Enough

 Today I finally had enough of Google and Chrome. I've already read that you can't really escape Google even if you want to. But I do have a choice of web browsers, and of search engines. What did it for me finally was what happened as I was attempting to do a Google search on the string, "modernism."  I typed the word in the little rectangular box, with which we are all so familiar:  m, o, d, e, r, n, and then, right in the box, and not in the list below, before I could finish with i-s-m, suddenly it looked as if I had typed "Modern Family." That's a TV show, I guess. 

Mind you, this is not about the list of suggestions that appears below the search box as you type. This had taken over my typing and made my search request say "Modern Family."  

This is B.S.  I switched over to Safari, and the behavior was slightly different the first couple of times, but then it did it there, too. 

I tried DuckDuckGo.com and everything worked AS IT SHOULD. 

What is happening to Google? This is truly invasive and annoying. I have low expectations when it comes to the Internet and anything on it, but this is, finally, too much. 

Since I have two Mac computers and an Apple iPad mini, I have started the switch to Safari. I know, I know--they all have their fans as well as their detractors. In the end, it really doesn't matter. When you compare these apps, looking at the lists of "PROS" and "CONS," the items amount to a matter of convenience or lack thereof, to a few extra mouse clicks here or there. It kind of comes down to what you're used to. Anyway, what are a few clicks of a mouse compared to, say, rolling a ladder along stack of books in a library with 20' ceilings, climbing said ladder and retrieving a moldy volume and then awkwardly descending said ladder? I'll take the mouse clicks every time, whether they be one or two or even a few in sequence. 

Or, you know, maybe I'd take the ladder. I'm in no hurry--I'm going to die on the same date no matter what I do until then. 

Cars, Collars, Hair

The picture, here, is one taken by a friend's mother--I don't recall exactly when--when I drove into their driveway on a spring day. She came outside carrying a camera and said since she was sure I didn't have any pictures of myself, I might want one to look at years from now. In that spirit, I posed, leaning against my '65 Pontiac Tempest, with the thought that I was looking through the camera into the future, where my future-self would be looking back. So, now, when I look at this picture, I easily imagine that I am looking into the past with a certain intensity of reality. 

I remember that shirt, for some odd reason. The collar was, you know, like, six inches wide. Must have been the early Seventies. I see, too, that I had hair back then. 

The car was purchased while I was living in California briefly around the early Seventies. I broke my '57 Chevy and was too disenchanted with automotive technology (i.e. laying on my back underneath a car that probably dripped oil on me) to fix it. A friend told me a customer at the gas station where he worked was selling this old Pontiac. (At the time, not really that old, but more about that in a minute . . . ) He told me the guy was convinced that the car had very little life left in it, as it had 118,000 miles on it. Back then, it seemed like everybody regarded 100,000 miles as the limit of a car's life. 

Parenthetically, my theory is that--back then, at least--used car dealers routinely rolled back odometers, so a car like this would be sold as having, say, 60,000 miles on it, rather than the actual 118,000, and so we all went along thinking cars just didn't GO that far. 

Richard Custer, (yes relation,) the friend who knew about this Pontiac, said the guy had it serviced at their station pretty regularly, and in his opinion, it was in very good condition despite the high mileage. I test drove it and liked it and bought it for the princely sum of $300.  We, the original owner and myself, both walked away from that deal chuckling in victory. However, I was the winner. I drove that car until it had almost 190,000 miles on it, still running as it always had. 

Now my memory is running away with me--through the portal of this picture, my mind's eye looks around at the familiar setting and its attendant memories. However, blog posts should only be so long. 

 

Buildings

 

From left to right:
Waltower Building, Scarritt Building, Rialto Building.

Where I live has its own landscape. Not trees or mountains, but buildings. Kansas City must have been thriving in the Twenties and Thirties, because that seems to be about when all these big fancy buildings were erected. About half, or more, maybe, were banks. The building I live in (that's its east wall on the left edge of the picture) started out as the Fidelity Bank and Trust Building. It was built in 1933, the company went bust pretty quick, and the building sort of languished. 

In 2005, some company converted our building into a 32 story apartment building with a penthouse and two towers. The Waltower building is now apartments, the Scarritt Building is soon to be apartments with some retail and commercial on floors 1 and 2. The Rialto Building, of late the Ozark Building, is being converted into a high-end Marriott hotel, with restaurant. No telling how long all of that will take. I know they're making a lot of noise. Lot of noise. 

I'm still working on the courtyard there. I changed the way the wires ran for the lights, and I put up a couple more of those hanging basket things. (I don't want to do too much lest I defeat the whole purpose of living in an apartment instead of owning a home in the 'burbs.)

For this picture, the camera is facing north, and we do get some direct sunlight--just not all day. Like, I doubt I could grow tomatoes. Not real big ones, anyway. 

That's my blog post.  Just didn't want to get rusty. 

The Mysterious Room

It’s not that remarkable. As a telephone company repair technician I’ve been in thousands of houses, met thousands of customers, and fixed thousands of broken, deteriorated lines, jacks, and telephone sets. I have maybe a dozen or two funny stories. (Either “funny haha or “funny mysterious.”) Pretty low percentage. 

Well, maybe more. More come to you as you tell them, like telling jokes in a bar. “Reminds me of the time . . .” 

The one I was thinking about today concerned a customer who called in a report that his “phone was dead.” Obviously, a common malady in this line of business. The telephone company ran automated tests on reported lines and the result on this one was, short. 

Seven or eight times out of ten, a short in the absence of a ground and/or stray voltage meant the problem was going to be in a phone jack or wiring inside the house, so when I arrived  and no one was home, I walked around to the back to see if I could isolate the trouble to the house wiring, leave a “no access” card and move on to another job. 

Sure enough one of the inside wires had a short on it. There were a few inside wires going off in different directions, stapled to the siding, and I could see that the bad one led to what was probably a bedroom in a back corner of the house. I left it disconnected and hooked everything else back up—any other phones would work OK now—and wrote up a no access card. 

As I was about to hang the tag on the front doorknob, a car pulled into the driveway and a guy got out. I told him who I was and explained to him that his problem was caused by one of the lines running into his house and that I needed to go inside in order to fix it. 

OK, he said, and he opened the house up and let me inside. I saw a door that was obviously leading to the back bedroom where that bad line was headed, and I stepped toward it, saying something like, I'll need to check in here. 

He panics. “No!” he said. “Don’t go in there!”  He trotted toward the door to put himself between it and me.  “It’s OK. Don’t go in there!  Just leave that wire disconnected. I don’t need it. Just never mind.  You can go on. It’s good.” Or words to that effect. 

That’s my story. Once in awhile I wonder what the hell was going on in there, because I left as he suggested, never did go back, and never found out. 

Not Illegal

You gotta think,
no, that's not really a good parking spot.

 

What to Blog

happy shiny clean people inside

 

What to blog . . . what to blog . . . there must be something to write about. Well, here's a picture. It depicts the Church of Scientology headquarters here in Kansas City (Everythin's up-to-date in Kansas City) which I found somewhat dismaying when I ran across it last week. I had a brief exposure to Scientology years back in the form of being approached more than once by a young lady who wanted me to buy that Dianetics book.  This is the book that outlines the scientific method used to "clear" somebody. I say "scientific" because it involved using tin cans connected with strings, or something--can't remember--and something called "e-rays," which is pretty darn sciency, fer sher. The girl's name was Mary.  She was pretty, somewhere in age between high school and legal drinking age, and, I feel, was a very lost soul. When I asked about her circumstance, she said she was working for the Scientology group in order to be able to buy the treatment proposed by L. Ron Hubbard to become a "Clear."  I guess they charge money for that. Hmmm . . .  Anyway, she wasn't finished and was only a "pre-Clear."  As one journalist explained it, this is when you're only part-way through the program and your mind was still clouded by the occasional thought. Fast forward to witnessing Tom Cruise explaining Scientology to some TV host and laughing maniacally in a fit of Charlie-Sheen-like narcissistic fervor. Anyway, no. 

The only other thing of interest might be this photo taken quite accidentally of someone in the building across the street from me trying to smoke a cigarette in their apartment without setting off the smoke alarm. I was taking a picture of the building in general, saw this open window while processing the picture in photoshop, and zoomed in on it. So, no, I'm not actually a stalker. Not intentionally, anyway. 

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy.