Saw a story that AT&T are selling refurbished iPhones for $99 with a 2 year contract. Went to the AT&T website and tried to see if we could buy one. Turns out we can't. It shows nothing when you try to upgrade from the phone we have to an Apple phone. Plenty of other choices, like LG's and Motolrolas and Blackberrys. All more expensive than $99.00.
I guess we don't earn the right to upgrade until we hit the next anniversary in May. This despite the fact that we've been using the same old Treo for four years. WE must have replaced my wife's phone after that.
So let me get this straight. We've been AT&T Wireless customers since before there was an AT&T Wireless (At least in its current incarnation - we weren't with that crappy AT&T no one liked). We've been customers since it was Cellular One and then Cingular. Our first phone was a brick. But now someone who is not a customer can get an iPhone and we can't.
I've decided to call this the Loyalty Penalty. So you heard that phrase here first. (I Googled it and no one else has used it in this way). It's the same thing that my daughter said a few years ago: "I been a Citibank customer for five years. Where's MY frickin' iPod?!"
They complain about "churn," well this is why they got churn. Wise up. I'll wait. I don't NEED an iPhone. In fact, I switched my ell phone to Sprint because I could get phone as modem for my laptop with them (and a new Centro for 99 bucks), which is why my son got the Treo. But the Treo doesn't work on 3G.
We also just switched from Comcast to AT&T for home Internet service. It was cheaper, the people were nicer, and it doesn't cut out the way the cable did. And I was smarter than the Comcast tech support bimbo. I had to tell her to change the modem MAC address in her computer so mine would work.
Not that I have any loyalty to AT&T. It's just another frickin' company with toll-free numbers, stupid people, bad service, and erratic pricing. BAit and switch is the watchword of our economy. Look at the mortgage industry. See how well THAT worked out for everyone.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Saturday, November 8, 2008
I'm Becoming a Camera Geek (Again)
I’m becoming a Camera Geek (Again)
When I started this blog, I talked about how in middle age I can “fascinate myself” the way I used to when I was a kid, and not feel like a weirdo. I spoke to my boss the other day – we both had Sears Silvertone guitars as our first guitar.
The other thing I’ve done over the past few weeks, as I cleaned out a closet among other things, was to get very enthusiastic again about film photography. I stopped taking film in 2000 when I got my first good digital camera (a Fujifilm 2.5 megapixel camera that I always thought was pretty damn good, until I see 10 MP cameras that come in Cracker Jack boxes now). But I have thousands of digital images, and boxes of film prints, and I haven’t done much to organize any of it. But that’s for another time (I’ll ask my son, Hey, what year was it that you let your girlfriend at the time bleach your hair? When did we finally get rid of that chair we bought off the nurse I used to work with in 1982 and reupholstered a couple times? When did we give the piano we got for free in 1980 to the preschool?
But that task seems too onerous, so I settled for hauling out and cleaning up all the cameras we have kicking around. Not the Instamatic or the Sears Tower 120 box camera (my first camera); those disappeared long ago. But I do have my Praktica SLR that my dad bought me in 1971, and his camera that my sister gave me a couple years a go (she snagged it when he died without my knowing it, then my brother-in-law decided he wasn’t going to use it so they gave it to me after letting it sit in the damp basement). That one is a Minolta SRT-101 (also bought in 1971), a really kick-ass camera. Then, when my kids were in high school and taking photography, and somehow jammed the film advance on my Praktica, I picked up a used Sears TLS (Actually a Ricoh Singlex with the Sears name on it) at a flea market for about 50 bucks. It is also a fairly kick-butt camera, though apparently not as coveted as the Minolta among us aging photo geeks, judging by my Web searches.
I also found a Nikon EM and I couldn’t figure out where it came from. That one (unlike the others) was an aperture priority camera, so I guess officially it’s the only automatic one (the rest are all match-needle manual adjustment cameras, which is fine with me). I discovered that my daughter’s ex-boyfriend had bought it for her on eBay, so after they broke up and she got her own apartment, she forgot to take it. So she has that one now.
I decided to give the Sears/Ricoh to my son. Another film camera fan can't hurt.
The Sears and the Minolta have a 1/1000 second shutter; the Sears has an f 1.7 lens which is very sharp (I guess it’s actually a Ricoh lens too). The nice thing about the Sears and Praktica is that they can share lenses (screw mount). I already had a wide angle and telephoto lens for the Praktica (they were stolen in Minneapolis in 1975, and mysteriously arrived on my doorstep five years later). So I have a full (enough) set of lenses for those two, and my dad also had extra lenses for the Minolta (They’re the ones that don’t actually stop down to meter, because of a clever interlocking meter/diaphragm arrangement). Thus, I have lenses and cameras out the wazoo.
I got the Praktica working again last week by bending the sheet metal inside the film canister compartment back to where it’s supposed to be (the rewind shaft was binding because the film cartridge was shoved off center). But I still don’t trust it, it only has a 1/500 shutter, and it has a scratch on the groundglass (I did that the first year I had it when I tried to dust off the mirror with a cloth instead of a brush, and touched the groundglass with my fingernail). So I’m glad the Sears/Ricoh works, because it’s in better shape and is a much better camera (the shutter is a metal Copal shutter instead of the Praktica’s cloth shutter, which has been known to stick).
I cleaned up the other cameras. (I discovered that the former owner of the Sears camera engraved his initials and social security number on it. At the time, that probably seemed like a good way to PREVENT theft…)
The only problem I had was that my old Vivitar electronic flash gave up the ghost a few years ago, so I got a thyristor bounce flash that I bought used on the Internet for a few bucks. (I had also had a K-Mart thyristor flash, but it was a piece of crap and broke long ago). But none of these cameras has a hot shoe (in fact they don’t even have a cold shoe, and need an accessory shoe to snap or screw onto the viewfinder). But my flash will work with any of them, since it has a cord and they all have X synch jacks.
If anyone else knows what I’m talking about out there, much less cares, you’re as big a geek as I am.
So I bought five rolls of Kodak 400 speed film (Holy cow, it’s cheap these days!) and I’m all set for Turkey Run this year. But we also bought a cheapo video camera at Kohl’s, so I’ll have three cameras if I take one of the SLR’s, my wife’s Nikon Coolpix digital camera, and this little video camera.
By the way, the video camera cost us 90 bucks. We never had a video camera all the time my kids were growing up. All my siblings did, and they took really awful boring videos, which soured me on the whole idea. But now we have no videos of my kids when they were little and only a few sound recordings of them (on brittle 7 inch reel to reel tapes from my hulking Teac tape deck). Bad parent, or smart parent? I’ll ask them. My siblings have boxes of VHS tapes with all their boring videos on them, plus they’ve had some of them transferred to DVD. They all still look terrible. If I ever had tried to do videos. I’d probably have wanted to do “production” on them, since that’s how I did audio tapes. That’s why I stuck with still photography. But my skills as a photographer went down the tubes when I became a parent. All that bourbon probably didn’t help either. So we have boxes of kinda good but basically snapshot-quality pictures.
But I took my dad’s camera to Starved Rock a couple weeks ago, and I loved it. After eight years of using a digital camera (where you never know if the picture has been taken yet, or what), I love the solid “ka-ZIP” of the SLR. Makes me feel so cool. Ka-ZIP, wind, compose, focus, meter, ka-ZIP, wind. And that quick shutter is great.
My only angst has been over the battery. Each one of these old SLR’s used the same battery – a 625 mercury cell that was 1.33 volts - for the meter. Now, they stopped making mercury batteries a while ago, because of the toxicity to the environment. And the silver batteries that they sell now are 1.55 volts. So purists complain that this will throw the exposure off “Up to TWO f-stops!!” People advise soldering a resistor in the camera. Others sell special batteries that put out the correct voltage. Others say it’s just fine to use the new batteries and makes no difference with today’s films. I bought new silver batteries for all, and will see how it goes. The guy at Central Camera (where my dad bought two of these things 37 years ago) says it’ll be just fine.
Ironically, one of the best-known and iconic photos taken with the Minolta SRT-101 camera was the one from 1971 (which I’m sure you’ve seen) of the Japanese woman bathing her handicapped teenage daughter, who was born with multiple birth defects from (dramatic pause) – mercury pollution.
Damn good photo, though. Gotta have that CLC metering for those dramatic shadows.
When I started this blog, I talked about how in middle age I can “fascinate myself” the way I used to when I was a kid, and not feel like a weirdo. I spoke to my boss the other day – we both had Sears Silvertone guitars as our first guitar.
The other thing I’ve done over the past few weeks, as I cleaned out a closet among other things, was to get very enthusiastic again about film photography. I stopped taking film in 2000 when I got my first good digital camera (a Fujifilm 2.5 megapixel camera that I always thought was pretty damn good, until I see 10 MP cameras that come in Cracker Jack boxes now). But I have thousands of digital images, and boxes of film prints, and I haven’t done much to organize any of it. But that’s for another time (I’ll ask my son, Hey, what year was it that you let your girlfriend at the time bleach your hair? When did we finally get rid of that chair we bought off the nurse I used to work with in 1982 and reupholstered a couple times? When did we give the piano we got for free in 1980 to the preschool?
But that task seems too onerous, so I settled for hauling out and cleaning up all the cameras we have kicking around. Not the Instamatic or the Sears Tower 120 box camera (my first camera); those disappeared long ago. But I do have my Praktica SLR that my dad bought me in 1971, and his camera that my sister gave me a couple years a go (she snagged it when he died without my knowing it, then my brother-in-law decided he wasn’t going to use it so they gave it to me after letting it sit in the damp basement). That one is a Minolta SRT-101 (also bought in 1971), a really kick-ass camera. Then, when my kids were in high school and taking photography, and somehow jammed the film advance on my Praktica, I picked up a used Sears TLS (Actually a Ricoh Singlex with the Sears name on it) at a flea market for about 50 bucks. It is also a fairly kick-butt camera, though apparently not as coveted as the Minolta among us aging photo geeks, judging by my Web searches.
I also found a Nikon EM and I couldn’t figure out where it came from. That one (unlike the others) was an aperture priority camera, so I guess officially it’s the only automatic one (the rest are all match-needle manual adjustment cameras, which is fine with me). I discovered that my daughter’s ex-boyfriend had bought it for her on eBay, so after they broke up and she got her own apartment, she forgot to take it. So she has that one now.
I decided to give the Sears/Ricoh to my son. Another film camera fan can't hurt.
The Sears and the Minolta have a 1/1000 second shutter; the Sears has an f 1.7 lens which is very sharp (I guess it’s actually a Ricoh lens too). The nice thing about the Sears and Praktica is that they can share lenses (screw mount). I already had a wide angle and telephoto lens for the Praktica (they were stolen in Minneapolis in 1975, and mysteriously arrived on my doorstep five years later). So I have a full (enough) set of lenses for those two, and my dad also had extra lenses for the Minolta (They’re the ones that don’t actually stop down to meter, because of a clever interlocking meter/diaphragm arrangement). Thus, I have lenses and cameras out the wazoo.
I got the Praktica working again last week by bending the sheet metal inside the film canister compartment back to where it’s supposed to be (the rewind shaft was binding because the film cartridge was shoved off center). But I still don’t trust it, it only has a 1/500 shutter, and it has a scratch on the groundglass (I did that the first year I had it when I tried to dust off the mirror with a cloth instead of a brush, and touched the groundglass with my fingernail). So I’m glad the Sears/Ricoh works, because it’s in better shape and is a much better camera (the shutter is a metal Copal shutter instead of the Praktica’s cloth shutter, which has been known to stick).
I cleaned up the other cameras. (I discovered that the former owner of the Sears camera engraved his initials and social security number on it. At the time, that probably seemed like a good way to PREVENT theft…)
The only problem I had was that my old Vivitar electronic flash gave up the ghost a few years ago, so I got a thyristor bounce flash that I bought used on the Internet for a few bucks. (I had also had a K-Mart thyristor flash, but it was a piece of crap and broke long ago). But none of these cameras has a hot shoe (in fact they don’t even have a cold shoe, and need an accessory shoe to snap or screw onto the viewfinder). But my flash will work with any of them, since it has a cord and they all have X synch jacks.
If anyone else knows what I’m talking about out there, much less cares, you’re as big a geek as I am.
So I bought five rolls of Kodak 400 speed film (Holy cow, it’s cheap these days!) and I’m all set for Turkey Run this year. But we also bought a cheapo video camera at Kohl’s, so I’ll have three cameras if I take one of the SLR’s, my wife’s Nikon Coolpix digital camera, and this little video camera.
By the way, the video camera cost us 90 bucks. We never had a video camera all the time my kids were growing up. All my siblings did, and they took really awful boring videos, which soured me on the whole idea. But now we have no videos of my kids when they were little and only a few sound recordings of them (on brittle 7 inch reel to reel tapes from my hulking Teac tape deck). Bad parent, or smart parent? I’ll ask them. My siblings have boxes of VHS tapes with all their boring videos on them, plus they’ve had some of them transferred to DVD. They all still look terrible. If I ever had tried to do videos. I’d probably have wanted to do “production” on them, since that’s how I did audio tapes. That’s why I stuck with still photography. But my skills as a photographer went down the tubes when I became a parent. All that bourbon probably didn’t help either. So we have boxes of kinda good but basically snapshot-quality pictures.
But I took my dad’s camera to Starved Rock a couple weeks ago, and I loved it. After eight years of using a digital camera (where you never know if the picture has been taken yet, or what), I love the solid “ka-ZIP” of the SLR. Makes me feel so cool. Ka-ZIP, wind, compose, focus, meter, ka-ZIP, wind. And that quick shutter is great.
My only angst has been over the battery. Each one of these old SLR’s used the same battery – a 625 mercury cell that was 1.33 volts - for the meter. Now, they stopped making mercury batteries a while ago, because of the toxicity to the environment. And the silver batteries that they sell now are 1.55 volts. So purists complain that this will throw the exposure off “Up to TWO f-stops!!” People advise soldering a resistor in the camera. Others sell special batteries that put out the correct voltage. Others say it’s just fine to use the new batteries and makes no difference with today’s films. I bought new silver batteries for all, and will see how it goes. The guy at Central Camera (where my dad bought two of these things 37 years ago) says it’ll be just fine.
Ironically, one of the best-known and iconic photos taken with the Minolta SRT-101 camera was the one from 1971 (which I’m sure you’ve seen) of the Japanese woman bathing her handicapped teenage daughter, who was born with multiple birth defects from (dramatic pause) – mercury pollution.
Damn good photo, though. Gotta have that CLC metering for those dramatic shadows.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Suspicious of Yahoo!
Yahoo! is my home page but it's ticking me off. You know about how United Air Lines got hammered becaue some insomniac looked at a year-old story about their bankruptcy, and Google's algorithms treated it as a "most-viewed story" because of the hour, leading to a "War of the Worlds"-like lemming panic.
I suspect the same thing is going on with Yahoo's "Most blogged" list on their home page. Almost all of the "most-blogged" stories are from a site called "hotair.com" which is a vile compendium of nastiness and libel thrown against anyone to the political left of Rush Limbaugh. Obviously, these guys have made it a point to spin out a bunch of self-serving blogs for the sole purpose of getting on lists like the Yahoo one.
Don' trust anything you read on the internet, including that advice.
I suspect the same thing is going on with Yahoo's "Most blogged" list on their home page. Almost all of the "most-blogged" stories are from a site called "hotair.com" which is a vile compendium of nastiness and libel thrown against anyone to the political left of Rush Limbaugh. Obviously, these guys have made it a point to spin out a bunch of self-serving blogs for the sole purpose of getting on lists like the Yahoo one.
Don' trust anything you read on the internet, including that advice.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Random Thoughts (in the Year of the Plague)
The Dow is all over the place, my modest stock portfolio has lost about a third of its value, and I'm down $3000 from what I put into it. The stocks that haven't lost me money are Borg Warner, Procter & Gamble, and Smucker's. We're putting new brakes on the old car, staying home to do laundry, and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
I was actually hoping that the new austerity would bring some of the changes we dreamed about in the 70's but forgot about while raising kids, playing Mario, and refinancing mortgages. I voted early at a nearby library Monday, and was inspired to go to my own library and get a library card again for the first time in about 15 years. While the librarian was working on it I flipped through Mother Earth News and managed to recapture some of that 70's feeling. Maybe the whole country will go along... drive less, stay closer to home, grow or buy organic (melamine-free) food, play Scrabble and Parcheesi, play the banjo and fiddle, and put up a yurt instead of a double-wide filled with formaldehyde-laced fibreboard, when we can afford a vacation home. We'll rebuild some interurban railroads and bike more.
Then the stock market went up again the next day because oil prices were down and the governments of a lot of countries pumped a lot of manufactured cash into the economy. So nah, never mind about the organic life and living wisely (and maybe trying to forge a community). Get out the credit cards again, and gas up the Hummer for a trip to Disney World now that gas is heading back to three bucks a gallon.
Politics for a moment: Last night when I heard about the infamous "Joe the Plumber's" imperfections, all I (and probably a lot of other Chicagoans) could think of was the annoying commercial from a few years back, where a Chicagoese Regular Guy announcer (I think he sounded suspiciously like the mayor of Orland Park who managed to eliminate my department in 1995) warned us all:
"This man is not a licensed plumber!"
"It's your typical flamshooter. "
I love the term "flamshooter." Which is what I thought about McCain and the right-wing nutjobs like Newt Gingrich who pile on on his behalf. Telling us Obama is a socialist who wants to take your money so he can "spread your wealth" to other people. Probably minorities and those who want to push the "homosexual agenda," right? And who wants to waste breath on those tired old arguments about "partial birth abortion" these days, anyway?
Hey, Newt, I don't know about you, but I can think of a lot of CEO's whose wealth I want spread around, with a slice for me; since they ripped me off of my retirement investments. And you and Cheney owe me too, for letting it happen. That's not socialism, that's a small step toward righting the wrongs that have been done to us in the name of capitalism.
I just read a comment by one of the executives at Mesirow Financial who lamented the fact that (with Fannie and Freddie, most notably) we saw a pattern in the U.S economy of "privatizing profits and socializing losses." Which is obviously a very bad thing. So the arguments are not as simple as the McCain campaign would like the Average Joe to believe.
You know what I had a sudden chilling fear of today? I worry that some crazy person is going to try to take out one of the presidential candidates, and (given the tenor of the crowds lately, and things like the hate sign someone put up along a roadway in Illinois) I'm sure many, like me, would fear who that would more likely be. My daughter's boyfriend said he actually had a dream about the same thing. I'm sure other people are worried.
Anyway, I walked out of work and this sudden chill came over me that was reminiscent of 9/11/01, and of 1968. It felt surreal, because it was like a premonition. I sure hope nothing bad happens, and I hope the Secret Service is doing its job.
I was actually hoping that the new austerity would bring some of the changes we dreamed about in the 70's but forgot about while raising kids, playing Mario, and refinancing mortgages. I voted early at a nearby library Monday, and was inspired to go to my own library and get a library card again for the first time in about 15 years. While the librarian was working on it I flipped through Mother Earth News and managed to recapture some of that 70's feeling. Maybe the whole country will go along... drive less, stay closer to home, grow or buy organic (melamine-free) food, play Scrabble and Parcheesi, play the banjo and fiddle, and put up a yurt instead of a double-wide filled with formaldehyde-laced fibreboard, when we can afford a vacation home. We'll rebuild some interurban railroads and bike more.
Then the stock market went up again the next day because oil prices were down and the governments of a lot of countries pumped a lot of manufactured cash into the economy. So nah, never mind about the organic life and living wisely (and maybe trying to forge a community). Get out the credit cards again, and gas up the Hummer for a trip to Disney World now that gas is heading back to three bucks a gallon.
Politics for a moment: Last night when I heard about the infamous "Joe the Plumber's" imperfections, all I (and probably a lot of other Chicagoans) could think of was the annoying commercial from a few years back, where a Chicagoese Regular Guy announcer (I think he sounded suspiciously like the mayor of Orland Park who managed to eliminate my department in 1995) warned us all:
"This man is not a licensed plumber!"
"It's your typical flamshooter. "
I love the term "flamshooter." Which is what I thought about McCain and the right-wing nutjobs like Newt Gingrich who pile on on his behalf. Telling us Obama is a socialist who wants to take your money so he can "spread your wealth" to other people. Probably minorities and those who want to push the "homosexual agenda," right? And who wants to waste breath on those tired old arguments about "partial birth abortion" these days, anyway?
Hey, Newt, I don't know about you, but I can think of a lot of CEO's whose wealth I want spread around, with a slice for me; since they ripped me off of my retirement investments. And you and Cheney owe me too, for letting it happen. That's not socialism, that's a small step toward righting the wrongs that have been done to us in the name of capitalism.
I just read a comment by one of the executives at Mesirow Financial who lamented the fact that (with Fannie and Freddie, most notably) we saw a pattern in the U.S economy of "privatizing profits and socializing losses." Which is obviously a very bad thing. So the arguments are not as simple as the McCain campaign would like the Average Joe to believe.
You know what I had a sudden chilling fear of today? I worry that some crazy person is going to try to take out one of the presidential candidates, and (given the tenor of the crowds lately, and things like the hate sign someone put up along a roadway in Illinois) I'm sure many, like me, would fear who that would more likely be. My daughter's boyfriend said he actually had a dream about the same thing. I'm sure other people are worried.
Anyway, I walked out of work and this sudden chill came over me that was reminiscent of 9/11/01, and of 1968. It felt surreal, because it was like a premonition. I sure hope nothing bad happens, and I hope the Secret Service is doing its job.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
In Praise of Chlorine
We’ve had an above-ground pool in our backyard since 1991. We got the first one used from friends who put in a bigger pool when they moved. That lasted us about eight years, and then we bought a new pool. We’re on our third or fourth liner, and our second pump and filter, and we had to tear down and rebuild the pool one year after a big chunk of ice shifted during the spring thaw and the sides collapsed. I built a deck on one side about eight years ago, and we’ve enjoyed the pool every summer since our kids were still in grammar school (they’re all grown and two have moved out now). So this pool has been Dad’s obsession, more or less.
When we replaced the pool, or thereabouts, we switched to Baquacil instead of chlorine. Big promises. No red eyes, no smell, no constant feeding of chemicals. So we bought into it. And for the first few years, it was pretty good. The water felt clean, smelled mild, stayed pretty clear, and was low maintenance. But because we didn’t drain the pool completely in the winter, the chemicals apparently built up. So, by this year, we had a real witches’ brew in there. We were constantly adding gallons of that really nasty peroxide shock, adding five pounds of calcium, three pounds of sodium carbonate, and a quart of algaecide every time we tested the water at the store. Worst of all, we were waging a constant war against white water mold. The water felt sticky and slimy, smelled funny, and never really got clear. My eyes bothered me, and I swear I was getting fungus in my ears. We were spending 50 to 100 bucks every time we went to the pool store. My wife didn’t like swimming in it and started talking about taking down the pool.
The local pool store stopped carrying Baquacil, so I had to drive ten miles to keep buying the crap. I looked on the Baquacil web site to find out what causes the water mold, and they blamed the victim by saying we must have neglected something. Certainly not when judged by our expenses…
Then, two weeks ago, with the solar cover on and the filter running all week, and the Baquacil level up above normal (it never got below normal even though we hadn’t added any in about two months), I went out on Saturday and took off the cover to find the pool was greener than the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day, and smelled like the Des Plaines River. That was it. I’d had it. I got my son over, we pulled off the catch basin lid, and pumped out all the water we could from the pool. We had to stop when it got down to about a foot, for fear the sides would collapse again. We power washed the sides as best we could to get the algae and water mold off. Then I refilled it and dumped in two gallons of bleach to kill the rest of the Baquacil. The pool was still green and the sides grew a new coating of algae, but at least we had plain water in there. I had to wait a couple days to get to the pool store and in that time the algae grew back enough to make the water opaque. But we finally got some bags of chlorine shock and started dumping them (and half a bottle of polysyllabic algaecide) in the pool, and vacuumed and filtered for a couple days till it was clear. We backwashed our sand filter about ten times during this process, and the stuff that came out was nasty. But I never had to flock it.
So by this weekend it was crystal clear. I define that as clear enough to see the little rainbows on the edges of the ripples of sunlight on the bottom. And the water smells and feels clean. I no longer feel like I have to head straight for the shower as soon as I get out.
Now the weather has turned cool and it’s getting down in the high 50’s at night. But I don’t care. The pool is staying clean (with a quarter cup of chlorine granules or so every day) and even the solar cover smells better. The water is staying above 80 degrees, and I’m defiantly swimming when I come home at night. I know Labor Day is coming, and it’ll be time to think about winterizing again soon, but I’m relishing this one brief period of glorious, clean, chlorine-ey swimming that brings back memories of when I was a kid and went to the YMCA or the Elmwood Park High School pool or the Union League Club pool (on the 21st floor, where the naked men ordered half pound hamburgers by the poolside and the women weren’t allowed above the second floor). And I love being my own pool guy and relish this little indulgence, and I’ll fight to keep my pool at least another few years. Viva chlorine!
When we replaced the pool, or thereabouts, we switched to Baquacil instead of chlorine. Big promises. No red eyes, no smell, no constant feeding of chemicals. So we bought into it. And for the first few years, it was pretty good. The water felt clean, smelled mild, stayed pretty clear, and was low maintenance. But because we didn’t drain the pool completely in the winter, the chemicals apparently built up. So, by this year, we had a real witches’ brew in there. We were constantly adding gallons of that really nasty peroxide shock, adding five pounds of calcium, three pounds of sodium carbonate, and a quart of algaecide every time we tested the water at the store. Worst of all, we were waging a constant war against white water mold. The water felt sticky and slimy, smelled funny, and never really got clear. My eyes bothered me, and I swear I was getting fungus in my ears. We were spending 50 to 100 bucks every time we went to the pool store. My wife didn’t like swimming in it and started talking about taking down the pool.
The local pool store stopped carrying Baquacil, so I had to drive ten miles to keep buying the crap. I looked on the Baquacil web site to find out what causes the water mold, and they blamed the victim by saying we must have neglected something. Certainly not when judged by our expenses…
Then, two weeks ago, with the solar cover on and the filter running all week, and the Baquacil level up above normal (it never got below normal even though we hadn’t added any in about two months), I went out on Saturday and took off the cover to find the pool was greener than the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day, and smelled like the Des Plaines River. That was it. I’d had it. I got my son over, we pulled off the catch basin lid, and pumped out all the water we could from the pool. We had to stop when it got down to about a foot, for fear the sides would collapse again. We power washed the sides as best we could to get the algae and water mold off. Then I refilled it and dumped in two gallons of bleach to kill the rest of the Baquacil. The pool was still green and the sides grew a new coating of algae, but at least we had plain water in there. I had to wait a couple days to get to the pool store and in that time the algae grew back enough to make the water opaque. But we finally got some bags of chlorine shock and started dumping them (and half a bottle of polysyllabic algaecide) in the pool, and vacuumed and filtered for a couple days till it was clear. We backwashed our sand filter about ten times during this process, and the stuff that came out was nasty. But I never had to flock it.
So by this weekend it was crystal clear. I define that as clear enough to see the little rainbows on the edges of the ripples of sunlight on the bottom. And the water smells and feels clean. I no longer feel like I have to head straight for the shower as soon as I get out.
Now the weather has turned cool and it’s getting down in the high 50’s at night. But I don’t care. The pool is staying clean (with a quarter cup of chlorine granules or so every day) and even the solar cover smells better. The water is staying above 80 degrees, and I’m defiantly swimming when I come home at night. I know Labor Day is coming, and it’ll be time to think about winterizing again soon, but I’m relishing this one brief period of glorious, clean, chlorine-ey swimming that brings back memories of when I was a kid and went to the YMCA or the Elmwood Park High School pool or the Union League Club pool (on the 21st floor, where the naked men ordered half pound hamburgers by the poolside and the women weren’t allowed above the second floor). And I love being my own pool guy and relish this little indulgence, and I’ll fight to keep my pool at least another few years. Viva chlorine!
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Vacation in Door County
I'm relaxing for two weeks, learning a few new fiddle tunes on the mandolin (Don't want to irritate the neighbors). Learned this one,"The Falls of Richmond" (This isn't me playing, but I wanted to see if You Tube imbed would work here):
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Save the postage, give the rebates to Al Lord instead
I read a few comments that President Bush could save a lot of postage by direct depositing the economic stimulus checks in the oil companies' bank accounts instead of sending them to taxpayers. Well, I cut back my driving, but there's no escaping Sallie Mae for my son. So, despite having a meager paycheck, his 3 month "forbearance" period ends this month and he's up for over $800 a month in loan payments to that evil company that owns so many Congress members. And I can't let him go into financial disaster because of it, so we're on the hook to help out. (I almost said, "I can't let him go into bankruptcy over it," but then I remembered that the evil giant got the law changed so that if you're bankrupt - hell, even if you're dead, probably - you still have to pay Sallie Mae. Forever. And in ever-increasing amounts that make Payday Loans look like a good deal.
Or, maybe more accurately, you still have to pay former chief robber Al Lord, at least until he dropped the F-bomb at a meeting and had to resign. But I doubt he's given up all the spoils of his CEO-ship. As CBS News' Leslie Stahl reported last year:
'"It would be very hard for me to tell you that what I make is not a lot of money," Lord said. Said to be worth a quarter of a billion dollars, Al Lord is building his own private golf course and made a bid to buy a professional baseball team. During the past 13 years taxpayers have spent $40 billion on guaranteed student loans. Sallie Mae would not tell 60 Minutes how much of that went to them.'
So I'll suggest that Bush just transfer the rebates for anyone who has Sallie Mae loans directly to Al Lord's (probably offshore) bank account. He can pay his golf course landscapers a few hundred bucks, and so help out some of their relatives back home, and he can spend the rest on whatever rich people spend money on. Trickle down economics, you know. As in, Al (and all the Congressmen he's bought) stand there and piss on regular people like us, and it trickles down our throats, after we asked the Federal government for finanical aid and filled out all those FAFSA forms that did nothing but give Sallie Mae all our private information. I love this country.
Or, maybe more accurately, you still have to pay former chief robber Al Lord, at least until he dropped the F-bomb at a meeting and had to resign. But I doubt he's given up all the spoils of his CEO-ship. As CBS News' Leslie Stahl reported last year:
'"It would be very hard for me to tell you that what I make is not a lot of money," Lord said. Said to be worth a quarter of a billion dollars, Al Lord is building his own private golf course and made a bid to buy a professional baseball team. During the past 13 years taxpayers have spent $40 billion on guaranteed student loans. Sallie Mae would not tell 60 Minutes how much of that went to them.'
So I'll suggest that Bush just transfer the rebates for anyone who has Sallie Mae loans directly to Al Lord's (probably offshore) bank account. He can pay his golf course landscapers a few hundred bucks, and so help out some of their relatives back home, and he can spend the rest on whatever rich people spend money on. Trickle down economics, you know. As in, Al (and all the Congressmen he's bought) stand there and piss on regular people like us, and it trickles down our throats, after we asked the Federal government for finanical aid and filled out all those FAFSA forms that did nothing but give Sallie Mae all our private information. I love this country.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Care for some gopher?
Friday evening we had my work "holiday" party. Yeah, it was six months late. It was an OK party, at a place that used to be a fish market in Chicago buit is now a trendy bistro bar with a Hispanic flair. They served us a bunch of appetizers, starting with guacamole, then shrimp ceviche on tortilla chils, the some spicy stuff on fried plantain, then some chicken grilled on skewers, with green stuff on them (tasted pretty good -cilantro). I ate one. So we're chatting, my co-workers were drinking wine or sangria, I was drinking iced tea, and I'm pacing myself for the main course.
The next thing they brought was dessert - some fudgelike stuff, and little fruit cups, and espresso cream puffs. So no main course. I guess it was a tapas bar. So I said to my co=worker, "If I'd known that there was only appetizers, I would've eaten more gopher." So I had to try to explain how the skewers looked just like the gopher on a stick in "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?" Which even when I explained it, no one got.
So the next nught at home we were going to make a Weber recipe for carne asada, and I modified ot to be more like the "gopher" I'd missed the night before. And it came out pretty good. So here's my recipe. I had to give it a Mexican sounding name, and the Internet translator I found gave me a term that apparently means, literally, "Ground squirrel." MAybe they don't have gophers in Mexico. But rest assured, this isn't Chip and Dale. It's not even gopher. Just mock gopher.
Ardillas Terrestres
8-10 servings
Marinade
1/2 C Lime Juice
1/2 C Tequila
1/2 Medium Jalapeno Pepper, seeds removed, minced fine
1/4 C Onion, minced fine
2 cloves garlic, minced fine
2 Tbsp Fresh Cilantro leaves, minced fine
1/4 tsp ground pepper
Meat
2 lb Sirloin Steak or flank steak, fat trimmed, cut in strips
3 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut in strips
Vegetables
1 red pepper and 1 green pepper, seeds and ribs removed, cut in strips
2/3 of a medium onion (the rest of what you used for the minced onion), sliced thin
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
Soak enough wooden skewers to hold all the meat, in water for at least 30 min.
Mix all marinade ingredients. Place meat in two large Ziploc bags, pour half of marinade in each bag, and marinate for 2-4 hours in refrigerator.
Place vegetables on a large (15 inch) piece of wide heavy duty foil. Dot with butter. Wrap in a packet.
Prepare coals in grill for direct heat.
Thread meat onto skewers.
Spread coals and place foil packet off to the side to steam while meat cooks. When coals are ready for direct grilling, place skewers of meat on grill over coals. Grill, turning several times, until juices run clear in chicken and until steak is done to your liking.
Remove foil packet from grill, place steamed vegetables in a nonstick skillet, and brown until desired doneness.
Remove meat from skewers. (or, offer a skewer to your dining companions and ask, "Care for some gopher?")
Serve meat and vegetables with unsalted corn tortillas, cheese, avocados, and Trader Joe's low sodium salsa.
The whole thing was done to be consistent with my low-sodium diet, but it's tasty enough not to be bland.
The next thing they brought was dessert - some fudgelike stuff, and little fruit cups, and espresso cream puffs. So no main course. I guess it was a tapas bar. So I said to my co=worker, "If I'd known that there was only appetizers, I would've eaten more gopher." So I had to try to explain how the skewers looked just like the gopher on a stick in "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?" Which even when I explained it, no one got.
So the next nught at home we were going to make a Weber recipe for carne asada, and I modified ot to be more like the "gopher" I'd missed the night before. And it came out pretty good. So here's my recipe. I had to give it a Mexican sounding name, and the Internet translator I found gave me a term that apparently means, literally, "Ground squirrel." MAybe they don't have gophers in Mexico. But rest assured, this isn't Chip and Dale. It's not even gopher. Just mock gopher.
Ardillas Terrestres
8-10 servings
Marinade
1/2 C Lime Juice
1/2 C Tequila
1/2 Medium Jalapeno Pepper, seeds removed, minced fine
1/4 C Onion, minced fine
2 cloves garlic, minced fine
2 Tbsp Fresh Cilantro leaves, minced fine
1/4 tsp ground pepper
Meat
2 lb Sirloin Steak or flank steak, fat trimmed, cut in strips
3 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut in strips
Vegetables
1 red pepper and 1 green pepper, seeds and ribs removed, cut in strips
2/3 of a medium onion (the rest of what you used for the minced onion), sliced thin
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
Soak enough wooden skewers to hold all the meat, in water for at least 30 min.
Mix all marinade ingredients. Place meat in two large Ziploc bags, pour half of marinade in each bag, and marinate for 2-4 hours in refrigerator.
Place vegetables on a large (15 inch) piece of wide heavy duty foil. Dot with butter. Wrap in a packet.
Prepare coals in grill for direct heat.
Thread meat onto skewers.
Spread coals and place foil packet off to the side to steam while meat cooks. When coals are ready for direct grilling, place skewers of meat on grill over coals. Grill, turning several times, until juices run clear in chicken and until steak is done to your liking.
Remove foil packet from grill, place steamed vegetables in a nonstick skillet, and brown until desired doneness.
Remove meat from skewers. (or, offer a skewer to your dining companions and ask, "Care for some gopher?")
Serve meat and vegetables with unsalted corn tortillas, cheese, avocados, and Trader Joe's low sodium salsa.
The whole thing was done to be consistent with my low-sodium diet, but it's tasty enough not to be bland.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Fear, Ignorance, Hatred
Saw a story today in the paper about the “Tough” sheriff in Phoenix who likes to “round up” anyone who might be an illegal immigrant, on whatever minor charge he can think of – broken taillights, cracked windshields, you name it. I’m sure he has plenty of support from righteous folks who think that illegal immigrants are stealing jobs from decent Americans, and committing identity theft in the process. The sheriff and his supporters mention "crime" and "the laws" a lot.
The line that’s been haunting me all day since then is from Woody Guthrie: “They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”
Listen to “Deportee” (I think The Byrds did the best version) and think about the immigration debate. These people are being treated like thieves for supposedly stealing jobs and Social Security numbers. Crime, fraud, oh my; now we can treat them like outlaws. But the jobs are those that won't be filled otherwise, and the use of fake Social Security cards would only benefit the people whose Social Security numbers are being used – not he people using them. So what’s being stolen?
I’ll tell you what’s being stolen in this whole debate. Our humanity, and our core values. This country has fought a two-hundred-and-thirty year struggle to keep the values of liberty, equality, and opportunity alive -- not only in the face of external threats, but also in the face of the more insidious threats of fear, ignorance, and hatred. That’s about as simple as I can make it.
Fear, ignorance, and hatred. They come up most often in commentary about the immigration debate, but they really poison our whole political discourse and much of our culture these days. Not that it's new, by any means. But all this stuff has been stewing around in my mind, and gets me trying to think about it all (which my wife would say is a dangerous thing to start me doing).
Reading Kathleen Parker’s column the other day, about how the “true bloodline” of Americans is being overlooked by the presidential candidates, really ticked me off as a not-so-subtle piece of racist rhetoric. People have been using their purported idenitity as part of a "better" group, from time immemorial, to keep other folks down.
But it occurred to me that maybe the real “bloodline” that defines the United States of America is a bloodline of ideas and values. At our best, our country stands for affirming the best in people, and protecting the people who need protecting the most. I don’t care what party you support, or where you stand on all the tired “litmus tests” that are supposed to define your ideology and let you be pigeonholed and tallied by the pollsters and politicians seeking your vote. It’s the values that matter. And we need to take a hard look at every issue and every position related to that issue, in some very simple terms: Does that position represent and affirm our most basic and cherished values, or does that position represent a forgetting of those values, in favor of our less-admirable motives?
And I’ll tell you exactly what those less-admirable motives are: Three words: Fear. Ignorance. Hatred. Think about it.
Fear is a terrible basis for policy. It gives us excuses to start ill-advised wars, causes us to allow our basic rights of free expression and free assembly to be threatened, and it fuels hatred as surely as June heat fuels weeds. Fear got us into Iraq; it spawned a whole new bureaucracy that worships suspicion at our airports and in our border towns, and it nurses grudges even when the reason to be afraid is gone.
Caution is another matter. Caution leads to further investigation, and to looking before we leap. Caution is rational; fear is irrational.
So what’s the antidote to fear? Courage. Courage means knowing the risks and dealing with them or transcending them. Courage means being willing to meet others halfway and work toward solutions. Courage means being willing to balance safety against our other important values.
Then there’s ignorance. Ignorance means not only failing to educate yourself about the facts, but also failing to think when an issue presents itself. Ignorance is jumping to conclusions. Ignorance is assuming that those in authority are making decisions based on good information, and that they’re trustworthy. Ignorance believes questionable theories because they make us feel more comfortable, or because they excuse us from having to check things out and think for ourselves. Ignorance is letting emotion be the basis for selective attention, as when we use one incident to “prove” that all of “those” people are “that way.” Ignorance is assuming that one solution can cure all our problems – whether that solution is more taxes and government oversight, or letting “the economy” take care of decisions that profoundly affect the general welfare, further disempowering those already without power.
So what’s the antidote to ignorance? Well, the simplest answer is “intelligence,” but you gotta be careful using that word so people don’t think you’re elitist or making some kind of categorization of people. You know, “The Bell Curve,” and all that. But let’s define intelligence this way: Developing and using our powers of human reason in order to solve problems and make things better in the long run. Intelligence is the “executive function,” the “ego” as opposed to the “id;” it's the willingness to postpone immediate gratification, to look at issues objectively, and to arrive at some reasoned conclusions rather than using knee-jerk reactions. Sure, passion can play a part in this, and passion often tips the balance in favor of one approach when several might work. But passion without reason is like a fire hose with no one to aim it. It wastes resources, fails to solve the problem, and can hurt people needlessly.
So let’s use Thomas Paine’s reliable old phrase and call what we need “Common Sense.” It works for me.
Which brings us to hatred. People underestimate the sneakiness of hatred. Oh, there’s plenty of pure, straight-ahead hatred in this world, there’s no doubt about that. And people who indulge in hatred seem to gravitate to others who enjoy the same thing, which creates mobs and keeps bumper-sticker makers and talk radio hosts in business.
But there are plenty of milder, yet still destructive, forms of hatred. There’s resentment, which leads to revenge and grudges. There’s jealousy, which leads to malicious scheming. And there’s labeling and dehumanizing, which may not be accompanied by anger, but which lead to many of the same results as angry, hateful, spiteful behavior. Hatred rejoices in the misfortune of others. Hatred loves to turn others into objects so they’re easier to hate. And hatred fuels things like litmus tests and loyalty oaths, because hatred loves things to be in all-or-nothing terms. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.
By the way, you notice at this point how fear, hatred, and ignorance feed on each other and help each other out immensely. All three get us to forego the higher human faculties in favor of the baser urges. All three involve our “lizard brains,” to use a term that’s been popular lately, because those pesky higher functions of our minds take a bit more energy than the simple information-processing subroutines that our animal urges favor. See bug (or something that looks like a bug). Catch bug. Feel good. See illegal immigrant (or someone who looks like an illegal immigrant). Catch illegal immigrant. Feel good.
Last week I washed out my barbecue grill on the lawn. The next day I saw that my dogs had eaten all the grass and a pretty good quantity of dirt from the spot where I'd washed the grill. My dogs swallowed a bunch of dirt because they liked the way it smelled. The parallel with the audience for the average ranting talk radio host is just too perfect to pass up...
One of my favorite quotes as a therapist has always been, “Emotion, like fire, is a useful servant but a terrible master.” Emotion can drive much of our behavior, on the political front as much as on the relationship front. Whether it’s Eliot Spitzer’s tarnishing of the role of attorney general, Bill Clinton’s impeachment circus, or stupidly negative campaign advertisements, unregulated emotional urges and their accompanying stupid behaviors cost us, and they cost us plenty. They cost us financially, they cost us our spirit and our morale, they cost us time and energy that could better be used fixing the real problems we all face, and they cost us our integrity as a nation.
But I digress. So what’s the antidote to hatred? Pretty simple, really. We’ve been taught since we were kids that it’s respect, concern, helping others, and plain old charity. The Golden Rule is golden for a very good reason: It works best as a guide to behavior. We’re social creatures. We don’t have tusks, poisonous skins, claws, sharp teeth, or powerful muscles. We have each other. We need each other. And we find our purpose on this earth in relation to each other. Originally, that meant survival of the tribe. But we can’t afford tribes anymore. Our existence is too fragile and too interdependent. So the tribe has to be all of us. But it certainly needs to start with our nation. And governments and political leaders probably hinder social cooperation much more often than they help it.
The United States was built around a basic affirmation of those values of cooperation and working together, of dignity, and of equality. Sure, we’ve often failed to live up to our standards, but at least we kept them front and center through much of our history. Or at least that’s the story we’ve tried to tell ourselves and our children. We saw the hypocrisy of allowing slavery, so we eventually got rid of it -- though it almost tore us apart and came at great cost. We struggled with the unfairness of keeping more than half of our fellow citizens (women and black people) out of the political process, and we did the right thing in each case -- though it’s been a struggle that continues to this day (hanging chads, anyone?) But that story is no longer being told. Instead, we have cynicism and brainless ranting. Most political discourse these days is garbage, and we shouldn't be proud of it as a reflection of what our citizens strive for.
All of our images of the traditions that we want to keep – whether it’s Norman Rockwell’s ordinary citizen speaking up at a town hall meeting, or “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – reflect the aspirations contained in those three guiding principles: Courage, common sense, and respect. Yeah, I know, the images are always of WASP-ish men in those roles, but that's not the point. A rainbow of people should be honoring that tradition and setting the standards we should all be following. So if Norman Rockwell doesn't do it for ya, think "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rogers." Who are the people in your neighborhood? Won't you be my neighbor?
So what should we be doing? Well, we should start making a point of evaluating our own discourse, and that of others, according to these values. And we should demand of our politicians that they do the same, whether they are stating their positions or making decisions on our behalf. Let’s start with you, Senator Obama. You talk about hope and change; let’s hear you start publicly affirming these values. It would be a real change, and would give us all a lot more hope.
Senator, you have my permission to take any part of my blog post here as material for a speech. I won't mind. Hearing some of these ideas get talked about in the political arena would be reward enough for me.
The line that’s been haunting me all day since then is from Woody Guthrie: “They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”
Listen to “Deportee” (I think The Byrds did the best version) and think about the immigration debate. These people are being treated like thieves for supposedly stealing jobs and Social Security numbers. Crime, fraud, oh my; now we can treat them like outlaws. But the jobs are those that won't be filled otherwise, and the use of fake Social Security cards would only benefit the people whose Social Security numbers are being used – not he people using them. So what’s being stolen?
I’ll tell you what’s being stolen in this whole debate. Our humanity, and our core values. This country has fought a two-hundred-and-thirty year struggle to keep the values of liberty, equality, and opportunity alive -- not only in the face of external threats, but also in the face of the more insidious threats of fear, ignorance, and hatred. That’s about as simple as I can make it.
Fear, ignorance, and hatred. They come up most often in commentary about the immigration debate, but they really poison our whole political discourse and much of our culture these days. Not that it's new, by any means. But all this stuff has been stewing around in my mind, and gets me trying to think about it all (which my wife would say is a dangerous thing to start me doing).
Reading Kathleen Parker’s column the other day, about how the “true bloodline” of Americans is being overlooked by the presidential candidates, really ticked me off as a not-so-subtle piece of racist rhetoric. People have been using their purported idenitity as part of a "better" group, from time immemorial, to keep other folks down.
But it occurred to me that maybe the real “bloodline” that defines the United States of America is a bloodline of ideas and values. At our best, our country stands for affirming the best in people, and protecting the people who need protecting the most. I don’t care what party you support, or where you stand on all the tired “litmus tests” that are supposed to define your ideology and let you be pigeonholed and tallied by the pollsters and politicians seeking your vote. It’s the values that matter. And we need to take a hard look at every issue and every position related to that issue, in some very simple terms: Does that position represent and affirm our most basic and cherished values, or does that position represent a forgetting of those values, in favor of our less-admirable motives?
And I’ll tell you exactly what those less-admirable motives are: Three words: Fear. Ignorance. Hatred. Think about it.
Fear is a terrible basis for policy. It gives us excuses to start ill-advised wars, causes us to allow our basic rights of free expression and free assembly to be threatened, and it fuels hatred as surely as June heat fuels weeds. Fear got us into Iraq; it spawned a whole new bureaucracy that worships suspicion at our airports and in our border towns, and it nurses grudges even when the reason to be afraid is gone.
Caution is another matter. Caution leads to further investigation, and to looking before we leap. Caution is rational; fear is irrational.
So what’s the antidote to fear? Courage. Courage means knowing the risks and dealing with them or transcending them. Courage means being willing to meet others halfway and work toward solutions. Courage means being willing to balance safety against our other important values.
Then there’s ignorance. Ignorance means not only failing to educate yourself about the facts, but also failing to think when an issue presents itself. Ignorance is jumping to conclusions. Ignorance is assuming that those in authority are making decisions based on good information, and that they’re trustworthy. Ignorance believes questionable theories because they make us feel more comfortable, or because they excuse us from having to check things out and think for ourselves. Ignorance is letting emotion be the basis for selective attention, as when we use one incident to “prove” that all of “those” people are “that way.” Ignorance is assuming that one solution can cure all our problems – whether that solution is more taxes and government oversight, or letting “the economy” take care of decisions that profoundly affect the general welfare, further disempowering those already without power.
So what’s the antidote to ignorance? Well, the simplest answer is “intelligence,” but you gotta be careful using that word so people don’t think you’re elitist or making some kind of categorization of people. You know, “The Bell Curve,” and all that. But let’s define intelligence this way: Developing and using our powers of human reason in order to solve problems and make things better in the long run. Intelligence is the “executive function,” the “ego” as opposed to the “id;” it's the willingness to postpone immediate gratification, to look at issues objectively, and to arrive at some reasoned conclusions rather than using knee-jerk reactions. Sure, passion can play a part in this, and passion often tips the balance in favor of one approach when several might work. But passion without reason is like a fire hose with no one to aim it. It wastes resources, fails to solve the problem, and can hurt people needlessly.
So let’s use Thomas Paine’s reliable old phrase and call what we need “Common Sense.” It works for me.
Which brings us to hatred. People underestimate the sneakiness of hatred. Oh, there’s plenty of pure, straight-ahead hatred in this world, there’s no doubt about that. And people who indulge in hatred seem to gravitate to others who enjoy the same thing, which creates mobs and keeps bumper-sticker makers and talk radio hosts in business.
But there are plenty of milder, yet still destructive, forms of hatred. There’s resentment, which leads to revenge and grudges. There’s jealousy, which leads to malicious scheming. And there’s labeling and dehumanizing, which may not be accompanied by anger, but which lead to many of the same results as angry, hateful, spiteful behavior. Hatred rejoices in the misfortune of others. Hatred loves to turn others into objects so they’re easier to hate. And hatred fuels things like litmus tests and loyalty oaths, because hatred loves things to be in all-or-nothing terms. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.
By the way, you notice at this point how fear, hatred, and ignorance feed on each other and help each other out immensely. All three get us to forego the higher human faculties in favor of the baser urges. All three involve our “lizard brains,” to use a term that’s been popular lately, because those pesky higher functions of our minds take a bit more energy than the simple information-processing subroutines that our animal urges favor. See bug (or something that looks like a bug). Catch bug. Feel good. See illegal immigrant (or someone who looks like an illegal immigrant). Catch illegal immigrant. Feel good.
Last week I washed out my barbecue grill on the lawn. The next day I saw that my dogs had eaten all the grass and a pretty good quantity of dirt from the spot where I'd washed the grill. My dogs swallowed a bunch of dirt because they liked the way it smelled. The parallel with the audience for the average ranting talk radio host is just too perfect to pass up...
One of my favorite quotes as a therapist has always been, “Emotion, like fire, is a useful servant but a terrible master.” Emotion can drive much of our behavior, on the political front as much as on the relationship front. Whether it’s Eliot Spitzer’s tarnishing of the role of attorney general, Bill Clinton’s impeachment circus, or stupidly negative campaign advertisements, unregulated emotional urges and their accompanying stupid behaviors cost us, and they cost us plenty. They cost us financially, they cost us our spirit and our morale, they cost us time and energy that could better be used fixing the real problems we all face, and they cost us our integrity as a nation.
But I digress. So what’s the antidote to hatred? Pretty simple, really. We’ve been taught since we were kids that it’s respect, concern, helping others, and plain old charity. The Golden Rule is golden for a very good reason: It works best as a guide to behavior. We’re social creatures. We don’t have tusks, poisonous skins, claws, sharp teeth, or powerful muscles. We have each other. We need each other. And we find our purpose on this earth in relation to each other. Originally, that meant survival of the tribe. But we can’t afford tribes anymore. Our existence is too fragile and too interdependent. So the tribe has to be all of us. But it certainly needs to start with our nation. And governments and political leaders probably hinder social cooperation much more often than they help it.
The United States was built around a basic affirmation of those values of cooperation and working together, of dignity, and of equality. Sure, we’ve often failed to live up to our standards, but at least we kept them front and center through much of our history. Or at least that’s the story we’ve tried to tell ourselves and our children. We saw the hypocrisy of allowing slavery, so we eventually got rid of it -- though it almost tore us apart and came at great cost. We struggled with the unfairness of keeping more than half of our fellow citizens (women and black people) out of the political process, and we did the right thing in each case -- though it’s been a struggle that continues to this day (hanging chads, anyone?) But that story is no longer being told. Instead, we have cynicism and brainless ranting. Most political discourse these days is garbage, and we shouldn't be proud of it as a reflection of what our citizens strive for.
All of our images of the traditions that we want to keep – whether it’s Norman Rockwell’s ordinary citizen speaking up at a town hall meeting, or “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – reflect the aspirations contained in those three guiding principles: Courage, common sense, and respect. Yeah, I know, the images are always of WASP-ish men in those roles, but that's not the point. A rainbow of people should be honoring that tradition and setting the standards we should all be following. So if Norman Rockwell doesn't do it for ya, think "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rogers." Who are the people in your neighborhood? Won't you be my neighbor?
So what should we be doing? Well, we should start making a point of evaluating our own discourse, and that of others, according to these values. And we should demand of our politicians that they do the same, whether they are stating their positions or making decisions on our behalf. Let’s start with you, Senator Obama. You talk about hope and change; let’s hear you start publicly affirming these values. It would be a real change, and would give us all a lot more hope.
Senator, you have my permission to take any part of my blog post here as material for a speech. I won't mind. Hearing some of these ideas get talked about in the political arena would be reward enough for me.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Random Thoughts (Well, OK, random gripes)
Low Sodium Blues
I had a blood pressure "adventure" last week -- despite being on medication for 4 years -- and called my doctor after my B/P was up around 150/95 for a couple days in a row. He gently suggested that I was still eating way too much sodium, and needed to be super vigilant about cutting down. So I bought two low-sodium cookbooks (the American Heart Association's and the "Complete Idiot's Guide") and installed some software on my computer (from FitDay.com) that lets me put in everything I eat and track calories, fat, and everything else as well as sodium. The program is a little aggravating in terms of choosing the foods from their selection list, but at least it's keeping me a lot more honest about what I eat. And I lost six pounds in the first two days, which I'm sure was all water, when I cut back as much as I could on sodium. Since then, some of it has come back, but I'm still down four or five pounds. Guess that's the price I pay for being middle aged and stressed. I'm also practicing yoga (no classes, just books, the "Yoga Dacks" of cards, and when my daughter returns them, I'll use our Rodney Yee DVD's. I'll try to ignore his package.
Anyway, my gripe is that it's REALLY hard to find food at the grocery store that isn't loaded with sodium. You pretty much have to cook your own fresh meat and buy fresh vegetables. Some frozen stuff is OK, as long as it's "one ingredient" stuff, like green beans or lamb chops. But anything that's in any way convenient is loaded with the stuff. And even most breads have way more salt than they need to have for baking purposes. I suppose the food companies would say that people demand the salt so the stuff "tastes good." Well, that's what a salt shaker is for, if they can have it. I can't.
Now of the black journalists who've commented, I liked Clarence Page's take the best. But he's probably thought of as not black enough, either. And Mary Mitchell from the Chicago Sun-Times had that old disapproving DCFS-caseworker-facing-white-people-who-want-to-be-foster-parents-to-a-black-kid look on her face. She commented that Obama didn't have a good connection to the black leadership, or something to that effect. Obviously she meant it as a criticism. Well, Mary, I say again, if I wanted a black candidate who had that kind of connection, I'd vote to bring back Al Sharpton for another sorry circus like he had before. That's the whole point.
And by the way, what's with this "prophetic tradition" crap? That's just a code word for whipping up a lot of racist rhetoric from behind the shield of a pulpit, if you ask me. You can justify pretty much anything you want to by quoting the Old Testament selecively, including hate crimes against gay people, polygamy, and domestic violence. I don't recall anything in there about prophets (or their emulators) having a license to blame white people for everthing wrong with the world. Amen. Thank you. Mmm-Hmm. That knowing smirky clever blame game, like we all know the score and how things really work in this country and how they always will work as long as white people are running things, is a sorry rehash of the Black Power/Black Panther era, only dressed in Sunday clothes and kept behind church doors.
I read one column that quoted a survey that said something like 37% of black people surveyed believe that the United States Government really did create (or at least spread) the HIV virus in order to kill minorities. Now, THAT, my friends, is about the most scary and dangerous piece of ignorance that I've heard since we learned about the anti-semitic rants of Nazi Germany. And even though it kind of expalins why someone like Wright can keep on blowing these rhetorical stink bombs and getting away with it, it still makes me feel like our country is in pretty sorry shape and the future looks bleak for race relations.
But then again, a depressing percentage of white people think that the universe was really created in seven days, so it's not race relations that's the problem, but a general tendency for Americans to swallow stupid ideasand hate people who disagree with them. As the Internet has proven quite well - look at the Comments posted after any news story on AOL, if you need proof.
Damaged Disney Goods
I feel sorry for parents who've paid $500 for scalped tickets for their kids to see a "Hannah Montana" show, but not because they now have to explain to their kids why their idol is acting like a tartlet. Rather, I feel sorry for them because they've failed to avoid letting the media juggernaut brainwash their kids into thinking that's something they need to do in the first place. And I'm sorry for Miley Cyrus, not because she was manipulated into doing this ill-advised photo shoot for Vanity Fair (although I would GUESS that an adult had to give permission for it). Rather I feel sorry for her because she was turned into a "franchise" or an "image" rather than being allowed to be a kid. Her objectification started long before she let Annie Liebovitz drape a bedsheet around her and sit her in front of the camera. The furor I imagine is taking place at Disney is probably a lot like the feeling among investors in a Kentucky Derby winner that's just broken a leg. Their product has been damaged. They shoot horses, but Miley may just not have her contract renewed.
How did I miss "Pinky and the Brain?"
When my kids were in their pre-teen and teen years, I was pretty busy working and going to grad school, so I didn't have a lot of exposure to their entertainment. I know they liked "Animaniacs" because they got me to replace all our Windows 95 sounds with wave files from Animaniacs and Tiny Toons.I knew about "Pinky and the Brain," but it looked like just another Roger Rabbit style homage to old Bipolar Bugs and the Looney Tunes I grew up with.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on a You Tube clip of Pinky and the Brain doing the famous Orson Welles "Frozen Peas" tape almost word for word (took out the cuss words). Watching that, I thought, I wonder if my kids had ANY idea what that was all about when they saw it? It was humor aimed at people MY age who grew up with Orson Welles and his pompous attitudes, and the rumors of his drunken outtakes for those Paul Masson commercials we all hated (of course now, the rumors can be validated on You Tube as well, along with Alex Trebek drunk on his ass). But it almost makes me feel guilty that I'm discovering things that were hip so late that they're now nostalgic. Kind of like what happened with me and some music of the 80's. Except that was stuff that was so BAD it's now campy and nostalgic ("Mr. Roboto" and "She Blinded Me with Science" come to mind). Like I said, I last paid attention to popular culture about the time of Woodstock. Well, I admit that I was taken in by "prog-rock" a bit in college, when people were blasting "Lucky Man" by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer out their windows so they could hear the Moog synthesizer echo off the Administration Building... Wow, man...)
But anyway, good job, Pinky and the Brain.
I had a blood pressure "adventure" last week -- despite being on medication for 4 years -- and called my doctor after my B/P was up around 150/95 for a couple days in a row. He gently suggested that I was still eating way too much sodium, and needed to be super vigilant about cutting down. So I bought two low-sodium cookbooks (the American Heart Association's and the "Complete Idiot's Guide") and installed some software on my computer (from FitDay.com) that lets me put in everything I eat and track calories, fat, and everything else as well as sodium. The program is a little aggravating in terms of choosing the foods from their selection list, but at least it's keeping me a lot more honest about what I eat. And I lost six pounds in the first two days, which I'm sure was all water, when I cut back as much as I could on sodium. Since then, some of it has come back, but I'm still down four or five pounds. Guess that's the price I pay for being middle aged and stressed. I'm also practicing yoga (no classes, just books, the "Yoga Dacks" of cards, and when my daughter returns them, I'll use our Rodney Yee DVD's. I'll try to ignore his package.
Anyway, my gripe is that it's REALLY hard to find food at the grocery store that isn't loaded with sodium. You pretty much have to cook your own fresh meat and buy fresh vegetables. Some frozen stuff is OK, as long as it's "one ingredient" stuff, like green beans or lamb chops. But anything that's in any way convenient is loaded with the stuff. And even most breads have way more salt than they need to have for baking purposes. I suppose the food companies would say that people demand the salt so the stuff "tastes good." Well, that's what a salt shaker is for, if they can have it. I can't.
And The Snowball's Chance in Hell award goes to...
Well, I kept quiet so far about Rev Wright, but it's hard to ignore the whole deal. I'm a child of the civil rights era, and a white liberal; and I've put up with diversity training, the politics of guilt and resentment, and the circus of Chicago identity politics all my life while trying to be a good sport about it. I've been accused of being an unconscious racist (because I'm white), of taking my "privileged" status for granted, and blah blah blah. I've always wished that my sincere hope -- that we could some day be color-blind in this country -- wouldn't brand me with all the above-mentioned accusatory labels, but what the hell. I'm an idealist, so I still hope for it. So Rev, Wright's first round of bombast struck me as just more of the same old crap. I thought, well, if his ilk had their way, we'd be having Al sharpton running again, not Obama. I found Obama refreshing because he didn't echo all that same old grievance politics and pessimistic accusatory crap. And I still think he's managed to stay above it. But all the talk about Wright is kinda depressing.
Now of the black journalists who've commented, I liked Clarence Page's take the best. But he's probably thought of as not black enough, either. And Mary Mitchell from the Chicago Sun-Times had that old disapproving DCFS-caseworker-facing-white-people-who-want-to-be-foster-parents-to-a-black-kid look on her face. She commented that Obama didn't have a good connection to the black leadership, or something to that effect. Obviously she meant it as a criticism. Well, Mary, I say again, if I wanted a black candidate who had that kind of connection, I'd vote to bring back Al Sharpton for another sorry circus like he had before. That's the whole point.
And by the way, what's with this "prophetic tradition" crap? That's just a code word for whipping up a lot of racist rhetoric from behind the shield of a pulpit, if you ask me. You can justify pretty much anything you want to by quoting the Old Testament selecively, including hate crimes against gay people, polygamy, and domestic violence. I don't recall anything in there about prophets (or their emulators) having a license to blame white people for everthing wrong with the world. Amen. Thank you. Mmm-Hmm. That knowing smirky clever blame game, like we all know the score and how things really work in this country and how they always will work as long as white people are running things, is a sorry rehash of the Black Power/Black Panther era, only dressed in Sunday clothes and kept behind church doors.
I read one column that quoted a survey that said something like 37% of black people surveyed believe that the United States Government really did create (or at least spread) the HIV virus in order to kill minorities. Now, THAT, my friends, is about the most scary and dangerous piece of ignorance that I've heard since we learned about the anti-semitic rants of Nazi Germany. And even though it kind of expalins why someone like Wright can keep on blowing these rhetorical stink bombs and getting away with it, it still makes me feel like our country is in pretty sorry shape and the future looks bleak for race relations.
But then again, a depressing percentage of white people think that the universe was really created in seven days, so it's not race relations that's the problem, but a general tendency for Americans to swallow stupid ideasand hate people who disagree with them. As the Internet has proven quite well - look at the Comments posted after any news story on AOL, if you need proof.
Damaged Disney Goods
I feel sorry for parents who've paid $500 for scalped tickets for their kids to see a "Hannah Montana" show, but not because they now have to explain to their kids why their idol is acting like a tartlet. Rather, I feel sorry for them because they've failed to avoid letting the media juggernaut brainwash their kids into thinking that's something they need to do in the first place. And I'm sorry for Miley Cyrus, not because she was manipulated into doing this ill-advised photo shoot for Vanity Fair (although I would GUESS that an adult had to give permission for it). Rather I feel sorry for her because she was turned into a "franchise" or an "image" rather than being allowed to be a kid. Her objectification started long before she let Annie Liebovitz drape a bedsheet around her and sit her in front of the camera. The furor I imagine is taking place at Disney is probably a lot like the feeling among investors in a Kentucky Derby winner that's just broken a leg. Their product has been damaged. They shoot horses, but Miley may just not have her contract renewed.
How did I miss "Pinky and the Brain?"
When my kids were in their pre-teen and teen years, I was pretty busy working and going to grad school, so I didn't have a lot of exposure to their entertainment. I know they liked "Animaniacs" because they got me to replace all our Windows 95 sounds with wave files from Animaniacs and Tiny Toons.I knew about "Pinky and the Brain," but it looked like just another Roger Rabbit style homage to old Bipolar Bugs and the Looney Tunes I grew up with.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on a You Tube clip of Pinky and the Brain doing the famous Orson Welles "Frozen Peas" tape almost word for word (took out the cuss words). Watching that, I thought, I wonder if my kids had ANY idea what that was all about when they saw it? It was humor aimed at people MY age who grew up with Orson Welles and his pompous attitudes, and the rumors of his drunken outtakes for those Paul Masson commercials we all hated (of course now, the rumors can be validated on You Tube as well, along with Alex Trebek drunk on his ass). But it almost makes me feel guilty that I'm discovering things that were hip so late that they're now nostalgic. Kind of like what happened with me and some music of the 80's. Except that was stuff that was so BAD it's now campy and nostalgic ("Mr. Roboto" and "She Blinded Me with Science" come to mind). Like I said, I last paid attention to popular culture about the time of Woodstock. Well, I admit that I was taken in by "prog-rock" a bit in college, when people were blasting "Lucky Man" by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer out their windows so they could hear the Moog synthesizer echo off the Administration Building... Wow, man...)
But anyway, good job, Pinky and the Brain.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Spam Haiku
Got a spam that slipped past the filter, and the sender's poor English almost made it into a haiku:
Expand your penis with a lot inches running on the chief cure.
Go on without hesitation to
(A link with lots of nonsense HTML embedded)
and view the groovy treatment ever.
So my haiku would be:
Expand your penis
With a lot inches running
...The groovy treatment
Expand your penis with a lot inches running on the chief cure.
Go on without hesitation to
(A link with lots of nonsense HTML embedded)
and view the groovy treatment ever.
So my haiku would be:
Expand your penis
With a lot inches running
...The groovy treatment
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Amazon.com Visa is bad news. Chase credit cards are bad news.
I made the mistake of signing up for an Amazon.com Visa when I was amking an order, as a way to save $30. Then they never sent me a bill, and the e-mails they sent me linked to a different account with a zero balance so I never knew what I owed. By the time I figured it out (after a lot of conversations with people from India named "Kevin"), they slapped a $29 late fee on it that they wouldn't take off. So I only saved a buck and got pretty aggravated in the process. so I closed the account after I paid the small balance off. Then the lady (American, this time) mentioned ominously that she'd notify the credit bureaus right away. Why, I asked, are you reporting this to make me look bad? No, she said, we just report it.
So here are my conclusions: Credit cards exist to screw you. They count on human error, being too busy to keep up 100% of the time, or just general human nature to guarantee them that you'll give them the opportunity to screw you royally. Chase is the worst. Shame on them. And shame on Amazon.com for setting me up. And shame on me for getting suckered.
Banks with their overdraft fees are almost as bad. Luckily, I managed to get a deal with Citibank 10 years ago that protects me. I have instant deposit up to $5000 so no waiting for my deposits to clear. And they'll turn any overdraft into a line of credit so instead of "domino overdrafts" at gatling-gun speed (you know, take your deposit, hold it for five days, pay the biggest check you wrote, bounce the 10 little ones, and mail you the $300 bad news three days later, and oh by the way here's another 40 bucks from TeleCheck for that one you wrote at the store), I get a bearable (though still usurious at 22.5%) little loan on the overdraft and can pay it back when I have time to sit down and take a look.
Yeah, I'm not a good cash flow manager anymore. I admit it. But you know what? No one is anymore. I'll bet the number of people who still balance their checkbooks every month is less than the number of people with dial-up Internet. Who can balance an account with five pre-authorized debits, a bunch of grocery store swipes, three online bill payment services, and four more pay at the merchant's site accounts (with maybe one paper check a month)?
Don't think the financial institutions haven't studied this. I'm just waiting for the day Citibank realizes I'm dodging their biggest profit center with this instant deposit credit and cut me off...
So here are my conclusions: Credit cards exist to screw you. They count on human error, being too busy to keep up 100% of the time, or just general human nature to guarantee them that you'll give them the opportunity to screw you royally. Chase is the worst. Shame on them. And shame on Amazon.com for setting me up. And shame on me for getting suckered.
Banks with their overdraft fees are almost as bad. Luckily, I managed to get a deal with Citibank 10 years ago that protects me. I have instant deposit up to $5000 so no waiting for my deposits to clear. And they'll turn any overdraft into a line of credit so instead of "domino overdrafts" at gatling-gun speed (you know, take your deposit, hold it for five days, pay the biggest check you wrote, bounce the 10 little ones, and mail you the $300 bad news three days later, and oh by the way here's another 40 bucks from TeleCheck for that one you wrote at the store), I get a bearable (though still usurious at 22.5%) little loan on the overdraft and can pay it back when I have time to sit down and take a look.
Yeah, I'm not a good cash flow manager anymore. I admit it. But you know what? No one is anymore. I'll bet the number of people who still balance their checkbooks every month is less than the number of people with dial-up Internet. Who can balance an account with five pre-authorized debits, a bunch of grocery store swipes, three online bill payment services, and four more pay at the merchant's site accounts (with maybe one paper check a month)?
Don't think the financial institutions haven't studied this. I'm just waiting for the day Citibank realizes I'm dodging their biggest profit center with this instant deposit credit and cut me off...
Ann Coulter should lose her Intenet privileges
Ann Coulter is pure hate speech.She should not be included in columnists featured on Yahoo! This is not about her political views but her downright nastiness. Yahoo! should not encourage the incivility prevalent in our society by featuring her. She's a walking Tourette's Syndrome. She not only is incapable of censoring her nasty thoughts, she revels in them; throwing them in our faces and smearing them on our living room walls, like a political encopretic...
Just an observation.
Just an observation.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Attack of the Vanilla Everything
What is it with vanilla lately? Or I should say, "vanilla" everything. I saw an article on a website (promoting vanilla products) that nowadays "vanilla is anything but plain," and is making a big impact because it's more "complex" now. Bull. If that smell that's nauseating me every day, everywhere I go, is really real vanilla that's gotten more "complex," then someone needs to start spraying Madagascar with paraquat, or something. Unless some clever scientist figures out how to reverse breed vanilla back to what it usd to be. 'Cause this smell is awful. It's in candles, it's in fabric softeners, it's in the latex gloves that my dentist wears when she drills my teeth, and it's emanating from people on the train that sit down next to me. It literally makes me gag
The worst, besides some of the perfumes (let's hear it for the ladies at Macy's with Russian accents), are the fabric softeners. Especially the Downy "Simple Pleasures" vanilla and lavender. I like lavender. But after my wife bought this stuff, I have to rewash my clothes if she uses it. I swear.
I've always been sensitive to smells, and now that my hearing is fading into a constant ringing (from age, or maybe from too much loud music in the 60's and 70's, I don't know), smell is about the only sense I've got that works well. I've always been nearsighted and now I'm on bifocals. So a smell that cloys is just torture for me. I suppose I could claim I've got "Multiple chemical sensitivities" like those people who wear silver underwear because they live near power lines, or insist that the formaldehyde "outgassing" from their houses is making them sick. But I won't dignify this by calling it a medical condition or claiming that I'm protected under the ADA. I just can't stand that smell.
I'm a person who used Dial soap since I was a kid, and when they changed the smell in the 80's (making it more "cheap-after-shavey"), I stockpiled all the old Dial I could find, until there was no more to be found. I used Zest for 15 years until I found they had more or less restored Dial to its old self.
Anyway, vanilla. It was bad enough when that sickly sweet artifical vanilla scent only showed up in a few things, like Carmex and cheap store brand sweets. My kids learned early to mock me mercilessly by imitating me saying, "Ugh! Someone's wearing Carmex!" But I could usually avoid that artifical sickly smell. I even loved vanilla ice cream, as long as it's real vanilla. Black cows had always been one of my favorite treats. That is, until the root beer makers started throwing in - you guessed it. I'd always hated butterscotch candy as a kid, but then as an adult I discovered that butterscotch is really supposed to be just butter and brown sugar. I developed quite a taste for that as a topping for my oatmeal. So now I figure that the old candy I hated as a kid was loaded with that "vanilla" flavor.
So I guess it's really vanillin, the artificial vanilla, that I can't stand. But whatever it is, it seems to be everywhere these days. So I'd just like to ask people to cool it. It really does make me sick, and people are using more and more of stronger and stronger fragrances with it.
That reminds me... something I need to mention to Greg Hall from Goose Island Brewing, next time I see him. Greg! What's with the vanilla in the root beer? AND the orange soda? Let me tell you about how I felt about Dreamsicles as a kid...
The worst, besides some of the perfumes (let's hear it for the ladies at Macy's with Russian accents), are the fabric softeners. Especially the Downy "Simple Pleasures" vanilla and lavender. I like lavender. But after my wife bought this stuff, I have to rewash my clothes if she uses it. I swear.
I've always been sensitive to smells, and now that my hearing is fading into a constant ringing (from age, or maybe from too much loud music in the 60's and 70's, I don't know), smell is about the only sense I've got that works well. I've always been nearsighted and now I'm on bifocals. So a smell that cloys is just torture for me. I suppose I could claim I've got "Multiple chemical sensitivities" like those people who wear silver underwear because they live near power lines, or insist that the formaldehyde "outgassing" from their houses is making them sick. But I won't dignify this by calling it a medical condition or claiming that I'm protected under the ADA. I just can't stand that smell.
I'm a person who used Dial soap since I was a kid, and when they changed the smell in the 80's (making it more "cheap-after-shavey"), I stockpiled all the old Dial I could find, until there was no more to be found. I used Zest for 15 years until I found they had more or less restored Dial to its old self.
Anyway, vanilla. It was bad enough when that sickly sweet artifical vanilla scent only showed up in a few things, like Carmex and cheap store brand sweets. My kids learned early to mock me mercilessly by imitating me saying, "Ugh! Someone's wearing Carmex!" But I could usually avoid that artifical sickly smell. I even loved vanilla ice cream, as long as it's real vanilla. Black cows had always been one of my favorite treats. That is, until the root beer makers started throwing in - you guessed it. I'd always hated butterscotch candy as a kid, but then as an adult I discovered that butterscotch is really supposed to be just butter and brown sugar. I developed quite a taste for that as a topping for my oatmeal. So now I figure that the old candy I hated as a kid was loaded with that "vanilla" flavor.
So I guess it's really vanillin, the artificial vanilla, that I can't stand. But whatever it is, it seems to be everywhere these days. So I'd just like to ask people to cool it. It really does make me sick, and people are using more and more of stronger and stronger fragrances with it.
That reminds me... something I need to mention to Greg Hall from Goose Island Brewing, next time I see him. Greg! What's with the vanilla in the root beer? AND the orange soda? Let me tell you about how I felt about Dreamsicles as a kid...
Friday, February 22, 2008
School buses and Global Warming
I read an item in another blog --
http://thoughtsonglobalwarming.blogspot.com/2007/09/largest-american-school-bus-fleet-to.html
that one of our local school bus fleets is converting to biodiesel, which is supposed to be a great thing. But I have a more fundamental question: Why have we allowed school districts to deploy their school facilities in ways that require so much busing?
The disctrict I live in, Dist.103 in Lyons, Stickney, and Brookfield, used to have a school in each neighborhood, so no student lived more than 5 or 6 blocks from a school. My kids walked to school until they entered high school.
Then, a few years ago, the district did a whole bunch of remodeling (with hefty tax increases that they lied about the costs of, and used their students to arm-twist the community in support of, using them as unwilling unpaid political lobbyists). They turned our nearest school into a middle school, and moved the lower grades to other schools. The result is that nowadays, almost every student has to be bused to school and our quiet community is clogged with hordes of school buses each morning and afternoon.
They told us at the time that this was to better serve the students by giving them more appropriate facilities and programs, blah blah blah. I think it was to seve the bureaucracy of the district better and became a self-justifying financial commitment that will be with us indefinitely.
All the kids in the district still have a school within walking distance; most of them just can't go there because they're in the wrong grade. And the middle school has become a miniature version of the suburban warehouses/prison camps that pass for high schools these days.
And the diesel fumes waft into the chilly air as the buses run all night to be ready for school the next morning.
And the kids are struggling with obesity, while the school district officials whine that unless we agree to give them ever-increasing wads of money, they're going to be "forced" to cut physical edication programs.Or else make the kids sell gift wrap door to door. While the superintendent makes a whole lot more money than I do and appears to work about half as hard.
Next time I'll lay into those "street blimps" downtown as a pet peeve in the global warming dustup. Having a truck drive around an already crowded downtown area, burning fuel and clogging the streets, in order to advertise a Hummer dealer in the suburbs, strikes me as outstandingly decadent. Particularly when the mayor is talking about a "toll" to enter the downtown area with your car in order to get to work, and the transit system crumbles amid endless dickering and tax increases.
http://thoughtsonglobalwarming.blogspot.com/2007/09/largest-american-school-bus-fleet-to.html
that one of our local school bus fleets is converting to biodiesel, which is supposed to be a great thing. But I have a more fundamental question: Why have we allowed school districts to deploy their school facilities in ways that require so much busing?
The disctrict I live in, Dist.103 in Lyons, Stickney, and Brookfield, used to have a school in each neighborhood, so no student lived more than 5 or 6 blocks from a school. My kids walked to school until they entered high school.
Then, a few years ago, the district did a whole bunch of remodeling (with hefty tax increases that they lied about the costs of, and used their students to arm-twist the community in support of, using them as unwilling unpaid political lobbyists). They turned our nearest school into a middle school, and moved the lower grades to other schools. The result is that nowadays, almost every student has to be bused to school and our quiet community is clogged with hordes of school buses each morning and afternoon.
They told us at the time that this was to better serve the students by giving them more appropriate facilities and programs, blah blah blah. I think it was to seve the bureaucracy of the district better and became a self-justifying financial commitment that will be with us indefinitely.
All the kids in the district still have a school within walking distance; most of them just can't go there because they're in the wrong grade. And the middle school has become a miniature version of the suburban warehouses/prison camps that pass for high schools these days.
And the diesel fumes waft into the chilly air as the buses run all night to be ready for school the next morning.
And the kids are struggling with obesity, while the school district officials whine that unless we agree to give them ever-increasing wads of money, they're going to be "forced" to cut physical edication programs.Or else make the kids sell gift wrap door to door. While the superintendent makes a whole lot more money than I do and appears to work about half as hard.
Next time I'll lay into those "street blimps" downtown as a pet peeve in the global warming dustup. Having a truck drive around an already crowded downtown area, burning fuel and clogging the streets, in order to advertise a Hummer dealer in the suburbs, strikes me as outstandingly decadent. Particularly when the mayor is talking about a "toll" to enter the downtown area with your car in order to get to work, and the transit system crumbles amid endless dickering and tax increases.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Musical tangents 2007-2008
Haven't put anything here in months because no one reads it anyway. But what the heck. I've spent the last 8 months or so jumping from one thing to another musically. Haven't had a get-together with those guys who jammed last year, mostly because the one guy's wife was hurt and took a long time to recuperate. (Some idiot hit her with a van as she was walking to her car in the supermarket parking lot). So the Stump Grinders (or the Apple Knockers, or whatever we could call ourselves) have been dormant.
So I've taken up one style of music after another, in my typical attention-deficit style. Took Bluegrass Banjo 1 and 2 at the Old Town School, with a teacher I really liked (Ryan Fisher) and one I always felt mildly annoyed by. But that was probably my "issue." I learned a lot from both of them. I've kept up practicing enough not to lose what I learned, but haven't progressed. Meanwhile I've been fiddling more, and joined some old time jam sessions at the School and at people's homes. Plus I pick up the guitar and uke every so often to keep from getting rusty.
Actually, learning a bit of Scruggs style banjo has been good for my guitar playing, because I finally feel at home with finger picks. I always felt clumsy with them before, so I always tried to finger pick naked (my fingers, that is) with muddled results. Now I've been relearning some tunes like "Freight Train" and "Railroad Bill" in crisper style. Maybe I should try more Travis style. Also fooled around with "Tears in Heaven" using the finger picks. Some guy from England or Australia (Mike Herbert) has some videos you can watch for free and that's one of the songs he covers.
I also stumbled on a really interesting NPR web page with clips from segments they did on the 100 most important musical pieces of the 20th century.
http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/vote/100list.html
Some of them weren't about "pieces," strictly speaking - like the story on all the Carl Stalling scores from Warner Brothers cartoons - but all were interesting. And certainly eclectic. I also liked the story on "Wildwood Flower," which pointed out how the Carter Family mangled the words to the original poem from 1860. And the piece on "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" should have been required listening for Bluegrass Banjo 1, as it described the evolution of Earl Scruggs' three finger style really well, with some commentary by John Hartford.
Speaking of eclectic... This morning I woke up and played "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"on the ukulele. It's not a bad instrument to use for that song. But key of G is a little high for my 55 year old voice. Or a little low, depending on which octave I try to sing in.
And speaking of Warner Brothers, I also actually edited a Wikipedia article for the second time in my life. I put in a couple sentences about how "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" sounds an awful lot like "Chinese Breakdown," the old fiddle tune:
http://www.lyon.edu/wolfcollection/songs/joneschinese1257.html
So I've taken up one style of music after another, in my typical attention-deficit style. Took Bluegrass Banjo 1 and 2 at the Old Town School, with a teacher I really liked (Ryan Fisher) and one I always felt mildly annoyed by. But that was probably my "issue." I learned a lot from both of them. I've kept up practicing enough not to lose what I learned, but haven't progressed. Meanwhile I've been fiddling more, and joined some old time jam sessions at the School and at people's homes. Plus I pick up the guitar and uke every so often to keep from getting rusty.
Actually, learning a bit of Scruggs style banjo has been good for my guitar playing, because I finally feel at home with finger picks. I always felt clumsy with them before, so I always tried to finger pick naked (my fingers, that is) with muddled results. Now I've been relearning some tunes like "Freight Train" and "Railroad Bill" in crisper style. Maybe I should try more Travis style. Also fooled around with "Tears in Heaven" using the finger picks. Some guy from England or Australia (Mike Herbert) has some videos you can watch for free and that's one of the songs he covers.
I also stumbled on a really interesting NPR web page with clips from segments they did on the 100 most important musical pieces of the 20th century.
http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/vote/100list.html
Some of them weren't about "pieces," strictly speaking - like the story on all the Carl Stalling scores from Warner Brothers cartoons - but all were interesting. And certainly eclectic. I also liked the story on "Wildwood Flower," which pointed out how the Carter Family mangled the words to the original poem from 1860. And the piece on "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" should have been required listening for Bluegrass Banjo 1, as it described the evolution of Earl Scruggs' three finger style really well, with some commentary by John Hartford.
Speaking of eclectic... This morning I woke up and played "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"on the ukulele. It's not a bad instrument to use for that song. But key of G is a little high for my 55 year old voice. Or a little low, depending on which octave I try to sing in.
And speaking of Warner Brothers, I also actually edited a Wikipedia article for the second time in my life. I put in a couple sentences about how "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" sounds an awful lot like "Chinese Breakdown," the old fiddle tune:
http://www.lyon.edu/wolfcollection/songs/joneschinese1257.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)