Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

§  This travel rule originated with my spouse, but I concur:  Any on-the-road restroom where you have to ask for the key will make you regret having asked for the key.

§  I was slicing radishes for our dinner salads when I made a tiny but generously-bleeding cut on the end of my thumb.  Acknowledging my inherent lack of skill with knives, I said to my spouse, “If I had lived in the 1850s, I’d be dead by now.”  (Hmm, ya think?)

§  How the shame of shame has changed.  On August 9, 1974, President Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment for conspiring to cover up a criminal act.  Not half a century later, President Trump led a conspiracy to overturn the result of a legitimate election and then has the temerity to insist that his First Amendment rights demanded this of him.  Yes, the First Amendment protects your right to be an asshole, Mr. Trump, so you be you.

Interestingly, temerity comes from the Latin tenebrio, “person who operates in darkness.”  This must also be the Latin root word for trump.

§  If I may share this once-upon-a-time excerpt from Bill Moyer’s May 1976 PBS interview with then-presidential-hopeful Jimmy Carter:

We have traveled light-years beyond Jimmy Carter’s spacetime.  Spin is now the currency of the realm.  Liars are embraced if they tell us what we want to hear.  Truth?  How quaint!

Use the dots or arrow keys to advance the frame.

§  There aren’t many six-letter English words with 3 syllables.  I was able to come up with these without external help:  ALBEIT, BONOBO, CALICO, DIADEM, ELATED, FINALE, GIGOLO, HERNIA, ICONIC, JICAMA, KAOLIN, LIABLE, MUSEUM, NOVENA, OCELOT, POTATO, QUALIA, RESUMÉ, SUGARY, TAMALE, UNABLE, VIABLE, WIRING, YTTRIA, ZINNIA.  I could not think of a six-letter X-word.  Your submissions welcome.

§  Shopping in Sam’s Club the other day, I was walking down an aisle near the tire center and thought to myself, I sort of like new-tire smell.  McGill University says I am not alone:  “[T]here are people who love the scent of new tires, some even describing an addiction to the fragrance.”  Reddit user gersty asked, “Do they make a new tire smell air freshener?”  Travis, on a Yamaha motorcycle forum, exclaimed, “DAMN I love the smell of a new tire!” and posted a photo of a tire he keeps next to his computer desk for its aroma.

Then there are people who like the smell of skunk.  (Not me, but certain people I know.)   Quora user David Lincoln Brooks rhapsodized thus about roadkill skunk:  “Yet on a cold November night, when the assailed skunk is a mile away, then the smell tints the cold still air with a curious mournful longing… the olfactory poignance of a distant train whistle at midnight.”  OK, Walt Whitman, but what about tires?

§  A while back, I read maybe half of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data (and so on) by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz; his topic was how our internet searches reveal ‘the real truth’ about ourselves.  The author’s examples and anecdotes might have made for a good essay in The Atlantic, but not a whole book.

I increasingly don’t care whether I finish non-fiction books — I find there is rarely much substance after the first 100 pages.  I know a book has been padded when I start skimming the first sentences of paragraphs and don’t feel like I’m missing anything.  Just because an author satisfies his publisher’s word count doesn’t mean I have to follow suit.

§  Why is it easier to give up on a bad movie than a bad book?  I venture it’s because we take (somewhat) more care selecting books and thus are more invested in our choices, which makes us less willing to abandon books.  Do Kindle users agree?

§  Old people are too old to be funny.  Consider: Jane Curtin is 75 (I think she has always been 75).  Goldie Hawn is 78.  Dave Letterman is 78, as is Steve Martin.  Michael Palin and Eric Idle are 80.  Lily Tomlin is 83.  Tom Smothers is 86.  Bob Newhart is 93.  I am 70, and this wasn’t funny at all, so that clinches it.  Old comics: they’re either weird, or dead.

§  I have three questions that need answers:

•  How do pacemakers know to speed up during exercise, when we need more oxygen?

•  Has any contestant on The Price is Right intentionally interfered with the wheel while it was spinning?  You know, to slow it down and try to make it land on $1.00.  After 50 years, wouldn’t you be surprised if it hasn’t been tried at least once?

•  What does eel taste like? (I bet it tastes like anything with two ee’s would taste like.)

§  Last but not least: Our pit of past despair (i.e., the water feature) is now a corner of zen.  All because I broke my toe and couldn’t reasonably work on it, and so we hired someone to finish it off.  It’s a big relief.  This lesson will last me a long time.

• What should one do when the housefly one has been chasing for hours is found resting on the business end of the fly-swatter?

• Let’s all finally admit that when we decide to make scrambled eggs, we really don’t have high expectations how they turn out.  Sorta fluffy is okay.  So is sorta moist, where you press down on them and some liquid oozes out.  The happy place for scrambled eggs is in the middle, but with an wide margin of error.  The key is having them go straight from the pan to the plate and then into your mouth.

• Speaking of scrambled eggs, I am always amazed by the number of hotel reviewers who down-rate a hotel based on the perceived quality (or absence) of the free breakfast.  As if make-your-own pancakes, toast-your-own tasteless bagels, and steamed turkey sausages count as amenities.  Do y’all lift your pinky as you dispense the OJ into your Dixie cup?

• Here’s a challenge for you.  When was the last time anyone told you a joke?  I don’t mean a crack by a late-night comedian but the kind of joke that used to pass from one person to another, before the internet made that kind of thing passé.  My spouse and I still recall the one her mother liked to tell about the grocery shopper looking for broccoli, which gave her an excuse to use the f-word — because hey, it’s a joke!  Naughty jokes were social currency back then.

• The correct number of black olives to add to a tossed salad is (a) 2, (b) 3, (c) 4.

• The correct number of baked croutons to add to a tossed salad is (a) 3, (b) 5, (c) 7.

•  I bet most of us amateur chefs think we know the “right” answers to the above questions. I say definitely (b) and (c) unless the croutons are those “Texas-style” ice-cube-sized ones, in which case don’t bother to add them at all.

• Most video games and role-playing games award a player multiple “lives” in case you do something wrong (or haven’t gained enough knowledge) and you need a do-over to survive the current encounter.  Life, or more precisely the prospect of losing it, is the best teacher.  So it’s a shame, how in real life, we only get one of them.

• But wait — aren’t most religions designed to award extra lives, to keep us in the game?

• Something inspired me this evening to check in on the archives of my college newspaper, the Carnegie-Mellon Tartan, for which I was a columnist, cartoonist and features editor.  Re-reading just a couple of my articles from those days, I was struck by how unbelievably bad they were, smug and cynical and full of authority I didn’t merit, albeit dressed up in clever phrasings.  It made me wonder how this blog will look to me when I am 120.

• Speaking of prunes, Henry Kissinger, NSA chief and Secretary of State for Richard Nixon from 1969-1974, celebrated his 100th birthday a few weeks ago.  Sadly, 58,22o U.S. troops who served in Vietnam will not match Henry’s milestone.

Kissinger was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his purported efforts to keep more young people from dying in that ill-fated war.  Many recall those efforts differently, but the truth of the matter has been obscured by time.

I did not serve in the military — as I find myself saying every time I buy something at Lowes.  The only reason I am writing this piece and you are reading it is because how a basket of numbered capsules happened to tumble on February 2, 1972.  That was the day my 1973 lottery number, #244, was drawn and I was off the hook from serving and dying in Vietnam.

Lottery Number #001 went to those born on March 6, 1953.  I could easily have been born one week earlier on March 6.  But I wasn’t and that is half the reason I’m here today.

The highest lottery number called up in 1973 was #010, or those born on August 23, 1953.  The last U.S. military draftee, Dwight Eliot Stone of Sacramento, California, was inducted into the Army 50 years ago on June 30, 1973.  He was not called to serve in Vietnam.

Immediately after my lottery number was announced, my not-even-19-year-old self wrote and recorded in my dorm room a multi-track song of celebration called No Army for Me.  It was probably my most highly-produced recording, replete with jet-engine sound effects inspired by the 1968 song Sky Pilot.  The essence of the song was that my life would go on, unscathed by mortar rounds, my limbs intact.

“Hell no, I won’t go!  /  I don’t have to, you know!” was one of the lyrics, referencing the anti-draft protests of that era and how they had become moot.  I was nineteen.  And now here I am apologizing for having been inappropriately happy that I wasn’t cannon-fodder.

The survival guilt of solders who see their peers killed in battle is well-documented.  But I haven’t read anything about lottery guilt — how some people were forced to fight for their lives while others born a week later could watch the war on TV.  Or write songs about it.

•  I recently skim-read a lengthy Paul Krugman editorial in the NY Times about so-called “rural rage.”   I was about to comment on it when I saw that commenting was closed, after 4314 comments had been posted in less than 24 hours.  I guess comment sections are like suitcases — there are only so many crumpled things you can stuff in there.

I was feeling left out, voiceless and resentful, ready to shake my pen-clutching fist at the media gods, but I reconsidered.  The whole point of pundits taking controversial stances under provocative headlines is to rile people up, to keep readers engaged and make them come back for more — and read more ads.  The “now you express your opinion” thing is just part of the reinforcement cycle.  Your own opinion, if you do the math, is only about 1/4314 as weighty as that of the person who wrote the column.

So what do you think about this?  Hey, feel free to leave a comment.

•  I had a dream the other night that I invented a great app — cat-sharing.  It’s for people who like the idea of having a cat but don’t want it to control their lives.  You install the app on your phone and sign up to share your cat.  Then, whenever you tire of plucking cat hair off your clothes, you open the app to find other users cruising your neighborhood looking for cats.  You click on the nearest one and, within minutes, your bewhiskered burden is off your hands.  You get your long-awaited chance to defelinate your house, and the cat’s new owner gets whatever benefit cats supposedly provide.

I’m going to call the app CatNap™.  Looking for venture capital as we speak.  Meow.

•  I’m sorry if any cat-owners were offended by that item.  That would be I’m sorry, as in my condolences, as opposed to my apologies.

•  Defelinate.  Remember you saw that neologism here first.

•  I’ve never been able to figure out why the Jeopardy! audience applauds when one of the contestants happens to reveal a “Daily Double” answer.  I mean, it’s not like there is any skill involved.  It’s like clapping after you take some random item out of your dishwasher.

•  The Oscars.  Otherwise known as The Who-Cares.  The Cultural Conformance Awards.

•  The following thought is from Mr. K, the first person to call me Grandfather: “Why do they call it a building if it is already built?”  I love seeing the sparks of human imagination start to fly every which way in young people — that must be why we call it humor.

•  It reminds me of the time when my daughter Emily — still small enough to ride in the grocery cart seat — and I wheeled up to Wegmans’ whole-bean coffee station so I could grind a bag of Eight O’Clock.  I no longer recall our exchange verbatim, but I do remember that Emily pointed out how kids “shouldn’t touch that machine or they will get grounded.”  I was both charmed and impressed by her use of double-meanings — which I believe was intentional — at such a young age.  How creative sparks fly!

•  “Where are my flying cars?” is a well-worn trope lamenting unkept promises of the past.  But it fails to capture the multitude of down-to-earth ways that The Future has managed to disappoint those who once believed in it.  May I list just a few of those ways?

☆ In the old days, it took a handful of quarters to park your car on a city street or in a public lot.  But now, it requires figuring out some app to download, linking the app to a credit card, then linking your space to the lot and finally your car to the space.  Admit it (assuming you remember such times), wasn’t it easier to plan ahead and grab some quarters to take care of the meter?  It’s just another example of how the burdens of commerce inexorably shift to the consumer, because service has become a luxury item.  You serve their tech, it never serves you!

☆ If I may repeat: You serve their tech, it never serves you!

☆ In the same vein, so to speak, we were told that electronic medical records would result in high-tech, pinpoint-accurate health care, in whatever facility you happened to visit.  The reality?  Even when making an appointment with my own doctor, I have to trudge through a ten-screen questionnaire reiterating my (long-deceased) parents’ health histories, my own chronic conditions, and whether I have felt little pleasure in everyday activities lately.  Maybe you can guess what I find little pleasure in!

☆ And then the nurse asks you the same questions you already answered online!

☆ In the old days, one didn’t have to remove one’s shoes in order to board a plane.  Part of me still believes that shoe removal is mostly security theater (thanks a lot, Richard Reid) and that scanning shoes for explosives isn’t beyond the TSA.  It grates on me that I have to get half-undressed (or fully, in the eyes of the TSA X-ray team) for the privilege of being seated on what is essentially an airborne Greyhound bus.

☆ Two decades ago, believe it or not, one didn’t need a cellphone number to make everyday transactions.  But now, anyone you do business with insists upon sending your cellphone a text to make sure it’s really you.  (Or to make sure you are really going to see their ads and promotions.)   I for one am tired of having to provide both my cellphone number and my credit card to make a simple restaurant reservation which, if cancelled less than 24 hours in advance, triggers a $30-per-person charge to my credit card!  The monopoly that RESY (which is owned by American Express) has established in the online restaurant reservation business is deplorable and worthy of legislative scrutiny before it gets to TicketMaster scale.

•  Finally, we use “smart devices” to turn the lights off in our homes, monitor the status of our dishwashers, check the temperature in our barbecue grills, and count the steps we take every day, but even with this all-pervasive smartness, most people still don’t know their blood pressures.  I hope that Generations X, Y, Z and beyond eventually decide to apply monitoring tech to something that benefits humanity rather than “as long as we’re putting a chip in this thing, we could also collect some user data.”