Cud-chewing

Focus Tales

2011-03-06T08:53:00.003-05:00

Well, it's coming up on the anniversary of a full year of this blog (in April) during which I have not posted an entry.

Too much has happened in the intervening time to write about. Most bloggers would be thrilled by this wealth of events, given that these are the stuff of which life (and hence, blog entries) are made. I refer, of course, to the three Rs: Remarriage, Retirement and Relocation.

During this embarrassingly long interval of hyperactivity with no literary output, the phenomenon of social networking has taken a stranglehold on the web. Facebook in particular has become as daily an addiction for the generations behind mine as Days of Our Lives is for my own age group (66+). Twitter likewise, is filled with Tweets, or is it Twits? And these are only two components of a whole movement, abetted by the ubiquitous cell phone/camera/movie theatre/game parlor that has become a tool for the upheaval of entire societies and cultures.

To post to a blog requires reflection, introspection and above all, time. Where did all that go?

In the old days (a couple of years or so ago) it would take, at a minimum, ten or fifteen minutes to sit down and write anything on a blog. Even assuming the computer was already running, there was the ritual of having to log onto the blog site, run the editor, type up the entry, proofread it, and then post it (and in many cases, correct it post haste). Blog hosting companies soon adopted the idea of simplifying posting by allowing direct posting from an email message, and now, of course, you can post voice messages directly from your phone.

Other writers have mentioned Attention Deficit Disorder as a symptom of our times: some call it The Demand for Instant Gratification, and the doddering amongst us find Impatience to be a sufficient description of the trend. My generation experienced it mainly on three occasions: Christmas morning, sermons, and the last week of school.

If it is true that humanity is speeding up and becoming more interconnected at the same time, there is a down side to this trend, which has already shown up in, for example, Facebook. Some call it over-sharing. There's TMI (too much information). The stretching of privacy boundaries until they snap. The arbitrary changing of corporate policy or rules while the game is on. The inattention to craftsmanship and detail. The elevation of the trivial to the consequential.

Along with the ratcheting up of the pace and triviality of mass communication (and to think that most of this junk is now stored and indexed and retrievable), comes an overwhelming need to limit intake and filter content. It gives me pause to think about the hours of my life that I have irretrievably wasted on reading comments that follow even a New York Times piece, or a home improvement site. It becomes an addiction, like gold mining: panning the muck for that valuable gem of insight or information that can instruct me, enrich my experience, or save me effort, when the odds against success are those of a Reno blackjack table. Even the search engines are swamped.

When I ponder my tendency to waste these hours (which are now more available, given that I finally smartened up and retired), I conclude that I'm as needy for community wisdom as a teenager is for social interaction. The difference is, a younger person has little difficulty in mastering the technology, while I can't seem to hit the mute button on the remote without changing the channel or turning the damn thing off.

I cannot multitask, talk on the phone while watching TV, boil water unless I remain in the kitchen, or converse with an Android. So what are my options? This post started an hour ago. I have only one option: to go from Point A to Point B in a single, straight line, pausing only to deal with spelling, grammar and composition. I suppose that during this interval, a million or more Tweets have flown by , and another 3/4 of a million people have logged onto Facebook.

As I gaze at the Ohio River in flood, a slowly turning raft of sticks, twigs, branches, bottles, tires, styrofoam and plastic revolves just offshore. Occasionally an object will break free from the vortex and rejoin the current, only to become entrapped in the next whirling mass.

The burden of churning flotsam reminds me of social networking.

All the world's a stage.

2010-04-03T09:07:00.005-04:00

How hard can it be to sell a house?
Very hard.
Lot of work.

The irony, amongst all the patching, painting and purging, is that you're trying to make the house look like nobody ever lived it in. Clean as a whistle. Empty as a tomb yet considerably more inviting. A home, not a house.

I think buyers have been educated by this consumerist society to believe that only the new has desirability. A whole new genre of TV shows based on the principle that we're all unbelievably messy and therefore need professionals to come in and help us get rid of everything that made us comfortable has taken hold on the home improvement channels.

The word is "staging", which is new to anyone trying to sell a house, but has been around professionally for a number of years.

It's all about putting your house on stage. About making it look as though it was perfect. Just like the theatre, it's all a big act. Buyers are invited, as they walk through the door, to suspend their disbelief and be swept up in the superficialities of surfaces.

There's a certain irony in the phrase "real estate". A staged home is neither real, nor, for most of us, is it an "estate". In the case of a resale, it's a place to live, constructed in the past for a different era, for different expectations, and meant to support different lifestyles. Renovation is not far in the future for any resale purchaser.

So the staging becomes a mandatory function to bridge the gap between the reality of this old house and what the prospective buyers think they need, at a minimum, to live conveniently and comfortably and happily ever after, despite the reality that they will move at least once or twice more as they age and their needs change.

Hence, the totally inadequate bathrooms, typically a mere 30 square feet, of a Cape Cod must somehow be made to appear double that size, and the garage, which in most neighborhoods serves the function of a storage unit so full that the car(s) must be left on the driveway, becomes a burden that only a dumpster can solve. And how, we ask, did the people for whom those tiny houses were originally built ever manage with a kitchen that had no dining room or separate pantry, or a bedroom with no walk-in closet or ensuite bathroom?

No building that is more than a few years old can possibly remain wearless and tearless. Nature takes care of that detail by a process called "settling". Techtonic forces are ever at work beneath the foundation, and the effects of weather and wear are discoverable everywhere, the older, the more. It costs more to sell an older house. And what nature doesn't destroy, people and pets do.

Just as the seller hires a stager to dress up the place long enough for the buyer to fall for its cosmetic curb appeal, so the buyer pays for the assurance that there will be no nasty structural surprises. Or perhaps the contract places the burdens of closing on one or the other party. All is done in an effort of the buyer to pay as little as possible, and the seller to get as much as possible for the same piece of property. Yet if you look at any other form of resale transaction, most other personal property (unless you're famous) will net you only garage sale prices.

Oddly enough, there is a way to figure out exactly what a house should be worth. I've never heard of it being done, but since all building costs are known, such as the value of materials and labor, factored by inflation and operational costs (taxes, utilities, depreciation etc.) some such formula should be the basis of a rational calculation. The price should become much more predictable and reasonable and maybe affordable for both parties. Perhaps.

Instead of that, we have to deal with "comparable houses in your district", and how much more reasonably they sold than the price you are demanding. Forget that your house was built of oak by a master Amish carpenter and no nails were used in the construction thereof, the fact remains that it will sell based on the price of whatever else is in your neighborhood, and how pitifully yours compares with theirs.

Location, location, location.

It was only a matter of time

2009-11-26T07:24:00.002-05:00

OK. Some mental midget spammed an old entry on this blog (not that I get all that much traffic, but that's fine... quality rather than quantity matters). It was especially galling because it was appended after one of Jo's few entries, and it was anonymous (coward) and it had a whole mess of links to buy cheap software, which you know has to source itself in piracy.

My apologies to my few faithful followers, but I'm now moderating comments, and you'll have to fill in a Captcha as well. I do appreciate the sincerity of your comments, but this is the internet, and part of that is the dark sewer of spam that flows beneath the bright surface of friendly interchange. I'll be as timely as possible in posting whatever is written by an actual human being.

Celebrate!

2009-11-22T13:08:00.003-05:00

I've been impressed by the thoughtful responses to my previous post, about the difficulty of responding to an unintentionally awkward question in the aftemath of a loss. In some sense, the grieving person is put in the position of trying to ease the pain of the questioner, while having to deny his or her own feelings, however briefly.

Such denial contributes at least one more paving stone to the road to depression. Like all roadbuilding, it is a cumulative process, only not as obvious. So if that road is to be cut off, we need to find ways to stop building it, or reduce the pace of the project.

One way is to celebrate. If you hit the online dictionary, you'll find several different meanings, each of which suggests some approaches.

1. To observe with ceremonies of respect, festivity, or rejoicing.

In the case of the departure of a loved one, whether through death, divorce or duplicity, there are still things to celebrate:

there was a time when we were the best of friends
there were times when we understood each other perfectly
we forgave and forgot the other times, at least for a while if not forever
life was challenging, comfortable, exhilarating, difficult, worthwhile
I grew up a little (or a lot): especially in regard to....

2. To perform (a religious ceremony):

In certain cultures, a household shrine, or a table of mementoes, commemorates the ongoing presence of the spirit of the departed.
In the case of some acrimonious departures, a dart board can be a target of ceremony that at the least reduces stress
Writing a list of all of the things that one is thankful for, and all the others that were painful, and then burning it (preferably outdoors or in a fireplace) along with statements like, "Thank you for our love: I release you, and you me" or, conversely, "Begone miserable witch/warlock, and haunt no more this sphere of misery" can be as meaningful, if not more, as any priest or prophet can conjure.

3. To extol or praise:

We generally get our first chance to do this at a memorial service or a funeral, but the stress levels are very high, despite the presence of empathetic supporters. So it needs to be done again, and again.
The obituaries offered by the funeral homes are bland lists of living relatives, with standard phrases that conjure nothing of the intensity of feeling and emotion. And if you have too many survivors, the high cost of listing them brings out the natural Scrooge in many of us. And yet, "survived by her loving husband, Alfred, et al." would seem unkind at best. So put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, mouth to mic, and write speak or record what you really feel. Then see that at least one other person reads, hears or sees it.
With the passage of time, the mind blots up the inky spots of bad memories, and so, writing an annual or unscheduled remembrance is likely to take on a more silvery gloss as the days become weeks and the weeks months. Rereading previous peans will encourage you to see that indeed, you have actually grown emotionally and spiritually, because all paths eventually lead to forgiveness and understanding.

Note that I do not refer to those horrible, smarmy couplets that appear in newspapers, picked from prescripted Hallmarkian anthologies. "You are gone but not forgotten, though the leaves of fall be rotten".

No indeed. If smarm is your thing, well, good on you. I'm just saying that you can do better. As the Moody Blues put it, "Say what you mean, and mean what you say." "Best damn husband I ever had" is good, and true, especially if you've only had one so far.

4. To make widely known; display. Well, why not? If the mayor of your city, town or village can declare a day to honor a celebrity or an occasion, you certainly can do the same amongst your friends and relations.

An email message that has as its subject line : "I hereby declare: Today is Jo Day" is bound to attract attention. But do not pass it along by the carbon copy method. Send out one to each of the persons who would care, each one highlighting a different memory. It is impossible to remember everything about another that we would wish to remember. But in the replies you are bound to get, there will be others, some of which you may well never have know.

And should the day commemorate someone who is best forgotten, the above exercise should provide an opportunity to indulge in a little rueful irony, which may well help with the healing of feeling.

How You Doing?

2009-10-24T22:56:00.004-04:00

It's interesting, and very kind, that people constantly inquire after your welfare once you have lost a partner. The professionals whom you have to contact about all the unpaid bills and the other legal miseries that inevitably come bobbing along in the wake of death pretty much universally use the phrase, "I'm sorry for your loss." This comes either early or late in process of taking care of business. My response is usually, "Thank you, so am I." It's sincere, but somewhat distancing. A statement of fact, it only requires a quick response.

People who know you more informally, however, take it farther. They ask, "How you doing?". This is a response that triggers thought, because it more or less implies that they're aware that you're going through a difficult adjustment period, and it's definitely more supportive in its intent. It's more nuanced than "How are you?", and less insouciant than, say, "How's everything going?" Its implied focus is on you and your particular feelings and situation.

But "How (are) you doing?" is difficult to answer, because sometimes you just want to stop for a minute and say, "Well, I'm glad you asked. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what's going on with our bank accounts." Or maybe it's more like, "My God, I didn't know chicken got so dry and tough if you left it in the oven too long." But does anyone really want to have you do data mining like that? In the computer world, we call that a core dump. Probably it's best to keep it brief, honest, and appreciative in tone.

"How (are) you doing?" can be pretty open-ended like that. It's nice. It presents one of those rare opportunities that if you feel like elaborating, you may, but you don't have to. Nobody has a particular agenda, other than to show an interest, and offer an opportunity.

So if you happen to see me, and happen to say "How ya doin'", don't be surprised if sometimes I say, "Just fine, thanks", but other times, "Well, the cat threw up on my kitchen chair, and a raccoon chewed a hole in the swing seat, and I don't think I like the way I cook, but generally, not so bad, thanks." After all, you asked for it. And thank you for asking.

The Dumb Cluck in the Kitchen

2009-10-04T20:56:00.006-04:00

I understand that in some parts of this country, especially in the south, there is a preference for meats of various kinds, blackened. This normally involves various spices, such as paprika, salt, cayenne, cumin, thyme, white pepper, and onion powder. Searing the chicken breast, for example, after oiling it and rubbing it with these condiments produces the desired blackening, and subsequent baking turns it into something special.

It is with great pleasure that I announce via this blog entry that I have found a much simpler way, involving no additional expense for condiments of any kind. Based on my extensive kitchen experience, this is how I produced it. One caveat: this recipe requires that you own a dog or cats, or maybe a ferret. Or a skunk.

1. Purchase a chicken. Without it, this recipe fails.

2. Unpack it and lose the giblets. I hate giblets.

3. Put it on a roasting rack (the vertical kind makes it self-basting).

4. Ask someone whose vision is good enough to read the oven temperature indicator to turn it on to 450 for you. (Thank you, A.)

4. Place it in the oven on the bottom rack. This assumes you have removed the top rack before the oven started to heat up.

5. Set the timer for about an hour and a half, if you like well-done chicken.

6. When the timer goes off, silence it and remove the beautiful, brown chicken, off whose bones the meat will be falling.

7. Turn off the oven.

8. Because your pets will materialize on cue when they hear you open the oven door, you cannot leave the bird on the kitchen counter. Instead, when you have carved off what you want to eat, return the bird, on the platter, to the oven, and securely close the door.

9. Set the table, throw together some accompaniments, and have dinner.

10. After dinner, you may remember that the oven was fairly dirty. Turn it on to self clean.

11. Busy yourself with other activities for about 20 minutes. By that time, the smell of well-done chicken should be permeating even the fabric of your curtains.

12. If you can see into the kitchen, run and cancel the self-clean cycle. If you can't, feel your way until you burn your fingers on something hot. It will be the stove. Cancel the self-clean cycle.

13. Tug at the oven door until you realize that the unreadable little red digital bar on the control panel is saying "LOCKED".

14. Busy yourself with other activities for about 40 minutes. By that time, the oven should have cooled enough to unlock the door.

15. Carefully, and with several pot holders or pairs of oven mitts, remove the platter and bird, and place on a non-combustible surface. Be careful not to set it down hard, as all the meat will fall off, except for the burnt parts which will stick to the bones like Velcro(tm).

16. If you prefer, transfer the chicken to a new plate and scrub the platter with any strong abrasive. The burnt-in lines on the bottom where the platter sat on the rack provides a pattern unique in the industry. Your dinner guests will be fascinated by the permanent black spots and the Rorschach smear where the chicken rested on the platter.

Voila. Blackened, Ready-To-Discard Chicken. This recipe will undoubtedly work with a wide variety of dishes, although blackening times may vary. Be sure to include cooling time, as the entree cannot be removed before the oven latch releases. And don't forget to clean your oven afterwards.

J has left the building

2009-09-14T09:25:00.003-04:00

After a nineteen-month* struggle with the nastiness of breast cancer, the effects of chemotherapy and the short-lived relief of blood transfusions, Joana Hudgins, always previously referred to as "J" in these entries, has moved along. Nothing more to see here.

Jo was born in Ohio, and apparently always wanted to leave to see other places. She travelled to 26 of them, mainly reflecting her attraction to Florida and its beaches, birds and palm trees.

Her marriage to The Old Guy resulted in a few short years in Canada, where she learned how we say "out" and "about", eh? As close as we came to paradise was a quarter-acre lakeside bungalow north of Kingston, Ontario. When The Old Guy found new employment, it brought her back to Ohio, although this time to Jackson, in Appalachia. Two years later, that job was eliminated, and another move across the bottom of the state found us in Hamilton, Ohio, a city in the Greater Cincinnati area.

If one were to stick pins in a map where her friends are located, it would be too heavy to lift. Her fascination with the internet probably began with the need to express herself in writing, an endeavor that took her on flights of imagination, grounded in the hardship of not the happiest of childhoods. The net offered her an outlet for her loneliness as well as her sense of humor and her natural empathy for all types of creatures.

The Old Guy met her at the right time: email lists were in vogue, and Jo's musings became public on a listserv called "alt-support-loneliness". It was there that she caught the eye of this former high school English teacher, partly because she held nothing back, and that included creating the occasional portmanteau because her brain worked far faster than even her flying fingers.

Over our 14 years of married life, Jo continued on the nets, became expert on The Sims, got into website creation, and maintained a continuing dialog with anyone who would listen. There were many.

The drum circle called OGADE was a compelling interest for her, not only for its rhythmic appeal, but for the friendships she made there.

Her life in the politics of social justice was just the latest in her many creative ways of expressing her love for people and her frustration at the selfishness and avarice of the oligarchy that saps the political will of this republic. In her role as webmistress for both her own website and the local Democratic party, she worked beyond her limitations to bring in a better life for all.

Her five surviving children experienced unconditional love, and so did the world of animals. Jo got involved in rehabilitation of five raccoon babies, three skunks, a few bunnies and many cats and the birds they wounded. Various landlords had trouble with that side of her loving nature. The internet became her daily source for information on how to heal the hurts of all creatures, great and small. Although she became a fan of "Deadliest Catch", she could not help commenting on "those poor king crabs" while watching an episode. Fortunately, she could not bring them all home.

Neither she nor the oncology team could heal the very aggressive breast cancer that she discovered too late for remediation. It was difficult for her to leave, for a time. But her unconditional love and playful humor glowed brightly even as her candle began to flicker out. Life without Jo will go on, better for her having shown us the way.

*Footnote: Jo was diagnosed in February 2008. I can't do math. Also, her daughter tells me that the phrase "a few bunnies" should be amended to read, "more than a few bunnies". I do remember having to get up early each morning when the dew was still on the ground to pick the finest, largest dandelion leaves (and there were thousands to choose from, such was my groundskeeping expertise) for feeding time.

Parking: now, there's the ticket!

2009-08-02T09:57:00.003-04:00

What is it about parking on your driveway (as opposed to driving on a parkway?)

This isn't a rant, or at least it's not intended to be. There's always the possibility that it will turn into one.

The fact is, however, that the world divides into two types of people: those who, when they come over to your house and notice that your car is parked in the driveway, blithely park behind you, and the (very few) others who don't.

Think about it. In our situation, we have a long, very narrow, single strip of tired old asphalt that accommodates three cars, but we only have two. So when someone comes over, sees a parking space behind the second car, they have a decision to make. For most, that is easy, apparently. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Here's the thing. There are no parking prohibitions on our street. It's a long, dead-end avenue, filled with houses populated mainly by older people and younger families, many of whom have only one vehicle. There's room in front of our house, and our neighbors', to park at least six vehicles. That's more cars than we have friends.

Here's the next thing. My wife's disabilities qualify our cars for handicapped parking. Unlike most, she doesn't put the tag on her mirror unless she's actually in a designated parking space. I have a duplicate tag which I use only when she is with me, or I'm picking her up from some appointment or store. Nevertheless, everyone who visits us knows about her condition. So why, then, would they not assume that I need extra room on the driveway to load the trunk or the back seat with the wheelchair, walker, oxygen tank and whatever else is needed? Sometimes I need to get out and back the car in, to put the passenger door on the easiest side for loading.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a rule around here that if your car is more than ten feet away from the house, it is fair game for vandals. There are street lights, but they are largely concealed by ancient tree foliage. One night both rear doors of my car were keyed in a random spiral pattern. Another time, a brand new front tire was slashed, but that was likely because we were proudly displaying an Obama lawn sign prior to the elections. Raccoons don't carry shivs, so it had to be a message from a political opponent.

In an effort to keep the car from being damaged, I leave it close behind the other one, so that when the vandals appear, the porch light automatically turns on. At least this allows them to complete their masterpieces with less chance of hurting themselves. Bottom line: there is generally a full car length of free space behind my car.

On some occasions, I've maneuvered like a truck rodeo contestant, inching back and forth with much turning of wheels and adjusting of mirrors, to make it out of the three-car trap. This usually ruts the lawn somewhat, but as long as it doesn't happen in the spring, the grooves even out over time.

Let's be clear here: there is no possibility of a double width driveway. The gas and water lines would end up being directly under any such extension, so that in the event of a problem, a Bobcat would be required.

I think there are two influences at work in this whole situation. America's car-centered culture demands convenience. Why have a car if you have to walk more than twenty feet to its doors? Hence, the development of valet parking services, the drive-thru church, the drive-by funeral home, and, of course, the fast food joints.

Apart from the obvious air and noise pollution that occurs while drivers wait impatiently at a window, there is much to be said for not having to get out of a car to go into a pharmacy, especially when you look at the lineup at the dispensary, and the distance you have to travel to the rear of the store to get in line. It's always good to know that the fast-food joints are doing their damnedest to get you fed up faster.

The other influence, sad to say, is thoughtlessness. I never park in anyone's driveway unless there is a good reason, or better yet, an invitation, to do so. Why would I want to inconvenience myself by having to go out to the car (especially in winter) to move it so that the host can get out of his own driveway? Why waste the gas and generate the pollution?

Even if I were carrying, say, a trunk load of concrete blocks, my instincts are to deliver them and then find a parking space elsewhere until it comes time to leave. Who knows? If there were an emergency, wouldn't it be better not to have blocked the paramedics?

But judging from the number of perfectly-abled drivers who pull up into a handicapped parking space, hang a permit from the mirror (or not) and march into the shopping centers, this whole parking thing is never going to go away until the car does.

So I'm sorry, I guess this was a rant after all. I guess I'm guilty of the desire for automotive convenience after all.

Breathing room.

2009-07-18T20:49:00.002-04:00

Well, it's been a different few days. It only took a couple of minutes for the oncologist to send J to be admitted at the local hospital for lung function testing. After four full days there, the news came back: her cancer has started to show up in her lungs.

A couple of transfusions and a chemo drip later, we have a new noisemaker in the house: an oxygen concentrator, connected through a nasal cannula . I've consigned the machine to the middle bedroom with the door shut, where only my collection of teddy bears will suffer the annoyance. If this proves inadequate, we may try the upstairs, with a hole through the closet ceiling for the tube.

Already the newest adopted cat has demonstrated a pernicious interest in the 50 foot long tube. To fend off what may be inevitable fang marks, I've taped the tube to the wall until it reaches our bedroom. J should be able to shake off any attacks when she feels the need to venture out. We use a spray bottle of water along with a vigorous "Get off the table!" as our weapons of choice.

If you really think about it, a few decibels of rattling are a small price to pay for the possibility of extending life expectancy.

Live long and respire!

Tourist Trap

2009-07-12T12:52:00.005-04:00

The article in Wikipedia under the heading "tourist trap" explains very clearly and with a hint of irony the meaning of the phrase, and lists a large number of the better-known places. The final entry under North America is, "the Tennessee cities of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg have numerous tourist traps."

"Numerous" is an understatement which could be enriched by editing it to read "too numerous to mention".

OK, so Dolly Parton was born in Sevierville. That explains the Dollywood attraction. But how about all those other wall-to-wall traps that do everything from stuff you with pancakes to fling you around in a vertical wind tunnel.

None of the above, not even the food, attracted us. As the driver on the trip, I had to negotiate the passage through Gatlinburg to the mountains. Crawling along at an average of perhaps two miles an hour reminded me of the time we drove to Canada up I-75 and got caught in an interstate parking lot between two exits miles apart. I seem to recall it took 2 hours to drive 10 miles.

Since we're not great photographers, I figured that YouTube would fill in the gaps.

This video gives you one person's experience driving through the town. Traffic, people, and multiply by two, and you have our experience.

The real attraction, of course, is the mountains themselves, and the thrill ride is driving the twisty-turny US-441 that takes you to Clingman's Dome. Once there, we were content to watch the perpetual fog blow in over the slopes, and the hundreds of tourists who hiked up and down the trail. We were not among them. Although posted with handicap wheelchair signs, it is clear that an electrically-assisted chair would be the only reasonable way to hike to the top. Walking normally, the hike is 30 minutes to the outlook tower. We came, we saw, we demurred.

And then, there's the bears. This one clouted a car back a few years ago. That bear really knew how to trap tourists.

If you can't lick them, join them

2009-06-06T21:12:00.003-04:00

Well, Sylvie is well on the way to adopting us. In fact, she already has. It's just that we have to keep her separated from the other cats so that there won't be pitched battles when they finally come together in the house. And, of course, she has to wait for a few more days until the clinic removes her powers of reproduction.

Spaying/neutering go a long way towards civilizing a stray, as most folk know. Sylvie will miss the excitement that goes with mating with some other local stray, the stress and responsibility of raising kittens two or three times a year, and the vulnerability to disease and early death that inevitably skews the feline actuarial tables.

The Feral Cat Coalition of San Diego puts it this way:

Many people assume their animals will survive when they move away and leave them behind. Contrary to popular belief, domestic animals do not automatically return to their "natural" instincts and cannot fend for themselves! Already, U.S. animal shelters are forced to kill an estimated 15 million homeless cats and dogs annually. ...

And think of the reproduction rate:

A pair of breeding cats, which can have two or more litters per year, can exponentially produce 420,000 offspring over a seven-year period.

The Feral Cat Coalition subscribes to the Trap-Neuter-Release theory that releasing a feral cat once it can no longer reproduce is the antidote to being overrun with cats. An opposing argument is, of course, the one that says that ferals become experts at avoiding traps, and hence they are not vaccinated against the deadly diseases that put the public, especially children, at risk. And this is in addition to the vast numbers of birds killed by cats.

A page at the University of Michigan, Detroit says:

If each outdoor cat only killed one bird per year, it would equal over 60 million birds annually.

Well, Sylvie, who doesn't know about all these facts and opinions because she doesn't spend any time on the internet, is quietly sitting in the Zinn Center at our back door, where, we hope, she will be protected from the nightly maraudings of various male cats and various raccoons of undetermined gender. In a few days, the great experiment of seeing whether she and Orange and Dusky and Kaboodle can co-exist in the same household will begin.

My guess is that there will be a few territorial puddles and some feral feces to clean up, and perhaps a number of free-floating balls of hair in the atmosphere, but the time will come when the ancient wisdom of cats will prevail, which is, I suppose, "a bird in the paw is worth two in the bush."

Robin In The 'Hood?

2009-05-10T10:16:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, J spent several hours intently researching bird songs on the internets. She had noticed an unusually clear and melodious tune coming from somewhere in the neighborhood, a voice that seemed familiar, but yet one that she couldn't place. Off she went to the computer, and for the next four hours bird calls peeped, squawked, chirred and pippled from the speakers. This one was clearly complaining, "People never know our song tunes."

We had to leave for a drumming gig, so I busied myself loading the car. It was a day of audible contrasts. We played on the sidewalk and at the curb on a very busy street, with big diesel buses stopping beside us to board and discharge passengers. The store (10,000 Villages) had arranged for the group to celebrate Fair Trade Day, dedicated to the principle that if we're going to buy from other countries we should not take advantage of them. I bought a bamboo pan flute and J purchased a clay ocarina.

Unusually for the drummers, the noise levels out on the street were almost enough to silence them. The pedestrians had no trouble, and many paused for a while to listen. Some danced a bit, and some of the kids took over a djembe or two for a few licks.

The band flailed away valiantly for three hours despite the physical layout. The musicians at either end could not hear their opposite companions well enough to stay crisply on the beat at times.

At dinner, J announced that she had found the bird song. It belonged to a baltimore oriole, who clearly believed in being heard and not seen. The identification of a baltimore oriole is relatively straightforward if you can see the bright orange breast and black head, but the bird is very creative when singing.

At one point, a technology company offered an in-field pair of binaural bird identifiers, the Song Sleuth, a portable device with a built-in sound matching algorithm that could identify the likely source of whatever you focused it on. According to the site, it was too expensive to manufacture for the target market ($299), but they're working on a new model and looking for a manufacturer.

I hope they succeed, because as everyone knows, spring is the best time for birding: the birds are calling, the leaves are not fully out on the trees, and in the clear air of a fine spring day, what can be more satisfying than to know that even if you haven't seen it, you can be sure of the bird you heard. Meanwhile, pass the mnemonics, please.

Archaeology: can you dig it?

2009-02-06T20:30:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, for something completely different, we took our portable GPS and set off for the Cincinnati Museum Center, a huge former train terminal from the 1900's when trains were the preferred intercity method of travel.

On arrival at the parking lot, we were told that all the handicapped spaces opposite the building appeared taken, so we parked in the main lot and tugged out the wheelchair. The wind chill was pretty palpable, but we survived the push up the sloping drive to the main building. After a few attempts and some compression, we were able to get the 24-inch chair through the 24-inch doors, and proceeded to buy tickets to the Natural History Museum section.

We navigated several areas of the NH, mainly by trying to brake the chair from rolling down the interior ramps. Many exhibits display the natural history of Ohio. It gives one pause to contemplate the lower jaw of a mammoth, compare it with that of a mastodon, and realize that both stomped the Ohio landscape from the Ice Age until about 10,000 years ago.

As a learning center, this museum is not burdened by today's computerized electronics. Rather than clicking mice or breaking lightbeams, these exhibits tend to offer specimens mounted on the walls, with a bit of natural history narrative below, terminating in a question which can be answered by lifting up a cover, below which is printed the correct response. Most of these are multiple-choice. This simplistic, non-mechanical approach means, essentially, that the only thing that can go wrong is that a lightbulb may burn out inside a display case. In fact, the few displays that actually used computers didn't seem to be working.

Have you ever seen the underside of a blue jay? Perhaps. But all of the birds in the collection are mounted on their backs, so the undersides are pretty much all you see. This is interesting because it's not the usual way you see birds, except in flight, and they are too fast to study in that mode.

It took about two hours to move through to the end of the museum, which terminates in a display of the contents of a number of 19th century outdoor privies, excavated in the back yards of older houses in the earliest parts of the city. What is left of a 38-caliber revolver tossed down the hole is perhaps the most interesting of the many household articles and vast quantities of hand-blown bottles. This exhibit is artfully located just down the hall from the restrooms on the lowest level.

At 3:00 pm it would be time to watch the Omnimax film "Grand Canyon Adventure". We were led to the elevator, where we ascended to the globe-shaped theatre. While waiting for the current showing to release its audience, we bantered with a couple of older couples, who "always wanted to see the Grand Canyon/always wanted to go whitewater rafting".

The movie itself is an experience that can be, at times, disorienting. It's a bit like watching the news crawl at the bottom of a weather channel: when you look up at the main screen after watching the marquee scroll for a while, you could swear the screen was moving. But because the Omnimax is like having your head inside a globe, some scenes, such as lifting off over the edge of a mile-deep gorge, can make you feel as though you were actually on board the helicopter. It's not 3D, unless you mean disorienting, dizzying and death-defying.

So, yeah. We got our money's worth, and more. And we left promptly at 4:00 pm. Within 20 minutes, we were in a traffic snarl that came close to being a parking lot, on I75. There had been "an accident". All it takes in the big cities is one car to depart from the norm, and we're all in trouble. I truly believe that an evacuation order from Cincinnati would be impossible to fulfil.

Some time later, after successive arguments with Jill, our GPS unit who seems always to want to bring you back to the route that you were taking when the trouble occurred, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel to fill the stomach and pass the time. On the wall were three old tools that evoked some reminiscences of my days in the cottage country of Central Ontario.

The first was a two-man crosscut saw. My Dad and my Uncle Sid (who is now about 98) are preserved on DVD cooperatively trimming the logs that underpinned our lakeside dock with one of these.

The second was a drawknife, used to rip the bark off branches when making wooden rustic furniture.

The third was a nipper, that I had seen a couple of times used by a blacksmith to pull the old nails from horses' hoofs.

Was that a day!

A trip I didn't enjoy.

2009-01-28T11:54:00.004-05:00

A paradox. That's what it is.

As a library systems person, I have always had the conviction that the library's computers must be kept running at all times. When I worked at the Thunder Bay Public Library many years ago, I sometimes suddenly woke up in the early hours of the morning, usually from the rumble of distant thunder. If lightning accompanied it, I would instinctively feel around for my clothes, and before the storm hit, I would be dressed and out the door, on my way to the workplace.

In those days, electric power supplies were not as sophisticated (for the money) as are today's versions. Even though our computer room circuits were protected by a massive Uninterruptible Power Supply, they were not certain to survive everything nature could throw at them. And in any case, the batteries on that UPS could only keep things running for perhaps a half hour at best. Today's versions have software that can phone a designated person in the event of a failure. (Ever notice that phone service rarely goes down, while power is more vulnerable?)

Our service probably could have included that extra cost feature, but did not, but in any case, it didn't matter. My instincts served me well. I was like a wolf in an earthquake zone.

After the storms passed, I would be there to restart any gear that was down, and assess damages if any. In those cases when the event was prolonged, I might have to restore files from a backup tape.

Today, I work in a system that has a very large UPS in a separate computer room with environmental conditioning. There are about a dozen servers, and some other computers drawing power from the room's own service panel. Power interruptions are, thankfully, rare, and when they occur, the UPS generally gives us an hour to shut things down gracefully.

So why did the entire room shut down instantly yesterday, servers, services, UPS and all?

We decided to set up a brand new server that will take over the duties of one of the ones due to retire. I crawled under the counter to remove a small power supply (also known as a "wall wart") that powered a set of computer speakers, to make room for a power strip with six receptacles on it. I plugged it in, and then plugged in the power supply. As I pushed it home, I noticed a small blue spark. Instantly the room went dark and quiet, except for the emergency lighting and the light from the windows. HUH?

This was a case of the 25-cent engine part bringing down the plane. Presumably, a faulty power strip shorted out when the plug was inserted, and the main circuit breaker tripped. It was electrifying.

It took my boss and me a few minutes to find the solution, because, unlike many breakers whose handles flip to the half-open position, everything seemed unchanged. Finally, he toggled the main switch, and the lights came back. Half an hour later, we had the servers back up.

Fortunately, the incident occurred on a day when the first heavy snowstorm of winter had rolled over the area. Not many people were making it to the library in any case, so the main complaint was that users couldn't get on the internet for a while.

I'm no electrician, but I would suspect that the UPS basically protects the circuits from incoming events. When the wall wart shorted out the circuit, it did was not a power failure or a surge from the main supply. It was a problem from the circuit itself, flying back to the main breaker, which did its job. Don't try this at home, if you can.

My piano role

2008-12-30T22:24:00.008-05:00

Back in the day, when I was not in as much control of my life as I would like to be now, I had to take piano lessons. I did not want to take piano lessons. My parents often admonished me with a "some day you'll thank us for these piano lessons." That day never came, at least not on any specific day that I can remember as having marked the time I thanked them for forcing me to study the piano.

Of course, you should never expect gratitude from a younger generation, simply because chronologically they're not in a position to appreciate your wisdom in these matters. Had I become a concert pianist, or even a competent pianist, undoubtedly I would have told anyone who listened that I owed it all to the generosity of my parents, who paid for the many hundreds of hours of instruction, and tolerated the thousands of hours of practice.

I quit taking piano from the first instructor, a tyrant who intimidated me at every misstep, and insisted that I did not practice sufficiently. Of course, he was right. I practiced out of fear, and gave new meaning to the musical term, tremolo.

The next and final teacher lived in the neighborhood, offering lessons to many who could otherwise not have afforded them. She might have succeeded in inspiring me to a more musical life, had it not been for the fact that I had been aesthetically traumatized by the first teacher, to the point where only a lobotomy would have allowed me to approach the instrument with any sense of calm.

Our next-door neighbour who moved in while I was still approaching the teen years, was, in fact, an accomplished classical pianist who taught many higher-achieving students. Her entire diningroom was taken up with a baby grand piano. Her husband, an Armenian rug merchant, was himself no musician, but spent hours listening from the kitchen while drinking his tea, in rapt adoration of his spouse's and her students' musical achievements. A professional photographer in his native country, he would retreat to the basement darkroom to develop his black and white photos of flowers and faces, but since it was directly under the piano, I suspect that much of what he did down there was listen undisturbed to the heavenly concerts above.

Although I did not blossom as a pianist, I retained a "musical ear" which has permitted me to play exclusively by it, in any of three common, uncomplicated keys, C, G and F, on a variety of instruments. That, plus a few lessons, allowed me to be a third clarinettist in our high school cadet corps band, thereby saving me from having to carry a gun. The clarinet was much lighter.

I like to think I didn't totally waste my parents' money even as I dashed their hopes, because I appreciate music, especially of the baroque classical genre. Perhaps the struggle with the intractable piano has led to a greater appreciation of those who master it (including my own brother's abilities: he plays both from notes and/or by ear, in a variety of styles, and in any key required, and if the key is unsuitable, he transposes, even if he's playing by sightreading a piece for the first time!)

The advent of Internet radio with stations like Otto's Baroque on 1.FM and many others from around the world is an enormous gift to my generation. Perhaps in the future the technology will make it possible to travel back in time to watch the young Mozart composing his themes on the harpsichord at the age of three. For now, I am seriously grateful for the musical education I was given, for by failing as a performer, I have had the time to become a better listener.

Carpe Diem

2008-11-26T22:00:00.001-05:00

It looks like the beginning of a hard winter.

J has just commenced her first round of chemotherapy for her stage IV metastatic breast cancer. The side effects (fever, aching and loss of appetite) have already devastated her energy and, to a lesser extent, her spirit, and this is only the first day after the first treatment.

J lost her mother to the same disease at the relatively young age of 55. Her mother suffered through chemo, but unsuccessfully. She refused a second round, as I understand the story, and it is not difficult to see why.

One of the difficult transitions J has been facing is that of letting go of her expectations for life. We all, whether we acknowledge it or not, live a good portion of our lives in anticipation. And another big chunk is devoted to the past, whether rose-colored or not. Cancer of any type, however, or indeed any other life-altering disease, forces a change of perspective.

How one feels right now becomes the focus when pain is so omnipresent. One of the handout booklets from the oncology center cites cancer as somehow improving one's ability to live in the present, because to live in any other expectation is a waste of time and precious energy. I can vouch for this as a computer instructor in a public library. Most of the seniors I teach are very much focused on the present. They want to learn enough to be independent of all those people who are mostly younger than they are, because the young are impatient: they are future-focused.

As we progress towards our second babyhood, we once again become dependent on and appreciative of those around us who are our caregivers. As we grow dependent after a life of independence, we grieve our loss of control, our limitations. But each new day is ours, even if only in some small, inner way that is not necessarily obvious to those who care for us and about us.

And so it is with the will to live one day at a time that one "beats" cancer, even if it eventually wins.

My thumb is opposed to old saws

2008-11-19T20:42:00.004-05:00

On September 14th, 2008, in the remnant of Hurricane Ike with peak gusts of 82 miles per hour in the Cincinnati area of Ohio, two large branches of our neighbor's 50-year-old sycamore came crashing down. The smaller one (about 5-8 inches in diameter) landed across the old wire fence, and the much larger one came down in their yard.

I took my pitiful electric chain saw next door once the weather cleared. Cutting and piling for a couple of hours, I managed to arrange a respectable pile of logs for their newly-built firepit. Then, I moved back to our side of what used to be the fence, and began cutting and limbing the remaining branches.

I got into a kind of rhythm at the job: pulling a branch over the wheelbarrow, lopping off a stove-length chunk, pulling the branch further, lopping off another length. The problem is, when you get into a rhythm with a chainsaw, even a pathetic, underpowered electric one, you become accident-prone.

In this case, I lopped off a limb and stopped the saw. The branch fell and the blade kicked up against the thumb of the left hand which was holding the main part of the branch. Electric saws don't stop instantly the way their bigger cousins do. So the slight remaining momentum of the chain caught the glove on my left thumb and shredded the heavy cotton.

Instantly I noticed a rather generous bloodstain welling up in the glove. When I tore it off, it appeared that a tooth on the chain had caught my thumbnail with sufficient impact to cut a triangular piece nearly out of it. It had lifted up, but was still attached. I immediately ran for the house, to get a band-aid, if not a tourniquet.

J met me and helped wash the wound. Knowing my sensitive nature, she prepared a drink of juice, all the while attempting to persuade me that I needed the services of the local emergency room. I demurred, because I felt that getting blood on the car upholstery would only hasten its rate of depreciation.

In time, the healing began. As at this writing, I still wear a band-aid over the area, simply because the nail has grown out to the point where the slightest catch, such as putting on a glove, results in a sharp reminder that all is not yet whole.

Some things I reflect on from this experience:

1) The body aggressively tries to heal whatever hurts it. And in most cases, it succeeds, although not without leaving some evidence of the struggle to survive, perhaps as an object lesson, or at the least, a warning.
2) As a rule of thumb, the price paid for inattention is one of the highest we can pay.
3) The inattentive are protected only by their good luck. One should not rely on this, but when it happens one must be grateful.
4) You can do something a thousand times, but the thousand and first may be the one that gets you.
5) Bleeding is a sign that something is probably wrong.
6) The empathy of a loving person is a powerful force for healing.

GPS: for the GyPSy in you

2008-11-01T12:18:00.007-04:00

It wasn't the fascination with gadgetry that inspired me to buy a GPS receiver this week. It was partly that I was itching to spend money on something to mark my 67th birthday coming up. It was even more due to my fear of getting lost, as we have many times when driving around Ohio.

Some cities, like Cincinnati, are impenetrable via ordinary road maps. Even Google maps present difficulty when driving: you have a printout on the seat beside you (or on the lap of the seatmate beside you), and you give it your best shot, trying to squint at directions in a timely manner while blasting down a major highway, or through streets that you've never seen before.

The GPS, on the other hand, talks you through the entire hassle. Signals from four Global Positioning Satellites are constantly providing quadrangulation, so that the little car icon on the well-lit screen moves calmly down magenta avenues, and the voice of your choice warns you that you'll need to turn in a few moments. If you miss a turn, or take one that you like better, she says, "Recalibrating", and after a few seconds, directs you to the next possible route back to your original path. And these are just the features we've tried so far.

However, there's a learning curve.

I had read the manual, and poked in the address of a Hallowe'en hafla that would be our destination for the evening. In passing, I would note that Google's directions always begin with an instruction to "turn north on ..... Street". This is a horrible way to commence a trip for someone other than a flock of birds, who, it is said, navigate by the position of the sun. By contrast, this GPS tells you which way to turn, and shows you the compass setting as well. Then, I handed the unit over to J.

I have blogged elsewhere about my spouse's ability to control the most complex of home electronics without reading the manual. She does it by experimentation. Hence, when it was time to go, she had seen everything worth seeing on the little box.

We started out fine, although Jill got a workout as we followed our normal route to the Interstate, rather than giving in to her insistence to take a more constricted one. She had probably been asked to give the shortest route, rather than the fastest, which, in traffic terms, can make a huge difference.

As daylight disappeared, we found ourselves moving into a suburban area of 25 mph streets. When Jill announced that we had reached our destination, it was a dark urban wooded park. We turned into the parking area, and stopped to to reconnoitre. Shortly, a white Park Patrol car pulled up and we rolled down our windows.

"Do you need some help", queried the officer.

"Sure do", I explained. "We have this new GPS, and we're trying to get to ...."

"Oh, well, you'll figure it out", she said.

"I sure hope so", I replied.

"Just turn right at ......... and left at ........... and you'll be back on ........."

(I use dots here because whenever someone gives me directions, I retain them in my head for about 10 seconds, 15 on a good day.)

"Thanks for the help", I said.

"No problem: have a good evening."

I reprogrammed the destination, and ultimately, in spite of a detour around a bridge maintenance site, we arrived, safely, a mere 45 minutes late.

So the mystery remained. How did the destination get changed from the original to another one that bore little relation to reality? We may never know, but perhaps this time the "poke around until you find out" learning style of the partner may have manifested Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

The best points:

With Jill announcing everything in her accurate-to-20-foot self-assured manner, the coefficient of profanity is approaching zero.
Gone is the nagging at the navigator (disagreements are now directed at a 3-by-5 inch screen).
Directions are always given in a timely and complete fashion, such as by telling the driver what the next turn will be at least a block or two ahead of the need to make it, taking into account the actual speed of the vehicle.
The presence of an accurate compass heading is reassuring.
For the navigationally-challenged, saving a home location means that, like a prairie horse in a blizzard, you will always be able to find your way back.

Can you dig it?

2008-09-07T17:36:00.003-04:00

Last year we had cherry tomatoes in abundance. This year, almost nothing. Last year, we grew them upside down, in pails with holes in the bottom. This year, we got smarter and hung the pails right-side up, which apparently drowned the roots, or starved them of oxygen. So our waterboarded tomatoes failed to yield any useful data.

This afternoon, I was enjoying a beer in the Zinn Center, a screened addition to our deck, when up popped a squirrel. Assuming a he, although one is never entirely sure except during breeding season, the visitor scrambled up onto the railing. In this mouth, he clenched a black walnut in its green case. Around the corner he roared, and came to a screeching halt at a handful of peanuts, placed there by J's granddaughter earlier in the afternoon.

He placed the walnut carefully beside him, and paused to enjoy the first few pieces of the offering. Soon he retrieved the walnut and raced to the end of the railing, where he clambered up a wooden post from which I had hung a pot of petunias. With his back to me, he dug a substantial hole in the pot. Then he dropped the walnut into the cavity, and covered the treasure.

Back he roared to the remaining peanuts, and sat calmly while devouring them so fast that I could barely see his lower jaw moving. Stopping to scratch an itch, he completed the feast, and continued along the railing the way he had come in. At that moment, a tomato pail caught his eye, so up he jumped into the pot. It soon became apparent from the falling leaves and stems that he was treating himself to an after dinner mint.

The devastation complete, down he sped along the rail to the steps, and vanished.

I assume that the idea behind burying the treat is that the outer covering rots, making it easier to delve into the nut inside. I also assume that he, like every other squirrel we have observed, will forget where he buried the walnut. At some point, the chances are better than fifty-fifty that a small walnut tree will begin its life in our petunia pot. And in this way, Mother Nature carries on her fascination with life against all odds.

Help. I've fallen and I have no cell phone.

2008-08-23T09:35:00.004-04:00

I teach seniors how to use computers. Being a senior myself, I think this gives me some seniority in the matter, plus the fact that I started out in the biz when computers read (and ate) punch cards. To sort cards you had to understand how to plug wires into a patch panel underneath the sorter. Or, if you were too scared to do that, you could sort them by hand.

In fact, I had a computer burst into flames one night. Well, that's a bit of a stretch: a few wisps of smoke and the smell of electrical fire permeated the computer room when a resistor or a capacitor decided to burst. Fortunately, I was not to blame, but it made me more respectful of the power of computers to cause gut-wrenching panic.

We are now thoroughly into the age of the cell phone, even though we don't know for sure whether these things are killing us. Since you can now watch feature length movies on your cell phone, there's not much holding us back from being thoroughly immersed in cell(ph)-absorption.

What amuses and amazes me is the number of my older students who come into the lab knowing square root of minus one about computers, despite having no trouble dealing with the tiny, inconvenient buttons and displays on their cell phones. Of course, they forget to turn the damn things off (a skill they have yet to master), so each session is inevitably disturbed by someone's choice of annoying ringtone music at random intervals, despite the signs on three walls asking that they be considerate of others by turning off their cell phones. Or at least setting them on stun.

Well, when I say "no trouble", I mean, relatively speaking. For one thing, they forget which pocket or section of the purse or pants the phone is stashed in. This can sometimes lead to complete performances of a ringtone opus until the battery wears down or the device comes to hand.

Most seniors, however, display basic courtesies when taking a call. After all, they grew up before the right to privacy was shredded. Back in the day, no one would THINK of discussing a private matter within earshot of strangers. In one class last year I had a student in the middle of the room who took a call from the phone company and settled in to a discussion of a billing error, complete with credit card numbers. One of the other students finally told her to take the call elsewhere. (I suppose that was my job, but I'm not an authority figure).

The other day at the physiotherapy center, I waited for J through about an hour and a half of her treatment. Although I was able to absorb about fifty pages of Leo Buscaglia's 30-year old book, "Personhood", it took considerably more concentration than usual, owing to a cell phone monologue provided by a woman who was clearly trying to sort out someone else's life. One of the many blessings of senior living may well be diminished hearing acuity. An elderly lady who brought her husband for therapy sat absorbed in her paperback for the whole time. When her spouse reappeared, he came over to her and tapped her on the shoulder. She probably got through a hundred pages.

Just in passing, it appears that a too-loud ringtone can set off a feedback loop in a hearing aid. Very unpleasant, because you now have to deal with two miniature sets of controls, located in two different areas of the personhood.

There are a few of my students who will never master anything more difficult than a can opener. Nevertheless, they continue to try their best to understand a technology that claims to be simple, but is becoming more complex with every iteration. One of them is bringing her twelve year old granddaughter to class with her, presumably because she knows that a kid who has been born in the late 90s is intuitively able to fix whatever goes wrong. I think the granddaughter mostly instant messages her friends during the sessions, but I could be wrong. She is probably, like most kids, multitasking, a computer geek term that means doing several things at once. Certainly she asks pertinent questions at times.

I will have taught myself out of a job in another two years, I think. Already we are seeing that in some classes where twelve register, only three show up. Perhaps in the few weeks that they were waiting for the class, they learned how to google and satisfy their own curiosity. I always make a point of teaching how to use Google, because it is the most easily understood (and fastest) way to learn how to do something. Once they can google, they don't need me anymore. And that's a good thing.

And by the way, Google generally doesn't like the word google to be used as a verb. You could look it up.

Ask and it shall be given you

2008-08-07T06:50:00.002-04:00

J's been in pretty much constant pain lately. So far as the doctors know, it's not caused by the cancer, but rather by some combination of muscle and nerve interaction that results in bouts of sciatica or muscle pain or both. This is all very motion inhibiting.

How can they be so sure? Three letters:- MRI. Magnetic resonance imaging. If you ever want to know more about your insides than you want to know, be sure to get one of these examinations. Then sit down and poke through the collection of amazing images: it will give you a new respect for your inner you.

The irony is that the long periods during which the patient has to remain motionless while undergoing the scan produce further immobility in J. She can barely get up, and has to load herself with pharmaceuticals before the exam in order to endure the pain of arising after the scan is over (which can be a period of 90 minutes or more for each scan, and they do at least two).

For the person who takes the patient to the MRI center, the experience can be somewhat of a misery as well. J's recent scan took place at an imaging office in Cincinnati that has a very small seating area, and a ceiling-mounted TV set that is never off. The volume setting is generally past "background" and very close to "annoy".

Since the scan took place in mid-afternoon, the TV was set to a channel that offered all the classics of the worst of American network television: Judge Mathis, Jerry Springer and Maury Povich held forth for the hours from 4 pm to 6. The first exemplifies impatience and intolerance, the second, ignorance, sex and violence, and the third immorality, the three great operating principles of public life in the US today. People suing each other over unimaginably trivial complaints are followed by women beating the crap out of each other over some neanderthal who has made one or more of them pregnant but whom they still love dearly, and finally a whole hour devoted to name-calling and swearing, all of which is bleeped out to the point where there is no way to follow a conversation, with the issue finally being settled when Maury pulls out a manila envelope and reads the results of the DNA paternity test.

Although I had taken J's MP3 player with me, I was unable to match the volume, so even though John Denver did his shrieking best to cover the background, I could still involuntarily follow the thread of each program. Another visitor sat impassively in one of the tiny chairs and worked on sudoku puzzles with such concentration that I concluded he was already deaf.

J's scan took so long that several patients had to leave for supper and come back. A mother with a young son and a teenage daughter who was wearing a knee cast, came in and began to fill in the medical history survey form. It wasn't long before she turned to me and said, "Isn't there anything else on?" Her young son was obviously enjoying lip-reading the animated dialog between the three women who were claiming that the Cro-Magnon across from them was the father of their various progeny.

I shrugged. "I've been staring at this stuff all afternoon. It's so fascinating to see real life."
She replied, "I can't even think about what I'm writing."
A moment later, she got up and went to the receptionist.
"Is there a remote for this TV?"
"Yes, here," and the small key to freedom was handed over.

Two or three clicks later we were watching NASCAR, but the roar of engines was muffled to nearly nothing.

I slapped myself mentally upside the head.

On her way to dinner, the mom said, "Here... you look like you could use this."
"I promise not to wear out the battery," I replied.

Surfing for a few minutes, I finally found the Discovery Channel, and spent the next half hour absorbed in the disasters that will finally overtake the earth when it is hit by the asteroid that we all know is out there. What a relief!

To Make a Long Story Shorter

2008-07-29T10:47:00.006-04:00

A barber is a very personal choice. I had one once in Thunder Bay who could barely speak English but his Italian was masterful. Unlike a typical talkative barber, this guy would just say, "Same t'ing a-like-a always?" And I would say, "Yes thanks!" And that was about the extent of it.

Mother cut our hair when we were kids: the famous "bowl cut". She didn't actually use a bowl as a guide, but the results were easily identified.

Mother's manual clippers pulled occasionally: not a pleasant experience. And I lived in terror of those scissors pokes in the back of the ears when she was "Trimming" around them. Equally, I feared the itching that took place at the end of The Trim, when she brushed us off, but the tiny clipped hairs remained like little needles. If I complained, she responded by blowing at my neck. The puff of motherly air was seldom enough to relieve the itch for more than a few minutes, but I was "grateful for small mercies", as my Dad (her most patient and least hairy customer) used to put it.

In winter, the venue during The Trim was the kitchen, a cramped corridor in which we sat on a stool during the ordeal, where the only light was provided by the kitchen ceiling fixture directly overhead. As a Child of the Depression, Mother would never approve higher than a 60 watt lamp for this unit, so The Trim was finest on top. Perhaps this contributed to my current bald spot.

If The Trim could be arranged for a Saturday, the lighting would be augmented by the ambient reflected sun, bouncing off a gray stucco wall, providing just enough illumination to reduce visibility whenever the barber stepped between it and her ~~victim~~ customer.

However, the real challenge was the fact that the neighbor's wall contained a large window, which sometimes framed the neighbor's children, noses pressed to the pane, enjoying the scene next door. Although they never taunted us about these moments, I felt extreme vulnerability when I went outside for about a week afterwards.

My brother likes to say, "The only difference between a bad Trim and a good one is three weeks." Sometimes, when Mother would say, "Hold still", because The Trim had continued for a longer time than I could comfortably endure, it would be followed by "I've asked you to hold still." I knew that even three weeks from that point, I would still have a small thatch to mark the place when my muscle spasm occurred.

When I was in university, I occasionally would take the electric clippers to my own cranium and emerge from the bathroom with a cut that would have made a woolybear jealous. It was all done with mirrors. The coordination of hand and eye when working in a non-intuitive direction was not of a high order. Although I never actually Mohawked, I often achieved a certain sassy imperfection that attracted comment from my peers, who evidently delighted in such deviations.

"You get run over again by yer lawn mower, Bill?"
"Gotcher ears lowered, I see, haw haw haw."
"Don't worry, I know a good barber."

And so forth.

Although I felt that buzzing my own follicles would impress my Child of the Depression mother, she never seemed to appreciate fully my frugality. Often her response would include the word, "Scalped" and an invitation: "Here, get me the clippers and let me fix that."

The other palpable memory is of the hair-raising, chilling experience of a plastic sheet being draped over a half-naked body.

We did not wear much clothing during The Trim. In the summer, we moved to the enclosed back porch, where, ironically, no neighbor urchins could actually view the process. No windows were so closely aligned, and wisteria vines provided cover on the opposite side. And the light was better. So, dressed in my Trim uniform, a pair of underpants, I exposed myself to a Trim that held the promise of a refreshing shower.

Given that Toronto in July was reliably hot and humid, the notion behind near-nakedness was that the hair was going to stick to me anyway, so why not be shower-ready, and why make all that extra work for the laundress (Mother)? The shock came when she stopped using a linen cloth, and started using a plastic cloth (why make all that extra work for the laundress?) Draping this material over my back would instantly correct my normally slumping posture. Sitting up straight was the only way control contact. Of course, as the body warmed the plastic, it was possible to assume the normal curvature, which was much more comfortable. But then the sense of humidity and stickiness eclipsed all other sensations.

My non-ergonomic posture was responsible, at times, for the distinct slope of my sideburns. Head bent forward, clippers held level. Result: six degrees of separation from true horizon.

There was always the moment when "the Bangs" were Trimmed. I closed my eyes, ears, nose and skin pores as best I could, but nothing prepared me for the oncoming steel, whose point I occasionally got in the forehead. And at the end of The Trim, Mother would stand back, shake her head slightly, and come at me again. Seldom totally satisfied with her handiwork, she would offer to Trim something she missed because "the light was bad', even as much as three or four days afterwards.

In later life, I have always resisted going to a barbershop. For one thing, I don't speak the language. For another, they seem to charge exorbitantly for something that I can do for myself. I don't miss the Playboy and Hustler magazines. We couldn't read while Mother cut hair, because it would fall into the fold of the book, and turn up in some other context at a later time.

I look at the cats and wonder, how did they manage to evolve those wonderful Trims that are always exactly the right length for their furstyle, and how come we didn't? Perhaps the creator knew that cats would never consent to sit still long enough to endure a Trim.

With one Accord we locked the doors.

2008-07-17T21:07:00.010-04:00

The other night, OGADE had a drumming gig at a retirement community in Oxford, Ohio. The Knolls, as they are known, is a lovely, modern complex, complete with all the features and conveniences that make for a gracious denouement of life's struggles, assuming one has the means to afford it.

In any case, the performance was followed by a concensus that we repair to a local watering hole for whatever refreshment we might deem pleasing to our palates. J and I were able to park in front of the place, and we shortly ordered our entree and made our way to the patio. As it turned out, the cooks made a small error and duplicated the order, so we were able to share our choice with others of our group at no extra charge.

Suffering from sciatica as she sought to sit at the picnic table, J dispatched me to the car for her folding chair, which sports a large cushion. I went around to the side of the vehicle where I had stored the chair.

Imagine my mixed feelings of shame, anguish and frustration as I peered in the window of the unyielding door, spotting my keys reposing in full, tantalizing view on the rear seat.

It is J's habit to lock everything. Michael Moore, in his documentary "Bowling for Columbine", discovered that Canadians hardly lock their houses, let alone their cars.

I reconstructed the events in this fashion: I had laid my keys on the seat because I had both hands full at the time, retrieving my wallet from a bag on the floor. I momentarily busied myself with checking for tissues, wallet and credit card.

Meanwhile, J had extricated herself from the front seat, pressed down the lock button, and moved on to the restaurant. Satisfied that I had everything I needed, having no reliable short-term memory to speak of, I closed the door. Oh, the power, the synchonization, the irrevocability of electric locks.

Once the error became public knowledge, many helpful suggestions were offered. Most would have incurred considerable monetary loss if not physical damage. Finally, one of our members, M, offered to take us back to Hamilton (some 15 miles) to our house, where J's purse would yield the extra car key.

This solution was much preferable. A few miles toward our destination, it occured to me that the house key was also a taunting component of the incarcerated keychain. The only holder of a spare key was J's daughter who lived in the community on the far side of Hamilton.

"No matter," said M cheerfully. "We'll go wherever."

It was a long journey, taking in not merely the trip to get the key, but obviously a return to Oxford to make use of it. By midnight we were stumbling in, with work looming ever closer the next morning. However, the car was undamaged, and a lesson was learned.

According to this site,

The oldest known lock was found by archeologists in the Khorsabad palace ruins near Nineveh. The lock was estimated to be 4,000 years old. It was a forerunner to a pin tumbler type of lock, and a common Egyptian lock for the time.

That's impressive. Four thousand years of imbeciles locking themselves out of domiciles. Forty centuries of the inconvenience of non-conveyance.

I wonder if Khalil Gibran locked himself out of his studio before he wrote:

Your friend is your needs answered.

Thank you, M...
---
Footnote: This article in Wired Online appeared in timely fashion today, although it probably does not apply to the situation described above.

Pass me the butylated hydroxyanisole

2008-07-13T09:52:00.004-04:00

Remember the old days before the cell phone? In fact, the days before phones could take messages for you? Days when "the party line" didn't mean that your representative was once again voting against your best interests?

Back in that day, a conversation without multiple "clicks" being heard as your neighbors tuned in on your conversations would be a rarity. Even in cities like Toronto, phone lines were shared, and you didn't just get an "in use" signal: you heard what the other party was saying.

Interesting, therefore, is it not, that improvements in technology brought the private line within reach of the ordinary user. An expectation of privacy grew out of that advancement.

Ironic, therefore, is it not, that advancements in technology have made it possible for millions of daily conversations to be culled for keywords and phrases that might catch you up in an unwelcome net of inference. The party line is back, and you'd best be adhering to it or you'll be invited to a hearing.

And so, as the art of literate communication fades, the algorithm of text messaging surges. Today's instant messengers have rediscovered what the ancient Phoenicians knew: y dnt nd vwls 2 b ndrstd.

We were a hardier crew back in the day. If we were out on a car trip and a tire went flat in a way that we couldn't fix, we bundled out of the car and sought a farmhouse or a phone booth. Or we waved down a passing motorist who invariably would help in some way. The technology of travel was not advanced enough for us to be able to hold a cellphone up to our head, let alone have a car that knew where we were at all times, and what the problem was and how to report it.

So life is easier in many ways, but more expensive, for those services are pricey. And at some point, our dependence on technology will inevitably bite us in strange ways. Tech that reduces our physical activity levels contributes to all sorts of potential harms, such as thrombosis caused by poor circulation. Cell phones themselves are suspected of inducing tumors over long exposure.

At what price does convenience become too expensive? With oil going as it is, our ability to eat a wide range of imported foods in the off-season will be curtailed. Of course, this could be better in the long run, given the preservatives that are often added to extend the life of perishables. But extending the lives of perishables may not be extending the lives of those who eat them. Other methods may be developed to reduce the chemical components of our feasting.

Fortunately, the internet is the easiest resource to use to identify risky food additives. In a sense, the technology of information is available to counter ignorance that is fed by habit. Inertia must give way to motivation, and searching for answers is good exercise.

If you don't have enough irony in your diet, consider this: while we may be living longer, we need to work longer in order to afford our longer lifespan.

A new moan, hey?

2008-06-24T21:33:00.003-04:00

So I'm out mowing my lawn tonight, and a middle-aged couple and their daughter are out for a constitutional, and as they pass by, he says to me, "That there's one thing I'd never be able to do. First time out I'd cut the cord."

See, after six seasons or so years of faithful service without even an oil change, the transmission on my 6.5 horsepower Sears Craftsman self-propelled mower seized up, and the mower became as balky as pushing a wheelbarrowful of cinder blocks over a railroad track. So after researching the matter, including some bank balance inspection, I decided to go for a cheaper option: a swingover-handled Black & Decker electric push mower.

Mowing a lawn using a device that has a swath width of "an average commercial string trimmer" (a derisive but probably accurate measure authored by my stepson-in-law), one requiring about 200 feet of grounded power cord, comes down to how well you did in geometry. The front lawn is encumbered by two young maple trees and a slightly older peach tree. So navigating the mower becomes an exercise in devising the most efficient, least annoying layout. The maples are not bad, because at their age they have not branched out wildly. The same cannot be claimed for the peach. Not only is the peach a wide-branching tree, but is also a variety that branches low to the ground. I believe it may have been a lawn-mowing person who invented the limbo.

At any rate, I smiled back at the gentleman and parried, "Sounds like you're speaking from my experience!"

"Not on your life," he shot back. "I know my limits!"

And off they went. I chuckled, and resumed trying to calculate the square on the hypotenuse that would best describe the next half of my lawn cutting pattern. He had triggered a memory of a time in Thunder Bay when I was out trying to use an electric snow thrower as a Zamboni on our backyard rink. Of course, electric cord meets no resistance on ice, and so in one startling instant, twenty feet of fairly new outdoor cable was severed and tightly wrapped around the paddle and axle of the thrower. Ah, the memories.

I console myself by thinking that the carbon footprint from the lawnmower is probably much less than that of its predecessor. This may be fallacious, if, indeed as it seems, it takes three times as long to cut the grass. But the other consolation is that it is not nearly as noisy. I can even hear the barking dogs and the revving Harleys even while scalping my yard.

I sure do miss that gas mower.

Wheeling and dealing

2008-06-12T21:25:00.003-04:00

The new wheelchair, indeed, the first one ever, arrived today. Its purpose is to allow J to participate in such events as a birdwatching field trip, or the Oxford, Ohio Relay for Life for breast cancer research, or just shopping at stores that don't have electric carts. It weighs 42 lbs. And it was made in Mexico, not China.

Isn't it amazing how unconscionably high the prices are for assistive devices? Not being an expert in economics, I'd have to put it down to the fact that prices in this field are determined by how much a manufacturer can gouge an insurance company. Otherwise, how can you explain the spread between $197.00 and $560.00 for exactly the same item? And when you're buying something like this without going through insurance, you want to be sure you find exactly what you're looking for, so you won't have a full-blown case of buyer's remorse two days later when you discover the same item on the internet for hundreds less and free shipping.

In any case, we discovered this gem at IKEA, the new monster furniture place in West Chester, when J looked for an electric cart and found a wheelchair that met her weight and dimensional requirements. I have to assume that battery technology just isn't up to propelling the average shopper in a cart around an area that's touted to be the size of six football fields. Or maybe they just don't want amateur jockeys bashing into all that lovely Swedish furniture. In any case, we enjoyed the whole experience, and from her seated vantage point, all she had to do was point in the direction she wanted to go, and I revved up the old Armstrong motor and off we trundled.

Whenever we shop at some food chain outlet, she gets into an electric cart, because they have a basket on the front, and because they make an obnoxious beeping whenever she thrusts it into reverse. The six-year-old in her loves that. But now that sciatica has become a sporadic accompaniment, she needs access to places where no electric cart has ever gone before.

Why not an electric scooter? Well, refer to the points made in the second paragraph above. But even more importantly, we're still paying off a Honda sedan that we bought before we realized that the future might be easier if we had bought a van. And there are other reasons, too. I can't keep up with a scooter. A scooter has power requirements that border on being a nuisance. After all, J does not have to plug me into the wall at night, although I might get a charge out of that.

So what do we know now? One thing we know for certain is that the fully-expanded chair will not go through the doorways of our 70's cape cod home. Another is that I will develop muscles in places where they have been largely absent hitherto. And another is that since I've always walked behind J when she rides around in the stores, I will now be less of a Prince Philip (hands behind back, head slightly deferentially bowed forward, attendant on every word) and more of an interested companion. And if J doesn't like where we're headed, she can apply the brakes or turn the wheel. She's on a roll!

Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down

2008-05-11T09:43:00.005-04:00

It is Sunday morning. Three cats are in three window boxes Pictured by J on her website. Sleeping with their faces planted into the towels laid on the floors, or with one paw covering their eyes, they do what cats do best.

Outside, a thunderstorm brews and the winds pick up speed. Inside, incessant babble and keening of two grandchildren. My sanity is preserved by a door which, though locked, cannot completely filter the frequencies because it has a hole in it, for the convenience of the cats.

At the first rumble, an ear pricks up and rotates slightly. As it settles back, another rumble brings the head up and the eyes open. The rain begins in earnest, and the owner of the ears moves quickly out of harm's way. She begins a new vigil near the interior doorway, to be ready for the event that she most desires, the opening of the bedroom door and the emergence of J, on whose chest, in front of the computer, she will truly begin her day.

Lightning. Now nature has the cats' full attention. There is a world of birds out there, seemingly within easy reach, but the era of chattering teeth, twitching tails and guttural whining has long since passed. Maturity, along with indoor captivity has attenuated their interest in those feathered morsels who flit so tantalizingly close to edibility.

A roll of thunder. The orange cat turns around to face the interior. Still in his bower, he considers whether he, too, should retreat to a less exposed venue. But to do so, he would have to pass The Vigilant One, who would not take any such intention as less than a challenge to do momentary battle. Old instincts do not pass easily.

A Mozart violin concerto begins on the computer. The Vigilant One stretches languidly and commences her morning lick. Evidently she has calculated, based on noises that only she can hear, or perhaps some innate timekeeping facility, that it is coming close to the time of emergence.

She is not disappointed. Barely has she completed her grooming when J opens the doors. The inner door is one of the few that does not have a cat hole. The prospect of a cat ensconced in The Old Allergic Guy's bed was as unwelcome as the cat's sudden materialization in the bedroom. The Old Allergic Guy, therefore, added a screen door to the outside of the frame, a solution which proved antidotal to the element of surprise. There have been lapses of attention, but on the whole, the animals are excluded.

But now, two cats have accompanied J to the bathroom, and there this tale must end. It is the same each Sunday morning, a comfortable diversion, varying slightly with the weather, of course. And no bird is ever harmed in the observance of this ritual.

KISS me, you old fool

2008-04-29T21:10:00.002-04:00

There comes a point in an old guy's life when he begins to wonder if all this new technology is worth learning. My lovely bride is the master of the remote (as well as of the intimate, but that's another story). Whenever I turn on the television set, I get as far as pushing the button for sound, and hitting the power button that turns on the TV. After that, all bets are off.

If I hold my mouth right, I can get the weather report on the local Cincinnati channel. If not, the DVR will report that both channels are in use, and to be able to shift channels I'd have to cancel one of the recordings currently in progress. Do you think I'd have the nerve to even consider such a possibility? If you do, you don't know me very well.

It's not that I care, really, because J and I share a lot of the same interests in programs that she records. These include The Daily Show, apparently the only reliable source of media-based news reporting in the USA at the moment, and Deadliest Catch, the story of the rigors that crab fishermen endure in the Bering Sea for the sake of their share of a million dollars or less a season. We root for the crabs.

Video games are becoming so sophisticated that the next phase will be the surround helmet, which will convince the player that s/he has stepped into a real, not virtual, world. Beyond that is 3D computer and movie screens that require no special glasses to view.

Cars that drive themselves, kitchen robots that take care of meal preparation, cranial implants that will replace the functionality of diminishing senses, all of these and more are well on the way to mass production.

If these can all be operated by pushing one simple button, then I say, "Let them come and take over". But so far, it has been my life's experience that more sophistication entails more difficulty. Consider the barbecue, and how it has morphed from a grill over a pan of briquets to an outdoor appliance, complete with timers, rotisseries, warming ovens, side burners and self-cleaning ovens. Just putting one together, never mind learning how to use all its features is a challenge suitable for a younger mind.

At some point many of us feel a growing discontent with the complexity of our daily lives. It isn't necessarily a sign of senility to feel that it's getting more and more difficult to find simplicity and contentment, even though automation is moving the mundane to the periphery of our existence. First, we voted with a shout of assent. Then we began requiring a show of hands. Next came the paper ballot. Then the voting machine. And now the computerized voting station. With what result? More certainty? More fairness? More accuracy?

There's a lot to be said for the KISS principle, "Keep It Simple, Stupid". When the things that make your life easier make it more complex, then something just isn't adding up.

Get a Horse!

2008-04-12T09:43:00.001-04:00

Do you remember a song called "Love and Marriage?" It claimed that "they go together like a horse and carriage".

You know, there's a downside to the horse and carriage. I don't date back quite that far, but I did once "enjoy" a ride in a pony carriage, on a farm owned by a cousin of my mother's, down near Picton, Ontario. That was about all I could handle.

My first and only recollection of riding a horse was that pony. I guess I might have been about nine or ten, and, as my dad so eloquently put it, "scared shitless".

When you climb aboard one of those animals, you become conscious quite quickly that you are astride some independent-minded horsepower. That, and the smell. Thank goodness old Henry Ford didn't find it necessary to capture the essence of horse in the horseless carriages he produced. Note, by contrast, that contemporary horseless carriage manufacturers (or horseless carriage dealers) use synthetic "new car" sprays to bring the olfactories in line with the old factories.

This pony was docile enough until it started to move, but even though it was being led around by the cousin using a short lead and tight control, I was more or less paralyzed by the feeling of straddling a rocking bench with ears that constantly turned toward me, daring me to issue any commands that it might challenge.

I did not stay long aboard. "Get me offa this thing!". Amidst the spectatorial merriment, my carriageless horse came to a gentle stop, and I slid down some way or other, smelling of horseflesh and humiliation.

No, it is not a tale of someone who, first time aboard, was thrown, as my dad so eloquently put it, "ass over teakettle" by an ill-tempered bronco. It was more like the gentle repudiation by a knowledgeable animal who totally understood that some are made to ride and most are not. I recall a sound of equine snickering, which, in later recollection morphed into a whinny, only because my pride prevented a more accurate depiction.

Yes, I did go for a ride in the pony-sized carriage, but cannot claim to have enjoyed it. The driver seemed to want to urge her steed to higher rates of speed than I felt were safe. Neither she nor her pony appeared to think that the speed of a normal walk would be worth the effort of harnessing.

My cousin later appears in one of our home movies, riding the pony bareback, chasing the family dog in ever-tightening circles around the expanse of the front yard, and loving every second of it. It is a tribute to her patience and sense of humor that she was willing to lead her fear-soaked cousin around on his gentle, thirty-foot trip aboard such a free-spirited mount.

Music going down the internet tubes?

2008-03-25T20:26:00.003-04:00

Greed almost killed internet radio a while back. The authorities in the federal government who go by the name of Copyright Royalty Board imposed a new fee structure for stations that play music, making it prohibitively expensive for internet niche players (e.g. "all-baroque-all-the-time") to stay on the air. At present, only Congressional action (an oxymoron) can prevent this from happening.

The current situation is best understood if you look at this article.
So the old motivation of greed kills the simple pleasures. Where there's a buck to be made, you can be sure someone in this country will find it. Once again, Big Media takes over and deprives anyone who can't pay from listening or broadcasting.

Apparently corporations don't understand the story about killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

There's plenty of evidence that consumers are more likely to buy music if they have a chance to audition it. When I was twenty something, one of the biggest music stores in Toronto had a whole floor devoted to listening stations where you could (with the help of staff) put on headphones to listen to a potential purchase. Some people, of course, abused that, but most were serious purchasers. And this was years ago.

Now, the music distribution model has changed, and become much more convenient than the old listening station. And music of any type can be downloaded rapidly and wirelessly to your tiny listening device while you're doing something else. We are living in an era when it is no longer necessary to buy a load of claptrap on an album in order to obtain what you really want.

The notion that royalties must be set in such a way that only the corporations survive is so quintessentially stupid that it is astounding. Music does not survive when nobody can hear it. It is essential to the culture of any civilized country. Put a prohibitive price in place and you penalize the populace. And another goose gets killed.

An end will come. It may be that when we can no longer afford oil, sometime in the next two years at the current rate, we'll have no means of churning out the plastic for CDs and DVDs. But it seems to me that before that happens, the music business will have killed the affordability of its own product in any case. Way to go, you greedy idiots.

But until that happens, why not download and install a good internet radio player like Screamer Radio, or find a Mac equivalent, or just go to a website like Accuradio.com, select a genre of your choice, and listen to the amazing works of Bach or the Beatles, or Benny Goodman while you still can?

"The day the music died" may well be on its way unless saner heads prevail.

What is it about Florida?

2008-03-09T16:04:00.003-04:00

What's so much about Florida anyway?

The climate? The beaches? The ocean? The people?

Well, three out of four ain't bad.

And it's not the people: it's the crush of people and traffic, all seeking only two things: a place to eat and a place on the beach. Preferably both at the same time.

For anyone who has been to the running of the bulls at Pamplona (and I haven't), the only thing lacking in the Florida beach scene is "thee bool". Along the roads of Clearwater that parallel the Gulf shore, any place that has public parking is, by definition, full. Every other place has a private property sign, rife with the numbers of local ordinances that condemn the violator to a life of perpetual payment and pariahhood. People circle the block or doublepark (with engines running and the A/C/ on of course, because it's hot in a car) while waiting for a parking space to become available.

By contrast, if you are fortunate enough, as we were, to drop your air mattresses into someone's spare bedroom, you can suddenly find yourself, as our host frequently remarked, "Livin' the Dream." Even if only for a couple of days.

The future of Florida is uncertain, as it is with any near-sea-level outcropping near the great oceans. If global warming doesn't slow down or reverse, all the beach-front public parking areas will be part of a huge involuntary marina.

The only other place I've been to where access to Paradise is comparably restricted is San Juan, PR, and that was a few decades ago. I don't know how much things have changed, but at the time, the island was full of junker cars. These old crates were imported by the shipload from the mainland because there was a prohibited import tax on anything that was less than a couple of years old. It was said that in PR, there was only room to park a third of the cars. Thus, two-thirds of the cars had to keep moving.

Of course, certain times of the year are more congested. We know this. Events, however, conspired to make us take the trip or not go at all. And to our host and hostess who saved us the cost of accommodation and let us be who we are, we can only say,"Thank you so much." With friends like these, who needs beach-fronts?

Each ending is a beginning

2008-02-07T19:26:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow J undergoes the increasingly common operation that women are experiencing in depressing numbers, a mastectomy.

The support expressed by everyone who has learned of this situation has been most reassuring. Typically, these expressions fall into two categories: 1) my friend, relative had this operation (or variant of it) and has survived for __ years, and 2) you have our prayers/good thoughts. And many also add, "If there's anything we can do..."

This is the good stuff that human beings are made of. It comes out spontaneously, and it's not mere polite/self-conscious chatter. The worse the situation the more intense the sympathy and support.

Cancer itself is one of our universal fears, not always because of the probability of a shorter lifespan than one would have wished or planned for, but often because it means such a loss of control over one's body. Medical treatments are not something anyone looks forward to, but the fear arises as much or more from the uncertainty as from the inevitable pain.

And so, from tomorrow forward, the prospect of living a day at a time with an attitude of gratitude becomes the first order of business. For, as the Dalai Lama has said, "If you have a situation that you can do something about, why worry? And if you have a situation that you can do nothing about, why worry?"

One day, perhaps, we shall understand how to heal ourselves of all these genetically-based diseases. I hope that if that is ever the case, we also become wiser, gentler, and more loving. Greed and war and selfishness are so old school.

Let me make this perfectly clear

2008-01-21T22:34:00.000-05:00

Nixon used to say that phrase a lot, didn't he? It was right up there with "Make no mistake", and "I am not a crook".

Can it be true that manuals are written as part of a corporate strategy to wrest yet more after-purchase money out of the consumer's bony fingers?

Currently, I'm trying to assist a friend in another state who is having a problem getting his VCR to record or play back anything that comes via the new cable box service he has had installed. I think that video manuals and instruction sheets hold the record for being the least well written documents.

I suppose the companies keep their costs down by writing documentation that takes little note of the end user. The quick start guides that show the cartoons of how things get connected often seem to leave out certain facts, such as the ones that show optional gear as though it were part of the standard setup. The optional gear is the stuff that actually makes the rest of it do what you bought it for in the first place.

This, of course, makes after-market revenue almost a certainty, and the rates for such personal attention vary all over the country.

Even though most of the manuals for installation and setup are now available on the web, that just means that it's more convenient to find this miserable collection of poorly-written, myopically printed documentia. And while we all appreciate that it's there, we still can't get past the fact that it doesn't say what we want to know, which is, in simple terms, How do I get this damn thing to work properly without my having to go back to college?

Well, it comes down to the fact that the young generally do not understand the needs of the elderly. Unless they've had first hand experience of no experience, they can't possibly write a manual or prepare a tutorial that starts at Square One and step-by-steps it through everything it takes to make it happen.

After all, the technical writers of today were born in the generation that had a computer in their home. And the next ones will have them in their brains. They have little in common with us: their documentation is rife with assumptions about what we know, based on what they have always known.

And then there's the matter of English as a second language, but let's not get into that here. Generally, these manuals seem to have been translated word by word, choosing the first, not the contextually applicable, meaning for each one.

My friend just wrote that he's thinking about telling the company to take the gear out and return things to the way they were. And I just wrote back that I believe he has found the solution. Corporate America doesn't lose customers willingly.

And for any of you out there who may be technical writers, don't take this personally, but just as a favor to me, will you please read "How to Give Instructions" from Lifehack.org. Dustin Wax, the author, has a wealth of good ideas. They're not hard to understand. So why are they so difficult to do?

Ack and gah!

2008-01-19T12:40:00.000-05:00

One thing I especially love about J is her insatiable desire to experiment. She never reads a manual: she just dives in and presses all the buttons, making a mental note of which ones do whatever, and from then on, she is mistress of all things related thereunto.

In the culinary arts, however, she adopts the prescriptive approach. She browses her collection of recipe books and computer files until she finds one that both her mind and her appetite can agree on at the moment. She takes these instructions to the kitchen and by following them pretty much as written (except when things that are listed are not to be found in the cupboard so substitutions are in order) produces something that would certainly be worthy of public consumption.

Many times we have discussed whether if all else failed, she might open a bistro under the obvious name, "Eat@Jo's". This would accommodate both those meat-and-potato eaters to whom the very name suggests roadside diners, while also making room for the computer-savvy amongst the traveling public, who could order ahead by email.

Rarely, but not statistically impossibly, she will hit a clinker, which finds its best audience with the raccoons who nightly forage our feeding platform, otherwise known as the deck.

Last night was such a rarity.

She found something that combined it-might-have-been-a-chicken with breadcrumbs and something else, and the other thing was broccoli and something also coated. Her irrepressible urge to experiment resulted in a dish I promptly named, "Ack and Gah!"

Back in the day, had my mother put such a meal on the table and met with restlessness from the natives, my father would have answered my reluctance by saying, "Too well fed!" This in turn used to enrage me, because, from my point of view, at that precise moment, I was not well enough fed at all. Dad, as usual, of course, was merely quoting some wisdom of the Fathers, someone whose name was "Grandad", who might have been any one of a number of such persons in his stable of ancestors.

J, on the other hand, simply laughed. And laughed. And laughed some more. This made me laugh in concert, until eating either the Ack or the Gah was rendered nearly impossible.

Such happy times! Other spouses might well have said, "Suck it up or go get your own food". But J's attitude toward food doesn't differ much from her attitude toward life itself. "Well, let's try this, and if it doesn't work, we'll have to try something else."

I once made the mistake of bragging, "I'll try anything once". That's no longer true. Bungy jumping and anything involving heights is pretty much exempt. I've learned to draw a pretty strong line in these older years. But occasionally, something will cross the line.

Ack and Gah! Please dear...

Derailing my train of thought

2008-01-15T21:26:00.000-05:00

On my way to work a couple of mornings ago, a trip that normally takes about ten to twelve minutes, I encountered conditions that tend to confound the drivers in this area. A light dusting of snow had fallen. Lacking countermeasures, we all drove over each other's tracks which became more slippery with each passing vehicle. Intersections were positively dangerous. Yet not many people got in trouble, because they drove with extreme caution. The one or two who spun out were driving light, fast cars, or at least they were when they started out.

And then there was the train. A four-headed monster with about 150 cars, traveling around 15 miles an hour. This was the second train in two days. The previous day, however, the train was shorter, and the time was around noon, which I regard as preferable to 7:45 a.m. when you need to make it to work by 8. This train, however, stopped on the crossing for five minutes, and since I was the first in line, I had no choice but to observe the rusty side panels and the insignia of the companies within my view.

There must be some law here. Let's see how it might be formulated.

1) The speed of the train at the crossing is inversely related to the urgency of your mission.
2) The amount of snow that falls, multiplied by the number of cars using the roads during that time period yields a number which expresses the scale of certainty that you will be late for whatever you need to do.
3) Preferred times for rail traffic are during morning and evening rush hours.

I think this last one is so because when they run trains at night, they are bound to get more complaints about disturbing the peace than if they run them during the day. And it's obviously much safer during the day, because motorists can see the trains coming. On the other hand, in our city, trains run night and day, so perhaps this rule needs more precise formulation.

It always amazes me how close to the railway right-of-way people build their houses. At a local crossing (when I was a kid I used to think those big crossing signs read "Rail Crossing Way"), there is a house that can't be more than ten feet from the wigwag, which has the World's Most Annoying Bell that pounds continuously and can be heard for about two blocks whenever a train comes. The people who live there must have to strap down the TV and pick the pictures (or the plaster) off the rug. But I bet they got the place for a really good price.

Ah, but there's nothing quite like trying to puzzle out the graffiti on the boxcars and tank cars as they crawl across your field of view, since you're the one driver who couldn't make it across the rails before the bar descended. You may not make sense of this, but you have a feeling that it's the last protest against the totally surveiled society. Is this the handwriting on the wall?

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

-- Omar Khayyam

For the love of lava

2008-01-08T19:32:00.000-05:00

The Lava Lamp

You know, there's something brilliant about the lava lamp. I'm not talking about the level of the lighting, because we all know that there's something very subdued and subtle about lava lamps. The brilliance lies in the way it fascinates and intrigues.

Like most things in life, the lava lamp does not immediately perform its formless magic upon being turned on. It takes a while for the 40 watt light in the base to heat the wax enough to begin the process of changing the specific gravity to cause flotation.

And this is, of course, a metaphor for most things in life. Things that begin immediately tend to end immediately if not sooner, in my experience. The things that we savor, such as a fine dinner or an episode of meaningful lovemaking, do not have instant beginnings. They take planning and consideration.

When the wax heats to the right temperature, the process begins. Thanks to the laws of physics, chemistry and thermodynamics, a blob rises through the water and becomes a ball as it separates from the column that feeds it. And it ascends for a time, and it stays at the top for a time, but all too soon, it sinks slowly down, often being compressed by a new blob on the way up.

And this is, of course, a metaphor for most things in life. Thanks to the laws of gravity and similar imponderables, the blob is doomed to descend, slowly and perhaps with a certain dignity, but nevertheless downward, inexorably to be absorbed at the bottom of the column, to await a tranformational experience that will renew its upward course. But it will not be the same blob. It becomes a part of all that it has met.

Can you relate to this? Is your life a series of ups and downs: the ups caused by the heating and energy of some source that may not even be visible or clearly understood, and the downs the result of the inevitable cooling of interest and the general downward pull of forces that seem only too ready to work against always being up?

Eventually, the general temperature of the lava lamp heats to the point where the large and sensuous blobs give way to a chaotic mix of small balls and bubbles, and the charm of the lamp is perhaps diminished by a more frenetic mode of activity. And eventually, the action ceases as the water is too warm to allow for the cooling which brings the ball back to the bottom. And so the last generation of lava modules rests for a while at the top of the lamp. But when you turn off the lamp, everything gradually returns to the state in which it began, at the bottom of the lamp.

Without wishing to beat the metaphor to death, I can say that this phase may recall that critical stage in human development called "Midlife Crisis", where, after a life of increasing tempo, and compulsive need to achieve as much as possible, one comes to the realization that you are but one blob in a very numerous crowd of like-minded blobs, and even if you make it to the top, you won't hold that position forever. "Cool it!", and so you do, and you begin the final descent as the energy that moved you to action no longer seems so compelling.

But it is not necessarily a descent into darkness and incapacity, unless you allow it to be so. Like a blob of cooling lava lamp wax, you may find that you will coalesce with a larger group like yourself at this stage, having in common the experience, the judgment, and the perspective that is somehow comforting and welcome amongst like-minded companions. And you may not resent the surrender of your rugged individualism for the greater good, at least as much as you did when you were on the way up, or even at the top.

The lava lamp. It's all in how you look at it.

When it's empty, fill it. When it's full, empty it.

2008-01-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

These words to live by are from my loving and gentle spouse. She coined the phrase a couple of days ago in response to my ha-bitch-ual comments about the one-snout-away-from-a-pigstyle house that we live in. Since that time, this phrase has roiled around in my frontal lobes and come to have a much wider applicability than at first thought.

See, the problem is, as anyone who has been around children or has started out life as a child (Mark Twain), kids don't pick anything up without being harped at. Merely demonstrating the process does not typically inspire imitation. There's nothing in it for them, after all. If they had the ability to understand that leaving stuff strewn in the living space is both dangerous and unaesthetic, there would probably be no issue. As it is, it is much handier to leave stuff where you'll be sure to be intrigued by it another time.

Well, in the course of talking about this as if there were any potential cure for it, J came out with a few ideas as to how behavior can be altered best by simple means, such as posting helpful reminder signs on every vertical surface. Not all of the children, of course, can read, but most can. And in considering the wording, she considered the need.

In our tiny inadequate corridor kitchen, we have a water cooler, two sinks, a garbage pail, two recycle bins, a can crusher and a dishwasher. At any given time of the day, one or more of these devices is bound to be full to overflowing.

Hence, the brilliant relevancy of J's sign (which she has yet to make because her desk is too full to find the sign-making supplies, but that's for another day). For consider this: if the dishwasher is full, it needs to be emptied. If the dishwasher has not been run yet, it needs to be started, and after an appropriate interval, emptied. If the sink is full, it needs to be emptied into the dishwasher and/or garbage depending on contents. If the dining room table is full of dishes, the table needs to be emptied at least into the sink, but preferably into the dishwasher. If the garbage is full, it needs to be emptied outside into the garbage containers. If they are full, they need to be taken to the curb, or set aside for collection. If the water container is empty it needs to be filled.

To this new J's Law, I would add a few corollaries. If the basement is full, it needs to be emptied into the garage. If the garage is full, it needs to be emptied into a garage sale. If the rug is full, it needs to be cleared (of toys and Cheerios and clothes and books, as well as dirt). If the countertops are full, food and appliances need to be put away. If the refrigerator is empty, we need to go shopping. If the stomach is empty it needs to be filled.

And so I wait for a sign.

Justice once, let's do something nice for these folks

2008-01-01T21:25:00.000-05:00

The most interesting thing about the New Year is that it will have one more day than the three previous years did. I suppose they each gave up a quarter of their entitlement so that 2008 could bask in the additional day.

So the big question becomes, "What am I gonna do with the extra day this year?" For most of us, it's just the last day of another month, and if we're working, we're working.

This is all wrong. February 29 should be a national, if not a world, holiday. It's very special. Consider all those people who were born on this date. Their first birthday celebration would have been when they were three years old.

It should be a bigger deal, and there are, of course, leapers who are working on it constantly. Here's a list of famous leapies, and here's an example of the kinds of problems they face, having to live a lie when it comes to drivers' licences and insurance.

What could it hurt to honor leapers by declaring a day in their name, and preferably a day off? It's a throwaway anyway, because most of us don't welcome the idea of working an extra day in February. We're too excited by the groundhog and winter and global warming and terror and shopping to want to waste time slaving in the pits that day.

I think I'm gonna do it anyway. If I haven't burned up all my vacation by then, I'm gonna talk the boss into letting me celebrate LeapDay this year. After all, it's a Friday.

And then I'm gonna find me an 84 year old and wish him or her a Very Happy 21st Birthday!

Xmas Wrapup

2007-12-25T21:50:00.000-05:00

'Twas the night after Christmas and all through the day
There were signs that the children had done more than play.
Of the living room rug we had long since lost sight
As its burden of paper grew, morning till night.
And the ribbons and bows that had graced every gift
Lay scattered and splattered, too many to lift,
And to tell who gave what we were no longer certain
Except when a label popped out from a curtain.
To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall
There was plastic and paper and boxes and all.

With his motions impeded by oceans of plastic
The Grinch who lives with us might do something drastic,
Absent some effort to clean up the place,
To pick up the boxes, to clear out some space.

He no sooner had vowed not to do it himself,
When someone stepped forward: a right jolly elf,
And smiling and waving, she came on the scene
With a sack she held tight that was plastic and green,
Then she spoke not a word but went straight to the floor
And she picked up the papers, the ribbons and more
And she stuffed the sack with them and giving a nod,
Handed them off to her deer partner, T__d.

It was good while it lasted, but far from complete,
For the plastic still catches the old Grinch's feet
There are pieces of toys that belong in a box
That somehow get caught in the toes of his socks,
And sharp things that pierce through the sole or the heel
That none but the Grinch who lives with us can feel,
And things that are larger and easy to trip
And fracture a thigh or a hip or a lip.
Though no one else sees them the Grinch knows they're there,
So he's painting a sign, "Let the traveler beware".
And he's staying confined to his dark, tiny room,
For no matter how dank or how musty the gloom,
He prefers to be thought somewhat iconoclastic
To ending his days as the victim of plastic.

Bah, humbug

2007-12-22T17:42:00.000-05:00

Well, here we are again, the last three days before December 25th. During the run-up to this festive occasion, every member of the tribe has been sick with a flu variation that seizes hold of the stomach and lower digestive tract with ramifications that are unpleasant both to experience and to relate.

It does take the edge off one's desire to celebrate a season notorious for egregious menus and involuntary gluttony. And that's a good thing. But the whole notion that somehow the meal must go on, despite the fact that the preparer herself is a walking virus farm is perhaps worthy of re-examination.

Far better, it seems to me, to celebrate the fact that this season offers the gift of about four days in a row off work. This is time that can be spent, sick or not, in allowing the body to relax from the daily grind of getting up at an unnatural hour to satisfy the demands of the workplace. Modest reason though it may be, the gift of time is the one that universally returns the most benefits.

Two-day weekends are only a partial luxury, given that the first day is barely long enough to spin down from the weekly trance, and the second is over too soon. Sunday night is not the best night for sleep, because the mind ramps up to deal with the upcoming fresh and/or unfinished business of the week at hand. Saturday, for those of us who are fortunate enough not to have to work it, is ideal because it begins without the tyranny of the alarm clock, and ends with the promise of yet another day devoid of the same.

Thus, a gift of four mornings without a rude awakening is a rare treasure. Why spoil it by eating egregiously and indulging in seasonal gluttony? Why mess it up by slaving for the better part of a day over a massive menu that will end up in overconsumption and discomfort, with the attenuated aftermath of same-tasting leftover food that must be dealt with in the ensuing days?

Back in the day, consumption meant one thing: tuberculosis. Now it means consumerism. Which disease is more destructive?

Press Delete

2007-12-12T22:05:00.000-05:00

Is writing one of those "riding a bicycle" skills: Painful to learn, but once you get the hang of it you never forget how to do it even if you seldom do it?

Or is writing one of those "setting your digital watch" skills: You did it once by accident but that was last year and this is this year and damned if you know how to do it this year?

Writing indeed could be like a whole variety of other things we learn how to do, but some of us don't, as Eeyore said sadly, simply because there is a whole variety of other things we like to do. "Priorities", Eeyore might have muttered, had he known the word, which probably he did but was too depressed to think of it.

Back in the day when paper and writing instruments were all we had, writing in the sense of literary endeavor as opposed to penmanship was not for Everyman. It was, for the most part, one of the delights of the leisure class, who happened to have much of the education and most of the leisure. When Gutenberg developed moveable type, as everyone knows, the promulgation of literature to the masses became possible. And so it continued, with every new development of technology tending to lower the common denominator of who could be published and/or popularized.

As "recycled electrons" becomes the medium of choice, the blog and the wiki and all their variations are supplanting the book as the medium for delivery. The language is changing more rapidly; shrinking through the elision of vowels and by the return to phonetic spelling. Sink your Bluetooth into your Blackberry and you have instant earphonic communication. hu nedz vwlz?

So what is the future of writing? Who can say? If laws are written and promulgated in text message format, they will be impossible for the older generation to understand, but if they are not, they will be too archaic for the young. Will a work of literature have to be translated to l33t in order to be appreciated?

Another associated and equally disturbing trend is that which decrees that everything written, photographed, said or thought must be archived and preserved for future generations unknown. What distinguishes the archivist from the librarian in this regard is the subtle thought that the archivist strives to preserve everything because it is not possible for us in the present to know what will be important in the future. The librarian seeks to arrange everything currently available for the best possible retrieval, and recognizing that space is limited, seeks to keep the best of what is current at the expense of discarding the deadwood. I would hope that writers generally take the latter view.

Amazing strides are being made in the field of storage and retrieval of information. The next big thing is probably holographic storage although nanostorage solutions (manipulating storage at the subatomic level) are also field of intense interest. So perhaps storage capacity won't lag behind need as much as it does now.

In the technologically advanced countries we are largely unable to erase any trace of our personal histories because we have no idea where it is stored and in what format and who has access to it. And since mistakes are inevitable and all systems break down at some point, the record we leave behind may not even be wholly ours or may be only partially true, or could be altered to serve some undesired purpose.

So the question remains: how badly do we need to record everything about everything? If the population of the world in just forty years from now is 9 billion and climbing, will there be answers to the problems of supply that our progeny would otherwise not be aware of had we not kept all the archives of all the agricultural enterprises of our own day?

There certainly will be problems if we don't preserve the seeds from today and plant them tomorrow, since engineering of crops diminishes the diversity and thus disease resistance of our plants. Is the same true of our culture? Will the generations to come somehow be unable to cope because we failed to record everything we did? Smhw i dnt thk so.

There's snow way around it...

2007-12-05T22:58:00.000-05:00

Today's snowfall put new meaning into the second syllable.

It was one of those heavy, wet snows that come when it's not terribly cold. The stuff clumped and layered over the tarp on the car shelter that I had constructed this summer and reinforced with chicken wire this fall in anticipation of one of those heavy, wet snows that come...

When I came home tonight, I saw that the center peak of the car shelter I made out of those thin metal tubes of a former dining tent had collapsed down onto J's car. I got out a stepladder and a rake and removed as much of the snow as I possibly could. By the time I finished, the general roofline was flat, but at least not sagging onto the car.

This, of course, means that any further snows will simply repeat the process. And on the 50 degree days that are forecast to follow later this week, the water will pool in the tarp, and flow down through the slits that I had to put in it this summer when it rained and remained undrained.

A real, honest-to-gosh car shelter would have cost upwards of $800, which is money that only the government has at this point. So I'm forced to consider how I am going to cope with having a saggy, baggy tarp that has to be harder to shovel off than the car would be if I just took the whole thing down. But such is the problem with designing for assisted living.

There may yet be hope. This weekend, weather permitting, I shall betake me to the local domicile improvement emporium in the hope of finding structural reinforcements. A couple of two-by-fours artfully fastened by plywood braces should do it, wouldn't you say?

Byron Katie

2007-11-25T14:01:00.000-05:00

I confess: I like days off. For the most part, Saturdays are not days off, because the accumulated and regular tasks tend to take a largish bite out of the available time. The laundry, the dishes, vacuum cleaning and generally picking up are just the beginning. Sometimes the housecleaning extends to carpet shampooing, since the Law of Baby Feeding Gravity is in resurgence. And then there are the special efforts required on days when a cooking and baking frenzy has left the sink invisible under the overburden of assorted tools, pans, beaters, whisks, measuring devices and platters. Needless to say, I am not the original user of this type of gear: as they say in baseball, I follow in the cleanup spot.

It's not as if I'm the only one engaged in these activities: we have a shared schedule that works fairly well for the most part. Before we put this in place by consensus, there was a sense of resentment which would rise to considerable heights when a string of days went by with little evidence of cooperative effort. It's amazing how formalizing a schedule can lead to better habits while reducing excuses.

Sundays, however, are more like it. Once having freed myself from the family-based historical guilt feelings associated with failure to attend a place of worship, I found out how beautiful the seventh (or first) day of the week really can be. What a gift to be able to sit around in pyjamas (rather than office duds) and explore new worlds of sound and sight on the internet, at my own pace, without any particular objective except to find worthwhile things that have been unknown to me until that moment.

I've always felt uncomfortable using the phrase "I found ... on the internet." That's claiming too much credit. What I "found" is not a discovery so much as an uncovering of what has been there for some time.

Example: TheWork.com. Many thousands of people know of Byron Katie and her simple, four-question method that results in turning around the direction of lives.

I came upon this amazing woman and her story while watching an unrelated video on YouTube.com. There are dozens of videos of interviews and sessions that she has done over the course of 20 years or more, but the essence of her presentations is always the same. It involves identifying the issue (say, resentment over dirty dishes being left in the sink, or toys on the floor), examining how I feel about and react to that issue, and then questioning what life would be like if I did not have that feeling. The objective is to see whether or not what I am thinking is true. Katie believes that we are so attached to the truth of our own thinking and assumptions that we don't think to question them, to see what the truth really is.

The end of this process comes in the turnaround, when I see that the resentment is something that I generate, rather than the people who leave the place messy, and once I free myself of this belief, I can calmly and more appropriately deal with it. Over time, she says, this process of questioning becomes automatic whenever confusion (which is the source of suffering) occurs.

There are many others who have found their own pathways out of their suffering and have shared their experiences and ideas with the rest of us. A day off is a good time to explore them and find out which ones work for you.

Thanksthinking

2007-11-21T23:20:00.000-05:00

So here we are, on Thanksgiving eve, thinking about how nice it will be to not have to pay attention to the alarm clock for one extra day this week. And then we remember that we have grown so used to getting up before the clock alarm so as not to disturb the partner that we can't really enjoy the prospect of a late lie-in, even though the alarm will not be set.

And of course, there are the dogs across the street, who seem to be let out into the yard to give voice to their discontent as soon as the sun begins to rise. What annoys them, perhaps, is their electronic collars which respond in some semi-painful fashion when they cross the buried transmitter boundary wire in the front lawn.

So, to calm the wearied and over-active mind, I turn to Shoutcast.com, to Otto's Baroque on 1.FM while the rain begins. The windows remain open just a smidge because the predicted cold front has not yet pushed into the region. But just as I settle back and my eyelids begin to flutter toward total closure, I remember that the laundry has to be moved from the washer to the dryer.

While performing that minor chore, I think of the enormous distance we have come over the past two generations. From the crystal radio to the satellite radio. From the washtub to the washing machine. From the 8 mm black and white silent film camera to the high definition home theater digital video. From the evening newspaper to the web log. I'm thinking here only of the field of communications. All other fields, from astronomy to zoology have made similar discoveries, mainly because of new technologies.

It has taken enormous inventive, creative engineering and manufacturing skills achieve this kind of technical-mechanical progress.

Not only do these manifestations of creativity make life easier, on the whole they make it more enjoyable, interesting, educational, healthier and longer. Outrageous claim? Not really. The potential, at least, is there to stimulate the mind, the body and the spirit. At the most basic, we are vibrating cycles of impossibly small matter and impossibly huge energy, which is probably why I resonate with Otto's Baroque in such an elementally refreshing way.

So this Thanksgiving...

The primary ordeal

2007-11-19T19:26:00.000-05:00

Everyone in the house is sick at the moment, except for me and the cats. What is it about cats that seems to let them mosey along through life without succumbing to the general unhealthiness of humans? Of course, when you look this up on Google, you find that the difference is whether the disease is contagious (from one to another in the same species), or zoonotic (from one species to another). And if you look farther, you can get fairly worried, not about the lifespan of the cat so much as that of yourself, from just the latin names of the things they can give you: Leptospirosis, Echinococcosis, Ebola fever...

The problem with most things that don't go down well with human beings is that of being "too soon old, too late smart". Things that we should discover early enough to do something about end up killing us. The newly discovered adenovirus 14 seems to offer a case in point.

It's generally true, too, that it's not the big things, like the nuclear bomb, that are going to kill us. There's too much at stake for any country to start a nuclear war. Back in 1945, that wouldn't have been true, but with the sophistication of weaponry today, the deterrent effects are pretty obvious given the "assurance of mutual destruction" that nuclear weaponry guarantees. Self-interest is keeping us from launching the war to end all humanity, at least so far.

But it's the small stuff, and anyone who tells you "don't sweat the small stuff" is a maxim-izing meathead. Viruses and bacteria and decomposition have always waged war for supremacy on this earth, and the viruses are getting smarter while we...

A study I heard about today on NPR says that Americans average two hours of TV a day and only 7 minutes of reading. What a difference. TV, generally speaking, stimulates somnolence and passive acceptance, while reading triggers thought and imagination and creativity.

So dumbing down is not a myth. It's as real as global warming. And, should the trend continue, and by the law of inertia it seems likely to continue, the next generation will be stupider than we are, and so on down the line. At some point the viruses and bacteria will be well positioned to take over and become the dominant species. Just as they were in the primordial soup. Welcome back, Rotter.

Cats have (ring)masters?

2007-11-07T21:30:00.000-05:00

There is actually a Moscow Cat Circus with one Russian ringmaster and 120 cats. He says that the secret of his protégés' performance is that he watches them, gets to know what they do, and builds their acts around that. He also acknowledges that you can't make cats do what they don't want to do.

He has discovered two simple principles, both of which could be the basis of a whole new approach to a better world for all.

Consider. The first point is observation. Quietly watching other beings as they go about doing what they do, without interfering or trying to spread democracy on them. Refraining from intervening to achieve one's own ends. Withholding criticism of their way of life, their beliefs, their preferences and their way of doing things. Admiring them for being who and what they are, and seeking to understand them better without criticism or complaint. Offering encouragement and applause for a job well done.

The second point is acceptance. Realizing that cats have staff, not owners. Understanding that cats dictate the terms on which you shall live with them. Knowing that cats will respond to open hands and arms and laps: that an occasional can of tuna will restore their faith in human kindness and you in particular.

Ah yes, but is the Moscow Cat Theatre exploiting the very nature of cat life for monetary gain? If the cats are as happy and cooperative as they seem to be, who can argue that anything cruel or untoward is happening? It must cost a fair amount of money to maintain 120 cats. They earn their keep, and the entire enterprise probably never has to deal with mice.

Our cat, Kaboodle, has always greeted me at the door after work. Lately, she has added a couple of tricks to her repertoire of attention-getters. In addition to meowing in response to my verbal affirmations, she sits back and raises her right paw. I take this to be her offer to shake hands, but if I'm not very quick, the paw is replaced on the floor.

The circus-worthy moment, however, comes when she stands on her back feet, even for only a few seconds, and extends her front feet into the air. So far as I can see, she does this in response to my bending down slightly, reaching out, and offering to scratch her ears.

One of these days, Kaboodle, you'll be ready for the Big Top. But please, don't run away to join the circus. We'd rather you be a barn cat than a Barnum cat.

The Evil Eye and the Susceptible Ewe

2007-11-06T22:38:00.000-05:00

Whenever Dusky, the senior male cat in the household, decides that he wants a particular place or seat, he simply jumps into it. Usually, the place he lands is on J's lap. But whenever the place has an incumbent, he takes a different, much more subtle approach: he gives the occupant the Evil Eye.

Invariably, staring at the opposition with an unbroken gaze is sufficient to force the abandonment of such a prized location. The loser, usually Kaboodle, slinks away, scarcely daring to glance backwards, but clearly mortified and somewhat angry at having to relinquish the venue. The more comfortable the resting place the more resented the victory.

What is most intriguing to me is that more often than not, he will stay in his new-found eyrie just long enough to establish his seniority. Then he will jump down again and wander off in search of new conquests. It is not that he particularly wanted the spot in the first place. It is more likely that he needed to boost his sense of self by maintaining his rights as he sees them.

His method, however, does not transport easily. I have tried it once or twice on the grandchild, but the fact that I have eyes of slightly different colors tends to fascinate rather than intimidate. It does not work on the cats, because they either do not know what I'm trying to do, or they are such excellent practitioners themselves that they are immune to its effects, or they get bored and look away.

According to Wikipedia, the origin of the evil eye is in the envy that one feels when others have good fortune. You may be casting it unintentionally on the person whose good luck you envy. But there is a defense: paint a blue bullseye on yourself or your house, and the Evil Eye will be rendered powerless. But you may feel a bit sheepish when people ask you about your decorative tastes.

It's about time.

2007-11-03T21:01:00.000-04:00

OK, so now we're goin' down Route 66. Today's birthday boy is your obedient scribe.

What's it like being 66? Well, for one thing, it's like being twice as old as you were at 33, and three times as old as you were at 22, and six times as old as you were at 11.

Before we try to figure out what it feels like to be sixty-six times as old as you were at age one, let's just stop and think for a moment. Do you remember what it was like to be one year old? If you do you must be a phenomenon.

Actually, it's not too bad. Speaking for myself, I'm more settled now than I was at any of those other milestones. Different things annoy me now from those that annoyed me then. When I was six, I wasn't particularly easily annoyed by children. Well, mostly I was afraid of them. But at 66, interacting with kids has become one of my least sought after activities. I think this is partly the result of attenuation of hearing. As I lose the range of upper frequency response, I am less able to make out what kids are trying to say, particularly at the early stages of child development. And what I can understand, in most cases, is not something that offers much in the way of subject interest. Perhaps as I grow older, they will too, and some moments of effective communication are to be anticipated whenever that may happen. But it is likely to be a brief window indeed, given that I'll be nearly 80 when the granddaughter is a mere 16-year old, assuming we both survive.

What, then, you ask, are the joys of being on Route 66?
They are, at a minimum, three in number.

1) To have survived for another year is a fine thing. Much preferable to the alternative.
2) Some people seem to take note of my age and appearance and show a certain, perhaps undeserved, deference. I no longer have to do all the dishes and all the cleaning. Which is a good thing because
3) Time has become a valued commodity. It's amazing how much there is to do each day, and how little of it actually gets accomplished. When I was twice as young as I now am, I could remember to do things very easily. It didn't mean that I did them, but at least I was aware that I needed to do them. Now, my best friend is a to-do list at Google Calendar.

And so, as life progresses toward unavoidable eventuality, knowing that it's highly unlikely that we'll someday be twice as old as we are today, let alone three times as old, we take the time to reflect on our turning off the freeway to follow Route 66 for a year. May this be the road less traveled by, making all the difference.

Mess-merized.

2007-10-28T00:14:00.000-04:00

As you get older, does time seem to move faster for you or slower? If, like me, you are still working for a living, chances are it seems to move faster. There are not enough hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the month nor months in the year to accommodate all that you have/would like to do. When you were younger, you had time to waste. Now, wasting time seems like a waste of time.

But then again, perhaps it is really a simple matter of being disorganized. It's not that I forget to write things down that I need to do. It's more that I forget to look at the list. Or maybe that I forget where I left the list. Or maybe I can't find my glasses to read the list.

Millions of philosophical nuggets have been authored over the years on this business of time and energy and work. Most of it falls into the Get Organized school of thought, which seems to suggest that if only you get into the habit of thinking ahead, you'll be successful. Hang up the clothes you'll need for tomorrow where you can easily get at them. Make your lunches for next week on Sunday evening, and freeze the ones for Tuesday through Friday. Keep a list of the foods you have in your freezer by date so nothing will go past its best by date. Set aside a specific time to do laundry, to vacuum, to do the dishes, to read, to meditate, to pick your nose....

The wonder of it all is, it works for some, and not for others. By the time I've read the self-help stuff on getting organized, there's no time left to get organized: another week is upon me.

Complicating all of this confusion is the environment of living in a house of three generations. I swore I would avoid this eventuality at any cost, but the Robert Frost's Law of Returning Offspring ('Home is the place where, when you have to go there/They have to take you in') has resulted in a kind of compound interest effect when it comes to disorganization.

Although I was brought up in a house that was probably less than 800 square feet on the ground floor, I now believe that children cannot be raised in any house that is less than 2000 sq. ft. in floor space. Why is this? Because of the proliferation of plastic. We live in a polymer paradise. For every phase of childhood, there is now something made out of plastic or encased in plastic that is vital to their well-being; something without which the young person will inevitably be unable to achieve a wholesome adulthood. And the best of these creations, such as play saucers and cribs and storybooks, will turn out to have been the ones that required alkaline 9-volt batteries for their operation.

Part of the function of these devices and the flotsam and jetsam that bobs in their wake is to slow me down, to make my progress more arduous. A simple walk to the door in the morning typically requires navigation through the treacherous shoals of multi-geometric shapes which fit inside some sort of octahedron that is not currently in the same room. It has not, in fact, been seen in this room for some time. These plastic triangles, rectangles, stars and squares have cleverly-designed thin edges that are guaranteed to immobilize any unsuspecting instep for at least several minutes.

In a similar vein, the closet doors are often wedged open by shoes belonging behind the opposite door. Because they have stepped out into the pathway and taken up a position, the range of movement of the door to my side of the closet is severely limited.

There can be only one karmic reason for this mode of living. I am meant to slow down. It's time to set my eyes toward the earth, to be more grounded, to notice what is around me for the sake of my own well-being. I cannot forever be rushing forward in hot, heedless pursuit of what captivates me at the moment. The time to achieve goals is past. The time to take note of where I am and what I am doing is upon me.

I need no more self-help than a good pair of glasses. Now where the hell did I leave them?

I hear ya

2007-10-21T10:56:00.000-04:00

Last night we went to a party where there was supposed to be live music. A group of four older guys with guitars and a drum kit were slated to play 50s songs, which is one of the two genres that I really enjoy, the other being classical instrumental from the baroque period.

When I got inside the venue, and saw the size of the speakers and the amplifier console with its upward curving red line of LEDs, I knew it was going to be a noisy night.

In anticipation, I had brought with me a pair of compressible foam earplugs that I sometimes use when the going gets too enthusiastic in our drumming rehearsals. With the first crash of the cymbals and the thwanging of the guitar, I could hear nothing but the shattering high frequencies that sounded like glass being broken. The bass guitar could not so much be heard as felt. As fast as I could, I rolled up the little cones and stuffed them into my ears. As the foam gradually expanded, the extreme noises died back, and I began to recognize the songs the band was playing. It actually became enjoyable as the crystal-shattering, floor-shaking ends were cut off while leaving a subdued middle.

I looked around at J who was busy trying to make herself heard and to respond to other people at our table. It occurred to me that the others might be experiencing this same pain. I got up and went to the car where I had stashed a package of these wonderful earplugs and brought them back to the table. Everyone took a pair.

I have tinnitus, as do many of the older people who were at the party. It manifests in my case as a high-pitched frequency that is constantly present, although not (thankfully) constantly heard. It does interfere with my enjoyment of orchestral music, primarily live, but also for several years now on CD and DVDs. The violins in particular trigger my awareness of this background noise. As some wag said, "The trouble with this music is there's too much sax and violins."

During the (mercifully short) evening, a young boy, perhaps seven or eight years of age, was the only dancer on the floor. I didn't think of it at the time, but since he was a mere ten feet from the band, in front of a large speaker array, there could be no doubt that his hearing was being damaged. Nevertheless, he did his moves for about ten minutes with his sneakers flashing those little red lights near the heels as he pranced around. It was cute and amazing.

When he has trouble later in life making out what people are saying, or cannot enjoy music because of a persistent ringing, will this young fellow blame his parents or the band or a society which is deathly afraid of silence, yet whose most popular catch phrase is, "I hear ya"? Or will we by that time have developed aural implants that instantly clamp down sound bursts that threaten our audiological well-being? Or will electricity have become so expensive to produce that the rock or country band with the thousand watt amplifiers have gone the way of the dodo?

An ice idea.

2007-10-16T21:06:00.000-04:00

I don't usually (ever) write about sports. It's not that I'm not a sport fan. If you're born Canadian, at some point you become a hockey devotee. It's in the genes. But there's been a breakthrough in the technology of the game that is going to take it in new directions.

As anyone who has ever skated can tell you, it's punishing work, learning how to skate. Your rear end takes an incredible beating as you struggle to master the balance and the starting and stopping. In fact, I found that I never did.

When I ice skate, I can only turn in one direction. I'm ideal for those outdoor and indoor public skating hours when everyone goes around and around in one direction and nobody has to stop (because many can't). I learned how to avoid crashing into people by crashing into other people. And when you stop, you're supposed to turn sideways on your blades and drop down so that the leading edge of your blade cuts into the ice evenly, sending up a flash of white snow that is really a cloud of ice chips. It looks so, so, suave. In fact, you can't play hockey if you can't hockey stop.

I'll never forget the time I decided to save ten bucks and sharpen my own kid's skates. I guess I was just ignorant enough of skate sharpening to think that you could take an ordinary grinder and run it over the blades. Trouble was, after all the trouble of lacing R's skates up, and pushing him out onto the ice, his feet shot out from in under him like Bambi's, and he couldn't even get himself back up again.

The secret, of course, was that the professional skate sharpening machine has a very thin, convex profile grinding wheel which they constantly keep formed by running a special profiling diamond dressing tool against it. The result is that the sharpened blade is slightly hollow-ground, giving two edges to it. It is these edges that determine whether you'll start, stop, slide or slip on the ice. So skating is like dancing on four knife blades pointing downward.

But of course I went through the era of the bobskates that strapped on my winter boots, so I never started out the hard way. You can stand on bobskates, and if your brother pushes you along from behind at a reasonable pace, you can pretend you're skating. That's kind of my style now, too, although at some point I did learn how to turn around 180 degrees and skate backwards until stopped either by the rink boards or by someone coming the opposite way (known in hockey parlance as a "check").

The big problem till now for anyone playing hockey is the extreme expenditure of energy in chasing after the puck. It requires exceptional skill to be able to follow the rubber around the rink, given that it can come from any direction at high speed. So a hockey player is a major anticipator: exceptional hockey players recognize and anticipate plays, using their peripheral vision to great advantage in positioning themselves on the ice to minimize the amount of energy they have to expend.

The physics of frozen water is such that as you skate, you're actually melting the ice through the pressure of your own weight on the narrow blades. But recently, after some years of testing, a Canadian inventor has developed a heated blade. This device has been shown to save energy and offer quicker starts and stops because it doesn't freeze up like the ordinary blade. Instead, it keeps the ice at a constant temperature slightly above freezing, because, as everyone knows, the friction is reduced between the steel and the ice by the thin layer of water. So, less energy is needed to skate.

So I guess I'm really not writing about sports after all, but rather about physics. Heating the skate blades is just another example of fundamental laws of physics with a practical application that would not have been possible without the invention of microchips and the improvement of battery technology.

My understanding of the physics of skating is very simple It's the Law of Levity. "What stands up must fall down."

Better buy the dozen

2007-10-10T21:39:00.000-04:00

With all the unfair, despicable, cowardly and brutal things going on in the (political) world around us, you'd be excused for not wanting to hear about another.

This is just a reflection on something that comes up time and time again in the course of my daily work. When I teach classes, sometimes I get to hear little bits of stories about the people who come to them.

Tonight, I had a dozen people, eager to learn the basics of Microsoft Word. I was into it for about ten minutes when a burly gentleman arrived and apologized for being late. I set him up with a computer, and got him caught up to the point I had left off with the class. In a few minutes, he was a bit lost, so I went over to him and helped get him back on track. During that minute and a half or so, he told me that he had just lost his job, a desk job in law enforcement, that he had held for 30 years, because he lacked the computer skills required by changes in the department, and was given no time to pick them up. He needed to climb the mountain of the learning needed to become competent in Windows and Office skills, because that was now a requirement. Fortunately, he had a working wife.

After the class was over, I got talking to another of my students, a man in his 40s, who lost his job as a machinist, because he had apparently had a back condition that was undiagnosed from birth, resulting in a deterioration that made him no longer capable of doing the kind of operations that machinists do. He too wanted the Windows and Office skills to make it possible to re-enter the workforce. Fortunately, he had no family or dependents.

There have been many others, especially during the last eight years, who have felt the sting of layoff, firing or unemployability, and they pass hopefully through our classes, which are probably too general to do them much good. In all this time, I have not heard of more than about three people who have succeeded in getting a job that paid a decent wage. One person solved the problem by working for his brother, but that is rare indeed.

This America is not a worker-friendly country any longer. There are no real breakthrough ideas as to how to deal with the older, hard-to-employ worker. There are few good jobs for mothers returning to the workforce, or starting for the first time since their children left home. There are no solutions that haven't been tried by thousands. And there is no compassion because there is a common perception that there are no solutions that aren't basically socialist in nature. And socialism is a four-letter word.

What would it take to change this country into a nation that actually cared about the poor and the powerless? Cared enough to try to change so that everyone is treated fairly?

Some form of the 12-Step Program should just about do it.

Admit that life in America has become unmanageable because of addiction to consumerism, power and the accumulation of wealth.
Realize that a Power beyond anything we have experienced can restore us to sanity. That could be, for example, the power inherent in an unrigged election system.
Make a decision (i.e. vote) for someone who is undeniably moral, decent, honest and open, who has the best interests of the world's people at heart, not just "what's good for GM".
Take stock of what exactly we mean by "morality" and develop a global perspective on what morality means in the context of our common existence on this blue ball.
Admit to the current and past (and in the case of Iran, future) "enemies" the exact nature of what we have done wrong to them as a nation and part of the world as we know it.
Become entirely ready to remove all these defects of character, attitude, and posture.
Humbly ask them to help remove these defects. For those who think God, however understood, has any interest in this, well, we need all the help we can get.
Make a list of all the countries and nations and peoples that we have wronged and publicly and as a matter of policy prepare to make amends to them all.
Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Releasing the wrongfully imprisoned at Guantanamo would be a good start.
Continue this process of moral and political inventory, especially through the rehabilitation of the mainstream media, which would long since have awakened from their acquiescent stupor and pernicious collaboration during the reign of the current administration.
Sought to improve our conscious contact with our conscience, both public and private, such that the right thing would always be done whenever there was a choice.
Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, then try to carry these principles (freedom, equality, opportunity, compassion) to others and practice them in all our affairs.

While I realize that "in a perfect world none of us would be here" (thank you, Eric), I also think that it is the lack of personal effort even to stop and think that there may be a better way than the one we're going now that causes so much indifference, fear, cruelty and self-indulgence. Every minute of every day is a great starting point to create a better world. So come on, let's do it. We need to heal the nation's addiction to greed and self-preservation. We can. We must. It's the right thing to do.

Oh my Gourd!

2007-10-01T21:55:00.001-04:00

Our duties as djembists and balafonists took us to the Darke County Fairgrounds in Greenville, Ohio on Saturday. For someone who only occasionally eats pumpkin pies, this was a revelatory experience. There were thousands of gourds of every shape, size, configuration and color. So what is a gourd anyway?

Apart from the scientific definition which you can find on the internet, a gourd is a cello, a flute, a drum, a banjo, a whole orchestra, really, judging from the amazing ingenuity with which these instruments were constructed. It is a table lamp, a bowl, a spoon, a water fountain... in fact, it can be almost anything that time and talent can make it.

Part of the musical entertainment tied in with this theme at the annual Gourd Show was an Indian musical group whose featured instrument was a sitar. The leader pointed out that the resonating chamber of a sitar starts out as a gourd, and in fact many sitars have a second gourd at the top. The spiritual aspect of the sitar's gourds was explained by a charming story of the rescue of the god of music from drowning in a river when a higher god tossed him a gourd.

What I think makes the gourd so fascinating is that it is as individual as we are. All shapes and sizes, all thicknesses and weights, and all different color shades and hues populate the world of gourds. In the hands of someone who respects the gourd, a gourd can take on a beauty or radiate a sense of humor that reflect the crafts-person's own.

And as a balafon player, I can testify that the graduated gourds that resonate under the bars of the balafon make it possible to be heard even when the drummers are in full flight.

If you teach it they won't come

2007-09-26T22:13:00.000-04:00

In my line o' work, I have 12 seats to fill three times a week in a computer lab at the local public library. When I started out five years ago, I filled them five to eight times a week, teaching how to use Windows 2000, and the basic how-tos about Microsoft Office programs. Now, into the sixth year, there are evident signs that I've done a good job: five people will sign up and two will come. And sometimes one of them won't have signed up for the class.

Of course it's possible that I've just become old, doddering and tiresome. Some days I really am tired, and it's hard to work up the enthusiasm of youth. But on a normal day, teaching is still what I like to do, because over the years, I think I have evolved from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.

There's a wonderful social side to all this, too. Some of my "students" have attended over 100 classes (in a few cases almost 200). They haven't mastered the computer, but they love to forgather and "learn something new every day".

Personally, I think they learn the most from each other. Some classes begin with one of them talking about something that they've just recently learned, or something that has happened to them, or someone they know. One gentle former teacher hands out vitamin C candies to anyone who wants them. And if one of them has a bout of hospitalization, they all want to know the details. This is not an ordinary class. Where else could you have someone talking about rehabilitating a goldfish that got speared by a great blue heron in a garden pond and can't swim because of a punctured swim bladder, and then everyone looks up Ardea herodias and becomes an instant expert on the subject?

I've been told that the attendance issue would be resolved if the library charged, say, $10 a class, refundable if you show up. No doubt it would be. Nobody would come. Many of the people who attend can't afford that money, because they're out of work, and the reason they're enrolled with me is that they hope to learn enough about spreadsheets to compete on the job market with the hundreds of twenty-somethings who have grown up with computers. Some have worked for thirty years of loyal office drudgery only to be downsized, laid off and not qualified for the kind of computer work that involves knowing Office and other programs. Windows is a mystery to them.

One older woman attended about eight classes before she sold her computer. But her daughter wouldn't let her off so easily. The lady showed up again a year later for another few sessions because her daughter got wind of the situation and gave her a computer for Christmas.

Most of my seniors would agree that you can't learn from a relative. My wife has learned not to ask me too many questions for exactly that reason: I'm the soul of patience with the library crowd, but I become short-fused when I have to come home and work through similar stuff with my nearest and dearest. I'm not sure why that is, but it's typical.

When I ask my students if they have anyone who can help them with their home computer, they'll say, "Oh, yes, my son/daughter installed the whole thing for me, but then, you know, they said 'You just press this and click that and move this over here and you'll be fine'. And you know, I STILL don't know how to get on the Internet or do email."

Some of the job seekers actually end up taking whatever I'm able to give them initially, and going off to a community college to do more detailed work. But for most of the rest of us, I suspect that the computer eventually begins to gather dust like an old doily, and when they pass on, the offspring dispose of the computer rather than being burdened by it.

Well, in the Cincinnati area at least, there is the Cincinnati Computer Consortium, and they recycle the old stuff so that eventually nobody will have to teach seniors how to use a computer. And, apart from the loss of social contact and interaction, that might be a good thing. When you're over 65, it's not necessarily fun to learn all this new technology, but it does open up possibilities for your declining years that may just keep you interested, and therefore alive. And that is a good thing.

I started out as a child

2007-09-23T20:39:00.000-04:00

We all started out as children. There is much to be said for the childlike attitude of wonder and discovery, which support investigation and learning and creativity. Some of us, however, don't apparently get much beyond that stage. The downside is the personality trait of someone who has the other childlike characteristics, such as showing off, and demanding immediate gratification, and possessiveness and controlling.

Much of our adult life, I think, is spent in learning how to deal with people who have experienced lopsided development, overcompensating for some perceived weakness by exaggerating the opposite trait. Most often this results in an obsessive need to control.

All of us have a need to control whatever we can in order to reduce the pain or irritation elements of daily living. But some of us put control before understanding. At his trial for heresy, Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Controllers suffer either from an excess of self-examination (leading to recrimination and guilt) or from an excess of denial. "We have seen the enemy and it is us", said Pogo.

In our drumming group from time to time, we have new people joining. Some of them are modest hangbackers, who are fascinated by what they hear, and gently try to emulate it until they become more confident. The opposite are the people who come in, think they understand the language of the piece, and end up beating the crap out of it to their own perception of the rhythm. The worst case is the dundun (bass drum) player who thinks he understands the rhythm, but soon loses it and ends up beating the drum at his own pace, or putting in accents where the song begs for silence.

Perhaps one of the most revealing aspects of learning how to perform in an African drum circle is the fact that over time, you begin to realize, if you have any sensitivity to the culture at all, that music is not performance. It is innately spiritual, and it is all about communicating within a group. It is about cooperation and perception, about reigning in your normal need for control in order to appreciate the contribution of others: it is about melding into a whole in order to create a greater. A drum circle is a symphony, or else it's a cacophony.

Some days you just get a little tired of people who don't get it. But then you have to remember that maybe that was how you started too.

Anything but humdrum

2007-09-16T18:17:00.000-04:00

We went up to Oxford to take up a position at the mouth of the Drum Barn driveway, early, early in the morning. It was the morning of the State-to-State Half Marathon, and by popular demand OGADE (or at least those of it who were awake) was to play as the runners and walkers progressed toward Indiana and back.

And play we did. It soon became clear that we could only occasionally match the actual footfalls of the runners, for some were serious marathoners who looked straight ahead, concentrating on their own internal rhythms and shutting out all other distractions, while others moved to a different beat.

The ones who won our hearts were the many who, upon coming within range of our drumming, smiled and grinned and waved and high-fived and yelled "Thank you" and "You're the best" and a few actually shifted their pace to match our relentless thumping. And then there were the ones who were serious enough about their running that you had to look carefully as they passed, but you could see the grin or the tiny uplifted hand motion, or the V-sign with the fingers.

These were throat-lumping moments. Momentarily we beat the drums a little harder, or threw in a little extra syncopation: you couldn't keep from doing it: energy became synergy and the runners and the drummers connected ever so briefly in a meeting of spirits. Then, as the runner or the group passed, we kept our own rhythmic marathon going, for we felt that if we stopped we would somehow break the bond of rhythm, even for those who were no longer within the sound of our drums, gourds, balafon and shakeres.

Special mention must go to Pete, our intrepid leader, whose skill at tuning and playing an array of empty coffee cans is near kin to the finest Caribbean steel drum craftsmanship.

Pool closing weekend

2007-09-08T17:04:00.000-04:00

It is a sad affair. The 16-foot plastic pool with the inflatable collar must be taken down at the end of the season. And the season ends once the nighttime temperatures hit values that are low enough to prevent daytime temperatures from building up to a comfortable level (even with a solar cover). And so, even though the current temperature is 92 F, and the pool is around 86, the comfort level of 89 degrees is no longer sustainable.

Thus, out comes the portable electric pump with the garden hose. This year the weather has been so dry that the water runs off faster, without being absorbed as in years past. But even as we write, a pop-up thunderstorm is muttering its tentative growls. The cats in the window seats are on the alert, which is to say that when a rumbling is heard, their ears twitch, but so far only one eye is open amongst them.

The garden hose will take probably 16 to 18 hours to drain some 2500 gallons; water that has seen considerable action, both human and chemical. Yes, we know that there are test kits and such that allow proper maintenance of pH levels, but in an informal way, the bleaching of a bathing suits and floating toys or the greenish strands of algae have served equally well as harbingers of lack of balance.

On the down side, the pool was a great entertainment center for the younglings. And when they weren't there, it was a fine place to float around and savor a Blue or a Blue Light (none of that wishy-washy American stuff for me).

As in other seasons, this was actually the second pool of the season. In the past, we had cat claw damage on the inflatable collar which rendered the pool unusable, so we went to a metal frame version. This one developed a serious hole in the bottom, probably from the efforts of a mole who came up in the wrong place. The result was a second pool of the inflatable type, because no metal frame ones were locally available by the time the damage became unrecoverable.

I suppose that if you were to amortize the cost of the pool, supplies, electricity and water you'd end up having to charge the swimmers about $3 each for every swim. But it's been a long, droughty summer, and when you're floating there, toes up with a Blue in your hand, you don't think mercenarily. Life is too good, and so short.

Barbecue: it's the pits

2007-08-28T20:49:00.000-04:00

Ever since our ancestors huddled together in caves blackened by fire and smoke, trying to keep warm while trying to reduce a mastodon ham-bone to something other than leather, there has been a handing down of knowledge about fire. So important was fire that the Greeks claimed that Prometheus stole it from the gods who were hoarding it as one more sign of their superiority. Superior firepower, I suppose you might call it. They rewarded him by chaining him to a rock and letting an eagle devour his liver once a day for eternity. The liver, of course, unless soaked in alcohol, regenerates itself.

Somewhere along the line of Western civilization, the knowledge and fear of fire was supplanted by the taming of fire. When we wash our clothes, we can hang them out to dry, or, much more conveniently, bundle them into a dryer with a cloth that makes them smell as though we hung them out. The furnace replaces the soot-blackened firepit. And if it's not warm enough for you, there are many different kinds of heaters.

And so the last vestigial bit of knowledge about firemaking is dying out. As, for example, today when my next door neighbor's grandson, early twenties, dragged out the smoker kettle and prepared to set a barbecue dinner for his beloved. Sitting in the Zinn Center, I observed only his hands and feet through the wide boards of our deck. But that was enough to tell the whole story.

First, he poured in a fairly generous portion of a new bag of briquets. So far, so good. Next came about a quarter of a spray bottle of firestarter. Then came the wooden matches. About two dozen of them.

The wind was up a bit, and Grandson had a lot of trouble getting a flame to catch. He's close to six feet tall, and it's a long way for a match to fall and retain its flame. Some matches indeed fell into the firepit, but landed in such a way that they could not catch the fuel. Some fell across the grill, and so other matches had to be used to push them into the fire. Bending over would be dangerous if your reaction time is factored by your height.

After a time and a tussle and the addition of more starter fluid, a fairly decent plume of orange flame shot up, and G went inside to get the chicken breasts. After carefully applying at least four different doses of dry seasoning to the topsides, he went back to find the fire had left no discernible trace of its existence. The occasion called for more fluid and more matches, and apparently more wind.

Eventually, another dozen matches later, he saw flame, and encouraged it by spraying the starter stuff directly into the cauldron. He was rewarded by the heavy smell of refinery and a generous flare. At this point, he put the chicken on the grill.

Covering the grill, he went back inside. Upon his return, the flame perversely had died down again. He treated it to several fresh infusions of starter spray, around the outside edge. Some additional flames burst up, but apparently not enough to suit the recipe, for he then began lighting matches and tossing them onto the unburned briquets. Back into the house for a few minutes, and soon out again to turn the birds.

At this point, he added equal amounts of condiments to the conflagration for the second side, squirted a bit more starter, and threw in a few more lights. Then the cover went on again, while the neighborhood began to smell like the Esso truck had just made another delivery.

Finally, the chickens gave up, and he replaced them on the grill with hamburgers or buns: it was difficult to tell through the smoke. And then, at last, the reason for this labor of love, this multimatch extravaganza, his girlfriend arrived.

I do not know how the meal turned out. I can only guess. It might have been the original or the crispy. I speculate that it was historical, in any case. It had to have tasted like one of Ogg's attempts at mastodon meat when he tried using tar pit blobs as briquets. That was before Ogga took over and forbade him to enter the kitchen ever again. And just think: it could all so easily have been otherwise, if the ancient knowledge of the mystery of fire had been passed from father to son just one more time.

Unintended Coon Sequences

2007-08-26T22:21:00.000-04:00

So just one raccoon, although it might have been two, blew my whole weekend, and there's still more to do.

I deconstructed the Zinn Center just enough to be able to wrestle with a 14 by 14 foot chicken-wire top, made by joining four strips of what the manufacturers elegantly term "poultry netting" with wire ties (also called "zip ties") every foot. It took about four hours to staple the netting in place and clip the individual wires to remove the extra footage. The next problem was to figure out how to fill the 3.75 inch gap between the Zinn Center and the side of the house, which, to make it more complicated, has clapboard aluminum siding.

The Zinn Center is not straight vertical, because it follows the slight slope of the deck. It had to be this way to make the six foot wide screen cloth wrap evenly around it. So there's a gap at the top that tapers to almost nothing at the bottom. Add to that the serration of the clapboard, and you have a very unwelcome combination of incompatible surfaces. An open door, you might say, for flies and mosquitoes.

The previous solution was to stuff the joints with insulation rolls. They occasionally slipped, but could be held in place by cardboard and duct tape. But when the raccoon(s) started throwing the stuff around, I had to consider other techniques and materials that would be more resistant to vandalism.

I've settled, I think, on a spray concoction that is like the foam insulation you can spray into cracks, but this stuff is not supposed to expand into huge grotesque beige puffballs that have to be trimmed with a saw. The only time I've ever used that material, it called to mind those horror movies where a whole town is overwhelmed by an endless rolling ball of goop.

And then, of course, there was the cleanup, which is only partly done as of this writing. Vacuuming the deck would have gone more quickly had not the sweeper suddenly ingested a label or something that caused a total embolism in the hose. Another fifteen minutes of disassembly and reassembly made the day seem even more tedious.

The toughest part is yet to come: to fold the chicken-wire into disposable packets that can be dropped into a garbage bag without ripping it to pieces on the way in. Meanwhile, two raccoons have already been back up on the deck, checking on the new configuration, or maybe just scouting for more green tomatoes to pull prematurely off the vines. Let's hope they regard the chicken-wire as a boundary, rather than a challenge.

Reality shows.

2007-08-23T20:48:00.000-04:00

Well, the raccoons have, as they always do, won.

I built a screen room 8 x 8 near the back french doors of our dining area, resting on the deck, but not actually attached to the house. It's a "Florida Room", in a sense, which we call the Zinn Center.

J's love of everything raccoon has finally encouraged them to bolder moves. Starting with the nightly feedings of whatever was left over (and J's leftovers are as good as some restaurant's entrees), the bandits moved in. They would walk right past us when we were sitting around the firepit, on their way to the bar and grill. Eat at Joe's.

Next, they found there were tomatoes: bright red orbs that looked like Christmas balls. And even better, if you followed the vines up to the deck level, there was the intriguing sound of a fountain in one corner. Of course, ascending the tomato vines has its dangers. On two separate nights, the damn things broke off in a cascade of raccoon fur and greenery.

Arriving at the fountain, they found fish. Carpe diem. At least they looked like fish, but when they got them in their mouths they chomped down on plastic. And raccoon rage being what it is, they bit the nose and mouth off one of them, shredded the plastic water lilies, and flung the fish to the far reaches of the deck.

Tonight I took a closer look at the Zinn Center. I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but it was obvious that the torn and battered paper lantern that formerly swung from the center of the Center and now rested on top of one of the ceiling screen panels could only have gotten there by something breaking through the other screen and reaching in to haul the lantern to the top. Only one screen panel remains still firmly attached to the frame. The other is the same panel I had to repair when one of our temporarily adopted cats decided to have a sleepover.

So plans are afoot to replace the top with a new screen, then build a framed roof with clear acrylic panels that can be raised to let the heat dissipate, and the whole to be covered with the tarp to act as a heat shield when necessary. If not, then at least some combination of materials that will let heat out, cool air in, and provide a visual path to the wonders of the summer sky. It was 110 degrees in there late this afternoon.

Raccoons are not to blame, of course. They are cute, intelligent, curious creatures with a love of anything new or shiny or food-looking. They pull things apart in order to better understand them.

They're so much like grandchildren.

Maybe I'm all wet, but ...

2007-08-05T08:58:00.000-04:00

Saturday afternoon, J and I returned from a drumming gig at the Oxford, Ohio farmers' market. It was hot and humid, and when I finally joined her in the pool, the afternoon popup storm was waiting to begin. It reminded me of a long-ago visit to Puerto Rico, where the saying is, "If you don't like our weather, wait a minute."

J climbed out to attend to other matters, but I decided to stay and see what might transpire. I put up a lawn umbrella at the side of the pool to sit under, and turned off the normally turbulent pool pump. As the current died away, the sprinkles began.

I sat in the pool with my eyes as close to the water as my nose would permit. Each raindrop splash instantly created a bubble about half an inch across. At first, I could count them, but very quickly, it became an impossible task. And as the rain became steadier, the bubbles were burst immediately by the drops that came more frequently. Soon, I saw no bubbles at all, but only small columns of water popping up, sporting tiny spheres on their tips.

The ripples generated by the pelting rain countered across each other in patterns of interlaced diamonds and circles. I submerged to listen to the music of the showers as I had many times in my childhood at the lake. This time, however, I could no longer hear the soft, high singing of the raindrops that I loved so much as a youngster. But I could hear the pinging and popping that is heard nowhere else in our lives as the rain dented the surface and the waves fanned out.

As I emerged, a sudden menace of thunder reached my hears. It turned out to be the only rumble of the afternoon, but it sent me back to the garage to change into my clothes. I went upstairs to the Zinn Center (named after a beloved friend of ours in Florida) which is essentially a framed, screened 8-foot cube on the deck with a tarp on top. The pattering and then pounding of the rain on the canvas brought back memories of what J refers to as my "two camping trips".

It was a day to be savo(u)red. If I had a waterproof camera, I could have taken one picture, which would have saved a thousand words.

Your moment of Zen

2007-07-18T23:06:00.000-04:00

One of the incentives we use at work is a website called the "Good Job Blog". On it are listed members of our staff who have shown some initiative that goes beyond what is normally asked or expected. Anyone can be cited, and anyone can propose a citation.

It's a nice touch, I think, in terms of not merely motivating people to go the extra mile, but also because it shows people where opportunities exist to do extend themselves.

Many organizations use the same type of public exposure with their employee of the month awards. Some schools have signboards on their lawns that name a particular teacher, or a student, as an example for others.

As a Canadian, I have generally been uncomfortable with this kind of publicity, because we have a certain reserve about us, very like the British. A British comedian put it this way: "We don't talk about ourselves, you know. That would not be polite. Of course, we'll talk about anybody else..." And so, when I get the occasional mention in the Good Job Blog, I shuffle my feet, say "Awww, shucks" and go on about my business, even though there's a certain undeniable buzz that comes from seeing your efforts publicized.

In America, the saints and the scoundrels get unending exposure. With their enormous communications infrastructure, Americans never seems to tire of bringing people in front of a microphone or a camera, or plastering their picture (especially in the news media) on any convenient TV channel.

Why this need to publicize? Why does everyone have to know what everyone else says or does or thinks? How does that improve the life of the listener or watcher?

In some cases, it does. It is always worthwhile to hear or see the Dalai Lama. There are just some people who are wiser than the rest of us. But who the hell cares about Paris Hilton's jail time or her determination to sort out her life now that she's on probation? I won't even mention American Idolatry.

The internet has made it possible to have instant access to millions of people, most of whom are of little or no interest to the people who look them up. With new storage technology, it is possible to maintain records on almost anyone forever (or at least long after they die). Today I was reading about an FBI program that can locate, identify and record every keystroke on any computer that they want to examine over the internet.

America has been panicked by its government into trading privacy and liberty for security. We all know how this has been done over the last six years. And we also know how limited the security is, and how easily it can be breached. As Bob Dylan put it, "The times, they are a-changin", and not for the better. Where in Canada, do you walk into a public library past a sign that lays out penalties for carrying a concealed weapon?

There is hope, of course. But the way things look at the moment, the lame duck is still the top dog, wielding unconstitutional power as it suits his purposes, which, in the end, come down to oil and profits. The only instrument he trusts to ensure a constant supply of both is war.

J has a saying I like: "When the love is gone, there is only the money."

I would apply this to contemporary America. An administration that is as money-mad as this one is surely does not love America. But as the Dalai Lama put it so well: "If you have a situation that you can do something about, why worry? And if you have a situation that you can do nothing about, why worry?"

One more box

2007-07-12T22:48:00.000-04:00

The other day, I came across one more box.

A good part of my family history has been captured on videotape. My first camera weighed about 15 pounds. It was a used one that we bought when our firstborn boy was at the stage where the proud parents want to capture every breath, twitch and burp. The camera was a used one in the Sony Beta format (remember how VHS won that battle?). It produced pastel colors in all lighting conditions, but through force of imagination, I could convince myself that they were vivid. And the viewfinder was a tiny TV monitor inside an eyecup, in black and white.

Then we graduated to a compact VHS format that produced a very high quality picture but sound, not so much. So we now had two different formats, neither one compatible with the other. However, with the aid of a special adapter, it was possible to play the new format in a standard VHS player. The old camera got thrown out somehow.

Then came DVD, and the need to convert the old formats to the newest and greatest. To handle the original betas, of which I had many, many hours, I eventually found a working Betamax on eBay for $100. I went through all the tapes and dubbed them and did a bit of editing, ending up with about three dozen DVDs. The compact VHS was a little easier, because the camera had outputs that would connect directly to the DVD recorder. And for those old movies that I had already converted to VHS, I bought a combination machine, one half VHS and the other DVD burner.

The Betamax stopped rewinding fairly early, so I hastened through the task and ended up completing it just as the machine gave up the ghost.

Without going into more tedious detail, let me say that I was well satisfied with these amateur conversions, and made a few copies for my progeny (after all, it was mostly their hockey games that were featured) and other interested parties.

Then, the other day, I came across one more box.

My grandparents would have disbelieved if confronted by the archival capabilities of today's digital technology. My parents would have been thrilled to be able to have sound instead of silent 8mm recordings of their young. Sound film did come in during the latter half of my childhood, but they would not indulge in the wasteful practice, because it cost more and involved special projection equipment. I remember them as having only one Kodak projector for their entire lifetime, and how hot it became to the touch after an evening of shows. Sprocketless film handling was a new feature that they never experienced, and that was a shame, because as the films got older they became more brittle and intermissions became more frequent as Dad spliced the films, often in mid-show. At first, it was a special acetone-based cement, but later, little tabs of splicing tape took its place. And who could forget those sudden bursts of circular color wheels which receded to white as the film became stuck and melted in the fierce Fahrenheit fire of the bulb?

Not all memories can be kept. Not all should be kept. But still, I have to wonder, as I gaze into that one more cardboard box, what have I forgotten that I am not likely to see again? A child spitting up some offensive baby food? A father and son building a snow bear? A Doctor Snuggles cartoon?

The generation that follows will not have the luxury of forgetting. It will all be there on YouTube.

Dancing to a different drummer

2007-06-27T10:43:00.000-04:00

Last night, the OGADE band performed at the Fitton Center for the Performing Arts in Hamilton, Ohio. In the darkened theater, about a dozen of us took our drums and flutes and rainstick and crammed into one dimly-lit corner of the stage area. The dundun player had to be careful not to whack the djembists on either side.

Despite the constricted space, the local troupe of belly dancers who call themselves the "Circle of Rhiannon" danced into the center and performed a series of group and solo dances that had everyone fascinated and wanting more.

Obviously the aesthetic and primal appeal of this performance is very strong. The insistent beating of the drums takes hold of the heart rhythms of the audience, and the swirling of colorful costumes and the liberated, sexy movements of the dancers draw the eyes of everyone. As a drummer in the back row, I could see that the entire audience was intent on the action on stage, and many were swaying to the beat.

It is good to have these occasions. Especially, it is good that audiences in the conservative world of Cincinnati have so many occasions to be exposed to live world music and dance.

When I drive around Hamilton with my moonroof open, I am assaulted by country music, country rock, christian(!) rock and hip-hop crap with indistinguishable lyrics played by cars that thump obnoxiously at intersections while waiting for lights that seem never to change. Though I close the moonroof, I cannot escape the monotonous, unimaginative thumping. It is enough to rattle the metal signs that say, "LOUD STEREO: Penalty $500".

Public exposure to live dancing and live music of other cultures helps to broaden the cultural awareness of the local citizenry. The current political climate, in which all things Arabic/Muslim are equated with terrorism demands to be countered by whatever means are available. Multicultural music and dance are powerful ambassadors for acceptance, appreciation, and understanding.

Mister Resister

2007-06-24T20:53:00.000-04:00

More often than not, when I sit at the dinner table with J, the repast ends with an attempt by our cat, Kaboodle, to sit on my lap. Sometimes I rebuff this action. These are times when the day has been long, I am tired, or otherwise preoccupied by some project that remains unfinished.

Other times, I welcome the visit. Quality time with a cat is not something to be taken for granted. Of the four cats, only Kaboodle finds the time to sit on me, or make the attempt, on any regular basis. Evil, the gray cat and master of perverse behavior, greets me in the morning, but only because I am the first one up, and he thinks there is a possibility that I will feed him some treat that I would not dare to give to the others. Even so, his greetings are confined to touching my calf with his tail, and walking between my legs as I try to navigate the kitchen. If all other methods fail, he plops down across what he knows will be my path, and waits.

Kaboodle knows that I am not to be trifled with in the morning. I have an early start in order to get to my job to check the computers before the staff begin to arrive and use them. There is no place for trivial pursuits, such as opening cans of tuna or spreading treats on the floor.

Evil's behavior is in no way endearing. It is a sign of a desperate attempt to gain mastery. He has conquered others in this house. On more than two occasions I have stepped in a bowl of milk that I didn't see, placed on the floor under the overhang of the kitchen cabinet. Once, a can of some kind of meat by-product flew down the basement stairs as a result of similar unfortunate placement. And, since I am the one who spills these victuals, it falls to me, morally at least, to clean them up, thereby subtracting even more minutes from the total available to complete my autopilot morning rituals.

I learned that the milk was a distraction offered up in order to allow the giver a chance to prepare food in relative peace, which is to say, without having to step over a recumbent cat several times.

Given these circumstances, perhaps I should lighten up a little on Kaboodle. She does wait until dinner is nearly over, or my legs are uncrossed, whichever she notices first. She keeps her distance in the morning but greets me with her tail a furry question mark and summons up a squeaky meow whenever I come home. And she is very soft.

But answer me this: why do cats seek out and suck up to the person in the family who is most allergic? I guess they understand that our immune systems are already weakened, so our resistance is lowest.

To each his zone

2007-06-21T22:27:00.000-04:00

I used to think that one day all songs would have been written: all the possible combinations of the chromatic scale would be used up, and all that would be left to do would be to recycle the old stuff, maybe by putting new words to it. Not being mathematically inclined, I would further wonder about the number of meaningful permutations and combinations of English words. Wouldn't there come a time when nobody could copyright a song or a poem or story because they'd all have been written? Ecclesiastes (Koheleth - The Preacher) certainly said so.

That was B.G. Before Google.

Now, we are awakening to the fact that there is a vast amount that is not known, that has never been seen by most of the world's eyes, or heard by most of its ears. It is only our limitations of imagination and creativity that put bounds to our experience. Defensively, we enter the comfort zone, where the strange and the challenging are filtered out.

The urge to pressure others to adopt our beliefs and philosophies and customs, I think, comes from being outside our comfort zone, rather than wanting others to share it. "Mission" comes from the Latin "mittere", meaning "to send". When we are outside our zone, we feel the need to enlarge it to feel safer, so we send out missionaries of one sort or another. Some are people, some are simply messages of various kinds. The main opposition to missions of this type arises when other people are in their own comfort zones, and do not wish to be disturbed, let alone challenged, and definitely not converted.

So in all this time, we have not, apparently learned or accepted that most people like to be left alone, or at least helped to cope with life on their own terms. What is true of individuals is true collectively. Nations do not appreciate being invaded, occupied and despoiled in the guise of being "helped". People get upset when their world is turned upside down by the intervention of power over which they have no control.

It is not that we don't know all this. Deep from within that tiny place called "conscience", there is a voice crying out to us to do what is right; to respond to human need, not human greed. But years of being in a comfort zone of having everything we could possibly need and most of what we could possibly want have deafened the inner ear to that voice. Walls have been built, and continue to be built, to keep out those who annoy us. A wall of bureaucracy is stronger than a wall of concrete. The wall of indifference is strongest of all.

All walls eventually fall. The energy we waste in building them could have been used to eliminate the reasons why we build them in the first place.

Getting Centered.

2007-06-02T10:40:00.000-04:00

Last evening J and I went to a local building on Main Street which serves as the center of Zen Buddhist activities in our city. On the first Friday night of every month, those who like to drum, play flutes or shakers or whatever foregather to exercise their creative muscles.

Symbolically perhaps, the tall old building has a very tall and steep staircase, with a landing half way up for those who may be wish to stop for a while and contemplate the possibilities. There are two: go up or down. To reverse directions would be to give in to the laws of aging and gravity. Onward and upward.

At the top, we entered a room with a sofa, desk and some people from our group. After unpacking J's djembe, I sat for a while thinking about stairlifts and catapults and oxygen masks and pitons while the group discussed its next gig. In the absence of either of the two instruments I usually play (the dundun or bass drum, and the balafon or xylophone) I decided to get up and poke around and discover the Center.

There were two back rooms: one a kitchen with a small cubicle containing an empty cabinet (appropriate) on which a small Buddha sat, a box of matches and some incense sticks. The kitchen proper had a refrigerator and microwave, a huge coffee urn and a poster about how to make donations. A doorway led to the HVAC system/cleaning closet.

Retracing my steps, I passed by the drummers into a very large, high-ceilinged room with large windows facing the street with blinds drawn. A rectangle of mats and beanbag cushions was laid out before the benign gaze of a second, larger Buddha on another cabinet.

No lights were on, but the setting sun provided enough to see a parchment divider screen to the left. Behind it lay a large supply of mats and beanbag cushions.

Like Goldilocks, I decided to try on a few for size. I soon discovered that proper placement of these devices induces a very deep state of meditation, one that some cultures call "sleep". Meanwhile, the drummers beat out a number of patterns, some classic and some improvised. When you lie on the floor like that, the bass beats become particularly pervasive and hypnotic.

Time passed, and we made our way slowly down the mountain.

And from The OaklandNews comes this bit of Zen wisdom: Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me the hell alone.

We were taken for a ride

2007-05-15T23:29:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday, May 12, 2007, was just one more in a series of anniversaries. This time it was the 12th reminiscence of J and The Old Guy getting married on the beach at Treasure Island in Florida's St. Petersburg area.

So we went out and bought a car.

Neona the Canuck Neon finally croaked. She had transmission problems: couldn't get out of second gear. She couldn't run her engine fast enough to sustain the effort, and even when she got revved up, it didn't last. Slow down and she'd shift back to a more comfortable second gear at 40 miles an hour.

Her steering was starting to falter, and her rear struts had long since been bent out of shape by The Old Guy's habit of carrying too much home improvement material in her trunk. Take her over a railway track and you bent your sacroiliac.

Perhaps worst of all was the total lack of air conditioning. The medical report was that they'd have to remove her dashboard to get at the non-functioning heat exchanger. So to get her to where she could be considered roadworthy again was estimated at around $1900 US.

Well, we did lay out $200 about three weeks earlier to replace a leaking oil pan gasket, but that was where the bucks stopped.

We didn't start out on Saturday to buy a car. We went to look at a Scion, the boxy offering that J wouldn't find fitting, but fortunately, the new models were coming in but hadn't yet arrived. So we moved on, past the Toyotas to the Hondas. And whaddya know: the salesman found a 2004 Honda Accord with a mere 40,500 miles or so on it for us to test drive.

It was love at first flight. I had forgotten what a real car felt like. Power to spare, but a gas sipper, and working air conditioning (an impressive selling point in these parts). Electric windows and, get this, an electric sunroof. So THIS is how the other half has been living all these years!

So now the Honda Automobile Corporation is down by one car, but the Honda Finance Corporation is rubbing its hands at the beginning of a five-year relationship. Or to put it more ironically, TOG has to work for five more years to pay off the car he needs to get him to his job.

And Neona? Well, her trade-in value boiled down to $500 US. I guess that's the floor price they're willing to pay anyone who brings in a junker. So she has been replaced in TOG's heart and soul by a brand new girl: Wanda Honda. How fickle he is.

Even though the new car is a thing of beauty and a toy forever, J topped it when she presented TOG with a small radio-controlled sailboat. That was right on Target! What presents of mine! Perfect fit for the 16-foot swimming pool that has yet to be reinstalled for the summer. On windless days, we can take out one of our floor fans to the water's edge and keep on tacking.

Just trying to keep a roof over our heads

2007-05-10T22:22:00.000-04:00

So, yeah. Here we see The Old Guy (TOG) sitting in a nearly-completed “florida room” on the back deck of the house. How did that happen, you ask?

Well, since the dawn of time, we’ve had dining tents or gazebos of one form or another. Each year we have to replace them. The tops rip, or the plastic deteriorates, or somebody stumbles while trying to operate the door zipper and shreds the mosquito netting.

Each year, we go out to find a new dining tent. But alas, this year, none was to be found at an affordable price. This awakened the Spirit of Carpentry in TOG, and soon he was haunting the local Lowes home improvement store. The idea was to reuse the last tent, which was 8 by 8 feet, as the cover for an 8 * 8 dining tent frame made of 1 by 2 inch furring strips.

A couple of weeks and much sweat equity later, a sturdy frame of 2*4s emerged, and screen cloth that was six feet wide by 24 feet long was wrapped around it and stapled down. The tent idea was discarded, as was the tent, when it was noted that it wouldn't fit over the frame.

A door was devised that had magnets embedded in the edge to ensure that no cats could leave the compound. At the suggestion of interested family members, rafters were added, and the entire roof area was first screened beneath them, and then the whole assembly was covered with a retractable plastic tarpaulin.

Back in the day, Dad built various features of our cottage, including putting it together out of a "prefab" delivered kit. We thought prefab meant "pretty fabulous".

Perhaps that was where the carpenty bug bit (followed closely by the black fly). At any rate, trying hard to adhere to “measure twice and cut once” and other tribal memories, TOG made a couple of errors that were mainly inconvenient, and so perhaps a better name for the unit would be “the Leaning Tower of Pizza”.

The main discrepancy is that the original dining tent flared at the bottom, out to ten feet square. So we had 100 sq. ft. to accommodate us. But by making the sides vertical (the way Dad did it, using a level), that total floor dimension shrank to 64 square feet. So the maximum occupancy sign will have to read “Four adults or four cats”. But then, if the sides had flared out at the bottom, the screen cloth wouldn’t have fit. So you see how torn The Old Guy was at times in trying to meet all the group’s needs. And how he now understands how an architect feels at a planning meeting.

Of course, the first night found the Grey Cat Who Personifies Evil up on the rafter, presumably by climbing up the screens. But that was before the top was screened in. Now he is content to lie across the path of anyone who dares to use the Catbana.

The best idea of all came about 75% of the way through the project, from J, of course.

“Why not fit it right up against the patio door, so we can leave the inside doors open and the cats can go out anytime they like and sit in the screenhouse with us?”

And that, Dear Reader, explains the batts of fiberglas insulation between the exterior wall of the house and the abutting wall of the Catbana. We may not have black flies in season but we sure have mosquitoes. As the saying goes, “Once bitten, twice shy.”

The finesse fish I tasted

2007-04-22T11:43:00.000-04:00

Did you ever enjoy grilled fish, fresh from the furnace?
I did.
When I was a teenager in Toronto, we had an Armenian next-door neighbour, Ed, who was a man of all talents, and a well-respected carpet merchant. His wife, Winnifred, was a classical pianist who gave lessons to a number of students, most of conservatory-level talent, on a baby grand piano which was large enough to fill the dining room of their 1.5 storey 1940's house. The piano stood on a very fine maroon persian rug, of course, leaving just enough room left for the student and her master to sit at the keyboard, metronome ticking. But Ed always saw to it that there were fresh flowers on the piano.

Everyone called Ed what sounded like "Hopar" to my ears, a term of endearment and respect meaning "uncle", I was told. He adored his wife and her music and her students. He would sit in the kitchen for hours over an espresso and absorb the many repetitions of Schumann and Brahms (and the Liszt goes on) whom most pianists would find difficult to perform, waiting for Chopin and Mozart. If neither of these was forthcoming within a reasonable time (two espressos), he would disappear to the basement, where he had built a darkroom.

In his country of birth, Ed had been a professional photographer. That is, he took the pictures (often using a view camera with its enormous plates) and processed them whether in color or B&W, the latter being his creative favourite.

When he came to Canada, he was mentored by a previous immigrant who was a rug seller, and in due course, opened his own shop south of the 401 highway on Avenue Road. None of these merchants were in competition with each other: they were a community and most were directly related, so they would lend a hand when one was needed.

Hopar and I became great friends: I spent many a summer leisure hour in conversation with him in the back yard. He planted a mulberry tree (later to be known as "that damned mulberry"... a term my father coined when out in his garden rooting up the weeds and the unstoppable progeny of the tree, even though it was on the far side of Ed's yard.)

One summer, Ed gave me a job at his store for two weeks while his regular help was on vacation. I typed invoices, confirmed installations with customers, kept payment records and when things were slow, tacked down expensive rugs on the floor of the shop and sprinkled dry cleaner and vacuumed them. New shipments would arrive, and we would wrestle them into the storage area. It was fascinating, tiring and he even paid me, although I would have worked for him for nothing.

Ed's accent rendered the "i" as a long "e" in English, and the reverse. So one day I found myself puzzled for a moment or two when I saw him spreading fertilizer on his extensive border garden. I asked what it was, and he said, "The very best ship sheet."

Nevertheless it was Ed's tending, care and advice that nursed a sparse wisteria vine on his side of our back porch from a pathetic trellis of six or seven vines to an impenetrable forest of violet cascades and dark green leafiness. And his roses and cucumbers were paragons of their species.

One summer day, Ed invited me to dinner, and said that we were going to have greelled feesh. I knew it would be good. We went inside, but rather than to the stove, we descended to the basement. Ed opened the furnace. Inside was a steel tray of coals, sitting on the big circular burner that was part of the typical coal-to-gas conversion. On it was a grill, and on that were three white fish, that from my cloistered experience of mainly breaded fish sticks, I failed to recognize.

Hopar turned them over gently, closed the door, and went into the darkroom to show me his latest work. From the drying line he unclipped this picture. Five minutes later, we retrieved the perfectly grilled whatever-it-was, repaired to the kitchen, and with certain fresh additions from the garden, sat down in the guest bedroom, now converted to a dining area. Beethoven thundered from the music room. The metronome ticked relentlessly. But the furnace fish was finesse fish. I have not tasted its like since.

New owners inhabit our houses now. The music and the strong Armenian coffee are long gone. I have no idea what transpires in the neighbourhood these days, except that the price of those houses has increased more than tenfold. But I have no better wish for you than that you may enjoy neighbours on all your boundaries like Ed and Winnie.

(I wrote this with Canadian spellings in honour of my favourite neighbour who did me so many favours.)

Drumming up support for the newlyweds

2007-04-14T21:58:00.000-04:00

So let me share with you my impressions of a wedding we attended today.

This was the first time I can remember being the wedding band. And we were golden! The couple had requested that the OGADE group provide background music for the guests, although African drumming is not, by nature, a background type of activity. Far from it.

The day started out raining and dreary and progressed from there to dreary and raining. The location was at a farm and wilderness preserve some 20 km west of the city of Hamilton, Ohio. Although J and I were almost the first of the band to arrive, almost every available parking place was occupied, so I was directed to a space behind the drive shed.

After unloading Jo and her djembe as close as I could to the pavilion (a massive white plastic tent at the margins of a very large lawn), I drove around as instructed, but lost my nerve when I put the car into reverse and the wheels turned and spun in two ruts made for and by the occasion. Neona and I solved the problem by parking her behind another car on the lawn. No ruts for the wicked.

Entering the tent, we located our spot in the far corner, next to a very large white box with a vent on the bottom. The family had rented this massive electric heater to blow hot air into the tent. There was another one at the opposite end.

At least a hundred people were convening as the rest of our group rendezvoused and began to noodle on the various instruments. L had brought a melodious metal balafon which he had made at a workshop in Ghana. It has a beautiful sound and plays easily, enough to be heard over the thumping of the djembes and dunduns and bucking up the courage of the quavering flute.

One of our members lives up the road. He had the sense to drive his tractor, should any of the guests' vehicles require extrication from the muddiness. He is also a fine gourd and scraper player, never breaking the rhythm, which helps when you are striving for syncopation.

Our first number was a hot one indeed. The massive electric heater was working at full bore, and although the tempo stayed constant, the temperature shot up. However, this was only a temporary problem, since during the next piece, the heater failed, and only cold, moist air blasted us. Through it all, great artists that we were, we kept the beat.

Then, it came time for the ceremony. Everyone stood up throughout, which meant that nobody could see properly. Some knew how to use the sound system while others did not. The usual stuff, although I must say in retrospect that this was the first time I had heard someone read "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss as a wedding blessing or whatever it was. Other magic moments were applauded enthusiastically as well, and to our surprise and delight, one of the valedictorians read the lyrics of Leonard Cohen's "Dance me to the end of love". Then came the vows, accompanied by the ring falling in the mud (as I later learned), and the circle of life moved on.

At that point the thumping of J's lone djembe invited us to ramp up the celebration again. Quickly the Billyphon joined the fray, and soon all the drummers, shakers and scrapers were in the thick of it once again. Finally hunger prevailed and conversation resumed.

The reception food delighted everyone, the vegetarians in particular. Have you ever experienced a spinach salad with parmesan and strawberry slices?

I believe I inadvertently shared my hot dog with the family springer spaniel. I accidentally dropped the other half of it, and he, a member of a noted family of conservationists, determined that it not be wasted. The numerous bottles of free wine were not wasted either.

At the end of it all, packing up and heading home, we said our goodbyes. Our leader reminded us that Monday night we were due for one more rehearsal with the belly dancers. I'm so glad he didn't say, "Billydancers". I don't dance. Don't ask me.

Food for thought

2007-04-01T09:13:00.000-04:00

On Friday the OGADE drum and gourd ensemble in which J and I participate assembled at a local church gymnasium just before supper. This was a free meal evening, a recurring feature of the social outreach of this particular congregation to any who find themselves in need of nourishment.

Perhaps 70-80 persons were in attendance, along with another 15 or so volunteers who circulated among the tables, bearing paper plates of a macaroni+spinach+mystery meat dish and a half slice of bread to whoever wanted them. There was coffee, tea, juice and water.

So, to the accompaniment of several djembes and assorted shakers, bells and balafon, the evening began. The leader, P, and members of the group who have mastered the various traditional rhythms and even know the various names took the lead as they always do, and soon people were beguiled by the unstoppable energy that cascaded from the stage and neutralized most conversation.

After several numbers were offered it was time for our supper, so we dispersed into the crowd and were served. The table where J and I sat had four interesting companions. One was a fellow who reminded me of Willie Nelson: dark clothes and black shoulder-length hair that came together via an elastic band at the back. He responded that he'd been called worse. Across from him sat a short, thin woman who claimed that she couldn't eat spinach: it would make her puke.

One tall gentleman moved from one end to the other end of the table when a buddy of his showed up. While the buddy chowed down at least four plates worth of the entree, this fellow talked about his job in a plastics extrusion-forming factory. It consisted of waiting 60 seconds and then opening a door to an oven-moulding machine, and retrieving a part that would be further finished into some component of an automobile. He was proud of his consistently-high performance. No, he didn't find it mind-numbingly boring: he was fascinated by the various products that he produced, because they were all done by custom moulds that were changed whenever a given job lot was completed.

-- As an aside, J and I watch a cable program from Canada called "How it's Made". We use it to go to sleep by: I doubt that we've ever seen more than two or three of these programs in its entirety. So much automation, and in many cases, it looks like workers are employed to do the jobs that robots refuse. --

After supper, P handed around a number of small gourds to the children in the hall, and led them around to one of our drum sequences. Such natural performers. Personally, I think he was on a recruitment drive for OGADE.

For the final couple of numbers we were joined by an older fellow who wanted to play his harmonica with us. Of course, lacking amplification, it was completely drowned out by the percussion, but he seemed immensely satisfied by his performance and asked to come back the next time.

Out in the parking lot, L suggested that we go for a coffee, but it's very difficult to find exotic coffee outlets within a reasonable driving distance. Various reasons and excuses were offered as the group melted away, each to their own Friday night activities. Mine, as it turned out, was to go get supper. I was not a huge aficionado of spinach, macaroni and mystery meat.

Later that evening, when we went to the local McDonald's, we were astounded to learn that one couple there had been waiting 20 minutes for their food order. There were only about three people on duty, and several drive-thru cars were waiting as well. J and I circled the local fast-food emporiums but nothing appealed to our jaded tastes, so we pulled into the local Subway outlet and brought home a couple of six-inch delights.

Even the moon was nearly full as we speculated on the nature of life and the injustice of it all. J pointed out that the money squandered by Bush and his pals so far in the Middle East (not to mention the lives lost) could have given every U.S. citizen a million dollars. That would pretty well put church basement charity suppers out of business.

In too deep? Cut it out.

2007-03-25T21:44:00.000-04:00

Well, I suppose the big news around here right now is that we topped out at 80 F today, March 25, missing the all-time record by a mere 8 degrees. It was a great day all around.

And in other news, I took a circular saw to the outmoded whirlpool bathtub on the main floor, and converted it to a walk-in type. These are very popular and very expensive amongst the assisted-living crowd, but I’m sure the net effect was to lower our property values by a few thousand Washingtons.

The whirlpool sides were too high for J to vault comfortably, and the tub never belonged there in the first place. A standard tub was removed, and some space in an adjoining closet had been annexed to provide for the bigger receptacle. Before we bought the place, the contractor who had been fixing it for the owner had to change a lot of plumbing and stop a serious leak in the drain system. Even that wasn’t enough to make the tub all that attractive to bathers. The whirlpool initially coughed up green water and plaster dust, and despite repeated cleanings, it seemed unlikely ever to resemble something that would be found in Better Homes and Gardens. We used it only twice in two years.

A shower stall, on the other hand, would prove prohibitively expensive. So I cut to the chase, so to speak, and over two days fashioned the new look. The problem of supporting the shower curtain over the 20 inch open space was solved with a plexiglass panel that hooks over the side of the tub. The electrical connections have been rendered inoperative, which will solve the problem of guests thinking they’re turning on the vent fan and getting an obscene burp from the jacuzzi. The old nozzles have been covered by glued-on rubber drain stoppers.

There’s still work to do. The water in the Great Miami Aquifer is notoriously hard, and it takes only a few weeks for rust stains to attach to walls and curtains. The easy part is finished. Now I gotta clean the grout.

SMART for life.

2007-03-14T21:32:00.000-04:00

Rebuilding a computer that's gone bad is not easy. It takes a lot of time and better-than-average familiarity with the inner workings of a computer.

I've been trying to do that now for two days for a colleague. But this computer presents its own set of issues. The hard drive (as most do) has a "health monitor" called SMART, which warns you when you boot it that the disk drive is pretty well on its last legs, and you best get your act together and save anything worth saving to another medium before the drive goes to the big recycle center in the sky.

Rather than get into the boring details, let me just say that we're on the way to recovery. It won't be perfect, but neither will it be a total loss.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a SMART system built into our lives that would start flashing warnings like "Death is Nature's way of telling you to slow down" when you're veering towards self-destruction? I'm not talking, necessarily, about the physical part. There's tons of physicians willing to take your case if you are interested.

No, what I mean is, I guess, a kind of seventh sense that says "you know, given your future potential, you need to start wearing a helmet when you're on your Harley." And then, just in case you missed the message, it would accompany the text crawler with an in-skull video of a morgue drawer being pulled out, with you in a torn leather jacket sleeping the eternal sleep of the un-helmeted. And you'd see that vision periodically, like every time you turned the ignition key.

I don't think it's that we're by design inclined to ignore wisdom when it confronts us. It may be more that we obey the Law of Inertia more than we know: things like to keep on doing what they're already doing. Same holds true of those asteroids that are supposed to collide with earth over the next few decades. Ditto for beliefs, biases and bodies.

Trouble is, if you obey the Law of Inertia, the Law of Averages will gitcha.

To our daylight, the times change.

2007-03-11T22:46:00.000-04:00

Another fine day, with another cold night. And the end of a weekend that costs us an hour of sleep.

J had an enormous cold, probably the worst one she's ever had, brought to her by the friendly infant elfin granddaughter who chose to share her infection by coughing in her grandmother's face. Or perhaps her grandmother aimed her at her face accidentally by playing a grandmother game, known as "I'll Get You to Smile Even If I Have to Let You Cough in My Face."

On the animal front, Gary the Groundhog put in two or three appearances. We had not seen him since last fall. It appears that he may have wintered under the tool shed at the back of our neighbor's garage.

Sitting out on the deck this early evening, basking in a warmth that was tempered by the occasional gust of lingering chill wind from Canada, we saw Ardie again. This time, s/he was flying just about 60 feet above the rooftops, probably wanting a closer look at the critters on the deck. A house finch landed on our handrail and cocked a worried eye at us. He took off again and landed a little farther away. Finally deciding, most likely, that we posed no serious threat, he flew down to the sunflower seed feeder to join the other boys and girls who are always there if there is anything left.

Little Red, the tiny red squirrel who valiantly dragged a snowman's scarf halfway across the yard but abandoned the effort when he saw how improbably difficult it would be to haul it up the tree, appeared late in the afternoon. After skittering about amongst connecting branches, he sat on a limb about twenty feet away to partake of something nutlike. We could hear his tiny teeth clicking against each other as he devoured whatever it was.

I finally got to meet and chat with a neighbor lady for the first time in two years. As we mused about this and that, I learned about some of the original gossip and the changes that had been made during the many years she had lived on the street. I had not realized, for example, that the demolition crews were already at work on one of our city's two hospitals.

And so, it was another fine day. Almost enough to take the mind off the global warring crises.

Delight come and we wanna stay home.

2007-03-09T19:51:00.000-05:00

Was that a day!

With the temperature soaring into the Fahrenheit of warmth, and the sun blazing down with only minimal pollution to stop it, the back of winter was broken today. Lovers were strolling down the streets in short-sleeved shirts and tattoos, while motorists' elbows appeared once more on the left side of their cars.

J and I sat out on the deck for the first time since winter began. The birds were beginning their spring rituals of alternately singing and fighting for territory. After a while, Ardy flew over. Shortly after that, Ardy-Two followed in his trail. Most spectacular was the persistent pecking of the pileated woodpecker who decided to put on a show for us in the trees in the back lot.

The sound of the motorcycle was again heard in the land. Harley a day goes by without it once spring comes. And yet, we're early. Officially we're still a couple of weeks away. Nevertheless, we savor every beautiful day that does not mandate the closing of double-paned windows and the locking of storm doors.

So too the incredible realization that THERE ARE NO BUGS OUT HERE!

Summer is beautiful in its own way, but this few weeks of early spring allow the spirit to revive without the droning and piercing of insect wings and mouth parts. It is possible to eat outdoors without ingesting unwanted extra protein supplements.

More subtly, I guess it's the realization that it can only get better: that soon the annoyance of having to don two coats and mitts and the occasional tuque will give way to the ease of exiting without extra drapery.

We were meant to live this way.

Time tickets away.

2007-03-05T22:57:00.000-05:00

Today proved to be a bit harrowing. It was the day immediately before the scheduled 8:30 a.m. court appearance mandated for any driver who doesn't pay a ticket on time. In my case, it was a ticket previously blogged that would have involved $130 for driving without valid license tags.

I had made two telephone attempts last week, plus an appearance in person at the court offices to pay the fine. There would be no point in contesting it. It would have been obvious because the bright yellow sticker was four months out of date, while I had it in my head that license plate renewals were valid for two years, just like operator permits.

But after a couple of phone calls to the police department which included not being able to contact the officer involved, I panicked and drove once more to the court office. Again, they found no evidence that a ticket had been written. At that point, they checked with the police office next door, and determined that the charge had been dismissed.

Needless to say, I was grateful. I told them that I was sorry I couldn't buy roses for them, but that the two ladies in the office should consider themselves bouqueted. If that's a verb. Actually, I don't think I knew what I was saying.

The whole thing saved me shelling out $130.00

I later contacted the officer who reassured me that it was indeed dismissed. I told him that what I had learned from all this was that it wouldn't happen again, he replied, "I think that's a pretty safe bet. Have a nice day!"

It was a nice day. Thank you, officer. You two, ladies.

Do bears sleep in the woods?

2007-03-05T18:42:00.000-05:00

Did you ever wonder where bears go in the winter? I think I found the place. The Thrift Shop.

Every time J and I visit the local thrift stores, whether they are Thrift Shops or Salvation Army stores or Goodwill outlets, we inevitably see evidence that bears hibernate in these stores by choice.

First, they put a tag on their toes, with a number on it. This number apparently is a warning to whoever interrupts their sleep that there will be some small price to pay for this action.

Then, they find themselves a place to hang out, which may sometimes be a hook or a shelf, or a table or even an old couch or rocking chair. I have seen a number of them holed up in a big hammock made of netting. As soon as things settle down, they apparently go to sleep. I always think that the ones that hang upside down are somewhat batty.

In the light of global warming, this strange habit of bears may be a good thing. Even in cold, remote Russia, there are bears that are going without hibernating. It is important, I think, that some bears, not just sun-bears, preserve this longstanding tradition of hibernation.

When you approach a tagged bear and turn over its toe tag to see what its number is, it inevitably wakes up and leaps into your arms. It seems heartless to put the animal back after that. And so a bear or two will generally find itself snuggling into your bed or a bookshelf or a mantel, settling back into a far more comfortable state of hibernation.

The latest one is Ferguson.

It ain't no calamity, Jane.

2007-03-03T08:59:00.000-05:00

For the past two days, the library where I work has been dead in the water. It all began when four out of the five disk drives on our main server failed at the same time. These drives operate in a mode in which every bit of data which is written to the first drive is copied to the remaining drives so that if one drive fails, another one instantly takes over. This is the way banks and other transaction-intensive systems work.

In the best traditions of "the show must go on", I did not cancel the seniors computer class on Friday. One computer was working, which was the instructor's machine, because it was able to bypass the computer that regulates access to our public computers. So I set up the projector, and the five people who were registered arrived, and we commenced with something more akin to a demonstration than a hands-on session.

The subject was Microsoft Word XP, and we worked out way through a few of the more interesting things, like how to put tables into a document, and how to put pictures into tables. Suddenly the lights flickered several times, and the entire place plunged into darkness. The lights then came back on, and the computer rebooted and I resumed where I left off: showing how the Declaration of Independence could be imported from a website into a two-column newsletter.

The lights flickered and dropped a second time, and the computer died once more. One of the students rose and put on her coat, at which point we all agreed it was time to leave. Meanwhile, anyone who was in the library building and not on staff pretty much exited as well.

It turned out that the cause of this problem was a cold front that brought wind gusts to 50 miles an hour and higher. So now the library was without power as well as without a computer system.

It is a very rare occurrence for most libraries to be closed at times when they are normally open. Sometimes patrons become upset and unreasonable in their reaction to the closing, especially those who use the library primarily as a form of public shelter when other institutions are closed. Parents who are accustomed to leaving their latchkey children in the library until they can pick them up after work are also affected. But normally, libraries tend to stay open as long as they can without endangering the public or the staff.

Schools, with all the liabilities involved in busing and child care tend to close at the slightest sign of disruption. That didn't happen in Cincinnati this year at the commencement of our first major storm. For some reason, the administration dismissed the kids at the usual time, even though there was icing and snow happening earlier in the day. As a result there were reports of some children sitting on school buses for five hours before they arrived home. The next storm, things were different. The schools were closed even though the roads were pretty much clear.

In this area, the schools have five "calamity days" before time has to be made up. According to the Free Dictionary, a calamity is:
1. An event that brings terrible loss, lasting distress, or severe affliction; a disaster: A hurricane would be a calamity for this low-lying coastal region.
2. Dire distress resulting from loss or tragedy.

Seems like a bit of semantic escalation to call a winter storm a calamity. Perhaps "inconvenience days" would be a more reasonable term. Calamity? Think Katrina. Think Iraq.

Fish. Pondering.

2007-02-27T22:29:00.000-05:00

One of the most enjoyable and interesting presents anyone ever gave me was a resin-cast fieldstone water fountain that I coveted the first time I clapped eyes on it. It looks convincingly real, (not exactly as pictured) and sits about three feet high, with the water bubbling up at the back, dribbling and bubbling over five shelves of flat rock, and into a pool below. Lighting is optional, but it comes with a small underwater lamp that can be set anywhere you want.

The resident adult children gave it to me because they knew I’d buy it for myself sooner or later, and it’s been out on the deck for a couple of summers, burbling and throwing ever-changing reflections on the wall. I tricked it out with a timer, of course, so as not to keep the neighbors up too late.

When I was a kid, my dad had a clamshell pool in the back yard of the house I remember. The previous owner had scooped out the earth and laid in a layer of concrete, and finished the whole circumference with a twin border of small flagstones embedded on their ends. The space between these embellishments he filled with dirt, and planted hens-and-chickens. A walkway of flagstones surrounded the pool, and in it swam goldfish.

I believe my dad was the one who had to have a waterfall, so one was build of heavy flagstones and concrete at the middle of the back of the pool. But over time, and every spring, the shallow pool leaked. There being no reinforcement except perhaps a layer of sand underneath it, each heave of the soil would stress the pool, and the spring ritual involved cleaning and water-blasting the pool so that it could be patched and refilled.

Eventually, dad decided to replace the pool, so he called in a crew of some sort, to excavate and build a much bigger, less imaginatively-shaped rectangular pool with a heavy border. He wanted to raise waterlilies, which need about four feet of depth. In the center, he had them form the footings for a cement frog fountain (again, not exactly as pictured, but same idea).

Unfortunately, the crew that poured the pool did not have enough cement mixed to do the job in one pour, and when they came back the next day to finish, there was an imperfect bond along the back side. So the spring ritual involved cleaning and water-blasting the pool so that it could be patched and refilled. The fish always seemed grateful for being released from the confines of their winter aquarium in the basement.

Two years ago, I brought the resin fountain into the living room for the winter. It would have been more successful had not the presence of a small child tended to turn it into a water play area. The experiment has not been repeated. And last summer, I bought five plastic carp for the pool, because you have to have fish in a pond. The raccoons who feed at our patio stole one of the fish. We found it half buried in the soil along the fence line. Another fish had its lips bitten off.

So for now, the fountain sits out in the storage area beside our swimming pool. I cut the big picture of it off the carton and mounted it on our "office" wall, and I console myself with the thought that by the end of March, I might even be able to put it outdoors again. The surviving plastic fish will be very grateful.

A different typo music

2007-02-24T11:41:00.000-05:00

This morning while wasting time at the computer I went to the Google Directory in search of internet humor. Unrestrained clicking led me to a folk music style I'd never heard of: filk music.

A little further surfing revealed that

in the early 1950s, the term filk music started as a misspelling of folk music in an essay by Lee Jacobs, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music." - Wikipedia

The common thread that underlies filk, apparently, is science fiction or technology or cats and stuff like that and, frequently parody. One really great example is a song entitled "The Star Trek Next Generation Episode Guide" by filk artist Blake Hodgetts.

It's not all parody: there are all different styles and different performers, and a number of festivals across the US and in the UK. How come I never found out about this until now? I guess I just never made that particular typo.

Deja vu from the Dept of Redundancy Dept

2007-02-23T15:26:00.000-05:00

A while back, the readers of these screeds were getting multiple notifications of new posts from ChangeDetection.com. I did the only decent thing: after finding that this was not a common complaint, but nevertheless other sites had noticed this, I yanked CD off the site. As a solution, I suggested using the Atom syndication feed that is built into Blogger at the bottom of each post.

May I now offer if not a solution, a reasonable workaround. Try it if you find the RSS type feed too annoying.

I've set up a page on my website that points to this blog. Yes, using ChangeDetection. So you can sign up to monitor THAT page by dropping in your email address. (You can go to Changedetection and kill any previous pages that might have been monitored).

So here's what happens:
1) I write a blog entry and run a QBasic script that updates the date and time on that page on that site. What it actually does is change a local copy of the page and then FTPs it to the website.
2) ChangeDetection's monitor checks that page and finds only the time and date to have been changed. No fancy formatting, CSS or comments that could make it think there have been multiple changes.
3) You get the email notification of the change to THAT page, and click on the link to Cud-Chewing. It's just that easy.

If this fails, I will abandon the hope of simple notification. See, when The Coffee Bean Goddess blogs, she writes a nice little summary of her new post. The service she's chosen then notifies everyone. Much more user-friendly than Cud-Chewing.

Now, I would do that too, if I had any idea what I was talking about. But ChangeDetection, if it works, is ideal for people in a hurry. It doesn't summarize or repeat the comments; it just tells you that I mouthed off again, and gives you a link. You can run it pasteurize and see if it's working.

Google Calendar: now there's the ticket.

2007-02-22T19:21:00.000-05:00

Generally speaking, I’ve kept my nose pretty clean since arriving in the US some seven years ago. You won’t find me on political blogs, commenting about how insane the Bush administration is. You won’t see me railing against the basic selfishness of this presidency and how it has hurt the world in general and America in particular.

But today was different, and it was, apparently, my own damned fault.

Driving back to my office after my class, I noticed a police car in my rear view mirror. I noticed it even more clearly when the bubblegum lights atop the vehicle began to flash.

I pulled over and rolled down the window.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said the officer. “You are driving with expired tags. I’m going to have to give you a citation, so please remain where you are and I’ll be back with you in a few minutes.”

I was flabbergasted. I searched my skull for any memories of having renewed the tags, but when I reached into the glove box, it was clear that I should have renewed for both cars prior to November, 2006. I just plain forgot. I obviously got it confused with renewing the driver’s permit.

When he came back to the car, the officer said, “I’m sure this was just an oversight. I ran your licence, and you have no violations.”

I shared with him that I had only one traffic violation, for speeding, in my entire driving career. Not to influence him, because I think it was a natural reaction by someone in shock. But he did say that he would note on the record that he thought it was an oversight. A very pleasant encounter, were it not for the money involved.

The other violation in question was, to some extent, caused by the police near Stratford, Ontario. Coming back from the Shakespeare Festival one night, I was nearly blinded by a car behind with headlights in the mirrors. I adjusted the interior mirror to “night” setting, but the outside mirror still gave me trouble. So I sped up, just a little: about five miles an hour above the limit. The pursuing vehicle kept pace. That alone should have warned me, but when the annoyance continued, I shoveled a little more coal, and ran 60 in a 50.

On went the lights.

So now, I have to deal with the American court system, to the tune of what I don’t know until tomorrow. Some research on the web suggests $185 U.S. dollars. But that’s a couple of years back. And I still have two cars to register, so we’re looking upwards to $300.

There is an answer to all this. It’s called Google Calendar, and it comes as part of the package when you sign up for a Google Gmail account, which is, as of Feb 20, open and free to anyone who wants one. I’ve now put an annual reminder on it that will tweak me a month before.

I looked up the local jurisdiction and found that there is another person who ran afoul of the gendarmerie back in 1998 by the simple but idiotic method of giving his car fake license plates (tags) to wear in public. Regrettably, he has the same first and last name as I do. I have no doubt that the court computers will identify me as a second offender, again with license problems, and will act accordingly.

Never mind. I have always wanted to visit Cuba, all expenses paid, although not for life.

J has a feel for pushing buttons

2007-02-21T22:25:00.000-05:00

Last night I went over to the house of a friend of mine whose computer was showing all the signs of dementia. After an hour and a half of running cleanup programs and diagnostics and making a few educated guesses, we got it working again at a reasonable rate of speed. But computers are always lagging behind developments. They may be bleeding edge when they're still on the store shelves, but not necessarily even then, because it all depends on when they were made. And everyone knows they begin their descent into obsolescence as soon as the ink dries on the check (cheque).

The current buzzword, of course, is Vista, Microsoft's newest version(s) of the Windows operating system. You can find every possible point of view about the merits and demerits of this offering on the web: thousands of reviews that have been penned since the product launched in January.

Most of the seniors I teach, however, want a reliable computer than can do email, surf and search the internet, and show slideshows of their grandchildren to anyone who cares to stop and watch. Modest requirements these are, and yet every time a new version of Windows comes out, it seems they have to drop what they're used to doing and start upgrading and relearning. The computer makes life more interesting but also more complicated. Screens get bigger but print gets smaller, just at the time when it should be getting bigger.

One gentleman I used to see in a nearby town asked me to come over and help him sort out a problem on his computer. It turned out that his machine was a relatively early IBM PC. He had used it for all his research and correspondence for years, but now it was showing its age, and refusing to print.

When it finally became apparent that his machine was past retirement age, he cast about amongst his friends, and someone donated a more recent model which was functional, although not significantly advanced beyond the ailing machine. He was very pleased with this turn of events, given that he was not anxious to part with good money for something that really didn't need to meet complex demands.

I guess it comes down to what a person needs to be satisfied. In my case, life is simple. If I want to watch a prerecorded television program, I ask J to watch it with me. I lack the remotest interest in learning how to program or control the digital video recorder. The number of buttons on the handle is daunting. And in any case, what I need is the company, the companionship and the mutual interest. J, on the other hand, is a master of anything remotely related.

How does J learn to operate all this stuff? Not by reading the manual. That's for sure. She just presses buttons and watches screens until she has her muscle memory programmed to feel for the right button. It is all a great source of wonder and amusement to me. Come to think of it, that's enough for tonight. She wants to watch something. Excuse us, will you please?

Enlightenment down under.

2007-02-20T17:57:00.000-05:00

Today the news announced that it's lights out for the old Edison-type electric lamp in Australia. What a great idea! Not only for ecology's sake, and the reduction of carbon pollution, but because it will save everyone pots of money. Compact flourescents are the answer.

Back in the day, we had only one bulb in the "back basement", a dank, smelly dungeon in which the washing machine and laundry tubs were located. When I was a kid, the washing machine was a motorized tub with a beater in it and a wringer that had a trough below it. The trough could be pressed down to spill the wringer water in one of two directions. When the Momma turned the trough inward most of the water would drop back into the tub as the clothes went through the wringer and dropped into the rinse water. Then, after pushing on the clothes with a plunger, she would lock the wringer between the tubs, and pass the clothes from the rinse side to the other side, which was dry.

I used to stand in the "back basement" for a considerable time, fascinated by this intricately choreographed effort. But how clean were the clothes? Hard to say, because the entire scene was lit by nothing greater than a 40-watt bulb. My parents, children of the Great Depression, were very cost-conscious.

Other underlit places come to mind. The bathroom was one of the more illuminated spots: after all, Dad had to shave in there. This he did by the light of two bare 25-watt bulbs in black, unadorned fixtures on either side of the built-in medicine cabinet. Patches of stubble were sometimes the more obvious result. The old knob-and-tube wiring in the walls probably couldn't support much more.

I could tell when my parents were getting older. The wattage went up. But still, Dad was fond of the advice his dad gave him.

"R... that light switch has only so many clicks in it. When they're gone there won't be any more." This was an incentive for me to leave the lights on, but for Dad, the reverse.

The millions of "wall warts" (low voltage transformers) that power our electronic toys and recharge our batteries are costing us a bundle for the convenience they offer. My folks would have been disgusted by the amount of power and ultimately carbon dioxide pollution caused by the number of computers we have. But for them, the biggest waster of electricity was always the electric light bulb. My shins were living proof of how successful they were at conservation.

More again from the Departure of Redundancy Department

2007-02-19T12:13:00.000-05:00

I've removed the ChangeDetection.com facility from the blog side-bar. A little research on the Internet showed that it is fine for normal web pages, but has been reported as having problems with CSS-type pages (and not with all of them, just some).

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are responsible for the fancy formatting you see on blogs of this generation of the web. They make it easy for authors to control the way pages look no matter what the browser the user is using to read them. Apparently they're too confusing for ChangeDetection to handle properly, hence the repeats, according to several users.

So if you want to keep up to date with this blog (and why you should, I'm not totally sure), navigate to the bottom and click on the link to Atom feed. This will create a live bookmark in Firefox, which will list all the articles and let you read them directly. If you have an RSS feed reader, you may not be able to see the articles, and I haven't had time to figure out how Internet Explorer will give direct access (depending on the edition of IE). Almost any good newsreader will handle Atom feeds as well as RSS feeds. I'll have more to say on this when I'm not on my employer's time.

From the Department of Redundancy Department

2007-02-18T12:21:00.000-05:00

If you give it your email address, ChangeDetection.com sends you an email whenever there's a recognizable change in the text of the webpage you're currently reading. The only thing is, it seems to have sent out two or three notices for the same page in the last 48 hours. In the several years I've been using it to watch for page changes on many other web sites, that has only happened about three times.

In my view, this is the Sorcerer's Apprentice Phenomenon. You remember the Disney's movie Fantasia where Mickey Mouse was apprenticed to the master sorcerer? When the master left instructions that Mickey was to mop and sweep the shop while the master was on an errand, Mickey decided to try out his nascent magic on a broom that lay quietly in a corner. Commanding the broom to grab a bucket and fill it at the cistern and then start mopping the floor, Mickey sat back and napped as the broom did as it was commanded. Suddenly awakened, Mickey felt panic as the broom kept on drawing water and sloshing it on the floor until the place was awash. And panic became horror when Mickey tried to stop the broom, first by reciting every magic word he knew and then by splitting the broom with an axe. The broom was now cloned, and two brooms continued the actions of the first.

Of course, when the master returned, a single word was enough to reverse the situation. But Mickey was hung out to dry. His career path to wizardry was cut short.

Automation is like that. If there is a law that applies to the process of allowing a computer to take over something, it is probably that of Unintended Consequences. One example that's more common than you might think is the Utilities System computer that sends you a bill for an account balance of $0.00, and unless you damned well send it a check (cheque) for that amount, you'll be dunned and sent to a collection agency. I tell you this: any company that puts me in that situation won't get nothing from me.

So I have to assume that if you sign up to be notified of changes to this blog, Mickey Mouse's broom will take over at some point, and you'll have so many notifications that you'll ignore them or put them in your spam filter. This would certainly be an unintended consequence. Or the other thing you can do is regard the problem as a blip. I've found once or twice that I've mistakenly signed up for a service more than once. I tend to do that with things that are free... since, as we all know, they are the best things in life.

Don't put your futon the gas pedal

2007-02-15T22:38:00.000-05:00

Son-In-Law has a very large car. It's a Buick Roadmonster of some vintage or other. These machines are best described by the phrase "That was the last year that they made...". At any rate, he acquired it from a good friend of his who may or may not have known about all the parts and pieces that were on the verge of collapse. So over the past year it has become a money pit, but even at that, it has one thing that none of our other cars have: room.

Tonight J and I headed for darkest greater Cincinnati to pick up the futon that we ordered last weekend. The Roadmonster is the only thing big enough to accommodate a futon mattress. So SIL obligingly removed the High Impact Baby Clamp from the back seat and folded the seat back to floor level. Then we left for the open road which is pretty much clogged these days with unforgiving ice ruts and snowbanks.

Well, actually just before we left I had to learn to drive all over again. I normally bounce around in a 1998 Dodge Neon (called "Neona") whose rear struts have long since been bent to uselessness by her role as the family mini-truck. So here I was, easing into a leather-lined cockpit where the first challenge was to find which of the many chrome buttons would push the seat forward enough for my feet to reach the pedals.

Looking out over the vast expanse of hood, I realized that normal stopping distances and width calculations would likely fail me. And so now I understood why so many old men drive like snails. They're stuck with cars that are big enough for their potbellies, but too long for them to reach the pedals.

Eventually, I found a panel switch that not only pulled me forward, but jacknifed me like a giant clam. "This can't be good," I thought, as I twiddled the remaining controls to neutralize the unwanted embrace.

I started the beast, and after a bit of head scratching, the automatic temperature control decided to spring into action, trying to reconcile 14F outside with 72F desired inside.

J scrambled aboard, and we started off, arguing about which button would lower the steering wheel. A moment of panic at an intersection later and I determined to ignore any further adjustments.

Down Main Street and out to the highway we cruised. It was an experience opposite to the line in Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song: "I ache in the places where I used to play". I found myself tensing up as we approached the usual hazards, like potholes and beaten-down railroad crossings at which Neona would bounce, wobble and bang. What? The Roadmonster didn't even notice these minor annoyances. I could get used to this. I played in the places where I used to ache!

Finally, after our usual one or two excursions into roads that led to the wrong places, we arrived on the scene and I pulled in to the parking lot. J, of course, intuitively knew that all we had to do was drive to the side shipping doors, and someone would take care of us. But as a Canadian I'm so conscious of the need to follow the rules that I went in and asked. And the receptionist said, "Drive to the side shipping doors, and someone will take care of you."

We arrived and a few minutes later, the futon was loaded. Off we drove, back up the street to a Ruby Tuesday's (bar and grill) to indulge in supper before heading home. I noticed that a courtesy lamp in the rear of the vehicle did not turn off, but thought that perhaps it was on some timer or other.

After a dinner that tasted good but embodied the Cajun concept of "slow cookin'" (as in: they sent someone to Jamaica to get a tilapia for my order) we once more boarded the bus for Hamilton, OH. The rear light was still on.

It wasn't until I got home and SIL came out to help cart the futon inside that I learned that this luxury light actually has a small switch on the side. Apparently while being squeezed into the back seats at the loading dock, the mattress caught the switch.

So now, let me confess: although the Roadmonster is a beautiful, smooth-riding relic, I much prefer driving a car that doesn't force you to read the owner's manual before you turn the key. And these days, I prefer a car where you don't notice the fuel gauge unless you've been on a really long drive. But as a truck, it totally rocks!

Neona, I'll never carry cement blocks in you again.

No hurt felines

2007-02-14T21:14:00.000-05:00

Cats seem to have mastered the art of being content anywhere they find themselves. At the moment, J's cat, K, is stretched out atop the set of four fluorescent lights that I put together as an antidote to J's Seasonal Affective Disorder. Light therapy is common now for this particular problem. But for K it's not the light but rather the heat that matters. It's a considerable leap of faith and feet for a cat of uncertain age to jump the 50 inches from the floor directly onto the top edge of this contraption, but her motivation is undeniable.

Owing to my allergies to all things feline, I had to mount a screen door on the bedroom door frame, to act as a kind of airlock for when we try to get into the bedroom without a cat. Occasionally K or D or B or T will manage to time the entry so well that we find one of them inside the room even though we did not see it happen.

The only reliable method I've found to dislodge a wayward cat from a forbidden venue is to capitalize on her fear. It takes considerable effort, but always works. I head for the cleaning closet across the hall and drag out the vacuum cleaner. In the past, I've had to plug it in and actually start it up, but thanks to the Pavlov effect, the illegal immigrant will now generally seek the nearest exit seconds after hearing the closet door open.

The other intriguing phenomenon is what we call "milling". The cats will sit anywhere they feel good about it, but the second J gets up to head for the bathroom or the kitchen, the tails trans-moggy-fy into question marks and out into the slipstream their owners glide, drawn, no doubt, by the possibility of food or treats.

During meal preparation, the level of milling usually doubles. At the point where we actually sit down to eat, K will occupy the nearest vacant chair, while D will sharpen his claws in preparation for the begging act to follow.

The meal proceeds calmly for a time, when suddenly J lets out a surprised yelp. D has made his point(s) on the side of her legs. K, meanwhile, is much more ladylike in her approach. She merely leans toward the plate that interests her most. When she believes you are not watching, two front feet will delicately ascend to the tabletop. At this point, J barks "Hey!" at her, and she withdraws, knowing full well that a pacifying portion of the evening's entree will be forthcoming.

It is a ritual not to be denied. What have I learned from being allowed to live with cats? Life is best devoted to comfort and leisure, for someone will take care of you if you let them.

Winter is a skate-freeze zone.

2007-02-13T22:36:00.000-05:00

All this layering of snow, ice, rain and sleet that we're having today in southern Ohio puts me in mind of my early years in Toronto, where you could count on snow (because we were sitting on the north end of a Great Lake).

Toboggan. Toboggan comes from two Micmac words (or Algonquin, depending on the internet source), probably meaning "tow' and "bogging", as in "I hate towing this sled uphill. It's always boggin' down. Here! It's your turn." (The native peoples were noted for saying a great deal in very few words.) Ultimately, the tow-person would try toboggan (Noo Joizy or Noo Yawk infinitive form) with the passenger person to get him or her to drag the heavy, icy thing back to the top of the hill so they could have another thrilling six-second slide.

One winter Tronna had a blizzard that deposited snow half-way up our front door, itself elevated by a porch that was about four feet tall. Dad diligently got out and shovelled the front steps, building a huge pile that eventually came to about the height of the front door. On this, OB and I sledded, tobogganed and generally launched ourselves into space.

Someone took movies of the entire act, so it's much easier to remember that OB and I had snowsuits with snow helmets that had earlaps that were made of the scratchiest available material. I think they sold this same liner to the quartermaster at the cadet corps in our high school to make uniforms. At any rate, these helmets were tied under the chin, usually by a parent in such as manner that almost precluded its removal after the events of the day were over.

The other Great White North experiences were (when we were older and more self-reliant), skating at the public rink a couple of blocks away, and sliding down the huge hill at the High School a couple of blocks away. And if that failed, there was a lesser hill in the public school yard across from our house. All very convenient and alluring.

Ah! The odor of wet mittens and scarves that were redolent of the stockyard. Even more rank was the scent of the kids who vigorously played hockey on the public rink despite the prohibition and the presence of a boarded rink on the same site, as they sat smoking, swearing and impressing no one except me in the heated change room, with its memorial carvings of initials in the wooden benches. Seemed to me those guys were permanently on the bench. I only saw them on the ice in their boots, walking home. But they stuck their sticks vertically in the snowbanks as they entered the ~~smokehouse~~ change room, so I, for one, believed heartily in their athletic prowess.

There wasn't much worse than getting snow in your boots and having to walk home, except, perhaps, getting snow down your skates, and continuing to circle the ice to the scratchy 78 rpm rendering of "The Skaters' Waltz" on a single loudspeaker despite the obvious chilblains developing in your unprotected toes. After all, skates in those days were unforgiving leather boots with long, fat laces that would break at the slightest sign of strain. Not like those pampered hockey players personal form-fitting boots that let them play barefoot.

Take off, eh?

2007-02-11T21:37:00.000-05:00

Last week ended for me on Thursday, when I had a vacation day left to take before the anniversary date of my employment. It is such a delicious feeling, not to have to set the alarm clock for three whole nights in a row! Furthermore, it is an spiritual experience to be able to lie in bed beyond the time when one would normally be stumbling about in the kitchen, making choices between two generally unappealing breakfast alternatives and trying to remember where my socks are.

Friday morning I was comfortably past the normal alarm clock time, still feeling that dreamy drowsiness that accompanies the onset of lack of responsibility, when a sparrow started a sharp chirping right outside the double-hung, closed window. This is a normal result of our neighbor's feeding station, hung to attract chickadees and cardinals but generally overwhelmed by sparrows. Ordinarily, being up and out the door before this hour, I do not hear this concert, but today was different.

Saturday morning, I decided that some deterrent was needed, since J, my wife, has also been similarly awakened at undesired times. I turned to the internet where I found many types of gizmo including electronic ones that could break an egg. Now, that's bird control!

What caught my eye was "bird spikes", which are an array of plastic or metal spikes set in a ten-foot long base to be glued to the window ledge as a method of keeping birds from landing or nesting where they are not wanted. Also what caught my eye was the asking price: $49.99.

Thus began a day of drilling pilot holes at inch intervals and pounding 3.5 inch galvanized nails through them into a treated plank. I don't know how many nails are in five pounds, but it was in the hundreds and felt like thousands. The outdoor temperature hovered at 14 F all day. I broke two drill bits and had to sharpen a third to get through the plank, but by the end of the day, as they say on "The Daily Show", I nailed it.

Then I began a second board to accommodate the three-inch setback of the window itself. It only needed a hundred nails or so, but involved my third trip to the local Lowes.

By early evening, I had constructed two vicious spike strips that appeared both evil and medieval. I felt like Vlad the Impaler on a bad day. I pushed the pieces into place on the sill, and went inside to thaw out.

Sunday morning dawned much like Saturday. Cold, windy, and extremely comfortable in bed. The silence was awesome.

No birds were harmed in the making of this device. Disappointed, yes, disgruntled, no doubt. Only one thumb was mashed, but only twice, and not severely. The cold saved me; I was wearing mitts.

The net saving over the commercial spike strip was $10.00, which ought to just cover the replacement drill bits.

We're all here to learn

2007-02-04T21:22:00.000-05:00

When I was little and couldn't sleep
But wasn't allowed to creep or peep
Downstairs to see the adult folks
To join in the laughter and the jokes
But had to stay in bed instead
While fun sounds echoed in my head
I learned to hug my gray bear tight
To deal with the sorrows of the night
To hear him agree with all I said
To follow my thoughts wherever they led,
The promises whispered to the bear
That we would vow never to share
With adults on the floor below
Because they had no right to know.

As time has flown, some other bears
Have suffered through my list of cares
And shared the secrets of my heart
And whatever else I might impart
To furry ears knowing full well
The secret's safe: they'd never tell.

In retrospect a downside, too,
A countervailing point of view:
By "bearying" my secret life
I made it harder for my wife
To understand some of my acts
Which did not tally with the facts.
For buttons pushed should not result
In instant rage in an adult.
Those buttons labeled "DISAPPROVE"
When pushed are antidotes to love
And, pushed enough, the bonds will break
And love is something you can't fake.

The sad thing is, it's taken years
To learn the Secret of the Bears:
That there are other buttons, too
And most of us have quite a few.
Some are labeled "Love" and "Truth"
(Though they were there all through my youth
They seemed difficult to find
Much moreso than the other kind).

Now ones marked "Listen" and "Understand"
Are closer to my outstretched hand,
And since they know I've found the cure,
The bears are happier, I'm sure.

The day the music died

2007-02-03T21:05:00.000-05:00

One of the gifts my parents gave me, over my dead body at times, was music lessons. I learned to play the piano over a period of several years, under two piano teachers.

The first was a taskmaster: a well-known boys and men's choir director at a church in Toronto. He was born of English parents in India, and had the classic British public school education. (Note to Americans: "public" meant private school in British English). It showed.

Since the major component of any British education is discipline, Mr. L. invoked fear and shame as the two major learning motivators. On someone who was in his late childhood, this approach had a profound effect that has lingered for years. My failure to practice diligently was detected at almost every lesson. No excuse served.

I believe it was this approach that caused me to perform miserably at his annual concert in the church hall, in front of parents and peers. I took my place on the stage at the piano, and after fiddling with the knobs on the piano seat, and placing my trembling hands on the keys, commenced Beethoven's "Für Elise", a tender love ballad.

I suddenly realized that I had no idea what key I was playing in. I soldiered on, and got off the stage as quickly as possible, vowing never EVER to play in one of those concerts again. I am certain Beethoven never heard his opus rendered as quickly in a transposed key in his lifetime.

Shortly thereafter, my parents persuaded me to resume lessons from a local woman whose manner was much more compassionate. Still, the damage was done. I suddenly lost my ability to sight read (i.e. play while reading notation from music that was totally new to me). I became terrified of keys with more than one sharp or flat. And thus did my formal musical education end just prior to the Grade 7 Piano level examinations.

Nevertheless, none of this deeply horrific psychological scarring dimmed my love for classical music. During my rebellious years (the teens through the late twenties, I believe they were), I wavered between long periods of listening to country music and jazz and rock 'n' roll, but I would always come back to Bach and the baroque.

High school found me at (what else) a boy's private school, which had a compulsory cadet corps. As I was terrified of guns and had never known war, I hated this whole experience, especially the prickly woolen uniform. I turned to music as a way of reducing the angst. I played clarinet and later, bass clarinet, in the cadet corps band.

I seem to recall that I was wearing orthodontic appliances with hooks and rubber bands during this period, a factor that deterred me from attempting my real interest, the trumpet. At least the clarinet did not lacerate the lips, although the upper band did tend to restrict the circulation in the upper lip while attempting to create a good seal over the mouthpiece. Still, in the best traditions of British education, I stiffened the upper lip and learned to love the "licorice stick".

I did, of course, have my moments of shame in the band. One night as we were marching down the hall toward the auditorium, I was carrying the bass clarinet. I would be the featured soloist in Ferde Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite, in particular the bit where the burro trundles the tourist down the narrow trail. What I didn't notice was that the pad had fallen out of the key cover at the low end of the clarinet. So that night, the burro trotted confidently "On the Trail", but as he neared the base of the cliff, he bellowed a very convincing "Hee Haw!!", and was rewarded by a flushed face on not only his rider, but also on that of the conductor of the tour.

I was, I surmised, meant not to perform, but rather to appreciate the artistry of those who do. And so, tonight, I'm tuned in to "Otto's Baroque" on 1.FM.

Join me, won't you?

How the mighty have fallen

2007-02-02T22:19:00.000-05:00

Well, maybe not mighty. But certainly fallen.

All day at work, I had a pain across the intestinal area. But I kept on working because I had stuff to do that seemed more important than going home to lie down and veg out.

This isn't untypical of many people. I read an article not too long ago that basically pleaded for common sense: if you're sick, STAY HOME! That way you won't spread the gift of whatever it is. But unfortunately, the article also pointed out that most often, if you've reached the point of feeling like you need to stay home, you've already passed it on to the rest of your colleagues. And fair is fair: they probably gave it to you in the first place.

So what's the problem here? There are many people who can't afford to take time off to be sick, for fear of losing their jobs. At least that's what can happen in any country where the "employee serves at the pleasure of the company". In many cases, this happy phrase gives management the pleasure of withdrawing their pleasure in the name of productivity or risk assessment. However, I have the good fortune to work for a library system where humanity and decency and understanding tend to take precedence over the bottom line. I wish all of the working people could be so lucky.

Ever since our common ancestor dropped out of the trees or slithered up on the beach, microbes have been attacking in an unrelenting effort to compete for resources and check the population explosion. OK, I'm no biologist, but that's what it feels like when your gut aches every time you move for a whole eight hours or so.

See, somewhere along the line, we began to subscribe to the theory that we are indispensable: that nobody else can do what we do, or at least as competently as we do. Ego is perhaps a defense mechanism, but at times it sure gets out of hand. We define ourselves in terms of the job we do and how well we do it and how dedicated to it we are.

Of course it could be incentives: some contracts give you a bonus in some fashion for not using your sick days. And while that holds out a carrot, the microbes are laughing themselves sick. And face it, when you're dragging your posterior through the day, you really aren't doing anyone much of a favor: in some way, they're likely having to compensate for your lackluster performance.

So go, my children, and be sick. But don't be sick at work. Give health a chance.

Noble thoughts. I wonder what I'll do if I still feel this way on Monday. They don't call me "Indispensa-Bill" for nothing. They don't actually call me that. I think that's what I call myself. At least that's my gut feeling.
---
Footnote: "Service 'at the pleasure of' an appointing authority is a term with legal significance, meaning that the appointee may be dismissed at will, with no need for a hearing of the making of any particular findings." Link

Lighten up, everyone

2007-02-01T21:58:00.000-05:00

One of the concepts that fascinated me about Star Trek was that Data was a photon-based creature, while (for the most part) the other folks on board the Enterprise were carbon-based.

There are many advantages to being light-based, as we learned by watching the series. You don't have to eat or, presumably, poop. You have endless reserves of energy and strength, and are naturally unaffected by those nasty microbes that reduce the rest of us to sniffing, dribbling victims. You can regenerate in the presence of the right frequencies. You can learn everything, understand everything, and recall everything without having to invoke a computer. You ARE a computer.

The downside, if I have it right, is that Data was so different that it was almost a full-time job for him to learn what it was to be human. I always wondered why he felt he needed that capability, but perhaps it was in his photonic nature to try to enlighten himself to infinity.

In the old days of phonographs and records, the technology for recording was essentially carbon-based, from the steel needles to the wax and bakelite recording surfaces. Today, the laser is the key to perfect reproduction of sound. The surgeon's scalpel is giving way to the laser which can cut and heal at the same time. The wired world is yielding to the wireless.

Never mind that light is essential for our growth and that it directly influences our mood. The time-honored way to scare an audience in a horror flick is to darken everything and slowly reveal two red, piercing eyes emanating powerful beams as they move towards the audience. The presence of the light is as startling as the absence is disquieting.

We speak of someone's eyes "lighting up" as they become enthused by an idea. But what, I wonder, would happen if actual light beams (they were, after all, beaming with pleasure) were produced by the endorphins released at such a moment. You couldn't help noticing that transmission, and it would probably stimulate pleasurable feeling in everyone within eyeshot.

Fireflies attract their mates though blinking their butts. Perhaps there are other possibilities for us, too, if we are truly on our way to becoming photon-based. Suppose that by smiling, we could "light up a room." Suppose that just by being supportive, we could encourage someone to "see the light." Just by loving someone we could "light up their life."

Beam me up, Scotty.

I dunno, maybe I'm all wet...

2007-01-30T23:32:00.000-05:00

Every morning I take a shower. Not just because I want to be nice to be near, but even more because if I don't, my hair (what there is left) stands out in all directions and flatly refuses to lie flat. This gives me the "gray hedgehog" appearance that reminds me of Dagwood, or even worse, of a porcupine in full fright.

Every morning, I find myself singing little snippets of whatever I can remember of songs from various artists. I have read that the reason we sing in the shower is that as the water droplets are forced through the shower head, they create negative ions much in the way that waves crashing upon a beach result in a freshness that you can feel in the air. You can't help yourself. You feel like singing!

Of course, another reason may be the acoustics. The shower produces white noise, which muffles the whiny overtones in my morning voice, and convinces me that I could have had a career in the music industry if only I could have vanquished the stage fright.

Last week, it was Stompin' Tom Connors. More particularly, it was the lines:
"Tonight I'm due to bushwhack Sue
And take her to the Gumboot Cloggeroo
And do a little gumboot cloggin' (repeat 3)"

This week, Joni Mitchell :
"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
You pave paradise, put up a parking lot."

You might think it would more thematically appropriate to sing something like "Singin' in the Rain" or "Gonna wash that man right outta my hair". But you'd be wrong. Why? Because I don't decide consciously what to sing. It just happens, the way dreams happen.

I don't choose what I sing with this in mind. Like dreams, the mental pictures come to me, and I respond to them, not even knowing why I sing what I sing, or even why I sing.

It would be interesting to hear the songs that emanate from other people's shower stalls, if this theory has any substance to it, and then compare their selections with how they coped with their day.

I think the Stompin' Tom song may have been calibrating some purpose or goal that I wanted to accomplish that day, but since I don't remember which day it was, my theory remains unproven.

The Joni Mitchell is different. I had seen her on YouTube a couple of days back, and the lines I quoted above were apparently the ones that stuck with me.

Perhaps it was a reflection that as an Old Guy My Age, I'm not maybe quite as appreciative of people as you might think I should be for an Old Guy My Age. That thought percolated for a couple of days until it suddenly popped out on the Morning Shower Mantra Show.

So if there's anything to it, I plan to listen to my musical selections with a little more intention. Who knows? Someday I might be vocalizing a refrain from the Moody Blues , like:

"I've decided to do what I can and to find the kind of man I really am."

And then maybe that very same day, I'll find me!

Footnote: Do dreams have a purpose?

This idea's a sleeper!

2007-01-29T23:23:00.000-05:00

FINALLY! They’re recommending that you take a nap at work. Man! I’ve been saying this for ages, ever since I turned 40. In fact, some days I’ve been able to put it into practice.

I’ve considered dotting my closed eyelids with a big marking pen so I’d look more awake at meetings, but everyone knows I have eyes of different colors, so that would never work.

Of course, what they want is greater productivity. Well, maybe. But I’d settle for the memory benefits. Like being able to remember what it was I was going to do before I went to sleep.

People who work with computers have an obvious advantage over those who work in public service at a library information desk. And it’s unfair. If you’re a computer programmer, you can sit in front of a monitor for hours at a time without moving anything more significant than your index finger. It was programmers who invented the BOSS key, which is a shortcut that flips up a spreadsheet or something that looks like you're really busy as the boss goes by.

But that doesn’t do you much good if you’re in REM. So they came up with the timed boss key that allows you to set a timer so that your computer is browsing even though you are snoozing.

None of this subtle subterfuge would be necessary if employers were to read the news article above before it disappears (although Google or the Internet Archive will likely keep it around).

And for my colleagues on the Information Desk: Brace yourselves! Try these ! That way you won’t fall backwards when you doze off.

Architectural conservancy

2007-01-28T21:28:00.000-05:00

The house of the future will not need a kitchen
Since kitchens are places where people make meals,
And life is so fast now that people are switching
To restaurants, fast food and two-for-one deals.

Gone are the vignettes of Mom at the sink,
Scraping the carrots and slicing the beets
For now all you need is an internet link
And you get to go out for those homestyle cooked treats.

Follow those links to find special cuisine
Or take-outs that take merely minutes to serve
Or new, unknown bistros where no one has been
So you can be first, and ahead of the curve.

The fridge is unneeded except for your beer.
Your stove? Toss it out! It’s irrelevant now,
But you might need the microwave if you are here
To heat up your leftover restaurant chow.

Friends coming over? There’s a deli nearby.
You’ll have nothing to wash when the party is done.
Up early? Give donuts and coffee a try:
If the waistline’s an issue, remember… just one!

You’ll be doing a favor for those who depend
On consumers at drive-ins who eat in their cars
By closing your kitchen and taking your friend
To sample the goodies at diners and bars.

“Where’s for dinner,” must now be your rallying cry
As you scour the web for the less well-known venue,
And ferret out places and dishes to try
To understand every french phrase on the menu.

“Kitchen’s closed!” is the sign of a new generation.
For kitchens date back to when choices were few;
When a drought meant a time of severe deprivation,
When the veggies were local and farmers were too.

We need more music and less noise.

2007-01-27T22:49:00.000-05:00

The current evolution of the World Wide Web, popularly known as Web 2.0, is all about collaboration. There are new ways of using the new technology that weren't possible before the development of new programs such as Ajax and Active-X.

The days when authoring internet content was limited to those who knew how to write HTML code are behind us. The first stage was the development of forms: scripts that allowed a web page to actually collect responses to surveys and guestbooks and the like. The next major breakthrough was the invention of the weblog, which obviated the need to be an HTML expert in order to express yourself. And then, we had the collaborative weblog, where groups can post entries, not just comments in response to one person's blog.

Email groups have a long history. But then email is still the next biggest use of the web, right up there after spam. And there came the Open Source movement, through which amazingly useful and complex programs are written by people who do it for the love of it, and for the challenge of fixing problems in each other's code. This resulted, for example, in OpenOffice, a free Microsoft-compatible office suite, and several others of the type.

Under Web 2.0, though, office programs are migrating to the web. Microsoft may be planning to lease its next release, but the competition is free, and so is the storage space.

We hardly need to mention Google, do we? But you can look at Google Labs for insights into what is coming under Web 2.0. And let's not forget internet telephony and free calls to any internet-connected person in the world, and online video webcams.

Web 2.0 is most notable for social networking, with all its joys and perils. The internet dating services that charge for their meet market activities are not in danger yet, but through services like YouTube and the many photo sites, it is a simple matter to identify things to do, places to go and people to see. Meetups are common: people get to know each other before they attend one. The blind date is eliminated by the webcam.

Not too many years back was Napster where music was a steal. Then came MP3.com, a place where you could find any kind of music you love, for free, but also a place that got sued out of existence because of a copyright slipup. It's back, but there's not much there for The Old Guy's taste.

MySpace started out as a place for independent bands to store and serve their music, although now it has become something of a voyeur's paradise, but still, it attracts musicians and filmmakers and audiences of many kinds. Many artists get recording contracts as a result of this exposure.

Soundclick and Live365 and Last.FM and Freeplay and Shoutcast are just a few of the new sites that provide music. Pandora is unique in the way they try to discern what kind of music you like from the kind you play, thereby introducing you to new stuff that won't jar you, but that you might like to investigate (and potentially, of course, buy).

Gnod is a site that doesn't actually play what you suggest, but uses an interactive graphic approach to mapping the universe of music that begins when you enter one title you like. It plays music for your when you become part of its social network, by signing up.

Thus the web has become a place where you can expand your particular universe to include things that expand your universe.

We need more music. We need more harmony. And who but we ourselves can be the musicians? With Web 2.0 we are also the producers, distributors and customers. But that's not a new thing. It's just a different way of being present.

Yehudi Menuhin said that the purpose of music is essentially to entune us to the vibrations of the universe. Deep in us there must be an Essential Tuning Fork: the perfect pitch that keeps us centered and able to recognize that harmony in others. We speak of "overtones" as a negative, as in "there were overtones of mistrust in his remarks", but it is the overtones that create the unique timbre of a sound. You can distinguish a harp from a flute by their overtones, subtle vibrations that are created even as the universe is moved by our own moving.

Porch: chance to dream

2007-01-25T20:42:00.000-05:00

Older Brother (OB) and I used to sleep on the back porch in the humid nights of Toronto summers. This remarkable sanctuary was build of flagstone and cement up to about three feet, with a wide cement top along the tops. On top of this, Dad framed up 2 by 4s to hold screen and storm windows, and over the top he put stringers of the same to hold a slanted roof.

The whole area was just big enough to accommodate a couple of rollaway beds, and a small kitchen table and wooden chairs. Over time, a huge wisteria vine covered the side of the porch that faced our next door neighbor, thus affording beautiful and fragrant privacy in the spring of the year.

Dad put rolling blinds at the top of each window, but it was more fun to leave them up when we crawled into bed. That way, our eyes had access to the moon and our imaginations to the shadows. There was a huge Manitoba maple tree right along the fence line, overhanging the porch. Under the right conditions, the swaying branches would scrape the porch roof, leading us to snuggle further into our respective coverings (usually kapok-filled sleeping bags) for safety.

Occasionally a plane would drone overhead and the odd car would come to the stop sign at the corner and then move on. Sometimes we would hear someone talking almost inaudibly, and no amount of ear-straining would allow comprehension. For a couple of summers, a bullfrog croaked under the lilypads in the fishpond in our back yard. Dad had captured the big fellow while its mind was on something else, and brought it back from the cottage to keep the goldfish company.

Funny, though. I can't remember any conversations that the OB and I had, although we must have talked. Put two children, even five years apart, into a private room with that much audio-visual diversion, and they're bound to talk. But I do remember the pleasure of just being there together instead of the winter-bound stuffy upstairs of our one and a half storey house.

We did many things together. We read under the covers by flashlight. We climbed up onto the shed roof of our garage and leaped down into what eventually became a raspberry bed. In later years, we performed gymnastic moves on tumbling mats that Dad produced from somewhere (possibly cast off from the school where he taught). Where? From the livingroom into the diningroom, of course.

When Dad finally bought a heavy slate pool table for the basement, it quickly became a family tradition to leave the Mum with the dishes and head to the basement for a game of Boston before it was time to do homework. In our defense, I should point out that in those days, the pool game was often delayed as Dad washed the dishes, and Mum dried, so she was not totally abandoned, but drying took longer. She didn't seem all that interested in pool. Domestic arrangements by Jack Sprat.

I was reading today in the NY Times about families on the Upper East Side of New York who have their children driven by chauffeured S.U.V.s to their preschools and kindergartens, and how this is creating traffic jams as the hired drivers double-park to let the little dears descend from their carriages.

Yes, I would have enjoyed being chauffeured, but then, we lived right across the street from our public school, so early on that taught us the virtues of depending on our own two feet to carry us ever forward. We were NEVER late. How could we be? We were the offspring of two teachers.