Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

• Saltines shouldn’t be salted on the top but the bottom, where our taste buds are.

• By the way, I want to register a formal complaint to the Attorney General about Nabsico, the company that makes Premium Saltines.  We have been getting lots of broken crackers  the past few months.  That was never a problem before Donald Trump was elected.  Sad!  Need to investigate!

• Judges (and attorney generals) are often called upon to “recuse themselves” when their personal interests may cloud their ability to make impartial judgments.  My issue is with the object of recuse: one cannot recuse another; a recuser can only recuse oneself, which renders the object of the verb redundant.

• Cars fail to start about 10,000 times more frequently in the movies than in real life.  Hollywood needs better car mechanics.

• Trees three styles.  From Hilton Head, South Carolina:

• I have not been in many women’s restrooms — after all, it is illegal in North Carolina —  but I have to assume that they are not the nearly-universal disaster that men’s rooms tend to be, in all but the better establishments.  Why do so many men want to make such a mess of things?  Why do other men not only put up with it but expect it?  I intend to dedicate a future blog post to photos of public men’s rooms — without men, of course — in order to heap shame on both their users and their owners, if that is possible.

• When men stop trashing public restrooms, I might start trusting them to do things like, say, crafting health care legislation or acting as commander-in-chief.  Until then, I assume that what they do in the restroom reflects how they would act in more important matters.

• Please note how I showed excellent restraint by not using “piss on them” as a punchline in the previous item.  This is a family blog.

• A fair number of Trump supporters seem to be less interested in more education and more interested in Trump finding jobs for the less educated.  I hate to break it to you, but it looks like one of you already has the Secretary of Education job.  I’ll leave it at that.

• I support primary health care, but my last primary-care physician didn’t seem to want to deliver it.  She would triage me to specialists for things that I know a PCP should be able to handle, if only she were willing to work with me.  It was akin to calling a repair shop and saying, “My car won’t start” and getting the response, “OK, please hold — we need to refer you to a battery specialist.”  I didn’t know whom to blame, my insurer or my doctor or her malpractice insurer.   So I now have a new primary-care physician, and so far so good.

• As I was trimming dead leaves out of a houseplant, I absently snipped into my fingertip with the scissors.  It was a small but deep cut.  It has almost healed now but the rest of my finger was unhappy for a good while.  The red and swollen part was saying to me, what the hell were you thinking when you did this?  I apologized to my finger and made an empty promise that I would never be so careless with it again.

• George Harrison’s estate just released a $399 16 vinyl-disc box set of his solo work and announced a $499 Harrison-branded turntable to play them on.  George lives on in the Material World.

• The label on the can says “Cream of Mushroom” soup.  Now we all know that one cannot get cream from a mushroom, no matter how finely one tries to chop it.  I suggest we soup-eaters and casserole-makers have been complicit in perpetuating an improper preposition here.  At best, the label should say “Cream and Mushroom” soup.  And that’s being generous with the notion of what “cream” means.

• This is the 75th anniversary of the use of penicillin to treat infections.  Antibiotics such as penicillin are losing their effectiveness as bacteria evolve and become resistant to them.  Perhaps an even greater worry is when bacteria, parasites and other organisms develop resistance to bleach and chlorine, the chemicals that keep our surfaces and water supplies free of pathogens without causing much harm to people.  Our war on bacteria began only 200 years ago, but bacteria have fighting the survival battle for four billion years.  I think they have a head start on us.

• Sometimes I wonder whether there are so many good causes to become involved in and/or contribute to that they suffer together from the dilution of our attention.  Would it be better if the world were to focus on malaria one year, HIV the next, hunger and famine the year after that?  Or is our current practice better, practically-speaking, of mounting low-level but sustainable efforts on all these countless fronts and reluctantly accept that it takes years to achieve results in any one of them?  Injustices test one’s patience.

• I am researching new toilets to replace our old noisy ones.  To be sure, this is an unglamorous task.  It got me thinking that someone (like me) could make a living as a toilet-whisperer to the stars and other highly-moneyed folks, people who don’t mind flushing several hundred dollars down the drain for the perfect toilet recommendation.  But inevitably, I would attract competitors and this kind of advice would become — yes — a commodity.

• Rick Lanier is founder of the 15-year-old U.S. Motto Action Committee. The purpose of this “committee” is to lobby county commissioners to put the words “In God We Trust” on the entrances to courthouses.  A Facebook post by Ken Lynn quotes Lanier as telling the Christian Action League, “We feel compelled to move forward aggressively in the hope of maintaining a remnant of our godly American heritage. Because of the apostasy of our nation and the evil forces of political correctness our religious freedoms are quickly dissipating.”  Lanier’s not-even-thinly-veiled religious action committee just convinced our neighbor Hendersonville, North Carolina, to place these words prominently above the entrances of its two courthouses.  So it seems that courthouses now join foxholes as places with a special power to convert atheists.

• The box says “Seedless Raisins.”  Imagine your surprise if you bit into one that wasn’t.

• There is something annoying about watching the evening news and hearing the anchor express his gratitude to the reporter at the conclusion of her story.  It seems self-serving. Isn’t the reporter just doing her job?  It’s not like she went out and bought the anchor a birthday gift.

• It’s interesting that one is likely to find Salade Niçoise in every big city in America, but I do not recall seeing a Caesar Salad on any menu in any restaurant in France.  If there is a joke here, it’s probably on us.

• Here, all this time, I thought it was teatotaler.

• I rented a Thrifty rental car a few weeks ago.  The representative at the counter asked me whether I wanted liability insurance for $13.95.  I replied yes, since I thought that $13.95 was a good deal for a five-day rental.  Turns out the cost of the insurance was $13.95 a day and so I spent $56 more for insurance than I intended (otherwise I would have declined).  After I got home, Thrifty sent me an online survey — I told them about my experience and clicked the box to request that a manager contact me about it.  Have I heard from Thrifty?  Of course not.

• My spouse thinks that my recent laptop purchase constitutes a Christmas gift to myself.  I have tried in vain to convince her that the sorry state of my old laptop (low battery life, wobbly screen, screws falling out) justified the purchase as a wear-and-tear replacement rather than a Christmas gift.  Would I be mentioning this had I won that argument?  No.

• I’m eating some Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn — the bag says “best by” 2009. I figure, OK, I was probably best by 2009 too, so we’re even.

• I don’t begrudge Christians, Jews and Muslims their religious holidays.  Hell, we atheists have somewhere around 350 unreligious holidays a year… we need a break now and then from all that celebrating.

• I can identify several instances in my lifetime where the universe has bifurcated, that is, where the path taken vs. the alternate path has had profound consequences.  These events include (1) the 1980 assassination of John Lennon;  (2) the Contract with America enacted by the Republican Congress in 1994;  (3) the USA failure to kill Osama bin Laden in 1998;  (4) the election of George W. Bush in 2000;  (5) the horrific attack by Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001;  (6) the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

• Discussing this list with my daughter-in-law the other day, it dawned on me that all these bifurcations were negative in outcome and that I neglected to mention any positive ones.  So, for the sake of balance, here are a few other, more personal universe-changing events: (1) the day my future wife happened to stroll by and pick me up at the bus stop in 1969;  (2) the births of our children in 1978 and 1981;  (3) meeting a boy named Bill Foster in second-grade (1960), which led to a twenty-year friendship that demanded little from me other than listening, while offering an island of safety and sanity and the assurance that I would not need to compete with the rough-and-tumble playground crowd to be accepted.  I miss Bill.  This universe is a worse place without him.

• Haddock tastes different than halibut in the same way that nonetheless means something different than regardless.  Inconsequential differences among bland alternatives.

• We are going to be treated to a four-year circus in the US.  Let’s hope the tents have been fire-proofed, the lions and tigers have been tamed and the clowns can lead us to the exits.

• Could the likes of Richard Nixon be impeached today?  Probably not.

• My resolution for 2017 is to avoid pontificating on subjects on which I have no expertise.  Should I decide to abide by this resolution, my readers will encounter many blank pages next year.  But should I not, then hooray, business as usual at The 100 Billionth Person.