I mentioned a while back that I was going to try something different to stay in touch with friends, now that I have cut the Facebook cord. This feature, called Note from Self, is one idea toward that end. I intend this to be a month-end catching-up on a more personal and newsy level, without so much of the “grinding self-commentary” that my favorite college professor David Walton decried. Less Thoughts at Large, more Strictly Personal, to put it in Sidney J. Harris terms.
So here goes. May has been a month of blossoms and raindrops. Our Catawba (purple) rhododendrons are spent and their new shoots are sprouting. The mountain laurels that have managed to survive on our windswept lot are in profuse bloom. The multitude of peonies that Sue adores have been beaten down by our rains, and it has been a race to cut them and enjoy them before their blossom-heads explode or fall to the ground under their own weight. We had almost five inches of rain from May 13-19, another half-inch May 20-26, and almost an inch in the last two days (and raining again). At least I have not had to water anything.
The wet weather has given me the excuse to avoid yard work and focus on the paper I plan to submit to the MDPI Games Journal. I’ve worked a long time on this project, which deals with optimum bidding strategies in the Showcase Round of The Price is Right show.
(I discussed this in a previous post.) I hope to finish the paper by mid-July. This will be my first submission to a journal since the days of the now-defunct Journal of Recreational Mathematics.
I also spent some hours this month doing art for a music CD that my singer-songwriter friend Bruce Irving created. It is his fourth, speaking of dedicated efforts.
We just lost our 13-year-old side-by-side refrigerator that we had named “Steve & Eydie” in honor of the famous rendition of “Side by Side” by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. (OK, we really didn’t name our fridge, I just made that up. Some things haven’t changed here at the blog.) But our fridge really did conk out, and right on time, based on their average 13-year life expectancy. We learned a few things from the experience. One is to estimate the value of the contents of your fridge when it fails. Knowing this could save you many dollars worth of ice and dry ice. Dry ice is not cheap and it lasts 40 hours max in a regular cooler. Figure $10 a day to keep your frozen food frozen.
It took seven days for us to get our new fridge 
delivered, and then another 12 hours for it to cool down after it was installed. It is possible we had $75 worth of food in the freezer — but not much more. That said, it has been a long time since I had a chance to play with dry ice. So from lemons, lemonade (or whatever this fiendish concoction is).
We have had various medical and dental appointments along with the regular ones for my left eye. We took the opportunity before one appointment to have a wonderful anniversary dinner at Bentley’s on 27 in downtown Charlotte. The view was impressive, the service was great, the food was excellent, but the company — my wife — is what made the evening special, more than the accoutrements.
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This was my first attempt to be newsy and I’m not sure how it went. It’s like Jon Stewart has given way to Trevor Noah here. We’ll try this again next month and decide.
From what I read on the intertweet-o-telesphere, politcal-satire show host Samantha Bee referred to Ivanka Trump using the c-word. I’m not going to spell it, because I object to the word and what it stands for. I am not an Ivanka Trump fan, but neither she or anyone other woman deserves to (or should) be called the female equivalent of the n-word. That’s my red line.
I have been recording Samantha Bee’s shows on the DVR, and I watch one once in a while. Samantha Bee is no Jon Stewart in terms of satire or subtlety. Although I do not frequent comedy clubs, I understand that outrageous language is the norm there. Samantha Bee’s crude name-calling may get a shock-laugh in some sleazo comedy club but it was not right on her cable-television show and it would not even have been right if the two of us were having a private lunch together in a diner.
So I am done with Samantha Bee. Her apologies aside, she has shown what her values are and what her boundaries aren’t.
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The next story is about Roseanne Barr’s blatant racist comment and its social and political sequelae. Roseanne now seems to think she can walk back her comment comparing black people to apes. Maybe, in this bizarre intertweet-o-telesphere that we inhabit, she will manage to do that. But even if she does, it doesn’t mean she is not a racist. Like Ms. Bee, Roseanne has shown what her values are and what her boundaries aren’t.
I was never a Roseanne fan. I’m not sure how you could have guessed.
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Last but not least. I went to the Post Office earlier this week and asked for a sheet of the Mister Rogers stamps. The clerk told me that the stamps sold out on the first day and that they weren’t available anywhere in the area. I was astounded, and I said to him, using a louder voice than I should have used, that it was not a beautiful day in this neighborhood. My wife told her sister about my story, and my sister-in-law suggested I order them online (without fully understanding why I would want Mister Rogers postage stamps). I did so, and I expect to get the stamps in a couple of days.
Mister Rogers showed us what his values were and what his boundaries weren’t. I will be happy to put his stamp on any message I send.