has two r’s in it.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • The folks who run the New York Lottery aren’t doing a lot to tell people they can now buy Powerball tickets as well as Mega Million Tickets, are they?

  • Could we please have a snow storm on Thursday night or Sunday night?  Friday night is bad because I already have Saturday off. 

  • Ed Lowe was once a columnist for Newsday.  I knew Ed many years ago and always enjoyed his columns.  Did you ever wonder why, when snow is imminent, people strip the stores of bread and milk?  Ed’’s theory was that they make the traditional cream of bread soup.

  • The woman’s hairdo known as a ponytail looks like the tail of a pony, so I understand the name, but why do they call pigtails that?

  • Woman and women.  If you change the spelling of the second syllable, it changes the pronunciation of the first syllable.  Are there any other English words like that?

  • Could we please have a law that says when a car dealer advertises a car for sale and the ad includes the price, it should be the price?  You know, no $16,000* and in print too small to read at the bottom of the page, it says *price includes $3,000 trade in or buyer equity.  If I’’m not mistaken (and I seldom am about math) that makes the price $19,000, not $16,000*.

Things I Know

  • An aide to former Presidential candidate John Edwards reports in his new book that Edwards made a sex video with his mistress.  I’’m not the least bit surprised, or the least bit interested.

  • John Smoltz was once a great pitcher, but he’’s past his prime.  Once, and for many years he was the ace of the Atlanta Braves.  He was released by the Red Sox last year and caught on with the Cardinals who didn’’t offer him a contract for this year.  At 43 years of age he’’s likely to be injury prone.  So he’’s a perfect candidate for the Mets.

  • Twenty days to pitchers and catchers.

  • Since Groundhog Day is Tuesday, I thought I’’d point out that the Groundhog always sees his shadow because of TV lights.

  •  If Conan O’’Brien and Jay Leno had been as funny over the past seven months as they have been over the past few weeks, this whole mess would not have happened. 

  • I couldn’’t imagine this would turn out right, but I do admire the guy’’s optimism.  A man from Ft. Myers had a pen pal named Theresa Jones.  She’’s 49 and was a prisoner at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Fl.  Why was she in jail?  Escaping.  According to published reports, she had done three other sentences for stuff like cocaine and prostitution.  Anyway, she was released.  He was waiting for her.  They went to a hotel.  Maybe they were looking forward to multiple channels of HBO, but I’’m just speculating.  After being there a while, Theresa said she was going to his car to bring in some beer.   Time passed; he went to look for her.  No Theresa, no beer, no car.  She did bring the car back the next day.  By then she had acquired a crack pipe, some cocaine, and still no beer.  Also by then, the man had called the police.  They sent her back to jail and mercifully didn’’t release his name to the news media.

  • I thought “orientated” wasn’’t a word, but it is.  It means the same thing as oriented.  In fact, in Britain, “orientated” is the preferred usage.

  • Producers of the History Channel TV series ““Life After People”” don’’t think Twinkies will last forever, but  they quote unnamed experts as estimating they’’d be edible for at least 25 years.  However, they don’’t say “Twinkies.”  They call them “snack cakes.”

  • I’’m thinking of buying a different car.  Either a new one or a late-model used car.  But to do so, I’’d have to deal with someone who sells cars and that’’s a major turn off.  I’’m sure there are some fine, and honest people who sell cars, but enough of them are anything but to stain the entire business.

  • In case it’s not obvious, the Sisyphus Project is copyrighted 2010 too.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Was anyone you know out of work or under-employed a year ago when President Obama took office?  Are they still out of work or under-employed?

  • Did you find it as funny as I did that when President Obama called for bipartisanship during the State of the Union Address all the Democrats in the audience cheered and all the Republicans in the audience sat on their hands?

  • Steve Jobs, head of the Apple company, is, among other things, a marketing genius.  Do you think he introduced the iPad on the same day as the State of the Union Address on purpose?  Maybe he thinks the iPad can’’t live up to its pre-introduction hype, so he released it when it would be overshadowed by another event.

  • Here’’s a serious question and I’’d like a serious answer if anyone out there knows.  Why is my car covered with frost in the morning when the outdoor temperature is above freezing by a couple of degrees?

  • The Mets acquired outfielder Gary Matthews Jr. from the Angels, leading to this question:  can he pitch?

It’s the Stupid Economy

If you are a politician and someone of a different political party comes up with an idea, it’’s your duty to be against it, even if it’’s a good idea.  I know that.  I don’’t see how President Obama’’s economic policies are helping one of our worst recessions. 

If what you’re doing isn’’t working, try something else.  I’ve been telling my son that since he was a toddler.  It must have made an impression, because I’’ve heard him say that to other people.  As an aside, hearing your kid parrot your advice is pretty cool, even if he’’s just parroting it and not actually putting it into practice.

President Obama, people don’’t believe your economic policies, such as last year’’s economic stimulus cargo (it’’s too big to be a package) are working.  You can say without those policies things would be much worse and you may even be right, but the problem is nobody can prove that.  In addition to thinking the policies aren’’t working, many people think the current administration’s policies are going to lead to a lot of inflation and soon. 

These don’t have to be partisan comments.  I seem to recall Bill Clinton won the White House with a campaign that included the slogan, ““It’’s the economy stupid.””

I understand the President, in his state of the union address,will propose tax credits for businesses that create jobs.  Good.  It’’s a step in the right direction.  If I were advising the President, I’’d say concentrate on jobs to the exclusion of almost all other economic initiatives.  If anything might produce jobs, the President ought to be in favor of it and ought to be the major cheerleader for it.

Something called consumer confidence is an important element in the national, and even the world economy.  It sounds crazy, and it might even be crazy, but if all of our leaders were to say the recession is over and say it loudly,  clearly and repeatedly, it would help.

Things I Know

  • I would leave my job for much less than the $32.5 million NBC is reportedly paying Conan O’’Brien to go away.  In fact, I’’m sure I know at least three people who have left NBC for less than they’re paying Conan O’’Brien to go away.

  • Anyone who has watched the Tonight Show or the Jay Leno Show in 2010, especially the Tonight Show, now knows why radio and TV companies usually don’’t let you back on the air once they’’ve fired you, even if they have to continue to pay you for a while.

  • Some talking heads on the TV this morning threw Martha Coakley under more than one bus.

  • Those  political pundits who think either President Obama or the Democratic Party is dead after this week’s Senate election in Massachusetts should remember, a lot of political pundits thought the GOP was dead 15 months ago.

  • Many of the people who voted for Scott Brown did it because he isn’’t a Democrat, not because he is a Republican, so I’’m not sure the Senate election in Massachusetts marks a turnaround for the Republicans either.

  • So, I walked into an office supply store that’s named after some sort of paper fastener, intending to buy a copy of Turbo Tax.  Except the floor display was marked with the wrong price and all the boxes in the display were display boxes (empty).  There was a sign on the display that directed prospective customers to see a sales associate for help.  But there weren’’t any sales associates around.  So I walked out of the office supply store named after some sort of paper fastener without buying a copy of Turbo Tax.

  • Correction:  For many years, the major league baseball uniform player agreement opened Spring Training for pitchers and catchers on February 15.  Apparently that was changed when I wasn’t paying attention.  According to the MLB Network, the date this year is February 18.  So, 29 days to pitchers and catchers.

  • I don’’t wish the NY Jets anything bad, but I don’’t care at all about football.  Therefore, I hope it’’s over soon so I don’’t have to listen to football talk on the local sports radio stations and we can move on to something important, like baseball.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • I was In the US Army a long time ago, in something called a STRAC unit.  Here’s what wikipedia says that means.   To us it meant we were supposed to be able to pack up all our equipment and arrive at Pope AFB within two hours of being alerted.  We never went anyplace for real, but we practiced enough so that when the alert came during breakfast, we finished breakfast before we started packing.  Having said all that, I wish someone would explain to me why it takes a week to get a US Navy hospital ship from Baltimore to Haiti.  I assume there’’s a good reason, but I have no idea what it is.  You don’’t have to pack a ship.  You do have to provision it, but I understand the situation in Haiti is dire, so why not deploy the ship and send the provisions by air to meet it when it gets there?

  • If Carlos Beltran or any other professional athlete needs surgery, he needs surgery.  But I don’t remember any NY Met doing anything important last October, do you?  Pitchers and catchers report to spring training on or about February 15th.  When do Met centerfielders report?

  • Now we have a TV “reality” show about a family of four in which everyone, including the 14 and 16-year-old kids, eats way too much.  What’’s next?  A reality show about a family that sits around the living room or family room watching TV all the time?

  • The other day, the Long Island newspaper Newsday, printed an article in which it described a 61-year-old man as “elderly.”  This led me to three questions:  does the 61-year-old man describe himself as elderly; how old is the reporter who wrote that; and how old is the editor who allowed that to go into the paper?

  • Would it be too much to ask if when you search Facebook for someone by name the exact matches come up first?

  • Which makes you feel better, being happy or doing something to make someone else happy?

Things I Know

  • I don’’t want in any way to diminish the tragedy of the earthquakes in Haiti this week.  They are a natural disaster of the highest order.  My prayers go out to those killed and injured and to their loved ones.  I hope yours do too.  That said, Haiti is on an Island.  It shares the island with another country, the Dominican Republic.  Lots of Dominicans live in the area where I do.  If I were in charge of news coverage, I would mention that the earthquakes were felt in the Dominican Republic, but damage was minor and nobody was killed.  Also, if you want to be pedantic, and I know I always do, since Haiti is part an island and not an island unto itself, the earthquake happened in Haiti, not on Haiti.

  •  I own a Canon Pixma MP980 printer.  It works well except for two things:  it takes a long time to buffer a print job; and it uses more ink than I’’d like, a lot more.  It even uses colored ink when it prints black and white.  If you have one of these and it tells you that you’re running low on ink, you can buy some more, but don’’t replace any of the cartridges until the printer won’’t work anymore.  You get the low ink warning quite a while before you run out.

  • When it’’s appropriate to be a little silly, I often pronounce the “c” in the word scissors as a mild protest of the ridiculous ways some English words are spelled.  And in similar circumstances, I pronounce the first “x” in Xerox as an “x” rather than as a “z” too.

  • As I count down the days to baseball spring training, I know all the teams don’’t report on February 15th.  In fact I’’m aware some report on the 16th or 17th.  But February 15th is the first day teams can require pitchers and catchers to report and that’’s why I use it as the benckmark.

Things I Know

  • I saw a woman shopping in Macy’s today.  The lower half of her body was covered only by a pair of shiny, magenta tights.  She was wearing shoes, but no skirt, no tunic, no leg warmers, just the tights.  It was not a good look for her.  Come to think of it, I can’’t imagine it being a good look for anyone.

  • It turns out drunk walking is dangerous too.

  • I saw the public TV broadcast of the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors recently.  One of the honorees was jazz musician Dave Brubeck.  On the show, they over-played “”Take Five”” to such an extent that I thought if that’’s why they’re honoring him, they’’re a little late.  Great song, but it came out almost 50 years ago.

  • There’’s a commercial on the radio about an improved thermometer for taking a child’’s temperature.  In the commercial the little kid says something like, “Mom, I hate when you stick that pointy thing in my ear.”  And I find myself thinking, “You’re sure lucky you weren’t a kid when I was.”

  • At least they’’re consistent.  The same people who thought mistakenly that the twentieth century and the millennium ended at midnight on December 31, 1999 also thought the decade ended on Thursday night, December 31st. 2009.  They are wrong, of course, because there was no year zero.  However, I believe this is one of those situations where being right is no excuse. 

  • We made it through the holiday season without any Pfeffernusse.  Perhaps it’’s because I don’t know how to spell Pfeffernusse.  Neither, by the way, does MS Word’s spell checker.

  • Effective Monday, six weeks to pitchers and catchers.  Of course, the Mets need both, but that’’s neither here nor there.

  • I understand that Gasoline Alley was the first comic strip to allow its characters to age at a more or less natural pace, but Walt’’s one of the world’s oldest people now and Skeezix is pushing 90.  Phyllis died in 2004.  It’’s time to let someone else go.  Plus, there’s a crying need for new characters.  In my opinion the strip hasn’’t been reliably funny in many years.

  • In newspapers, comics have been shrinking to the point now where they’’re hard to read.  I’’ve taken to reading some of them on the Internet.  Even there, they’re too small.  But at least on the web, you can zoom in and make them big enough to understand.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.  Instead of turning him over to the FBI, why didn’t they turn him over to a Detroit street gang?

  • So now, we have to worry about weapons-grade tighty the usual expression is whiteys, but those were kind of yellow weren’t they?  Come to think of it, my underwear would probably be yellow too if it was on fire either deliberately or by accident.  It would, of course, become yellow in an effort to douse the fire.

  • If he had donned his underpants backwards, would they have become a weapon of ass destruction?

  •  My father read the NY Daily News from back to front.  Sports and comics, then news, if there was any.  I do too.  In fact, do you know anyone who reads the NY Daily News from front to back?

  • What’s the point of newspaper comic strips if they’re too small to read easily?

  • What did you return after Christmas?

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Do you know what you’re getting for Christmas yet?

  • What do you want for Christmas?  I’m good right now.  My son passed the bar exam, I bought myself a good, new camera, and my wife made Swiss steak for dinner last night.  Swiss steak is one of my very favorite meals, although I do wonder why there are no holes in it.  I told my wife I would be happy if my Christmas present is a cupcake or something equally extravagant.

  • What did you get other people for Christmas?

  • May we please have our next big snow storm on Sunday night?

  • What do you get as a present for someone who’s just become a lawyer?  My wife and I got our son the family heirloom pocket watch (it belonged to my late father) and we also bought him two Internet domain names for his fledgling law practice.

  • I just saw “Vince” demonstrating the Slap-Chop on TV for the nine-billionth time and I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before:  why do I need two Slap Chops?

  • When I sign on to Amazon.com and it says I have recommendations, why do I have to click two different things to see all the recommendations?

  • Who would have thought a TV show about Helvetica type would be an hour long?  Or interesting?  What’s Helvetica?  It’s a ubiquitous type face.  You see it on highway signs and almost everywhere else.  And if you haven’t seen Helvetica, youve seen Arial on your computer because Microsoft uses Arial widely and Arial is very similar to Helvetica.

  • Have I ever written two blog items in one day before?  I don’t think so.

Merriest Christmas?

My wife and I got engaged on Christmas Eve.  It wasn’t exactly a surprise.  I don’t remember if she was with me when I picked out the ring (update–she says she wasn’t), but we did go looking at them together.  We had dated for four years at that time, since about halfway through her senior year in high school.  I sat her down in a chair in her parents’ living room, got down on one knee (I’m very traditional and anyway, it’s getting back up that’s the trick) and presented the ring.  I’m so smart that in all the years before and since I’ve never tried to dissuade her from her silly idea that I’m someone special.

If you are very lucky and extremely observant, you may have seen someone as happy as that, but I guarantee you’ve never seen anyone happier.

We went to midnight mass and, in church, she kept holding her hand out, catching the light with the diamond and watching it sparkle, enthralled.  I watched her being happy, also enthralled. It was a good omen.  In my life, she’s made most of the good stuff happen, and she’s made most of the bad stuff bearable.

As long as I mentioned midnight mass, I heard on the news this morning that Pope Benedict XVI rescheduled the traditional midnight mass at St. Peter’s for 10:00 PM.  I know the Pope’s supposed to be infallible about some things, but I don’t believe that’s one of them.

Things I Know

  • Today is the first day of winter.  Therefore, I can now look forward to spring.  I think it’s unseemly to look forward to a season before the season immediately preceding it arrives. 

  • We have a beautiful illuminated angel ornament for the top of our Christmas tree.  My daughter remembers going shopping for it with me when she was a pre-teen.  She’s an adult now.  She found one she could afford at Wal*Mart.  I took her to a more expensive store, where we bought a nicer one and I made up the difference.  She observed that if a kid goes shopping with one parent to buy a present for the other parent, often the kid’s budget expands in magical ways.  I told her that in the case of that particular angel, the reason for that is Daddy loves both Mommy and the kid.

  • If you are exiting a limited-access highway, slow down in the deceleration lane, not the traffic lane.  If you slow down in the traffic lane, you make everyone behind you slow down too.

  • When it snows a lot, the people who plow parking lots have to put the snow someplace.  They put it in some of the parking spaces.  So, it’s more, not less important to avoid blocking other people’s passage through the parking lot after it snows.

  • We got about a foot of snow overnight on Saturday into Sunday.  When we know snow is coming, we back both cars into our driveway.  That way, we can drive straight out of the driveway and we don’t have quite so much driveway to shovel because the part under the cars isn’t that bad.  It also lets the snow plow get closer to the curb.

  • We don’t put the cars in the garage when it snows.  We have a 120-foot-long driveway and since both cars will start in this weather, using the garage would make shoveling a lot harder.

  • When my house was built, it was illegal to have the garage attached to the house.  Two reasons:  cars were much more likely to catch fire back then; and horses smell.

  • With snow and Christmas lights, I wanted to buy a star filter for my new camera.  A lot of camera stores in my area have closed down over the last few years.  I’ve never had a bad customer service experience at Best Buy, but I want to tell Google that Best Buy is a store that sells cameras.  It isn’t a camera store.

  • After I got done hiring two kids from my Boy Scout troop to shovel my walks, a neighbor showed up with a snow blower, offering to do it for free. 

  • In the area where I live, you order Girl Scout cookies in February, so the only things I regard as good about winter are Christmas and Thin Mints.

Things I Know

  • I have 24 versions of “Silent Night” in my music collection.  That’s not including the one in German.  I don’t know how many versions of “The Christmas Song” I have in my collection because only Nat King Cole’s version counts, as far as I’m concerned.  Even Mel Torme, who wrote it, didn’t sing it as well as Nat did.

  • The latest Brookstone catalog arrived at my house in today’s mail.  For just under $150 you can get a machine to wind your self-winding watch.  That’s not something high on my letter to Santa.

  • You’d think a nationwide chain of restaurants would have the same menu nationwide, but no, at least not Outback Steakhouses.  Where I live, they used to have a side dish of apples cooked with cinnamon and caramel.  They also had a desert called cinnamon oblivion which was that apple dish with vanilla ice cream and pecans.  They dropped both a few years ago.  But they still have the desert at the Outback on Howe Avenue in Sacramento CA.  So I got a dish of those apples when I was in Sacramento last week and I didn’t get any when I took my wife to the Outback nearest to our house this week.

  • Speaking of both restaurants and Sacramento, my family and I had a very nice lunch at McCormick & Schmick on the day my son officially became a lawyer.  The food was good.  The restaurant looked nice.  They gave us a large, curtained off booth and staff went out of their way to be nice to us.  I would go there again, but I chose it mostly by chance and because it was close to the courthouse.

  • To me, in order for it to be a hotel suite, it has to have at least two rooms (other than the bathroom) and each bedroom must be separated from the rest of the suite by a door.  This is a good arrangement if we’re traveling with either or both of our adult children.  It’s also good if we’re by ourselves because I’m an insomniac and if I can’t sleep I like to get up so I won’t disturb my wife.  Unfortunately, that’s not what most hotels mean when they call a place to sleep a suite these days.

  • If I bought the collision damage waiver when I rented a car, I’d insist on getting my money’s worth.  And then, I don’t think they’d want to sell it to me again.

  • When I rented a car in San Francisco recently, I reserved a “Toyota Camry or similar.”  They gave me an “Or Similar.”  In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the advertised car that I reserved.  The “Or Similar” wasn’t similar to the car I own though.  There’s nothing sporty about it, but it has bucket seats and a floor shift.  There’s nothing sporty about mine either and it has a column shift.  I had the rental just long enough that when I got back into mine, I reached for the non-existent floor shift.

  • I splurged and  bought myself that camera I wanted.  I got a good price, but it still cost about $700.  So far, I like it a lot.  It takes very good pictures.

Things I Know

  • It hasn’t snowed in the Sacramento area in seven years.  However, people from Sacramento who want to see snow in the winter don’t have to drive that far on Interstate 80 eastbound, to see more snow than anyone could reasonably want.  So, wall-to-wall, team coverage on Sacramento TV stations of snow flurries seems a little excessive to me.

  • The problem with the BCS college football championship is that the two best teams could be in one conference.  But Florida didn’t make too much of an argument about that over the weekend, did they?

  • My son was admitted to practice law in California on Friday.  If you are me, the correct team won the SEC champion ship this weekend.  There is much correct with the world right now.

  • A cross-country trip in an airplane is surprisingly comfortable if the plane is one-third full.

  • The Sacramento CA History Museum has a small display about local Boy Scouts among its exhibits.  Within that exhibit, there’s one Boy Scout patch from 1984.  I have at least one Boy Scout patch older than that on my red jacket and I didn’t join Scouting until I was an adult.  I hate it when I have older stuff than they have in the museum and I’m still using it.

  • Cops don’t seem to like the word suspect anymore.  I don’t know why.  But if you hear that the police investigating a crime want to question you as a “person of interest,” it means they think you probably did it.  Police in Washington State tracked down a person of interest in the murder of four other police officers.  They were alert enough that he didn’t kill any more cops; they killed him.

  • Bob Sheppard isn’t coming back to be Yankees public address announcer.  It’s not a surprise really.  Mr. Sheppard is 99 years old and he started announcing at Yankee Stadium in 1951.  Mr. Sheppard spent his working life going to sporting events to earn a living, Giants football games in the winter and Yankees baseball games in the summer.  I hope he doesn’t have to go to an office from 9 to 5, five days a week now that he’s retired.

  • Bobby Bowden must think that’s how it works.  When the 80-year-old legendary football coach from FSU was forced to announce his retirement at the end of this season, Bowden said he would have to find a real job now.

  • When someone says, “One thing lead to another,” often “another” means “sex.”

  • Cogent advice from Click and Clack, the guys on National Public Radio’s Car Talk program:  “You don’t want a car that’s smaller than the elk.”

  • If I get one of those much sought after Zhu Zhu pets for Christmas, I’m going to call it Petals.

  • Note to the grammar checker in MS Word 2007:  All you need in order to have a sentence is a noun and a verb.  I remember that from grammar school, and I went to grammar school so long ago they attempted to teach me grammar; hence the name.  So, “I am,” is a sentence.  Therefore, “I’m sorry,” is also a sentence, not a sentence fragment.

  • Here’s something unnecessarily complicated.  I want to buy a new camera.  Canon makes good ones so I checked whether they have the manual for the camera I’m interested in available on line.   They do, so I started reading it.  I liked what I was reading so I wanted to download it and go over it at my leisure.  The way Canon has its PDF reader configured, I couldn’t find a way to download the manual.  I did find a way to e-mail it to myself and that works.  But it’s an extra and unnecessary step.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • How many times did the word “Pasadena” appear in the Sunday Tuscaloosa Times this week?  And since my son is an alumnus, Roll Tide!

  • Flying across the United States, I noticed on one of those progress maps on the TV screen in front of me a place called “Atlantic City Wyoming.”  Of course I wondered why anyone would name a place in Wyoming, “Atlantic City.”  The next thing I wondered is whether it has a boardwalk.  I got the answers to those questions.  It’s Atlantic City because it was founded as a mining community and it’s near the Atlantic Lode.  It doesn’t have a boardwalk.  It’s kind of a ghost town.  Fewer than 50 people live there and it’s only accessible over land on a gravel road.  So now, my only question about Atlantic City is, why is a place like that even on the GPS map the airlines show for your in-cabin entertainment when you’re flying cross country?  While I’m at it, why is the Atlantic Lode called that when it’s in Wyoming?

  • Have you or anyone else you know ever stayed in a hotel with a quiet HVAC system?

  • Why do car rental companies even bother to tell you what kind of car they rent?  I’ve never gotten the car they said, have you?  Historically, you got a better car if they couldn’t deliver what they promised.  A few times recently, I was offered a lesser car for the same price.   That should open them up to charges of false advertising, don’t you think?

Full Disclosure

According to Federal Trade Commission regulations, bloggers who receive freebies, or payola for favorable mention of products and services have to disclose those things starting today.  For the record, I’m not getting any of that stuff for any of those things.

If that changes, I’ll be surprised, but I’ll try to remember to let you know too.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • What was Tiger Woods doing at 2:25 AM when he had an auto accident while backing his car out of his driveway?  My daughter suggests he was leaving early to sign up for a good tee time at a nearby public course.

  • I’m going to San Francisco, and with apologies to Scott McKenzie, I’m not going to wear some flowers in my hair.  Is that alright?  I would wear the flowers, but I don’t have any hair.

  • I bought a boxed set of Simon & Garfunkel CD’s.  You’d think a big music company like Columbia would know better.  The set contains 5 CD’s with slip cases (not jewel boxes) that are replicas of the original vinyl album covers.  I don’t mind the lack of jewel cases so much (and who called them that anyway?).  I don’t even mind that the type on the slip cases is too small for a Simon & Garfunkel fan to read.  After all, the slip cases are mini-replicas of the actual 12-inch vinyl record covers.  But Simon & Garfunkel fans are likely to range from over 40 to over 60, so why did they make the type in the booklet that’s included with the set too small for fans to read too?

  • And as long as I’m on the subject of Simon & Garfunkel, by mistake, I typed it here as “Garfunkle,” but you can add Garfunkel to the list of names MS Word knows how to spell along with others such as Asimov and Mandelbrot.

  • A lot of the things we say when we’re cursing don’t make any sense.  If you really were a son of a bitch, you’d be a puppy, right?  How is that bad?

The Holiday Feast

Gourmet cooking is wasted on me.  I can’t discern the subtleties.   If you gave me home-made cranberry relish, lovingly created with orange zest and other special or even secret ingredients I would either not tell the difference between that and canned Ocean Spray, or I’d like the Ocean Spray more.  I’m sorry.  As many of my high school girlfriends told me, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

But we don’t use jellied cranberry sauce in my house.  I like the texture of the stuff with the berries still in it.  My mom thought being fancy at Thanksgiving meant getting the canned, jellied cranberry sauce, cutting out both ends of the can, pushing the whole contents out in one jellied cylinder and then presenting it sliced into disks that looked like purple hockey pucks in a special cut-glass serving dish.  You can’t do that anymore.  Today’s cans are extruded and don`t have a lid you can open on the bottom.

I grew up reasonably big, and reasonably healthy, so I can’t complain too much about my mom’s cooking.  My wife is a better cook.  There are a few things she makes I’d change, but she does so well, I have no cause to complain and I don’t.  I’d prefer beef stew with a tomato base rather than a gravy base.  That’s one example.  But the gravy is good and I love her, so I keep my mouth shut, except when I’m shoveling in the stew.  My wife has been known to make chicken soup with so much rice that it sops up most of the broth.  She makes it that way if I ask her to.  My mom probably made it that way because she added more rice to the soup than the recipe called for.

The most idiosyncratic thing about my mom’s cooking was that she served the same things together most if not all the time, and that she served the same meals on the same days of the week, or the same holidays.  Maybe that’s why I usually eat the same thing for breakfast and the same thing for lunch every day until I get sick of them and then move on to another same thing.

The worst of these concoctions was scrambled eggs, and canned spaghetti.  We had that a lot on Friday nights.  For Easter, it was always leg of lamb with creamed onions, green beans, and pan-broiled potatoes.  It`s only a slight exaggeration to say that I thought when we had steak that French fries, and peas were also parts of a cow.  You  might have a different green vegetable with turkey on different occasions, but you would have turkey for Thanksgiving and for Christmas, maybe for New Years Day too; never any other time though.  And when you had turkey, you would have mashed potatoes, mashed turnips, giblet gravy and that purple disk.

I don`t want you to think I miss my mother`s cooking; I don’t, but I do remember it.

Things I Know

  • With Thanksgiving this Thursday, it’s time for me to share my recipe for roast turkey.  Remove the giblets, wash the carcass, blot it dry and season it to taste.  Stuff the bird with un-popped popcorn.  Put the turkey in a pre-heated, 350-degree oven, and baste it every 15 minutes with Wild Turkey whiskey.  When the bird blows up, throw it away and drink the gravy!  Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone.

  • Ours is the only family I’ve ever heard of that does this and it comes from my mother’s mother.  If you put whipped cream on pumpkin pie and think it needs a little something else, try this:  spread a generous layer of Damson plum jam on the pie and then slather on the whipped cream.  I won’t eat pumpkin pie any other way.  I won’t eat Damson plum jam any other way either, but I will eat whipped cream entirely without provocation, and either by itself or by myself.

  • As long as we’re talking about my grandmother as a cook, she used to make plum pudding for special occasions, but no occasion was special enough to get me to eat the nasty stuff.

  • Here’s the latest genius idea from Tom’s kitchen:  Lipitor-chip cookies.

  • The woman in Boynton Beach Florida who was arrested for trying to hire a hit man to kill her husband.   According to an interview question on the Today show, the loving couple met when he hired her as an escort.  I’d consider that one strike against a rewarding life-long union.

  • The St. Petersburg FL, Times reported that there are over 700,000 licensed drivers in Florida who are over the age of 80.  I hope I can drive safely when and if I reach 80 years of age, but at some point, senior citizens ought to have to take another driving test.

  • I like old-time radio.  I remember the few shows that were still on in the late 1950’s, but I like a lot of it.  I’m a little behind the times because I realized only the other day that iTunes has a bunch of old-time radio podcasts.  I haven’t reviewed all of them, but the ones I have seen are free.  So, I downloaded all the “X Minus One” shows.  It just seems a little odd to hear an old-time radio show sponsored by Carbonite On-Line Back Up, a company and a service that didnt exist when the show was first aired.

  • Big Bird is 75 years old.  Well, the puppeteer who plays him is.

  • I borrowed my friend’s spirit level to hang a towel bar in my bathroom.  Borrowing his didn’t help me find the one I lost.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Who watches infomercials?  Somebody must, or there wouldn’t be so many of them.

  • South Florida hunter Jamey Mosch was found in reasonably good shape after being missing for four days in the Everglades.  I can understand how he could lose his way in the Everglades, but how exactly did he lose his pants?

  • I can’t find my spirit level.  Here’s the experiment.  Does borrowing someone else’s tool help you to find your own, or do you have to buy another one before you can find the one you lost?

  • Do you suppose scruples or ineptitude kept Ashley Dupree from cashing in on her tryst with former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer early last year?

  • Why do they call it candy corn?  I’ve seen close matches for the color in nature, but not all on one ear of corn and have you ever seen a corn kernel shaped like that?

  • Can you be in a hair band if you’ve gone bald?

Great News!

Tonight at 6:00 PM, people in California who took the Bar Exam last summer were notified whether they passed, or whether they have to go back to studying for the next one.  Our son called at 6:03 PM.   He passed!  He was almost as happy as his mother and I were.

Happy Birthday to Me

I’ve already shared with you the story of my humiliation on Leslie’s birthday.  Today is my birthday, so in honor of that here are three more birthday stories.

My birthday is the anniversary of the day I slept with one of my female high school classmates.  It was nothing salacious though.  I learned in art class one day that this girl was two or three days older than me.  In the course of talking about it, we discovered that we were born in the same hospital.  So, I figure we must have spent at least one night together in the same hospital nursery. 

My sister’s birthday is the day before mine, although she’s four years younger.  I remember my parents bringing her from the hospital for the first time, not home to our apartment, but to my maternal grandmother’s house.  I stayed with my grandmother while my mother was hospitalized for the blessed event.  I also remember sitting on the couch that day in my grandmother’s living room and being allowed to hold my baby sister.  I thought it was pretty special.  But within a few weeks, I wanted my parents to take her back to where they got her. 

I still feel that way.

Many years after my high school junior prom, I met my date again.  I told her I’d like to send her a birthday card and a Christmas card and while I remembered when Christmas was, I didn’t remember the date of her birth.  No humiliation for me surrounded the day, so I forgot it in the ensuing years.  She told me she was born on December 18th, but that she would not tell me what year.

Hello!  I’m pretty good with math.  If I knew how old you were when I was 16, I still know how old you are.  That’s one I can still do in my head.

I’m not going to tell you how old I am, but if we have a cake with the requisite number of candles, the local building code mandates either fire sprinklers or a Halon fire suppression system.

Things I Know

  • Somebody asked me yesterday if I had worked for my current employer all of my life.  Not yet is the obvious joke, but the real answer is no; it just seems like it sometimes.

  • If English spelling and pronunciation made any sense at all, said and paid would rhyme.

  • On cable TV after that terrible tragedy at Ft Hood, I saw someone say the Army is one big family.  I thought maybe, but no sergeant I served under ever expressed that idea in words or deeds.

  • According to the Fort Myers News-Press, Dan Ross, a guy in Lehigh Acres FL tried to send a bouquet of yellow roses to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan the man accused of the Fort Hood shootings.  The florist didn’t fill the order and instead of getting a bill for the flowers, Ross got a visit from the FBI.

  • I’m writing this on Veteran’s Day.  If you are a veteran, thank you for your service to our country.

  • There are valid arguments on either side of the death penalty issue, but it seems to me the execution of John Allen Muhammad was more justified than most.

  • Our house is more than 100-years old.  If you were to infer that nothing in the house is plumb, level or square, you would have been correct until we finished remodeling the kitchen last year.  There is still very little that’s plumb, level or square, but if I put an egg on the kitchen counter and walk away, when I return, the egg will be where I left it.  Last year, it would have been on the floor.

  • Today is the anniversary of the first time I noticed my wife.  She says we met before that.  Her friend mooched a ride home from a school play for the two of them.  Neither of them would sit in the front seat with me; they both sat in back.  Beginning three days later, and for all the years since, she has sat beside me.  Maybe we’ll go for a ride today and to commemorate the event she can sit in the back seat again.

Things I Know

  • The first lady and the vice president’s wife too will be at the World Series game tonight.  Security will be tight.  In fact, it has been reported that if fans leave their seats, they’ll have to go through security again to get back.  That ought to cut way down on beer sales.

  • I run Norton Internet Security on my home network.  I recently upgraded the program.  The spam filter is now so good that it recognizes all the junk e-mail Symantec sends me as junk mail and dumps it.  Now there’s a company with integrity!
  • The 1955 World Series ended on October 4th.  The 1969 World Series ended on October 16th.  The 2009 World Series ends in November if it goes seven games. 

  • Met fans had a really ugly year.  It’s topped by the two teams they would hate most to see in the World Series, the Yankees and the Phillies.  I suppose most Met fans are hoping both teams lose.

  • Buy an ugly used car.  Often, the ugly ones are cheaper.  Plus, you bought it used, so you didn’t cause them to make another ugly car, and when you’re driving it, that’’s one less ugly car you have to look at.

  • Being an effective manager means getting people who work for you to do more work for the same money, or less.

Special Day

Today is my wedding anniversary.  Coincidentally, it’s also my wife’s wedding anniversary, so we’ll probably celebrate together.

The smartest thing I ever did was marry my wife.  I doubt I’ll ever do anything smarter.  I have no idea what the second smartest thing I’ve ever done is and I should be able to keep track.  I haven’t done that many smart things.

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble sleeping (I have trouble sleeping every night, I just do this sometimes) I look over at my wife sleeping beside me and think how lucky I am to have her in my life.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • One of the guys who works where I work thinks I’’m one of the brainiest people in the building.  Is that flattering or frightening?

  • How long do you think it will be before one season’’s World Series takes place after opening day of the following season?

  • Did Bernie Madoff get his money’’s worth or his money back?  Before he went to prison, he engaged the services of a consultant to teach him to get along better in the big house.  On October 13th, the NY Post reported that he had a fight with another inmate.

  • I have plantar fasciitis.  Do I have anything else in common with a multi-millionaire star NFL quarterback?

  • My boss told me I’’m indispensible; I disagree.  But, if I am, why don’t they treat me as if I were indispensible? 

  • Over the last 30-40 years, General Motors has built some awful cars and some mediocre cars and very few great or even good cars.  So, many people have decided never to buy another GM car.  If you are one of those people, what car made you reach that decision, no matter how reluctantly?  For me, it was a malaise-era Monte Carlo.

Number Two

The Albany Times Union newspaper in Albany, New York piqued my curiosity with an article declaring that Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska, was the second wackiest tourist attraction in the United States as determined by the website tripadvisor.com

Carhenge, for the uninitiated, is a bunch of cars that a farmer erected in a formation similar to Stonehenge, except that Stonehenge is in Britain and made of big slabs of stone, while Carhenge is just outside Alliance, Nebraska, and made out of old American cars painted flat gray.  Many of the cars are installed nose-down in the sand hills. 

As an aside, if you were to search the Internet for Stonehenge replicas, you’d find a surprising number of people in the USA have lots of land, some big stuff, some heavy construction equipment to stack the stuff with and far too much time on their hands.

News judgment is my issue with the Albany Times Union.  I’d buy a story with that lead in the Alliance, Nebraska, Times Herald (and I didn’t see it on their website tonight, I looked).  I’d even buy that story in the Omaha World Herald.  Nebraska is a big state.  Unlike Rhode Island, you can be in Nebraska and be pretty damned far from something else in Nebraska.   Omaha is pretty far from Alliance.  Omaha is on the west bank of the Missouri River, which means it’s at the eastern edge of Nebraska.  Alliance is about 30-45 minutes north of Sidney Nebraska.  I’ve been to Sidney, twice, (don’t ask).  I was surprised to learn that Alliance is considerably larger than Sidney, although “large” is a relative term when referring to cities in western Nebraska.  Carhenge is on my bucket list, but when I was in Sidney, I forgot it was nearby.

News, herald, times, post, union, world, there seems to be a short list of words that you’re allowed to have in the name of a newspaper.  I have no idea how picayune got on that official list, but I digress.  So the story in the Albany Times Union seems odd to me because Sidney, Alliance, Carhenge and even Nebraska aren’t anywhere near Albany, NY.   

If I was editor of the Albany Times Union (and I don’t want to be because most newspapers, including that one, are struggling financially) I would have wanted a story about the list of ten, or about the top one which is the toilet seat museum in San Antonio, TX.  Oddly, I checked the website of the San Antonio News and the story about the second wackiest place to visit isn’t there and there’s no story about the wackiest place either.  Or if there is, it’s hiding. In case you didn’t click the link near the beginning of this piece, the tenth wackiest tourist attraction is the world’s largest ball of twine.  The Winchester house in California isn’t even on the top ten list.  I wonder what’s #11.

Things I Know

  • Doug McIntyre on WABC said something profound in the five-o’clock hour this morning.  He said, “Nobody ever calls the cops because they’re having a good day.”

  • Nobody ever accused me of waiting until the last minute, unless of course they were serious.  I filed my 2008 income taxes last night at 10:00 PM.  And, yes, I filed the extension at around 10:00 PM on April 14th.

  • It costs the government less and doesn’t take as long either to process your income tax return electronically, as opposed to handling your paper return.  So, the government ought to encourage electronic filing instead of allowing companies to charge you a significant amount of money to do it.  I paid, because I wanted the convenience, but as a money decision, I got a very small refund and it would have been cheaper for me if I printed the thing out and mailed it in.

  • I won’t like this winter any better than I liked last winter.  A guy on the Weather Channel last night around dinner time said the 40 degree temperatures taking place in the Midwest are more like winter than fall.  There’s a guy who’s never been to Minnesota in January.

  • Since I root for the Mets and whoever is playing the Dodgers, I still have a rooting interest in the post season.  I was for the Cardinals, but the Dodgers have, after all, made the NLCS.

  • I don’t like all the extra days of rest that have been inserted into the post-season schedule this year.

  • The lords of baseball may be surprised that the Rockies made the playoffs, but they can’t be surprised it snows in Denver in October.  Some year, the Rockies will make the World Series and, under the new schedule, they’ll be playing baseball in Denver in November.  Note to the lords of baseball:  you’re supposed to play winter ball in South and Central America and the Caribbean, not in the Rocky Mountains.

  • Almost every time a baseball player checks his swing, the bat still crosses the plate and it should still be called a strike.

  • It would not upset me if you didn’t know what points are on a mortgage because you’re young and don’t own a house.  That wouldn’t upset me unless you were young, didn’t own a house, didn’t know what points are on a mortgage, and worked in the mortgage servicing department of the bank that holds my mortgage.  That bank is, of course, bank.com.  Or maybe it’s bank.gov by now.

Things I Know

  • If you are an extortionist, as Robert Halderman is accused of being, don’t accept checks, ever.  Your victim can stop the check, the check can bounce and most important of all, the check is evidence.

  • I hope Elizabeth Smart is as together as she appeared to be when she testified in court against her alleged kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell.  It’s hard to imagine that Mitchell didn’t do what he’s accused of and if he is found guilty, Mitchell’s heinous acts make me wish once again that cruel and unusual punishment were required for certain crimes, rather than prohibited in all instances as it is in the US Constitution.

  • According to a website of indeterminable reliability, the word “mispronunciation” is one of the 100 most often mispronounced words in the English language.  I found this website because I looked up the pronunciation of the word “hierarchy” after sitting through a sales presentation for a major computer hardware and software package.  One of the presenters mispronounced hierarchy multiple times during the sales pitch.  According to the same website, “hierarchy” is another of the 100 most often mispronounced words.  I was right; she said it wrong.

  • I wasn’t the only one who noticed that woman mispronouncing hierarchy.  We had another meeting about a new software system today and somebody else brought it up too.

  • Even before her current book tour, I knew far more about Mackenzie Phillips’ sex life than I cared to.  Recently, thanks to a pervasive lack of taste in most mass media, I learned more about the sex life of Robert Melia than I wanted to know as well.  Google him.  I won’t help you find out.  I tell you what.  Whether or not you tell me about yours, I won’t tell you about mine.  Okay?

  • MS Word’s spelling and grammar checker doesn’t recognize “Google” as a verb.

  • I bought a new paper shredder.  The old one died while I was cleaning out some files in my basement.  Here are the two things I like best about the new one.  You can empty it without taking the shredding part off the waste basket part.  The bin slides out.  That makes it a little less messy than most of them.  And it’s  powerful enough that I can shred any credit card offer I get in the mail without opening the envelope.  What a time saver that is!

  • Speaking of credit card offers coming in the mail, Capital One’s TV commercials are much better than its direct mail advertising.

  • Here’s an unintended consequence of having a wireless computer network in my home,and a laptop computer.  When watching one of those mystery true-crime shows like “48 Hours,” I often researching the outcome on the Internet instead of waiting until the end of the show to find out what happened.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • I’m not complaining because I am a baseball fan, but regular season baseball is ending on October 4th, this year.  What’s with that?  Did you know that the World Series has often ended earlier than that, but not recently?  If they’re playing the seventh game of the World series in Boston, in November, I reserve the right to complain at that time.

  • TLC has renamed one of its biggest reality shows, “Kate Plus Eight.”  Will they come up with a spin off and call it, “Jon Is Gone?”

  • There are a lot of commercials on TV these days for gold bullion.  If you buy it, take it home and drop it in a pot of boiling water, will it make soup?  Broth?

  • The endocrinologist I go to has been on time or early both times I visited his office this year.  Those are the only two times he’s been on time or early in the 15 years I’ve been his patient.  Does that mean he’s getting ready to retire?

  •  “I could care less,” and, “I couldn’t care less,” mean the same thing.  Why?  The first one doesn’t make sense.  If you could care less and you wanted to care less, wouldn’t you?

The Hard Work of Shopping

The place where I work is in the market for a new computer system.  That is to say computers, peripherals and the software to run on the computers.  The new system will keep track of all the money and manage a lot of the tasks performed in the place where I work.  Buying such a system is no small task.  It will probably cost seven figures.  With upgrades of both hardware and software, what we buy ought to last at least 10-15 years.  We purchased the beginnings of what we have now in 1992.

We hired a consulting firm (not just one consultant) to help us decide what we want and need.  We issued a notice that we were in the market.  We heard from a lot of vendors.  We decided to get full-blown presentations from three of them.  Each presentation takes three days.  Most users have to sit through only those portions that affect their operations.  I have to sit through almost all of it. 

Two of the three vendors have made their three-day presentations.  Three more days and one more vendor remain.  It’s tough to absorb that much information in that little time.  After all, the mind can only absorb what the butt can endure.  When we’re done, the committee and the consultants working with the committee will have to decide.  I’m not an IT professional, but computers are something I’m interested in and good at.  I’m good enough to have built a couple of computers of my own and I’ve also installed a wired and a wireless network in my house.  I’ve been playing with computers since I was a teenager.  And I was a teenager long before most people who started playing with computers when they were teenagers.  When my kids were teenagers, if they had computer troubles, they asked me.

Here are the two things I was taught about computers in the first class I took about them.  First, a computer does what you ask or tell it to do, not what you think you asked or told it to do.  Therefore, if you ask a computer, “Do you know what time it is?” the computer will answer yes or no and will not tell you what time it is because you didn’t ask it that.  Second, a computer is a machine that will take a human error and repeat it at mind-boggling speed.  I figured out for myself that if computers worked the way they tell us in school, they wouldn’t break the way they do.

I thought it was cool when I learned how to write a program to generate Fibonacci numbers and I’ve written a few rudimentary databases too.  But a modern general-ledger accounting program is an amazing piece of work.  I’m really, really impressed even with the worst of the three we’re currently reviewing.  New ones are orders of magnitude more complex than what existed say 20 years ago, but they’re much easier to use.  For years, I’ve been making our existing system do things it wasn’t designed to do and I’m looking forward to working with a program that was designed to do those things. 

Accounting didn’t interest me as a young man because I thought the math was too easy, and the work was too tedious.  Computers have made the work a whole lot less tedious.  The math is still too easy to be interesting though.  However, I now know that the math isn’t what’s interesting about accounting.  What’s interesting is what the numbers tell you.  I learned a little while ago for instance, that more than half of the police officers in the community where I live and work will be eligible to retire in a little more than a year.

Things I Know

  • Module is a two, not a three syllable word.

  • If you don’t give a shit, they have medicine for that.

  • It’s impossible to discern someone’s religion from their e-mail address.  Spam is not kosher.  So, out of respect for people of the Jewish faith observing their high holy days, I’m asking everyone who sends out spam to stop it until after Yom Kippur.

  • GM is owned by the US government which is owned (in theory at least) by you and me.  So GM, one of the world’s larger industrial corporations, is a subsidiary of you and me.  GM is giving a sixty-day, money-back guarantee on many of the cars it sells.  So, if I buy a new car from me and I don’t like it, I’ll give me my money back.  For the things I’ve had go wrong with GM cars, sixty days isn’t nearly enough.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  GM is going to have to make good cars for a very long time to convince me to buy one.  They made terrible cars for a long time to convince me to stop buying them.

  • I’ve also said for a long time that the older you get the older “old” gets.  It recently occurred to me that the older you get the older “young” gets too.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • With all due respect to play-by-play baseball announcers, how does one achieve back-to-back-to-back, two-run home runs or back-to-back-to-back anything else for that matter?

  • I have a wheelbarrow full of acorns.  If I dump them all in the compost pile, how many oak trees do you think I’ll have next spring? If I spread them out on my back lawn, how many squirrels will arrive by dinner time?

  • Everyone has used it to make casseroles, but has anyone ever used a can of Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup to make soup?

  • My wife’s health insurance company wants her to prove that we’re still married.  How can anyone do that with certainty?

  • “I’ve got it,” means you understand something.  “I’ve had it,” doesn’t mean you used to understand something, but you’ve forgotten.  I don’t get it, do you?

Things I Know

  • Our founding fathers got a lot of things right when they came up with the US Constitution.  But when I read about Phillip Garrido who kidnapped  11-year-old Jaycee Dugard, raped her and held her prisoner for 18 years, I wonder if the constitution should require cruel and unusual punishment for someone who’s done what he’s accused of instead of prohibiting it.

  • I bought Marvel Comics lots of times for a dime or a quarter.  I stopped before they got to be a dollar.  Disney paid four-billion dollars!  Disney must have gotten a collector’s edition.  Maybe one of the ones with a hologram on the cover.

  • Ten of the top ten vehicles traded in during the cash for clunkers program were American made.  Two of the top ten vehicles purchased during the cash for clunkers program were American made.  I’m reminded of Arsenio Hall’s old talk show and the feature he used to have, “Things that make you say HMMMMMMMM.”

  • This year, the New York Mets didn”‘t playing any meaningful games in August.

  • If you don”t turn it over regularly, one way to keep your compost pile from becoming overgrown with weeds is to plant pumpkins in it.  If you do, it will become overgrown with pumpkins instead.

World’s Largest Microwave Oven

Back in the 50’s and 60’s science education was important in the United States.  Why?  We had to catch up with the Russians who launched Sputnik (or if you prefer Спутник) in 1957.  As part of the scientific education, every junior and senior high school in America tried to teach the students the metric system.  But they did it wrong, so almost nobody learned.

The metric system is so simple; you’d think everyone would do it, like a computer keyboard in alphabetical order or a telephone key pad in the same order as the keypad on a calculator.  Oh, I forgot, sorry.

How many inches in a foot?  Good.  Feet in a yard?  Feet in a mile?  Yards in a mile?  Got you on at least one of those, didn’t I?  Okay, now, how many milliliters in a liter?  How many millimeters in a meter?  How many kilograms in a metric ton?  Do you see a more regular pattern emerging here?

So when we were emphasizing science education, instead of teaching kids how to play video games and download songs to iPods, we tried to teach kids the metric system too.  It’s used in most of the rest of the world, so it only made sense.

Here’s how they did it wrong, and why we didn’t learn it, and start using it.  They taught us to convert from the old system to the new one.  We had to memorize dozens of conversion factors, yet there are very few times when we need to convert.  Washington DC is about 400 km from where I live.  Richmond VA is about 600.  My in-laws lived about 2,100 km from here.  My son went to college roughly 1,750 km away.  Do you need to know how to convert those figures to miles to tell me which one is closest and which one is farthest away?  If I told you it’s possible to average 100 km/hour on the Interstate highways, could you figure out about how long it would take to drive to any of those places?  Thought so. 

If the 7 mm socket wrench is too small, are you going to try the 6 mm socket?  Didn’t think so.

Forty degrees centigrade is warmer than most people care to be, although it’s a temperature I’ve experienced numerous times in various parts of the country.  Twenty-five is fine though.  I can convert -40 centigrade to Fahrenheit in my head (because that’s the only temperature that’s the same in both systems), but I don”t want to be that cold in either system and I’m proud to say I never have been.  Incidentally, Fahrenheit is capitalized and centigrade isn’t because there was no Mr. Centigrade.

Why do I bring this up at this time?  The rock slide.  According to the website of the Mariposa Gazette, a newspaper published in a community near Yosemite Park, this happened on Wednesday, August 26, 2009:  “Several moderately small rockfalls occurred in Yosemite Valley from early yesterday morning through early this afternoon.  The rockfalls released from the Royal Arches area directly above the Ahwahnee Hotel.  The largest rock that fell is estimated to be 350 cubic meters, about the size of a microwave oven.”  I added the emphasis.

I haven’t been an editor in a long time, but if the world’s largest microwave oven fell in my yard, a short distance behind my house, I’d put that in the lede, wouldn’t you?  The microwave oven in my kitchen may be about 350 cubic centimeters, I haven’t measured it, but unless I misplaced a decimal point or three, 350 cubic meters is about half the size of my house.

Ted Kennedy

I’m sorry Ted Kennedy died.  When I heard, I did what I always do, I subtracted my age from his and said to myself, “I hope I have more time left than that.”  The older you are, the older “old” gets.  I now think a lifespan of 77 years is much shorter than I used to think it is.

A man I used to work for knew the Senator from Massachusetts and once told me a joke I considered really funny that he said Ted Kennedy told to him. I met Ted Kennedy once;   He came to Long Island for a political fund raising dinner years before he ran for president himself.  I was a reporter at the time.  I didn’t know the man.  I didn’t even know anyone who was a close friend.  I can only say what it looked like to me.  That night, he looked distracted.  He was in a big crowd and he kept looking around.  Perhaps he was worried for his safety.  Who could blame him if he was?  He’s the only one of his brothers to die in old age or even to die a natural death.

This morning, when I walked into the local deli, they had the TV news on and they were showing a recording of Senator Ted giving a eulogy at his brother Bobby’s funeral.  For the very young, Bobby was assassinated when he was running for President in 1968.  Everyone who was alive in 1963 and many people who weren’t know that his brother Jack was assassinated while he was President.  I have to wonder why Ted ran for President after two of his brothers were killed, one in office and the other trying for the job.  When TV reporter Roger Mudd asked him that question, Ted didn’t seem to know himself.

Seeing the late Senator’s image on TV this morning at his brother’s funeral reminded me that I could have been there that day.  I wasn’t.  If I had been ordered to be in the military honor guard at Senator Robert Kennedy’s funeral, of course, I would have been.  My first sergeant, however, asked me if I wanted to be in the ceremonial guard.   My answer was that if he wanted me to, of course I would be, but if I had a choice, I’d prefer to pass.  I didn’t have the right ceremonial gear and would not have liked to spit-shine everything I owned, three or four times.  Plus, even at that tender age, I didn’t enjoy standing still in one place for a long period of time.

I’m reminded of a joke Abraham Lincoln used to tell, although I don’t know if it was original with him.  Lincoln said a man who was about to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail was asked how he felt about it.  His response was, “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”  I skipped out on Bobby Kennedy’s funeral, in spite of the honor of the thing.

The Dentist

I’ve mentioned the dentist before.  I said that I once told someone to have a nice day or go to work, but I didn’t do either that day; I went to the dentist.  Today, I went to the dentist again.  There’s no question that hanging upside down in the dentist chair, with your head tilted back a little farther than it will go, and your mouth wide open is unpleasant.  It’s especially unpleasant if you have compressed discs in your spine.  I don’t like the thing that sucks all the saliva and water out of your mouth either.  But shots of local anesthesia are really good if you need them.  I hate it until it wears off, but I’d really hate the pain if I didn’t have it.  Nitrous oxide is good too if you need it that.  They even have topical anesthesia that they rub on your gums when they’re cleaning your teeth.  That isn’t a good idea if, like me, you’re allergic to Benzocaine.  It makes me itch, so I take a pass on that.  But there are good things about going to the dentist too.

First among them is there is a dentist to go to.  Can you imagine a world without effective dentistry?  Especially once chewing coarse food wore down the enamel on people’s teeth, I imagine there was a time when most people had a toothache frequently, once a week at least.

I suppose one or two hundred years ago, the only thing you could really do about a bad tooth was have it pulled or pull it yourself.  Even that was iffy.   I don’t know when general anesthesia was invented, but I know it wasn’t typically used during the US Civil War and while penicillin was invented in the 1930’s, it didn‘t become widely available to the general public until after World War II.  Technology has improved immensely, even since the 1960’s and fluoride in drinking water and in toothpaste has greatly reduced the number of cavities an average person suffers in a lifetime.  Plus, most of the time, when I leave the dentist’s office and the anesthesia has worn off, whatever I went there for doesn’t hurt anymore.

I’ve been going to the same dental practice since I was in my mid-twenties.  When I retire and relocate, I expect to receive a pension from them.  In that time, I’ve had four dentists, including the new one who saw me today.  To me, the absolutely best thing about this practice and about others I remember too is that the office is efficient.  If I need to schedule an appointment, I always can.  If I have an emergency, they always accommodate me.  If I get there on time, they see me on time.

Did you understand what I just said?  The dentists I deal with are always within a few minutes of on time.  From what I understand, that isn’t unusual for dentists.  If every health professional I’ve ever dealt with was as punctual as my dentists’ office is, who knows what I could have accomplished with the five years of my life I would not have wasted in doctors’ waiting rooms?

Things I Know

  • If you’’re drinking beer instead of water in this hot weather, you’’ll be plastered before you’re hydrated.  But you already knew that, didn’’t you?

  • Morning glories are migratory plants.  Not like triffids, exactly, but If you plant them, your neighbor will soon have morning glories too.  So find out if your neighbor likes them before you plant them.  If your neighbor hates morning glories and you hate your neighbor, plant them anyway.  My neighbor planted morning glories a few years ago.  The herbicide I’ve been using on them ought to be called morning glory food.  They seem to like it a lot.

  • I’’m glad I didn’’t plant tomatoes this year.  They aren’’t growing well and there’’s blight.  But I’’ve planted tomatoes in years past, so I do have tomato plants.  They came up on their own and they started late enough that I don’’t think they’’ll mature before the weather changes.

  • My blueberry yield is way down too.

  • This weekend was the first time I watered my lawn all summer.  But before it showed faint signs of turning brown, it grew so fast last week that I had to raise the mower deck higher than it’’s supposed to go in order to mow it without choking the mower.

  • The grass is growing so well this year that I’’m trying, so far unsuccessfully, to remember to mow it every five days instead of once a week.

  • My wife’s car is being bombarded.  She parks it under the large oak tree in front of our house and we have a bumper crop of acorns, but we don’’t have enough squirrels to hide all of them.

  • In New York, every year when it gets over 90 degrees, TV stations send news reporters around to find people working outdoors in the awful heat.  I wonder if any New York TV news director knows that in Death Valley, CA, they run a 135 mile super marathon every summer.

Things I Know

  • It wasn’t a sense of duty that compelled me to my office this morning.  I didn’t sleep well last night.  It was nice where I live when I got up this morning, but the car had to go to the shop to have its brakes checked.  So, I walked to work instead of calling in sick and driving to the beach.  I love the beach and I can’t tell you the last time I went; it wasn’t this year.  I felt better about going to the office and not the beach at lunchtime because as soon as I picked up the car at the garage, it started raining.

  • It’s hard to believe, but Monday was the first day this summer that it officially hit 90 degrees in New York City.  I could use a little global warming around here.

  • I saw a cicada’s molted skin in my driveway.  That’s unusual, because they usually leave them in the trees.  Some people view cicadas as a sign of summer.  Since they are at their peak around here in mid to late August, I view them as a sign of impending autumn.

  • This next is to anyone who read or heard about the horrific wrong-way accident on New York’s  Taconic Parkway that killed Diane Schuler, her daughter, her brother’s three children, and three men in another car.  If you think no mother could jeopardize the lives of her children, and other people they love, by deliberately driving drunk and/or high, you’re wrong.  I’ve seen it lots of times.  I’m not saying Diane Schuler did it deliberately although it looks like that may have happened.  But many people have done it deliberately.  I hope no more lives are ruined among those left behind.

  • Muhammad Ali was at the new Yankee Stadium last week.  As if age didn’t attack everyone’s physical prowess with enough fury, it’s sad to see Ali, who was once one of the best athletes in the world, devastated by Parkinson’s Disease.

  •  A guy from Jensen Beach Florida was arrested for having child pornography on his computer.  The accused said in his defense that it was his cat’s fault.  He said the cat downloaded the illegal material when it jumped on his computer keyboard while he was downloading music.  If the cat didn’t use a pointing device, I guess it wasn’t a cat-and-mouse game, was it?  As a former Congressman I know once said under different circumstances with respect to another criminal case, the plaintiff only has to get one of the 12 jurors to buy that story.

  • On one of the few days it hasn’t rained around here this summer, I saw a guy driving around town in a black 1960 Ford convertible.  He was slouched behind the wheel with his left arm draped out the window in a way that tells you this is a man who wasn’t raised in air-conditioned cars with the windows always rolled up.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Has anyone done any research on murder-suicides?  There was another one a few miles from where I live.  This bozo killed his daughter and his mother-in-law and critically wounded his estranged wife before turning the gun on himself.  These incidents really trouble me.  Why isn’t suicide enough for someone like that?  But how would you find out if all the perps killed themselves?

  • Have you seen the funny TV commercial for Staples office supply stores?  A father is gamboling through the store, buying back-to-school supplies and the Christmas song, “”Its the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” playing in the background.  Clearly from his antics, he agrees with the song, but about back-to-school time, not Christmas.  His kids follow with a really down-trodden look.  Clearly from their body language, they don’t.

  • What’s with the weather around New York this summer?  Has it been hot?  Well, my wife runs the room air conditioner in our bedroom every night it’s in the window, whether it’s hot, or humid, or not.  This July, we used about 12 percent fewer kilowatt hours of electricity than we did last July. 

  • Has one of those car alarms that flashes the headlights and honks the horn ever prevented a car theft?

  • If someone is signaling a left turn, why pass him or her on the left?   I’d particularly like the person who did that to me today to answer that question.  Someone could have been seriously killed.

  • Michael Jackson died more than six weeks ago.  To the best of my knowledge, he’s still dead.  So could we please stop devoting so much air time to his demise?  That is, of course, unless there’s some news about it and there hasn’t been any in quite a while.

Cash for Clunkers

Ever since I got my first car, I’ve always owned at least one vehicle that gets over 20 miles per gallon.  So I’m in favor of fuel-efficient vehicles.  Cash for clunkers though, not so much.  It just doesn’t work for me.  Not even now that the Senate  has agreed with the House to add another $2 billion to the program.  Here’s why. 

First, I have two cars right now.  Between them, they’ve driven about 250,000 miles.  I consider one a clunker and the other one not.  The government says one of them is eligible for the program, the other one not.  My problem is my non-clunker, the van, is the car the government would pony up $4,500 for me to get rid of and that won’’t help me because it’s worth more than that on the used-car market.   

I like my Toyota, but even Toyotas wear out eventually and mine is old enough to vote, so I think it might wear out at some point in the foreseeable future.  If I trade it in, I’ll get a lot less than $4,500 too.  However, according to the EPA it gets a combined 23 mpg so it isn’t eligible for the program.  I’d certainly consider getting something newer that gets 33 mpg, the ten mpg improvement the government is looking for, but to qualify, the car has to get 18 mpg or less. 

I was also hoping the Congress would add a cash-for-brakes incentive before next Wednesday when the Toyota goes into the shop for a checkup.  No such luck!

Even though the program won’t work for me, I’m still paying for it and so are you if you’re gainfully employed, gainfully retired, or independently wealthy.  Since I bought my very first car I’ve always owned at least one that gets superior gas mileage.  And now my tax dollars are going to all the bad little boys and girls who drove SUVs and other gas guzzlers in an effort to encourage them to be good.

When I got out of the Army, they gave me a medal for being good.  That was nice, but I couldn’t wear it after I got it because I didn’t stay in the Army, so I didn’t have a uniform to put it on.  I would rather have had cash.  Today, I’d rather have cash too.  I’m not getting any either, but in the cash for clunkers program, I don’t even get a medal.

Citi Field

I went to Shea Stadium to see a ball game on Thursday, but Shea wasn’t there, so I did the next best thing and went to the ball park next door to where Shea used to be.  I went to Citi Field to see the Mets play the Colorado Rockies.  It was a good game and I couldn’t ask for better results, 7-0, our team.

My son and I saw another Mets – Rockies game at Shea in 1993.  That one was the first game the Rockies ever played that counted in the standings.  I went Thursday because a friend of my son was our house guest for the week while taking the New York Bar exam and the baseball game was one of the things she did to thank my family for our hospitality.  Her thank you to my wife and the one to my daughter were equally thoughtful.

Since they first took to the field in 1962, the Mets have called three baseball parks home, the Polo Grounds, Shea Stadium, and now Citi Field.  The Polo Grounds was a grammatical nightmare.  How do you refer to one place with a plural name?  Since it was only one place, I’m sticking with singular because it was a singularly bad baseball stadium.  It served both the baseball and the football Giants.  It was shaped like that to accommodate football.   I am not a football fan, so I don’t know if it did that well, but I went there as a little kid and I still remember clearly that I couldn’t see the whole field.

The scoreboard was in deep, straight-away center field.  It operated manually like the one in Fenway still does.  When the Giants played there, they put people with binoculars in the scoreboard to steal the opposing catcher’’s signs. What can you say about the Polo Grounds if you remember it, except maybe, “”Thank God they tore that mess down.””

Before I was a Met fan, I was a Dodger fan.  Ebbets Field seemed more charming to me, but there were posts supporting the upper deck and the late Sandy Amoros certainly proved in a memorable way that the seats behind the posts weren’t the only ones in Ebbets Field with obstructed views.

I don’t remember obstructed seats being a problem at Shea, but Shea did have issues.  It was built on the cheap and looked it.  The worst way they saved money there was by not having enough bathrooms.  Some people have a lot of nostalgia for Shea, not me.

Citi Field is clearly an improvement in every way but cost.  As long as they can find enough people to pay the price, I imagine the team owners have no objection at all to the price.  Upper deck seats are $25 each for a Rockies game.  I think they cost more for Mets v. Yankees.  However, to make the price more bearable, they don’t call it the upper deck; they call it the Promenade Deck.  I’d call “Promenade Deck” hoity toity, except I haven’t heard that phrase used since forever.  And if there are any bleachers at Citi Field, I missed them.

Citi Field isn’t a municipal stadium built on the cheap.  It’s a shopping mall with a baseball field buried somewhere inside.  It’s a nice baseball field, but it may have some obstructed seats too because they play the live game feed on the giant screen in the outfield.  When the first giant screens came into existence, playing the game live on them quickly became against MLB rules on the theory that a TV shot of a blown call would incite the crowd against the umpires.  Why go to the stadium to watch the game on TV anyway?  I have cable; I can watch the game on TV at home.

I went on Thursday to see the game, so I didn’t explore the park much.  If I go again, I’ll probably go as soon as the gates open, walk around and see as much of it as they’ll let me.  I don’t have enough money to see it all.  I wish they’d have tours when the team is out of town.  I’m sure there are interesting things to see.  If they do offer tours, they are hidden along with the bleachers I couldn’t find.

The older you get the more ridiculous prices become, because you can remember what things used to cost.  You don’t have to be very old to find the prices at all major league baseball stadiums ridiculous.  I hear the prices at New Yankee Stadium are even higher than they are at Citi Field.  One of life’s little pleasures is a day game on a beautiful day, a day game your team wins in decisive fashion.  I hope I never get so old that I can’t afford to go.  But the $25 seats have moved from the corporate-owned field boxes behind the dugout at Shea to the Promenade Deck at Citi Field in only 15 years, so it could happen.

“My House

Is a very, very, very fine house.”  At least Crosby, Stills Nash and Young thought their’s were when they sang about it or them.  But they were rock stars and could afford the best.

I don’t know if my house will ever qualify for three very s.  I’d say it’s worth about 1.5 now, or at least it will be when everything is painted and/or put where it belongs.  Some of my stuff belongs in the trash and if that’s where it belongs, that’s where I intend to put it.

Maybe, one day, my house will be a very, very fine house.   I doubt it will ever get to three very’s.  I’m not a rock star and while I’m comfortable, nobody would call me rich, especially since that’s not my name.  But being in Boy Scout Camp for the past few days has given me a new appreciation for houses in general and mine in particular.  At night, I like to soak in a hot tub and read a book.   I can do that at my house.  The woods don’t have hot water, tubs or electric lights.  The camping lantern does attract bugs and the woods don’t have window screens either.

Electric lights push back the darkness.  Room darkening shades push back the light.  It’s a lot easier to sleep past 5:15 AM in my house than in my tent.  My house has central heat and room air conditioners.  Climate control in my tent?  Well, I have several sleeping bags, so how warm it is when I’m asleep depends not on a thermostat, but on which bag I brought with me.  Oh, I can put the tent flaps up or down too.  My house is also quieter than a tent.  Thunderstorms seldom wake me up at home.  In fact, I usually cannot hear a rainstorm when I’m inside whether the storm is now equipped with new, improved thunder or not.  And the only creature who can get at my food when I’m in my house is me.

So why did I go to Boy Scout camp last week?  Why have I gone for each of the last 22 years?  Well, one reason is I used to get a laugh from my doctor when I showed up in his office in shorts, a t-shirt and sandals and announced I was there for my summer-camp physical.  I no longer get a laugh with that act.  I’ve pulled it too many times to expect another laugh, so I don’t expect one.  Yes, I’m too old for summer camp; I was too old for summer camp when I started going.  The camp won’t even let me in unless I bring a Boy Scout Troop.  I checked.

I like most of the boys and most of the adults too.  I’ve seen one guy there for 22 years and never seen him anywhere else.  On the ferry up there last week, I saw a guy who looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him until I got to camp and he was one of the leaders in the next campsite.  I like a good many of the activities in the camp.  I don’t like the food.  I’m crazy, but I’m not stupid and nobody goes to Boy Scout Camp for the cuisine. 

I guess part of camp’s attraction for me is I can act like a boy in camp.  Teddy Roosevelt said of his trip to the Amazon after his presidency, “It’s my last chance to be a boy.”  It’s also because I can handle anything that comes up in camp and I’m free of many adult responsibilities.  There are no bills to pay in camp; no telephones; no e-mail, not even any Internet.  No TV either.  And I do get to read, but it’s in the daytime in my camp chair, instead of at night, and in my tub.  And that’s a reasonable substitute.

MJ

Michael Jackson died.  I didn’t know that.  Did you?  I was hoping the story would go away by now, but it hasn’t, so I might as well weigh in on it; everyone else has.

Michael Jackson died fifteen days ago, on June 25th.  His death is still in the news.  He died twenty-five years and two days after his last top 40 song hit the Billboard top 40 charts.  That song was #38.  To quote James Thurber, “You could look it up.”  I know you could, because I did.  So for the past 25 years, Michael Jackson has been famous mostly for being weird, plus for two instances in which someone publicly accused him of being a child molester.  More than anyone else since Elvis Presley, dying was the best thing Michael Jackson could possibly have done for his career.

There’s an old saying in public relations; it’s okay to die, but never screw up on a slow news day.  Michael Jackson may have died in a slow news year.  The coverage of his death has been astounding and considering how important he was to the grand scheme of things, the coverage of his death has been appalling.  I think Congressman Pete King was appalled at the coverage and because of that, he overreacted to it.  I’ve known Pete since before he was a Congressman.  If we ran into each other, we would each say hello and we’d stop and chat for a few minutes if time permitted.  We did the last time we saw each other.  I think calling Jackson a pervert and a molester was an overreaction.  The singer may very well have been those things, but there’s no proof of it.  He may just have been a battered psyche who was denied his childhood and denied himself his adulthood to compensate.  I think Pete was appalled at so much coverage of something so trivial and said what he did in an attempt to shock the public into realizing how overblown and silly this whole spectacle was, and still is. 

The other day, during my lunch hour, I got to see a small part of the wall-to-wall coverage of his funeral, the cortege coming from the cemetery to the Staples Center.  Live TV coverage of nothing happening is something we should not do, even though we can.  

Could we please stop this now and pay attention to something important, like how far President Obama’s jaw dropped when he saw a pretty young woman walk by?  I can’t be the only person who longs for the time when trivial pursuit was a board game and not a synonym for journalism. 

Things I Know

  • Oh, joy!  Results are in for the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton writing contest.   I was reading them aloud to my wife until she begged me to stop.  http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2009.htm

  • I think the runner up in the adventure category is my favorite:  “In a flurry of flame and fur, fangs and wicker, thus ended the world’s first and only hot air baboon ride.”  Gary Larson didn’t write that, but it does remind me how much I miss “Far Side.”

  • If you are a public figure who has screwed up royally, embarrassing yourself and your family, admit you were wrong, apologize, ask the public for forgiveness and then shut up.  You may want to reread step # 4, if you are the current governor of South Carolina.

  • Billy Mays died.  But if you call within the next 15 minutes ….

  • The blog consumerist.com had a joke about Billy Mays that struck me funnier than my own joke.  They said after hearing Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died, Billy Mays was heard to remark, “”But wait!  There’’s more!””

  • Gail Storm died too, but she was old enough and out of the public eye long enough when she did that very few people cared, and a lot of people were surprised to find out she was still alive.

  • All of the publicity attendant to Michael Jackson’s death leads me to believe he was almost as famous as Tim Russert.

Things I Know

  • The worst thing about being an adult is today wasn’t the last day of school and I cant go out and play for the next ten weeks.

  • That executive parking space I got in April, they took it away today.  Is that handwriting I see on the wall?

  • If you missed National Dry Martini Day (June 19th) because you were drunk, you probably have a drinking problem.

  • I like a good play on words as much as the next person.  Maybe more.  So kudos to Bill Korbel, weatherman for News 12, a cable news channel on Long Island.  Mr. Korbel said he’s no longer worried about global warming.  It’s global wetting that has him concerned.

  • I was excited recently when someone registered as a commenter on my blog.  Then I looked up the e-mail address and discovered that it wasn’t someone who registered.  It was some thing, a spambot from Switzerland of all places.

  • An infant was abandoned in a shoe box in the lobby of an apartment building in Hempstead NY on Sunday night.  This is either an act of desperation or something as cold and uncaring as it’s possible to be.

  • They caught the woman who allegedly did that.  She’s a 24-year-old, Illegal alien, drug-adicted prostitute with six other children under the age of eight.

  • When Ed McMahon died at the age of 86, I did what I always do when I notice that someone has passed away.  I subtracted my age from his and said to myself, “”I hope I have more time left than that.”

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • I was in a 2.5 hour meeting today with two other people.  Each of them left their cell phone buzzing or ringing and each of them answered their cell phone more than once.  Am I wrong, or is that rude?

  • Mark Sanford.  What?  Was he thinking?  Governor Sanford, meet Murphy and his law.

  • Is South Carolina’s newspaper. “The State,” out of line for publishing Governor Mark Sanford’s e-mails to his lover?  They didn’t come from his government account.  And is Governor Sanford out of line for not spell checking his e-mail?  Maybe he did spell check it.  The trouble with trusting a spell checker is that if your mistake is also a word, the spell checker won’t tell you it’s wrong.  And neither “world wind” nor “lightening” will trigger the spell checker, which doesn’t know you mean “whirlwind” and “lightning.”

  • Did Jenny Sanford write that statement by herself?  If she did, she has a future in crisis management PR.

  • She’s classy and he’s not.

  • Let me get this straight.  Jon and Kate Gosselin are getting divorced because they’ve been living apart for two years, right?  And their TV show is a “reality” show?

  • Ed McMahon died.  How dead is he?

  • You can eat blueberry pie without vanilla ice cream, but why would you?  I grow blueberries in my yard and they never make it inside the house.  I pick and eat them as I’m walking past the bushes while I’m mowing the lawn.

Fathers’ Day

On Father’s Day, I’d like to share with you an image that my daughter gave me a while ago.  She said that when she was a toddler, she thought she was really strong because she could push open some really heavy doors.  She learned later that I was standing behind her and reaching over her head to help her push.

Thats what daddies do, isn’t it?  We help our children to do what they have to do. Sometimes we do it out in the open and sometimes, as in opening those big, heavy doors, we do it behind their backs, or over their heads, or both.  Sometimes, we have to resist temptation and do it for them.  We have to let them do it for themselves, so they can grow up.  My in-laws, who were wonderful people and treated me better than my blood relatives did, had one characteristic that drove me crazy.  They treated my wife and me less like adults than I would like.  If we lived with them it would have been unbearable, but we didn’t, so it’s really not much of a complaint, is it?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could pass along to your children those characteristics you admire in yourself and to keep them from getting any of your shortcomings?  If you have a tendency toward depression, you’d love to keep your children from suffering the same thing.  If you’re tall and heavy, it would be great to pass along the tall, but not the heavy; the good teeth and not the bad eyesight.  We can’t do that, of course, but it’s still rewarding to see and hear ourselves in our children and it’s even better to see them accomplish more than you did, by beginning their lives standing on your shoulders, while you stand on the shoulders of your father and mother. 

My son pulled a few things that reflected to me what I did to help his mother raise him.  When he was a child, I often said to him, “If what you’re doing isn’t working, try something else.”  I smiled the first time I heard him say, “What I was doing wasn’t working, so I figured I’d try something else.”  When he moved to California, he tried to call his girlfriend and she had turned her cell phone off.  He said, “I asked her to leave it on. She never listens.”  I replied, “Funny, I feel the same way about you.”

My father didn’t even go to high school.  He wasn’t stupid by any means.  His father died when he was 10 years old and when he was 13 and graduated from eighth grade, he dropped out of school to support his mother, brothers and sisters.  My sister and I received Master’s Degrees on the same day.  My son graduated from law school.  My sister’s daughter is going into her junior year at an Ivy League university.  So, if your children turned out at least as good as mine did, wish yourself a happy Father’s Day and if they didn’t, blame it on them, not you.

Bob Lawrence

It was a cold, nasty winter Saturday morning, probably in 1969 or 1970.  Dennis Quinn, who went on to a long and successful run at WPIX FM and CD 101.9 in NY City, was on the air at WGBB in Merrick NY and the sun wasn’t up yet.  In those days, Dennis called himself Jim Quinn.  Yes, GBB is licensed to Freeport, but the studios were just north of the Long Island Railroad Station in Merrick.   I want to say it was around 4:00 AM, but it might have been a little later.

I walked into the studio.  Dennis announced to the audience that I had arrived and asked, “Tom, how cold is it?”  Who’s listening to a station pumping out 250 watts on a winter Saturday morning before the sun comes up?  So, I stole a line from legendary broadcaster Jean Shepherd and said, “It’s colder than a well digger’s…No, it’s colder than a witch’s…No, it’s colder than a brass monkey’s….”  Dennis played a record and laughed at what I’d just done.  By the broadcast standards of 40 years ago, it was a little racy and I guess Dennis thought it was original.

The studio hotline rang.  Who’s listening to a 250 watt station at something like 4:30 AM on a cold, nasty Saturday morning?  The program director was listening.  Bob Lawrence was listening.  Dennis picked up the phone and listened to the sound of Bob laughing his head off.  Bob thought it was one of the funniest things he had heard in a long time.

Whew!  Program directors held the power of life and death over at-will employees like deejays and newscasters and Bob thought it was funny too.  I didn’t work directly for him and we weren’t close friends outside of work, but I knew Bob as an easy-going, upbeat man with a lot of energy and a radiant smile.  If he ever screamed at people, I wasn’t one of them.  He was a talented and versatile broadcaster too.  He pulled various air shifts at the station, but mostly 9 AM to noon.  He was the PD and for a time after I left, the station manager too.  And in his spare time, he was a voice of the NY Islanders hockey team when they were going around winning all those Stanley Cups.

Why am I reminded of this today?  Bob passed away this afternoon around 1:30.  I didn’t know Bob had cancer until yesterday.  He didn’t mention it at the WGBB reunion in April.  I don’t think Bob burdened a lot of people with his troubles.  Bob Lawrence is dead and the world is a poorer place for it.  Damn it!

Things I Know

  • I am an appointed public official, not an elected one, but when my daughter was in high school, she was disturbed that one of her social studies teachers knew me because of what I do.  So, from my perspective, and in my opinion, David Letterman was out of line in his joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter, no matter which one he was talking about.    Plus he committed the cardinal sin of offensive jokes; it wasn’t funny.  Elected officials seek the spotlight, so I say make fun of them anyway you want, but leave their minor children alone.

  • Carrie Prejean is a lot more famous today than she would have been if she had won the Miss USA title earlier this year.

  • Local anesthesia is the only kind I want.  If I’m getting surgery in New York, I want the anesthesia within reach.  Having it in Chicago or Los Angeles just won’t do.

  • Developments in bankruptcy court notwithstanding, Little Anthony and the Fiats won’t be the same as Little Anthony and the Imperials.

  • I need a new doctor.  I’m old enough that when I show up in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt, and announce I’m there for my physical for summer camp, I ought to get a laugh.  But I’ve been doing it in the same doctor’’s office for long enough that they’ve all heard it before and I don’t even get a chuckle or a snicker. 

  • Thanks to union contracts, people who work where I do get rewarded if they don’t use all of their allotted sick days and vacation time.  When they retire, they are paid for a certain number of days they didn’t use during their career.  The economy is bad, so our mayor is trying to cut back.  Good for him.  The mayor asked department heads to propose 10-percent cuts in their current year’s budgets.  I can’t.  Because of that accumulated leave, even if I fire someone, I can’t.   And, if I quit, whoever replaces me can’t either.

  • I’m not growing tomatoes this year.  It was too rainy and cool to start them early.  And the garden beds can use a rest.  So, this year, I’ll pass.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Have you read about the Israeli woman who bought her mother a new mattress and threw the old one away?  The old one stuffed with a million dollars! 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/10/million-dollar-mattress-thrown-away 

I’m skeptical.  A million dollars in US currency weighs around a hundred pounds, maybe 110, assuming it’s all in hundred dollar bills.  I assume Israeli currency weighs roughly what US currency does and I doubt anyone converts their life savings into hundred dollar bills.  So it would likely be in mixed, mostly smaller denominations and therefore, it’s likely to weigh more than that.

If the mattress you were throwing away had the body of a young, slim woman on it, you’d notice the extra weight, wouldn’t you?  On the other hand, maybe the million dollars was in the form of a check.

Adam Lambert, runner up on this year’s version of “American Idol,” announced that he’s gay.  Two questions:  why should anyone care, and among those people who do care, did anyone really think he was straight?

My doctor’s office called to confirm my appointment this week.  If I were Jewish, would they still have confirmed the appointment, or would they have Bar Mitzvahed the thing?

As the US government switches frequency spectrums and makes TV go digital, I do have one TV that needs a converter box to work with the new system.  I’m not getting one.  The TV is near death anyway.  I’ll just throw it away. 

Things I Know

  • I saw Larry King sing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” at Wrigley Field recently during the Cubs-Dodgers Fox Game of the Week.  No criticism here.  I can’t sing either and if they asked me to sing at a major league baseball game, I’d do it too.

  • “How are you” is hardly ever a real question, so I’m on a one-man mission to discourage its use.

  • I got a phone call today from a woman soliciting contributions for a charity.  She said, “How are you?”  I said, “I’m fine, but that’s probably not why you called.”

  • The contractor came to fix my garage last week.  He said, “How are you?”  I said, “I’m sick.”  He said, “Then I won’t kiss you.”  I knew there was an upside to the miserable cough I’ve had for more than a week.

  • I’ve never had any trouble staying awake, so I should never take a medicine that has insomnia as a listed side effect.

  • It’s June and I’ve had so little sleep lately, I feel like I should have gone to somebody’s prom.

  • One of the reasons I’m so healthy is when I was a child, my parents used to do things like make me play in the sunshine, and fed me wholesome foods such as hot dogs wrapped in bacon.

  • I’ve actually gotten answers to a few of the questions I’ve asked on my blog since I started it in February 2008.  Germs do get sick.  Bacteriophages cause them to.  And you can buy an MP3 player with an AM radio in it.  As far as I know there’s only one.  But it’s designed more to record radio shows over the air and works better for that than it does if used to play MP3 music files and podcasts.

  • One reason AM radios in mini-music devices are so rare is the device has to be bigger to accommodate the antenna for an AM radio.  An FM radio can use the earphone cord as an antenna.

  • My daughter told me recently someone she knows made a joke, the gist of which was viruses can’t read.  She made a better joke when she said, “Of course not; the print would be way too big.”

  • Some people believe that an nonviable fetus is a mass of cells and that removing it is a medical procedure.  Some people believe it’s a human life and that removing it is murder.  This is a dispute that will never be settled because the only way to settle it is to ask God, assuming God exists.  And in the words of Lilly Tomlin, “When God talks to you, its called schizophrenia.” However, I’m very sorry there isn’t universal condemnation of the guy who gunned down a doctor during a church service last weekend.  Three lefts make a right; two wrongs don’t.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Can we give President Obama his own TV show so he won’t interrupt all the other shows so much?

  • Who invented the common cold?  It was a really, really bad idea.

  • Is nothing sacred?  A woman in Dayton Ohio was caught embezzling money from the sale of Girl Scout Cookies.  She has agreed to repay $20,000.  If she stole the cookies instead of the money, and if all the cookies were Thin Mints, I’d buy as many as I could afford from her so she could pay back the Girl Scouts.

  • If speed bumps slow down traffic, what do goose bumps do?

  • I went to a catered fund-raising dinner where one of the deserts on the buffet was cream puffs filled with chocolate pudding rather than whipped cream.  Why didn’t I think of that?

  • If I buy a Saturn and lose my job, Saturn will make my car payments, right?  What happens if I buy a Saturn and I lose my job and Saturn goes out of business?

  • Has there ever been a reality TV show that contained even one iota of reality?

Things I Know

  • I’m looking for a great big Fiat decal to put on the back window of my Chrysler.

  • I used to think upper respiratory infection was just a longer way to say bronchitis.  I was wrong.  Bronchitis, it turns out, is actually a lower respiratory infection.   Who knew?

  • If Judge Sotomayor saved baseball, maybe she’s okay, but some things she has said trouble me.

  • I don’t know why the news media is so obsessed with opposition to this Supreme Court nominee.  Republicans don’t have enough votes to do anything about it except ask a few questions.  I’d be surprised if she isn’t confirmed by at least 80 votes in the Senate.

  • The commercial for www.hulu.com featuring Dennis Leary is brilliant.  It’s even better than the one with Alec Baldwin.  Leary comes across as a little more maniacal

  • If being well known is what qualifies contestants to leave the island on the new reality TV show, “I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here,” then some of the contestants are going to be there for a long time.

  • Nobody should be surprised if GM, soon to be known as Government Motors, goes bankrupt next week.  The company has been in decline for more than 40 years.  Not a steady decline, but a long-term decline nevertheless.

Adventures in Musteroling

Do germs get sick?  I hope so.

Getting well and staying well are two major driving forces in the world’s economic engine, but otherwise, I don’t see any purpose for illness.  I know there are people who contend that you can’t enjoy the good without something bad to compare it to.  Count me as dubious.  I, for one, would like to try enjoying good with no bad.

When I was a kid if you were sick and moping around home, my Aunt Nancy, who was a nurse, called that “musteroling,” after the mustard-based patent medicine ointment.  I don’t know if they still make Musterole; I don’t think so.   Musterole.com is a website written in Arabic.  I don’t pretend to understand Arabic, but the website doesn’t seem to be selling ointment.

I’ve been musteroling for the past week.  It’s no fun.  Being sick is not a good way to use up all of your sick days at work either.  I don’t think what I have is serious, but I haven’t gotten any better, even though I’ve watched as much daytime TV as I could stand, and a little more.  I hope I don’t have to take the drastic step of eating hospital food to get well.  That would mean going to the hospital and I already know from experience that being hospitalized is a bad idea.

My adventures in musteroling started last Friday.  I had an infected ingrown toenail, so off I went to the podiatrist.  He told me I actually had two infected toenails, cut and pulled out little pieces.  Pulling your nails out probably was effective as torture when people used to do it for that purpose.  The podiatrist certainly over-estimated how much pulling of nails I could tolerate without local anesthesia.  Ouch is just one of the many four-letter words I uttered.

Then, over the weekend, my throat got sore, my head got stuffy and instead of performing the requisite food grilling ritual on Memorial Day, I was musteroling.  Soon afterward, I developed chest congestion, a post-nasal deluge and a horrible cough.  How bad is the cough?  It hurts!  My chest and stomach muscles are sore from coughing.  I’ve been sleeping all week in a reclining chair.  At least it took my mind off my feet. 

It’s not the worst cough I ever had.  For that one, it also hurt my back to cough.  If you cough so hard you pull a muscle in your back, try leaning against a wall to cough.  That seemed to help me.

On Wednesday, I felt a little better, but that was just the germs messing with me.  So on Thursday, I went to the doctor.  One thing I hate when I go the doctor is if anyone there says, “How are you?”  That’s what I’m there to find out.  The doctor gave me a rapid flu test.  I thought she said rabbit flu test, but no, it was rapid flu test.  There is such a thing as rabbit flu, but it’s much rarer than the swine flu that’s all the rage right now.  I don’t have the flu. 

So, I had to have a chest x-ray to find out if I have pneumonia.  Don’t know yet.  Hope not.  I’ve done that before and I don’t want to do it again.  My wife has pneumonia.  She had something very similar to what I have, but she had it first and went to the doctor first.  She caught the pneumonia just as it was starting and seems to be doing fine.  She will, of course, have another x-ray in a few days to make sure she is doing fine.  It’s important she takes care of herself.  If she doesn’t, how will she take care of me?

As I was leaving the doctor’s office this afternoon, the receptionist said to me, “Feel better.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” I replied.

Things I Know

  • Those guys calling me all the time have it wrong.  The two cars I own are about to expire.  The warranties for those two cars expired a long time ago.

  • Not only are Senators Warner and Schumer after the auto warranty sales callers, so is the entire Internet.  http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8i1u7/want_the_phone_number_to_the_your_cars_warranty/

  • I never buy anything from telemarketers or spammers.  Doing so would encourage them to do it again and they don’t need any encouragement.

  • My oldest friend signed up for Facebook, so I signed up too.    It’s too early to tell if I like it.

  • These days when I go outside, my car is covered with flowers.  That’s a whole lot better than my car being covered with snow.

  • Weather permitting; I will get to see a Met game at Citi Field in July.

Things I Know About Facebook

When I was a kid, another kid in my neighborhood used to go up to people he knew and people he didn’t know too and ask, “Are you my friend the best?”

If computers were as advanced as they are now, and if he were good with computers, he could have invented Facebook, or MySpace.  But they weren’t and he wasn’t, so he didn’t.

My oldest friend recently joined Facebook and he invited me to join, so I did.  I’m certainly no expert, but here are a few things I’ve learned in the few days I’ve belonged.  The first is both of my adult children use Facebook.  I am not going to ask them to be my friends.  I don’t think they’d want that.  I’m their father, not their friend.

Some people are very selective and some people want to accumulate as many friends as possible.  If you have a lot of friends and they’re all chatty, you could spend your entire life reading your wall.  I know some people are addicted to Facebook.  I’m not, at least not yet.  I’ll keep you posted right here and maybe on my wall too.

A couple of people I don’t know invited me to be their friends.  I accepted one of them because he is and I used to be in the broadcast news business and we know a lot of the same people.  The guy posts a lot.  He posts more than everyone else on my list of friends combined.  It’s almost like having your own personal AP news wire.

Some of the profile pictures are pretty strange and some of them aren’t very useful.  My picture has me in the foreground, and the Grand Canyon in the background.  Still, if I didn’t know it was me, I wouldn’t recognize me in the picture.  One of my friends apparently took his own picture, not with a tripod, but by holding the camera at arm’s length.  That didn’t really work so well.  Another looks kind of like an 18th-century pirate in his picture since he’s wearing a head scarf and the picture is taken on a boat.  Of all my friends, the profile picture I like the best is the one of that closely resembles Grizzly Adams.

The Facebook search engine could be a lot more useful.  The thing I find really strange is you can search for a person’s name and get a pages of results and nothing near the top seems to have anything to do with that name.  How exactly does that work?  At least it could tell you something more about a name you search for than just the name and the listing of their friends.  I’d like it if you could click on and enlarge profile pictures that show up with a search.  That way, you’d have a better chance of recognizing the person in the picture.  I’d like it if you could do the same thing to pictures of people in lists of friends and for the same reason.

I know Facebook is a business and it is to the owners’ advantage to have as many members as possible.  Still, I wouldn’t want to let the program search my contact list for those people who are on their system and then invite them all to be my friends.  There are people on my contact list I wouldn’t want to annoy and a few I wouldn’t want to annoy me.

It doesn’t surprise me that people of both major political parties follow politicians who don’t share their political views.  It does surprise me a little that politicians from both major political parties follow other politicians who don’t share their political views.

I don’t know how much it costs and I don’t have anything to sell, but if I had something to sell, it seems to me ads on Facebook could be extremely targeted.  So for some things, it’s got to be an effective marketing tool.

I have 14 friends so far.  If I get to feeling strongly, one way or the other, about Facebook, I’ll let you know.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Did they release the results of the MRI of the horse “I Want Revenge” that scratched from the Kentucky Derby?  I was wondering, did the MRI make the horse’s nose itch too?

  • All the spam I get offers to sell me Cialis or Viagra.  Why doesn’t anyone try to sell Levitra that way?

  • If I needed Cialis or Viagra, I’d already be annoyed, so what makes the Internet spam generators think I need to be further annoyed with nine-million unwanted e-mails a week?

  • I know there are exceptions to the federal no-call law, but if I went to the trouble of getting on the no call list, what makes anyone think I’d welcome their call, even if it falls into one of the exceptions?  When my cell phone company started calling me because my contract was expiring, I told them that if I had to stop doing business with them to get them to stop calling me that could be arranged.

  • Could the Mets possibly catch the ball or hit the ball or both when Johan Santana is pitching?

  • A few years ago, my wife let slip a previously carefully guarded secret.  She likes lilacs.  I wonder what awful thing she expected to happen once I knew that.  So far, she’s got four lilac bushes growing in the back yard.  I bought the most recent one for Mother’s Day.   Each is a different color.  Is that so bad?

Things I Know

  • Marty Ingles suggested that his wife, actress Shirley Jones of Partridge Family fame, ought to pose naked for Playboy.  Shirley Jones is 75.  Well, he got her name all over the media and he was once a comedian.

  • I’ve been objecting for years to the practice of using the word “like” instead of using a comma, or just pausing.  I went to one Ivy League University for less time than it takes to graduate.  Our first lady, Michelle Obama went to two Ivy League Universities and graduated from both.  Michelle Obama uses the word “like” that way.  If it’s okay for the first lady, I guess we’ve lost that battle and I’ll shut up about it.

  • If you’re a TV reporter who has to do live updates over a period of hours from a place where nothing is happening, that’s got to be more boring to do than it is to watch.  And it is boring to watch.

  • Last week, on Tuesday, I heard a radio replay of a call in Monday night’s Mets game.  The play-by-play announcer said the Mets had back-to-back two-run homers.  That’s impossible!

  • You can’t work or laugh your ass off.

I Eventually Apologized to Horses

My story of how I left one job just before my boss was about to favor me with his guidance hit a nerve; at least the story provoked a response.  That was a job in the normal world.  Here’s one from the abnormal world (AKA radio).

If you are what the broadcasting industry calls talent and you lose your job, you have to move, sell cars or insurance, or go into advertising or public relations until you can find another on-the-air job in the market where you live.  Sometimes the people at the unemployment office understand and sometimes not.  In one market where I was fired, there were 13 radio stations including the two that just fired me.  Assuming the people who canned me meant it, there were 11 other stations where I could seek employment and since some owners had more than one station, there were fewer than 11 companies eligible to engage my services.  Some of those were places where I wouldn’t work and some probably wouldn’t hire me.

To get another on-air job, I moved six hours away from where I’d lived before.  It didn’t go well.  One reason was that I was young and full of myself.  There were probably others.  My employer may even have caused some of them.  I’m not in favor of burning bridges behind me, but when I was in my early 20’s and hot headed (I’m neither now), I had no objection to throwing what arson investigators call an accelerant on a bridge that was already on fire and this situation was already hopeless.

My boss and I agreed on only one thing.  We each thought the other was a pig-headed idiot.  I was right and now that I’m more mature, I’m willing to allow that he may have been right too.  One day, I had a huge argument with him; I don’t remember why.  I called him another part of another animal’s anatomy.  I called him a horse’s ass, if you must know.  It was not a nice thing to say about horses.  I’m sorry now, but I wasn’t sorry then.

My boss tattled to his boss.  His boss told me, in front of my boss, that I had to apologize.  You already know what’s coming, don’t you?  That’s right!  In front of both of them, I said, “Okay, I’m sorry you’re a horse’s ass.”

Two or three years ago, I was at a conference in Albany, NY.  At dinner on the closing night, the organizers hired a comedian.  I wish I remembered his name.  He was funny.  Most of his act was about how he was fired from all the jobs he had before he became a comedian.  After the show, I told him I enjoyed his act and that I could empathize because I was once fired for apologizing to my boss.  Then I told him the story I just told you.  Another reason I wish I could remember the comedian’s name is to find out whether he incorporated my story into his act.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • How can National Vanilla Pudding day fall in the middle of National Chocolate Custard Month?  That’s just not right!

  • “I Want Revenge,” the pre-race favorite in the Kentucky Derby, was scratched on race day because of a sore ankle.  The horse’s owners said they were going to give the three-year-old colt an MRI to determine the extent of the injury.  Do they have to use an open MRI on a horse?

  • Over the winter, the NY Mets signed left-handed pitcher Oliver Perez to a three-year, $36 million contract.  Perez has shown flashes of brilliance, but has been inconsistent during his career.  Who would have thought that when he turned consistent this year, he would turn consistently bad?

  • Raccoon roundworm, a rare and serious disease that can be fatal, has been reported in New York City.  It is spread, according to one article through ingestion of raccoon feces.  Is ingesting raccoon feces really a big public health problem?

Things I Know

  • Open mouth, insert foot, speak, and then think.  That’s the wrong order, Vice President Biden.

  • I’ve only worked one place in my entire life, a radio station, where former employees hold reunions and other former employees go to the reunions.  I go to the reunions even though the station fired me.  We had one last weekend.  It was nice to see all those people again.

  • I haven’t been fired since I stopped working at radio stations.

  • If you were wondering how hotel staff or police get into a hotel room when the door is locked with a chain from the inside.  One answer is a strong magnet.

  • I heard someone say recently that they wish they could go back to high school, knowing what they know now.   Because I know what I now know, I don’t want to go back to high school.

  • The Mega Millions Lottery on Friday has a big prize of around $220 million.  Your chances of winning if you don’t buy a ticket are zero.  Your chances of winning if you do buy a ticket are still virtually zero, unless, of course, you win.  So, make a joke about what you would do if you won, but don’t make plans to give it away until you do win.  And don’t bet the rent either.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Can you remember the last time you saw a May Pole?

  • Do you need a license to run amok?

  • If I buy a buttered roll or muffin for breakfast at my local deli, the butter only sticks to one side.  Why?  Do you think it’s a plot by the people who manufacture plastic knives?

  • William Parente.  Why?  Once again someone killed a bunch of other people, in this case his wife and two daughters, in a Maryland hotel and then killed himself.  If, as has been suggested, he was in trouble with the law for running a Ponzi scheme, perhaps he thought his arrest and imprisonment would ruin his family’s lives.  They might have recovered.  They can’t recover from being murdered.

  • Chocolate candy cigarettes supposedly encourage smoking.  I wonder what chocolate Easter bunnies encourage.

  • If Chrysler does merge with Fiat, how long will it take before Chryslers rust that fast?

  • Did you think you’d live to see General Motors become a government agency?

Perfect Timing

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I worked for a fictitious company.  Let’s call it Dun & Bradstreet for want of a better name.  The company was nice to me.  The boss was nice to me.  Working conditions were decent too, but I’ve mentioned before that I’m crazy so it may come as no surprise that I wanted to be on the radio.   I became a stringer for the best local news operation in the area.  A stringer gets paid by the story.  The more you work, the more you make.  I worked so much that my full time job was interfering with my stringing.  I made more money stringing than I did from meaningful employment.

One Monday morning, I arrived early at my place of business.  My desk normally had a rack on it which contained about 500 files.  That Monday morning, no files, no rack.  A few minutes later, my boss walked in with my rack and my files under his arm.  My poor boss.  Because he bore the mantle of leadership, he had taken my files home and spent the weekend reviewing them.  He told me as he walked past my desk that he wanted to talk to me in his office.

I never found out what he wanted to say.  You see, I wanted to talk to him too and as I entered his office I told him it would probably save some time if I went first.  My full-time job, I said, was seriously interfering with my career, so I quit.

Perfect timing!

Things I Know

  • I was kidding with a friend this week and said, “Have a nice day, or go to work.  Your choice.”  Today, I didn’t do either one; I went to the dentist.

  • Paul Giblin, one of two reporters who just won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, was laid off between the time he co-wrote the stories and the time he won the prize.  So was an editor who oversaw the project. 

  • I met a guy who won a Nobel Prize and one who won a Pulitzer, right after each prize was announced.  In both cases, I was more excited than they were.

  • If I’m listening to the NY Yankees on the radio and John Sterling is doing the play-by-play, I always hope no Yankee hits a home run.  One signature home run call is plenty for me.

  • In New York City, an SUV plunged out of the sixth floor of a parking garage and fell three stories to crash on to the roof of the building next door.  Newsday reported that the cause of the accident was not immediately known.  Attention Newsday:  gravity caused the accident.  Always happy to help.

  • The way the Yankees chose camera angles during the ceremonies when the new Yankee Stadium opened, you couldn’t tell if Yogi Berra was able to reach home plate without bouncing the ceremonial first pitch.  I don’t care if he did.  Mr. Berra is a baseball treasure.

  • Close proximity to a very attractive woman decreases the typical man’s IQ by a measurable amount; a large, and easily measurable amount.  The effect is sometimes temporary.

  • The bad news for New York baseball fans is if you average Chien-Ming Wang’s and Johan Santana’s ERA’s, the answer you get is about 17!  The good news for Mets fans is Johan’s ERA is under 0.50.

  • The strangest headline I’ve seen in a long time is: “Stephen Hawking Is Gravely Ill.”  A brilliant mathematician and physicist, Professor Hawking has been seriously ill with Lou Gehrig’s Disease for most of his life, so that headline isn’t news at all.  Now, sadly, Dr. Hawking is hospitalized, suffering from another serious, but undisclosed illness.  Lou Gehrig’s Disease is incurable.  We hope he recovers from whatever else ails the body which encases his remarkable mind and spirit.

  • Finally, a warm weekend!

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Do you think paving over the area where Shea Stadium used to be got rid of the strong smell of urine?

  • What did the golden goose ever do to merit so many people trying to kill it?

  • Why do we need any ado at all, let alone much ado or further ado?

  • If you could care less, wouldn’t you?

  • Why don’t people ever watch TV on television?

  • The ground hog saw its shadow.  Isn’t the six weeks up yet?

  • Isn’t it too early to rehabilitate Eliot Spitzer?

  • Madonna says she fell off a horse on Long Islands fashionable east end because paparazzi jumped out of the bushes and spooked the animal.  So, how come there aren’t any pictures of the event?

Things I Know

  • In the second inning, I’m thinking Mike Pelfry may have been the wrong choice as the Mets’ starter in the first official game at the new Citi Field.  Tom Seaver was the only choice to throw out the ceremonial first pitch.  I’m glad Seaver was able to throw it to Mike Piazza without bouncing it.   He bounced his ceremonial last pitch at Shea.

  • As a culture, we over-use the word “Hero,” but just for the record, Richard Phillips:  Hero!

  • If we are in fact waiting, as David Gregory said on NBC Sunday morning, for official confirmation of the arrival of the “first dog” at the White House, then many of us who do not have them now should get lives.

  • It’s hard, but don;t pay attention to rumors.  What actually happened is I got reappointed to the job I already had and to a second job as well.  So I have more work to do and I like that.  I now have a reserved parking space too.  In order to get to it, I turn left when leave the building at night.  I used to turn right.  Believe it or not, it’s a change I’m having a hard time getting used to.

  • I’m older than the median for the US population.  That’s no surprise; half of us are.  So, if you’re walking in the same area I am, chances are you’re fast enough to keep up, agile enough to get out of the way, or both.  Pedestrians in Manhattan used to be good at walking in crowds and not getting in the way.  They aren’t anymore.

  • Rule #1:  The boss is always right.

  • Rule #2:  If the boss is wrong, refer to Rule #1.

  • In my experience, Rule #2 is immutable.

  • Change happens.  So does entropy.

  • I don’t think there’s a person in the USA who thinks the baby sitter killed Caylee Anthony.  And since Casey Anthony doesn’t have any money, all I can see that the baby sitter is accomplishing in pursuing a lawsuit is giving publicity to and repeating the false charge that the baby sitter did it.

The Vagaries of Language

We do some funny things in the English language.  A friend and former colleague commented on it last month in his blog, www.wessays.blogspot.com.  It’s entry 527.  I would have called it to your attention earlier, but I’ve been away and it took me a while to catch up. 

Wes says the word misspeak actually means lie and it is but one example of watering down the English language.  I think Wes made a small omission because misspeak also means mistake, but both mistake and lie are stronger words than misspeak, so Wes is correct with respect to the principle of the thing.  Reading Wes’s blog regularly is anything but a mistake; I recommend it.

We do water down the language; we also distill it.  The word hero is overused and the way it is used takes a strong word and uses it as if it were weaker.  People are lauded as heroes when they didn’t even do something brave, just considerate.  When I was a fine young physical specimen (if you blinked you missed it) if I jumped into warm water to rescue someone who appeared to be drowning, I would have been nice, not heroic.  I’m a good swimmer and I learned how to rescue people without drowning myself.

If I did the same thing in icy water, I would have cramped into a ball, sunk to the bottom and drowned.  That wouldn’t have been heroic either, even though it would have been done at risk of my life; it would have been stupid.  Incidentally, I never became a lifeguard because the one time I took the lifeguard test, the water was extremely cold and the testers pulled me out after I cramped up but before I sank.

To be heroic, I think the hero has to exhibit bravery and risk life and limb.  Today, most headline writers have a much lower standard.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • There are several ways to spell Chanukah, so why is there only one way to spell Passover?

  • Is radio and cable TV host Glen Beck like that, or is it an act?

  • If I had a dog named Trick and I taught it to roll over, would I be guilty of turning a trick?

  • Do they still dye pistachios red?  Why?

  • The people who run the cable channel that carries NY Mets games schedule the live broadcasts of games for two-and-a-half hours.  They almost always last longer than that.  So why do they do it that way?

  • When Chrysler president Jim Press arrived at the New York International Auto Show the other day in a Fiat 500, he said Fiat and Chrysler didn’t have a merger to announce yet.  He also said that Chrysler was conducting business as usual.  That’s not a good idea, is it?

If Dying Was Easy, Everyone Would Do It.

When you were young, if you tried something and failed, did anyone ever say to you if whatever you tried was easy, everyone would do it?  Not correct!  Dying isn’t easy and everybody does that.  Depending on how fast you go, dying can be easy or hard on you, but it’s always hard on the loved ones you leave behind, assuming anyone does love you.

Everyone dies and everyone experiences grief and a sense of loss that accompanies the death of someone we care about or even a much-loved pet.  But when we talk about dying, we dance all around it.  He passed away.  We lost her.  He kicked the bucket.  She met her maker.  There are endless euphemisms; I won’t bore you.  I’m kind of fond of saying someone reached ambient temperature.  It takes a lot of people a long time to figure out what that means.  If we’re not going to be direct, I say obfuscate as much as humanly possible.

The usage that baffles me about death is what happens afterwards; she will be missed.  How do you know that, unless you are going to miss the deceased?  If you are planning to miss him, why not do it right now instead of putting it off?  Miss him now, not later.  Or miss her both now, and later.  Just don’t wait to start.  How long would it be appropriate to wait anyway?

I barely speak English.  Do they do that in other languages too?

I used to be nuts about death.  I would insist that when I die I didn’t want a wake.  Personally, I think Shiva is much more civilized than a wake.  Jewish people bury the deceased right away, usually the same day.  Then they gather at the home of the survivors and remember the one who is no longer there.  Irish Americans like me tend to stuff the old bat and have a party. 

I don’t worry about it anymore.  I haven’t been very good at controlling what goes on around me while alive, so when I die, I’m going to stop trying.  Maybe I’ll stop trying before that.  Whatever ritual surrounds the demise of someone is to comfort those left alive.  They should do what comforts them, not what would have comforted the person who died if they were still around.  So, the survivors should decide what happens and the dead person should relax and stay out of it.

Things I Know

  • The baseball season opens tonight.  Yay!  And it opens in the USA at a time of day when I don’t have to alter my sleeping habits to watch. 

  • Sunday is the first day of the week, but by Saturday, this will probably last as the dumbest thing I’ve heard all week.  On the radio this morning, I heard a doctor say we’ll have a worse pollen season this year than last because daylight saving time came three weeks earlier, so the plants will have more daylight to grow under.  Hello!  Daylight saving time does not make days longer.  It makes you get up an hour earlier so you don’t sleep through as much of the sunshine.

  • I may have to mow my lawn this week.  I knew there was something I didn’t like about warmer weather.

  • If I forget to lock my Blackberry before I put it in my pocket, either I take interesting photos of the inside of my pocket, or I call a random someone, sometimes someone I don’t know at all.

  • The phrase two-a-day no longer refers to football practice.  It now applies to someone killing a bunch of people and then killing him or herself.  This is bewildering, tragic and very, very sad.

  • Appointment update:  I’ve been told I will have a job after tomorrow night, but not the one I now have, or one I really like.  However, in this economy, jobs being as hard to find as they are, being employed full-time with benefits has more to recommend it than it once did.

Things I Know

  • Note to the brunette woman in the old, red Mercury Tracer headed north on Rte 17 in Ramsey NJ last Tuesday afternoon:  If everyone is passing you on the right, you have no business in the left lane.  Move over and stop blocking traffic.

  • Note to everyone who cut me off on Friday afternoon on the NY State Thruway (and there were lots of you):  If you do that, could you please drive faster than I am afterwards?  I don’t like to slow down either.

  • Central Avenue in Albany NY has joined the rare group of roads I won’t drive on anymore unless someone else pays to fix my car.

  • I made a big mistake when I bought something over the Internet using the e-mail address that goes to my Blackberry because the Blackberry doesn’t have a SPAM filter.

  • If you have 500 bored people with Blackberries in the same room, all of them won’t be able to get on the Internet at the same time.

  • I have a hard time sleeping in hotel rooms, especially the first night I’m there.  Because of that, I have no trouble sleeping in conference meeting rooms.  The solution should be obvious; put the beds in the meeting rooms and have the conference sessions in the hotel rooms.

  • I was at a conference this week.  I’ve been going to it off and on for 14 years and the one that just finished is the first one where I got a ribbon to go on the bottom of my badge.

Birthday Wishes

I come from a big family.  Not counting their spouses I had 12 aunts, and uncles, and “cousins by the dozens“was a reality for me.  If you count spouses, it gets harder because the question is do you count ex spouses?  If they are widows or widowers, certainly.  If their ex-ness is as a result of divorce, I make the judgment on an individual basis.  Truth be told, I liked some of the spouses better than some of the blood relatives. 

While I still have cousins by the dozens, I only have one uncle left.  He married one of my mother’s sisters and he loved her.  She didn’t make that easy.  She died many years ago.  He could have walked away from my crazy family, but didn’t.  Maybe he’s sad sometimes, but I think of him as upbeat and cheerful.  That’s the way he always is when I see him.  He’s also helpful.  He lives near my sister and he’s always been nice to her.  He’s a good man.  I wish I did share some of his genes.  His family is very long-lived and he is a remarkable physical specimen for a man of his age which is nearly 80.  I wish I was as physically active as this uncle and I’m nowhere near 80.

Why does he come up today?  It’s his birthday.When I was in grade school, he was a school bus driver and he used to tell the children on the bus that if they were good, he would take them to the circus for his birthday.  All but one of the kids looked forward to it.  I was the one who didn’t.  He was my uncle and I knew his birthday was April 1st, April Fools’ Day.  He never did take us to the circus.

Many years later, I was a Cubmaster and we were taking the tigers, bears and wolves to see the lions and elephants.  I ran into my uncle shortly before the Cub Pack’s trip to the circus and told him what we were doing.  Then I told him that he should really pay for the whole thing since he promised to take lots of kids to the circus over the years and never delivered.  He laughed.  He didn’t take the Cub Scouts to the circus either, but he thought it was funny that I remembered that as an adult.

Early in the life of this blog, I told you I remembered Leslie’s birthday because of humiliation.  I remember my uncle’s birthday because he didn’t take me to the circus.  Happy birthday Unk and Happy April Fools’ Day to everyone.

Things I Know

  • I now have reason to believe that I will be appointed by the new administration to the job I now have, or something similar.  I’m glad to hear that.  But I still have trouble thinking of myself as an adult with a responsible job.  And I can’t think of myself as a responsible adult at all.

  • If orders of protection worked, then at birth everyone would receive an order of protection against everyone else and there would be no conflict in the world, or at least no violence against other people.  But they don’t work.  If I wasn’t afraid of being charged with assault or murder, I wouldn’t be afraid of a contempt of court citation either.

  • Regis Philbin has been on TV for more hours than any other person in the history of the medium, but President Obama is catching up, fast.

  • There are way too many times when being right is no excuse.

  • Garrison Keillor on “Prairie Home Companion” said March is a month designed by God to show people who don’t drink what a hangover would be like.  For me, it’s an up and down month.  I was away for the weekend, and when I came back the crocuses were in bloom.  Hooray!  On the other hand, I ran out of Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookies and I’ll be out of them until next February.

  • When someone asks me how I am, I usually say, “Let me check,” pause for a moment and then tell them I’m fine.  I do that because “How are you?” isn’t usually a real question.  I do that too because Larry Glick, legendary Boston radio personality, made me chuckle when he used to do it and Larry passed away last week.  I didn’t know Larry, but I’ve never slept well and I used to listen to him often in the middle of the night.

  • The late comedian Sam Kinnison used to scream, “Move to where the food is,” as his advice for starving people of the world.  I have some sympathy for the people who live along the Red River in North Dakota, but early settlers had to live near rivers for transportation.  People who live there now already knew it floods and maybe they should move to higher ground.  I don’t always follow my own advice though.  I live 15 feet above sea level, four blocks from the water in an area subject to the occasional hurricane.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • When the Today show runs a live via satellite interview with real people who participated in some story, couldn’t they possibly find articulate real people?  Wouldn’t that make for a better program?

  • According to JD Powers Associates, the two auto makers who have the best quality across their entire brand are Jaguar and Buick.  Does that say good things about Jaguar and Buick quality, or bad things about the accuracy of JD Powers’ survey?

  • I truly don’t understand SPAM as a marketing tool.  How does annoying someone every day make them want to buy your product?  If I order a three-month supply of prescription drugs over the Internet, why would I need to order another three-month supply tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that?  Do you care that free shipping ends tomorrow when you know it begins again Saturday?  If I ask you not to e-mail me, why do you e-mail me to confirm that I don’t want to get your e-mail?  Don’t the people who do this know you can set your e-mail program to dump that stuff in the trash.

  • In this media intensive day and age, what’s the point of a wax museum?

  • When you are turning on to a highway with four or more lanes, you’re supposed to end up in the lane that’s going in your direction and closest to where you came from.  So if you turn left, you’re supposed to end up next to the center line of the road and if you turn right you’re supposed to turn near the curb.  You flunked your road test if you didn’t do that.  These days, if you count on people doing that, you’ll have an accident.  So, could everybody please do it right at least when there’s another vehicle coming from the opposite direction and turning with you?

WAND STRASSE

If your bosses wanted to give you a bonus that made you a millionaire, would you take it?  How about if your company had received government bailouts?  How about if the US Congress had passed a bill to specifically allow your bonus from the company that received government bailouts?  That’s really what happened in the case of AIG, the huge, international insurance conglomerate failure. 

The economic stimulus cargo (it’s too big to be a package) that was rammed through congress without anyone reading it did contain an amendment that allowed bonuses in companies that received stimuli as long as the bonuses were contracted prior to February 11th.  When I say NOBODY read it, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut was responsible for that amendment that allowed the bonuses and he apparently didn’t know it was in there so maybe he didn’t read the bill or write it.  It certainly looks that way.  Maybe the conservative talk show hosts who ranted and raved that nobody read the bill were right that someone should have before it came to a vote.

I have rarely driven or even walked on Wall Street and have no money in any of these markets.  So to me, the idea of performance bonuses for executives whose companies didn’t perform is alien and the idea of retention bonuses for people who leave your company is insane in the clinical sense.  I’m willing to make a concession for executives who achieved spectacularly well in a company that did badly, but only if the bonuses don’t jeopardize the company itself.   I think stock options, not cash, would be appropriate bonuses for a handful of executives who performed well when their companies didn’t.

What troubles me is the public officials who issued figurative calls for blood that could very easily have turned literal.   Several self-righteous office holders wanted the names and addresses of the bonus recipients to be made public. A demonstration brought bus riders to the homes of AIG executives in Fairfield County CT last Saturday.  AIG issued security tips to its employees and executives.    We’re getting dangerously close to a real witch hunt, complete with pitch forks and flaming torches.  I’m glad none of these executives were lynched.  That of course, would have been more wrong than the bonuses themselves.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s witch hunt resulted in many of those AIG bonuses being returned.  The overseas ones and the ones outside New York State jurisdiction, not so much.

An ex post facto law is one that makes something illegal after it happens.  If traffic cops issued tickets today to everyone with a drivers license because the government passed a law today making it illegal to go through a green light and made the law effective last week, that would be an ex post facto law.  Those are unconstitutional and have been since the constitution was written.  In fact the founding fathers thought it was so important to ban ex post facto laws that they are illegal according to Article I of the constitution.  So the US Congress rushing to punish the people who got those huge bonuses by taxing them after the fact at 90 percent seems unconstitutional to me.  But I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a justice of the US Supreme Court.  Enough money is involved here that the issue could very well come before the Supreme Court before things are done. 

Over the weekend, the Obama administration floated a trial balloon about limiting executive compensation in private companies that haven’t received bailout funds.  We’ve already driven most US manufacturing jobs overseas.  If we tax executive compensation in the financial industry too much, there’s nothing to prevent Wall Street from being translated into Wand Strasse or some other phrase that means Wall Street in some other language and some other country.  In fact, it would be a lot easier to export most of the jobs in finance than it was to export the manufacturing.  We could use the Internet to export most of them at very low cost.  Someone in a policy-making position ought to think about that before they dispose of both the baby and the bath water.

Things I Know (mini edition)

  • Happy Spring.

  • I have the kind of job that requires appointment each April.  I hope next month’s appointment comes through.  The people who’ve been appointing me for years weren’t reelected.

  • No matter what other turmoil exists in the world, I can still buy low-cost drugs without a prescription on the Internet.  Not that I want to, but I got 30-40 e-mails today reassuring me of that.  It’s nice to know there’s some consistency in the world.

Things I Know

  • Genealogists have discovered that America’s first African-American President also has enough Irish blood to make him three-point-something percent Irish.  That’s good enough for me, so Happy Saint Patrick’s Day President O’Bama.

  • Howard Hughes was eccentric.  I’m crazy.  A big factor in locating the boundary between eccentric and crazy is how much money you have.  I’ll always be crazy.

  • News item:  admitted swindler Bernard Madoff was sent to jail until he’s sentenced for his multi-billion Ponzi scheme.  His lawyers are appealing and trying to spring him.  If he doesn’t want to be in jail, he shouldn’t have pleaded guilty and he shouldn’t have done it either.

  • Until the market rose several days in a row last week, you could buy a share of stock in the company that owns Citibank for less money than the bank charges a non-customer to use its ATM’s. 

  • I’m glad I don’t have one of those new iPod shuffles.  It’s so small I’d probably lose it the first day.

  • I have a granite paving block in my office.  You can call it a Belgian block or a cobblestone if you like.  It’s a productivity tool.  On those days when I’m at work and  need to beat my head against a stone wall, I have a mini-wall right in my office so I don’t have to run around the building to find the stone wall with  the shortest line.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Maybe I missed something.  Has Meghan McCain, 24-year-old daughter of Arizona Senator John McCain, done anything on her own to justify the attention she’s received recently in all sorts of media?

  • March Madness (the NCAA basketball tournament) starts Sunday.  At least they announce the brackets Sunday.  But it doesn’t end until sometime in April.  Once they reach the final four, I know it’s not March anymore, but is it still madness?

  • I haven’t tried this, but could you have a computer password that consisted of eight asterisks in a row?  And if you did, how would it appear on screen when you went to enter it?

  • Fighting with someone doesn’t prove who’s right.  It only proves who’s stronger and that’s not usually in dispute.  Do you think, for instance, that Chris Brown thought Rihanna stood a chance of beating him up?

Daylight Saving Time

I wanted to kvetch about daylight saving time, but I was too sleep-deprived to do it until today.

Ben Franklin didn’t invent daylight saving time, even though he is often credited with it.  He wrote a satirical letter in a French newspaper urging Parisians to get up earlier to enjoy the sunshine in the morning and suggesting that officials ring church bells and set off cannons to make them get up earlier.  I’d be more against cannons and church bells than I am against daylight saving time:  slightly more. 

Daylight saving time came into wide use in the USA and Europe around World War I.  In case you’re wondering, they didn’’t call World War I when it was going on, but the name of World War II is disturbing because it implies that the people who named it expected at least one more.  But I digress, as usual.

I don’t like daylight saving time because I don’t like getting up early, or earlier.  I do want to get up to demonstrate that I’m not dead, but I don’t want to demonstrate early.  And I say this as someone who had at least one job that required me to get up way earlier than average.  How does 2:30 AM grab you?

The two worst things about that job were getting up and the strange schedule it put me on.  When that alarm clock went off at 2:30 AM, I was startled awake and often grabbed the bed to keep from falling up, because that’s how disoriented I was.  My wife, by the way, was a saint to put up with it because she didn’t have to wake up then, ever.

Having a tuna fish sandwich for lunch at 8:30 AM wasn’t too cool either.

Has anyone ever kept you up past your bedtime, even as a child?  Did you like it?   Once, when I was on that schedule, my father-in-law took my wife and me to a party and kept us out not past my bedtime, but past the time I usually woke up!  After that, you tell me where it is, and I’ll drive, even though I don’t get up that early anymore.

Switching back to standard time is fine.  It happens during the busiest period of my year, so I don’t adjust to the time and I go to work an hour earlier without any trauma.  I ease into that time change around Christmas.

I like summer and I like extra hours of daylight.  I hate the pain and suffering that comes with switching to daylight saving time.  Did you know there’s no conclusive evidence that it saves energy or reduces the cost of anything?

In Ancient Rome, there were 12 hours of daylight every day of the year.  The way they accomplished that was to have longer and shorter hours depending on the time of year.  That doesn’t work for me either. 

I don’t have a solution.  I just felt like ranting about it.  Mission accomplished.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Do you suppose Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez needed pre-approval from his health insurance company to have surgery this morning in Colorado?

  • Let me get this straight.  We got into the economic mess we’re in because we spent and borrowed too much, right?  And the way we’re planning to get out of it is to spend and borrow a whole lot more, right?

  • Is it time for crocuses yet?

  • If you were trying to buy Viagra or Cialis on line, could you communicate with the company you were trying to purchase from, or would your email program insist it was all spam and block it?

  • Have you noticed that Ringling Brothers doesn’t call it a circus anymore?

  • Considering how bad the odds of winning are, I think people who make plans for how to spend their lottery winnings before they win are foolish.  Don’t you?

  • Do Donnie and Marie Osmond own the TV show Entertainment Tonight?  They’re not big enough celebrities to be on the show as often and as prominently as they are without some other explanation than they were big in the 70’s.

  • Teen star Miley Cyrus has published an autobiography.  She might have written it, or it might have been ghost written.  She’s sixteen!  Even though she’s famous, how long can that book possibly be?

Things I Know

  • This may sound like whining to someone who lives in International Falls MN, but yes, it is cold enough for me; more than cold enough.  And I wish weather forecasters would tell me the temperature instead of the wind chill factor, and then let me decide how cold I feel.

  • Baseball causes warm weather.  If you think about that, you already know it.  So, when your favorite team starts broadcasting Spring Training games on the radio (this past weekend for the Yankees, next weekend for the Mets) I want you to drive around with the game on and your car windows down.  It will help warm things up more quickly.

  • It bothers me that my local daily newspaper and TV shows like “The Insider” and “Entertainment Tonight” apparently think of Nadya Suleman, mother of octuplets and six other children, as an entertainment story.

  • Ten people in the Tom’s River NJ area are claiming they won the Mega Millions Lottery that had a top prize of $216 million.  I would much prefer to have the lottery winner in Tom’s house, rather than Tom’s River, but let this be a cautionary tale.  The chance of winning a big lottery are enormously small, but if someone in your office starts a pool, chip in.  On the odd chance that they do win, you don’t want to be the only person left working there.

  • Wearing your pants under your gut instead of around your waist makes you look heavier, not thinner.

  • Ezra Cornell invented the telegraph pole.  He actually invented the ceramic insulator that kept telegraph lines from shorting out when they were strung on poles, but a lot of people think he invented the telegraph pole.  He made money from this because whoever invented the tree neglected to patent it.

  • Here’s why the government spends so much money.  Consumers who have a good handle on finances determine how much to spend based on how much they make.  Government determines how much to make based on what it spends.  If you could do that, you’d spend more money too.

The Snow Conundrum

“The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below”.

Clement Moore is usually credited with writing that (although I have seen it attributed to Henry Livingston Jr.) in the famous poem, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.”

I have a conundrum in the secondary meaning of the word, an intricate and difficult problem.  It’s a conundrum because I hate being cold and I love new-fallen snow.  Since snow is ice, you can see how this could be difficult.

Moore or Livingston was right about that lustre, although today its generally spelled luster.  Snow’s reflective qualities make a nighttime walk an entirely new experience.  People stay home when it snows, so even if it didn’t have acoustic qualities, a heavy snow storm would quiet things down.  It does have sound-dampening qualities though.  Snow (unless accompanied by gale force wind) slows things down and quiets them down too.  Plus, it changes the look of everything and covers up some mundane or dingy things entirely.  A good snow storm is just plain pretty.

And if it happens overnight on Thursday or Sunday, it creates an unexpected three-day weekend for a lot of folks.  What’s better than that?

Of course, there’s a downside.  I heard on TV this morning that snow-removal costs New York City a million dollars an inch.  So, heavier than usual snow is a budget buster for local governments.  In fact, in New York State, it’s legal to issue bonds to pay unanticipated and unbudgeted snow removal.  Usually, you borrow money for things that last longer than the term of the loan, not things that melt within a week.  This weekend’’s snow storm came at a very good time for the public works department in the village where I live.  Yesterday was the first day of a new fiscal year, so this snow storm didn’t blow this municipal budget.

There are people who think former New York Mayor John Lindsay might have become President of the United States if he and his administration had been able to handle a huge snow storm in February of 1969.  Another public official had a more sanguine approach.  Faced with a snow storm too big for the public works equipment to handle, former Nassau County Executive Francis T. Purcell said, “Snow melts.”

Of course, there’s the getting-your-car-stuck-in-it thing which leads to the shoveling-it thing.  I spent many years shoveling it for a living, but by “it” I don’t mean snow. 

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • If you spent your adult life as a play-by-play announcer for major league (or even minor league) baseball games, watching your team play baseball every day, when you retire, do you have to go to an office from nine to five every weekday?

  • Why would you call something you stick in your ear a Bluetooth?  In fact, why would you call anything a Bluetooth?

  • Cursing is supposed to demonstrate that you’re angry.  If you curse all the time, how is anyone supposed to tell?

  • Are we searching for intelligent life on other planets because we’ve determined conclusively that there isn’t any on this one?

  • Was the person who named it the Cross Bronx Expressway being ironic, or hopeful?  And, either way, isn’t it way past time to change the name?

  • As I was crawling west on the Cross Bronx Expressway last Friday night at 5 miles per hour,  I couldn’t help but question all the electronic signs that said, “Reduce speed.”  Do you think traffic would have hit 15 miles per hour if they shut those signs off?

Things I Know

  • The injuries an enraged adult chimpanzee can inflict on a human being are horrifying, literally horrifying.  And because that’’s so, I do not want to watch, listen to or read news that goes into gruesome detail about what happened to Charla Nash.  Saying what happened to Ms. Nash was and is horrific is quite true and quite enough.  And when radio and TV stations broadcast a recording of the 911 call from the owner of a chimp that went berserk in Connecticut the other day, I tuned to something else.

  • It’’s generally a bad idea to give a little kid an opportunity to lie.  Let’’s say you hear a crash and walk into your living room.  In the room, there’s a five-year-old kid and a broken lamp.  If you ask the kid, “”Who did this?”” is the kid going to say, “”I did!”?”  Not unless the kid is George Washington and the lamp is a cherry tree.  Same thing, although he’’s no kid, with NY Yankee super star Alex Rodriguez.  Did he cheat?  Is he still cheating?  If the answers are yes, and no, in that order, it’’s all we should expect.  Asking for the gory details is creating the opportunity for Mr.  Rodriguez to lie and the general consensus is that he hasn’’t been entirely truthful since word leaked out that he used steroids.

  • I’’m going to miss the division of General Motors that came up with the GTO.

  • You do not have a constitutional right to go through life un-offended.  Nobody does, but a lot of people seem to think they do.

  • People who live in California don’’t eat pretzels so much.  I’’ve been to several stores in the Sacramento area, including the ubiquitous Arco gas station, where you could buy beer and soda, but they didn’’t sell pretzels.  If you ask me, beer and soda without pretzels seems contrary to the Natural Order.

  • If you have a brick-and-mortar business and a website, you should put the address of your business on your website—on the home page.  The phone number too.

  • Unique doesn’t mean rare.  It means only.  So, the expression “”very unique”” has been very high on my list of pet peeves for a very long time.    Incidentally, if I ever own a dog or a cat, I think I’’ll name it Peeve.   I had a dog as a kid for a short time.   The dog’s name was “Socrates of Hicksville.”  That always seemed unwieldy to me.  We called him Socks because he had four white feet.  I liked Socks, but I didn’’t like taking care of him.  So I gave Socks away rather than take care of him which I didn’’t want to do or have him be neglected which I didn’’t want either.

  • Perhaps my favorite color is plaid, but I’’ve decided I’’m over-using the phrase. ““’I’’m of two minds.”” and I hereby resolve to knock it off.  Or maybe not.

  • You can buy one share of common stock in the company that owns the New York Times for less than it costs to buy one copy of the Sunday Times.  Except, of course, the news stand doesn’’t charge broker’’s fees.

  • I’’m planning to live forever and, so far, that’’s working out.  So, I don’’t want to receive any money from the government’s economic stimulus cargo (it’’s too big to be a package) because I don’’t want anyone to think I’’m a shovel-ready project.

  • I’’m trying to introduce a new expression into English.  You know that ASAP means ““As soon as possible,”” right?  Well my new expression is MSTHP.  It means “”Much sooner than humanly possible.””  For the sake of brevity, I’’m willing to accept MSTP, “”Much sooner than possible.””  Use it.  Pass it on.

Anniversary

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Sisyphus Project.

I started this blog to entertain myself.  So far, that’’s working.  I’’ve also occasionally entertained my friend Richard who has seen fit to mention my blog in his and to comment on my blog more than any other reader.  Of course, once would be more than any other reader, so if you want to chime in too, please do.

I’’m kind of amazed that I do have some readers.  Without doing anything to promote the blog, I get around 1,500 hits a month.  I know that’s fewer than 1,500 individual readers, but it’s a lot more than the four or five people I’’ve told about the blog I’’m writing.  I even found a blog whose author I don’’t know that linked to this one.

I haven’’t done anything to promote this because it’’s a hobby and I’’m paying for it out of pocket.  If a lot of people started reading it, I’’d have to pay more and then I’’d have to try to figure out a way to make money on it.  So while I am a twit, you won’’t find me pushing myself on Twitter.

I judge the first year a modest success.  I’’m a modest guy, so that’’s okay.  The truth is, I have a lot to be modest about.

While nobody is clamoring for the Sisyphus Project to continue, I believe I will continue writing about things I’’m interested in, things that frustrate me, and things I find funny.  But unlike Sisyphus, I won’’t do it forever.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • “The Insider,” is a TV show that primarily covers the world of entertainment.  Tonight they led with the Chimpanzee named Travis that mauled a woman in Connecticut this week, blinding and disfiguring her for life.  I know Travis was in at least two commercials some years ago, but will someone please tell me what’’s entertaining about that vicious attack?  My wife and I changed the channel.

  • How’’s the stock market doing since the economic stimulus cargo became law?

  • I take medicine that affects the way some foods taste to me.  I hope it’s the medicine, but this year Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies don’’t taste quite as minty or quite as chocolaty as they used to.  Is it the medicine, or does it seem that way to you too?

  • Comedian Bill Engvall asked a question so profound I’’m repeating it here because it needs answering.  How did fish acquire a taste for worms?

  • Have you seen the Food Channel TV show, “Ace of Cakes?”  Has it occurred to you that this is a TV show about cake decorating that doesn’’t really show you how to decorate a cake?

  • When I make a doctor’s appointment, instead of asking for the first appointment of the day, would it help if I asked for the first, first appointment of the day?

It’s The Stupid Economy

It’’s troubling that nobody in the House or Senate read the economic stimulus cargo (it’’s too big to be a package) before voting on it last Friday.  Remember, if it were all in hundred dollar bills, it would be over 8,500 tons of US paper money.  If it was so important to pass it quickly, why did President Obama wait until Tuesday to sign it?  Based on the length of the bill (over a thousand pages) it’’s doubtful President Obama read it either, before signing it into law.

Congress and every state legislature with which I’’m familiar works on the committee system.  Members are assigned to committees and they and their staffs become well informed or even experts on the type of legislation their committee regularly considers.  Members who are not on the committees tend to rely on colleagueswho are on the committee to determine how they’’ll vote.

In Congress, it would be unusual for everybody to read a bill that the members were voting on, but it’’s also unusual if nobody does.  In the case of the stimulus cargo, nobody had time.  The bill was made available eight hours or so before the voting started.  Even if a Congressman or Senator divied up the bill and distributed it to staff to analyze, the time involved was too short.  And the only reason to vote on it Friday was to give opposition no time to build.

It can’’t be as good as its strongest proponents say it is, and I certainly hope it’’s not as bad as its harshest critics opine.  I hope it works too.  My son is among those currently unemployed.  But two old adages come to mind and either or both of them make me concerned.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee, and two things you should never watch being made are sausage and laws.

Today the President announced a program for homeowners in or near foreclosure.  I’’m of two minds on this.  The first is I’’m already paying for my house and I don’’t want to help pay for anyone else’’s.  The second is that when I eventually retire, I’’d like to be able to sell my house and move to a smaller one someplace warmer.  And, while it’’s easy to buy a house someplace warmer for a lot less than they cost last year, in present conditions it’’s also harder to sell my house and my house is worth a lot less than it was a year or two ago.  So if propping up the mortgage market to cut down on foreclosures works, then it should drive the price of housing back up since there won’’t be many foreclosures on the market.  That, I’’d like to see. 

Valentine’s Day Inspiration

I’’m of two minds about gifts.  For me, as a recipient, only the thought counts.  Nobody likes me enough and has enough money to give me anything I can’’t afford to get for myself, so it’’s the thought that counts.  Plus, my grandmother told me that when I was a young boy (I was never little) and she was crazy.

But when I give someone else a gift, I want it to be something that I like and that they like too.  I think I’’m bad at selecting things that meet both criteria.  Once in a while I succeed, but not often.

Valentine’’s Day is a holiday for retailers.  Gifts are pretty much obligatory.  Guys can always wimp out with flowers or one of those heart-shaped boxes of candy.  Most women also appreciate jewelry.  You can cheat and buy your wife or girlfriend some lingerie.  I say that’’s cheating because both of you know lingerie is a present for you too.  For this Valentine’’s Day, however, I was inspired.  I bought my wife a present she loved and laughed at.  She has a great laugh.

My wife is a little odd.  She’s been with me for a long, long time so even if she started out normal, some of my odd would have to have rubbed off on her and I have more than enough odd to spare.

Two weeks ago she told me she had a really weird dream.  She was right.  She told me she dreamt she had a chocolate candy turkey and I ate it on her.  She dreamt that she was so mad at me that she decked me.  This dream is weird for a number of reasons.  First, I don’’t recall ever inviting a chocolate turkey into the house.  Second, I wouldn’’t take something of hers without asking.  Third, we don’’t fight.  We argue; every married couple argues and we probably argue less than average.  But fighting would not prove who’s right; it would only prove who’s stronger.  Neither of us ever has or would hit the other with anything stronger than a love pat.  I’’m about six feet tall and she isn’’t.  I weigh over two hundred pounds and she doesn’’t, by a long shot.  I’’m a lot bigger than she is.  It’’s obvious who’’s stronger.  The only way she could knock me down is by running me over with the family car.

So the dream was absurd because of the turkey, out of character for both of us and physically impossible.  As the lady said, it was weird.  It also inspired me.  That’s right.  I bought my wife a rafter of chocolate turkeys for Valentine’’s Day.

Chocolate bunnies are traditional for Easter and you might find a chocolate turkey around Thanksgiving, but where, you may ask, did I find chocolate turkeys at Valentine’’s Day?  The Internet of course!  That’’s also where I found out the correct term for a group of turkeys is a rafter.  If I had thought of it sooner, I would have saved some money on express shipping, but it was still a reasonably priced gift.  If I do say so myself, it was inspired.  In fact, I have said so myself, twice.  This morning, I was rewarded for my inspiration with my wife’’s musical laughter. 

Things I Know

  • Friday is the safest day on which to have Friday the 13th.  If it happens on a Sunday or a Monday, Friday the 13th could last all week.  That’’s not my idea.  Walt Kelly thought it up and put in the mouth of Albert the Alligator in the late and very much lamented comic strip Pogo.

  • We need to find another term for the stimulus package.  The word package doesn’’t make you think of something big enough.  How about stimulus shipment or stimulus cargo?  The Feds have been throwing the term billions about for so long that it’’s lost the ability to shock us.  We’re nearly immune to being shocked by the word trillion too.  So we need to find another way to describe large amounts of money.  The US House and Senate have apparently agreed on a $789 billion stimulus package.  If it’’s all in $100 bills, that’s between 8,500 and 9,000 tons of paper money!  That’’s a little bigger than a package, don’’t you think?

  • Senator Schumer, I care about the pork in the stimulus bill and I bet I’’m not alone.

  •  I don’’t know which way is up.  Well, when I’’m awake I do, but I used to have a job that required me to get up at 2:30 AM and when that alarm clock went off, I grabbed my bed to keep from falling up many, many times.

  • The flaw in the space-time continuum has apparently been mended.  I arrived on time for my 7:00 AM appointment at my endocrinologist’s office, having been told that 7:00 AM was the first appointment of the day when I made it.  If you recall, I’’m always on time, the doctor never is, although the last time he was early, not late, which screwed everything up and caused me to worry about the continuation of life as we know it.  Today, the doctor saw me around 7:30.  Why?  He saw the other first appointment of the day first.

  • “Where To Retire” magazine, in its current issue, says the cost of living for retirees in San Francisco is “Well above average.”  From what I’ve seen when I’ve visited that lovely city, it should say the cost of living in San Francisco is “Oh my God!”

Happy Birthday George

If George Washington were alive today, he’’d still be dead!   I mean, it’’s his birthday, and he’’d be 277 years old, for God’’s sake.  What’’s that you say?  George Washington’s birthday isn’’t until February 22nd, you say.  Wrong.  George Washington wasn’’t born on his birthday.  He was born on February 11, 1732.  If you don’’t believe me, try believing your own eyes.  Here’’s a picture of the relevant page from the Washington family bible. 

http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/project/faq/bible.html

How is this possible?  Religion and politics.

The Julian calendar came into effect in 45 BC at the insistence of Julius Caesar.  It had a 365 day year with leap year every four years.  The trouble is our Earth goes around the Sun slightly faster than that.  Not much, but a little.  So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull decreeing a new calendar which became known as the Gregorian calendar even though he didn’’t invent it.  I don’’t presume Julius Caesar invented the Julian calendar either.  By that time, the Julian calendar was about 10 days out of synch with the celestial orbit of the earth.  The Gregorian calendar has the same 365 days and the same leap day every four years, except that if a year is evenly divisible by 100, but not by 400, it isn’t a leap year.  So, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years although 2000 was.  Doing away with another leap year every one thousand years would make the Gregorian calendar even more accurate, but it isn’’t yet 500 years old, so we don’’t have to worry about that for a while.

If you have surmised that Pope Gregory XIII was a Roman Catholic, you are correct.  If you recall your history, you also know that 1582 came after Henry VIII made England a Protestant nation.  In fact, it came after Henry VIII all together.  So, England, and when it came into being, the British Empire did not embrace the Gregorian calendar until September of 1752, and by that time the two calendars were 11 days out of synch.  I told you the difference was small.  Returning to America’’s first President, George Washington was born as that bible says on February 11, 1732.  So, between his 20th and 21st birthday, the calendar was changed, 11 days were added and his birthday became February 22nd.  But he was born on February 11th.  I already asserted that and proved it.  Now, I’’ve explained it.

That concludes the educational portion of this blog item. 

Now on to the burning question:  How come I know that (and lots of other similarly useless information), but I don’’t know anything that would make me tons of money?  One ton of US currency (if it’s all in $100 bills) is around $9 million, so I could probably make due with a single metric ton.

Things I Know

  • I used to think the name of the last bank left standing would be bank.com.  I now think it’’s likely to be bank.gov.

  • With all the billions being thrown around in Congress these days, I can only thank God we’’re not Great Britain.  You see, here in the good old USA, a billion is a thousand million.  In Great Britain, a billion is a million million.  That’’s a big difference.

  • The late Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen is famous for having said, “”A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.””  Only problem is he probably never said it:  http://www.dirksencenter.org/print_emd_billionhere.htm

  • Here’’s why a city like Seattle or London can be crippled by snow that other cities like Chicago or Albany would consider insignificant.  If you bought enough equipment to deal with six inches of snow and you got that much snow once every twenty years, you’’d use the equipment once and it would then rust and rot.  The next time you needed it, in an average of twenty years, it would be broken beyond repair and you’’d have to buy more.  So in areas where it doesn’’t snow much, they don’’t have a lot of snow removal equipment.  After all, snow does melt.

  • An MRI is a large and very noisy machine.  They charge a lot to stuff you in one and its main purpose is to cause your nose to itch.

  • Village elections in New York State are held on the third Tuesday in March.  This year, that date is also St. Patrick’’s Day.  A while back the state legislature, in its extremely finite wisdom, passed a law that says if the election would fall on St. Patrick’s Day it will be moved to March 18th.  As an American of Irish descent, I don’’t know whether to be flattered they want to honor St. Patrick and Irish Americans or offended that they think we’ll have too much to drink before, during and after voting.

  • I told my wife that I would never have married her if I had known what her mother-in-law would be like.

  • Capital One, the credit card company that’’s also a bank, sends me multiple credit card offers each month.  On the back of each envelope it says “”Please recycle.””  Hello!  If you want to save the environment, mail me fewer credit card offers. 

  • A while back, I said the best invention of the twentieth century was mixed vegetables with no lima beans in them.  Now that our kitchen remodel is complete, I have to say that sliding shelves for your pots and pans are right up there.   I’’m not going to try to evaluate the best of the 21st century until we have more of the century to go on.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Did you hear the audio of the conversation between pilot Chesley Sullenberger and the LaGuardia tower as he was ditching flight 1549 in the Hudson river last month?  Basically, it boils down to save my life now, panic later.

  • Has Christopher Lambert ever been in a good movie?

  • The janitor in the office building where I work rolls a large trash barrel up to each waste basket in order to empty it.  He takes the barrel to the waste basket, not the other way around.  So, it seems to me that moving my waste basket from where I put it would be extra work.  But he never puts it back where I want it.  Why is that?

  • The birth of octuplets in California raises some troubling questions.  Why would a single woman who already has six kids want more?  If you know you won’’t abort any of the implanted embryos, why have so many implanted?  I mean having eight more kids at the same time is dangerous to both the mother and the children; any of the nine may develop serious health problems as a result.  And if it’s dangerous to the mother, then she was risking the welfare of the six children she already had.  Both fertility treatments and post natal care of octuplets are very expensive.  I’’d like to be assured that this family, mom and her parents, have the resources to handle the expense.  I’’d rather not see taxpayer funds expended on what appears to me to be an ego trip.

  • Is there a category in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most credit card offers received by one person over a specified period of time (like a month or a year)?  If there is, how do I apply for recognition?

  • Haven’’t paid your federal income taxes?  Maybe you’re qualified for a cabinet-level appointment in the Obama Administration?  I was being considered to be secretary of the Department of Redundancy Department until they found out I had paid my taxes.

  • Someone on the radio used an expression I hadn’’t heard in a long time:  “smart as a whip.”  Aren’’t whips inanimate objects?  Isn’’t a whip exactly as smart as a box of rocks?

An Earlier Plane Crash

When flight 1549 crash landed in the Hudson River last month, everyone praised the pilots’’ skill and rightly so.  It was in the news everywhere.  Was it a big deal to the world when a small plane crashed near the end of a runway Mason City Iowa a little after 1:00 AM fifty years ago today?  To kids everywhere in the USA, yes, it was.  To the world at large, not really.  Is it a big deal that today is the 50th anniversary of that plane crash?  To a few senior citizens who really care about music, yes it is.  To the world at large, not really.

The plane carried a rock ‘‘n’’ roll icon, Buddy Holly, and two other hit-music makers with a lot of promise, Richie Valens and J.P, Richardson, otherwise known as the Big Bopper.   Most of the news coverage of that event was broadcast on radio stations that played rock ‘’n’’ roll.

There is no birthday for rock ‘’n’’ roll and anyone who tells you they know what the first rock ‘’n’’ roll record was is blowing smoke.  Rock ‘’n’ roll evolved.  But by 1971, Don McLean would call February 3rd 1959, ““The Day the Music Died.””  He wrote, recorded and sold millions of copies of a song by that name that chronicled the music from the day of the plane crash to the time the song was written.  The chronicle had some very obscure references and people became obsessed with what the song meant. 

The music was aimed at teenagers and commercial rock ‘’n’’ roll was at most five years old when that plane crashed, so nobody in the news media was old enough to have grown up with the music.  Very few people in the media liked the music.  Imagine what kind of media coverage John Lennon’’s death would have garnered if nobody who worked for TV network news operations or major newspapers liked his music.

Holly, far more than the other two, was an influential figure in rock history.  He wrote and produced his own music before that was common.  His style influenced future rockers.  Tommy Roe and Bobby Vee are just two.  The Beatles and Rolling Stones recorded his music.  Why do you think the Beatles called themselves that?  Holly’’s band was the Crickets.  Holly was in the first group of inductees to the Rock ‘’n’’ Roll Hall of Fame.

But we’’ve come full circle.  There are very few people in the media today who know and like his music.  Many of the ones who weren’’t old enough to be hired when he died are old enough to be retired now.  And advertisers are interested in younger audiences because they’’ve been told it’’s hard to influence senior citizens with commercials and print ads.  So nobody is programming to the people who do care.

In the biggest broadcast market in the USA, there is no longer a radio station that features music from the 1950’s.  WCBS FM used to and DJ Bob Shannon who knows a lot about that music did a nice tribute to Holly and the others today at noon.  In the process, he laid out some of the ways Holly influenced other musicians.  But as an example of how little notice was paid to the anniversary, no cable TV outlet saw fit to broadcast the 1978 movie ““The Buddy Holly Story”” today.  Nobody scheduled “”Peggy Sue Got Married”” either.  The movie isn’’t about Buddy Holly, but the plot is kind of inspired by that song.

So the 50th anniversary of the day the music died passed with a lot less notice than yesterday got for being Ground Hog Day.

Things I Know

  • The supermarket near my home had a sign explaining one of their policies.  It included the line, ““Sorry for the inconvinance [sic.].””  In the bakery of the same supermarket, they had a super-sized cookie for sale on which was written the message, “”Super Ball XLIII.””  Maybe it’’s some sort of world-famous dance and I’’m the only person who hasn’’t heard about it.

  • Today is Super Bowl Sunday.  I don’’t care.  I don’’t even watch it for the commercials.  Tomorrow is Ground Hog Day.  The official ground hog, Punxatawney Phil, always sees its shadow at the appointed time because of TV lights, so we still have six weeks of winter to go.  However, Baseball Spring Training starts in two weeks and gasoline prices are on the rise, therefore warm weather must be near.  Keep the faith!

  • My house is nearly finished.  I have a little spackling to do and some staining.  I have to build radiator covers too, but I’’m really close to done with what I started last June.  Whew!

  • I’’m not trying to be a chauvinist, a feminist, or any other kind of “ist” here except a pragmatist.  If a plane crashes or needs emergency evacuation for any other reason, I don’’t want to hear about “women and children first,” the way we did when US Airways Flight 1549 ditched in the Hudson River.   Preferences slow down the evacuation process.  Of course, if anyone is injured, disabled or a child too young to fend for itself, help them.  Don’’t leave them to die.  Otherwise, I want whoever is nearest the exit to get out so that the second person can get out and so on.  That’’s the fastest way and the fastest way is the only sensible way.

  • Nobody likes criticism, but everyone wants to know where they stand.

  • If you are making a speech and you say, “”So in conclusion,”” or anything else that coveys the idea you are wrapping it up, say one more thing and either take your seat or open it up to questions.

  • When I was a teenager, I made two mistakes:  I thought I was the only person that awkward; and I thought I’’d get over it.

  • It is a good thing that different people like different things.  Otherwise, there would be shortages and really long lines.  And, as punctual as I am, it’’s still unlikely I’’d be at the front of one of those lines.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • If I’m worried about how much snow we’re going to get over night, is that the qualm before the storm?

  • When do you suppose we’ll reach the saturation point on cable TV shows that say you can’t sell your house because its filthy and full of junk?  I hope soon.

  • If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, where’s ugly?

  • Republicans in Congress say they’re against President Obama’s economic recovery program.  They want a more sensible spending program.  How do they know sensible spending will work?  Has that ever been tried in Washington?

  • Don’t you  just hate it when the Chinese New Year rolls around and you’re still writing Year of the Rat on your checks when it”s already the Year of the Ox?

Things I Know

  • President Obama says his economic recovery plan will create or save at least three-million jobs.  That’s $275,000 per job.  If they make the transaction non-taxable, I’ll sell them my job for $225,000.  Then they can give it to somebody else.  I’m sure a lot of other people are willing to do the same.  That’s almost a twenty percent discount.  Think of all the money they’ll save if they do that.

  • All men are NOT interested in only one thing.  There are a few of us who don’t give a dam about football.    So I won’t be buying an enormous and expensive flat-screen TV on which to watch the Super Bowl.  Even if I bought such a TV, I wouldn’t be watching the Super Bowl.

  • There were more things I want, but can’t afford in Scottsdale AZ in January than anyplace else on earth.  They were being sold at the Barrett-Jackson collectible car auction.

  • On ABC radio the night before the Presidential inauguration, an announcer said, “The first African American” will be inaugurated as President tomorrow.  I know what he meant, and Barack Obama’s inauguration does break a barrier that deserves breaking.  But the announcer didn’t say what he meant, did he?  I don’t think anyone knows for sure who the first African American was.  Did the Spanish bring Africans to Florida when exploring and founding St. Augustine in the 1560’s?  Did the British bring the first African to Jamestown in the early 1600’s?  Or to be the first African American, did we have to wait until the United States were formed?

We Are Not Alone

The science fiction section in my nearest Barnes & Noble is shrinking.  I don’t know if the rest of it has disappeared into another dimension.  I suspect the stuff just isn’t selling as well as it once did.

It’s fun to watch or read old science fiction because the people who created it used science that still hasn’t been achieved but didn’t pick up on stuff that was invented right afterwards.  Either that or they got something right but how it happened completely wrong.

Example of the first is Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, flying around the planet Mongo and navigating his space ship by looking out the window.  We still haven’t achieved manned, interstellar travel, but they came up with radar way less than ten years after those movies were made. 

Example of the second is the novel “1984.”  Orwell was right that we’d have no privacy, but wrong about how it would happen.  It wasn’t government-operated surveillance cameras inside our homes that did us in.  It was the Internet, tracking cookies and people willingly giving up their personal information so they could have a small discount at CVS or some other company with a customer reward program.  These things led to interactive databases that track everything about almost all of us. 

How much privacy does the average person have? 

Earlier this month, I told you I don’t remember my first kiss with my first girlfriend, Barbara.  I haven’t seen, spoken or written to Barbara in more years than I’d care to remember.  I have no interest in rekindling that childhood romance.  The childhood romance I still have with my wife is working out better than I had any right to expect, thank you. 

But just to prove that I could do it, I’m now about 99.5 percent certain that Barbara lives in Missouri, and is married to a guy named Lem.  I’m not going to call, write or visit her to be 100 percent sure, but I could.  That’s frighteningly little privacy for someone who hasn’t gone out of her way to be known.  And it took me about five minutes.  

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Is there a dumber ad campaign than Varian Medical Systems’ TV and radio commercials featuring letters from cancer?  Their website works for me, but their TV and radio commercials with the letter to cancer that ends, “Love, Me,” don’t.    I think being inspired by cancer patients courage is a wonderful idea and for each letter they post on their website Varian donates $10 to cancer research, up to $100,000.  That’s great too.  Look at the letters on their website instead of watching or listening to the commercials:  http://www.varian.com/.  The first one I looked at is signed, “Your sworn nemesis.”  That’s much more like it.  When I think about cancer, a number of four letter words pop into my head, but love isn’t one of them.

  • Did you know I’m being plagiarized by someone I don’t know and never heard of?  I said plagiarized for effect:  I don’t really mean it.  The blogger in question doesn’t credit the Sisyphus Project by name, but does link to it if you want more.  http://download.gamers-haven.com/here/things-i-want-or-need-to-know.  I’m flattered.  If I didn’t know me really well, I’d be impressed too.

  • Job hunting is very frustrating.  I know why a prospective employer won’t give you a reason they don’t hire you.  Nevertheless, how are you supposed to improve your act for the next interview if you never get any feedback about the mistakes you’ve made or how you could improve?

  • I’d understand the whole thing about Bernie Madoff and bail, if  he were free on bail as reporters keep saying and writing that he is.  But he’s not free on bail; he’s under house arrest that he’s paying for.  And if he is guilty as charged, he’s paying for the guards and the monitoring with money he stole from the people he swindled.  As long as he’s under house arrest, I don’t understand why they don’t just throw him in jail.

  • Near the end of that TV commercial Billy Mays does hawking some miracle fabric glue, he says, “You get everything for just $19.99.”  I doubt he really means that, don’t you?

  • Are hamburgers really that difficult that we need the Big City Slider Station?

  • Would someone please explain to me why watching amateur video of people hurting themselves is funny?  I cringe and change the channel if I inadvertently tune into “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” but the show has been on the air for many years now.

  • Why does the Viking raider in the Capital One credit card commercial have a British accent?

Things I Know

  • The title “Things I Know” isn’t very original.  I checked Google and there were 958-thousand hits.  “Things I Want (Or Need) To Know,” is far more original.  Eight hits when I looked a few days ago!  This blog accounted for the first two and the third one linked to this blog!

  • I don’t know if the allegations contained in a law suit against NY Knick player Eddy Curry are true and he says they aren’t.  But in my opinion, the law suit itself doesn’t seem out of place among some of the other court cases involving people who work at Madison Square Garden in recent years.

  • If Natalie Dylan can sell something for $3.7 million that most people give away, we should put her in charge of economic recovery.  That woman could sell ice to penguins and penguins hardly ever carry any cash.

  • If you live in the New York Metropolitan Area and plan to talk to anyone in Canada about how cold it is here tonight, or tomorrow morning, 10 degrees Fahrenheit is about -12 Celsius and 0 degrees Fahrenheit is about -18 degrees Celsius.

  • Once, years ago, I was on a plane that landed off the runway at Byrd Field in Richmond, VA.  Talk about scary!  Therefore I can say with some authority that while nobody wants a plane crash, one that everyone survives, like today’s crash landing in the Hudson River off Manhattan, is a rare and beautiful thing.

  • Based on TV reports of today’s plane crash, if you make a forced landing in the Hudson River when the air temperature is 20 degrees Fahrenheit and you not only survive, but your cell phone still works, the only way you could do better is if the plane arrived safely and without incident at its destination–and your cell phone still worked.

  • The first $350 billion of TARP Bailout funds don’t seem to have done much of anything.  So, it appears we’re going to hand out another $350 billion really soon with still more in the pipeline.  Sometimes, in government, if beating a dead horse doesn’t work, beating two dead horses is the next thing they try.

Things I Know

  • Tonight was the world premiere of the Pay-Per-View event “Amy Fisher:  Nude and Exposed.”  I didn’t watch it.  I hope nobody watched it.  In case you don’t recognize the name, when she was 17, Amy was having an affair with a married man named Joey Buttafuoco and she shot his wife in the head.  the woman survived and Amy went to jail.  This country needs to return to a time when people became infamous, not famous, for doing terrible things.

  • Judging from published pictures of gowns worn by Hollywood actresses on the red carpet at the Golden Globe Awards, some of them may have misinterpreted the nature of the event based on its name.

  • In case you’re wondering, the url www.highpoweredlawyer.com is taken.  It got a few links to law-related searches or law firms, but it looks like a place holder.  In other words, it appears to me someone thought of it and bought it In hopes of making some money by selling it to the next person who thought of it.

  • Before I saw anyone else make it into print, I wrote something about the poor public speaking skills of Caroline Kennedy.  But I didn’t print it at the time and it’s too late now to look original.  Most people are nervous when appearing in public.  I read once that more people are afraid of making a speech than of dying.  Death is, of course, inevitable.  Making a speech isn’t.

  • Vocalized pauses, um, er, ya know, etc., make you sound nervous, unsure, and maybe even evasive.  Silence while gathering your thoughts is much preferable.  In fact, you can use silence to your advantage.  Try this.  Ask someone a question.  When they’re finished with their answer, don’t say anything.  If the person who answered you is anything like average, it’ll only take about five seconds for them to start talking again to fill the awkward silence you created.

  • The first job of a politician is to get elected or reelected.  So name recognition is an important qualification for public office, one of the most important.  Therefore, regardless of her lack of public speaking skills, the Kennedy name alone makes Caroline someone Governor Patterson has to at least consider appointing to the US Senate.

  • I’m a radio geek.  I spent an hour the other day listening to the Jerry Williams radio show on WBBM in Chicago from sometime in 1967.  You can use the Internet to waste all the time there is; maybe more than that.

  • I could use a little global warming right now.  Based on watching the Weather Channel this morning, I’d be even happier to have some global warming by Friday.  At least the days are getting longer.

  • Baseball Spring Training starts on or about February 15th.  I like to think you can’t have Spring Training without Spring.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • I mean some of these things as jokes; this one is no laughing matter.  Bruce Pardo must have been terribly troubled and imbalanced to create that appalling Christmas massacre in California.  When someone is so disturbed they want to kill themselves and a bunch of other people, I’d hope they get psychiatric help, but whenever one of these things happen, I wonder why killing themselves isn’t enough for people like that. 

  • I’ve never bought anything from a TV infomercial, but I’ve often wondered if you call later, instead of calling right now, can you still get the special deal?

  • Why does it rain more on weekends?

  • Why does most windy weather happen when you have to put the garbage out, or after the light-weight can and the light-weight lid are separated from the heavier garbage?  There’s an idea for a product:  weights for plastic garbage cans and plastic-garbage-can lids.  I wonder if you could patent something like that, or if someone already has.

  • Getting up at the crack of dawn is overrated.  What’s wrong with bouncing out of bed at the crack of noon?

  • Instead of signing all the most expensive baseball players, why don’t the New York Yankees bail out General Motors?

  • Which is bigger, egantic or ginormous?

  • Takeru Kobayashi, the guy who made a name for himself by winning hot dog eating contests at Nathan’s of Coney Island, failed in an attempt to set a new world record for eating fruitcake.  I didn’t know fruitcake was edible, did you?

Reflections At New Years

New Years is a time for new beginnings.  It also causes me to reflect on old beginnings.  How many things have you done that left an indelible impression when you did them for the first time?

My mother took me to meet the kindergarten teacher at PS 77 in New York City.  The teacher’s name was Mrs. Green.  I told her I knew my ABC’s, could count to 100 and write my name, so she didn’t need to teach me a thing.  She told me to go sit down.  Maybe Mrs. Green did teach me a few things, but I remember two things she didn’t teach me.  Mrs. Green tried, but was unable to teach me to take a nap (a skill I had lost long before arriving at kindergarten) and she tried but was unable to teach me how to skip.  Yes, that’s right, I flunked skipping in kindergarten, but I made up for it with a vengeance in college. 

Graduating from high school is supposed to be one of life’s milestone events.  I remember very little about that day and most of my memories revolve around the girl I was dating at the time.  I can even describe what she wore that day, but not what I wore.  I remember a lot more about graduating from college.  I got a BA and an MPA the same day.  My sister got her MLS the same day I acquired my two degrees.

It was a cold, overcast day when my first driver’s license came in the mail.  The family car was parked in front of the house and I had to go from Syosset NY to Plainview NY.  With my newly minted driver’s license in my pocket, I walked.  The car wasn’t properly insured for me to drive it.  I had grey hair when I took my road test.  I was in dress rehearsals for a high school play.  The road test examiner asked me how old I was (17) but didn’t ask me to explain the grey hair, so I didn’t. 

I remember the first car I owned.  I know where I got it and roughly when, but I don’t remember driving it for the first time.  It must have been when I took it for a test drive, before I bought it.

My first airplane ride was from Tompkins County Airport in Ithaca NY to La Guardia in Queens.  The plane bounced three times when it landed. 

I don’t remember my first kiss with my first girlfriend.  I know who she was.  Her name was and probably still is Barbara and she lived across the street from my Godmother on Lorraine Ave., in Union, New Jersey.  I don’t remember why we broke up though and I think that’s strange. 

I do remember life’s other big break ups.  If my second girlfriend ever thinks about our break up, I’m sorry.  I was an inexperienced jerk.  I am a much more experienced jerk today. 

I remember taking a pretty girl named Judy on a date.  It was my first date with her but not my first date.  She shook my hand when I took her home.  I hadn’t even tried to kiss her, but she shook my hand!  She was the only girl I ever dated who did that.  I didn’t ask Judy out again. 

I don’t remember the first two times I met my wife, but she does.  She was not favorably impressed.  But, after many years together, I got her to stop teasing me about the first time.  I didn’t pay attention to my wife that time because we were introduced at the end of my senior year in high school by the sophomore girl I was dating at the time.  Sophomore, as you probably know, has Greek roots and basically means wise fool.  I didn’t try to “better-deal” my date at the time.  I wouldn’t try to “better-deal” my wife today either.  Frankly, I couldn’t possibly “better-deal” my wife.

I remember the third time we met–the first time I noticed.  I recall thinking at the time that subsequent meetings would be an extremely good idea.  I was right about that. 

Here’s the strangest thing.  I don’t remember the first time I kissed a girl, I remember the one girl I dated but didn’t kiss though.  I only remember the first time I kissed one girl:  my wife!  She was 17 at the time which is why I say girl and not woman.  I asked her once what I did to change her mind from being miffed at me for ignoring her in the past to dating me, kissing me and spending the rest of her life with me.  She doesn’t remember.

Christmas Movies

I like Christmas movies.  At least I like the idea of Christmas movies.  Some of the ones made for TV are bona fide holiday turkeys though.  The two Steve Guttenberg did come to mind.  Liked him in “Cocoon” and at least the first dozen or so of the Police Academy movies were amusing, but he can’t “Ho, Ho, Ho,” to save his life and in my opinion, “Single Santa Seeking Mrs. Claus” ought to be viewed with cranberry sauce and giblet gravy.

I can’t think of a remake I like better than the original either.  “Miracle on 34th Street” with Natalie Wood, is a classic–the newer one, not so much.

Then there are the movies that aren’t really Christmas movies but are shown at this time of year because they’re set at Christmas, or they give you a warm fuzzy feeling, or for reasons unbeknownst to me.  “Die Hard” isn’t really a Christmas movie, for example.  Neither is “It”s A Wonderful Life.”  In both cases, the movie’s climax happens around the Christmas holiday though.  “Going My Way,” and “Bells of Saint Mary’s” get shown this time of year (although I didn’t notice them this year), but I don’t think of them as Christmas movies.  My wife likes “The Bishop’s Wife” which I’d argue isn’t really a Christmas movie either, but again it does get played every year in late December.

If they showed the movie “Scrooge” staring Alistair Sim in the title role this year, I missed it.  And, if they didn’t show it, how can it officially be Christmas?  Nor do I think it could really be Christmas if they stopped doing the marathon of “A Christmas Story.”  Tim Allen has remade his career playing Santa.  But if I can make a suggestion to cable TV executives here, next year if we have a marathon of Tim Allen’s Santa movies, can we have all three of them, not just the last one?  Please?

I saw “White Christmas” on Christmas Day.  It has a pretty thin plot.  I mean the song is the plot.  Plus it’s only one-twelfth of another movie, “Holiday Inn.”  

A lot of the Christmas movies I’ve mentioned are old black-and-white chestnuts (roasting on an open fire, sorry, but I love that song too), and I like those in black and white.  I like movies shot in color too, but colorized movies are usually awful.  When they first came out I had a TV set with manual color controls and if they played the colorized versions on TV, I’d reset the set to show them in black and white.  Fortunately, most colorized movies get shown on TV these days in black and white.  The colorized versions have largely been abandoned.

Before I go, I’d like to recommend a relatively new Christmas movie to you, one from the 21st century, and in color.  It’s the British movie. “Love Actually.”  It’s an amalgam of love stories, most of which revolve around Christmas.  It’s very well done.  I don’t know if Bill Nighy is a big star in Britain, but he’s done some good work and to my way of thinking is under-rated in the USA.  I only saw “Love Actually” listed three times this holiday season though.  The original has a little nudity in it, and it has been edited for TV to remove the nude scenes.  I don’t think the editing hurts the integrity of this movie.

Maybe I’ll regret it if my wish comes true, but I do wish they’d play “Love Actually” a whole lot more than they do during the Christmas holiday season.   

Things I Know

  • My hope, if you are reading this, is that you’ll accept my wishes for a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Happy Kwanzaa, or any combination or permutation of the three that you choose to engage in.  Have a good New Year too, healthy, happy, prosperous.  You know the drill.  If I have somehow neglected to wish that you enjoy the holiday you celebrate at this time of year, it’s because I’m unaware of yours, so a generic happy holidays will have to do for you.

  • Judging by the number of shoppers at my local Home Depot on Christmas Eve morning, very few people will be getting two-by-fours for Christmas.  And how would you gift wrap them anyway?

  • Update:  After weeks of making collection phone calls to me, Sallie Mae finally acceded to my very reasonable request and sent me a bill.  Once I received the bill, I knew how much to pay and where to send it.  I did cosign the loans (if you need a cosigner, don’t ask.  I’ve learned my lesson) so while I didn’t like it, I owed it, and I paid it.  The bill came Thursday, and I paid it Friday.  Thanks to the miracle of computers, they got it Friday too.  If they credit it to the right account, that should take care of it.  I considered most of their collection calls over a two week period to be harassment because I did pay the bill as soon as I got it, so if they had sent me a bill the first time I asked, it would have arrived and I would have paid it about ten days earlier.

  • A bailout will work if a wave washed over your bow.  It won’t work if your hull was caved in when you steered your ship on to the rocks.

  • Maybe GM does make good cars now, but if they survive (and I hope they do) they’re going to have to make good cars for a long time to convince me to buy one.  They made bad ones for a long time to convince me not to.

  • According to Jerry Seinfeld appearing on the Letterman show, “It’s a war between us and the cookies.”  That sounds about right to me and at least on my front (and on my flank and my rear too) the cookies are gaining ground.

  • The people who collect garbage in my neighborhood leave the empty cans about two feet from the curb.  It would save some time and some precious petroleum too if they would leave them in the exact middle of the street instead.  Now, I come home, pull up to the empty can, stop, get out while the car keeps running, move the can to the curb, get back in the car and park.  Whew!  If they left the cans in the middle of the street, I could park and move the can.  Many fewer steps, much more efficient.

  • The way things are going, I predict eventually there will be only one bank and that bank will be named bank.com.

  • The good burghers of Brighton Michigan have made being annoying illegal.  I’d better stay away from there!

  • If someone gets up to give a speech and the first thing they say is they will be brief, they won’t.  Being brief is unusual.  People will notice if you are.  And if you want to be brief, you can leave that out and your speech will be a few seconds shorter.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • While channel surfing, I heard the end of an infomercial where Vince, the announcer, warned viewers to beware of Shamwow imitators.  Why?  What harm can a fake cellulose towel do to me?  I mean I’m a pretty tough guy.  I don’t think it can hurt me and I’m not afraid.  In fact, I’d be more afraid of an imitation Shamu.

  • Have you read about Alex Rodriguez and Madonna?  They were recently reported to be in Mexico together, and then looking for a house in Florida.  Who knows if these reports are correct?  If they are, Madonna is in very good shape for a woman of her age and many people enjoy her singing.  But still, doesn’t Alex Rodriguez know that she isn’t particularly pretty, she’s almost old enough to be his mother and he’s Alex Rodriguez?

  • How can you steal $50 billion and not have much of anything to show for it?

  • I’d like to know whether Bernie Madoff started out to run a Ponzi scheme, or whether he switched to that when his investments went to hell in a hand basket.  By the way, Charles Ponzi didn’t invent the Ponzi scheme.  His were just the best known ones until now.

  • I can’t resist a good pun, or especially a bad one, so shouldn’t I classify what Bernie Madoff did as a capital crime?

  • Assuming for a minute that some of the institutions getting government bailouts are really too big to be allowed to fail, why isn’t anyone at least looking into new anti-trust legislation to prevent additional companies from getting so big we can’t let them fail?

  • How do children survive between the time they stop being cute and the time they start being bigger than we are?

Putz

The NY Mets this week introduced their two newest pitchers to the public and the media in New York.  One of the new pitchers is a man named J.J. Putz.  I noticed that NY TV stations pronounced his name “Puts.”

For the uninformed, “Putz” is a Yiddish word that means. . .well, it means putz is what it means.

I hope Mr. Putz and all of the Mets succeed in 2009.  But if he doesn’t, I’m certain that fans at the new Citi Field will pronounce his name “Putz”, not “Puts.”  And they’ll do it loudly, clearly, and often.

Things I Know

  • A 55-year-old man in Pharr Texas was arrested because a 9-year-old girl wrote a letter to Santa Claus asking that Santa prevent this alleged human being from touching her and her sister, something he had apparently been doing for four years.  From this we conclude that there really is a Santa Claus.

  • They’re going to have to call Ponzi schemes Madoff schemes from now on.  I’m not blaming the victims here, but no matter how great the return on investment, you shouldn’t have all of your nest egg in one uninsured-investment-program basket.

  • As far as I know, orange is the only English word that doesnt rhyme with any other English word.  You’ve got to admit it would be far more ironic if poem or poetry was the only word that doesn’t rhyme.

  • The word “phonetic” doesn’t start with the letter “f.”  Think about it.  That means phonetic isn’t spelled phonetically.

  • Here’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen:  Lucky, my oldest friend’s dog, does what his parrot tells it to do.

  • Mischievious isn’t a word, neither is Artic, although we should  probably give up and make it one.

  • Staining the woodwork in your house and then coating it with shellac, varnish, or urethane is a lot more work than painting it.

  • The day is not far off when you’ll be able to buy a computer hard drive big enough to download and store the Internet.  Not a web page, the whole Internet!

  • During this baseball free-agent season, I find myself wishing some team would pick up my $12-million option, or even my $4-million option.  But I don’t have a screwball: I am one!

  • I can’t sing.  I’m allowed to.   I just can’t.

  • I believe everyone should pick at least one kind of weather that they like and never complain about it.  I’ve chosen hot.

Sallie Mae Is Acting Like A Dim Bulb!

Is this a dim-bulb way to collect debts, or what?

My son has student loans, but he doesn’t have a job.  Like most debtors, he’d like to pay his loans.  Like most unemployed people, he can’t.  There’s a lot of that going around.  It’s not his fault.  I’m cosigner of his loans.  Like most cosigners, I’d like not to pay his loans, but I did cosign, so I made my bed, I have to lie in it, and I can. 

I did get a notice a while back that he hadn’t paid.  Over the past two weeks, I’ve received maybe half-a-dozen calls from Sallie Mae.  In each case, I refused to provide my identifying information over the phone.  If you call me, I won’t do that no matter who you say you are.  In each case, I told them if they are calling for my son’s contact information, they have that, so don’t call.  If they want me to pay them, I said send me a bill in the mail.  If I owe it, I will pay it. 

You probably noticed those last two sentences are composed entirely of words of one syllable.  That was intentional.  I composed them entirely of monosyllabic words so they would be easy to understand  But Sallie Mae didn’t do what I asked any of the up to half-a-dozen times I asked them to. 

However, today, I did receive a letter threatening to report me to credit agencies.  It didn’t have the Sallie Mae or the SLM Corp. name on the outside of the envelope, so they’re lucky my wife opened it.  It didn’t say how much I owe or where to send it either!  I have to call them to get that information! 

What a pain!  You may imagine for yourself where the pain is located.

If someone with a FICO score over 800 told me if I sent them a bill, they’d pay it, I’d send them a bill.  If they didn’t pay it, then I’d harass them, but I would send them a bill first if they asked for one.  But no, I have to call them, and deal with a phone-answering decision tree.  Feh! 

If it wouldn’t adversely affect my otherwise stellar credit, I’d still tell them to stick it.

If they had sent me a bill the first time I asked, they would have had their money sometime last week.  So, this is a business model too dumb for me to understand.

Newspapers

Newsday, Long Island’s only local daily newspaper raised its weekday price today by fifty percent, the same day its former owner, the Tribune Company, which still owns the LA Times and the Chicago Cubs declared bankruptcy.

I understand price increases.  I don’t like them, but I understand them.  Newspapers are supposed to understand advertising, which is how they make their money, but lately, I don’t think they understand how to price their product and it mystifies me.

I am happy to tell you that Newsday raised the price of its Sunday paper from $1.59 to $2.00.  Who thought up $1.59?  Was that price selected because it’s hard to make change?  A lot of places would only give you the penny in change if you asked for it.  Maybe $1.59 was selected because newspaper vending machines aren’t nearly as popular on Long Island as they are in much of the rest of the country.  You need exact change for newspaper vending machines.  Imagine if you had to buy Sunday Newsday from a vending machine for six quarters, a nickel and four pennies.  So, I approve of $2.00.

What I don’t approve of is raising the price and lowering the quality or quantity of the product at the same time.  Newsday announced it was laying off 100 employees last week, shortly before announcing what most companies now call a “price adjustment.”  There are precious few merchants honest enough to call a price increase what it is.

Then there is the NY Daily News which has raised the price of its Saturday and Sunday papers last month.  The Sunday NY Daily News now costs $1.25, up from a dollar, and the Saturday paper 75¢.  The weekday paper remains at 50¢.  In addition to not liking lower quality for higher prices, I don’t like paying more for the smallest newspaper of the week than I do for the paper on five other days. 

Saturday papers generally have less news, fewer ads, and far lower circulation than weekday papers do.  I’m fortunate not to have to count my pennies, or my quarters either, but I stopped buying the Saturday Daily News.  If they had raised the weekday paper too, the way Newsday did, I would probably keep buying Saturday’s Daily News.  I bet a lot of people feel the way I do about that.

The newspaper business is plagued right now by three things, two of them related to the economy.  If the economy isn’t doing so well, a newspaper is something the average consumer can do without.  Advertising is also something the average business will cut back on in a bad economy.  Maybe businesses should advertise more rather than less in hard times, but they don’t:  they cut back.  

The third problem facing newspapers is that the Internet is making newspapers as currently structured obsolete.Newspapers have websites too, but a lot of them don’t use them to full advantage.  One thing that drives me crazy about Newsday’s website is they’ll write a story that includes a reference to a website without including the hyperlink to the website.

Newspapers in general have to get with the times and adapt to the Internet age much more quickly than they are.  Otherwise newspapers will become both irrelevant and obsolete.  Then, referring to newspapers will become the 21st-century equivalent of a 20th-century reference to buggy whips.

Bad Sport

You’ve got to wonder if the number football star Plaxico Burress wears on his jersey (17) doesn’t represent his IQ.  I was going to agree with Saturday’s NY Daily News and NY Post and call Plaxico Burress an idiot.  But I’ve reconsidered.  Calling him an idiot is not really a very nice thing to say about idiots.

I know if I made $7 million a year for playing a child’s game, I’d keep my nose clean long enough for doing so to boost my net worth and my pension. 

You can get a perfectly good holster for a Glock .40 caliber pistol for under $100.  I make nowhere near $7 million a year and I can afford both a .40 caliber Glock, and a holster for it.  I don’t have either, but I can afford both.  You may wish to buy them:  I want a camera that costs more than that.  I know you can buy pistol and holster together as a combo, and I presume someone who makes $7 million who has the weapon can also afford a holster even if purchased separately. 

I know about the gun laws in New York.  They’re very strict about concealed weapons in New York City and carrying a pistol there that isn’t licensed there puts him in more trouble than a less-than-fatal gunshot wound does; 5 to 15 years more trouble. Mr. Burress knows about them too because the NFL tells all its players about these.

I’ve never fired the model of pistol in question, but I am very familiar with the old fashioned Army Colt 45.  Here’s what you have to do to fire one of those on purpose.  You have to chamber a round, cock the weapon, release the safety, hold the pistol properly by the grip and pull the trigger.    Depending on circumstances, you might need to release the safety first instead of third.  I was told that if you chamber a round, cock the pistol and drop it on its hammer, it may also go off.  I never tried this because doing so would greatly increase the likelihood of shooting myself, or someone or something else I had no desire to shoot.

I believe you have to deliberately chamber a round to fire any automatic pistol.  I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.  When I learned about these things, the good sergeant told us to close the slide and then load the weapon.  That leaves all the bullets in the magazine and makes the pistol much safer to carry.  Then, if you want to fire the weapon, pull the slide back, and let it go forward again, the way they do in all those movies.  That both chambers a round and cocks the weapon.

So, Mr. Burress let a loaded and cocked automatic pistol slide down inside his pants to his leg.  This is supposed to be a guy with good hands, and it had to be in a particular state of readiness to go off when it started sliding.  You will never, under any circumstances, catch me carrying a loaded and cocked firearm tucked in my waistband.  I am crazy, but I’m not stupid!

It seems to me he is pretty damned stupid, and awfully lucky he didn’t shoot someone else, or his femoral artery, or something else both nearby and very dear to him.  Everyone who was around him at the time is equally lucky to escape unharmed. 

And laying aside proper licensing and proper safety with a deadly weapon, if you’re going someplace where you feel you need a gun because of the jewelry you’re wearing and the money you’re carrying, get a credit card, leave the jewelry in the bank vault, and consider going someplace else.  All three, not just one or two.

So, without resorting to obscenities, and without denigrating the world’s population of idiots, I suppose I have to rely on what Bugs Bunny once said:  “What a maroon!”

Things I Know

  • Right after you pass through the TSA security screening area at Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee Wisconsin, there’s a place to put your shoes back on, and generally get yourself back together.  They call it the “Recombobulation Area.”

  • In Home Depot, last time I was there, they had a tool for sale that’s designed to open plastic packages, several kinds of plastic packages.  It cost $9.97.  And it says all over the tool’s package that it’s advertised on TV, so you know it must be good, right?  One of the things this tool is designed to open is the dreaded blister pack.  But it comes in a blister pack!

  • I bought something recently over the Internet.  It came in two blister packs, one inside the other.  I guess that’s to keep the product from being broken, or utilized.

  • You don’t have to be hungry to eat pie!

  • It’s not the gift:  it’s the thought that counts.  My grandmother told me that when I was a little kid and when I was a little kid she was nuts!  But now, if she were still alive, she’d be right.  I mean nobody likes me enough and has enough money to buy me anything I can’t afford to get for myself.  So only the thought counts.

  • “It’s not what you wear; it’s how you take it off that counts.”   Former radio personality Dick Summer said that in his blog the Sunday before Thanksgiving.  Smart man Dick Summer!

  • After the recent Congressional Hearings with the presidents of America’s automakers, I have new respect for Congressman Gary Ackerman as a comedian, and as a demagogue.  The lines about the tin cup and the jet-pooling were funny.  Yes, the private planes look bad.  But compared with the number of jobs at stake, it’s immaterial.  It’s thousandths of a percent of the money the car company presidents were asking for.  Also, Rick Wagoner, the head honcho at GM makes about $40,000 a day, including weekends!  If he’s worth the money, and I’m not arguing that anyone is, then the private plane is actually a productivity tool, believe it or not.  Do the math.

  • If you have a job giving advice, you’re often judged not on the quality of your advice, but by whether the people you give it to take the advice.  Everyone says the private jets were a disaster for the auto makers and that they ought to get new PR people.  Were the PR people even asked?  And if they were asked, did they say it would be fine?  If the PR people were asked, and did clear the private planes, then the auto makers do need new PR people.  Otherwise, maybe not.

  • My sister-in-law talks all the time.  This annoys me because I also talk all the time and she can’t possibly be listening to me if she’s talking too.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • This morning, someone wished me a happy Thanksgiving and admonished me to not eat too much turkey.  Aren’t those two things mutually exclusive?  In order to have a happy Thanksgiving, don’t you have to eat too much turkey, or too much of something anyway?  Glutton that I am, I plan to eat too much turkey and too much pumpkin pie as well.

  • Why do so many people these days stop so far behind where they’re supposed to stop at traffic signals?  Don’t they know that a lot of traffic signals have sensors under the pavement and if nobody passes over the sensor the light won’t change?
  • If there’s a liquidity crisis in this country, shouldn’t I be receiving fewer credit card offers in the mail?
  • I’m beginning to think that traffic officials in New Jersey deliberately abandoned the left turn, rather than never discovering it in the first place.  Yesterday, I saw someone make a U-turn on a major New York State route (six traffic lanes, turn lanes in each direction and a center divider), from the middle lane, with the left turn signal red!  Is going around the block a felony?  I only ask because I know that was at least three traffic violations.

My Dad

Today I am one year older than my father was when he died.  So, I’ve been thinking about him quite a bit. 

My father didn’t suffer adult fools lightly.  He told wonderful stories and he told them wonderfully well, but was otherwise kind of a stern man with adults. 

He was tall, muscular, but very thin and had large, strong hands.  He could hold a sturdy kitchen chair at arm’s length by the bottom of one of its legs and he could do that with either hand.  If you think it’s easy, you try it.  His demeanor matched his appearance. 

Maybe he was stern because he was a police officer.  Maybe it’s because his father died when he was a child and he supported his mother, brothers and sisters from the time he graduated from eighth grade at the age of 13.  It was a different time. 

Because he had both an eight-grade education and a passion for learning, he would have loved to see both of his children get master’s degrees.  I would have loved for him to see that too.  I know he would have loved to know his grandchildren, especially when they were little kids. 

With little kids he was different.  He wasn’t stern at all:  instead, he was sly.  He knew little kids love foolishness and absurdity.  When my sister and I were young children, he would tell us that he was pretty.  We would insist that he was handsome and we would argue back and forth until all of us were laughing. 

After he retired from the police force, he was a school bus driver.  I went with him a couple of times when my school and the one he drove for had different holidays.  Once he stopped the bus with its red lights flashing, making an ice cream truck coming the other way stop too.  He bought me some ice cream and a couple of the kids on the bus complained that he bought ice cream for me, but not for the rest of them.  I guess they didn’t realize we were related.  And I remember him asking a boy in kindergarten at the beginning of the school year whether he was married and what he did for a living.   The little boy laughed and for a while forgot he was nervous about this new thing called school.

He was 11 years older than my mother and he didn’t age well because for much of his later life he was in poor health so he looked older than that.  A couple of the little kids in our neighborhood would knock on our door and ask my mother if her father could come out and play. 

I still miss him sometimes, more often than you would think.

Response

I can’t figure out how to respond to comments made in the comment section of this blog, so I’ll respond when I feel like it in the blog item section.

To Richard, I’ll say that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fill the portable  hard drive I just got with MP3 music files (not even when I’ve digitized all my Moody Blues albums), let alone consider another hard drive because the one I bought last week filled up with music.

If the entire Billboard top 100 turned over every week since Billboard started its charts in 1955, that would be around 110,000 songs.  It doesn’t, so I’d guess the actual number of songs in the Billboard top 100 is on the order of 20-30 thousand.  I don’t like all of them and I’m not going to try to collect a complete set.

But it occurs to me that computer storage is now so cheap that while having everything is still out of reach financially, having a place to keep everything (at least if everything is digitized) does appear to be within reach.  A 500GB hard drive that fits in my shirt pocket sure beats the equivalent amount of storage in boxes of 500 IBM punch cards.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Did Joe Scarborough perform a necessary public service this week on his MSNBC program, or did you already know which word “the f word” is?

  • The National Toy Hall of Fame has named the stick as one of this year’s inductees.  I’m not kidding!  http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/07/stick.hall.fame.ap/index.html  How would you differentiate between a toy stick and a real one?

  • Polka dots:  why are they called that?  Does it have anything to do with dancing or accordions?

  • Is bombarding people with unwanted e-mail an effective way of selling stuff?  I took my wife to a nice restaurant last month.  They have a rewards program.  If we joined, they’d give us a ten-percent discount on the bill, so we joined.  Now, we get at least one e-mail from the restaurant per day.  Yes, I’ve added them to the filter that dumps selected e-mail into the junk mail folder.

  • I know I’m admitting to being older than a teenager when I ask this, but if you know what pismatology is, or the meaning of either the pompatus or the puppetuse of love for that matter, get in touch, please.

  • Has any individual ever used every function of a top-of-the-line Swiss Army knife?

  • Did you ever wonder why there are no holes in Swiss Army knives or in Swiss steak?

  • “Into,” one word.  “On to,” two words.  How does that make any sense?

  • Why is orange the only fruit named after a color?

  • Did you know you can play solitaire without a computer?

  • I don’t know if they still do, but the NY Times used to run personal ads in the regional sections on Sunday.  I didn’t see this recently, but it’s still stuck in my mind.  Only in a NY Times personal ad would a man describe himself as “ursine.”  I know that means bear-like, but doesn’t it really mean big, fat and hairy?

  • Are you as sick of teasers on TV newscasts as I am?  “Governor Patterson’s proposed state budget cuts, how will they affect your property taxes?  Coming up.”  Uh, your property taxes will go up?  I think I’m going to banish those things to a new cable TV channel and call it The Obvious Channel.

  • For less than $200, I bought a portable hard drive that holds 500GB of information.  Do you know how much that is?  The package says it will hold 120,000 songs.  I have around 6,000 now.  I’d better get busy downloading.

A Cautionary Tale

I had already graduated from high school.  My sister hadn’t yet.  It was Veterans’ Day, just as it is today.   School was closed, but they were holding rehearsals for a school play and my sister was on the stage crew.  My Dad wasn’t feeling well, so he asked me to drive over to the school that night and pick my sister up from the rehearsal. 

In those days, pay phones had been invented, but cell phones hadn’t.  In that school the pay phones could be locked up and they were when I got there.  So, unable to phone her parents to pick her up, a girl I knew named Rita was walking around the stage saying, “Who’s got room in their car?”

I said, “I do, Rita.”

She said, “Good, you can take us home.”  Us turned out to be Rita and another girl named Karen; a petite, cute, blonde girl named Karen.  Rita and Karen were on the stage crew with my sister.  So, three girls and I went out to my car.  My sister got in the front seat, Rita and Karen got in the back. 

I took my sister home first.  She’s four years younger than I am, so I got to stay up later.  At least that’s what I told the two girls in the back seat, neither of whom was willing to sit up front with me after I dropped my sister off. 

Rita told me to take her home next, so I did.  Karen still would not join me in the front seat.  While driving the couple of blocks from Rita’s house to Karen’s, I decided it would be an extraordinarily good idea to go see that play the following Saturday night,  I don’t remember anything about the play.  I may not have remembered anything about the play halfway through the second act.  I had no interest whatsoever in the play. 

But Karen and Rita invited me to the cast party which was at my ex-girlfriend’s house, so I knew how to get there.  In fact, I was the only person driving to the party who did know how to get there, so I led a caravan through town.  This time, Karen did sit in the front, between me and my ex-girlfriend.  In back were my sister, Karen’s friend Rita, and my ex-girlfriend’s best friend, Sue.  I had warned (or perhaps threatened) my sister about sitting in the front seat again.

All this sounds harmless, right?  So why is the tale cautionary?  Well, not right away, but I eventually married Karen.  I’ve just recounted how we met on the anniversary of the day we met.  So, I’d like to take this opportunity to warn all petite, cute, blonde girls to think at least twice before accepting a ride from a strange boy.

Things I Know

  • Ford reported third-quarter losses of $129 million:  GM reported third quarter losses of $2.5 billion!  If it’s all in hundreds, General Motors lost over eleven-thousand pounds of money in three months!  My wife is really good at finding the things I misplace.  They should hire her to look for all that money.

  • It’s a little early for certain liberal-leaning reporters to be canonizing President-Elect Obama.  On the other hand, it’s a little late for conservative talk radio to be whining about the outcome of the election too.

  • I think it’s great that an African-American can now be elected president.  I reserve judgment on whether it’s great that this man has been elected.  I’m not crazy about some of the policies he’s advocating.

  • Nobody’s taking any notice of the fact that 200 years ago importing slaves into this country became illegal.  That’s probably because while it was a noble idea, it didn’t do anything to curtail slavery in this country and slavery is probably the biggest stain ever on America’s soul.

  • The most boring thing I’ve ever done is drive Interstate 80 west through Indiana.  I say that because I’ve driven I-80 through Indiana twice in each direction.  Both times, I noticed the sign marking the time zone boundary when heading east, but not when heading west.  It might be there, but I didn’t see it.

  • There is a semi-permanent speed trap on the New York State Thruway, headed north, just over the top of a hill around milepost 52, south of Newburgh.  I’ve seen it in operation on dozens of weekday mornings through the years.  I’m telling you this because if they’re going to do that, I think they ought to put up a toll booth and get everybody.

  • I really like the Baseball Hall of Fame.  In fact, I’m a subscribing member of the museum.  I like Cooperstown too.  It’s a pretty place, but Cooperstown must be what Ogden Nash was thinking about when he said, “You can’t get there from here.  You have to start from somewhere else.”

  • The people who run the Baseball Hall of Fame must know that Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball:  he doesn’t have a plaque there.

  • Every time I visit my dentist, I think of the dentist in the movie “Little Shop of Horrors.”

  • Women should put the toilet seat down:  they’re the ones who want it down.

  • Women live longer than men, on average, because when we’re all set to leave, they’re still getting ready, on average.

  • My young adult daughter told me recently that not only can she believe it’s not butter, she’s always believed it’s not butter, even as a little girl.  She’s a strange child.  I wonder who she gets it from.  I mean her mother and I are completely normal.

Vote!

I was going to write a blog item about the importance of voting.  But my friend Richard (not Feder) of New Jersey (not Fort Lee) wrote a blog item in which he said voting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Particularly, he took issue with the often repeated statement:  “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”  He’s right about that.  While voting and complaining can be done simultaneously, they can be (and often are) done independently too.

I emailed Richard and he turned my e-mail into his own blog item.  So through the magic of hyperlinks, my work here is done.

And I don’t just recommend Richard’s blog because he was intelligent enough to recommend mine.  Richard and his blog are smart, quirky and often funny.  Today’s item is mostly my writing, but here’s his blog’s index in case you would like to catch up with his writing.  If you do, you’ll learn what a PLUCO is.  That’s a promise!

And here’s my endorsement for this election season.  I think Richard’s blog is worth following.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Is anyone really interested in watching Senator Obama’s infomercial tonight?  I’m more interested in watching oil-based paint dry. 

  • The Federal Reserve lowered the interest rate that banks charge each other today.  I know this is ordinarily considered an economic stimulus, but as I understand it, our economic woes include (but are not limited to) banks being unwilling to extend credit to each other.  There are more banks that want to borrow than banks that want to lend.  If that’s true, wouldn’t it make more sense for the Federal Reserve to raise that rate?

  • I’d like to buy a flash-memory MP3 player that’s also an AM/FM radio.  I know there are some with FM radios in them, but I need one with an AM radio to listen to ball games.  Does anyone make such a thing?

  • Someone did steal a base in the first game of the World Series.  Did you get your free taco on Tuesday?

  • Would you, ever, in your wildest imagination, have thought anyone could come up with a TV show about Mandelbrot sets?

  • Would you, ever, in your wildest imagination, have thought that someone would have programmed the proper noun “Mandelbrot” into MS Word’s default spell-checking dictionary? 

Things I Know

  • It was a nice restaurant.  We had a good time.

  • I like some non-traditional versions of the National Anthem.  I liked Jose Feliciano’s version even though it was controversial at the time.  I liked En Vogue’s sort of doo wop version at one of President Clinton’s inaugural parties.  In fact, I wish they had recorded it.  And I know there are very few people who have enough range to sing the standard version correctly.  That being said, if you take more than a minute to sing the first stanza of the Star Spangled Banner at a baseball game, you’re trying to show off.  So the first strike-out of the 2008 World Series:  The Backstreet Boys.

  • The people I work for are using Barracuda Web Filter to suppress ads if you surf the Internet from my place of business.  They have every right to restrict what you view at work.  Not that they need my approval, but I approve.  Only thing is when the Barracuda Web Filter blocks an ad, it replaces said ad with a message that says the ad was blocked by Barracuda Web Filter.  In other words, every ad Barracuda Web Filter blocks is replaced by an ad for Barracuda Web Filter!

  • I discovered through extensive and painstaking research that I need to own four utility knives in order to know where at least one of them is at all times.  It doesn’t matter if they’re brightly colored either.  I still need four.  What’s troubling is that right now, I know where all four of them are.  That’s never happened before.

  • During election time, if I get a telephone call from someone who says they’re conducting a survey, I tell them I know how big my property is, say “thank you” and hang up.

  • And since this is the political silly season, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell all cable TV news hosts that there’s only one “n” in “pundit.”

  • If you are what you eat, I’m Pepsi Cola and pretzels; either that, or chocolate ice cream.

  • Dilbert isn’t funny, not one bit funny, not a damned bit funny, if you work for the pointy-haired guy.

  • A chain saw is very handy to have if you believe the guy in the next college dorm room is making too much noise and you need to convince him to quiet down.  But an electric chain saw won’t do.  It has to be gas powered.  Firing that thing up and touching the tip of the bar to the door of the offending dorm room is remarkably effective.

  • Anyone under the age of 30, maybe 40, would sound a lot more intelligent if they never again uttered the following four-letter word:  “LIKE.”

  • If I ever win one of those big lotteries like Mega Millions or Power Ball, I have a great plan.  I’m going to turn up the heat in my house.  And, if I win one of those big lotteries, I want you to know there will be a really big party.  I don’t want you to think you’re invited, in fact I may not show up, but there will be a party.

  • When someone says, I know (insert the name of a big shot in the company or the government here), I usually think they don’t.  If they did know that person, they’d be talking to him or her, not to me.

  • My father’s whole life was about obligation.

  • Buffalo don’t have wings, chickens don’t have fingers or nuggets, and fish certainly don’t have sticks.

  • The word “hiccough” should either be spelled the way it is or pronounced the way it is, but definitely not both!  Same thing for the word “tongue.”

  • This year is the 75th anniversary of the end of prohibition.  I didn’t hear anyone offer a toast to commemorate the event.  Did you?

So Far So Good

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away and on this date in history, I got married.  Coincidentally, my wife got married the same day.  So today is my wedding anniversary and her’s too.  Therefore, tonight I’m taking her out to dinner at what I hope is a nice restaurant.  It comes well recommended.

Think about what you promise each other when you get married.  Marriage is really serious and not enough people take it seriously.  I like the love, honor and cherish part best!

We’ve done the for better or worse thing.  I prefer better:  we both do!  We’ve done the sickness or in health thing too:  I prefer health and hope we never do sickness again.  I’m pretty sure we’re also going to make it to the until death do us part milestone.  I’m certainly not looking forward to that, but I consider myself very fortunate–perhaps even blessed.  So many marriages these days end in divorce and ours seems to be a success.

I say this all the time because it bears repeating:  the smartest thing I ever did was marry my wife!

I only say this once a year:  happy anniversary darling.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

  • Can you be paranoid if everyone is out to get you?

  • With the Dodgers (I root against them) and the Mets (I root for them) done for the season, who am I going to root for in the World Series?  And why?

  • If General Motors and Chrysler merge, what will the resulting company be called?  I’ve seen “General Mopar” suggested and that is funny.  However, I vote for General Motors.  I mean how many Chrysler models are likely to survive such a merger?  I think two:  the minivan and the Jeep.

  • What do you call a mistake on a map?  Is it a topographical error?

  • Has your $600 check from the federal government made any significant difference in your own personal economic situation?

  • If someone steals a base in tonight’s World Series game, everybody in America gets a free Taco from Taco Bell next Tuesday.  But what happens if I don’t want a free Taco?

Stupid, Wrong and Dangerous!

I understand the first, but not the second-day coverage of New York Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain’s arrest over the weekend for drunk driving.  Chamberlain is relatively well known.  In Lincoln and in New York City, I’d venture to say he’s famous.  So his arrest was news.

Drunk driving is stupid, wrong and dangerous for the person doing it and those around him or her.   Hanging around with buddies who are willing to indulge in a shoving match with another patron over  his alcohol-fueled smart mouth is stupid, wrong and dangerous too. 

Bar fights can lead to death or career-ending injury for the professional athlete involved, even if he’s a bystander, or for someone else who happens to be there.  You might be the toughest guy in the bar, but you could hurt yourself or someone else proving you are.  Also, you are unlikely to know if someone there has a concealed weapon, because concealed weapons are (to state the obvious) usually concealed. 

Injury, criminal charges and death are all things anyone would do well to avoid.

All these aren’t things Chamberlain did:  all of them are reasons he should avoid places where problems like these  could happen.  And if Chamberlain develops into an alcoholic, that’s going to be a big problem for both him and for the Yankees.   I hope that doesn’t happen.

However, is the second-day lead, the fact that Joba Chamberlain spent part of Friday night with some buddies in a strip joint, really news? 

If you were 23-years old, made over $300,000 a year with the prospect of making lots more, single, didn’t have to show up at work until February 15th, and found yourself in Lincoln Nebraska, where would you take your buddies?  To the opera?

I don’t mean that as criticism of Lincoln, Nebraska either.  I have been lots of places and I know they all have good and bad points and I know the good and bad points about one place can be different from the good and bad points about another.  Moreover, you and I might differ on what is good and what is bad about one place or another. 

I suspect that New York has a more varied night life and I know it has over thirty-times more people than Lincoln. I know there’s live opera in New York City.  I don’t know if Lincoln has an opera company. 

I’m just saying that a group of young, single men are more likely to spend a typical Friday night in some bar than in some opera house.

I’m not nostalgic for everything from the past, but I’d like to return to a time when the obvious wasn’t news.

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

How is that Kazmir for Zambrano trade working out for the Mets these days?

How come “albeit” and “nevertheless” are one word each, but “inasmuch as” is two?

Wouldn’t it be ironic if all the ancient pyramids really were built by space aliens, and the ones in Mexico were built by aliens who were there illegally?

Have you tried to buy a radio lately?  Just an AM/FM radio for your bedside, or your kitchen or your office.  Just a clock radio or what they used to call a table-model radio.  Best Buy doesn’t sell them anymore.  Lots of electronics stores don’t.  Any radio you can buy for your bedside in the Best Buy nearest to me is also an iPod dock.  The fact that plain radios are getting harder to buy can’t bode well for the broadcasting industry.

If you use the trademark “iPod” at the beginning of a sentence, would it be spelled “IPod?”

Is there any rational reason for all the extra days off that have been injected into the Major League Baseball Playoffs?  The Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series on October 3rd, 1955.  This year’s series, if it goes 7, will end on October 30th.

Last Debate

Don’t get too excited.  Tonight is the last debate of the 2008 presidential campaign, not the last presidential campaign debate ever.

I was going to say that the security in the area surrounding the Hofstra University is extraordinary, but it’s really the norm.  It’s pretty damned hard to get within a mile of the debate site and it’s been that way since the most public part of the security plan was put into effect at 5:00 AM this morning.

 There was a time in this country, where if you wanted to see the Presidential candidates in person, you could find out where they were going to be and stand by a road to watch them ride by waving to the crowd from the backseat of a convertible.  Heck, there was a time you could knock on the door of the White House and maybe get to talk to the President.  Abe Lincoln did some of that during the Civil War.  All security around Presidents and Presidential candidates tightened up after President Kennedy was killed, of course.

I’d hate to think anyone wants to hurt these men badly enough to justify all this security.  There aren’t many who do, and  one would be too many, but the security is justifiable.  While there’s probably a very low chance of anything untoward happening, anything anyone can do to reduce that risk even farther is a good idea. 

And that’s not just a fact of life, it’s also sad.

Things I Know

The worst invention in history is either the battery-powered amplifier or the 2008 presidential campaign.  I’m leaning toward the latter.

The crowning achievement of western civilization to date is mixed vegetables, either canned or frozen, with no lima beans in them.

There’s no “I” in “electoral.”

I hope the people who make Viagra don’t think their awful TV commercials have anything to do with the product selling well.

I know you can’t make somebody love you because if you could, everybody would make somebody love them and nobody would wait for love to happen the way it does now.

The four food groups for teenage boys are salt, sugar, carbonated and French fried.  So the perfect food for teenage boys must be heavily salted French-fried Fizzies.

The smartest thing I ever did was marry my wife.  I have no idea what the second smartest thing was.  I should be able to keep track.  It’ not like I’ve done that many smart things.  Nor do I know the smartest thing my wife ever did.  She hasn’t said.

In raising her children, my sister neglected to teach at least one of them something very, very important.  I had to tell my niece there’s no such thing as too much chocolate.  I believe there’s also no such thing as too much money, but I’m never going to get close to having even in inkling of whether I’m right about that.

Insomnia wastes more time in my life than even the Internet.

Coke or Pepsi?  Pepsi!  For me, Pepsi.  My son likes Mexican Coca Cola because it’s made with sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup.  I don’t like either Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi.  To me, Diet Coke doesn’t taste like anything.  At least Diet Pepsi tastes like soap. 

Attention airline industry:  what you’re doing isn”t working.  Try something else!  Attention investment banking industry:  What I said about the airline industry, it applies to you too, if there are any of you left.

No More No Comment

Back in February, I started this blog with the avowed purpose of entertaining myself.  So far, so good.

Until the end of September, I hadn’t looked at the statistics on who’s visiting the Sisyphus Project.   Frankly, the stats surprised me.   After eight months in operation, it turns out I have a few readers.  Not only that, but the number of individual site visits is rising steadily.

I’ve only told a handful of friends that I’m doing this and two fingers of that handful have told me they don’t make a habit of reading blogs.  It occurs to me that some of the people who are reading the Sisyphus Project don’t know me from Adam.  So in addition to being surprised, I’m also flattered. 

Now that I know there’s somebody out there, I’ve turned comments on. 

There’s no registration and no password, however the software system we’re using here does require you to enter a name and an e-mail address.  It certainly doesn’t require you to enter your name.  Handles are okay with me.  I assume that nobody is using their real name to comment.  Everybody else should make that assumption too.  The software also requires you to enter an e-mail address.  I haven’t tried it and don’t know whether the address has to be a valid one.  The software says it doesn’t publish the e-mail addresses.  I haven’t tried that either.

Rules for commenters (I’m trying to keep them to a minimum):

The first and foremost rule is:  It’s my blog!

A panel of judges rules on the quality of comments.  The panel consists of me.  Decisions of the judges are arbitrary. 

Also, I’m writing this for free, and so are you.  If I figure out a way for me to make money on this, I get to keep it, and you’re commenting for free.  If you figure out a way to make money on this, I get to keep that too, and you still comment for free.  In other words, copyright 2008:  all rights reserved.

By choosing to post here, you agree to those terms. 

Please try to have your comments make sense, or nonsense.

I may delete something you’ve posted here if I feel like it.  If I delete something, it just means I feel like it.  I suppose I can edit things too, but I probably won’t.  No guarantees though. 

I don’t do libel and/or slander.  You can do libel and/or slander if you want to, but not here.  I don’t flame people either.  You can do that too, but again, not here.

In the very likely event   something comes up and I didn’t think of a rule to cover it, the first and foremost rule applies.  It’s my blog!

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Let me get this straight:  The pirates on that ship full of Russian tanks in the Indian Ocean have a spokesman?  Then I guess both journalism and public relations are dead.

By the way, would you call a ship full of Russian tanks a tanker?  Just wondering.

I have more thumb drives than I have thumbs.  Is that going to be a problem?

Has anybody considered that maybe Heather Locklear wasn’t DUI?  Maybe she slid across the hood of the police officer’s patrol car and he was too young to remember that.

Why do the people who make sneakers make them with shoe laces that are too long? 

Shouldn’t the word “synonym” have at least one synonym?

Where did 2-million people go when they evacuated New Orleans for Hurricane Gustav?   I didn’t see anything about that on the news.  Did you?

Is there anything that doesn’t make the price of oil and gasoline go up and the major stock market indexes go down?

Things I Know

There’s no “a” in definitely.  There’s no “e” in Manhattan either.   Thanks to computerized spell checking, I no longer have to remember whether there’s an “e” in truly.  Good thing too, because I used to forget between the time I looked up and the time I went to write it down.  Do you have something that won’t stick in your memory?  That’s mine.

My wife and I are remodeling our kitchen and both bathrooms.  It seems to me that it takes between four and five months to complete a five-week construction project.

She’s in charge of stuff like whether we’re going to remodel, what kind of cabinets, appliances, floor covering, counters and wall color. 

I’m in charge of stuff like how deep is the bathtub, and whether the medicine cabinet will be surface mounted or recessed into the wall.  I decided surface-mounted and then I changed my mind.

In the same remodeling vein, I know that most toilets get moved only twice, when they are installed and when they are removed, but it would still be nice if there was an easy way to carry the damned things.

It doesn’t take much longer, but it does takes longer to cook rice in a microwave oven than it does to cook it on the top of a regulation stove and you still have to put it in water to do it.

Those hard things at the ends of shoe laces are called aglets, but they aren’t called that very often because most people don’t know what they’re called.

Growing older means having to explain stuff to adults.

If you live long enough, you reach a point where all prices are ridiculous.

Choice Hotels is running radio spots where they say if you stay with them, it relieves you of worry so you can worry about important things like why sheep don’t shrink in the rain.  Lanolin!  I learned that in grade school.  Now, I’ve relieved you of worry too!  And you don’t have to stay with me either, in case you were worried about that.

The aroma wafting out of a pizza shop when pies are in the oven is pretty special.  Come to think of it, the aroma of any kind of pie baking is one of life’s pleasant experiences.

National Energy Policy

I heard earlier this week that oil was under $100 a barrel.  The price of gasoline and home heating oil has not declined in direct proportion.  You didn’t expect it to, did you?  Good!  Then you weren’t disappointed.

There’s been a lot of talk about an energy policy for the United States.  If we could power our nation on talk about an energy policy, we would certainly be free of dependency on imported oil.  Obama wants to conserve oil.  McCain wants to drill for more.  Paris Hilton says, “Do both!”  It’s sad, disturbing and surprising that Paris Hilton makes more sense than either major party candidate for President of the United States.  I hope it was the first and last time that happens.

Someday if oil becomes rare enough burning it will be illegal, because the petrochemical industry will be much more important.  Even if you think about it, you probably have no idea how many things you use every day are made from petroleum.  I’ve seen public service announcements recently urging people to eschew bottled water because it’s environmentally unfriendly.  All those plastic bottles are made of oil folks.  And they take almost forever to decompose in landfills, so drinking your water from a glass or some other reusable container seems like a good idea.  Here’s another one.

As I said I would be, I was back in Lake Placid this week.  Nice place:  As long as it isn’t winter, I recommend it.  I almost stayed there too long though.  It was 33 degrees, but still technically summer when I got up on Friday morning.  If you like skiing or other cold-weather sports, you may disregard my recommendation and go there in the winter too. 

While there, I stopped in a supermarket.  There’s only one in Lake Placid, so you could figure out it was a Price Chopper, even if I didn’t tell you.  There, I bought travel-sized toothpaste and travel-sized shaving cream.  In addition to coming in a tube and an aerosol can respectively, each of them came in a blister pack.

I know the advantages of blister packs.  They make it easy to hang the cans and tubes on display racks.  They also make small items hard to put in your pocket and therefore, hard to shoplift.  We all know some of the disadvantages.  I hate packages that require tools to open, especially packages of hand tools that require power tools to open.  And if what you bought turns out not to be what you thought you needed, you destroyed the package to find that out, making most stores unwilling to take your purchase back and refund your money. 

But those PSA’s about bottled water made me realize, that blister packs, since they are unnecessary and made of plastic, waste oil too.  So I hereby join the ranks of McCain, Obama and Hilton in attempting to define what our national energy policy should be. 

Prevent blister packs and save oil.

Non-Global Warming

You know it’s serious when the National Weather Service tells people in Texas to evacuate from the path of Hurricane Ike or die.  Given those two choices, I know what I’d do.  A storm that covers 40 percent of the Gulf of Mexico certainly has my respect.

I live within four blocks of an arm of the Great South Bay on Long Island, so when Hurricane Hanna started churning up the Atlantic I did what any person similarly situated would do:  I started paying attention.  When my area was placed under a tropical storm watch, I moved a lot of stuff from my back yard into my garage.  I also turned my picnic table upside down on the ground so it would not go airborne.  Then I climbed on the roof of the garage.  One could argue whether that’s sensible, but I did it to drive some more special screws into the corrugated metal roof.

As usual, we escaped the worst.  We got some wind and a lot of rain, but no damage.  So, I enjoyed the beautiful weather that always follows a big storm, returned to painting my kitchen, and forgot about it until two days after Hanna passed.   Then I noticed that I had forgotten to turn the picnic table upright.  If the grass had spent that much time under an opaque table, it would not be happy, but it would recover.  However, our picnic table has a translucent glass top.  The green house effect kicked in.  We experienced non-global warming (only under the tabletop) and the grass (only under the tabletop and in the shape of the table) died, except a small percentage of the grass sought shelter in the shadows of the table legs and survived.  I was left wondering what to do. 

In the meantime, I pay a company to apply chemicals to my lawn to make the grass grow better so I’ll have to mow it more.  One could question whether that’s sensible too, I suppose.  But they came by this week.  In addition to doing what I pay them to do, they left me about a pound of grass seed.  So, now I know what to do.  Plus, I feel good about the lawn service because I got something more than I paid for.   Not a lot more, but anything more is a good thing.

For the rest of the hurricane season, I’ll continue to follow my hurricane preparedness plan.  I watch the Weather Channel, find out where Jim Cantore is, and make sure I’m somewhere else!

Nuculer Non-Proliferation

So, they had to spell “nuclear” phonetically to get Sarah Palin to pronounce it correctly last Wednesday in St. Paul.  I thought it was already spelled phonetically, but they got her to say it right within five days.  They’ve never gotten George W. Bush to say it right and they never got Jimmy Carter to say it right either.  Carter, by the way, should have known better:  after all, before he became President, he was a naval officer on a “nuculer” submarine.

Spelling words wrong so you’ll say them right is an old broadcaster’s trick and Sarah Palin was once a broadcaster.  When I was on the air in Richmond, VA, I always spelled Staunton, a city in Western VA, along I-81, incorrectly in my copy, so I’d say it right.  The correct pronunciation, by the way, is Stanton.  And as a child of the New York metropolitan area, I always spelled Powhatan wrong too.   You can probably imagine how I sight-read that one if I didn’t leave out the “h”.  I didn’t have to spell Monticello differently in copy if I meant Jefferson’s home or the race track in New York.  For some reason, the difference in pronunciation of those two places is something I could always remember.  I’m not bragging, that’s just something that sticks in my head.  I never could figure a way that worked for me to keep from messing up the different pronunciation of Lima, Ohio and Lima, Peru.

If we have any hope of continuing to call what passes for electioneering these days “political discourse,” can we please stop criticizing the 7-year-old in public?  My mom used to moisten a Kleenex with saliva and use it to wipe my face when I was a toddler.  I know Kleenex is a trade name, but mom always used Kleenex as opposed to Marcal, Scots, or some other brand.  And I remember it because even when I was a toddler, I thought my thirty-something mother was doing something gross.   Someone will eventually teach seven-year-old Piper Palin not to use spit hair tonic on her baby brother.  In the meantime, I say cut the kid a little slack.   

Short take

Sarah Palin meets at least one qualification for high federal office:  she mispronounces “nuclear” too!  I say we just change the spelling to “nuculer” and give up.

Short take

I used to work for a US Congressman, but I’ve been totally bored  with this year’s presidential election for at least a year.  If I recall correctly, 1956 was the last time either major party’s presidential nominating convention determined who the candidate would be.  So, why does anyone watch the nominating convention of either major party?

Summer Vacation III

I had business in Saratoga Springs on Thursday. I don’t know why, but an organization I belong to has a legislative forum in Saratoga Springs the Thursday before the Travers every year. The Travers is a horse race. The meeting is productive. Having it in Saratoga Springs two days before the biggest horse race of the year seems like an odd and expensive choice to me.

I’m kind of a local government policy wonk. I work in government. I have a degree in it. I’ve taught it. I used to report on it. I like to talk about it and I even read about it in my spare time. So, every year, we have this meeting where everyone talks about what the New York State Legislature has recently done and what it’s likely to do. I enjoy talking to the people at the meeting and I’m happy that my boss not only allows me to go, but pays for it as part of my job.

One of the people who attends this meeting every year is State Senator Elizabeth Little. I’ve met Sen. Little a few times. Neither of us really knows the other, but I’ve got to tell you she impresses me with her knowledge of local government, her passion for public service, and her candor. I feel good about the fact that she’s the chairman of the New York State Senate’s Local Government Committee.

Have I mentioned that I’m cheap? And I’m cheap with other people’s money, as well as with mine. So, when I go to Saratoga Springs a couple of days before the Travers, I don’t stay in Saratoga Springs even though my employer is paying for it. I stay in Albany about 25 miles south. If I stayed in Saratoga Springs, a comparable room to the one I stayed at in Albany would cost $270 more, and that’s just at the Holiday Inn, not the Gideon Putnam which is a very ritzy hotel. After spending the night in Albany, I get up and commute to the meeting.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been fortunate enough to take my wife along with me, on the trip, but not to the meeting. The meeting would bore her to death. My wife and I pay her expenses and after the meeting, I take a day off and we go “Someplace Else” together. When we are on the way to and from “Someplace Else” and when we are there, we pay for both of our expenses. We wouldn’t even think of trying to charge my employer.

This year “Someplace Else” was Lake Placid the village. No, not the town in the awful monster movie, the home of two Winter Olympics. Lake Placid the village is a small, picturesque community whose business district is centered around a lake. No! Not Lake Placid the lake. Lake Placid the lake is kind of north of the lake that’s in the middle of Lake Placid the village. The Lake in the middle of the village is Mirror Lake. As far as I know, there’s no such thing as Mirror Lake the village and the two lakes are not connected, but they are near each other–not much more than across Mirror Lake Drive. Even though Mirror Lake is in the middle of Lake Placid the village, you might still think that Mirror Lake Drive goes around Mirror Lake and you’d be right. There isn’t a road that goes all the way around Lake Placid the lake.

Lake Placid, both the village and the lake, get around 15 feet of snow a year. That’s why it was a good place to hold two Winter Olympics. It’s also why I would much rather go there in the summer. I don’t like to be cold. I think I’ve mentioned that before. While we were there, we did the tourist thing. We stayed in a nice hotel, we ate some good meals, we shopped in local stores, we did some of the sights, including a one-hour boat tour of Lake Placid the lake. I never sign up for three-hour boat tours of anyplace. It’s a Gilligan’s Island thing.  

We also visited the ski-jump facility that’s left over from and has been improved since the 1980 Winter Olympics. Standing on top of the 120-meter ski jump causes me to wonder two things: How does one become a ski jumper; and why? It seems to me that one of the bravest people who ever lived was the first guy to go ski jumping for a second time. I say that because you just know the first time was an accident. From the top of the ski jump, you can see John Brown’s farm house and his grave, the one the Civil War song said his body was moldering in. The Abolitionist Brown had a farm near Lake Placid and after he was hanged for raiding that federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in what is now West Virginia, he was buried on the farm.

Since I’m talking about the Olympics, let me correct myself. I said recently I thought Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps’ diet was kind of heavy on fried food and cheese. Then I heard a sports nutritionist on National Public Radio. The woman said if Phelps tried to get that many calories from a low-fat diet, he would not have time to do anything else but eat. So the fried food and cheese make perfect sense.

As someone who likes to be warm, I’m sorry to tell you that in what New Yorkers call The North Country a few trees have already started displaying their fall colors. Nevertheless, I like Lake Placid, both the village and the lake. The place is pretty and has some interesting stuff in and around it. I’m going back next month.

This year, I’ve traveled more than I usually do, but Friday in Lake Placid the village, I had a revelation about travel and what would make traveling more palatable to me. I was walking around Lake Placid the village Friday morning, looking for a place to eat when it hit me. In my perfect world, Ben and Jerry’s will be open for breakfast!

Food Olympics? Nah!

If I start eating four to five times as much food as I normally would, will I develop muscles like those of standout Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps? I think he deserves all the attention being paid to his remarkable athletic achievements, but there’s too much focus on Mr. Phelps’ diet. He’s probably overdoing the fried food and cheese, but I’m quite ready to accept the amount of food he eats.

First, he exercises more in a week than many people do in a lifetime. Case in point, going to the pool several times a week, it took me about four months to swim 50 miles. I don’t do that anymore, because over a period of years, I wore out both shoulders swimming laps for exercise. Phelps swims 50 miles in one week, and I understand he does it every week.

Second, he’s not that far removed from his teenage years. As a Boy Scout leader and as a former teenage boy and young man myself, I can tell you from first-hand experience that food seldom spoils the appetite of young, growing or physically active men.

There’s no doubt that Michael Phelps is physically gifted and naturally talented, but let’s not overlook his hard work. His routine makes hard seem too tame a word to use. Very few people work anywhere near that hard at anything. If you or I did and we started out being at least good at it, we might not become the best in the world at what we we’re working on, we might not become the best in world history, but we’d probably become very successful.

Even more random

I used to be part of “The Media.” I’ve mentioned that before. When I was, I enjoyed my job. But when I see what “The Media” (with a big assist from her husband) is doing to Elizabeth Edwards, it makes me reluctant to admit I ever was a reporter. He deserves it: she doesn’t! We used to hear the phrase “common decency” occasionally, but decency isn’t common, is it?

Here’s an example of technology run amok. Pronunciation errors by radio and TV network news anchors bother me as much as spelling errors in newspapers, books and magazines do. These professional speakers ought to (and probably do) know better. I’d like to tell you about one I heard this week, but can’t. I’m writing this using Microsoft Works, and Works knows what I want to write is wrong, so when I type it, the program substitutes the correct word and I can’t figure out how to disable autocorrect. This episode does, however, raise an interesting philosophical question: if what I want to write isn’t a word, how can I misspell it?

Why am I sitting in my living room watching the parade of nations at the Olympics on TV, especially since it’s boring and it happened this morning? At least it was morning here when it happened there.

I have postulated that getting older means having to explain stuff to adults. Today, I saw a young man trying to avoid his 15 minutes of fame and realized he probably didn’t know who Andy Warhol was. The young man is a Midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is on the annual cruise that some students from Annapolis take on relatively small sailboats. I believe they are sloops. A very attractive young woman wanted to interview him for a cable TV show produced by a local college. He was reluctant to participate. More often than not, it’s very good idea for an unattached young man to do what an attractive, and unattached young woman asks him to do. I met my wife when one of her friends was wandering around saying, “Who has room in their car?” I allowed that I did. She said, “Good! You can take us home.” My wife was the other element of “us.” Almost every day since then, I’ve been glad that I offered someone a ride.

The saga of renovating my home continues. The refrigerator has been shimmed into place, making me glad I hired a contractor instead of doing the job myself. The dishwasher and microwave oven are in place. If I can get my friend to lend me two hands (just lending me A hand won’t cut it), I’ll put the stove back tomorrow. If you are remodeling your kitchen and want the project to proceed quickly, I have one word of advice for you, Formica. Actually any laminate countertop will do. It ought to be possible to create custom-made laminate counters for virtually any size kitchen in one day. Fabricating counter tops of granite, synthetic stone, concrete or certain other durable materials will take longer than the fabricator told you it would. And the fabricator will probably tell you it takes seven to ten business days. We are now ready for counter tops and could have been ready a few days ago. The counter tops will be installed a week from Wednesday. At least that’s the current plan.

That’s also the day I have to go to Saratoga Springs NY on business, but I don’t have to leave until the counters are installed. It’s tough to have to go to Saratoga Springs at the height of the racing season, but I’ll soldier through somehow. I’ll take my wife with me, and when my business is concluded we’ll enjoy ourselves for a couple of days exploring upstate New York. I don’t care for winter in that region, but the other three seasons are very nice.

Remodeling Saga

Fortunately, the world didn’t end last Monday when my doctor, one of the world’s least punctual people, was early for an appointment for the first time in the 14 years I’ve been his patient.    So, my remodeling saga continues.

I believe every house in the suburb where I live has a refrigerator in it. While I’m old enough to remember a few die-hards having ice boxes, I also believe it’s now true that far less than one per cent of all houses in the United States don’t contain at least one refrigerator. Right now we have two, plus a stand-alone freezer, but we’ll be getting rid of one of the refrigerators very soon.We have two because we got a new one today.

People who deliver refrigerators for a living work hard for their money. Refrigerators are big and heavy and even though almost every house has at least one, lots of houses, including mine, aren’t designed so a new refrigerator can easily be carried into the house even by strong men with specialized equipment like a hand truck with rollers that allow you to drag it up and down stairs.

When the refrigerator was delivered this morning, the men who did so measured two exterior and two interior doorways. They measured the space where the refrigerator is supposed to go and they measured the refrigerator too. Then they took the refrigerator apart. It’s one of those French-door refrigerators, so they removed two doors and the drawer front for the freezer portion. They also removed the back door to my house. They used the stair-climbing hand truck too, but they still had to lift the refrigerator and the dolly to squeeze it through the back door. I tipped the two guys who did all that work. They told me people with money don’t tip well. So, I guess it’s official (but not surprising to me) that I don’t have money.

After all that trouble, the new refrigerator barely doesn’t fit where it’s supposed to go. I think it’s because before I started to renovate, nothing in my 100-year-old house was level, square or plumb. The new cabinets are plumb, but the floor isn’t level so the refrigerator wants to stand at an angle great enough to make the space where it goes a little too narrow. I hope the refrigerator’s leveling adjustment covers a big enough range that we can make the fridge fit without requiring any of the already installed cabinets to be moved.  

I have more things delivered these days than I used to. My Uncle Eddie being dead for many years is the reason I had the refrigerator delivered. When we moved in my childhood from our apartment on the Brooklyn-Queens border into the family’s suburban homestead in Syosset, NY, my Uncle Eddie, who worked moving furniture, did the job. Eddie and my dad were close. He insisted. Resistance would have been futile. My clearest memory of that moving day is that my Uncle Eddie carried our refrigerator from the moving van into the house, on his back and by himself, using one of those canvas straps movers use. Standard refrigerators were much smaller then than they are today, which may be why new ones are hard to get into older homes, but cubic foot for cubic foot refrigerators were much heavier then than they are today. I am thinking that refrigerator weighed very close to twice what my Uncle Eddie did and he was a big, and obviously strong man.

Uncle Eddie died long before his time and when I was quite young. That trick with the refrigerator is one of only two strong memories I have of him. I’m happy I got my new refrigerator today and it was nice to be reminded of Uncle Eddie too.

Is This the End of the World?

I believe I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been going to one particular doctor for something like 14 years and during that period he’s never been on time.  That’s still true, but this morning he was early.  By using the phrase:  “He’s never been on time,” I’ve always meant:  “He has always been late.”  I can still say he’s never been on time  and be accurate, but I can’t mean he’s always been late anymore.

I’m not certain I can adjust to this new reality.  I won’t be making any plans for tomorrow until I’m sure there is a tomorrow.  By being early this morning said doctor has created such an imbalance in the universe that it may end within the next 24  hours.  I won’t keep you posted.  If the world or the universe ends within the next 24 hours, I won’t have to tell you.  Someone else will, or you’ll be able to figure it out for yourself.

At Random

There’s an expression: You’d lose your head if it wasn’t attached! I actually have forgotten my head on three or four occasions. I also forgot my wife, or at least didn’t notice her, the first and second times we met. I tease my wife that she takes my things and hides them, then finds them so I will consider her essential. That’s silly. I would consider her essential even if I knew the location of everything I own.

I’ve been conducting scientific research on losing stuff. I wondered how many utility knives and how many retractable metal tape measures you need to own before you will know where at least one of them is at all times. My current operating hypothesis is four. Right now, I know where two utility knives and one tape measure are. But I only own two hammers and know where both of them are.

At our house, we’re renovating both bathrooms and the kitchen. It’s confusing.  It would probably help a lot if we had all the things we need for the job on hand before we started, but to do that, we’d need another house to live in while this one is under construction, or we’d need another building to keep the stuff in. Tile guy is coming tomorrow. That means our full bath ought to be usable sometime early next week.

Air conditioning and I don’t seem to be on good terms this summer. Our whole family went to Sacramento CA in May to attend our son’s law school graduation. It was over 100 degrees there and the air conditioning in our hotel room stopped working. Management at the hotel moved my wife and me into the other hotel they owned next door. They also moved our adult daughter into the next door hotel although there was nothing wrong with her room. The second hotel was more expensive than the first, but we paid the rate from the first one. Mistakes happen and problems occur. The test is what you do when bad stuff happens and you’re responsible for it. Do you own the problem and fix it? I was very pleased with the management of those two hotels. This week, I’m having a lot of trouble with the air conditioning in my car. Tomorrow is the third day in a week my car has been in the shop. I hope tomorrow it gets fixed.

I was less pleased with a plumbing supply house that messed up my order and took a week to fix it.

Getting older means explaining stuff to adults. This morning, while entering the building which contains my office, I met a colleague. She said to me, “You don’t look happy.” I replied, “Wrong dwarf, I’m Sleepy!” Then I realized there are adults who wouldn’t get the Snow White reference.

Nutrition

The Blizzard of the Month at Dairy Queen has Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookies in it. I found this out from a TV commercial. There aren’t any Dairy Queens near where I live. Considering what it costs to drive around the NY Metropolitan area these days, I may have to forego that treat. Why couldn’t the Thin Mint Blizzard have been the June Blizzard of the Month? I was in Colorado Springs CO early in June where the nearest Dairy Queen is down the street in the local mall.

Thank God for the Internet! I have to go to Rhode Island next week and it turns out there are several Dairy Queens near I-95 in Connecticut. Thin Mints and ice cream:  there must be something better, but I can’t think of it right now.

Speaking of desert, have you noticed that things we know are no good for us have nutrition labels on them? Oreo cookies have a nutrition label right there on the package. And the Oreos’ nutrition label says three of them constitute a serving. Ridiculous! The number of Oreos in a serving depends on how much milk you have in the house.

Again in a nutritional vein, the NY Daily News reported last week that some foods for sale in NY restaurants don’t meet NY City’s new requirement to reduce or eliminate trans-fats.  Trans-fats are bad for you. One of the foods that doesn’t meet the new standard is Junior’s cheesecake. I don’t care for cheesecake, but I defy you to produce even one adult who believes cheesecake is a healthy alternative to anything.

We don’t need nutrition labels on food. There’s a simple and nearly foolproof test to determine whether a particular food is good for you. Does it taste good? Yes? Then, it isn’t good for you. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is fresh, ripe peaches

News

I used to be a reporter and I used to work in the public relations field too.  I understand the news business a little better than the average bear. There’s a saying in news and PR:  Never screw up on a slow news day.   It’s okay to die on a slow news day, but don’t screw up on one. The reason is TV and radio have to fill up their newscasts and news-entertainment hybrid shows whether anything happens or not.  And if it’s a slow news day the CBS Evening News (or NBC or ABC) will still be half an hour long.  CNN and Fox News Channel will still broadcast 24 hours a day.  Newspapers can print papers with fewer pages within limits.  They do have to leave room for all the ads they’ve sold.  TV and radio can’t broadcast shorter hours.

The esteemed TV journalist Tim Russert died on a Friday afternoon during what most people think of as the summer although technically it was still spring.  This helps to explain the astonishing coverage his death received.  Spontaneous news is the kind that happens most often on Friday afternoon.  Unless its really bad news, manufactured news doesn’t.  People go away or at least outside on Friday afternoon and Saturday so PR people don’t manufacture good news then because very few people will watch it, but they do manufacture bad news then for the same reason. Very few people will read about it either.  Saturday newspapers have lower circulation than any other day of the week.

All of this is preamble to my observations brought about by this morning’s news coverage.  Yesterday was a really slow news day around here.  The Today Show (which is only partially a news show, I know that) had a report to warn viewers that running a little kid over with a power lawn mower will hurt or kill them.  Now it was a terrible tragedy for the family of the little boy the Today Show focused on, but was it news?  The only reason you wouldn’t think that running someone over with a power lawn mower was bad is if you never considered that possibility at all.

Then, because I’m old fashioned and used to be in the business, I went out and bought three newspapers.  Well, maybe two, if you don’t consider the New York Post a real newspaper, and I know some people don’t.  I once had a job where I was paid to read six papers every day.  The entire front page of today’s New York Daily News was taken up with a big picture of the NY Mets new manager Jerry Manuel and a headline indicating that Mr. Manuel said the Mets are the #2 baseball team in NY.  Lots of the paper’s sports section was taken up with elaborating on the “story.”

I’m a Met fan, but duh!  If the Mets aspire to being the #1 baseball team in New York, it would help if they would win something.  When I started in the news business, I was told that the obvious isn’t news.  Does Jerry Manuel saying something obvious make it news?  I hope not. Now man bites dog, that’s a story!

The Internet Hammock

I have to admit I was pretty busy until I started traveling last month.  Then I was traveling and now I’m back.  My luggage arrived home too, although not on the same plane.  Based on the amount of spam I’ve been receiving from the airline I used, they must think (incorrectly as it turns out) that I was happy they lost my luggage.  I wonder what kind of terrorist threat my suitcase full of dirty laundry posed.  TSA must know:  they searched it.

The demolition crew is inside my house tearing apart the kitchen, putting unwanted holes in the dining room ceiling while tearing apart the bathroom and doing associated other things that demolition crews do, and undo.  That leaves me without anything to do but lie in the hammock in the shade in the back yard.

It sounds restful, doesn’t it?   Well, it would be, but out of curiosity, I activated the laptop I bought last January, and discovered that the wireless network I installed in my house does work in the hammock.  I have a hammock with Internet access!  I can rest and waste time or rest and work or rest, waste time, and work at the same time.  Let’s see, the electrician says he’s coming tomorrow.  If he does show up at the appointed hour, do you think I can get him to install a couple of outlets by the hammock?  If an electrician actually shows up at the appointed hour, does that mean he’s incompetent?  I think one outlet for an outdoor fridge and one to charge the laptop ought to do it, don’t you?  Then, cold, or inclement weather will be my only motives for motivating.

Actually, there is one thing I have to do that can’t be achieved while in the hammock.  I have to move the watering hose so all of my tomato, and blueberry plants survive until August.  I suppose I could use my cell phone and call an irrigation company to install appropriate sprinklers.  Then, I could wait until August to move.  The blueberries never make it into the house.  I eat them while I’m mowing the lawn. Once I have tomatoes and not just tomato plants, I can get up, grill a hamburger, array said burger on a toasted bun or better yet, a toasted Kaiser roll, adorn it with sliced onion, ketchup, one gigantic slice from a sun-warmed home-grown beefsteak tomato and sprinkle lightly with NaCl. The only way heaven could be better than that is if I could prepare and eat that culinary creation while reclining in my hammock, without getting it all over myself and the hammock.

 

Summer Vacation Part 2

When I was a child, I used to read Boy’s Life Magazine in the local library or in the school library.  I wanted to be a Boy Scout, but my mother wouldn’t let me. Apparently, she thought that being sponsored by a Lutheran church, the Troop near our home would be a bad spiritual influence on a Catholic boy like me.  This September will mark 25 years since I became a leader in the BSA.  I like the boys and I like the adults:  I like most of them anyway.  I’m long over the getting back at my mother part.  And despite my mother’s antipathy, my sister is also a Scout leader.  She’s Troop Committee Chairman for her son.  I’ve come to like the camping too, but you still can’t get me to camp in a tent when I know the temperature will be around zero. I do not like to be cold.

A few months ago, I got a letter offering to let me go to the Philmont Scout Ranch near Cimarron NM to attend a week-long training session on the finer points of Troop and Pack structure, and operations.  Some people call these letters invitations, but it costs you a lot of money to go there so I don’t call them that.  Thousands of Boy Scouts and their leaders travel from all over the country to visit Philmont each summer.  Some of them go to classes like I did at what’s known as the Philmont Training Center.  Most, however, go on what the Boy Scouts call treks.  These are week-long (or even longer) hikes through the mountains of New Mexico.

How does Philmont compare with the summer camp I’ve been attending for years, Camp Yawgoog in Rhode Island?  There really isn’t any comparison.  Philmont offers training, and it offers wilderness experiences.  Yawgoog offers a lot of fun during a week outdoors in the summer.  There are no mountains in Rhode Island where Yawgoog is situated and the entire land area of the State of Rhode Island is roughly five times the size of the Philmont Ranch.  Having been to Yawgoog more than 20 times, I’ve seen every inch of it.  Having been to Philmont once, I probably haven’t see, even one percent.

Let me interject here that my wife is definitely a keeper.  She didn’t want to go with me, but had no objection to me going.  The week of instruction at the ranch is quite reasonable, but it costs a lot to travel roughly 4,000 miles to get there and back.  And, if you Google Cimarron NM, and the phrase “speed trap” you get dozens of hits.  It’s a community of a little over 900 people, and they have two traffic court judges, so I’m saying draw your own conclusion.  If you visited Cimarron the first week in June, 2008, the officer with the radar gun could often be sighted at the northwest corner of US 64 and NM 58.   Then, there are the several thousand dollars worth of requisite souvenirs.  I didn’t really spend that much on souvenirs, but you’ve got to admit that the person who invented the souvenir was a certifiable genius.  Whoever invented the refrigerator magnet was on almost the same level.  

The campground in the training center is kind of rough.  Tents are only a few feet apart, so it can be noisy.  There are tents right outside the bath house.  I wouldn’t want one of those because people slam the door going in and out all night.  It was very windy, and the temperature got down to around 40 at night.  I wasn’t prepared for that.

The course was good.  The instructors know their stuff, and are enthusiastic.  Center staff, and management were enthusiastic and friendly.  They had wonderful programs for family members who tag along too.  I don’t care for instruction via role-playing, but that’s my personal taste.  I met a lot of people I’d like to meet again.  The altitude was a little tough to take for someone like me who lives at sea level.  I take a long time to adapt to changes in time zone too.  I’ve spent a week on west coast time, and a week in the mountain time zone in the last month and I’m still firmly on eastern daylight saving time. If you’re into Scouting and have the opportunity to go to Philmont for any reason, do.  Take your family with you too if you can manage that.

We’ve been away

It’s been almost three weeks since I posted here, but my wife, daughter, and I have been traveling, to visit my daughter’s brother, and our son.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, when I tried to post a picture of our trip that’s one inch wide here, it shows up so large that you can only see a small part of it.  When I get time to learn a little more about formatting this blog, I will try to post the picture again.  It’s a picture of our family.  You see, we’re quite proud these days.

Seventy-five percent of us have recently returned from California where we attended the law school graduation of the other 25 percent.  Now that he has earned a JD degree, I suppose we can call him doctor, as we could give that title of honor to anyone who has achieved a doctorate in any academic subject.  But, we can’t call him lawyer yet.  He’s still working on that.  He has to pass the bar exam at the end of July, and we’re sure he will.  But the California Bar likes to spread out the suspense, so while the exam is completed in July, he doesn’t learn the results until near the end of November.

A different 25 percent of the family will be off on another adventure this Saturday.  I’ve never traveled for a living, but I have been in 28 states.  I’m not counting air space.  I’ve set foot in 28 states and I’ve never just stepped across a state line, although I have walked across two of them.  When you think of the way we travel, walking across a state line is pretty unusual.  I’ve never just driven a mile or so into a state to say I’ve been there either.  I suppose I could have done that for Michigan, Wisconsin, Mississippi and Colorado on previous sojourns.  I’m doing Colorado on Saturday.  I’m flying there and on Sunday I’m driving to New Mexico.  So, by Sunday, I will have been on the ground in 30 of our 50 states.

I expect the trip to go smoothly, but whether it does or not I’ll be back and I’ll fill you in.  That’s a promise!

The Incredible Shrinking Container

The ice cream industry hasn’t fooled me with the 1.5 quart container, and I hate it.  I think I’m distantly related to Don Quixote on both sides of the family though, so I wrote to the president of the manufacturer responsible for most of the ice cream I consume.  And much to my surprise, he answered me.  At least, his form letter answered me.  Which ice cream company I wrote to doesn’t matter.  The industry as a whole seems to be switching to smaller containers.

I said I understand price increases.  I don’t like them, but I understand them.  I am, after all, old enough that the price of everything is ridiculous and has been for a while.  However, I don’t like the smaller ice cream packages because they are environmentally unfriendly, and make extra work for me.  The containers are still the same diameter, but even though they aren’t as tall, they are still too tall to stack in my freezer, so if I want to keep the same amount of ice cream on hand, I have to buy more containers.  The containers waste resources.  Six quarts of ice cream now take an extra lid and an extra container bottom.  If I don’t have room for more containers, I have to go to the store more often or buy a larger freezer.

My existing freezer is already an Energy Star appliance, so a new and larger one will use more electricity.  Going to the store more often will use more gasoline.  I could walk to the store, but the ice cream would be melted by the time I walked home.  So, putting ice cream in smaller containers does constitute a price increase, and the president of the company acknowledged that.

Frankly the acknowledgement surprised me.  I thought he would say it was some kind of improvement to serve consumers better.  He also said the marketing people know people are reluctant to spend a lot of money for ice cream so they can buy a container (albeit smaller) at the same price.  I’m sad to admit the president of the ice cream manufacturer is probably correct.  This gives me a bad feeling that you probably can now fool all of the people all of the time.

You see, the smaller containers of ice cream contain hidden costs for the consumer, and they increase the carbon footprint of both the maker, and the eater of ice cream.  I do want a lot of ice cream (summer is coming, after all).  I haven’t got room for it, and I won’t buy a bigger freezer.  I haven’t got room for one of those either.  So, the ice cream manufacturer increases its carbon footprint by using more packaging material.   I will drive to the store more often.  Therefore, smaller containers of ice cream cost me, and all other consumers more than they make for the manufacturer.

I believe I already said I hate the 1.5-quart container of ice cream, so that concludes this blog item.

The Phone

I’m not a luddite, but I have a cell phone so I can call  you, not so you can call me.  Very few people have my cell phone number, so the phone doesn’t ring very often at all.  Sometimes I turn it off.  Sometimes I leave it home.  I don’t wander around stores or restaurants or doctors’ waiting rooms or train depots yacking a blue streak, a really loud blue streak.  You don’t need to know where I am and I don’t need to know where you are either.  Last week I was in a doctor’s waiting room with one of those annoying yackers.  After he was done, he asked if he was talking too loud.  I said yes.  He said sorry, but if he was really sorry, he wouldn’t do it, would he?  And he wouldn’t have made another phone call either.

My family has a five-hundred minute family plan, and we’ve never gone over, or even come close.  Not even when my daughter was a teenager.  Despite not using the cell phone nearly as much as the average person, I just bought a new one.  In fact, I bought three new ones.  I got my wife and daughter new cell phones too.

None of us are luddites, but our previous cell phones made, and received phone calls.  That’s all they did; make and receive phone calls.  Well, they held a bunch of phone numbers too, but not a really big bunch, and they would dial the one you wanted with the push of one button.  Pretty primitive stuff.  For a friend of mine who’s fond of homonyms, I’m tempted to say they were primative too, but many primates have fingers too big to use a cell phone successfully.  When someone called, those phones didn’t sound ringtones.  They rang.  A couple of middle-school kids in my neighborhood think my old cell phone is an antique.

The new ones do alot more than the old ones.  They hold much bigger bunches.  They take pictures.  They access the Internet.  You can watch TV on them.  They cook dinner.  They mow the lawn.  I think the most expensive one may be a minor deity.  They were a good deal too.  Three free phones only cost me $111!  And one thing I noticed about them is the instructions for each of the new phones are bigger and heavier than the phone itself.

But, if I had to do it over again, I don’t know if I would.  It took two hours to activate three phones.  The people at the wireless provider were helpful, and polite.  The computer system they’re forced to work with was neither.  I couldn’t activate the phones on the Internet or through the automated phone attendant.  I was disconnected twice.  It took four phone calls and speaking to five people including tech support to get the job done.  I lost count of how many times I agreed to terms and conditions.  I hope that part wasn’t cumulative.  I don’t know if I want a 10-year contract with my cell phone provider.

PR

 The David Ortiz Boston Red Sox jersey that was buried in the concrete at the new Yankee Stadium, and then dug up sold for over $175,000 recently to benefit the Jimmy Fund.  Said fund is a Boston-based cancer charity.  I hope the guy who thought up that PR stunt got a big raise.  It got a lot of coverage and did some serious good.

What?  I can’t be the only person who thinks that whole thing was staged. 

Megan Fox is the sexiest woman in the world, at least according to FHM magazine.  She’s certainly a very pretty young woman, at least according to the pictures I’ve seen.   I don’t believe I’ve ever met any of the women on that list, although my son was in the background in a picture of Paris Hilton that got published in a Las Vegas newspaper last year around this time.

Still, it strikes me as odd that all of the 100 women on that list published in FHM are actresses, models, or both.  All of them appear to be young.  All of them range from well known to famous, and from well-to-do to rich. Do you mean to tell me there are no sexy female nuclear scientists, or medical doctors, or hair dressers, or prostitutes, or stay-at-home moms with 18 kids?  I bet there are.  To quote two of the leading intellectuals on National Public Radio, “BO-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-GUS!”

So, this is a list of pretty, well-known and relatively wealthy young women and not a list of the 100 sexiest women in the world.  After all, how would you determine the world’s 100 sexiest women?  Would you have a contest with Eliot Spitzer, a couple of professional athletes, rock stars, and Charlie Sheen as judges?  Would you vote on it?  Would the voters have to prove that they’ve had personal experience with the sexiness of the women they’re voting for?  How would they do that, exactly?  Spring break locations around the world could vie with one and other to hold the contest.  What a boost for tourism.

I’ve got an idea along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal.”  For those who are victims of a modern education, that means my idea is satire.  How about we have nominations like the baseball All-Star Game with the participants selected by the fans?  Then let’s have a performance exam, similar to the idea behind a third-year law school student’s mock trial.

Seriously, all lists of this type are PR stunts, and no list of this sort is definitive.  In addition to the fact that to be on the list you have to already be well known, the contents have a lot to do with who picks the list and how badly their ax needs grinding.  I don’t think anyone’s list of the top 100 films of all time has “Baby Mama” on it, or “Soylent Green” either.  Mine does have “Casablanca” though, and “Miracle on 34th Street” too.  I love that film.  Your results may vary.

The contents of such lists also have a lot to do with how old you are.  My daughter’s list of the top 100 songs of all time would undoubtedly contain something by Marilyn Manson or Bif Naked.  Mine would have “Wind,” not the Jesters’ version either, the one by Nolan Strong and the Diablos.

Pronunciation

Did you know that the National Broadcasting Company used to be considered the standard for pronunciation of English words in the United States?  There was a publication called The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation by Eugene H. Ehrlich and Raymond Hand, Jr.  It was, as the name implies a reference on how to say words in the English language.  It seems to be out of print, but it is available on Amazon.com, although some sellers want a lot of money for it.  http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0061811424/ref=dp_olp_2  was the link last time I checked.

The reason I bring this up is that in the first few minutes of NBC’s coverage of Pope Benedict’s visit to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan on Sunday morning, the NBC host called a guest the president “emetrius [sic])” of a university, and said the Holy Father was visiting “hollowed [sic]” ground.  Meaning no disrespect to the thousands of people who died there, of course it’s hollowed ground:  there’s a big hole in the ground where two enormous buildings and three-thousand people used to be.  Even the spell-checker in MS Word knew I really meant hallowed ground when I was writing this post.  Why didn’t the professional TV news person who was broadcasting the ceremony on Sunday?

Late

My late aunt, Joan, was late for everything even before she died.  Deceiving people who must be late so they will be on time only works for so long.  Then they catch on to your tricks, those tricks stop working and they go back to being late, only with a vengeance.  After all, they have to make up for time that wasn’t lost.  My mother invited Aunt Joan to come to the house for Sunday dinner at 1:00 PM.  Mom planned the dinner for 3:00 PM.  Aunt Joan showed up at 5:00 PM.  My dopey mother didn’t serve dinner until she got there.  When Aunt Joan sat down to dinner, the very first words out of her mouth were:  “This meat is overcooked.”   I replied: “It wasn’t over-cooked four hours ago.”  

Aunt Joan wasn’t even a doctor!  You’ve heard the old joke haven’t you?   Question:  What’s the difference between God and a doctor?  Answer:  God doesn’t think he’s a doctor. 

For some time now, doctors have been having staff call patients to remind them of appointments.  Lately, a new and more annoying practice has come into common usage.  They use a computer to make the call, and it insists you press  one to confirm the appointment.  If you don’t press “one,” the computer will harass you by calling you back until you do press “one.” I call this machine a Press One computer and I’d be more sanguine about doctors using it they made any effort at all to be on time themselves.

Is patients not showing for appointments a big problem?  Is it as big a problem as doctors not keeping appointments?  Is there a no-call list I can get on so they can’t do this to me?  There should be.  I am the second most punctual person in the world.  I say that because it’s almost never good to claim absolutes.  What I really mean is once you have met me, whoever was the most punctual person you knew won’t be anymore.  Punctuality is my most noticeable neurosis.

I am particularly annoyed today because my endocrinologist got one of those Press One computers.  He is the second least punctual person I ever met, and I have met both my former orthopedist, and the deceased anti-Vietnam War congressman Allard K. Lowenstein.   In the thirteen years I’ve been seeing this doctor, I’ve never been late and he’s never been on time.  If he had a person call me up to remind me to be on time, I believe I’d yell at that person.  If he called me up to remind me to be on time, I know I’d yell at him.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, insanity is expecting different outcomes when repeating the same action over and over.  I know this doctor is going to be late enough to be the envy of the overwhelming majority of those practicing healing arts.  In an attempt to short-circuit his tardiness, I sign myself up for his first appointment of the day.  This means I have to get up early enough to be at his office before 7:30 AM.  His office is 15 miles away and rush hour starts long before 7:30 AM in my neighborhood. 

Today, he came into my examining room for my 7:30 appointment at 8:45!  How did he manage that?  Easy!  He made four appointments for the same time.  So, now he’s harassing me to be on time yet making the first appointment of the day isn’t going to cut down my waiting anymore.  I didn’t walk out for three reasons:  I needed prescription renewals; walking out would further inconvenience me; and if I left, I’d be doing him a favor by helping him get closer to schedule.  I didn’t complain because I’ve done that before, and his response was, “If you don’t like it, find another doctor.”  75 minutes late for your first appointment is bad enough to make finding another doctor quite appealing.  But how do I find one who will be more scrupulous about keeping appointments?  That thought must have occurred to at least one other person.  But he or she is still working on it.  The url www.punctualdoctor.com does belong to someone, but it isn’t up and running.  It isn’t even under construction.  It’s just parked.  Damn!

 

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

Pride of lions, gaggle of geese, murder of crows.  Today, I found myself wondering what the correct term is for a large gathering of putzes.  It happens often enough there has to be a word for it I think.

If a policeman pulls you over, why does he ask if you know how fast you were going?  If he doesn’t already know, why did he pull you over in the first place?

If my call really was important to you, wouldn’t you hire somebody to answer the damned phone?

How did they figure out that Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies could be frozen?  At my house, they would all be eaten long before they got that cold and no matter how many boxes you bought.

Is there any way to reserve a rental car at an airport, fly to that airport, and get the make and model of car you reserved, instead of an “or similar?”

Can you be paranoid if everybody is out to get you?

Catching Up

Is there anything better than the home opener of your favorite baseball team?  For me, the answer is yes, a home opener where your favorite baseball team wins.  Note to Chase Utley:  it’s baseball, not dodge ball.  But I have to give the Phillies their due.  They beat the Mets last year and they beat the Mets again today.

The MLB Extra Innings package was offered as a free preview last week on my local cable system.  It ended on Sunday.  I found out on Sunday.  Why wasn’t I told earlier?  If I didn’t have anything else to do, I’d probably pay the money for that.  Imagine, being able to watch almost any major league game going on.  Is this a great country or what?

I’ll be traveling more than usual in the next few months.  If airlines are in the business of annoying their customers, they’re doing a good job.  I don’t relish the flying part of my next two trips  I was in Albany NY last week for a conference, but I drove there, and I like to drive.  When I was much younger, I considered going to college at RPI, but didn’t care for the Albany area.  It has improved a lot in the years in between.  It’s pretty nice now.  I’ve stayed in a number of good hotels in Colonie, and in Albany itself.  And, there are some nice restaurants too.  Unfortunately, the hotel I stayed in this time doesn’t see fit to allow patrons to watch the Mets or Yankees in their rooms.  You can watch in the bar in the lobby, but I don’t drink and do like to follow the game’s audio,   I even bring a radio to the ballpark.  So I passed.

I like going to conferences as a break from the office, to network and to learn something.  I don’t like being away from home very much though.  I’m about the biggest homebody I know. 

The kind of job I have requires renewal from time to time.  I was reappointed yesterday.  If you want or need a job, it’s good to have a job.  A rabbi I know told me last night that a job is a good reason to get up in the morning.  Unless you work nights, he’s right, I suppose.  If I were independently wealthy, I think I could find other reasons for getting up though, but I’m not even dependently wealthy, so I’ll never be sure.  The kind of job I have also requires external audit and we’re going through that.  The auditors seem like decent folks, but some of the rules they follow are silly.  I understand all about depreciation, but it’s an awful lot of work to get an answer that isn’t even close to correct.  At least that’s what I think.

Things I Know

My son got on a plane in Taipei just before 8:00 PM.  He flew to San Francisco where he arrived at a little before 3:00 PM the same day!  I’ve learned I don’t understand the international dateline.

Be nice to people.  It’s easier and more satisfying to start out nice and escalate to nasty than it is to start out nasty and back off to nice.

Loud does not equal correct or smart. 

Since I must be on time for all appointments, it’s a good thing I didn’t become a doctor.

George Washington wasn’t born on his birthday.  It’s true!   I swear!  I have no idea why I know that instead of knowing something that would make me a lot of money.

Never threaten anyone.  It spoils the surprise, and helps the prosecutor prove premeditation.

Most people shorten Murphy’s Law, thus leaving out an important piece of information.  The part they remember is:  “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”  The part they should remember is:  “and at the worst possible time.”   They should also remember Murphy was an incurable optimist.

I like those six-foot hero sandwiches delis make up for parties.  But I can never finish one.

Play Ball

Rush Limbaugh once said something so profound that I made it the screen saver on my computer.  He said, “Everybody should love baseball.”  I do:  I believe “play ball” are the last two words of the Star Spangled Banner. 

Frankly though, I think the first game of the season should take place in the middle of April in the middle of the day on green grass in Cincinnati.  But times change and I can’t keep them from changing.  Today, the Oakland A’s and the Boston Red Sox played the first game of the 2008 season in the middle of the night in Tokyo Japan.  If I were an Oakland fan who had to get up around 3:00 AM if he wanted to watch the first pitch, I’d be upset about that. 

This isn’t the first time American Major League Baseball has held its opening day in Japan.  Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig is trying to make the game more international.  Okay, and baseball isn’t the only sport with ticket prices so high average fans think more than twice about  going to a game, but by starting at what translates to 3:00 AM in Oakland and 6:00 AM in Boston, baseball is ignoring the people who made it popular to attract new people.

That doesn’t seem like good business to me.  If baseball is America’s pastime, schedule the first game of the season at a time when most Americans can watch it.

I’d like to do away with the designated hitter.  More strategy without them.  I’d like the game’s best pitchers to go more than six innings.  I’d like an occasional day game on a Monday or Friday so I could play hooky from work and enjoy both a game and a long weekend.  Every team should be required by law to play on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day.  I’d like fewer seasons tickets sold so I could get a decent seat if I decided to walk up for a game. 

When I visit Cooperstown (I’m a subscribing member of the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum,) I would like it if six of the top ten home run hitters of all times weren’t either proven or suspected of steroid abuse.  And I wish the games took less time.  When I was introduced to baseball, the average game took around two hours.  Now, it takes over three.  I’m not upset that the double header is practically extinct though.  I went to one of those ten years ago.  The whole thing took more than eight hours!  Each game lasted so long that my butt gave up and I left the second game long before it was over.  I caught the end of that game on the radio on the way home.

Speaking of which, every baseball game ought to be on the radio.  This morning, for instance, top of the sixth, bases loaded and nobody out.  I don’t root for either team.  I had to go to the bathroom  so I did.  When I got back, one out, two on and nobody scored.  How did that happen?  I could see two out and nobody scored, but was there a pickoff, or what? 

Plus, on a warm Spring day, I like to put the game on the radio and wash my car.  I find that relaxing.  Apparently what I like isn’t really popular today though because there are lots of portable entertainment devices that don’t contain an AM radio.  I have a Sony Walkman that has an AM radio and plays MP3 files on CD’s.  Ipods don’t come with any radio but some flash memory or hard-drive music players do have FM radios.  I’d buy one in a heartbeat if they had an AM radio for the ballgames too.

And I seem to be the only person in the whole world who knows about baseball’s greatest feature.  It causes warm weather.  They play baseball all winter in the Dominican Republic and it never gets cold there.

Oh Eliot

As I understand it (I don’t know the man) Eliot Spitzer who has called himself a steamroller, is actually a bully, which is something a little different.  He’s a man who had allies, but few if any friends.  That’s part of the reason everyone managed to abandon the sinking ship of Empire State so quickly when the NY Times let us know that Eliot (only one “L”, you could look it up) had met up with a hooker at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC. 

Seems Eliot’s sense of rectitude doesn’t extend to himself.  Ken Langone, who was a target of Mr. Spitzer’s prosecutorial wrath, said he hoped Eliot’s private hell was hotter than anyone else’s.  Col. Jack Jacobs, a military analyst for MSNBC called him a sanctimonious jackass. 

People’s names don’t usually stick in my head, but weird facts do.  So, I know where the term “Hooker” comes from.  It was coined because a particular Civil War General”s command had a lot of camp-followers.  But today, with General Hooker no longer well known, it seems strange.  Perhaps we’re referring to an avid fisherman or to a bad golfer.  Would people be as upset with Eliot if he’d engaged the services of a slicer instead of a hooker?  See what I mean?  And which is dumber, what Governor Spitzer did or Governor Corzine’s refusal to wear a seatbelt?

I’ve read a little about psychology.  There are several possible explanations for our soon-to-be former Governor’s behavior.  He has always had money.  He has had status for a long time.  Maybe everything came to him so easily that he felt he was above rules.  Maybe he didn’t think he deserved everything that had come so easily, so his behavior was consciously or unconsciously self-destructive.  Maybe he is addicted to risk.   Most of Psychiatry boils down to two short sentences, either or both of which would have benefitted Governor Spitzer if he knew about them before all this happened.  The first:  Want what you can have.  The second:  Stop that! 

I read an article in one of New York’s daily newspapers that said Eliot’s wife, Silda, was upset that the woman involved was only four years older than their oldest daughter.  News flash:  If you’re going to pay that much money for sex with a strange woman, you’d feel you hadn’t gotten your money’s worth if she was four years older than your grandmother! 

The young woman involved, “Ashley” Kristen “Dupre” Youmans,  will probably make even more money from book deals, recordings of her music, magazine covers, centerfolds, DVD’s etc.  I’ve heard estimates that she might make upwards of $5 million.  That’s a good trick.  Hell, that’s a lot of tricks, even considering what she charges.  It turns out the story on her Myspace page is somewhere between exaggerated and bullshit.  Her music doesn’t sound very good to my ear, but you’ve got to give her some props for claiming that Etta James was an influence. 

I’ve heard a lot of news about how beautiful Ashley is.  I have to demure, even if demure isn’t a word used very much around Ashley, at least in the last few years.  I think a good photographer can  take a pretty picture of her, but there’s something odd about the shape of her nose. 

Damn!  I’m old enough to notice her nose! 

 

Things I Want (Or Need) To Know

I have only one question.  Unfortunately, the question is, “Huh?”

Are we there yet?

What is the biological mechanism for liking or hating certain foods?  How is it, for instance that some people love asparagus while the rest of us remain sane?

Was the alphabet invented in alphabetical order?

Does it make any sense that abbreviation is a five-syllable word?

When they censor pictures of naked people on TV, why do they blur stuff we all have, like nipples and butt cracks?

Which reminds me, is there a correct, scientific name for butt crack?

Shouldn’t there be an equal number of horses and horses’ asses?

At The Hospital

I was sick a while ago.  I don’t recommend it.  I’m trying hard not to do it anymore.  If you’ve got to be sick, try not to go to a hospital.  You might, if you’re lucky, get everything you need in a hospital.  You can’t possibly get everything you (or your insurance company) pays for because it costs that much. One time I was in a hospital for about ten hours, and that hospital sent a bill to my insurance company for $31,000!  For that kind of money, they should turn the heat up a little.

While I was in the hospital, I didn’t get anything I wanted, but I did get a cold.  When I am sick, I want it dark.  I want it quiet.  I want to sleep when I want.  I want to eat what I want when I want.  Have you been in a hospital?  Did you get any of those things?  Neither did I.

I think nurses and other people who work in hospitals have a hard job.  Sick people are often contagious, so the hospital staff’s risk of catching something has to be higher than mine.  And, especially if they care about their jobs, it’s got to be tough that some people die while they’re in the hospital.  A great many of the hospital workers I encountered were very nice.  I don’t know enough to judge whether they were really good at their jobs, but I’m not in the hospital anymore, so they were good enough to suit me.

While I was in the hospital, I had time to think.  Giving me time to think is not a good idea.  I have a friend who insists that the word “askew” means the way I think. 

The pillow cases in this particular hospital were too small for the pillows.  I wonder why.  If they did that to save money on pillow cases, they ought to know you can buy small pillows too.

They stuck me with so many needles and took so much blood that I was going to invent the Hemospigot© when I got home.  I found out they already have that, but they call it something else.  Whenever the hospital staff noticed I was asleep, they sent someone around to get a blood sample, or take my blood pressure, but never both at the same time.  One time, the blood technician came around in mid-morning.  I told her she couldn’t have any of my blood because she didn’t wait until I was asleep to ask.  Around 2:00 AM, they made a lot of noise, snapped on the overhead lights and jarred me awake.  I hope they don’t do that to the heart patients.

There isn’t much on my back that anyone at the hospital wanted to examine, but that’s where the hospital gown opens.  Why?  A hospital gown that wraps around the front like a bathrobe would work better for me.  It could still have shoulder seams that snap opened, and closed if that made the designers happy.  And how about a choice of material?  Polar fleece is washable.  I’d like my hospital gowns made of polar fleece please.  I’m cold even when I’m not wearing an air conditioned hospital gown.

At the hospital, they rent TV’s for just enough money that you only balk at paying it.  You don’t refuse outright.  TV should be covered by your health insurance.  Daytime TV is a powerful incentive to get well.  Here are two additional sources of revenue for the hospital.  They should offer Internet access.  Some hotels charge ten dollars or more per day.  Imagine how much a hospital could mark that up.  They could make it a wired network if wireless N would mess with the health care machines.  They could charge extra for takeout food too.  I’m not used to eating that little food within that few hours and then going that many hours without any.  I would have paid double for a pizza, triple for a good one.  Hospital food is a powerful incentive for getting well too!

Happy Birthday Leslie

February 28th is Leslie’s birthday.  She was my girlfriend for maybe two or three months during my senior year in high school.  We liked each other, but neither of us was the love of the other one’s life.  Suffice to say we broke up.  The details weren’t all that gory, and within a very short while it became one of those rare break-ups where we actually did remain friends.  There were only 15 letters in the alphabet (four vowels and eleven consonants) when I was in high school, so you might wonder why I remember after such a long time that today is Leslie’s birthday.

Humiliation!

What do I remember about Leslie?  She was a redhead and because of that looked cute when she dressed up as Raggedy Ann for Hallowe’en.  I remember a year after we broke up I was away at college and she sent me some homemade cookies.  The enclosed note said she felt like baking and didn’t feel like having the cookies go to her hips.  She did not say, but I did think that when the cookies went to my hips, they would have plenty of company. 

I know today is Leslie’s birthday because tomorrow is leap-year day or if you prefer, Little Orphan Annie’s birthday, which explains why Annie’s aging so slowly.  You see, as part of the learning process that takes place in any new boy-girl relationship, I discovered that Leslie’s birthday is February 28th.  So as I usually did in those days, I said the first thing that popped into my head:  “Wow!  You just missed being born on Leap Year Day.”

Leslie responded with a long pause, during which she looked at me as if I had two heads, or possibly three, or maybe even none.  Then she spoke.  She told me the year in which she was born wasn’t a leap year.  We were in high school, so I knew roughly how old she was.  I should have realized the year she was born wasn’t a leap year.  That’s what made the episode memorable and so much more humiliating!

Happy birthday Leslie, wherever you are.

Driving would not be frustrating if I were the only person doing it

That ain’t gonna happen.  I know it.  For one thing, I couldn’t afford to pay for all those roads and gas stations if I was the only person using them.  Heck, I can hardly afford to pay for one tank of gas from one of those gas stations these days.

I’m not the only person on the Internet who thinks driving is frustrating.  There are whole blogs devoted to the proposition.  But most of the complaining boils down to four factors:

  • People know the rules, but don’t care
  • People don’t know the rules, and don’t care
  • People in general can be pretty stupid at times
  • You and I and nearly all the other drivers are people

Because there are only four major factors, websites devoted exclusively to bad driving tend to repeat themselves.  I’ll talk about driving once in a while, but not constantly.  So I won’t go on and on about the guy I saw driving east  in the westbound left-turn lane of the six-lane highway near where I live.

First the basic premise:  driving only works as well as it does because almost everyone does what they are expected to do almost all the time.  My sainted grandmother once asked me while I was stuck in a traffic jam, “Why don’t you drive on the other side of the road?  There aren’t any cars there.”  Grandmother, as you’ve probably surmised, did not drive.  I’ve surmised that she didn’t pay much attention to the world around her either.  She had eight kids.  Can you blame her?

Then, there’s parking.  Most parking lots are on private property so you are unlikely to receive a ticket for misbehavior in a parking lot, but if you speed around the lot driving on the left side of an aisle, you are probably going to participate in or at least cause an accident.  The same can be said for stop signs and crosswalks in parking lots.   They usually don’t carry the force of law, but it would still make everyone’s life a little easier if everyone did what they ask.  And at most Wal-Marts, the aisles in the parking lots are supposed to be one way.  You can tell which way by observing how the spaces slant with respect to the aisles.

As the name implies, parking lots are for parking.  They are not for blocking the flow of traffic.  They are not for blocking egress to or from individual spaces or the lot as a whole.

Hate is a strong word, but I’m really not all that fond of the people who double park 20 feet from a legal parking space at the curb.  Yes, I’m talking to you, guy in the brown delivery truck.  I don’t care for people who park directly across a narrow street from someone else’s driveway apron either.  I know I don’t because the people who live across the street from my driveway do it.  So did the people who lived there before these people.

Sisyphus Project Explained

Sisyphus was a character in Greek Mythology.  He made Zeus mad and after a convoluted series of events, he wound up in hell, condemned to roll a big rock up an even bigger hill for all of eternity.  Naturally the hill was too long to complete this task in one day and when Sisyphus ended his toils each day, the rock rolled back to the bottom of the hill and he had to start over again each morning.

 So, Sisyphus can be considered frustration personified.

Like Sisyphus, I too have a rock.  While I don’t have to roll mine up the hill for all of eternity, I do go home for lunch.  So, I start over again twice a day.

And here, dear reader, I shall categorize frustrations, mine and those I see or imagine.  Sometimes, but not always, blog entries will be based on reality.  I’ll write about other stuff too.  Nobody’s frustrated all the time.  Often, the names will be changed to protect the innocent, or the guilty, or both.  However, if you imagine yourself or anyone else to be libeled or slandered here, you are wrong.  If I intended to libel or slander anyone, you would not need any imagination or have any doubt!

I am writing this blog to entertain myself.  If I also entertain you in the process, so much the better.  If I don’t, find something else to read.  It’s a big Internet.

As we embark on the Sisyphus Project, please do not take this seriously.  Lord knows I don’t.