Credit Card

I have a bank credit card with one of those “chips” in it. You can’t slide it through a card reader – usually – though sometimes you can. Normally the card must be inserted into the card reader. But the chip was failing, and the card reader often said Card Read Error. So this morning I had enough of that and I called the phone number on the card. I wanted to ask for a new card. First, I went through a multi-step identity verification process – last 4 digits of my SSN, zip code, secret PIN number, etc. Then I was put into an automated queue wherein I was presented crummy music, occasionally interrupted by a female voice that said, “All our representatives are busy – please stay on the line.” After 5 minutes of that I punched End Call and went onto the bank’s website to send them a message. In the text box I typed “My credit card chip is failing. I need a new card.” I hit the Send button.

That concluded my business with the bank, so I stood up and went out the front door to get my mail. There were two envelopes in the mailbox. One was from the DMV – a new vehicle registration card. The other envelope didn’t say who it was from. But when I opened it and looked inside, there was a new bank credit card. “Wow,” I thought, “From requesting a new card to getting a new card in the mail was only 30 seconds.” That must set a record for customer service. Say what you will about my bank, their customer service department is on fire! Thanks, guys.

When I Lived in the Real South

I grew up many, many yarns ago in a small town south of Richmond, Virginia – the very same Richmond that was the capital of the Confederacy. I lived less than a mile from Petersburg, where a famous Civil War battle took place. Many Confederate soldiers lie buried in Petersburg's Blandford Cemetary ... as are some of my family.

The day came that I graduated college and went to work for a company in Burlington, North Carolina. One morning I went to a diner and sat down at the lunch counter. There was a short-order cook on the other side of the counter and behind him, a grill. I ordered an omelet. The conversation went like this:

Me: "I'd like an omelet."

Cook: "You want scrambled eggs?"

Me:  "I'd like an omelet."

Cook: "You want scrambled eggs?"

Me: "I'd prefer an omelet."

Cook: "You want scrambled eggs?"

Me:  "Yeah, scrambled eggs."

Cook: "I know where you're from."

Me: "Where's that."

Cook: "Up north."

The cook then turned around and prepared my scrambled eggs.

When I was a kid, my dad would occasionally take me to a deli in Richmond called the New York Deli. The deli made great tasting hot pastrami sandwiches and I always ordered one when we went there. So the day came in Burlington when I had a taste for a hot pastrami sandwich. But there were no delis in Burlington. So I went to a grocery store to buy the ingredients to make a pastrami sandwich at home. It was a large store, maybe a Kroger. I looked for pastrami and couldn't find it. So I asked an employee where the pastrami was kept. He didn't know. So I asked to speak with the store manager. The manager came out and asked me what I wanted. The conversation was short:

Me: "I want to buy some pastrami but I can't find it. Where is it?"

Manager: "What's pastrami?"

That really happened. That's when I knew, "I only thought I was living in the South. Welcome to the real South."

I imagined that somewhere, in some grocery chain’s head office, an executive was telling a meat company salesman, “You can keep your fancy pastrami, sonny boy. Here in the South, we eat scrambled eggs and grits, and we eat ‘em with country ham, not pastrami. What the hell is pastrami, anyway?”

Today, of course, it’s modern times and you can probably buy pastrami anywhere – even in the South. Probably. Although, I’m not sure you can find anyone there who can make you an omelet.

It Happened Again

Two months ago, on the early morning of 17 June 2017, a US Navy destroyer, USS Fitzgerald, collided with a merchant ship, ACX Crystal, near Japan. Seven of Fitzgerald’s crew were killed and several others were injured.

It has happened again. Another US Navy destroyer, USS John S McCain, has collided with a merchant ship, Alnic MC, near Singapore. Five of McCain’s sailors are injured and, at this time, ten sailors are missing.

So I was thinking, if only we had some way of bouncing radio waves off objects and displaying the result on a screen. Then our ships could avoid other ships.

However, until such a device is invented, we could station a couple of sailors on the ship’s bridge to watch for other ships. We could call those sailors "lookouts", because it would be their job to yell, "Look out! We're gonna crash!"

Sarcasm. Sorry. It’s just … what is going on with US Navy ships?

Syzygy

Syzygy – now there is a word I don’t often use. A syzygy happens when three celestial objects are in alignment with one another. Tomorrow (or perhaps today, depending on where you are), the sun, the moon, and the earth will create a syzygy. The result will be an eclipse of the sun. (Syzygy is also a term used in classical prosody, but let’s not go there.)

The last eclipse I clearly remember occurred when I was a child. Perhaps I clearly remember it because it was my first eclipse. I was in my parents’ bedroom, sitting on the edge of their bed, reading a book called The Search for Bridey Murphy. In front of me was an open window and I remember a very gradual dimming of the daylight. At some point I got up and went outside and looked at the sun. The world didn’t have eclipse glasses then, but I’m sure I used some kind of eye protection – perhaps black and white film negatives layered together. I didn’t look at the eclipse for long – just a few seconds – and my reaction, if it could be expressed in words, would have been something like, “Huh.” Then I went back inside and continued reading.

The last time an eclipse occurred coast to coast in the continental United States was in 1918, and it won’t happen again until 2045. But an eclipse occurs, on average, somewhere on our planet every 18 months. There are people who travel the world to see a total eclipse. An eclipse may occur over the ocean. It may occur over Siberia, or over Mongolia, or over the tip of South America. Which is to say, eclipses occur in plenty of places that you wouldn’t necessarily want to be.

People who travel to see eclipses often say the moment of totality is awesome. It would have to be awesome, and then some, to induce me to drive for hours in congested traffic in order to see something that will last for about two minutes. And with my luck, a passing cloud would block out the moment of totality.

If you’ve never seen a total eclipse, you may want to drive for hours to have the experience. Perhaps you’ll agree that the eclipse is awesome. But be warned: YMMV – your mileage may vary. You may spend hours on the road in great anticipation, only to say, “Huh.”

(Note – NASA will be webcasting the eclipse. Follow this link for info.)

Unintended Consequences

There are three types of unintended consequences. One is called unintended benefit, when a purposeful action has unanticipated positive side-effects (sometimes called a windfall). For example, aspirin was developed for pain and fever but also happens to be an anticoagulant that helps protect against heart attack and helps reduce the damage from thrombotic strokes.

A second type is called unintended drawback, when a purposeful action has unanticipated negative side-effects. For example, the added safety features of modern cars, intended to reduce injury, have led to riskier driving behavior because drivers feel safer and better protected. This riskier behavior (speeding, following too closely, applying the brakes too late) has offset, to some extent, the benefits of those safety features. The result is that certain kinds of automobile crashes have increased in prevalence.

A third type is called perverse effect, when a purposeful action has an outcome contrary to what was intended (sometimes called a backfire). For example, hate groups protesting the removal of a Confederate statue from a park in Charlottesville were met by counter-protesters, with violence being the predictable result. Far from deterring the removal of monuments, the rally hastened the removal of Confederate monuments all over America. Cities don’t want to host violent protests and so they expedited plans to remove all monuments that might attract hate groups. Those hate groups, by their actions to seek attention, have spurred a growing recognition of the threat they pose. The more they rally, the more they try to exploit violence, the less likely any Confederate relics will survive the coming purge.

Moral Equivalence

A protest rally was held by neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other white supremacists. They said they want to “take back” America, though it isn’t entirely clear what that means. They seemed to be protesting the existence of African-Americans, Jews, Hispanics, immigrants, and other minority groups in America. As could be expected, counter-protesters showed up to protest the extremists. President Trump said there was violence on both sides. Is he right? Only in the most literal sense. Yes, there was violence and fighting in the streets, but the two sides are not morally equivalent. When hateful elements arise in our society, good and moral society must push back. There is a very famous quote, often attributed to Irish statesman Edmund Burke:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Trump said “some very fine people” were among the white supremacist crowd. Allow this blogger to propose another point of view. “Very fine people” don’t attend white supremacist rallies. “Very fine people” don’t mix with Nazis and Klansmen and other haters. If you ever find yourself in a crowd of torch-carrying bigots who are marching in the night and shouting racial slurs, you can be fairly certain you’re not a “very fine person.” Just what the hell is going on in Donald Trump’s brain?

America’s Shame

There was once a great and malignant evil in America. That evil was slavery. It was malignant because, like the scourge of cancer, it metastasized into other evils. It metastasized into the KKK, into neo-Nazis, into anti-Semitism, and into various white supremacist groups. It metastasized into segregation, into lynchings, into bombings, into Jim Crow, and into murderous attacks on black churches. Slavery was an enormous evil and America suffers the scourge of its repercussions to this day.

Slavery is gone, but there is no way to wipe out history. Institutionalized slavery is a part of America’s past. We cannot, nor should we, pretend it never happened. We have to admit that our ancestors screwed up in a big way. They bought and sold people and called it good and proper. They inflicted a great evil on America and then fought a devastating war in a failed attempt to preserve that evil institution.

The remnants of slavery exist today in monuments to the defenders of slavery. I know there will be people who will claim the Civil War wasn’t about slavery – it was about “states’ rights.” Sure it was – it was about Confederate states “right” to be slave states.

There are people who call themselves “Christians” who think that monuments to Southern slavery are just fine and no one should bring those monuments down. I fear for their souls. They are so very far on the wrong side of history.

Should the statues come down? In one sense, they’re museum pieces. They’re like that piece of pottery from ancient Rome that today’s society would consider obscene. Civil War statues are not artifacts of today’s society. They are artifacts of the past and can instruct us as to where we have come from.

Civil War monuments to vanquished Southern military officers are like those museum pieces. They belong in a museum. No one, I hope, not Southerners nor anyone else, believes they are monuments to slavery. They’re artifacts from a time and place that no longer exists, and that is the way they should be seen. But that time and place did once exist, and we shouldn’t forget it. What our ancestors did was so very wrong. It’s hard for Southerners to accept this fact: our ancestors are guilty of participating in a great evil.

Civil War statues commemorate men who were bold and brave and daring and fearless and gutsy and stalwart, but when all is said and done, those men were very, very wrong.

Violence and a Dream

As I was video chatting with my R-town amigo CyberDave, I felt a fatigue creeping over me. The chat was going nowhere, as neither of us had news of any significance. So I decided I would lie down for a while in the hope that a short nap would leave me in a less enervated state.

I lay down upon my bed, but my restless mind would not allow sleep to come. I grabbed my tablet computer and played a few hands of Solitaire. Then I closed the Solitaire program and summoned the News to appear on my tablet’s screen. And so it did.

At the top of the news page was an article about an unfortunate and surprising event that happened today in Charlottesville, Virginia. A group of white nationalists, KKK members, Nazis, and members of the alt-right movement had gathered in a park for a rally to “take back America.” The rally was called “Unite the Right.” They want everyone to know that America’s Caucasians are getting a bad deal. Many protesters waved Confederate flags, which have become the unfortunate emblem for haters. Of course they were opposed by counter-protesters, and it didn’t take long for the rally to turn violent. Punches were thrown and chemicals were sprayed. In the midst of this, a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters in a pedestrian mall. The car hit twenty people, killing one and injuring nineteen. Five are in critical condition. Another fourteen people were taken to the hospital after suffering injuries from street fighting.

The police did what they could to quell the riot in the park, but the fighting continued on side streets. Many, if not most, of the white nationalists were from out of state. The driver of the hit-and-run car was from Ohio.

I said it was a surprising event because Charlottesville is a university town, home to the University of Virginia. University towns are usually bastions of tolerance, and Charlottesville is no different. In fact, the event that triggered the white nationalist rally was a decision by the Charlottesville city council to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

Having fed all of this sad news into my brain, I put my tablet down and rolled over and went to sleep. I napped for about 90 minutes and I dreamed a long dream. When I awakened, I could only remember the very end of the dream.

In this part of my dream, there was a large group of people and each person was holding up some kind of thing similar in shape to a medication capsule but much bigger. Some of these things were white, while some were red, and some were blue with a white star. The people held these things close to their bodies – close to their hearts – as they meandered about in the crowd.

My dreaming self was momentarily puzzled and wondered, “What are these people doing?” Then I realized what I was looking at: red, white, blue, and white stars. Each person held a bit of the American flag and they were trying to come together to make the flag complete. But at this point, they couldn’t find their places. They didn’t know where to go, where to stand, but they were trying. And there the dream ended.

What did the dream mean, if it meant anything at all? I can’t tell you. It’s like a Rorschach test – only you can decide what those inkblots mean.

That Kind of Day

It’s a rainy afternoon. I go to the kitchen and fill my 28 ounce mug with water. I place the mug on a nearby countertop and something goes wrong. As soon as I let go of the mug it falls onto the floor. Water goes everywhere.

So it’s going to be that kind of day.

I fetch a sponge mop and a bucket and begin to mop the kitchen floor. Right away, the sponge tears away from the mop-head. It was a new sponge, used one time, and I don’t have a replacement sponge. I decide to let the water evaporate. And it does. The water evaporates into the air and is removed from the air by the a/c.

It rains all day. Evening comes and I go to bed. Lying in bed, I hear a faint tapping sound. I get out of bed and follow the tapping sound to the bathroom. Water is dripping from the ceiling. Fortuitously, it happens to be dripping into a plastic bucket. The drops of water hitting the bottom of the empty bucket are making the tapping sound.

The next day a friend comes by the house, looks at my roof, and says he sees the problem. He goes home and returns with some supplies. He climbs a ladder and pounds nails, installs screws, and applies caulk. He pronounces the roof water-tight once more. I hope he’s right.

The twenty-four eventful hours are concluded in proper fashion when I heat a microwave meal for dinner and get food poisoning. Oh well, at least there’s Imodium for that.

Statue of Liberty

Did you know…

The full name for the Statue of Liberty is “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

Following its dedication in 1886, the statue was operated as a lighthouse under control of the United States Lighthouse Board, an agency of the US Federal Government within the Department of Treasury.

The statue’s torch, 305 feet above sea level, contained nine electric arc lamps that could be seen twenty-four miles out to sea.

The electric generator for the lamps in the torch was originally powered by a steam engine. In 1898 the steam engine was replaced by a ten-horsepower oil engine, which was cheaper to operate.

In 1901, jurisdiction over the statue passed from the Lighthouse Board to the War Department.

On March 1, 1902, the Statue of Liberty was discontinued as an aid to navigation.

In 1932, control of the statue passed from the War Department to the National Park Service, which operates it as a tourist attraction today.

Scooter Hoax

A friend sent me a video showing a man using a gallon or so of water to power his scooter. The claim was that the scooter could go 500 km.  The man in the video used a battery to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and then he burned the hydrogen to generate heat which was somehow converted into motive power. My friend asked the question, “Have you heard of this?”

I assume the real question was, “Is this real?” The short answer is, “No, it’s a hoax.” The longer answer is a little more complicated.

It is possible to use electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The process takes energy from the battery and creates stored energy in the form of the two gases. It is possible to recombine (burn) the hydrogen with the oxygen to generate heat that can be used to power an engine. When you recombine the two gases you get back the energy that was used to split the molecules. The process of splitting and recombining the water molecules does not create additional energy. You get back only the amount of energy you drew from the battery. And converting heat into motive power is not 100% efficient. You would do better to connect the battery directly to an electric motor and skip the hydrogen/oxygen step.

But yes, the scooter can go 500 km -- if the trip is downhill all the way.