Home Depot

I contracted with a home improvement store to refurbish my kitchen: new sink and countertops, new cabinets, new floor covering. The store made me pay in advance, but I decided that since they were a national chain, it would be okay. Two installers — a cabinet installer and a plumber — came and ripped out the old stuff. Then they left. “We have another job today,” they said, “but we’ll be back.” A couple of weeks went by and they didn’t return. I had to go to the store and complain before they would come back. When they did come back, they worked an hour and left again. Once again, about two weeks passed and they didn’t show. I went to the store and complained. Each time I complained, the installers would return and work an hour. A job that should have taken half a day, or maybe a day, took about two months to complete. And there were problems.

They installed the kitchen sink crooked, with the left side noticeably higher than the right side. They said the sink was as level as they could get it. Then they left for lunch. When they returned, I said to one of the installers — the plumber — “Try to get the sink so it’s not crooked. It looks half-assed right now.” The plumber picked up his tools and told me, “I refuse to be cursed at,” and walked out leaving his job half done. A plumber who can’t stand to hear the word ass? No way. He was looking for an excuse to quit the job. After all, he had his money.

I went to the store to discuss the situation, and I discovered that he had told the store manager that I had cursed at him. I told the store manager exactly what happened. That’s when I found out that the store had a list of approved contractors, and the plumber wasn’t on the list. The plumber and the cabinet installer were pals and the cabinet installer had subcontracted the plumbing work to his unapproved buddy.

The new floor covering, which was installed by a third-party subcontractor, was installed incorrectly and bubbles formed under the vinyl. I asked the store to fix it. They didn’t want to, but they eventually agreed to replace the vinyl if I paid for the labor. So that is what happened.

It seems to me that everyone has stories like this. You contract people to do a job, they demand payment upfront, they do half the job and disappear, and the half they actually do turns out to be done wrong. You really can’t trust anyone. More accurately, you can trust some people, but it’s hard to know who those people are.

Flight of Fancy

I went to Google News and clicked the Science topic. The top story was about a man — a “flat-Earther” — who has built a homemade scrap-metal rocket in which he plans to ride to an altitude of 1800 feet, at which point he can look around and declare Earth is flat. I’m not going to mention his name here, nor will I provide links to news articles about him, and there is a reason for that.

But first, what is the significance of 1800 feet? There are mountains taller than that. In fact, One World Trade Center in Manhattan is almost 1800 feet tall. Why build a rocket and go on a dangerous ride into the sky when a trip to the top of One World Trade Center will accomplish the same goal?

Because: publicity. Joining a gaggle of tourists riding elevators to the top of a tall building won’t get your picture on Google News. But it also won’t get you killed if the rocket explodes. Some people are willing to risk their lives to get publicity. And the news media are more than happy to oblige. “You’re going to risk your life riding on a homemade rocket? We’ll be there with cameras!”

Please, news media — don’t cover this kind of story. It only encourages crackpots to get themselves killed just to get their name in the news. But maybe that is what the news people secretly want to happen. It’s like an unspoken contract. The crackpot risks his life on a mission that won’t prove a thing (and everybody knows it) and in return the news media grants him free publicity. If he gets himself blown to little pieces in the sky, so much the better: more people will follow the story, and the rocket rider becomes a footnote in history. Man dies trying to prove Earth is flat. He may even get his own Wikipedia entry. Sadly for some, that’s worth dying for.

Hunter’s Checklist

I’m very tired of seeing headlines like these:

• Hunter Fatally Shot Woman He Thought Was A Deer
• Hunter Charged With Shooting Truck He Mistook For Deer

Tired, I tell you. I’ve seen headlines like these too many times.

So I’ve designed a “hunter’s checklist” visual aid. Attention deer hunters: print this page, clip out the checklist, and put it in your wallet. Before you shoot a deer, retrieve this visual aid and compare it carefully with the deer you are about to shoot. Make damn sure the deer looks like the top image — the one with antlers. If the deer looks like one of the other two images, don’t shoot it. After a while, you’ll probably find that you don’t need the checklist. You’ll be able to remember what a deer looks like.

That’s all there is to it. You’re welcome.

No Escape

Recently, I awoke from a nightmare. I rarely have true nightmares. Mostly, I have unpleasant dreams, especially the kind where I am looking for something and can’t find it. For example, I might be looking for my car. But I never find it, and the dream-search goes on and on, seemingly for hours. This dream was different. There was no single person or object to fear. Mostly, the dream consisted of a series of paranoia-inducing events.

As the dream progressed, my paranoia rose. The nightmare reached a point where I tried to run away from some nameless dread but only managed to fall down. I couldn’t escape. My fear level was one I haven’t felt in a long time: actual terror. But that is when I woke up.

It’s curious that a nightmare has the power to make us feel a kind of terror that we never experience when we’re awake. I think when we’re awake we have mental defenses against that kind of fear, but when we are sleeping our defenses are down and we can, under the right conditions, experience real terror. And there’s no way to end it, no way to get away from it. It builds and builds and we know it’s going to get us. The dream is in control, and when the dream wants to scare us, it knows exactly what to do.

Our dreaming mind taps into what we’re most afraid of — deep, subconscious fears that we’re usually not aware we have — and it plays with us, firing just the right neurons in just the right part of our brain to scare the bejesus out of us. It knows the weaknesses in our mental armor. At least in a scary movie, we’re aware that we’re watching a movie. But in a dream, it’s all real. Everything happening to us, and everything around us, is real. We’re trapped in our own fantasy world, a world that is in our heads.

If you have nightmares, it’s best to watch what you eat before bedtime. Ditch that late-night pizza, that sugary snack, that greasy bowl of chips or fries. Because once the nightmare starts, there is no escape. You’re in it to the end.

Russian Spam

"We eat ham, and jam and Spam a lot."
— from Monty Python’s Spamalot.

I received the following email. This is the lamest spam email I’ve seen lately, although I rarely open obvious spam emails so it’s possible I’ve missed lamer ones. This one claims to be from a “Cindy Franklin” and it has a link (not included here) to a Russian website.

Dear customer,

Propceia - 0.15$
Levitra - 1.63$
Ciali - 1.82$
Viarga - 0.56$

feel the energy of love! buuy viugra at our durgst0re !

Only one drug is spelled correctly. Viagra is not only misspelled but it’s misspelled two different ways. “Buy” — a word with only 3 letters — is misspelled. Drug, the thing they’re selling, is misspelled durg. Their “durgst0re” has the numeral 0 in place of the letter “o”. (“Hey, pick me up a couple of durgs while you’re out.”)

If I want to be picky, I could also point out that they put the dollar sign after the price instead of before the price; the last two sentences should begin with a capital letter; and there shouldn’t be a space between the end of a sentence and the punctuation mark following it.

You’re in Russia, you’re trying to get me to buy pharmaceuticals from Russia, and you send me an email with only 19 words and 5 of them have their spelling garbled?

Really? Does that actually work?

The email is composed so badly that I question if it’s not on purpose. Perhaps it was sent by the Russian government but they want to make it look totally amateurish so I won’t suspect they sent it. We live in a paranoia-inducing world, at least on the Internet.

Some people may click the link out of curiosity. That’s all it takes to get malware on your computer. Your computer then becomes part of a botnet — millions of zombie computers networked and controlled by Russian criminals (or Russia’s FSB).

Roger Whittaker

The song of the day is New World in the Morning from the 1971 album New World in the Morning by Kenyan/British singer-songwriter-musician Roger Whittaker.

Science 101

Some statements are verifiable, and some are not. Some are falsifiable, and some are not.

Consider the statement all swans are white. It is not verifiable, because in order to prove it is true we would have to observe all the swans on the planet. That is a practical impossibility, but even if we think we’ve done it, how can we prove we did it? How can we ever prove we didn’t miss a swan somewhere? We can’t. However, the statement is falsifiable, as all it takes to prove the statement is false is the discovery of one black swan.

Philosopher of science Karl Popper said that what is unfalsifiable is unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience.

Among today’s scientifically illiterate population, pseudoscience has found a convenient way to avoid categories such as verifiable and falsifiable. The scientifically illiterate avoid unpleasant truth by invoking dodgy explanations such as “fake science”, “hoax”, “conspiracy” and the like. Thus, a mountain of evidence pointing to an unmistakable conclusion that they find inconvenient is brushed away with a single unprovable excuse. And a total lack of evidence to support their pseudoscientific belief is also conveniently explained away as a “government cover-up”, a “vast conspiracy”, or a “whitewash”.

Science, one of the pillars of Western civilization that took us from the steam engine to the Moon rocket, is now declared unscientific. Many people today are rejecting science, sometimes to their chagrin. Many people can no longer discern the difference between the verifiable and the falsifiable, nor do they understand the significance of such distinctions. They refute the findings of science and give preference to what they want to believe. As a result, we have the global warming debate, the vaccination/autism hoax, space aliens helping ancient humans, astrology, homeopathy, intelligent design, and toxins everywhere, among other pseudoscience. Our society’s substantial and growing refusal to accept reality can only end in a bad way.

Trace Adkins

The song of the day is Wayfaring Stranger performed here by singer-songwriter-actor Trace Adkins (Tracy Darrell Adkins). The song is an old folk song that dates from the 19th century and has been recorded by many artists.

Hoax

Every once in a while conspiracy theorists bring up the planet Nibiru. This theory posits that a rogue planet called Planet X or Nibiru is going to either collide with Earth and destroy it, or it’s going to get into some special configuration with other planets that will cause devastating earthquakes all over the globe. Conspiracy nuts have predicted Earth’s destruction by Nibiru several times already, but when nothing happens they just change the date of the end of the world. There are people in great anxiety over this made-up planet. They believe the conspiracy nuts and refuse to believe reputable scientists.

I blame the decline of public education in American schools, and in particular the decline of scientific literacy, for the continual propagation of this and other fake news stories. It seems that society has become dumbed down to the point that many people are no longer capable of critical thinking. Today, you cannot create a conspiracy theory so absurd that no one will believe it.

We have a president who believes conspiracy theories and has invented  his own. IQs may not have changed, but ignorance of so many basic facts about reality has the same effect. A police officer who deals with people all day every day told me, “People are getting dumber and dumber.” He gets no argument from me.

In 2003, an early inventor of the Nibiru end-of-the-world hoax announced she had her dogs euthanized so they wouldn’t suffer when the last day arrived. In 1997, the Heaven’s Gate cult — 21 women and 18 men ranging in age from 26 to 72 — committed suicide so they could exit their earthly bodies and hitch a ride on a spaceship that was hidden in the tail of comet Hale-Bopp. They believed this ridiculous proposition because their leader, Marshall Applewhite, told them to believe it. How can people be that gullible? Why do intelligent people believe in nonsense? It happens because they don’t think critically when they hear or read something. They want to believe, and so they do.

Jim Jones ordered over 900 people to commit suicide, and they did. Charles Manson ordered his “family” to slaughter innocent people, and they did. David Koresh claimed to be the voice of God. His 76 followers believed him and followed him into destruction.

It’s hard to save people from themselves. Sometimes it’s impossible. People have to save themselves — by being skeptical, by being educated, by being rational. If they prefer not to think, then they will have earned the Darwin Award that will surely be bestowed upon them.

User Interface

I don’t mind if a company I deal with online, my bank for instance, changes their Web appearance (the user interface) because they’re adding features to their website pages. But I mind a lot when they change their user interface just for the sake of change. “Our new website looks more modern” is not something that is useful to me. Having to hunt for links I used to know second nature is a waste of my time. And when they tout their new website as more “streamlined” and easier to use, what they really mean is all the links I need are hidden in dropdown menus and other obscure locations, and I’ll spend three times as long finding the link I need.

A similar thing happens at brick-and-mortar stores. After a time, I learn the location of items I purchase frequently, then one day I walk into the store and everything is in a different location. All this does is annoy customers. In the end, I never buy anything I wasn’t intending to buy when I entered the store — I just spend more time finding what I want. And often I have to get a store employee to help me, and then I’m burning the employee’s time. And the end result? The employee might direct me to the correct location, or he might direct me to the wrong location. At that point I might decide “another time” and leave without making the purchase. I’m really skeptical that these inventory ‘resets’ help store profits.

Software programs have a user interface, too. I just upgraded Mozilla Firefox to the new version 57 called Firefox Quantum. It loads pages twice as fast, which is useful, but why change the user interface? Why move a ‘button’ from the right side of the program window to the left side of the window? Why make things look different? Is it to emphasize that it’s a new product “under the hood”? Frankly, I rarely think a new user interface is an improvement in any way. I think it just looks different and unfamiliar. What’s the point of that?

I have a suspicion that the webmaster and the software programmer merely want to justify their jobs. After all, they have to put something on their time sheets. “Our old user interface is boring. We need a complete redesign.” And that is how ‘make-work’ comes to be.

The Wendy’s Experience

I ate lunch today at my local Wendy’s restaurant. I do that from time to time, even though too often the experience falls short of satisfactory. Nevertheless, as I’ve done many times, I decided to give the place another chance.

I was the first and only person in line — for a while. Then customers began queuing up behind me. I waited for what seemed like ten minutes to place my order. It always takes me a while to place an order at Wendy’s, but today the wait seemed longer than usual. Finally the manager asked me if I had been waited on. I shook my head, and he yelled at someone to take my order.

A young woman appeared and asked, “For here or to go?”

I answered, “For here.”

The young woman took my order and I swiped my card. She placed the register tape on the counter for the next person to process. Then she asked me again, “For here or to go?” Again I answered, “For here.” She placed a tray on the counter.

The next worker looked at the tape and, with the tray right in front of her, asked me a third time, “For here or to go?” I tapped the counter and said, “This order is for inside.” A few minutes later I got my order.

I had ordered the spicy chicken sandwich and value fries. The fries looked different than the usual Wendy’s fries. I remembered Wendy’s fries as being thicker than usual fast-food fries, which is one of the things I liked about them. But these were skinny fries.

I went to the condiments counter to get ketchup. Instead of putting out packets of ketchup, Wendy’s uses a pump-machine; each time you press the pump handle, the machine squirts a little ketchup into a plastic cup. The machine was empty of ketchup, which did not surprise me. An empty ketchup machine is not unusual for that restaurant.

I assumed the kitchen workers had ketchup packets for to-go orders. I returned to the order-pickup counter and asked for ketchup. It took a minute or so to get their attention, but I finally got my ketchup.

I sat down at a table and prepared to eat my lunch. I tried a French fry. It wasn’t hot. Also, the fries had no salt on them. I stood up, walked to the condiments counter, got my salt, and returned to my table and sat down again.

I unwrapped the spicy chicken sandwich. It contained a piece of deep-fried breaded chicken floating in mayo inside a bun. It was tasty, but it was hard to keep the sandwich together because the mayo lubricated the bun so well that the bun slid around on the chicken.

At a table about 8 feet away sat a young couple with two small boys who may have been about 5 and 6 years old. Throughout my meal, the boys were constantly jumping up from their table to go running around the restaurant whooping and hollering. The man and woman ignored them. I guess they felt the boys were too young to be taught manners. I felt like I was at a children’s playground.

I ate half the fries, which after a couple minutes were cold and unappetizing. (Thin fries cool faster than thicker fries.) I also made a mental note that I should probably carry toothpicks with me to pin together slippery foods like bread and sandwich innards. Once again, I left Wendy’s feeling less than satisfied with the experience. This time, I probably won’t return.

I mention these things not because they are unusual but because they are so usual. I no longer eat at Burger King, even though I like their Whopper sandwich, for precisely the same reasons: food not hot, fries not salted, drink machine out of what I want, icemaker broken, kitchen slow. That BK doesn’t have a lot of business. The local Wendy’s isn’t usually busy, either. You know who has a ton of business every day? The local McDonald’s. The problem with McDonald’s is too many customers. Even so, the McDonald’s order-taking process and kitchen always seem to run efficiently. I have never left a McDonald’s restaurant vowing never to return.

My opinion is that the problems are partly related to the system the stores have in place (the work-flow from order-entry to delivery) and partly related to lack of effective management. For example, ordering food and paying can be a bottleneck, so McDonald’s runs multiple registers when they’re busy. Wendy’s runs one register.

Also, many young workers apparently fail to understand the importance of customer service and how it relates to their paychecks. Some hustle, while others amble about. Some greet you with a smile, while others act like waiting on you is a bother.

Wendy’s and other fast-food chains appear to give priority to the drive-through. People have told me, “If you want quick service at a fast-food place, use the drive-through.” What I see inside the store bears that out. My order-taker kept me (and all those in line behind me) waiting while she attended to the drive-through customers.

To be fair, fast-food restaurants are only as good as their manager and staff. Staff turnover is high and not all managers are effective managers. So the quality of the dining experience can rise and fall over time.

But the bottom line is: these are fixable problems. If one franchise can make it work, others can too. But instead, stores will tinker with the menu and run various specials in an effort to lure in customers, when what customers want is simple food delivered hot and quick. It just doesn’t seem like rocket science, yet so many fast-food restaurants drop the ball. As a result, they get enough low-expectation customers to remain in business, but not enough customers to flourish. The store fails to thrive and customers are dissatisfied. It’s lose-lose.

NaNoWriMo

November 30 is the last day of NaNoWriMo. Why wasn’t I informed of this? As Terry said to Charley in On The Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender.” Maybe next year.

The acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month. It began in July, 1999, with 21 participants. This year over 400,000 people signed up and committed to writing a 50,000 word novel in one month. A 50,000 word novel is a really short novel. The standard length for a novel is around 80,000 words.

It’s a formidable task, but I think I could write a novel in one month. There’s just one catch: no one, but no one, would read past the end of chapter one — if, indeed, they made it that far.

Writing a novel in a month is one thing. Writing a good novel in a month,  however, requires talent, imagination, and perseverance. Lately, I’ve been running low on all three. Writing a Reader’s Digest article in 30 days feels much more in my wheelhouse. I could title it, “How to write a novel in 30 days.”

I’m joking, of course. But there was someone who could have written such an article, and his name was Isaac Asimov. He wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. That is the equivalent of writing a full-length book every two weeks for 25 years. He wrote novels and he wrote science books on a wide variety of topics. If you look up the dictionary definition of the word prolific, there’s a picture of Isaac Asimov.

Without question, Asimov would have been the NaNoWriMo champ.

Sarah Brightman & Andrea Bocelli

The song of the day is 1995's Time To Say Goodbye by English soprano Sarah Brightman and Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. Time to Say Goodbye is based on the Italian song Con te partirò (I will leave with you). This video was recorded at a concert, "Sarah Brightman: In Concert", performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Paul Bateman. (Bocelli has been completely blind since age 12 following a football accident.)

Label Trickery

I ate a frozen fish dinner tonight. (It wasn’t frozen when I ate it, of course.) The name on the box was Hawaiian Garlic Salmon. I never even knew there was such a thing as Hawaiian garlic. Is the garlic grown in Hawaii? Or is the salmon grown in Hawaii? Or both?

The box’s nutrition label was one of those that, while perhaps truthful, was also somewhat deceptive. At the very least, it was intended to make it difficult to understand what the customer is getting.

If you’re a food shopper, you’ve probably seen nutrition labels that state the package contains 2½ servings. Or 3½ servings. Or 4½ servings. Who divides a package of food in such a way that two people get full servings and one person gets a half serving? No one! The purpose of the extra half serving is to make the calorie count a little smaller. If you’re counting calories and you pick up the can or package in the grocery store and read the nutrition label, you’ll see the per serving calorie count and think, “that’s not so bad.”

But the garlic salmon label went further. It stated the calorie count per serving was 236. But how many servings are in the box? And how large is a serving? Here’s what the nutrition label stated (in very fine print):

Serving size: 4 oz (about ⅔ of 1 Fillet)
Servings per container: about 3

Are there 3 fillets inside the box? You might assume 3 because there are 3 servings. (The number isn’t stated on the box.) In reality, there are 2 vacuum-packed sealed-in-plastic frozen fillets. Those two fillets are your three servings. But no one is likely to eat ⅔ of a fillet. Realistically, a serving is 1 fillet. At a glance, how many calories are in that fillet?

If you stop and think about it, you must increase the calorie count by 50%. Because 1 fillet is half again more than ⅔ of 1 fillet. Of course, in the store you don’t know how many fillets are in the box. But let’s suppose you have figured out the number of fillets by multiplying the serving size, ⅔ of 1 fillet, by the servings per container, 3. In the noisy store, with a shopping list in one hand and the frozen fish in the other hand, are you going to stop and do the math? Will you even notice the very fine print about a serving being ⅔ of a fillet?

If there are two frozen fillets vacuum-sealed in heavy plastic, why does the box say there are three servings? The food company is playing games. They’re obfuscating the facts.

There are many ways to deceive someone while being truthful. Suppose you ask me how much money I have in the bank and I tell you, “In all honesty, all my bank accounts added together total less than 4 million dollars.” You may leave thinking, “Wow. I didn’t know VirtualWayne had that much money in the bank,” and all the while I may have one bank account with 50 bucks in it. I told you the truth in a way that was intended to mislead you. Some of these giant food companies are doing a similar thing: they’re telling you the truth (supposedly) but they’re doing it in a way that is intended to mislead you — or at least make it difficult to figure out, on the spot, what you’re getting.

This pet peeve annoys me partly because it’s used so often, and partly because giant food companies think we’re too stupid to notice their little game. Well, giant food companies, this consumer is telling you that while we may buy your products, we buy them despite the misleading labels, not because of them. There is a well known saying, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

We’re on to your little game, giant food companies. And as Queen Victoria said, “We are not amused.”

No-Shave November

We’re in the middle of no-shave November. (If you think I’m making that up, it’s understandable, but go to no-shave.org and take a look.)

“What is no-shave November?” I hear some of you asking.  According to the organization’s website:

No-Shave November is a month-long journey during which participants forgo shaving and grooming in order to evoke conversation and raise cancer awareness.

I forewent shaving for a week. (Forewent is the past tense of forego. It’s also the imperfect subjunctive of forego, but really, who uses subjunctives these days? I mean, outside of Latin America where they are used a lot. You see the kind of twaddle that writers have to know about!)

But back to shaving and the foregoing thereof.

My no-shave November experiment lasted a week. Then my beard got to that in-between stage, where it was long enough to be itchy but not long enough to be, well, not itchy.

So I showered, then I shaved off my week-old beard, and I cut my hair (yes, I always cut my own hair — get over it). I washed a load of laundry (now tumbling in the dryer) and now I’m washing a second load of laundry. I'd like to relax and sip a shot or two, but that would only make me sleepy. So I'll defer that until bedtime — which will be sometime early tomorrow morning. (Yesterday’s bedtime was 3AM today.)

So men, if you would like to skip your morning shaving ritual for a while, and not comb your hair, and maybe not bathe for a few days, then go ahead and do it, knowing the entire staff at no-shave.org is one hundred percent behind you. If, when you get to work, your boss tells you to go home and shave, and bathe, and comb your hair, tell him in your strongest voice, “For God’s sake, I’m doing this for cancer awareness! Have you no compassion for cancer victims? What kind of monster are you?!”

Be advised: no-shave.org is not going to find you another job. But I’m sure they would hope you find comfort in knowing you had the moral high ground.

Memory

It’s interesting how the brain works — and sometimes doesn’t work.

Recently, I was explaining how to do something and I needed to use the term duct tape (a.k.a duck tape). But despite the fact that I’ve bought and used duct tape many times, and have a roll of duct tape in my toolbox, the words would not come. To save my life, I could not think of the name of that often used tape.

But a while ago I was thinking about the hot and cold water pipes under my kitchen sink, and I was thinking of the fact that they make their way into the house through rather large holes in the kitchen floor and in the base of the sink cabinet. I thought it might be possible for vermin, like insects and perhaps even mice, to crawl up the water lines and enter the house through those holes. I decided I needed two (one for hot, one for cold) of those round metal things that go around pipes and are installed especially to cover the holes where pipes come through the floor. Specifically, I needed two that were hinged so I could open them and snap them in place around the two pipes. But what were those round things called? I knew the term was lodged in some corner of my memory, but it was a term I had seen maybe once in my life. The odds that I would be able to recall it seemed slim.

However, seconds later the word escutcheon popped into my head. And then, pipe escutcheon, because escutcheons are made not just for pipes but for locks, and keyholes, and doorknobs.

I couldn’t remember duct tape, a product I’ve bought and used for most of my life, but I recalled the term pipe escutcheon — a term I’ve used probably never — after just a few seconds of pondering. It’s only a minor puzzle, but it’s still a puzzle. Memory is truly an enigma.

Maren Morris

The song of the day is I Could Use a Love Song from the 2017 album Hero by singer, songwriter, and producer Maren Morris (Maren Larae Morris).

It’s a Dream

I ate supper (or dinner, I’ve covered this before) and afterward I felt sleepy, so I decided to lie down for a while. in the darkness of my bedroom, I didn’t look at the clock but I think it was about 7PM. I knew if I fell asleep I might sleep for an hour, but no longer.

The next thing I remember is waking up and seeing the time on my digital clock. According to its softly glowing blue digits, the time was 11:30PM. I was surprised to see I had slept so long. I returned to a “dreamless” sleep.

Finally, again, I awoke. I rolled over on my side and looked at the clock beside the bed. Its glowing digits indicated 8:05PM. So the first time I looked at the clock, I was dreaming. And my surprise at how long I had slept was part of the dream. But it had seemed so real.

I have strange dreams from time to time. I’ve written about them in previous posts. I’ve had dreams where I dreamed that I was dreaming. Ordinarily, when I’m dreaming I don’t know I’m dreaming. But when I dream I’m dreaming, I know its a dream. Sometimes I’ll try to awaken myself, but I’m powerless to do so.

Sometimes I’ll dream a complete story with protagonist, antagonist, supporting characters, and a detailed plot. But when I awaken, the dream evaporates before I can write it down, and I’m left with a hazy, incomplete recollection.

Once I dreamed about a French woman whose last name was Cellére. The diacritic over the second ‘e’ is called an acute, and it was part of my dream. When I asked her to spell her name, she pronounced the letters using French pronunciations. I don’t speak French and know nothing about French names.

In one of my most unusual dreams, I awoke, dressed, and went about my daily activities. Then I awoke again. The whole day had been a dream. So I got up, dressed, and went about my day. Then I awoke again. That second day had also been a dream.

You can probably guess what happened next. I got up, dressed, went to work, came home from work, etc. A normal day. But then I awoke. The third day had also been a dream.

The next time I awoke, I was really awake. In a dream you may think you’re awake, but when you’re really awake, there’s no doubt. You know you’re awake. You know reality when you experience it.

People who almost die and have what is called a near-death experience (NDE) describe a vivid experience similar to waking from a dream. The NDE is much more “real” than their real life. NDE-ers will tell you that in comparison with a near death experience, this life is merely a dream. They’ll tell you that what’s on the other side of death’s door is the real deal.

They’ll tell you that fantastic experiences await us on the other side, and researchers who have spent years studying these things say that sometimes a person near death will begin to experience those fantastic things just before they pass away. I’m reminded of Steve Jobs’ last words. According to Mona Simpson, sister of the late Apple co-founder:

“Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

“Steve’s final words were: ‘Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.’”

For all I know, life is one long dream, and death is the wake-up call. Even if this life is a dream, it’s still a very important dream. It’s a dream that teaches us the importance of love, the importance of kindness, the importance of good deeds.

As I already said, “…when you’re really awake, there’s no doubt. You know you’re awake.” NDE-ers claim that on the other side, you’re really awake. Who am I to argue with them? They’ve been there and I haven’t.

But one day…

Queasy Times

An article I read on a website began this way:

“We live in uneasy and downright queasy times.”

Oh good. So it’s not just me. Now I know it’s just the times I live in. It’s the Weltschmerz. It’s the angst. It’s the world-weary ennui. It’s the melancholy. It’s the existential dread.

But why should the times we live in make us queasy?

Is it —

• devastating hurricanes
• corrupt politicians
• demoralizing tweet-storms
• cyber-attacks
• mass shootings
• fake news
• North Korea, Iran, and Russia
• nuclear calamity
• world-ending asteroid
• creepy clowns
• zombie apocalypse
• all of the above

The Roman orator Cicero put it this way: O tempora o mores — “Oh the times! Oh the customs!” Cicero was deploring the viciousness and corruption of his age.

But maybe I’m over-thinking this. Is life really so depressing, so discouraging? Yes, it is. If you think otherwise, then just continue living in your bubble and whatever you do, don’t read the newspaper. Don’t turn on CNN.

But for the rest of us, I have good news. I’ve found the solution for these queasy times, and it’s four simple words. Pass the vodka, please.

Windows Update Hell Redux

Back on October 15 I published a post called Windows Update Hell. In that post I detailed the troubles I faced while trying to install a Windows 10 update. I thought, and hoped, it was a one-time problem that I had resolved, but the problem has resurfaced. I’m in Windows Update Hell again.

This time the problem is with an upgrade to Windows 10 version 1709. Every time Windows updater runs, it gets to a point where it hangs. I have to reboot and run the Windows update troubleshooter, which (supposedly) identifies and fixes problems with the updater. And it does find problems, and it says it has fixed the problems. But it hasn’t fixed anything. I can run the update troubleshooter five times in a row, and it will tell me, five times in a row, that it has found problems and fixed them. It always finds — and claims to have fixed — the same problems.

I’ll try a few more things and see if I can resolve this problem. But I’m willing to waste only so much time on this Windows 10 updater issue. If I can’t fix it in a few more attempts, it’s going to be goodbye Windows 10 and hello Linux.

Gnarls Barkley

The song of the day is Crazy from the 2006 album St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley (singer-songwriter CeeLo Green and producer Danger Mouse).

Magic Lube

I once owned a Subaru that I purchased new. I owned the car for ten years. Whenever I wanted the oil and filter changed, I took the car to a nearby “quickie” oil change shop. I used this shop the entire time I owned the car. The shop was near my home and on the way to a nearby mall. I drove past the shop almost every day, so it was very convenient to stop in, tell the manager what I wanted, and sit down and flip through a magazine while I waited. Fifteen minutes later the car would be returned to me with (I hoped) new oil and filter. They also had a checklist which indicated other items they had checked, like brake fluid, steering fluid, transmission fluid, and so on.

One day, instead of reading a magazine while I waited, I stood at the window between the waiting room and the service bay and watched the mechanic work on my car. The Subaru’s spare tire was mounted in an unusual location: beneath the hood, on top of the engine. In order to check the gearbox oil, the spare tire had to be removed. I saw that the mechanic never removed the spare tire. When the mechanic finished and the car was brought around to me, I paid the bill and looked at the checklist. Gearbox oil was checked off. I confronted the manager.

Me: “This checklist says you checked the gearbox oil. You didn’t check it.”

Manager: “Yes we did.”

Me: “No, you didn’t. You have to remove the spare tire in order to pull out the dipstick, and no one did that.”

Manager: “You don’t have to remove the spare tire to pull out the dipstick.”

Me: “Yes you do.”

Manager: “No you don’t.”

Me: “Show me.”

We walked out to my car and raised the hood. The manager reached under the spare tire and grabbed the gearbox dipstick. He pulled it this way and that way. He twisted it until I thought he would break something. But the dipstick could not be removed.

He finally gave up and ordered one of his minions to remove the spare tire. After the tire had been removed, the manager grabbed the dipstick and pulled it out of the gearbox. We both examined it. There was not a speck of oil on the dipstick. It was clean and dry all the way to the end.

That shop was the only place I had taken my car for oil changes. They had been changing the oil every 3000 to 4000 miles for 10 years, and yet it appeared they had not checked the gearbox oil in a very long time, if ever. But the mechanic (and no doubt there had been several over the years) had always checked off “Gearbox Oil” on the checklist.

Running the gearbox dry will destroy it. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to be damaged. There must have been a little oil left in the gearbox — enough to lubricate the gears but not enough to measure. If you have a job and you’re supposed to do something, then do it or get another job. Don’t say you did it and charge the customer for doing it, and then not do it because it’s extra work. I trusted the lube shop and they let me down.

Why do I keep trusting people to do a good job? I know better.

There’s a footnote to this story. When I started to drive away, I realized the engine was running poorly. I stopped and raised the hood. A vacuum hose had been pulled off the engine’s fuel injection throttle body — probably by the manager when he was trying to remove the gearbox dipstick. I pushed the vacuum hose back onto the throttle body and the engine ran normally again.

I hate it when I take my car to a shop and then I have to fix it before I can drive it home.

One day I sold the car to a young man whose name I no longer remember. Soon afterward, he took the car to a mechanic to have, ironically, a repair made to the gearbox. (Maybe running it almost dry did damage it, after all.) The mechanic made repairs to the gearbox, but he neglected to put gear oil into the gearbox. The young man picked up the car, drove off, and quickly destroyed the gearbox.

What did I say about doing a good job? Oh yeah, I remember: I said it’s hard to find people who care about doing a good job. Most people want to do just enough to get by. Airplanes have crashed and hundreds have died because somebody took a shortcut while servicing an engine, or locking down a cargo door, or fixing an instrument in the cockpit. Countless injuries and deaths have occurred in factories because somebody took a shortcut.

I’m telling you, robot workers can’t get here soon enough.

The Bangles

The song of the day is the 1986 song Walk Like an Egyptian from the album Different Light by pop rock band The Bangles. The song was Billboard’s #1 selling song of 1987.

Sears

People who are in a position to know say that Sears is in financial trouble. The chain has been losing money and is selling off assets to pay bills. It may go out of business because it is losing customers.

My local Sears store will be closing in January, along with more than 60 other Sears stores. I feel sympathy for the people will be losing their jobs. But I really don’t care if Sears closes. Sears lost this customer a long time ago.

There was a time that I shopped at the Sears Auto Center (and the main store, as well). This was my experience: every time I tried to tell the salesman what I wanted to buy, the store phone would ring. He would say, “Excuse me” and answer the phone. “Yadda yadda yadda … I think we have that in stock … let me go check.” Then he would disappear into the racks of tires and batteries at the back of the store. Five minutes later he would reappear and pick up the phone. “Yes, we have that in stock. Do you want me to hold it for you to pick up? Yadda yadda yadda …” I waited patiently. Finally, after about ten minutes, he would hang up the phone. I would start to tell him what I wanted to buy, and the phone would ring again. Finally I asked if he could delay answering the phone until after he took my order. He said he couldn’t and explained that store rules gave the phone call precedence over customers standing right in front of him. I put up with that several times but I sure didn’t consider it “customer service.”

But here is the capper. One evening after work, I went to the Auto Center because my car had a tire that was out of balance and shaking at highway speed. I had purchased the tires at Sears and had paid for lifetime balancing. I knew a tire was out of balance from years of driving experience. Not only did I know that a tire was out of balance, I was pretty sure I knew which tire was the problem. I told the Auto Center manager that I wanted the left rear tire rebalanced.

The Auto Center manager told me the shaking was not caused by an out-of-balance tire — rather, it was a “bad strut.” I knew he was referring to a McPherson strut which was part of the suspension. I told him it couldn’t be a strut because the tire shook only at 60 mph, and a bad strut couldn’t cause that. He insisted my car needed new struts. This went back-and-forth for several minutes until I finally told him, “I bought these tires here. I paid for lifetime balancing, and I want the tire balanced.” He agreed to do it, but as a parting shot he told me it wouldn’t fix the problem.

When I got the car back, I took it out on the Interstate for a test drive. The car rode as smooth as glass — no shaking or vibration whatsoever. I had gone to the Auto Center for a simple tire balancing — already paid for — and the manager had tried his best to upsell me new struts.

The egregious part of this was that Sears had already been caught scamming Auto Center customers in several states. It had been in the news, so I was aware of it. But I’m not going to accuse that particular manager of attempting to scam me. It’s possible he was simply incompetent. But either way, I decided not to give them any more business. And I haven’t.

Now maybe — just maybe — Sears plays by different rules today. I hope they do. But it doesn’t matter to me. As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me.”

The Ventures

The song of the day is 1962's Telstar by instrumental rock band The Ventures. This song is a cover of the original Telstar by The Tornadoes.

The Encyclopædia Britannica states that The Ventures "served as a prototype for guitar-based rock groups." Wikipedia states “with over 110 million albums sold worldwide, the group remains the best selling instrumental rock group of all time.”

The band’s musical style inspired a rock genre: surf music. While the band never considered themselves a surf rock band, “they were a major building block of surf music, if not the first to play the style.” The Ventures have been called “the band that launched a thousand bands.” The band still performs and records music and is very popular in Japan, where they still tour.

The name of this song is derived from an experimental satellite communications system called Telstar. Two Telstar satellites were built by Bell Labs. The launch of Telstar 1 in 1962 was the first privately-funded space launch. Telstar 1 became the first satellite to relay transatlantic television.

New Store in Town

There’s a new grocery store in town. I can’t tell you the name, but it rhymes with Publix. Oh heck, it is Publix. You forced the name out of me. Happy now?

I went to the store two days after it opened. The parking lot, which provides parking not just for Publix but for about a dozen other businesses, was slammed full of cars. I had to park in the next town and hitchhike back to the store. Metaphorically speaking.

When I got inside the store, there was a mob scene. I could hardly navigate my cart though the noisy horde of customers. I had read on the store’s website that Wednesdays were “senior discount day.” So I found a manager and asked how I would go about getting a senior discount. Do I get a card to swipe, or what?

“We don’t have senior discounts in Virginia,” he replied bluntly. That was that.

I picked up 4 items and decided I’d had enough of the mob. I took my items to a checkout line. As I stood in line, a female manager walked up and pointed to another line. “Move to that line — it’s an express line,” she told me. “It will be faster than this line.”

I did as she suggested and moved to the express line. Guess which line turned out to be faster. The line I had moved from proved to be the faster-moving line. That didn’t surprise me at all. I learned long ago that the slowest line will always be the line that I am in.

A young man who looked like a teenager was bagging groceries. I asked him, “Does Publix offer any kind of discount card?”

“No,” he answered. “You don’t need a card because all of our shelf prices have a discount built-in. Anytime you buy something you get a discount.”

“That’s interesting,” I replied, “but if I have to pay the price listed on the shelf, I don’t consider that a discount.”

The young man refused to give up. He walked around me and pointed to a price tag on a shelf. “That price contains your discount. Everybody gets a discount. When you buy a product in the store, your discount is built in.”

When I was handed the cash register tape, I examined it. According to the tape, my total was $11.32 and my “special price savings” was $1.32. Gosh, the kid was right. The prices on the shelf do have built-in discounts. I imagined a conversation between a Publix employee and a customer.

Customer: “Is there a way to get a discount off this price?”

Employee: “You’re saving a dollar just by buying it.”

Customer: “How am I saving a dollar? The price is two dollars and I’m paying two dollars.”

Employee: “True. But we could have charged you three dollars. So you’re saving a dollar.”

I decided to compare what I paid at Publix with prices at my local Walmart. (Be aware that prices at my local Walmart may differ significantly from prices at your local Walmart. The same is probably true of Publix prices.)

The 12 oz. package of bacon I bought at Publix was $4.99. A 16 oz. package of Walmart-brand bacon is $3.94.

The 2-liter bottle of Coke I bought at Publix was $1.67. The same size bottle of Walmart-brand cola is 44¢.

A dozen large eggs at Publix was 99¢. A dozen large eggs at my Walmart is 38¢.

A jar of peanut butter at Publix was $3.39. The same jar, same brand, of peanut butter at my Walmart is $2.88.

The prices at Publix do seem a bit high — at least the prices I checked. But they have a nice salad bar and you can buy hot meals, and I think I saw a deli counter — though I was too busy dodging shoppers to look closely. By contrast, Walmart is a little more bare-bones, though my Walmart does have a deli that sells various hot foods including meals. They also sell salads and sandwiches and lots of snack items.

But there may be an upside to high prices. You probably won’t encounter many slow-moving seniors shopping there. And high prices will definitely keep out the riff-raff.

Like me.

Big Head Todd and the Monsters

The song of the day is Bittersweet from the 1993 album Sister Sweetly by Colorado rock band Big Head Todd and the Monsters. This concert took place at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, an open-air amphitheater near Morrison, Colorado, 10 miles west of Denver. Vocals are by Todd Park Mohr.

Dissent

It is an election year. America is fighting a war in a far-off land — a war that seems without end. On the nightly news there are scenes of racial unrest in the streets of American cities. There are demonstrations and protests. Two presidential candidates are running for president, and neither is very popular with most voters. The Republican candidate will win the election but is destined to resign in the face of almost certain impeachment and removal from office. I’m not talking about the 2016 election.

The year is 1968. The Vietnam war is dragging on, years from its conclusion. Civil rights and antiwar protests give rise to rioting and, at Kent State, the shooting deaths of college students by the Ohio National Guard.

On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, prompting riots in over 100 major US cities. On June 5, Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles.

The country is in turmoil.

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago becomes a violent and unprecedented disaster. Thousands of antiwar protesters flock to Chicago where police, Army soldiers, National Guardsmen, and the Secret Service are waiting. The result is the infamous Chicago police riot. Quoting The Washington Post:

Onlookers and innocent bystanders — including reporters covering the scene and doctors attempting to offer medical help — were brutally beaten by the police.

The Republican presidential candidate has already run for president once and lost. This time he will win, only to resign because of a scandal and a second-rate burglary.

America seems to go through these upheavals periodically. It doesn’t mean the country is coming apart, though it may feel like it. Totalitarian regimes can hide their shortcomings behind a wall of censorship and state-controlled media. Democracies air their dirty linen in public.

America has been through many protest movements: civil rights, women’s suffrage, antiwar, gay rights, the labor movement, the black power movement, anti-globalization, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street, to name a few.

There were the GM sit-down strikes of 1936, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the brutally repressed Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965.

In 1981, the Solidarity Day march involved 260,000 people in Washington, DC. In 1982, a million people filled New York’s Central Park to protest nuclear weapons. In 1993, between 800,000 and a million people marched in DC for LGBT rights.

There was the Million Man March in DC in 1995 and the Million Woman March in Philadelphia in 1997. There were protests in American cities in 2003 when George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq. There was the March for Women’s Lives in 2004. There is currently the Black Lives Matter movement and the take-a-knee NFL players’ protest. There are scattered protests and counter-protests over the removal of Civil War monuments from public spaces.

Demonstrations and peaceful protests are as American as apple pie. Every citizen is free to participate in a protest. If you have no desire to do that, that is okay, too. But do yourself a favor and try not to get too worked up when you see people you don’t even know protesting something. Support them or ignore them. Life is too short for anything else.

Natalie Merchant

The song of the day is Carnival from the 1995 album Tigerlily by singer-songwriter and musician Natalie Merchant. Merchant was lead singer and primary lyricist for 10,000 Maniacs from 1981 (when the group was called ‘Still Life’) until she left in 1993. She also played the piano on seven studio albums with the group. Tigerlily was Merchant’s debut solo album and Carnival was her first top-ten hit. The music video shows Merchant walking the streets of New York City taking pictures. In the lyrics, she compares the sights and sounds of the city to a carnival. The camera is a Leica M3.

Pardon My Hebetude

I’m not the dynamo I used to be. When I moved into this house 14 years ago, I was quite industrious. One of the first things I did was patch all the cracks in the plaster walls and ceiling with drywall joint compound. Then I painted the entire inside of my house – three coats of paint on both floors and the connecting stairwell.

I upgraded my kitchen with new cabinets, countertops, and floor covering. I replaced the appliances in the kitchen. I replaced the shower stall in the second floor bathroom. I replaced the second floor windows – had to, the double-glazed window panes had lost their gas charge and had become permanently fogged. I replaced the roof shingles and the fascia boards and the gutters. I repaired or replaced old plumbing. In other words, I did stuff.

Then time passed and I got older and lazier. Or, as I like to think: older and wiser. Because one day I had the thought: there’s no one in this house except me. Who am I trying to impress?

I got apathetic about house cleaning. I got indifferent to washing dishes – sometimes letting them collect beside the kitchen sink for 2 or 3 days before I washed them. I justified this on the basis that I used very few dishes and flatware: a plate here, a bowl there; a spoon at this meal, a fork at that meal. I could let them pile up for 3 days and still not have too many to fit in the dish drainer. But still.

I became indifferent about laundry. I quit neatly folding my just-laundered underwear before putting it into my chest of drawers. Now I stuff it into a drawer, close the drawer, and I’m done with it.

Today I threw two grocery bags of used underwear into the wheelie bin behind my garage. I did this because – well, I had just bought new underwear because I knew I was running out of clean underwear. If I didn’t buy new underwear, I knew I would have to wash something. Throwing out my used underwear felt good – and a little like spring housecleaning.

I changed the sheets on my bed today. What did I do with the used sheets? I took them to the wheelie bin and dumped them alongside the used underwear. I don’t mind washing sheets but I hate folding them when they come out of the dryer. I firmly believe it’s not possible for a male humanoid to fold fitted sheets. I put clean sheets on the bed, but the next time I change sheets, they’ll probably end up in the wheelie bin. (Note to myself: buy more sheets and pillowcases. I go through them rather fast.)

I suppose this is why they put people into “homes” – to protect them from themselves. Thank goodness no one knows about my lackadaisical turn of mind. It’s not like I’m telling the world about it. I have no way of doing that.

So shhhh! Don’t tell anyone about this blog. If one day I suddenly, and without explanation, quit publishing new blog posts, you’ll know why.