Rainy Days and Rainy Nights

When I was young, I hated rainy days. I had to stay inside, and I hated staying inside. I loved the outdoors. Now I’m older, and I love rainy days. Mow the lawn? Can’t do it – its raining. Trim the bushes? Can’t do it – it’s raining. Run the weed-eater? Can’t do it – it’s raining.

Night is the best. Because of the rain, the temperature tonight is just 70°F and is supposed to hit 61°F. So I have my bedroom window open. The night air comes in, the night smells come in, and the night sounds come in. I hear the chirping of crickets. Some years, I hear the drone of cicadas. I live less than a half mile as the crow flies from Interstate 95, and often I hear the sounds of Interstate traffic. I hear the incessant drone of tires on pavement. Sometimes I hear Jake  brakes slowing a tractor-trailer. (Perhaps you’ve seen a road sign that states: “No Jake Brakes Within City Limits.” They’re loud.) Frequently, I hear a train on its way through town. I hear the rumble of steel wheels on steel rails, and I hear the engine’s air horns.

The forecast calls for heavy rain tonight – an 80% chance. My house has a shingle roof, but half of my bedroom has a copper sheet on the roof above it. I can hear rain hitting the roof very well.

When I can’t sleep, I get up and see what’s on the television. Usually there is nothing interesting and I end up on the computer, perusing the World Wide Web. Sometimes I’ll use the opportunity to write a blog post. The house is very quiet, with only the sound of the refrigerator running. When the refrigerator turns off, there is no sound at all – except for the tinnitus that is always in the background.

The weather forecast calls for rain off and on for the next 24 hours. I say, “Bring it!” I love rainy days and rainy nights.

Lady Luck

According to the BBC, this twisted pile of smoking metal used to be a new £200,000 ($258,000) Ferrari 430 Scuderia. While cruising down the M1 motorway connecting London to Leeds, the vehicle “went airborne”, zoomed off the M1, and smashed itself to pieces. The driver walked away with “just cuts and bruises.” He had owned the vehicle for one hour.

Another BBC article showed the remains of a £143,000 ($126,700) McLaren 570S and reported that the driver and passenger escaped with “minor injuries.”

Who are these people? How were they able to walk away from a mass of debris that isn’t even recognizable as having once been an automobile? Are they invincible, like superheroes? Were they teleported out of their cars at the last second by a benevolent deity? Or are they just unbelievably lucky? Because if it’s the latter, I want one of them to buy my next lottery ticket. Come on, guys, I’ll split the winnings.

But on second thought, they don’t need me. People that lucky have probably won all the lottery money they can handle – and they used some of it to buy themselves supercars. I hope they bought insurance, too.

Sticks and Stones

It rained this afternoon and will probably rain again before morning. That means I can’t trim the bushes in front of the house. My electric hedge trimmer doesn’t play well with rainwater.

A few weeks ago I trimmed all but two bushes, after which the rubbish bin was chock full of leaves, so I had to stop at that point. I had planned on trimming the last two bushes a day or so later, but the weather turned hot (heat index 112°) for a while, and it was simply too hot to finish the job. Then the temperature turned bearable and I had a chance to finish the job, but bearable wasn’t good enough. I wanted comfortable weather. So I waited some more. And now it’s comfortable, but it’s raining. I still have to trim the last two bushes – I’m just procrastinating. It is the way of my people. My personal philosophy is, “Why do today what can be put off till tomorrow?”

I’ve been hit by summertime laziness. I posted two articles in June and, so far, one article in July. Now the end of the month is almost here and I’m just getting around to my second July post. Lazy.

But it’s not entirely laziness. There’s been plenty of fodder for the blog mill, not the least of which has been the clown show in Washington, D.C., and I’ve been tempted to write some commentary. But the clown show has been very adequately covered by hundreds of online news articles, opinion pieces, and late-night comedians. Therefore, I feel like I have nothing of substance to add to the conversation. Strangely, having nothing of substance to write about has never stopped me before, so the cause of my writer’s block is not entirely explicable. (I’ve been wanting to use that word, explicable, for years. Now I have. Next up: sanguine. Or possibly, amanuensis. But I digress.)

I decided I had to write about something. That’s how you get rid of writer’s block: just start writing. So I decided to blog about a product currently available at Nordstrom. They are selling a rock for $85. It comes in a little leather pouch. I don’t know if it comes with instructions, but it probably has a warranty. If it breaks they’ll send you another rock free. Assuming they have another rock. At this date, Nordstrom is sold out of rocks. Which raises two questions. First: why would anyone want to spend $85 for a rock? And the bigger question: how do you sell out of rocks? “Sorry, I’d like to take your $85 but I’m waiting for a shipment from the rock factory.”

I hope my bout of writer’s block has been quenched. It would be helpful to have an amanuensis, but I doubt I ever will. Still, I’m sanguine about it all. (Two birds, one reusable stone – pouch included.)

Conspiracies

NASA is once again knocking down a conspiracy theory that was promoted by a guest on Alex Jones’s website, Infowars, that advances the notion that NASA is hiding kidnapped child sex slaves in a colony on Mars. Yes, Mars the planet.

Alex Jones seems to have a “thing” for stories involving child sex slaves. The last big Infowars conspiracy involving kidnapped children was the story that child sex slaves were being held by Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. That conspiracy theory was dubbed “Pizzagate” and as unbelievable as it sounds to normal, rational people, the story actually induced a North Carolina man to travel to Washington D.C. and enter the restaurant with an AR-15 style rifle and fire several shots, hitting walls, a desk, and a door. After getting everyone’s attention, he demanded to know where the kidnapped children were being kept. When he discovered the restaurant didn’t have a basement and there were no kidnapped children, he surrendered to police. He earned himself four years in prison and agreed to pay $5,744.33 for damages to the restaurant. (In my opinion, the judge should have tacked on an additional four years just for stupidity. It should be illegal to be that gullible.) Other people are facing prison sentences and huge fines for phoning in threats to pizza restaurants in D.C. A Louisiana man is facing five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for threatening a different pizza restaurant. He said he wanted to “save the kids” and “finish what the other guy didn’t.”

When it comes to absurd nonsense, I didn’t think Alex Jones would be able to top Pizzagate, but he’s done it. According to the new conspiracy theory, NASA is holding child sex slaves on the planet Mars – a neat trick considering NASA has no way to get humans to Mars. In fact, NASA astronauts have to hitch a ride to the International Space Station on a Russian rocket, because NASA has no way to get astronauts to its own space station.

When a significant number of wide-eyed American adults so easily fall hook, line and sinker for a preposterous fiction, I worry for the future of this country.

And what’s up with Alex Jones and child sex slaves? Find another topic, Alex.

Food Ignorance

I recently read a startling fact. Seven percent of adult Americans think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Yes, I said adult Americans. That amounts to 16.4 million people who don’t know that chocolate milk is made of milk, cocoa, and sugar.

A study in the ‘90s found that 1 in 5 adults don’t know that hamburgers are made from ground beef.

Interviews with 4th, 5th, and 6th graders at an urban California school revealed that more than half of them didn’t know pickles were cucumbers, or that onions and lettuce were plants. Four in 10 didn’t know that hamburgers came from cows. And 3 in 10 didn’t know that cheese is made from milk.

Ask them where food comes from and their answer is “the store.” But, where did the store get the food? For too many Americans, that question is one of life’s great mysteries.

Commotion in D.C.

Watching the Russia election-meddling investigation on Capitol Hill reminds me of a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

… it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

There will be subpoenas, there will be witnesses, there will be testimony – then, there will be more subpoenas, more witnesses, more testimony. And so on.

James Comey says about Trump: “Lies, plain and simple.”

Donald Trump says about Comey: “… so many false statements and lies…”

Oy.

Trump is not afraid to lie, even when the lie is obvious to everyone. In a meeting with Congressional leadership, Trump began the conversation this way: “I won the popular vote, you know.” In reality – I mean, everyone else’s reality, not Trump’s reality – Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than Trump. But Trump lives in a different reality.

I’m sure Trump’s supporters are aware that he lies about facts, but I doubt that they care. Trump’s supporters are more concerned about this question: “What’s in it for me?” If they have better jobs and more income, they’ll be happy campers. Maybe that’s good. Maybe all of us should ask that question.

“What’s in it for me?”

Cognitive Ease

I recently watched an interesting video on Derek Muller’s Veritasium YouTube channel. The video is called The Illusion of Truth. In the video, Muller explains a psychological phenomenon called cognitive ease. When you hear or read something and it seems familiar and right and true, you are experiencing cognitive ease. (This is the opposite of cognitive strain, in which we have trouble understanding or believing something, even though it may well be true.) Sometimes the reason we experience cognitive ease is because we are hearing or reading something that we already know is true or because it simply makes sense.

But beware: we humans can be manipulated into feeling cognitive ease – manipulated into feeling that something is true when it is not. One of the simplest ways to create cognitive ease is through frequent repetition of a phrase. With each repetition, we become a bit more comfortable with the idea, and the idea becomes a bit easier to believe. Eventually, we accept the statement as fact. Advertisers and sales people (and politicians) have known about this phenomenon for a long time.

In his video, Muller mentions neither politics nor politicians. The video is just a discussion of cognitive ease: what it is, how it works. However, as I watched the video, I couldn’t help thinking about a certain politician and the derogatory nicknames he consistently applies to his opponents.

Hillary Clinton - “Crooked Hillary.” Bernie Sanders - “Crazy Bernie.” Ted Cruz - “Lyin’ Ted.” Marco Rubio - “Little Marco.” Jeb Bush – “Low Energy Jeb.” And more recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren - “Goofy Elizabeth Warren” and “Pocahontas.”

This politician also attacks our judiciary, labeling judges “so-called judges” and deriding their rulings as “erroneous” and “ridiculous.” He refers to news stories he doesn’t like as “fake news.” Clearly, he feels he should be able to do whatever he wants regardless of the courts or the Constitution.

While this politician is hardly alone in the manipulation game, he is the most visible, the most brazen, and perhaps the most dangerous of the many who will gain by convincing us to believe in their worldview. If we do that, we may find ourselves supporting what they want to the detriment of what we the people need.

Let’s remember: cognitive ease through frequent repetition is an effective tool used by advertisers, sales people, and less-than-scrupulous politicians.

Kirstin Maldonado

Probably no one has had her name misspelled and mispronounced as often and in so many ways as singer-songwriter Kirstin Maldonado. Maldonado takes it in stride, smiling wryly in this photo while wearing a tank top displaying some of the more common misspellings.

Recently, I watched an interview with Maldonado, and the woman conducting the interview introduced Maldonado as “Kristy Maldano.” My reaction: “Really? You couldn’t get either name correct?” I would have thought that a basic requirement for an interviewer would be to know the name of the person being interviewed. But I would have been wrong about that.

The worst mangling of Maldonado’s name that I’ve seen to date has to be “Kinston McDonald.” Kinston. McDonald. Wow. I suppose that given the current state of education in this country, it must count for something that someone at least got her initials correct.

Best known for her work with three-time Grammy-winning a cappella super-group Pentatonix, Maldonado just released her debut solo single and music video Break A Little. Maldonado wrote and recorded the song and designed the music video. Her debut EP is set to be released this summer.

Helena Legend & Kirstin Maldonado

The song of the day is 2017's Dose of You by British-born Australian singer-producer Helena Legend and singer-songwriter kirstin™.

Graffiti6

The song of the day is Calm the Storm from the 2010 album Colours by British band Graffiti6 (founded by London-born Jamie Scott and Tommy "TommyD" Danvers).