I’m Not Here to Talk

I went to the Walmart store to buy some groceries. I picked up a few items, but I don’t know how many items were in my cart because I didn’t count them. When I was ready to checkout, the checkout lines were long, but there was an express line that had nobody in it. The sign said “20 items or less” and eyeballing my cart I thought I might have 20 items, but I wasn’t sure. Standing at the register was a young woman who looked to be maybe twenty years old. There was no one waiting behind me so I figured a little friendly banter couldn’t hurt. I rolled my cart up to the register and said, “I’m not sure I have fewer than twenty items. Would you like me to count them?”

The young woman said, “No,” and looked in another direction.

“I don’t mind,” I replied. “You’re sure you don’t want me to count them?”

The young woman said nothing and continued to look away.

“I just don’t want to get in trouble with the Walmart police,” I tried one more time.

This prompted the young woman to say, “I’m just here to do my job. I’m not here to talk.”

“Well, “ I replied, “by all means, don’t let being cheerful get in the way of doing your job.”

So she did her checkout job in silence while I did my customer job in silence. Not another word was exchanged between us. When I left, I almost said to her, “I hope you feel better.” Almost. But I didn’t because that would have involved being friendly to her, and I knew that my being friendly would ruin her day.

I assume she was only having a bad day and that she isn’t a full-time grouch. But who knows. I guess it’s the grouches we meet that make us appreciate the friendly people we meet.

I Was Gonna But

This promises to be another day of “I was gonna but…”

I’ve needed to mow my yard for a month. I was gonna cut the grass yesterday, but it was too chilly. And I was gonna cut the grass the day before yesterday, but it was too wet. And I was gonna cut the grass today, but at 7 AM the temperature is 23°F ( -5°C). The high temperature is supposed to hit 50° today, but that will be at 5 PM. It’s going to be cold all day.

But it’s not too cold to keep the weeds from growing. My yard is chock full of various flowering weeds. The henbit and the chickweed and the dandelions are ganging up on the shrinking islands of grass.

Of course, I could work on the lawn tractor. I could remove and sharpen the blades. I could. But I’m unwilling to lie on a cold, cement garage floor when the temperature is in the 30s to 40s. I could do it, but I’m not gonna.

Tomorrow is Friday. I’ll mow the yard then – if it’s warmer. And if not tomorrow, then definitely on Saturday. I’ll mow the yard on Saturday at the very latest.

Or Sunday.

Spring Arrives

Today is March 20, 2017 – the first day of spring. This means I can mow my yard, which has needed mowing for a month. We had a warm February that allowed the grass to grow sufficiently that some of my neighbors mowed their yards a month ago. But I refuse to mow my yard in winter. It’s a little eccentricity that I justify by the fact that I live in central Virginia, not Florida. Virginia has cold winters, despite the occasional mid-winter warm spell (and here I’m thinking of the famous “January thaw”). Winters are a downside to living in Virginia. I have to burn heating oil. I have to wear a coat outside the house. I have to shovel snow. There’s no “fun in the sun” – it’s winter. There should be an upside to winter, and one upside I insist upon is that I don’t have to mow grass. But that changes today.

First, I’ll remove the mower blades from beneath the deck of my lawn tractor and sharpen them. This is necessary because last summer someone placed a brick in tall grass behind my garage. I couldn’t see the brick (tall grass, remember) and consequently I drove my mower over it. The mower blades chewed the brick to bits with a hellacious racket as the pieces of brick churned out by the blades rebounded off the inside of the mower’s deck and back into the blades for further chewing. The mower blades had (past tense) thin, sharp edges and they took quite a beating from the brick. Of course, the mower continued to cut grass. I could put the blades on backward and they would still shorten grass. But the process would be more of a tearing, ripping, and mangling than cleanly cutting the blades of grass. So there’s that.

And I no longer have an excuse to not scrape and paint over peeling paint on my house’s exterior woodwork. And will the window air conditioner that is 22 years old operate for one more summer? And dandelions are sprouting in the yard, and the yard needs fertilizer, and weed killer, and grass seed.

I should be doing yard work right now, but this blog post isn’t going to write itself. Priorities, you know. I can do yard work tomorrow, but there’s only one first day of spring.

They Might Be Giants

The song of the day is 2013's You're On Fire from the album Nanobots by alternative rock band They Might Be Giants featuring band co-founders John Flansburgh and John Linnel. The band’s name, They Might Be Giants, is also the title of a 1971 movie that starred George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward.

The Bologna Complexity

I went to the store today and came home with several bags of food. Among the food was a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a package of bologna. When I was a kid I often made peanut butter and bologna sandwiches for school lunch and enjoyed eating them every time. I’m sure that has a certain yuck-factor for some people. But don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. Many’s the day I sat in the school’s cafeteria, opened my brown paper lunch bag, and pulled out a peanut butter and bologna sandwich and a moon pie for dessert. Even today, far removed in time from my school days, the sandwich makes a quick and tasty snack enhanced, for me, with a bit of nostalgia.

Factoid: The sausage called bologna is named after the city in Italy where it was invented: Bologna (pronounced “boloan-ya”).

Many people pronounce bologna (as well as spell it) baloney. But technically, baloney is a different word with a different meaning. It means nonsense, as in “that’s a bunch of baloney.”

I’ve read that the name bologna is restricted to regions of northern Italy, and if you go south and ask for bologna, people won’t know what you’re talking about. In southern Italy, the same sausage is called mortadella. I suspect neither bologna nor mortadella are much like American bologna.

Bottom line: baloney can be sausage or it can be nonsense, but bologna is always sausage.

[UPDATE]
Upon reading this post, my amigo and fellow blogger CyberDave asked me if I have ever eaten a peanut butter and fried-bologna sandwich. I admitted I had not. I like fried bologna and think it’s tastier than bologna straight from the package, so I decided to try it. The result was both unexpected and disappointing. I could not taste the bologna on my sandwich. The bologna was hot from the frying pan and I could detect its warmth on my tongue, but as for taste: nothing. Much of what we call taste is actually smell, and it appears the frying process reduced the meat’s aroma. Oh well.

Equador

The song of the day is Bones of Man from the 2016 album Bones of Man by Equador (Henry Binns of English duo Zero 7, Binns’ wife, English singer-songwriter Catherine Anna Brudenell-Bruce a.k.a. Bo Bruce, and English pop/experimental songwriter, producer and bassist Jodi Millner).

Kilometer

A meter (spelled metre in Britain) is a unit of length equal to 39.37 inches. A kilometer is a unit of length equal to one thousand meters or about six tenths of a mile. It seems like a great many people don’t know how to pronounce the word. The correct pronunciation is kil-uh-mee-der (emphasis on the first syllable). A common mispronunciation is kuh-lom-uh-der (emphasis on the second syllable). That is incorrect.

Words containing meter usually indicate either length or a measuring instrument. Common units of length in the metric system include nanometer, micrometer (micron), millimeter, centimeter, decimeter, meter, dekameter, hectometer, and of course, kilometer. There are additional prefixes for the word meter to indicate both larger and smaller lengths than those already mentioned. All these various forms of meter have two things in common: all indicate length, and all have emphasis on the first syllable. So: mil-uh-mee-der, cent-uh-mee-der, des-uh-mee-der, and so on to kil-uh-mee-der.

Another usage of the word meter is to indicate a measuring device, as in thermometer, pedometer, speedometer, accelerometer, anemometer, barometer, and chronometer, to name just a few. All these forms of meter have two things in common: all are measuring instruments, and all have emphasis on the “om” syllable. So: ther-mom-uh-der, buh-rom-uh-der, puh-dom-uh-der, spee-dom-uh-der, and so on.

To recap, if you pronounce kilometer like kuh-lom-uh-der, then you are pronouncing the word as if you were speaking of a measuring instrument. If you want to properly pronounce the word that means one thousand meters, then you say kil-uh-mee-der. Every time I hear someone on TV say kuh-lom-uh-der, I wince. (Well, mentally I wince.) And I say out loud to the TV, “It’s kil-uh-mee-der, not kuh-lom-uh-der, moron.” But I know I’m speaking to the wind.

Factoid: U.S. military personnel commonly use the slang word klick to mean kilometer (as in, 20 klicks north of the river). Sometimes they use klicks (plural) to mean kilometers per hour.

Fast Food

In a recent post, I described a trip to a local fast food restaurant that I didn’t identify, but which I called Burger Tycoon. In this post, I’m going to describe a trip to another anonymous fast food franchise. I’ll call it Mindy’s.

At the suggestion of a friend, I tried Mindy’s fish fillet sandwich. Not surprisingly, it didn't look a lot like the picture on their website. The breading on the fillet was dark brown as if the fillet had been in the fryer too long. (I admit the possibility that it’s supposed to look like it’s been in the fryer too long.) The fillet also appeared thinner than the similar Mickey D's fillet but, as I haven’t applied calipers to either fillet nor examined them side-by-side, that’s only an opinion.

The Mindy’s fillet tasted much like a Mickey D fillet. (Mindy's fish is cod. Mickey D's fish is pollock. The two fish are similar in flavor and texture and most people can’t tell the difference.) Mindy’s fish was topped with tartar sauce, lettuce, and pickles. The lettuce and pickles were a nice touch. Mickey D tops their fish with cheese and tartar sauce (though perhaps they’ll throw in pickles and lettuce if you bribe the cashier).

Speaking of cheese, it seems many Americans think a fast-food entrée can be improved by adding a slice of American cheese, whereas I'm of the opposite opinion: cheese should be reserved for patty melts, Reubens, and grilled cheese sandwiches. And pizza. Nothing should have American cheese on it. Is it even real cheese? Or is it some kind of “cheese-like product”?

My french fries had no salt or other seasoning on them. Lots of fast food places have trouble with french fries. You never know what you’ll get. They might be hot; they might be just warm. They might be salted; they might be unsalted. And the local Mindy's is slow, considering their product is called fast food. Standing in line to order, the man ahead of me turned his head my way and muttered, "Must be shift change." I replied, "No, this place is always this slow." There was only one customer ahead of him, but it seemed like it took her ten minutes to place an order. The man eventually got to the register and placed his order. Then I stepped forward and placed my order. I moved down the counter to wait for my food and forgot about the man who had spoken to me. After a while I turned and saw him standing behind me. I couldn’t help asking the obvious: "Are you still waiting for your order?" He answered, "Yep."

My opinion of Mindy’s food is this: like all fast food, it is what it is. One day it’s pretty good. Another day it’s not as good. Fast food is for when you want to put something in your stomach and be on your way. If it’s delicious, that’s a bonus. It will satisfy your stomach and – if you’re not picky and the cook is having a good day – it may satisfy your taste buds, too.

Factoid: The word filet is usually applied to meats, whereas fillet is usually applied to fish, but it is correct usage to apply either word to meats OR fish.

Russia-gate

Donald Trump is demanding Congress investigate former president Obama for wiretapping Trump Tower. Sure, let’s waste a ton of taxpayer money on a pointless investigation about our last president wiretapping his successor. It’s an obvious ploy to get the news media to focus on something besides the Trump administration’s ties with Russia. But Russia-gate is a story that doesn’t want to go away.

If there were evidence that the wiretap story might be true, then it should be investigated. But Congress can’t investigate every kooky story that comes out of Trump’s brain. There is an adage that says, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In the case of the wiretap story, Trump has offered no evidence to support his claim. “I read it on the internet” is not evidence.

The longer the Russia-gate story goes on, the more complicated it gets. Here are some of the players (so far).

Michael Flynn, Trump’s first pick for national security advisor, met with (and communicated with by phone and text messages) Russian officials including Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the US. (It is safe to assume that Ambassador Kislyak stays in contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin and serves as a channel for communications with Putin.) At first Flynn denied communicating with the ambassador, but after intelligence officials confirmed it was true, Flynn admitted it and was fired for misleading the administration.

Trump senior aide (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner met with the Russian ambassador.

Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions admitted meeting with the Russian ambassador after first denying it.

Former Trump campaign director of national security J.D. Gordon met with the Russian ambassador.

Former Trump advisor Carter Page met with Russian officials including the Russian ambassador and Igor Sechin, a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Page also had business ties to Russia.

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was an advisor to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and also had business ties to Russia.

Trump secretary of state Rex Tillerson had business ties to Russia and was honored with an award by Vladimir Putin.

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Artemenko.

It’s possible that the meetings and communications were harmless. But it’s also possible they were not harmless. What were these meetings about?  Were deals discussed that should not have been discussed? Were promises made? Why are people lying about meeting Russian officials or claiming they don’t remember? As of now, we have no answers.

There is another adage: where there’s smoke there’s fire. It’s possible this Russia-gate story is mere smoke. But where there’s this much smoke, someone needs to check for fire.