Random But Highly Evolved and Inspired, Often Deep, Thoughts

All plates, no matter what their main color or pattern, should have a band around the edge that is dark enough, and wide enough, to provide a background to better see the salt as it comes out of the shaker and onto the food.

Forks should have smooth, rounded edges on the end opposite the tines so when you inevitably use the side of the fork to cut something, the end of the handle doesn't dig into your palm. I can't believe not enough centuries of using the fork have passed to allow our culture to realize this simple problem and its solution.

Car radios should have a minimum of these features:
1.) a large round knob for the volume control
2.) a large on/off button that is easy to locate
3.) a big red button that overrides all the other buttons and whose function is to set everything except volume to a pre-set default--a "just make everything work" panic button that doesn't require taking eyes off the road for more than four minutes.
4.) get rid of the goddam clock, or have a separate button(s) for setting the time, not weird combinations of button presses that require holding certain buttons down for longer than so-many-seconds for their function to change.

GPS devices should all have a STFU button.

All alarm clocks should have forward and reverse time/alarm set buttons. Come on. If I wake up one day at 8, and the next at 7, I don't want to sit there and hold the button down for a minute while it runs the time forward twenty-three hours.

P.E. class is so-ooo stupid. (Oh never mind.  I'm over that now.)

Uniform bumper and headlight height/intensity for motor vehicles.  Let's grow up.

ANYTHING technological that happens "automatically" should have some VERY EASY way of getting turned off or disabled. Like a big, red, "nothing" button, maybe.

Wages for school teachers should be inverted--Kindergarten teachers getting the highest pay, ($90,000/year) and decreasing each grade level until college professors, who shall get $17,000 per annum plus free beer, minus fines leveed for shoddy elocution.

The Machine Stops

An interesting thing has happened. My technology fatigue has begun to overshadow my love of the Internet.  I mean, being on the Internet is not worth the time and trouble it is probably going to take for me to figure out how to set the options on my new wireless router. 

I realized that I used to get through this kind of tough spot because I genuinely wanted to know how it worked.  Now, I don't care. I genuinely want all of this to become magical again.  I want to turn the etch-a-sketch over and shake, so that I can't see the wheels and pulleys anymore. They confuse and frighten me.  I want the promise of plug'n'play to be more than a hollow, tragic hoax. 

My old router does work. (Or I wouldn't be blogging.)  It is just a little flakey. Drops my laptop, sometimes makes page loading balky.  The PC that is plugged directly into it does fine. 

The new router is a beautiful, slim shiny black plastic work of high-tech art. It weighs about 2 oz.  Holding it in my hand, I get the feeling that if I squeezed, just a little bit, it would explode into a thousand tiny fragments. We may still find out if this is true. 

There is no manual with it, but only a CD that, it turns out, requires that I download and install Windows Service Pack #3. Which ain't gonna happen. I know enough to get to the setup screens in the router but there one finds a plethora of arcane settings and options, and, hell, I don't really know what I'm doing, so, bottom line, the old router is now back on line and the new router, the sleek, shiny black artifact of a techno marketing revolution gone awry, with my fingerprints all over it, sits on the kitchen table.

I look out the window. The sun is shining, and a gentle breeze massages the treetops.  Birds are chirping, and some people are walking their dogs.  

Call Me

Google seems interested in getting my cell phone number. It is for "security reasons" (I've heard a bit too much of that since 911,) but methinks they are just a little too eager. The reasons they give (all security related) are valid enough, but not really necessary.  Perhaps they add a little convenience to the whole operation of recovering your account, say, but . . . no.

I really liked the list of things they won't do with your phone number:

Ways we won't use your mobile phone number
Unless you make a specific request, we won’t use your mobile phone number for anything other than protecting your account. For example, unless you tell us to, we’ll never:

• Sell your phone number to other companies or organizations

• Call you for marketing purposes

• Publish your phone number online

The funny part here is the phrase, "unless you make a specific request." Really? I would ever request that they sell my cell phone number to other companies?  That I receive calls for marketing purposes? That my number be published online?

I'm afraid the good people at Google are losing their hippy-dippy good guy mystique here.  Can you say "uncheck the selection box?"  I am now very wary of these people.  And to be fair, for a moment, I thought it was just my own paranoia, but then, when I opted out of giving them my cell phone number, did we get to move on?  No. Yet another little box popped up.  Are you sure????   Huh???  Last chance . . .

Big Business

I have a motorcycle for sale on craigslist.  Because I am a blogger, I have re-written the ad several times as the days have gone by.  I am becoming obsessed with nuancing the text, concerned that my wording is influencing the prospective buyer in some negative way. At one point I went for the cheap laugh:

" . . . bike has been well taken care of and only ridden by an old man (me), although never to church."

Which I took out after a couple of days for fear of offending Bikers for Christ, any one of whom is a potential buyer. I began to worry about subtle wording choices, like "bike was purchased last February", vs "bike was purchased in February." Did the bike run "good," or "great."  Or did it run "really good?"  Did it handle "superbly?"  Was it awesome?  I already decided I wouldn't say the bike was "sick."  Which is good, somehow.  I think. It's wearing me out.  Right now, I think, the text is about as generic as it can get. I changed around the order of the photographs.  I had already removed the pictures I took when there were no leaves on the trees in the background. Don't want that.  I took new ones at a park.  Oh shit, not urban enough. I may redo them. Good thing I don't pay myself to do this, or I have already lost money on this thing.

First, I got an email from someone who wanted to know, simply, "Why are you selling?"  I answered, saying, now I need the money. Never heard back.  I still wonder what answer he was looking for.

Did I want to trade for a pickup truck?  No.

A third guy emailed, indicating a lot of interest. Was I negotiable on the price?  I said, yes. He emailed back. Will you take $7,500?  No.  Now I'm wondering why we are haggling price when he has never seen the bike.  I don't want to sound patronizing.  Eventually he comes over, after I give him my bottom-most price.  He looks at the bike, and likes it.  He will buy it! He says he needs to go home and get two hundred more dollars and a ride back so he can pick up the bike.  Why does he need $200 more?  He only brought the smaller amount.  I don't know why. He left, then called, later, saying he's not sure he wants to spend "that much" on a bike.  I thought I had it sold, but now this.  I told him OK. I hate to lose a sale over $200, but I was already below my bottom line at that point. Gotta stop somewhere.

The latest, and my favorite, is the email from the guy with his own company in Denver, which is, like, two states away. He is interested, he says.  He would be interested in a "fly-n-ride" (as he said) for the right bike.  Would I consider picking him up at the airport if we come to an agreement? How did we do that in Usenet?  <sigh>

And the Award for Most Boring Blog Post Goes To . . . May I Have the Envelope Please ?

You can't believe how boring my life has become.  Today I emailed with a friend about the advantages of aluminum over steel as a material in small trailer construction.  We decided that aluminum is stronger and lighter, but anything made out of aluminum, if it hopes to be as strong as its steel counterpart, must be made so beefy that it almost weighs the same anyway. We could be wrong.

I have been cleaning windows.  A couple a day, because to do them all on one day would totally ruin that day, instead of merely slightly degrading several days. Not windexing window panes, but cleaning the windows. It's amazing how dirty the entire window can get.  We have the vinyl ones with double glass.  The bottom half slides up and down, and can be removed.  This exposes an enormous amount of crap that, once you see it, you must clean it off, or you'll never be able to open the windows on a beautiful spring day and feel "fresh," again. The screens also have to be cleaned. You don't know they're even dirty until you clean everything else. I take the various components outside and clean everything with a sponge and dishwashing liquid in hot water, rinse with the hose and dry everything off with my new electric leaf blower. This last was a stroke of genius.  Now I can suck and mulch leaves, blow crap out of the roof gutters, "sweep" the garage floor, and dry large window parts and screens all with the same handy device. Best $89 dollars I ever spent.

And you've heard me complain about leaf blowers.  But in my defense, at least part of the annoyance of them is the noise from the small gasoline engine used to power them. Mine is electric.  It has a handy knob on it that is used to control the force of the blower--and most things do not require the full blast treatment.  And, being electric, one can easily turn it on, off, on, off, as needed, and thus avoid the steady drone that causes psychotic episodes among the closer neighbors.

My house has fifteen of these vinyl double-pane windows.  Yesterday and today I cleaned the ones in the living room, which leaves me with eleven to go.

The semi-hemi-demi-monthly report

It's time for another blog post! I spent the last few weeks trying to work out which of my thoughts were profound and/or interesting enough to commit to the internet and the search engines of eternity.

I got nothin'.

The other day I did spend an interesting hour or so on Google, re-reading old Usenet threads from misc.writing that I was involved in.  Some of the comments aimed at me--the really clever ones that were designed to cut me to the quick by virtue of their actual truth--they still have the power to elicit a cringe, even after all these years. But thankfully there aren't too many of those.  That is mainly because I spent most of my time on Usenet being silly, which is fun for the other people who are playful, and annoying and (we hope) boring to the other people for whom Usenet was the megaphone of their soul. Or their ego. Either way.

I put my motorcycle up for sale on Craigslist, then took it off after a week. Up for sale because I thought I had a need for the money other than to materialize a motorcycle in my garage, back off because I decided I really wanted it, probably could find the money I needed elsewhere.  This was after a protracted haggle-fest via email which I found frigging annoying because this guy wanted to talk price without actually coming over and looking at the bike.  What's up with that?

I think the process of conducting business over the Internet is, in one way, too easy.  Now I know why so many Craigslist ads leave a phone number, and then say,  I won't respond to texts or emails.

Anyway, after reading about Internet dating sites, I realized that the problems there and with Craigslist are pretty much the same problem, which is, you often find yourself dealing with people with whom you would ordinarily have nothing to do with, in the regular world. Think of the simple, secular logic Jesus used when he said "live by the sword, die by the sword."  Or, it's like when my friends, who were concerned at my bachelorhood and consequent lack of misery and strife, used to recommend I go to the laundr-oh-mat to meet girls.  (Never mind the fatal flaw in such a plan that announces to the vast sea of exotic, sophisticated and beautiful women normally found at laundromats that 1.) I can't afford a washer and drier, and 2.) I read comic books to pass the time while waiting for stuff to finish.)  I'm trying to say something about people who respond to Craigslist ads.  It's not this specific person, or that specific person, it is the the universality of it all, the step outside my carefully blown bubble of normalcy to invite any and all into my world, to meet me for a specific purpose.  People I might, under different circumstances, go out of my way to avoid.

It sounds shallow.

Well, that's enough blog post for now, lest for lack of substance it devolve into a discussion of the weird weather, or of the occasional pain in an upper right molar from a root canal job gone horribly awry.

TGI . . . F

It will be so great just twelve minutes past noon on December 12th this year. And then, finally, the nonsense will just have to stop. There is no thirteen o'clock, there is no 13th month, there will be no 13.13.13 at 13:13 etc. 12.12.12 at 12:12 will have to do.  Then it's over.  No more amazing number coincidences.

Ever.

Maybe the Mayans were on to something.

Be that as it may, I am not riding my bike down to El Dorado Springs today.  And I probably won't clean my rifle, or try to sneak those spent plutonium rods into the town trash dump in the trunk of my car.

Actually I don't own a rifle.

I will, however, hazard a new blog post.  What could go wrong?