Countdown: 2 Days

 Vote!

---

Ordinary Americans don't have a lot of power over their government, except for that one day that politicians fear: election day. Vote them in; vote them out. Express yourself!

---

It's a semi-sunny, late afternoon in central Virginia. The weak sun comes and goes. It's also Halloween, though I doubt there will be many, if any, trick-or-treaters. I never buy candy to give to trick-or-treaters. Because I have no will power. If I bought candy, there would be none left when the trick-or-treaters arrived at my door.

"¿Dulce o truco?" dijo el chico que tocó la puerta, y yo contesté "¡Truco! ¡No tengo caramelos! ¡Jajaja!"
"Trick or treat?" said the kid who knocked on the door, and I answered "Trick! I have no candy! Hahaha!"

I studied Spanish five days a week for two years, but that was a hundred years ago, and all I remember today is "¡No más!" That's not entirely true, of course. But I do know Spanish class taught me things that are questionable. 

Do I say, "¿Cómo estás?" or "¿Cómo está?" 

Should I say, "¿Cómo está usted?" (as I was taught) or is that too formal? 

How about "¿Qué tal?" or is that too informal?

The truth is, it doesn't matter; they'll know what I mean. But I want to get it right. If I'm saying it wrong, I would at least like to know I'm saying it wrong.

My friend in Central America texted me "Very good" and I responded "Mucho bueno", which I knew was wrong but couldn't think of the right word. And she responded "Muy bueno" which I recognized as the right way to say it. But she understood me, and that is the most important thing.

After I become fluent in Spanish, I want to become fluent in Mandarin Chinese and possibly Cantonese. I'd like to know what those workers in Chinese restaurants are saying about me and the other customers. Then I could say to them, "嘿，別再說我了 !"

I'll insist that all my friends learn Chinese and we'll walk around town speaking Chinese and smiling at people. If people speak to us, we'll wave back and answer them in Chinese. That should be fun.

 

Countdown: 3 Days

 

 Vote!

---

Are you planning a trip to a Latin American country and you don't speak Spanish? Then you've come to the right hombre. I can teach you all the Spanish that you will truly need.

A tourist can get by with knowing only two Spanish words. Beer is called cerveza. Bathroom is called baño. You'll mispronounce cerveza for sure, but if you pronounce it ser-bay-sa they'll understand. Baño is easier. It is pronounced bahn-yo. The third letter is called eñe (pronounced en-yay) and the letter is pronounced like the same letter in the word señor. The wiggly line above it is called a tilde. The word tilde came into the English language from Spanish and Portuguese, which in turn obtained it from Latin.

Of course, you already know the Spanish word for "yes" ... everyone knows. It is sí. You'll notice the acute accent above the letter i. With the accent, sí means yes. Without the accent, si means if.  However, they sound the same: like the English word see.

And finally, the word no in Spanish is the same word in English. It is no in both languages.  The English no comes from Middle English. The Spanish no comes from Latin. The Spanish language originated as a dialect of Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. This Latin is today called “Vulgar Latin,” as opposed to the Classical Latin used in literature.

I think tourists probably know a few more Spanish words than cerveza and baño, but for those Latinos who work in Central American resorts it probably seems like those are the only words tourists know.

"Mas cerveza por favor." And when they bring it, don't forget to say, "Gracias."

Countdown: 4 Days

Today is Friday, October 30. The election is on Tuesday, November 3. The election is four days away.

I see on the news that our democracy is under attack by our longtime adversaries. Russia is attacking and smearing the candidates, trying to make Americans question if democracy is working. China is doing the same thing. And so is Iran. When foreign powers attack our candidates, it's a bad thing. But the candidates have been attacking and smearing one another for months. It appears that when the candidates do it, it's a good thing. It's democracy in action. 

You can attack someone with the truth merely by telling a part of the truth. Tell people the candidate wants to raise taxes, but don't tell them he or she wants to raise taxes on the super-wealthy who have accountants and tax lawyers who specialize in avoiding the payment of taxes.

You can attack someone by repeating a story in the newspaper—a "tabloid" newspaper—a "newspaper" that prints stories about the space aliens who worship Oprah, or the fur coat that comes alive and bites its owner to death, or the second Pope, the mini-Pope, living under the Pope's hat. 

You can attack someone by telling the truth but putting your own spin on the story—your own interpretation. If you read Wikipedia's entry for Spin (propaganda) you can find many examples of spin. Governments and politicians use spin frequently to gin up support for their positions.The advertising industry uses spin frequently.

And then there are the obviously biased news sources that cater to one extreme group or the opposite extreme group. "But they tell the truth," people will say. Sure they do—they tell the part of the truth they want their listeners and readers to hear.

Constant exposure to these kinds of misinformation, if not outright lies, "programs" people. Constant exposure to one side of the story, one set of facts, can turn a population against a person or country, can gin up support for a war, can manipulate people into believing things that are really quite unbelievable.

I think everyone who reads this will agree, and yet half of those readers will be conservative Republicans and half will be liberal Democrats. They both will agree that the powers-that-be want to deceive us, and voters will agree, even as they cast the votes that they have been programmed to cast.

I don't doubt that the majority of American voters do not know the truth—the whole truth—but I also trust that they have the wisdom to know, at least, that there are people who are trying to deceive them.

Zeta

I awoke at 5 AM. At 5:30 I turned on my phone and found an early morning text waiting for me. That evolved into a conversation that lasted until 6:40. Now it's 7 AM and still dark.

Zeta is supposed to blow through central Virginia today. The center of circulation will pass north of Richmond this afternoon, bringing heavy rain, flooding, and strong wind. So they say. If they're right, it will be a test of my roof, which I've had roofers work on twice this year for leaks.

Still in darkness, I returned to bed and got another 90 minutes of sleep before getting up once more. Then I ate breakfast, which turned out to be two servings of potato chips. You're thinking potato chips make a terrible breakfast. I agree, which is why I followed it with two servings of corn chips. Then I popped a multivitamin and washed it all down with a diet cola. So much for breakfast.

Now it's 11 AM and rain is still falling, though not hard. It's the kind of gentle rain that would have made it through my roof a few weeks ago. Rain has a way of finding an entry into a house. A roof may not leak for years, and then one day there is a leak. I sat at my computer and after a couple of false starts, I managed to turn out a blog. It is the blog post previous to this one, titled "Don't Needle Me."

Time passed, and I ate lunch: a BBQ sandwich with coleslaw and a mug of diet cola. The BBQ was finished and tomorrow I would probably switch to slaw dogs. I have the buns, the dogs, and sweet coleslaw.

The rain reminds me of my first two or three weeks living in Roanoke, Va. My workplace was on the side of a mountain, and it rained every day for the first three weeks I was there. Dismal clouds hung low on the side of the mountain. It was a depressing atmosphere. "Does the sun ever shine in this place?" was my thought. But Roanoke turned out to be a nice city. 

After lunch I lay down for my post-lunch nap, and while I was napping, Zeta blew through town. I slept for 90 minutes and when I awoke the rain was gone and the sun was out. There were still a few stray breezes but mostly there was quiet. I went to my front door and peered outside at a sunny day. A friend who lives nearby told me later that we had winds of about 35 mph, but I was unaware. 

I engaged in a long WhatsApp chat with a friend, and as I texted I also ate my supper: two servings of potato chips, two servings of corn chips, and a diet cola. Does that surprise anyone?

Don't Needle Me

Once upon a time I worked as an electronics design engineer for a company that made self-navigating mobile robots. These machines weighed approximately 500 pounds. One day, during an ill-advised demonstration of the robots' ability to climb ramps, a robot turned over and landed on my right foot. It hurt like hell. I turned and walked silently out of the room. I walked to the front offices and related what just happened to Steve, a software engineer. "I think my foot might be broken," I told him.

Steve drove me to a nearby doc-in-the-box, a nickname we ordinary citizens sometimes used to refer to an urgent care facility. The young lady at the front desk quizzed me at length on my ability to pay. I had health insurance, but that wasn't enough. I had my checkbook, still not enough. I had cash with me, and still she wasn't satisfied. Finally Steve had enough of watching her interrogation, and he reminded her quite forcefully that I had insurance and money and there was an ATM across the street and a branch bank a few blocks down the street and demanded that she get a doctor. His persuasiveness was effective and I was ushered into an X-ray room. The technician did his job and then I was directed to an examination room where I could lie on an exam table—that blue bed with the wax paper running down the middle—and I could get my foot off the floor and relax a little bit while waiting for the doctor's verdict.

Within a few minutes a doctor appeared, and he was holding X-ray films. He had a quizzical expression. He told me I had no broken bones, but then he asked me if my foot had been bothering me before the accident, and I told him no. Then he showed me the X-ray films. One film was a side view of my foot, and another film was a top view, looking down on my foot. There was very clearly a sewing needle inside my right foot. It was located near the sole of my foot and was oriented parallel to the sole, about a quarter inch inside my foot. The needle was broken. About one quarter inch near the sharp end was broken off from the remainder of the needle but was still there, and the sharp point was missing. What remained was about an inch and a quarter long, and the eye of the needle was quite easy to see.

The needle was not bothering me so we left it there, inside my foot. I imagine it embedded itself in my foot when I was a child. It had probably fallen to the floor of my house, and as I walked through the house barefoot, the needle would have easily pierced the sole of my foot. Once inside my foot, it was there to stay, unknown for decades, until a workplace accident caused it to be revealed.

Math

On Sunday, I watched the Washington Redskins, I mean, I watched the Washington Football Team (the new name may be politically correct but I'll never unlearn the name Redskins) play their longtime rival, the Dallas Cowboys.

Of course, watching football and listening to play-by-play doesn't provide sufficient mental stimulation so as I watched the game I also read the latest science news, and I was intrigued by one particular article.

German researchers just measured the time required for a photon to travel the diameter of a hydrogen molecule (chemical name: dihydrogen). A hydrogen molecule is tiny, and light travels fast, so the time interval for light to pass through a hydrogen molecule is a super-tiny number. The Germans said the time interval was 247 zeptoseconds. (A zeptosecond is 10^-21 s — a decimal point, 20 zeroes, and a 1.)

I thought, "I wonder if that's true. I'd better check their math."

(The Washington Football Team is outscoring the Cowboys big-time. In Britain they would say, "the Washington Football Team are outscoring the Cowboys" because the Brits consider a group to be a plural noun.) Either way, the Cowboys are taking some butt-kicking.

I don't know how big a hydrogen molecule is, but it's not spherical so the width depends on how you look at it. I decided to calculate the time it takes a photon to traverse a hydrogen atom (atom, not molecule) which is smaller than a molecule, and it's spherical so orientation doesn't matter.

The time required for a photon to travel across a hydrogen atom is the diameter of a hydrogen atom's electron shell divided by the speed of light:

1.06 x 10^-10 meters divided by 3 x 10⁸ meters per second

(While I was doing my back-of-the-envelope math, the game ended. The Redskins (you know who I mean) won 25 - 3. It was Washington's second win of the season, making them 2 - 5. Another game came on—the San Francisco 49ers at the New England Patriots. The Pats are six-time NFL champions. This game would be the first this season that I would see the Patriots play.)

After doing the math, I get 0.353 x 10^-18 seconds = 353 x 10^-21 seconds.

And that, folks, is 353 zeptoseconds!

But the math for the photon's transit time through a hydrogen atom is simple, so why is the answer 353 instead of 247?  And this is for a single hydrogen atom. A hydrogen molecule is larger and should therefore produce a larger number. There must be a problem, either with my diameter of a hydrogen atom or with the number for the speed of light. The speed of light has been measured many times to a high degree of accuracy. If we (meaning science) did not have the correct number for the speed of light, GPS systems wouldn't work. We can rest assured we know the speed of light very exactly. The number is 299,792,458 m/s, and I rounded it up very slightly to 300,000,000 m/s (3 x 10⁸ m/s). 

(The 49ers had an easy time defeating the Brady-less Patriots. The Pats are a 2 - 4 team so far this season. The Pats' new quarterback, Jarrett Stidham, has his work cut out for him. Somebody tell Coach Belichick that his team may not be going to the playoffs this year.)

But if the speed of light is correct, the problem must lie with the diameter of a hydrogen atom. It can't be 1.06 x 10^-10 meters. It must be a little bit smaller. To be precise, it must be 247/353 or 0.7 of our assumed diameter. I think the measurement of 247 zeptoseconds is wrong and the more accurate number is at least 353 zeptoseconds. Somebody tell the Nobel Committee they can Fedex my Prize to me. I'll be on the front porch doing science and watching football.

Tom and the Buccaneers beat their opponent, the Raiders. The Bucs are 5 - 2. Brady's contract with the Bucs is worth $50 million for two years. And he's married to super-model Gisele Bündchen, one of the highest paid models in the world. It's a tough life, Tom. You have our sympathies.

If reading this is confusing, you're not reading it right. You cannot switch back and forth between football and science. You must have the ball game and the science playing in your head at the same time. You can do it. Your brain has two halves, right? Now you know why. The left half gets the science and the right half gets the ballgame. Try it! I know it's difficult, but if you can manage to do it for a few seconds, then for those few seconds you'll get to know what living in my world is like!

Sunday Morning

Rain fell last night and the morning is gray and a little foggy. We have a respite from the rain at the moment, but it will return by noon, so sayeth the weather prognosticators. (And to my non-native-born readers, let me state that you must be a native English speaker to know when you can get away with using an archaic, third-person singular simple present indicative form of verb. And likewise with "verily" which sometimes precedes the aforementioned verb.)

The National Weather Service reports the temperature is 53°F. My phone reports the temperature is 67°. I need a tiebreaker (though we don't have a tie here, but I don't know what the applicable noun would be in this situation), so I checked Weather Underground and it reports 53°. Should I settle for two out of three? I moved on to Accuweather and received another reading of 53°. I understand it's entirely possible that Weather Underground and Accuweather retrieve their temperature readings from the same source: namely, the NWS. So perhaps a fifth reading is in order. But from what source? How about my small city's EOC: the Emergency Operations Center. (It's really just Alice Foss at the switchboard and she can connect you with Chief Mattocks, and if he's tied up you'll get his deputy Norman Jonas. If you have a fire, just tell Alice it's a fire.)

I called the EOC but no one answered the switchboard (Alice is probably sleeping late today, as it's a good day for that) so I moved on to The Weather Channel, and it says the local temperature is 52°, so I think it's safe to say my phone is full of it. I wonder where does my phone get the temperature? (I just checked my phone again and now it says 54°. Go figure.)

When I opened the blog editor, I was planning to write about a really deep topic. I had in mind writing something about Free Speech. I can still use that as the title of this blog post, although such a title would be rather pointless now. So instead, I think I'll call this post simply, "Sunday Morning." Because today is Sunday. Did I not mention that?

A Day In Manhattan

It's Friday morning, 0-dark-hundred. And foggy. 54°F. The day will be sunny with a high temperature in the upper 70s. In other words, very nice weather-wise. I got a decent night's sleep, though I've been awake for a while. I lay in bed thinking about stuff that doesn't matter. Like my first (and only) trip to Manhattan. It took place a lifetime ago. I was visiting Princeton, New Jersey, for six weeks to take some courses at a corporate education center, and one weekend I took the bus into NYC. My destination was the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I got off the bus and was approached by a young man who appeared to be in the throes of drug withdrawal. He was sweating and looked like he was not having a good day. He asked if I could give him some money. I told him no, and he went away.

But sometimes I do give people money. A young man with a young woman I presumed was his girlfriend approached me in a drugstore and gave me a sob story—which I knew was likely fiction—and asked for five dollars. I gave him ten. A man approached me as I walked up the steps to my place of employment and asked me for ten dollars to buy his baby some food. I gave him ten dollars. I know it only encourages them to do it again. Nowadays, when someone approaches me in a parking lot and tells me they need money because they're hungry, I take them into a nearby deli and I buy them takeout. They never turn down the meal, and they can't use it to buy liquor or drugs. It's food in a Styrofoam container. They said said they needed money because they were hungry, and now they're holding food in their hands. So why do they look disappointed?

But returning to my Manhattan story, I left the Bus Terminal and was walking down the street, when I noticed another man about my age walking in the same direction. I noticed his fly was open. So I said to him, "Excuse me, your fly is open." He zipped up, and we struck up a conversation. He was on his way to Central Park to watch an eclipse. That's what he told me, and he showed me some kind of contraption he had constructed for viewing the eclipse indirectly, thus not burning his retinas. His trip was about to take a detour, and it benefited me.

I told him I was a tourist, and he offered to show Manhattan to me. So we rode the subway, and I recall the subway map looked like a plate of spaghetti. We went to the Empire State Building and rode the elevator to the observation deck where all the tourists go to look through binoculars for a quarter to see the sights of the city from above. Then we went higher, into a glass dome, and below the windows you could see radio antennas sticking out of the building. At least, I think that's what they were. It would certainly have been a good place to put them.

I saw many small stores with sun-faded "going out of business" signs in their windows, and I wondered if the owners thought they were fooling anyone. Guys, at least put a fresh sign in your store window every few years. Don't use a sign that looks like its been there since the Great Depression.

We walked and rode to a lot of places that day. I saw Central Park. I saw the Kennedy Center. I saw the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway in the Theater District. I walked and rode the subway all day and into the dark of night. Of course, it being Manhattan, the time of day meant little. The streets were as crowded with people at 3AM as they were at 3PM.

At the end of the day we parted company. I think we both enjoyed the day. I was a tourist in town for a couple days, never to return. He was probably just a guy without close friends who was happy to be a tour guide for a day, lacking anything more interesting to do. I returned to my hotel room for a few hours sleep before going to the Bus Terminal for a ride back to Princeton. I spent a few more weeks in Princeton, New Jersey, before getting into my car and driving back to Burlington, North Carolina, where I lived and worked at the time.

And a lifetime later as I lay in darkness, fragments of that day would waft around inside my head, becoming fodder for a rambling anecdote.

History

I looked at my bedside clock and saw the time: 6:30 AM. My first thought was, "Wow, I've slept late this morning." But then, it took hours for me to get to sleep, as it often does. The last time I looked at the clock before sleep, the clock read 12:30 AM. So I got 6 hours sleep. Realizing this, I didn't feel too bad.

I got up and shuffled stiffly to the bathroom. As I took care of morning business, I mumbled "Thor's Day" to myself, soundlessly, in my head. Because today is Thursday, a day named after the Germanic god Thor.

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday are named after the celestial bodies Saturn, Sun, and Moon. Other days are named after Germanic gods: Tuesday (Tiw's day), Wednesday (Woden's day), Thursday (Thor's day) and Friday (Freya's day). 

Just imagine there was a time in history when days did not have names. And people did not have names. So no one knew who they were, or when they were. Now here we are in week #3869 (I always assume the Universe began at the moment of my birth because, why not—it makes as much sense as saying it all started 6000 years ago, which some people believe) and now it's modern times and everything has a name, though some names are very archaic. October, for example. Why do we call it that? 

September, October, November and December are named after Roman numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10—they were originally the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months of the Roman year. That is because the Roman calendar began in March and had ten months. But the Romans played around with the calendar, adding months and renaming months, so now we have 12 months and the names are what they are. It doesn't have to make sense.

Thursday. Thor's day. I never cared much for studying history when I was in school. It was dry and dull: just learning dates and names and about endless European wars. If I had taught history I would have made it interesting. I would have told my students about Woden's day, and Thor's day, and about January being named after the Roman deity Janus, the god of doors, gates, and transitions, because the first month is the transition—the doorway—into a new year.

History doesn't have to be boring. People make it that way. Why? Maybe history is dangerous and the authorities don't want us to look into it too deeply. Maybe they're afraid that if we study it too much, we might get "ideas." So they teach it, but they make it deadly boring so we won't look at it closely. I'm just saying "maybe." If they could make sex as boring as history, there would be fewer people today and restaurants wouldn't have to give us beepers and tell us to wait outside—we could get a table straight away and order a beer and relax and we would all be happier.

Maybe.

Reality Is Not What It Seems

This happened. What I am about to tell you, happened. I didn't dream it nor am I making this up.

In fact, this kind of thing has happened to me numerous times. I have written about some of those incidents on this blog. I have some ideas about what is really happening.

I took a shower and afterward I sat on the edge of my bed, next to the dresser, and I picked up a pair of nail clippers. I have two pair (don't ask why, I've long forgotten). Both pair were within reach, but one pair was closed and the other pair was open and ready to use.  I chose the pair that was open and ready to use. 

I trimmed my fingernails. I trimmed my toenails. I put the clippers back on the dresser and it was then that I noticed both pair were open and ready to use. You're thinking, "Nah, they were both open all along and you are remembering it incorrectly." I won't argue the point. All I'm saying is that I remember choosing one pair because it was open and the other pair was closed.  I used it and when I placed it back on the dresser, I saw that both pair were open and ready to use.

This kind of thing has happened enough times to make me believe in multiple realities, or multiple timestreams, or multiple whatever sci-fi term you want to use. So the way it works is like this: every time we make a decision, our reality splits. In one reality we decided "Yes" and in the other reality we decided "No." Some of these realities are almost identical to "our" reality, with only a tiny difference. Sometimes our consciousness will slide from our usual reality to another that is very close by. So, for example, in one reality we come into our house and lay our car keys on the table near the door, then when we go to leave we can't find our car keys, even though we know we put them on the table. We look and look and finally we find them on the top of the china cabinet near the door. But we never put our keys on the china cabinet so what are they doing there?

This is a trivial matter, unless—and this is a big unless—it's true. If this happened the way I have described it, if reality can change in tiny ways from time to time, then I think it's a huge matter. It really can explain a lot of things. But this is the kind of thing that can't be proven. We have only our memory of what came before and what we have now. How many times have we said, "But I was sure..." or something similar. We know what our eyes saw, we remember not only our decision but the reason we decided as we did. And a minute or two later, reality tells us, "Nope, that didn't happen that way."

Maybe these splits in reality are random. But imagine the power you would have if you could control them. Imagine if you could make tiny shifts in reality whenever you wanted. The world would be your oyster! 

And for me? I would have stopped working 20 years ago and I'd be living in a house I didn't buy and driving an antique car that still looks great and drives perfectly, and ... Oh.

Yeah.

Right.

Two More Weeks

Today is October 20. That means there are just two weeks until US election day. And that means there are just two more weeks of having to listen to politicians lie about each other and themselves. Two more weeks and it might be safe to watch the TV news again.

There are different kinds of lies, which is why—when you testify in a US court—you must swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Other countries have a similar oath.

• Tell the truth: don't lie.
• Tell the whole truth: don't omit an important fact that might change the meaning or significance of your other testimony.
• Tell nothing but the truth: don't embellish the facts. Don't add your opinion, your interpretation, etc.

Unfortunately, those courtroom rules don't apply to political ads. It is possible to distort facts, to tell a part of the truth, to insert opinion as fact. Product advertisements do this all the time; why should political ads be different? Add to this the fact that people tend to believe what they want to believe, anyway. They filter what they see through the lens of their own prejudices.

Two more weeks of "baloney" and we will get a respite for a while. As Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons: 

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

Lacking a better mechanism for appointing rulers, we keep at it, hoping we'll get it (democratic government) right one day, hoping it will evolve into something where ratiocination and sound judgement rule our governance. In the meantime, we have what we have. Some might call it bread and circuses.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

Pentatonix

The song of the day is 2020's Be My Eyes from the album The Lucky Ones by vocal group Pentatonix featuring Kirstin Maldonado, who wrote the song and sang the lead. The album is their first with all-original content in six years.

This is the second single they've teased from the album; the first was Happy Now.

 

Gray Area

Whilst driving around town, virtually speaking, looking for a suitable accommodation for visiting friends to spend a few days, I drove by an extended-stay hotel and saw this: an SUV parked between two No Parking signs and almost on top of a large No Parking notice written on the pavement.

 

This is so typical of some modern-day Americans. "Those signs don't apply to me—I have rights!" And if a fire truck damages her car, she would be the first to sue everyone: the city, the fire department, the hotel. "You can't tell me where to park! Help! I feel triggered!"

I don't lump all Americans into the same parking-violators basket. I wouldn't park in front of no parking signs unless I was having a bathroom emergency, and even then I would be prepared to accept the consequences. "How much is a no-parking fine?" I wondered. So I looked it up and in my city it is "not more than $200." In Norfolk, Virginia, a larger city just under 80 miles from my 'burg, the fine for violating the No Parking sign is $50. 

I think $50 is reasonable—it's like the city has reserved a parking space just for me and $50 is the fee to use it. On the other hand, can the city fine me for violating a No Parking sign that is located on private property? Are these signs merely a bluff? Maybe this woman is onto something. However, if you rob someone on private property, you've definitely broken the law, so maybe it's a gray area. I'm not a lawyer, so what do I know?

A Truffling Matter

Blogging is a bit like hunting for truffles, but without the truffle dog. (Or the truffle hog.) Sometimes I sit at my PC and I know what I want to write about. I have a subject. I want to make a point. I have the narrative in my head and I know where I want it to go. But often I sit at the PC and I don't have any idea of what to write about. I may think for a while, or I may surf the Web until I stumble upon something that intrigues me. Then the fun begins. As I wrote in my previous post, "Writing them is like following a creek in the woods—I never know what direction they'll take next."

For example, take this blog post. I had a narrative in my head for it. I knew where I was going. But then a long WhatsApp conversation intervened and obliterated it. I can only remember that at one point I was going to write, "And I don't even own a truffle slicer." But I don't know what came before or after. 

However, while I'm on the subject, if you want to buy a truffle slicer (a.k.a. truffle shaver, and by the way they work well on mushrooms, too) you may pay over $70, or less than $2, and Amazon may give you a freebie if you buy a half ounce of Italian white truffle for $110. Yes folks, if pigs were as scarce as truffles, many of us could not afford bacon.

"Hello, waiter. How much for the bacon-burger?"

"That will be $115."

"How much for just the burger?"

"Five dollars."

"I'll take the burger."

"Fine. Would you like fries with that?"

"Uh ... how much for the fries?"

Truffle Dog Has Questions

I've never eaten truffles. I told a friend that I wouldn't pay that much for a half ounce of food even if it, well, you know. You know?! There is no food that tastes so good that I would pay $110 for a half ounce. Besides, with my luck I'd fumble the slicing tool and the lump of truffle would fall to the kitchen floor, whereupon a large fly would immediately land on it. And you're not supposed to cook truffles because it ruins their flavor. I would retrieve the truffle from the kitchen floor, brush away the fly, and... No, it's not worth it. But readers, if you've eaten truffles, tell the rest of us what we've missed. And be as descriptive as possible. Did your taste buds have an orgasm? Other than having bragging rights to eating something that was buried in dirt in the woods and found by a dog (or a hog), what was your reward?

What Is It?

Do you know what this object is? As I poured bran flakes into my cereal bowl, this thing fell out of the box. As you can see, it's about 2 inches (5 cm) long and egg-shaped. It's hard as rock—maybe harder. I gave it to a neighbor's dog. The dog was unable to chew it but did manage to put a very small scratch on it before giving up. The nugget makes me wonder about the degree of quality control that goes into the food products we purchase. For all I know, there may be a small mouse hidden inside that object. Or perhaps if it were polished, its inner glory would burst forth like the gleam of polished labradorite—only, much more brown.

Labradorite is a gemstone that is found inside certain kinds of rock. Some people think it has magical properties and can be useful in healing—a kind of crystal energy, I suppose. You can buy labradorite polished to wear as a pendant or to use for healing energy—if you believe pretty rocks have healing properties. Labradorite is named after (I'm sure you've already guessed this) Labrador, Canada, where it was discovered.

Labradorite should not be confused with Labrador Retriever, which is a breed of dog bred especially to retrieve game. Labrador Retrievers are said to have a temperament that is kind, pleasant, outgoing and of a tractable nature—unlike rocks, which will not fetch dead birds for you, regardless of how long you plead with them.

So you can see why I might wonder what is inside that nugget composed of bran flakes and industrial cement that fell from the cereal box into my bowl.

This article has wandered far from where I started, but that is the way of blogs. Writing them is like following a creek in the woods—I never know what direction they'll take next.

Travel Perplexity

"Why do you do that?" she asked. "Why do you refer to yourself as he rather than I ?" She was speaking of a recent blog post I had written about myself.

It wasn't the most flattering narrative, but "flattering" is not what I was going for. Sometimes writing in the first person puts me a little too close to the subject—which in this case was me. I don't want to write about myself; I want to observe myself. I want to observe myself "on paper," if that makes sense. Writing in the third person puts me in a state of mind for that. I tried to explain that to her but I felt this was one of those times when my verbal skill was badly lacking. She said "Okay," a perfectly noncommittal response.

She was planning a trip to the US, to the city of her late husband's birth. I was trying to assist her. I had access to plane schedules and bus schedules and Google Maps. Long after our conversation ended I still pursued a quest to find the perfect routes, the perfect connections. 

Why do airlines say an arrival or departure will occur at 9:04 or 12:09? That sounds oddly specific for an industry which does well to arrive or depart within an hour of their scheduled time. (Unless they have greatly improved since I last used their services.) Why not say 9 AM or 12 PM? Is the aircraft really going to pull back from the gate at the scheduled minute? How often does that happen?

I drove the virtual highways and byways of Google Maps, stymied that the local bus terminal has parking for a dozen customers wanting to drop off or pick up a passenger, while one intercity bus holds 50 or 55 passengers. Cruising the spaghetti roads of a local airport, I puzzled over the question of why I couldn't take the exit off Airport Drive that goes to by-the-minute parking instead of being forced to go to daily parking. I understand there is now a game called Airport Roads. I will guess the player's goal is to drive to an objective somewhere within the airport grounds, and the game's goal is to prevent him from getting there. Rather like real life.

Anyway, the time is now 3 AM and it's time to hit the Publish button and call it a night. Good night, all.

A Perfectly Ordinary Tuesday Morn

He fussed with his blog until little more than an hour remained before dawn. Some things were beyond his control, but he would exhaust all possibilities before conceding defeat. After hours of sitting in the darkness and tinkering at the keyboard, he achieved an equilibrium between what he wanted and what the gods of creativity would allow, and he put his computer to sleep and went to his bedroom. He picked up a book and began reading some pages of the novel that was his current literary interest: Love in the Time of Cholera, written by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The novel had won a Nobel Prize in Literature, though he hadn't known that (perhaps he had forgotten) when the book arrived in the mail, sent by a friend in Costa Rica. 

He turned out the light and lay back in bed and rolled over on his left side. His right side hurt from some unremembered accident incurred while sleep-walking, and he suspected a fractured rib, inasmuch as it had pained him for several months now. He was so accustomed to sleeping on his left side that his left shoulder joint was now hurting him, as if the ligaments were protesting the weight placed upon them for too many hours every night.  After a few minutes he knew he was deluding himself by thinking he could enjoy two or three hours of sleep before dawn. He knew it was not to be.

There was a time when he would anesthetize himself with vodka before going to bed, and it would put him to sleep—for a while. But then the sleep-walking started, and he would get up in the morning and find large bruises and sometimes lacerations on his body, and blood on his t-shirt and on the bed sheet. At first the blood puzzled him, but when he stepped into the shower and felt the cuts on his body, he knew that it was time to relinquish his nighttime soporific. He never remembered how the cuts and bruises came to be on his body. The part of his brain that could have communicated the event was asleep when it happened, and the part of his brain that possibly did remember the event was mute. Sometimes he felt like one of those unfortunate persons who had to have their corpus callosum severed: truly, a split-personality. He would go to bed sleepy with booze, only to awaken in the morning light, battered in a bedroom where a fight had apparently taken place during the night, with cardboard boxes bashed and broken, a table lamp placed on top of his cell phone on the dresser, a trashcan overturned, his sheet and blanket on the floor. Perhaps he had battled his own demons during the night.

Dawn was almost an hour away when he walked to the dark living room and awakened his computer. Within seconds he was illuminated by the blue-tinged white light of the flat-screen monitor. The light was paradoxically somewhat dim and yet harsh, he noted. He typed in the address of his blog and then summoned the editor. His mouse hovered over the button that was labeled "New Post" and he clicked it. He began writing about a man who couldn't sleep and he wondered how, one day, the story would end.

Indigenous People's Day

It's 4:12 AM. The house is dark. Rain falls noisily on the metal awnings over the front windows. The rain here is coming from remnants of Hurricane Delta, which just tore up the gulf coast—the same gulf coast that got tore up about 6 weeks ago. The rain should be done with my neck of the woods later this morning.

Louisiana has seen 4 named storms this hurricane season: Tropical Storm Cristobal, Hurricane Laura, Tropical Storm Marco and Hurricane Delta. Hurricane Laura had 150 mph winds when it hit shore. Compare that to Katrina with its 125 mph winds.

On the less meteorological side, today is Columbus day. If you're texting with someone from Colombia (the country) don't ever spell it Columbia. They don't like that. Apparently, no one in the Hispanic world likes that. Columbus was not Spanish. He has long been thought to be Italian, but now evidence has emerged that indicates he may have been Portuguese and he adopted the name Cristoforo Colombo when he moved to Spain.

We all know that Columbus voyaged to the "New World" and "discovered" it, even though millions of people were already living here. In fact, people were living in the New World for 10,000 years before Europeans came here. They had their own civilizations and their own history. They made many discoveries, and some important ones were related to food. 

For instance, consider hominy grits, a food typically regarded in the USA as Southern. It is made possible by the discovery of a process called nixtamalization, a word derived from the Nahuatl language spoken by the pre-Columbian people of Mesoamerica (now Mexico and central America) who invented this process of soaking corn in an alkaline solution of calcium hydroxide made from slaked lime, lye, or wood ash. This process kills the germ, thus preventing the corn from germinating and therefore making the corn last much longer in storage than it would if not treated. It also makes several important nutrients in the corn more bio-available. Thanks to those people who invented nixtamalization 3500 years ago, we have grits and tortillas and tacos and burritos and quesadillas and nachos and enchiladas and—you get my point. And nixtamalization is just one of the many things developed or discovered by the pre-Columbian people of Mesoamerica.

In fact, I vote that we should not celebrate Columbus on Columbus Day, but those unknown people—the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas—who developed foods, over thousands of years, such as maize (corn), sweet potato, sweet manioc, avocados, beans and chia, amaranth and squash, chili and chocolate, as well as a very long list of spices and flavorings. Plus, the short list of domesticated creatures is headed by the turkey and includes the dog as well as bees. We have many culinary delights thanks to the hard work of those Mesoamerican people of long ago. It's time we celebrated them with a Mesoamerican Day. Why not? I mean, who doesn't like nachos?

Oh wait, I almost forgot. We already celebrate a Mesoamerican Day. We call it Indigenous People's Day and it is celebrated on the same day as Columbus Day. So don't raise your nose at Indigenous People's Day. We have a lot of delightful foods thanks to their hard work.

End-of-Season Chores

We are well into the Fall season now. It began September 22 and ends December 21. It is 3:20 AM and I have been up since 1:30 AM. I'm a night person. It's not because I want to be a  night person. I just am. I wasn't always a night person. But I evolved. I go to bed at a reasonable hour and wake up three hours later. And that is if I get to sleep at all.

It's quiet in the house. The outside temperature is 49°F. Tomorrow is forecast to be 73° and mostly sunny. I have to make a trip to a grocery store in the morning. My kitchen cabinet holds one can of Brunswick stew and two tins of kippered herring filet. I have several sausage biscuits in my freezer. My fridge holds two tablespoons of peanut butter, some grape jelly, a 4 oz cup of applesauce, and a package of bacon. I'm getting low on food even by my own lax standards. I do have some oatmeal and grits. In fact, I ate grits with butter last night for supper. Plus, a tin of sardines. However, I know I'm scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel, food-wise.

(Time passes.)

I'm back. I just gobbled down that little cup of applesauce and two slices of cinnamon toast. 

I mowed my yard yesterday afternoon. I figure this will probably be the last time I mow it because the grass is growing very slowly now. So I mowed it close to the ground. Today I plan to trim the shrubs around the front of the house. If I succeed in overcoming my natural inertia (inertia: a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged), my house will be more or less ready for winter. Then I can hibernate until spring, awakening only to check the mailbox and pay the occasional bill.

It would be nice if I can get another couple hours of sleep before starting the new day. It's Friday. End of the week. I think the applesauce and cinnamon toast are making me a little bit sleepy. It's a good time to see if I'm sleepy enough to sleep. Goodnight and stay well.

Up Again—Sort Of

continued from previous post...

 

After sitting up all night at the 'puter, running Windows diagnostic procedures at 4 hours per attempt, I was able to get into the Dell "Diagnose and Repair" software, which seemed very well hidden. It took a long time to run—most of the night, actually—but when it finished I had Windows running again. Sort of. My PC now boots into Windows, but it's an earlier version of Windows that was stashed in a hidden partition somewhere on the drive. So the repair software re-installed Windows from that version in the partition. To do that it had to move a lot of my stuff off the drive and onto another drive, then after the repair it moved my stuff back to the C-drive. All my programs were gone. And lots of other stuff, like all my programming tools, my Thunderbird emails, and other items too numerous to mention. I doubt I know yet half of what's lost. 

 

And the computer behaves funky at times. I installed the Edge browser but it won't run more than 30 seconds without crashing. Open Live Writer, my blogging tool, installed but will not run. Some other programs would not even install. Their installer would open and shut without doing anything. Down in the lower right corner of my screen there is the label "Windows 8.1 Build 9600" that was not there before the crash, don't need, and don't know how to eliminate. There are many other differences, some subtle, and some are just in-your-face.

I look at it this way. I can "get by" and take my time shopping for a replacement PC. The end-of-year sales will be coming up in another six weeks, so I'll wait for them and maybe save a few bucks.

Fortunately, many of my documents, images, and videos were either backed up or located on an external drive. It might be time to archive the external backup drives and replace them with a single fresh drive. Although, product reviews are replete with stories of new drives failing within days or weeks of being turned on.

 
Meanwhile, I can browse the web with a "real" PC and a "real" monitor and keyboard instead of the tiny box that filled in while this PC was down. But I'm glad I had the little box. I had already begun PC shopping using it. How did I even live before the Internet? I cannot remember those dark years of no World Wide Web and no email. I understand the teenagers who walk around like zombies, eyes glued to their cell phones. I do it too—I'm just not walking around.

Down Time

It had to happen.

My pc's hard drive failed.

I think I bought my latest pc in 2014. It is a Dell. The pc before that was HP, and I bought it in 2008. So both lasted 6 years. But the HP died: it needed a new motherboard or a new CPU. Maybe both. The Dell didn't really die—its internal hard drive (C-drive) failed. In theory, I could replace the hard drive.A new 1TB hard drive can be had for $45 to $65, though going with the cheapest may not be the best idea. But it would need an OS. A copy of Windows 10 Home would cost $140. Windows 10 Pro would cost $200. So for $200 I could have a new drive with Windows 10 Home, and for $260 I could have a new drive with Windows 10 Pro. But that isn't the end of it. It's more like the beginning. I have to open the pc and remove the bad drive and install the new drive, then I have to install Windows 10 on the new C-drive. Which might be easy or it might not. It has been many years since I have installed an OS on a system drive. 

How am I writing this blog? I'm using a little Windows 10 convertible notebook (converts to a tablet) that I bought from Walmart a few years ago. I wanted to try out Windows 10 and see if I liked it before installing it on my "main" pc. For a tad under $100, the little box was a good deal. It is not something I would want to use everyday for real work, but it did work. Kind of. It is very underpowered, CPU-wise, and the 10.1 inch screen is difficult to read. The little keyboard is also difficult to type on. But for a temporary, "get-by" computer, it is worth having around. I can still pay bills with it, reply to email, and surf replacement products on the Web. 

My blogging software won't run on this little box, meaning I have to use Blogger's default interface. That's not the fault of the computer; it's the fault of Windows 10. Skype runs so-so. It might be acceptable one time and unacceptable the next time. Quality during a single call varies considerably. I was talking to a friend by Skype and found myself resorting to WhatsApp to communicate during periods of the call when her voice was breaking up, even as we were on a video call. I had to laugh because we were using Skype to watch ourselves text each other. What's wrong with this picture?

So I may or may not be doing a lot of blogging in the immediate future. I shouldn't be. I should be computer shopping. It's dark in my living room at 2:45 AM. I'll publish this to let my readers—all 3 of 'em—know the situation here. If I end up purchasing a new pc, I plan to replace this machine's C-drive and install some manner of Linux on it. Linux is an operating system, different from Windows, but probably in many ways better, and it's free. Google's Android mobile phone OS is based on Linux. And did I mention, it's free! Well, as far as dollars down, it's free, but it will probably take a good many hours of reading and study to become halfway proficient at using it. And time is an investment, too, just in a different currency.

Stay safe, friends, and I'll get this straightened out. Meantime, don't worry about Covid-19. Trump had it and reports it isn't a big deal. If you catch it, just call your personal helicopter crew and have them bring around the big chopper and fly you to Walter Reed. Once there, assemble a team of doctors to treat you with that new medicine that isn't on the market yet. When you feel better, have your chopper fly you to your limo, which will drive you home to your in-house backup hospital room. Why, that Covid-19 doesn't bother me any more than walking past a rabid dog lunging at me at end of his chain. What dog? Do you see a dog? I don't see a dog.

Woof-woof.

Syn Cole

The song of the day is 2017's Got the Feeling by DJ and producer Syn Cole (Rene Pais) featuring vocals by Pentatonix vocalist Kirstin Maldonado.

Jay and the Americans

It was late on a Saturday night and I was scrolling stations on the TV when suddenly I saw a pair of boobs waving at me. It was a bra commercial and the name of the bra was CaraMia Bra.

The name took me back to the 1960s to a song called Cara Mia and a rock band called Jay and the Americans. I liked the song. Once upon a time I had the song on vinyl. I probably still have it, somewhere in a box of old LPs.

The song was published in 1954 and was a UK #1 hit for English singer David Whitfield and in 1965 was a US #4 hit for Jay and the Americans. Cara Mia means “my beloved” in Italian.

And so, because I saw a 5 second clip of a bra commercial, I have made this oldie the song of the day—1965's Cara Mia by Jay and the Americans with vocals by David "Jay" Black.

Jay Black is 81 now, and he was almost 80 at his most recent performance. Here is a video of Jay performing Cara Mia circa 2011, according to the video’s YouTube title. Time takes its toll, but time hasn’t stolen his voice.

Risk Management

One thing I’ve noticed about Donald Trump is that he seems to think that reality is what he says it is, rather than what it is. He seems to think if he wants reality to be different, he can just say it’s different and presto, reality is different. Of course, reality doesn’t work that way. You can make fun of masks and social distancing and other precautions that medical experts have advised people to take, but all you’re really doing is upping the odds that someone is going to get sick, and there’s a real chance that the someone who gets sick will be you.

The reason I have to point out it might be you who gets sick is because many people don’t care if someone else gets sick. They don’t care if they transmit a deadly disease to a dozen other people or a hundred other people. They only care if an illness happens to them. So remember, it works both ways. You can make someone sick—but someone can make you sick, too.

To many of his supporters, Trump is the modern-day Elvis, minus the looks, the voice, the sideburns, and the singing talent. For many people, he has some kind of Elvis charisma. I don’t see it, but I think many people do, because I see how they respond to him. He has his fans under his spell.

He has mocked medical science and he has mocked those who took the precautions that doctors have been advising us to take. As late as the presidential debate he mocked his opponent for taking precautions against coronavirus. Now he’s in a hospital bed getting experimental drugs as his doctors try to prevent the disease from claiming him. You can mock the coronavirus but the coronavirus doesn’t care. It’s going to do what it’s going to do. It’s like pushing over that first domino in a string of dominoes: the rest are going to fall, one by one, because that is what dominoes do. Wishing and pretending otherwise does not change anything. If you don’t want all the dominoes to fall down, then don’t push that first one down.

And if you don’t want to get covid19, and if you don’t want to die while hooked up to a ventilator and surrounded by strangers, then be smart. Don’t pretend reality is different from what it is. There are no guarantees in life, but there are ways you can increase the odds you’ll win.

Vanishing Fruit

I’ve mentioned in several previous articles that my house is mysterious. I won’t say haunted, but perhaps that would be the more accurate word.

In mid-September I went to Food Lion and among other things I purchased 3 cans of fruit. One can held crushed pineapple in juice, another can held mandarin oranges in light syrup, and the third can held fruit cocktail in heavy syrup. I know because (1) I remember buying them and (2) I dug through the wastebasket and found the store receipt and all three are listed.

When I got home I put the three cans on the countertop to the right side of my stove. A couple days went by, and I opened the can of pineapple. I spooned some into a 4-ounce cup and ate it. I put the remainder into the fridge. A couple days later I ate another 4 ounce serving. Each night when I prepared supper I noticed the remaining two cans of fruit sitting side by side on the countertop.

Last night I finished the pineapple, and so tonight I decided to eat some of the fruit cocktail. I went to the kitchen to retrieve the can and open it, but the can was gone. The can of mandarin oranges was still there, but instead of the fruit cocktail sitting to the right of it, there was only empty countertop. The can of fruit cocktail was missing.

I looked everywhere. I looked carefully all around the countertops, I looked inside the kitchen cabinets. I looked on the dining table, I looked on the buffet table, I looked on the shelves under the cutting-board table. I looked inside the fridge. I looked inside the freezer. I looked in the kitchen garbage can. I looked in the cabinet under the sink. I looked and looked and looked for that can. It was gone.

How thorough was my search? Let me put it this way: I even looked inside the living room fireplace! Seriously, I thought maybe I had been sleepwalking last night and put the can inside the fireplace. I literally ran out of places to search. So, is it possible I ate it and don’t remember doing it? I do recall that I ate the last of the pineapple last night. Could I have eaten an entire can of fruit cocktail since last night and not remember doing it? Nope. Not a chance.

I’ll add this “vanishing fruit” to the other mysterious happenings I’ve witnessed in this house.