Mom Busted Teh Intarnets

Now, I have a lot of friends on these here internets. We jostle and poke fun, and chat and so forth about a lot of things. Some how or another, like a fool, I mentioned that Jackie Kennedy was a hot babe way back when. Twice as foolishly, I also mentioned that she couldn’t hold a candle to my own mother. And they tempted me to prove it.

Now, pictures of my family from forty years ago are in short supply, and I don’t have many. This one is a scan of a scan, I think. She might be graduating from high school here, or egad! junior high. Anyway, you see what I was talking about now, don’t you my friends?

The really funny part is, she pretty much looks the same right now. Hi mom!

Today’s Timbuk3 Reference

OK yesterday we defamed the elderly. It don’t matter; they’ve barely learned to use the telephone, and I doubt any of them are ever going to be reading teh intarnets, no matter how big they make teh intarnet pipes. So let’s get back to where we started. If you’re not a stick in the mud, technology can improve your life immensely.

As I am the foremost authority on myself, I can assure you in my case that’s absolutely true. That might seem odd at first blush.

I make reproduction antique furniture. Talk about a stick in the mud. Well, go to IKEA if you want to buy Jetsons furniture made out of wooden shredded wheat and formaldehyde glue, swathed in woodgrained wrapping paper. I’m not interested. And I’m not interested because “modern” furniture is an old idea. It’s just as dated as any Shaker table is. It’s the method of making it and selling it that’s new, and I put IKEA in the shade on that score.
So I’m a thoroughly modern mill- man, trust me. So what exactly makes my day so modern, in the true sense of the word, and how is it different than it was just twenty-five years ago? I’m glad you asked:

1. I can get really good coffee anywhere, including in my house.
This is totally overlooked. Good coffee was really hard to find 25 years ago. Home brewed was boiled, generally -a terrible way to make coffee. And your average diner had coffee from the tenth century in that pot. I’ve got a German coffemaker that cost $16.99 and makes sublime java, or I can drive four miles in any direction and get really good joe. I do.
2. I can live where I want.
Everybody told me I was crazy to move where I live now. They said I was too far away from everything. My house has appreciated 539% since I built it 13 years ago. Yeah, I’m a dope. You don’t have to live in a crummy apartment next to your job in a big factory chugging smoke if you don’t want to anymore.
3. My house is comfortable
Hot water always comes out of the shower head. It ‘s warm in the winter and cool in the summer. It’s dry in the basement.The furniture’s not bad in here either. I ride when I mow the lawn. My children have their own rooms. These were magical dreams when I was a kid.
4. I’m alive.
I’ve been brought back from near dead a couple of times. Twenty five years ago, they would have given me aspirin and last rites.
5. I don’t have to drive anywhere.
Look, I’m sympathetic if you’re a road warrior. I’ve been there myself. But I never drive anywhere now. It’s possible now. Even bank robbers can stay home and steal on the internet.
6. I make money at home by writing.
This one kills me. I tap out some text, which is visible in a little window on a screen, and occasionally get an attaboy or WTF from an editor that I have never met, and money is deposited directly into my bank account. This is the equivalent of alchemy circa 1975.
7. People find me even though I simply exist.
I invented guerilla marketing. I was the king of “copier art” word of mouth, free publicity, you name it. Now I simply exist on the internet, and people looking for what I have to sell find me and buy things. I think I’ve spent about $125.00 on advertising in the last three years. The internet is making willing buyer/willing seller come true in spades.
8. I have really good equipment from all over the world.
I’ve bought really good equipment and materials from all over the world and had it delivered to me here and never met the people I bought it from. I remember how hard it was just to get a 1×12 piece of pine after four in the afternoon on a weekday, and forget weekends. Now I can buy a 600 pound cast iron table saw made in Taiwan and sold through a company in Washington state, 2500 miles from me, at 2 AM on Sunday and have it delivered in less a week. I know this is the case, because I did exactly that. And Home Depot is open on Christmas.
9. I have access to really good information
Of all kinds too. Maps, directions, weather, pricing, comparative shopping, the internet is an astounding treasure trove of information.
10.You’re reading this, ain’t you?
I really can’t say enough about this mode of expression. They didn’t even teach men to type when I went to high school.
11.My packages get where they’re going.
I was a shipping clerk for a little while 25 years ago. Shipping used to be as reliable as lottery scratch tickets. Now everything gets there right away, and you can track it all the way there.
12.I know how much things cost.
How does a saleman get paid? It used to be that salesman got money by knowing what a customer didn’t, and taking advantage of that situation. Good luck trying that now, with this screen and Firefox in front of me. A saleman is in customer service now, or he’s fired. Unless you’re a car salesman. Then you’re still evil.
13.I can be contacted at all times.
When I entered the construction trades, the idea of a phone on the job was science fiction. We all met before the sun came up in a dingy construction office and tried to predict everything that would happen all day to everybody and fix it before it happened. Yeah, that’ll work. My life has been immeasurably ennobled by the cellular phone and e-mail. I f your job is miserable because of those two marvels you’ve got a bad job. Quit now.
14.I can make financial transactions on the web.
I go to banks to sign mortgages. I go to the Post Office…Never mind, I never go to the Post Office.
15.I have access to money easily.
People in the real world think easy credit is a snare to catch you. I’ve built empires on unsecured loans. All you have to do is always pay them back. People like me used to be trapped in laboring, or preyed upon by loan sharks, because regular banks wouldn’t touch us. Now they beg me to borrow money. I don’t need any today, because I could get my hands on it when opportunity knocked.
16.I have digital photography
It’s hard to exaggerate its usefulness. I sent a picture of the exact item purchased to a customer, with a picture of it inside its crate with one side open, to show a customer what’s inside and how to unpack it. He purchased it because he saw a digital photo of the last one.
17.I have a big truck.
I never go anywhere, but when I do, I can carry an enormous amount of stuff, safely and comfortably. The very idea of air-conditioning in a work truck boggles my mind still. Is that an FM radio?!!
18.I am not isolated from society.
I reiterate: you’re reading this, ain’t you? I have friends I’ve never met, all over the world. A note in a bottle, or waiting for my Nobel Prize ceremony was my only hope of meeting such persons before.
19.I can fly.
When I was a young teenager, my father took me to Boston’s Logan airport, who was running a sort of tour where the children of the great unwashed (that’s me) could get a chance to ride on an airplane. We took off, circled Boston twice, and landed. I thought at the time that was going to be my only chance to fly in my life. Thirty years later I was flying twice a week to a remote office for my last regular job. I used to get home in time for goodnight stories for my kids. My father worked in Boston when I was a kid, commuting only 35 miles from our house, and I almost never saw him at the dinner table.
20.This box makes me smarter than I am.
That’s not that difficult, but the computer and the internet is the greatest cheat sheet in the history of mankind.

There you have it. It’s always “the future” right now, and it’s so bright… well, I told that joke already. I must be getting old, I’m repeating myself.

I’m Wearing Shades; Are You?

Look, I’m not young. I don’t know what young is, really; but I’m not it anymore, of that I’m sure.

Why is the average person in a nursing home so dull? Make eye contact, or if you’re really foolhardy, ask a question in a nursing home, and you’ll likely get a disquisition on everybody and everything that person has ever seen that they can still remember, going back to Roosevelt. The first Roosevelt. And it comes out in one, punctuationless sentence, along with a little spittle generally. And 99% of it isn’t interesting to anyone. Why is this? Why are old people so dull? One of the very first jobs I had was working in a nursing home, so maybe I can answer this.

The reason most old people are so dull, is that they’re people, and most people are dull. You just don’t notice is until it’s in a wrinkly package.

We’re all mostly dull. But time strips away sex appeal, and the likelihood that the other person might be able to help you move furniture someday, or introduce you to someone with sex appeal, and all that’s left is the run-on sentence we all have prepared to answer the simple query: How are you? That, and a peculiar odor.

It’s the people that are the same person, just been around longer, that I’m interested in. My father, who you met here a while ago, has interesting things to say, and if you get a minute, ask him an interesting question. And so we must all strive to be interesting and/or useful throughout our whole lives, or we’ll be the ones waiting to describe our bowel movements to strangers, whether they ask us about them or not.

Like I said, I’m old. Well, I’m not young. Don’t invite me to the Ween show; I won’t go. I’d sit in and play with Ween, though. Because I’m not out of the game until they screw the lid shut. Growing up is not necessarily growing old.

Time marches really quickly these days. Lots of stuff is offered, in a dizzying array daily, agitating for your attention. And some of that stuff is pretty useful. And it occurred to me yesterday, that my life has been made easier, immensely so, by the march of technology coupled to the mostly open market to get it to me.

So tomorrow, I’ll list all the ways my day yesterday was made easier, safer, more convenient, faster, — and in a few cases just plain possible — by the march of technology and my willingness to use it instead of saying: “That’s not how we did it when Kennedy was President, you whippersnapper.”

Get Out Of My Way

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. Douglas Adams

I found out something fascinating yesterday. You can be educated, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for free.

No, I don’t mean the rheotorical you; I mean you. And me. Anybody.

Well not anybody, of course, because not everybody is educable. But there are no entrance requirements, no interview, nothing; they just put the curriculum up on the internet and let you use it. As Lawrence of Arabia says to Ali, pointing across the trackless waste of the Nefu desert towards Aqaba: “It’s just a matter of going.” Simple, really.

Indeed. Now, you’re not going to get to ask anybody any questions, get help from your peers, go to any keg parties, or clap any erasers for brownie points or anything. The stuff is just laying around there. You’ve got to do something with it, no one’s going to show you the way.

Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other. Ben Franklin

Now, if you know the vernacular of the 1700s, you’d know that “dear” means “expensive” or “difficult” in that aphorism. And Ben knew what he was talking about, because he was talking about himself, really. He’s one of a long list of people that taught themselves what they wanted or needed to know. Like most auto-didacts, he knew amazing and voluminous things, but there were large gaps in his learning. This is the danger in not having a curriculum set out for you.

I’ve never been able to learn things properly. I always just wanted to be left alone in the library with the information that interested me. But you’ll notice that Ben Franklin didn’t espouse his method of learning, and neither will I. It’s a self-selecting cadre I inhabit, and if you join because you think it’s sexy, you’ll likely make a mess of your life. Try going into IBM and telling them you know the things an MIT education encompasses, but you have no credentials to prove it. The tests you didn’t take online aren’t in the Human Resources person’s desk, either. Grab a broom.

The only real way to learn anything in this world is to do it alongside someone that knows what they are talking about. But the person that knows what he’s talking about is a rare thing, and rarer still is that person that will help you. They’re busy. But sometimes they write it down. And you can learn it from them, even if they’re halfway across the planet, or dead as a Pharoah.

People drop out of college now, and say: “Bill Gates dropped out of college, and he’s rich. No problem.” Believe me, you’re not Bill Gates. If you were, you wouldn’t be looking around to see what other people were doing, and mimicking their approach. Being an auto-didact is a force-play. You run to second base on a ground ball or you’re out. There’s no deciding in it. You are or you ain’t. Bill Gates and his ilk stole second and third and home, and you’re still trying to bunt.

A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, “You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.” Sir Arnold Bax

Regular people make the world go round. By definition, most people are regular people. But if it’s enough for you to have the stuff in your head, because you can use it, and know how to pan through the whole placer to find the glittering dust that’s there in the ore, it’s there now.

It’s just a matter of going.

Hysterical Fiction

Hi all. I’m having a Monday squared, how about you? There seems to be some sort of dark matter on-line somewhere that eats my text whenever I’m trying to enter it into a text editor. Bad comedians used to make jokes about “where the socks disappear to” in the comedy clubs. I imagine it’s been updated now, and with your two drink minimum you get to hear about “where the pixels go” now.

Anyway, we get peevish when the little wonders we are increasingly relying upon let us down. It’s human nature. But I’ve missed a few meals in my youth, and knew people that grew up dirt poor, and I always try to remind myself that we’re worrying about the icing on our cake, and luckily rarely have to worry about the pastry itself anymore. You know, like Sinead O’Leary had to:

Her Uncles had found her alone, a little girl sitting quietly in her family home in the county of Mayo. For the Irish, the famine was just the last straw; they had a litany of Cromwell’s leftover reasons to leave anyway. And so they left in their thousands. Sinead O’Leary was no different; first to Liverpool, then to Canada, on to Boston. When she finally moved to New York City, now a grown woman and married, she rechristened it New Cork, and no-one she knew dared disagree. She made it so.

She simply refused to remember anything unpleasant, and seemed to forget nothing else. She regaled her children and grandchildren with stories of Cuchulain, and Medb, and faeries and wee people, a living encyclopedia of fun and fantasy.

She saved what little money came her way, and she bought and sold things. Her long lost relatives would send her this and that from the Auld Sod, and she’d sell them to Yankees who collected such as her family had, as if the Irish were as exotic as Babylonians, not right across the Irish Sea from their own forefathers.

One fine spring morning, she opened a bible box her uncle had sent her. Inside, sheepskin glowed with monastic filigree. She knew the Lord’s word was on those Latin pages. Oh yes, she knew. She was wise enough to know also: There was a devil of a ransom in it from a collector too. And when a trim woman appeared at her door, sent by her employer, the Colossus of Finance, to buy it for that mausoleum of manuscripts he was constantly stoking on Fifth Avenue, Sinead was ready. He wanted it like the damned wanted icewater. Sinead knew how long to hold out before acquiescing.

Into real estate the money went. Then her son invested it for her in the stock market. Soon the simple woman, who still retied her own lace when it frayed, was rich. She always was, if you asked her, even though her Uncles could have told you they had found her alone in that stone cottage, all those years ago, because her parents were dead and gone, outside the door, their mouths green from trying to eat grass when the potatoes failed.

She was very old when that awful day christened “Black Friday” took her fortune, just like the famine had taken her family those many years ago. Her son sat with her on the simple wooden settee she still favored. “It has St Patrick�s clover in it, and to put a cushion on it would be extravagance itself!”

He gently told her that he had lost her money, over a million dollars, in one afternoon.

“What a blessing!” she said.

Her son, now grown grey himself, and ruined along with his mother, couldn�t comprehend.

“How kind of the Lord to wait until I could afford to lose a million dollars. Imagine what a blow it would have been to lose such a sum when I was poor!”

Her son burst out laughing. And he knew then, that his beloved mother was placed on this earth for a reason. And they would rise again. Surely.

“Besides,” she said, “I have three more Bible Boxes”

Alway remember whence you came, people.

Pat And Stanley Part Deux

We’ve pointed out the predilection of our children to pay minute attention to what they watch on a screen. They are paying attention, and in a way we adults don’t really understand anymore. We are looking at most everything we see and ignoring the bulk of it out of hand, relegating it to a kind of background noise. But our little ones are not comparing what they see to a framework they have already assembled; they are busy assembling that framework. And they notice.

Pat and Stanley are brushing their teeth in yesterday’s video. My little boy has camped out at my door for two days now, waiting to importune me to show him the big hippo and the silly dog at every chance. And yesterday, he ran up the stairs after watching, to brush his teeth, because Pat and Stanley do. He got out his bucket of bath toys, and started rifling through them like a mad person. He found his heretofore ignored rubber duck bathtoy, placed it next to the sink, and brushed his teeth over and over.

My wife later noticed that Pat and Stanley have a rubber duck off to one side in the video. We hadn’t noticed. But if it was good enough for his French-speaking friends, it was good enough for our little boy.

We’re afraid to eat spaghetti.

All Pat and Stanley weekend! Enjoy!

Pat And Stanley

Do you know about Pat and Stanley? I discovered them while looking for something else on the internet, and my three year old son is laying siege to my office right now, trying to get his hippo and silly doggie fix:

They’re speaking French, and my French is pretty rusty, but it doesn’t matter much. My toddler doesn’t speak much of anything, and he’s out of his mind for Pat and Stanley. There’s a kind of rude charm about them, an irreverence and foolish earnestness which comes across in most any non-Taliban country.

Here’s the one that got us hooked in the first place, and sent us scurrying for more.

According to Wikipedia, they belong to an Italian candy company, Ferraro SpA, who also make tic-tacs. Pat and Stanley are selling Kinder Happy Hippos, a sort of hippo shaped cookie available in Europe. They could sell steaks at a PETA picnic, if my little son is any indication:

YouTube can be a marvelous thing. It serves as more of a catalogue of human likes and dislikes for me than any other medium now. For all I know, Pat and Stanley are well known by everyone reading this, and I’m last to the party. I’ll risk it, to show it to you.
Advertising sometimes attracts the most talented people to it, and here’s a perfect example if that. I think kindly of anybody that brushes their teeth like Pat and Stanley, and makes my little boy laugh:

Bravo Andre Roche. Bravo Pat and Stanley!

Slow And Steady Wins The Race

[Editor’s Note: Hit the “Play” button and you can listen to this song while you read.]
{Author’s note: There is no editor}

Well, she’s stumbled badly. I’m vaulting over her prostrate form, after trailing her badly for a week. Ann Althouse has posted a picture in her series: Unplayable 45s I Won’t Throw Out, of Wham! singing Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. She’s suffered an irreversible setback on two fronts:
1. She owns this record. Now, I own lots of bad records. People would give me records all the time, thinking that’s just the sort of thing I’d like. These were generally the sort of people that used to give me handkerchiefs or Hai Karate aftershave for Christmas presents. “I noticed you like John Lee Hooker records, so I bought you this Olivia Newton John Greatest Hits. Same sort of thing, isn’t it?” I always found such gifts touching, but I never got the urge to listen to Physical while wearing after-shave and blowing my nose. Which brings us to:
2. Number two, indeed, because that Wham! record might be the most obnoxious thing ever pressed into plastic; but poor, deluded Ann is telling everyone it’s “one of the best pop singles ever.”
The mind reels.

First of all, we know that the greatest piece of pop ever is either Ringo singing It Don’t Come Easy, or Badfinger singing No Matter What. This has been determined scientifically by me listening to the radio for a while and then writing my opinion down on the internet. Literally tens of people have agreed with me. Case closed.

That Wham! (don’t forget the exclamation point!!!!!!!)record came out in the eighties. There is no delicate way to say this to a woman, but here goes: you’re older than me, Ann, and that means you were an adult when you purchased that thing. How do you bear the shame of it? Seek solace in the Bible or the bottle.

Now, me, I’m going to put up the second best Rod Stewart record ever, Maggie May. The best is of course You Wear It Well, but I can’t find that one. This will do, it’s still 25,000 % better than George Michael. Faint praise, indeed.

Now, Rod Stewart was busy being 99% as bad as George Michael in the eighties, and other than avoiding lingering in public bathrooms recently, it’s a tie as to who’s worse now. But Rod Stewart, or Raw Sewage, as I used to call him, made a few fabulous records thirty odd years ago, and he can always trot them out onstage while women throw their grannie panties at him. George Michael just gets to pose for mugshots.

And me? well, I’d rather hold up a mugshot number than a Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go single.

Thanks Everybody

Thanks to dirtcrasher for sending along this picture of the B-24 in flight.
Thanks to Pajamas Media for putting us on their Daily Scroll.
Thanks to Maggie’s Farm for linking to us.
Thanks to Patrick Martin for sending along his good wishes and linking to his fine story about his trip to the D-Day Museum on Stubborn Facts.
Thanks to Callimachus for his link, story, and more great pictures over at Done With Mirrors.
Thanks to Takhullus over at Sideways Mencken for noticing.
Thanks to the Collings Foundation for flying these things around.
Thank you to everybody else for reading and commenting and making my father happy two days in a row.
B-24 landing gear
Climb right in, and they’ll lower you out of the plane. Nice view. Look out for Zeros.
My dad flew in one of these too. B-25. Says it’ s the only plane he ever threw up in. Said it was like a Ferrari, while his B-24 was like a Model A Ford.

With guns.

Why Am I Writing This?

That is a difficult question. I don’t answer difficult questions unless you ask me while holding a check or a gun. And even if I did tell you, I might lie. More likely though, I’d just be wrong. Being wrong is more common than lying is. Occam’s paper cuts apply here too.

I think I know why you read it, though. Because I am an idler, and you wish to live vicariously through me.

Now, by idler, I don’t mean a guy doing nothing. I’m working more than most people are, and harder than maybe I should. But I’m not in a normal sort of work setting, and the trajectory of my life is not predictable. I go places and see things and do things and so forth that salubrious people have to eschew to make this world go ’round properly.

We used to play sports. Then we began to watch others play sports for us, and sat in the audience. Then we invented media so we could watch people watching. Now we go to chat rooms and talk about persons that watch people watching other people playing sports.

It’s all fine, of course, but the further removed from the engine of your interests you become, the more you long for a glimpse of the world you’re not currently in. People’s lives are richer and more interesting and varied than they ever have been, but the cost of that minutely parsed use of your skills, interest, and time is to risk making you feel a bit disconnected from the world at large.

And so perhaps you seek out others, whose lives are different than yours, and try to inhabit their little world for 600 to 1200 words at a time, and take a vacation from your discontents for a moment. What’s that dope with the two kids and the wife and the cottage and the guitar and the furniture and the camera and the keyboard doing today?

It’s not my fault I notice things, I used to tell people. I’m pleased to notice things for you, and allow you to notice things, namely me, in turn.

I read musty authors a lot. Twain, Mencken, Bierce, Kipling, Gibbons, Smith. I read Robert Louis Stevenson still:

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college or kirk or market, is a sympton of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiousity; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its’ own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will ever stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk; they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.

We all must furiously moil in the gold-mill. If I help you to idle a moment, as many have helped me, than I am content. To the rest of you… well… you’re not reading this anyway.