{"id":24924,"date":"2021-05-29T20:41:07","date_gmt":"2021-05-30T00:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=24924"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:42:43","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:42:43","slug":"thoughts-large-75","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2021\/05\/thoughts-large-75\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts @ Large: 75"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2022 Not that I want a libel suit from some real-estate developer, but my guess is that if you buy a house on a street called “Timberly Waye<\/a>” in Richmond, Virginia, you have probably bought more marketing than you did house.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Netflix seems to have turned into the Lifetime Channel, only more violent and featuring better-known actors.\u00a0 Apparently, their current business model is to flood the site with mediocre titles so that viewers ultimately click on one, any one, out of sheer entertain-me frustration.\u00a0 But do we still subscribe?\u00a0 Yes — for now.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\u00a0<\/p>\n

I once had a goldfish named Sad\r\nWhen having a fish was a fad\r\nBut one day its scales\r\nTurned a white shade of pale\r\nThen it floated upside-down without rhyming or anything.<\/pre>\n
\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2022 We recently set out on the internet to arrange the (perfect) house rental in our area for a six-night stay in June, so that our children and grandchildren could visit us and have their own space — and so none of our tchotchkes<\/span><\/em> get broken and peace prevails.\u00a0 We signed up for one promising property, which looked to have a backyard play area for the grandkids, based on the posted photos.\u00a0 A few days later, after<\/em> we obtained the address of the rental, we did a drive-by and saw the yard was filled with weeds and poison ivy.\u00a0 We contacted the owner who admitted, no, they never venture into the backyard due to the poison ivy.\u00a0 Long story short, we cancelled the reservation and, after much persistence on my spouse’s part, we got our deposit back, including (finally) the non-refundable AirBnB service fee.<\/p>\n
The reason I’m telling this story is that the idea of renting a property at location-unknown, as AirBnB forces one to do, is stupid.\u00a0 This gives all the advantages to the landlord and puts the renter in the position of buyer-beware, in the name of what?\u00a0 To avoid drive-bys, informed choice and comparison shopping?\u00a0 Yes, exactly.<\/p>\n
\u2022 I have taken stock and decided that, for much of the pandemic, I was in Meatloaf Mode.\u00a0 That is a state of mind dominated by comfort foods like meatloaf and mashed potatoes, metabolically-charged junk foods like Arby’s and Cheetos, and passably-comforting drinks which are nonetheless drunk.<\/p>\n
In Meatloaf Mode, various things are ingested to take the place of warm smiles, grasped hands, upper-body embraces, laughter, spontaneous conversation and jokes, and all the other tokens of the ordinary commerce of human interactions.\u00a0 When this commerce is thwarted, some of us turn to — meatloaf and its comestible cousins.<\/p>\n
In Meatloaf Mode, folks try to make up for all the sensations they have missed by stuffing a lot of stuff down their throats.\u00a0 It works, sort of, as a short-term distraction.\u00a0 But your gut soon informs you that what you’re eating isn’t a ticket to Happy Land.\u00a0 Your body knows what works even when you don’t.\u00a0 It pleads, don’t mistreat me just because you’re lonely.<\/p>\n
\u2022 In the United States, we have a baby-bird model of hospital care.\u00a0 Unless a baby bird stretches its throat up as high as it can, to get attention and show its vitality, it is less likely to get fed and survive.\u00a0 Patients in U.S. hospitals are treated like baby birds.\u00a0 They need proxies who stretch their necks out on their behalf.<\/p>\n
\u2022 In the United States, we have a better idea where our Uber driver is and what time we will be picked up than when, if ever, the hospital nurse\/doctor who needs to attend to us will show up and answer our questions.\u00a0 Perhaps this is the future: Uber Health Care.<\/p>\n
\u2022 If someone offered me a dollar for each one, I could probably name 700 or so baseball players. (Many more from the past than the present.)\u00a0 For football, I might be able to list 200 players.\u00a0 Golf, probably 100.\u00a0 Basketball?\u00a0 Maybe 25-30.\u00a0 Tennis, about the same.\u00a0 Hockey, I can think of 10.\u00a0 And soccer, there was Pel\u00e9, Messi, Beckham and Wambach.\u00a0 And I had to think hard about Wambach.\u00a0 That’s it.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Oh, I forgot bowling.\u00a0 Wasn’t there a bowler named Anthony?\u00a0 So him, and The Dude<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\u2022 No one really wants to walk down Memory Lane with you unless they lived there too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2022 Not that I want a libel suit from some real-estate developer, but my guess is that if you buy a house on a street called “Timberly Waye” in Richmond, Virginia, you have probably bought more marketing than you did … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-at-large"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24924"}],"version-history":[{"count":63,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25617,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24924\/revisions\/25617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}