ON PENMANSHIP

Those of us who have taken a few trips around the Sun have seen plenty of progress over the years. But it’s a two-edged sword, this business of progress. While some changes improve our lives in ways small and great, as we watch new technologies overtake old, some things are, inevitably, lost.

I have a device in my pocket that’s roughly the size of a candy bar. With it, I can talk to almost anyone I care to, anywhere in the world. I can send written messages. I can look at a map and get directions to almost anyplace. I can reserve a table at a restaurant, book a hotel room, buy an airline ticket. I can program my DVR (another new piece of technology undreamed of a couple of decades ago) to record my favorite television programs. I can maintain a calendar, send birthday greetings, take a photograph and send it anywhere on Earth. I can even pay my bills.

Paying bills. Now, there’s a task that technology has made somewhat less of a burden. Used to be, I’d sit down at my desk with a stack of bills twice a month, writing checks, sealing envelopes, affixing stamps and return address labels, keeping the check register. It was a huge pain in the ass.

Now, I log on to my bank’s website, open up my online banking screen, grab the mouse, clickety-click, and I’m done. Hours worth of toil, reduced to mere minutes. Of course, I still have to make sure there’s actually money in the account with which to pay those bills, but that’s a problem we all must grapple with, technology or no.

Over a century ago, people were writing checks. Witness:


A bank draft written in 1892. [Click to embiggen.]

It’s a postcard - a postcard! - from one W. B. Baker to D. Y. & R. R. Dancy of Savannah, Georgia. Notice the sparse address: just the name and city.  Good luck trying that today.

It reads: Feb 2nd 1892.; Gents - Have this day drawn on you favor Solomon & Co. for $32.18.  Please honor and oblige.

Nothing less than a polite written request for Messrs. Dancy to pay Solomon & Co.  A bank draft.  A check.  No account number... but in those days, people knew their bankers personally, and vice versa.

I fear the days are long gone when one could write such instructions on a postcard - anyone could read it! - and reasonably expect that it would end up in the hands of the correct recipient, who would then follow those instructions promptly.  And yet, I do not mourn.  I push a button; I pay my bills.  I am happy; my creditors are happy.

But what I do miss is the penmanship.  Look at the beautiful copperplate handwriting, the flowing letters, the whorls and curves of the signature.  The Palmer method and its brethren are arts that have been lost to the ages.  Do they even teach cursive writing in school any more?  Or has it gone the way of the Buggy-Whip?

HERE’S SOMETHING WE HAVEN’T SEEN IN A LONG-ASS TIME

An Elisson-eye view of my bathroom scale this morning.

The last time that number had a seven in the tens column, it was sometime in the 1980’s. After that, my inner slob took over.

I’m down twenty-eight pounds now - about six away from my goal. At my current rate, I ought to get there around the beginning of July. Wish me luck.

COMFORT

“Religion is, at its root, the unprovable belief in an invisible man [who] will fuck with you until you understand just how much he loves you.” - skippystalin

* * * * *
Skippy’s definition is a pretty good one, as far as it goes. As he puts it, “If you take any major faith out of its cultural and historical context and set it up on a compound in Texas, it would look awfully silly and dangerous.” I can’t argue with that, especially the silly part, being part of a religious tradition that includes hundreds of complex, niggling rules and regulations; and as well involves, at a specific time of the year, parading around holding tree branches and fruit.

Whether or not that is more ridiculous than some of the practices of other major faith traditions - eating God comes to mind - is left as an exercise for my Esteemed Readers and their individual consciences. Ridiculous, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.

But in my mind, what you believe is not nearly as important as what you do... and one of the most important functions of any religion is how it helps its adherents deal with the most difficult life events. At the top of that list has got to be death, because that is the gateway to that Undiscovered Country none of us knows a whole lot about.

These are a few of the thoughts I had as I sat next to She Who Must Be Obeyed in the local Catholic church, saying farewell to a friend of very long standing.

* * * * *
Well, I went to the doctor
I said, “I’m feeling kind of rough.”
“Let me break it to you, son:
Your shit’s fucked up.”
I said, “My shit’s fucked up?
Well, I don't see how!”
He said, “The shit that used to work,
Won’t work now.”

- Warren Zevon, My Shit’s Fucked Up

* * * * *
We had met Mike and Patricia back in the old neighborhood, twenty-nine years ago. Along with several of the other local residents, we formed a loose confederation of friends that managed to stay in touch and intact despite numerous relocations and the occasional divorce. Together, we’ve watched our children grow into a small mob of young men and women; now we’re seeing weddings and babies, another generation beginning anew. And together, we’ve dealt with various medical scares... and we’ve dealt with loss. Now we were dealing with it again.

Mike was a true Son of Georgia, having grown up in Commerce and being graduated with a Georgia Tech degree. Very successful in business - he was a senior executive in The Southern Company - he nevertheless retained his salt-of-the-earth prankster demeanor. When he found out that he had pancreatic cancer, rather than curl up into a ball and die, he fought it tooth-and-nail for sixteen months. Alas, in the end, it won.

We sat there in the church, SWMBO and I, surrounded by the Old Gang, grieving along with Mike’s family. His wife, Patricia; their two sons David and John; his brokenhearted mother. The priest conducted a Mass of Remembrance, a church ritual that is (to SWMBO and me) strange and yet strangely familiar, given that so many elements are rooted in our common Abrahamic tradition. And so it was that our old friend was ushered into that Final Passage.

Afterwards, we went back to Mike’s home and did what people do when they lose a friend or family member: find solace in each other’s presence. Our mutual faith traditions teach us to comfort those who mourn, after all... and isn’t that what makes humans more than mere animals? That - and the curiosity to ask what is behind that dark, impenetrable Veil of Mystery.

If Heaven is being amongst that which we love the most, Mike’s Heaven will be filled with family... plenty of Georgia Tech basketball players... a whole lotta sand, sunshine, and sailboats... and maybe even a little beer.

[Me, I have no idea what awaits us, and I’m not in a big hurry to find out.]

Mike was, in his own way, fortunate. He left us all too soon, but he lived a full life up until the very end. I will miss him. Requiescat in pace, big fella!

BARNACLES

A few days ago, I decided to book myself an appointment with my Skin Croaker. (That’s Damon Runyonese for the dermatologist.)

Guys my age tend to spend a lot of time with the Dermo. With us, it’s not so much the pocky zits of adolescence, or even the occasional Taint-Warhead, but the effects of five or six decades of cumulative solar radiation exposure. As much as we all love a nice suntan, the radiation that tans us is also slowly trying to kill us.

When I was a young Snot-Nose, we would visit the Grand-’Rents in south Florida every year... and every year, I would roast myself to a nut-brown turn. Down the road, I may end up paying a stiff price for those childhood suntans, because Mister Skin never forgets an insult.

I know too many people who have been carried off by melanoma... including a colleague in her mid-forties who managed to survive a brain aneurysm only to succumb to malignant melanoma two years later. And so, whenever I see something that looks like it may be problematic, I hie myself down to the skin-doc and have it checked out.

She Who Must Be Obeyed had noticed a spot on my chest several months ago, and we both had been keeping our eyes on it to see whether it was changing or growing in an inauspicious manner. But after a while I decided that I didn’t like the looks of it; it was time to have the Dermo weigh in.

It took only a moment for her to make the diagnosis. “It‘s a barnacle,” she said.

Say what?

“It’s a barnacle. A skin tag. A benign actinic keratosis. People of a certain age start accumulating these things - they’re like barnacles on a boat. When you get enough of ’em, we can zap ’em off, but since it costs the same to zap one as it does to zap a dozen, you might as well wait until you get a few more. And you will get a few more.”

Sweet. I’m growing Gawd-damned barnacles.

It’s no big deal, but SWMBO has already drawn her line in the sand. “If you start growing a bunch of those things, and they start getting big and hanging off your face,” she warned, “they are coming right the fuck off.”

Well, OK, then!

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* * *

With technology like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones, and Apple’s unfortunately-named iPad, one could very well wonder what the future holds for printed books.

There is, as there always is, a tradeoff. Reading a book with the latest portable Ars Electronica means forgoing some of the sensory pleasures of page and print: the tactile qualities of the paper, the subtle smell of the binding, the feeling of holding an object that has both physical and intellectual substance. These are important qualities, especially in certain books that celebrate the publisher’s and designer’s arts. McSweeney’s offerings come to mind, as do the leather-bound tomes sold by the Easton Press... and, in the Olden Days, the products of the beloved Heritage Press.

But then there’s the portability factor. One hand-held device can hold an entire library’s worth of books, which certainly is convenient if you want to polish off a shelf-load of stupid-ass Danielle Steele novels during your beach vacation. To an old gink like me, a Kindle will never have the home-enriching beauty of a shelf full of books, but at least you can carry a pile of cheesy novels around with you without giving yourself a hernia... and without people seeing that instead of reading War and Peace you’re working your way through the latest Kitty Kelley hatchet job.

I do not own a Kindle, nor do I have any plans to purchase one. If ever I should invest in an iPad, it will be driven by other applications besides electronic readers. But since I do have an iPhone, I gave the Kindle app a whirl, purchasing Lincoln’s Dreams, Connie Willis’s 1987 novel about a woman who has horrifyingly detailed dreams about the Civil War, seemingly via a direct channel into Robert E. Lee’s mind.

The novel itself was good enough, although not on a par with Doomsday Book (1992), Willis’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning magnum opus. Reading it on my iPhone was no problem; the type was comfortably large, even if (given the small screen size) each page took only a few seconds to read.

It was not too deep into the book, however, that I began to notice a huge number of apparent typos... the kind of typos that result from scanning printed pages and converting them to a text file with an OCR program. However good your OCR software may be, there will always be errors - and this Electro-Book was packed with ’em. It made for a certain low level of background annoyance (never a good thing while reading) resulting from having to stop and decipher a nonsense word every couple of pages.

I will therefore not be in a hurry to download more books to my iPhone.

Sure, it was cheaper than a print edition. Plenty faster delivery, too. And I’ve heard all the clichés: caveat emptor, you get what you pay for, et cetera. But if this Electronickal Literature business is ever to get off the ground, publishers will need to have a little respect for their readers. Proofread and correct your fucking publications, will ya?!?

Meanwhile, a question: How long will it be, d’you suppose, before printed books are as obsolete as Egyptian papryrus... or a clay tablet inscribed with cuneiform symbols?

ON RECYCLING

In this modern era of Environmental Consciousness, recycling is all the vogue. As it should be: Anything that can mitigate the effects of our wasteful American love of everything disposable is a Good Thing.

It’s not a new concept by any means. When I was a young Snot-Nose, soft drinks were sold in heavy glass bottles. You would bring back the empties when it came time to reload tour Soda-Pantry, and you would receive a deposit... something on the order of two cents a bottle. That was real money to a kid in those days when a bottle of Coke cost a thin dime. The bottles would be shipped back to the bottling company, where they would be cleaned and reused. There was a lot of transportation involved, but it made sense when fuel was three gallons for a dollar.

Stores like Whole Paycheck Foods make a big deal about their commitment to the environment. They sell reusable grocery bags, which patrons are encouraged to use in lieu of disposable plastic bags. And despite the fact that I spent years in the pay of the Great Corporate Salt Mine selling hundreds of millions of pounds of plastic to those selfsame folks who make those disposable bags, I’m all for the reusable bag. They’re sturdy, and they hold a metric shitload of groceries. If I could only remember to bring the Gawdforsaken things into the store with me.

Speaking of Whole Paycheck Foods, they’re building one just up the road from us, in a perfect spot to duke it out for the Upscale Foodie Dollar with Fresh Market and Trader Joe. It’s at a shopping center yclept Merchant’s Walk, an open-air mall sort of affair that was built in the late 1970’s and that was heavily renovated sometime back in the 1990’s. I guess commercial space of this type has a useful lifecycle of some 20-25 years, after which it needs to be torn down and built anew... which is exactly what Whole Foods is doing. Recycling on a grand scale, you could call it.

Great swaths of the former Merchant’s Walk have been leveled, razed to the ground, in order to accommodate the new Whole Foods and its peripherals. Where once was a (defunct) Media Play store and a branch of the county library now stands flat land festooned with mountains of Asphalt-Chunks, bricks, concrete, and other detritus. A Wachovia Bank branch was torn up and carted away... but not before another one was built 200 feet south of it.

Say what?

Yes: They built a new bank right next door to the old one, which they then tore down. Suddenly that doesn’t sound so “recycly” any more, does it?

It seems one of the provisions Whole Paycheck Foods insisted on when they agreed to fund this massive piece of reconstruction was that their store be visible from the street... and the old bank, situated on a slight rise, was blocking the view. The solution? Remove the bank and the hill it sat on.

According to the Whole Foods website, one of their corporate Core Values is “caring about our communities and our environment... We respect our environment and recycle, reuse, and reduce our waste wherever and whenever we can.” Perhaps... but am I the only one who mourns the loss of that little hill upon which the bank once sat?

They may sell pricey organic free-range broccoli and locally raised quail. They may sell delicate baby arugula that is picked as lovingly and as thoroughly as your pocket is picked at the checkout stand... but they’re Big Organic, and at the end of the day, their environmentalism rings just a tad hollow. Or am I just being cranky?

A DISASTER IN THE HEADLINES

One of the first things they teach you in Newspaper School is how to write headlines. It’s a tricky business.

You have to convey a lot of information in a short space, and you have to make sure the headline looks good on the page. Two-line headlines have to be written so that there is a natural conceptual break between the lines; the lines must also be the right length to fit the column. Awkwardness is a constant danger.

Headlines should use the active voice. In addition, they have a few stylistic quirks that differentiate them from body text. One example: Quotes are enclosed in single, rather than double, quotation marks.

Avoid “headlinese”... unless you write for Variety, where headlines like “Mick, Nick nix pix” are part of the house style. Resist the urge to get cute or to editorialize. And watch out for double entendres. A headline like “Textron Inc. Makes Offer To Screw Co. Stockholders” (a real example) is not going to please the folks at Textron - or at the screw company.

It’s a lot of rules to remember, so it isn’t too surprising when someone messes up: an epic fail by the Woonsocket (Rhode Island) Call, indeed.

[Tip o’ th’ Elisson fedora colander to Ole Phat Stu for the link.]

PARE THE PROBOSCIS, PEEVE THE PHYSIOGNOMY

Paring the proboscis to peeve the physiognomy - cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face - is rarely a good idea. But that’s exactly what is happening as declines in state and local tax revenues force spending cuts.

There are certain state services that really need to be supported in order to maintain a functioning, habitable society. You can’t do without police and fire protection. And, although the effects of cutbacks are less immediate, you can’t do without education.

Teachers have a hard enough go of it even in good times. Salaries are well below those available in private industry, and under the current No Child Left Behind philosophy of ensuring that, by 2014, every child in the United States is above average - Lake Wobegon writ large - a teacher’s career, more than ever, depends on factors beyond his or her control. If you work in an economically disadvantaged school, or if you teach a class with a large cohort of students on the low end of the bell-shaped Intelligence Distribution Curve, you are well and truly fucked.

But now, with state money thin on the ground, teachers are getting hammered. I’m talking about involuntary furloughs, RIF’s (Reductions in Force, a corporate-sounding euphemism for “firing a shitload of people”), and elimination of whole programs. The net effect: Fewer teachers, fewer programs, and less pay... without any change in the huge Unfunded Mandates like NCLB that must be accommodated.

Cutting education spending may be an unfortunate and dire necessity, a cascade effect of declining tax rolls, a nation- and worldwide economic meltdown, and record unemployment. But it’s an action of desperation akin to eating your seed corn, the full effects of which will - make no mistake about it - be severe and long-lasting. [And it’s not as though Georgia has that far to go before its quality of education is ranked dead last.]

Good schools attract employers and help create a productive, competitive workforce. Conversely, bad schools drive away prospective residents, employers, and jobs. Maybe our honorable governor should rethink his priorities so that Georgia remains an attractive and economically sound place to live and raise a family.

LIFE IS A BUMPY ROAD

We all maintain our own lists of Personal Pet Peeves - the things that piss us off on an almost daily basis - and mine is getting longer by the day. It is, perhaps, one of the signs of Advancing Old Age.

One item that’s on my list is the infamous Speed Bump.

Legend (or Wikipedia) has it that the speed bump first appeared in Chatham, New Jersey when the town installed crosswalks several inches above the road level in order to discourage speeders. When you consider that this was 104 years ago when the top speed of a typical automobile was something like 30 MPH, you can only speculate upon just how fast were these people going, anyway?

The purpose of the so-called Sleeping Policeman, of course, is to encourage traffic to slow down, be it on a road or in a parking lot. And while that is a worthwhile purpose, the folks who build and install these things are guilty of overreaching... because while the intention is (or should be) to keep traffic within a posted speed limit, most speed bumps these days seem to be designed to force drivers to come to an almost complete stop, lest they shatter their axles, pop their tires, or break their teeth. And to that, I say a hearty Fuck You.

If a posted speed limit is (say) twenty MPH and the Powers that Be deem that a speed bump is necessary to ensure that drivers don’t zoom by at forty-five, no problem. But fer Gawd’s sake, design the damned thing so that I can negotiate the thing at twenty. Do not force me to bring my car to a virtual standstill. This wastes fuel and chews up my brake pads. And heaven help the people whose house is on fire at the end of a long street full of speed bumps.

OK, that’s enough ranting on Matters Trivial. What’s pissing you off today?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Houston Steve was kind enough to forward this piece of important late-breaking news from England:

The Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service... turned up with a special equipment unit from St Mary’s station in Southampton and seven firefighters to help, in what a spokesman understatedly described as a “delicate operation.”

Said delicate operation involved freeing a gentleman’s membrum virile from a stainless steel pipe in which he had somehow managed to get it, er, ahhh... stuck.

How this may have happened is best left as an exercise for the imagination. The article does not provide any sort of hypothesis, stating that “the man, thought to be aged around 40, did not explain to hospital staff how exactly the pipe got stuck around his penis.” Which leaves us to exercise our perfervid imaginations.

Of course, for some things no explanation is necessary. Or desirable, for that matter. All you need to know is, a guy was involved. [Although in this case he may more properly have been described as a “bloke.”] And some guys - the exact percentage is unknown, but it is not insignificant - will stick their John Thomases into pretty much anything that resembles a hole. Just ask Anna Nicole Smith.

There is no mention of whether alcohol was a factor in this incident, but I say you can take it to the bank: There was. Ogden Nash once famously said, “Candy / Is Dandy / But liquor / Is quicker.” And I’ll add, “If you have enough liquor / You might attempt something sicker / Than merely to dick ’er.” The question that must be answered, of course, is just how drunk do you have to be when a stainless steel pipe starts bringing Teh Sexy?

A guy, some booze, and something that resembles a hole. A recipe for disaster.

A DISTURBING TREND

Some time back, I wrote a post that mentioned the Hershey Bar Scam. [Never mind that it was a post about toilet paper, a product that should probably never be mentioned in the same breath as Hershey bars for several scatologically pungent reasons.]

Just to refresh your memory, the Hershey Bar Scam was the sneaky way the good folks in the chocolate industry dealt with fluctuating raw material costs. Instead of jacking up the price of a candy bar to cover increased raw material costs, they would simply shrink the bar... and so it was that the 2-ounce nickel Hershey bar you could have bought in 1930 eventually withered away to a mere ¾ ounce less than forty years later. Things might have gone on like that even longer, but it got to the point where you would have needed a magnifying glass to see a nickel chocolate bar - and so prices began to rise.

This has been going on so long, I no longer pay attention to it... and, probably, neither do you. Getting less stuff for more money is nothing new. Anyone who visits a supermarket - especially if one is there for the purpose of purchasing food in order to feed one’s family - is all too familiar with the phenomenon. It affects way more than chocolate bars. Hell, it affects way more than just food.

Cars used to have humongous fuel tanks as a matter of routine. Twenty or twenty-five gallon tanks were common in family sedans. Now you see tanks that size only in Winnebagoes. And yet it costs a lot more to fill today’s dinky-ass 14.5-gallon tanks than anyone would have imagined back before the first Oil Shock hit back in 1973-74. Again - this is nothing new.

But lately, an even more disturbing trend has surfaced...

Ole Phat Stu models the latest Euro-Colander.

Bedam! They’re shrinking colanders now!

ON COMPUTATION

My experience with computers goes back to the fall of 1970, when, as a callow freshman in college, I encountered the IBM 360.

That was old-school computing at its finest. The damned thing was big enough to fill an entire building, but we rarely ventured there. It was said that a mysterious squad of Geek-Acolytes lived in the Computer Center, where virgins (thin on the ground in those heady days) would be sacrificed, on occasion, to the Calculational Gods. And so we would go to Fine Hall, where there was a convenient Hollerith card-reading station and a printer. You’d stick your deck of punch-cards in the reader, then wait for your job to run. As soon as the printer (a humongous affair the size of a Mini Cooper) would poop out your output, you would collect it, curse at the (inevitable) belatedly-discovered errors, then start all over again with a corrected card deck.

[Fine Hall was an interesting place. Late at night, bizarre scribblings would appear on blackboards, placed there by the so-called “Phantom of Fine Hall.” Said Phantom was none other than John Forbes Nash, Jr., the schizophrenic genius mathematician who would later receive the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in game theory... and who would eventually be portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind.]

The idea of a computer small enough to sit on your desk - never mind fit in your pocket - was pure moonshine in those days.

Home computing started impinging on our consciousness in 1984 when our friend Donnie Joe bought himself a Macintosh computer. It combined the CPU, disc drive, and monitor in a single, chunky unit... and it used something interesting and new: a mouse. We finally got one for ourselves seven years later - a Macintosh LC - by which time the machine had evolved to where it had a color monitor, a whole megabyte of RAM, and a 30 megabyte hard drive.

That machine, now nineteen years old, sits quietly in our garage. It has been superseded. Many times.

Sometime in the mid-1990’s, it became clear that technological advances had rendered our little Mac LC kludgy and obsolete. Connecting to the then-nascent Internet was possible only after jacking up the RAM, and even then the results were not especially robust. And so we ventured into PC-land.

In our experience, a computer will last for something on the order of four to five years before advances in software, operating systems, and hardware make replacement an increasingly more attractive option. Our most recent desktop machine had been with us for something on the order of six or seven years, and it was definitely showing signs of age. We replaced the hard drive a few years ago, but there just wasn’t enough RAM to keep up with the latest versions of my workhorse applications.

And so we have replaced it... with a shiny new machine that boasts 8 gigs of RAM and a 1 TB (that’s terabyte, y’all - a trillion bytes!) hard drive. And the 27-inch high-definition monitor is tasty, too.

The thing runs like greased lightning. Webpages snap into place, applications boot up almost instantly. Sweet.

Whether it will improve the quality of my blogging remains to be seen. But don’t count on it.

As hot as this new Computing-Engine is right now, I’m sure our grandkids (assuming we eventually have any) will be looking at its dusty, basement-dwelling carcass in fifteen or twenty years, thinking, “Geez - just one terabyte - how could those people live?”

POG

This morning, as our plane lifted off into the skies above Atlanta, both She Who Must Be Obeyed and I noticed a low-lying yellow-green pall over the entire metropolitan area. It could only be that most dreaded of Southern springtime atmospheric phenomena: Pog!

When April comes with its “shoures soote” - sweet showers, as old Geoff Chaucer might have said - Atlantans rightly fear the vagaries of the weather. Powerful Southern-style thunderstorms, some replete with hail and funnel-clouds, are frequent visitors... and a couple of months hence, we will be in the throes of hurricane season. Not that hurricanes per se are a huge problem for north-central Georgia, but they will occasionally swing through in their attenuated tropical storm personae, dumping floodly piles of rain.

But more dreaded still than any of these is Atlanta’s unique curse, the Pog. (Or maybe the Smollen.) It’s a pernicious combination of smog and pollen, an eye-watering, nose-stopping, lung-wrenching devil’s brew. It is, perhaps, the price we pay for being blessed with such an abundance of beautiful flowering trees.

We’ve always known it was a real phenomenon, and today’s aerial view of the city offered compelling visual evidence... that eerie greenish-yellow cloudbank.

The clincher was when I looked out the airplane window and saw a gremlin on the wing. At first I was concerned, but then I realized he was suffering from seasonal allergies so disabling, he couldn’t make any progress in his attempts to rip the cowling off the port side engine.

[Of course nobody believed me when I told them about the gremlin... but after we landed, I saw a wad of used tissues jammed into the engine nacelle...]

Postscript: Upon returning to Atlanta Saturday afternoon, I found the Elissonmobile encrusted with a thick layer of greenish-yellow pollen - this despite the fact that it had been in a covered parking area. I can only imagine what it would have looked like after three days of being parked under open skies...

SPROING

Spring has sprung;
The grass has riz.
I wonder where
The birdies is?
The birds is on the wing.
Oh, my word
That’s absurd.
The wing is on the bird.

Spring has sprung;
My ass has friz.
What is this snowy Monkey-Biz?

Yes, here we are two days into Spring, and snow was falling this morning in the northern Atlanta ’burbs. OK, it’s not as though it was the Great Blizzard of 2010 - Snowpocalypse - but nevertheless, snow of any sort is unusual in these parts, and downright rare after the vernal equinox.

Two days ago, we had temperatures above 70°F. Now, it’s freezing. Feh.

THINGS MY FATHER TAUGHT ME

“Have a glass of water. It quenches your thirst better than anything else - and it’s good for you!”

[But I just wanted a fucking glass of chocolate milk.]

“The crust? That’s the best part!”

[Then why the fuck aren’t you eating it?]

“Eat that potato peel - it’s the best part. It’s full of vitamins.”

[It’s also full of warts and hairs and dirt. Yecch.]

“Why don’t you have a piece of fruit instead of that slice of cake?”

[If I wanted the piece of fruit, I would have taken the piece of fruit. Can I just have a hunk of Entenmann’s without getting the fucking third degree?]

Of course, you know what the most galling thing is about all of these little bits of Fatherly Wisdom? The fact that, without exception, the Old Man was - and is - right about every single one.

TAKING LEAVE OF MY CENSUS

Last night I found our 2010 U.S. Census packet in the day’s pile of mail. I had been expecting it.

When something arrives in the mail that demands my prompt attention, my usual modus operandi is to shove it into the ever-growing pile of correspondence on my desk, to be dealt with at a convenient time. Given my tendency to procrastinate, said convenient time is generally somewhere in the distant, nebulous future.

But this envelope bore an explicit threat: YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW. And even though it did not say “PROMPT RESPONSE,” I figured why take a chance? I opened that sucker up and filled out the form right away. Happily, it was the short questionnaire, not the onerous and incredibly nosy long version (“How many taint warheads have you and your family members had in the past two years?”), so it took all of three minutes to do my Civic Duty.

Jerry, over at Back Home Again, was inspired by his filling out his own headcount form to take a backward look at his Census Footprint: where he was during each of the census years of his life.

That inspired me to look at my own Census Footprint. I’ve been walking the planet long enough to have been counted six times now. Here they are:

1960. Eight years old, living in Massapequa, NY with two parents and one brother.
      
1970. Single, still in Massapequa, NY (in a different house) with two parents and one brother. In June of that year, I was graduated from high school; that fall, I moved to Princeton, NJ to attend college.
      
1980. Married, with one child. Living in Hackettstown, NJ.
      
1990. Married, now with two children. Living in Trumbull, CT.
      
2000. Married; one child away at college, one still at home. Living in Atlanta, GA.
      
2010. Still married... and still living in Atlanta, GA. Both children off on their own.

So: what does your Census Footprint look like? Where were you on those “zero years”?

HONK

Here’s a bumper sticker I’d like to see...


[Click to embiggen.]

CHERRY

This morning, as I was returning to Chez Elisson after a wine-acquisition expedition, I saw an unusual sight: a 1962 Chevy Impala, tooling down the road in front of me.

The car was cherry, both in condition and color. It was being driven by a portly, white-haired gentleman who appeared to be about seventy years of age... and who seemed to be enjoying himself. And why not? It was a beautiful morning, and he was piloting a beautiful ride. A vintage ride, for sure - fully 48 years old. [And back when it was new, pretty much the only 48-year-old vehicle in existence was the Ford Model T.]

The 1962 Impala is not all that different from the 1961 Impala, a vehicle that Eli (hizzownself) purchased back in January of that long-ago year. It was the first new family car since the two-tone Dodge he had bought in 1954, when I was still a squatty little toddler... and so it was a Very Exciting Thing. It was a metallic beige color - “Champagne,” I’m pretty sure they called it, with the hyperbole typical of the automotive industry both then and now - and it had plenty of flashy chrome, inside and out.

It’s bizarre. I still remember the license tag number on that car: 1561-SB. In those days, New York plates were good for two years, so eventually those tags were replaced by another set bearing the number 9N-6661.

And there, Esteemed Readers, you have an illustration of the power of the Human Mind. For I can remember ridiculous ephemera such as the license tag numbers on cars my family owned fifty years ago... and yet if you asked me what the number is on the Elissonmobile - the car I drive every day, the very car that sits in my garage, even as I write this - I could not tell you to save my life.

EATAPETA DAY

Monday, March 15 is not only the Ides of March. It’s EATAPETA Day!

That’s International Eat a Tasty Animal for PETA Day, in case you are unfamiliar with the acronym. Seeing Meryl Yourish’s post yesterday served as a timely reminder; it reminded me, as well, of a very pleasant pre-EATAPETA luncheon we enjoyed with Ms. Yourish two years ago.

The point of observing EATAPETA Day is to figuratively thumb one’s nose at PETA, an organization that sees nothing wrong with comparing the consumption of food animals to slavery... or to the Holocaust. This four-year-old post of Meryl’s says it all:

The [notorious 2003] PETA ad campaign compared the slaughter of chickens for food to the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. They traveled the country with a series of billboards that used Holocaust imagery next to images of animals. They lied to the American Holocaust Museum to obtain permission to use these pictures in their ad campaign.

It’s a well-known fact that PETA has always chosen sensationalism in their ad campaigns. They’re usually stupid and offensive, but this campaign caused enough pain that a child of Holocaust survivors wrote me a letter asking if there weren’t something we could do about it. That’s why I created the first International Eat an Animal for PETA Day...

...Don’t get me wrong. I am utterly against animal cruelty. But I am also utterly against cruelty to humans, and especially against the misuse of Holocaust imagery to get a point across.

I see nothing evil about the idea that humans, who sit atop the food chain (unless one is in the jungle or deep in the woods), should use animals as a protein source. If you’re squeamish about eating animals qua animals, there are plenty of animal-derived products - eggs, milk, butter, and cheese - that do not require that animals give up their lives. But to PETA, even this is unacceptable. To them, even keeping company with Animal Companions - pets - constitutes unacceptable exploitation. They forget that the domesticated animals with whom we share our planet have mutually evolved, along with us, to be what they are today because of their having been “exploited” by humans for their food value... or for their company.

What am I gonna eat? Well, having just polished off a lovely brisket of beef last night, perhaps we will move on to beasts somewhat higher on the Cuteness Scale. A lambie, or a duckie, perhaps. Or, in deference to the Missus (who will let neither lambie or duckie cross her lips), a nice veal chop. I also have a few nice chunks of Bambi in the freezer...

Alas, whale bacon is not on the menu: You can’t get it here.

Update: How did I celebrate EATAPETA Day? I breakfasted on eggs (stolen from exploited chickens) and cheese (from cows enslaved by The Man). Since I wasn’t overly hungry, I had a simple suppler consisting of a couple of slices of Strasburg Pie: fatty duck liver baked into a puff pastry crust. What it lacked in volume it made up for in Caloric Concentration. Yummy!

YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK

It being 2010, it’s time once again for the Great Decennial Head-Count here in the United States. Yes: the Census!

The process is simple, really. You get a form in the mail, you fill it in, and you send it back. [How easy it is to fill in depends largely on whether it’s the short form or the incredibly nosy long form.] And if you merit special attention, a real live census taker may show up at your door.

Now, there’s a profession that might just be trickier than it sounds at first blush. Asking people how many folks are living in their house? Piece of cake... until you run into Hannibal Lecter:

“A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

Sure, he’s a fictional character... but whaddaya bet census taker recruitment took a big hit after Silence of the Lambs came out?

Taking the census is an expensive proposition, but it’s a Necessary Evil. At the very least, you need to know how many people inhabit a given state so that the appropriate number of political whores congressional representatives may be assigned to that state. And population data is essential to critical governmental functions such as gerrymandering, pork barreling, log-rolling, cheese distribution, et cetera.

Given that it is expensive, however, you wonder whether the People in Charge are doing everything they can to save a few bucks when they can. After all, the economy is still in the bog (by which I mean the toilet, not the swamp), and we need to conserve as many dollars as we can, the better to donate them to incompetent Wall Street investment bankers and sloppily-managed corporations.

So why did I get a letter from the folks at the Bureau of the Census a couple of days ago, the sole purpose of which was to tell me that I would be shortly be receiving - wait for it - another letter from the Bureau of the Census containing the actual questionnaire I would need to fill out?

I don’t need a fucking letter to tell me that I will be getting a letter. How many millions of taxpayer dollars were pissed away to send that letter? Don’t the bean-counters ever talk to the head-counters?

Why, it makes no sense-us!