Great Outings of 2017

Male celebrities are going down the tubes.  Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor—I think I missed others—have all gotten axed, charged with letting hormones override good judgment. 

Who’s next?  Will Santa Claus be ousted (outed?) for hanky-panky with an elf?

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Three Things

1.  I was out of the house for a time on Saturday.   I understand an apocalypse

occurred.  I guess I missed it.

2.  Various internet sites carried a story, “This Animal Sleeps but Has No Brain.” I guess that was supposed to be news, but I don’t know why.  I’ve known guys like that all my life.

3.  I didn’t miss the apocalypse.  It’s been rescheduled for October 15.  I’ll have to skip it.  That’s the day I go grocery shopping for the month.

4.  If there’s a cooking channel, shouldn’t there be a napping channel?

5.  Blogger does not know how to count. 

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A Pseudo-algebraic Representation of Why a Do-it-yourself Project Can Be a Pain

About a year ago I bought a new computer.  Its factory settings made the on-screen font too small for easy viewing, so I enlarged the font size.  But I overshot, and the enlargement turned out to be extra-large.  I couldn’t find a happy medium.  The font was either too large or too small.

I left the font size at too-large and pushed the monitor more toward the back of the desk.  That wasn’t good enough, so I scooted my chair back a couple of inches.  Now the viewing distance and apparent font size were as best as I could get them, optimal, as some people would say.

(Devout grammarians would say that optimal is the adjective form; optimum is the noun.  Details, details.  I chose optimal because I don’t get many chances to use it and I liked the way it sounded.)

Except that now my right arm sagged off the desk, unsupported.  A couple of days later, my right wrist began to ache.

I switched the system over so that I could use the mouse with my left hand, thereby giving my right wrist rest. (Say that fast:  Right wrist rest.)  But my left hand, throughout my lifetime, had never done anything more demanding than scratch my nose and operate the turn signal; it just didn’t have any self-control, and its movements with me in charge were herky-jerky.

I found a list of keyboard shortcuts.  My thinking was that I could use the keyboard to take some of the effort away from my wrists.  But keyboard shortcuts didn’t do as much as I wanted, and, besides, using them would be a step backward.  Keyboard commands were all that we had before the mouse and its buttons came along.   No backward technology for me.

I reset the mouse for right-hand use, and with a piece of scrap wood and an old towel fashioned a booster that I taped to the right arm of my chair. Truly an inelegant piece of office furniture, but it worked. 

But the mouse was evil.  Now my right shoulder began to ache, an aggravation of an injury I had done to the rotator cuff therein.  Somehow or other my chair had shifted to the left just enough so that I was not sitting squarely in front of the computing machinery.  My mouse arm was coming in at an angle.  However so slightly the angle was, I was clicking on the bias.

What’s going on here is a series of events that a friend and I talk about from time to time:  That is, it doesn’t seem possible to tackle the simplest of do-it-yourself projects without encountering some form of additional difficulty.  My friend and I have even formulated a sort of algebraic shorthand that we use to identify the problem:

A leads to B+C which leads to D+E+F which leads to G+H+I+J and so on.

That doesn’t really provide any solutions, but I feel better now, and, as Forrest Gump said, “That's all I have to say about that.”

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It's Time to Move on to the Next Level

Four mornings a week I exercise at a gym—excuse me, fitness center, in today’s lingo—where machines extract sweat and money from the customers.  The place also peddles one program after another for people who want to exercise the way someone else tells them to.  To keep people involved—that is, spending money—little blurbs of encouragement are posted here and there.  Here’s one:

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

If that is supposed to be a motto, it’s a lame one.

Sure, it could push you, when you’ve finished pumping thirty pounds of weight, to go back to the rack and move up to forty pounds.

But those words are nothing more than a truism, a description of the treadmill of life.  When you’ve finished eating breakfast, clear off the table and wash your dishes.  When you’ve finished cutting the grass, leave the lawnmower where you can find it when it’s time to cut the grass again.  If you quit this job, get another one.

And it’s a poorly wrought sentence, too.  It has no subject.  Who is doing the arriving?   To devout grammarians, that opening cluster of words—"Arriving at one goal”—is a dangling modifier.  It “dangles” because it’s not clear who or what is being modified (referred to).

I wondered who wrote it, for the gym did not name the perpetrator.  Ah, but Google knows.

John Dewey did it.  According to Wikipedia, Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.  Wikipedia calls him a well-known public intellectual, and a major voice of progressive education and liberalism.  The quote that I dislike is one of his most famous.

Well, that settles that.  It’s time to move on to the next level.

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The Grouch Speaks: Overwhelmed by Ennui

This morning, when I left the gym, I felt overwhelmed by ennui.  I don’t know why I was down, but I knew what would fix the problem, a cup of coffee.  As some ad or other says, “Caffeine—makes you do stupid things faster and with more energy.”

I went across the street to La Bou, got my coffee and a staple in my Kamikaze diabetic diet—a chocolate croissant—and sat where I could watch all three big-screen television monitors.  I wanted to see how bad things were in Houston, which was largely underwater because of hurricane Harvey.  A base just outside of Houston was one of my first assignments in the air force.  After more than three years there, I left with fond memories.  Now I'd like to know what was happening.

On one TV a woman wearing an Egyptian fright mask was talking about something or other, what I don’t know.  The sound was off as was the captioning.  Then the captioning came on and gave her name:  Kim.  Ah, yes, one of the famed Kardashians, the twenty-first century’s replacements for the Gabor sisters (Google them) of years gone by.

The station broke, and a more-or-less news program came on.  Three people were talking about a pay-per-view fight, the conduct of which soaked people for millions of dollars to watch late at night.  One of the panelists asked this question: “What late-night activity would keep you up?”

Be serious.  I was talking, silently, to the TV, asking, Do you guys think about the words you use before you throw them out over the air?  I know what late-night activity would keep me up, and it’s none of your business.

I pivoted to look at the monitor in the middle of the room.  A courtroom drama was on, but no, it wasn’t, a commercial came on for a local law firm.

At one time it was illegal for lawyers to advertise; now it’s not.  I don’t have a problem with that, but I think that when the law was changed it should have included a requirement that professional actors be used and lawyers not be allowed to pretend to act.  The lawyers representing themselves on the screen before were as wooden as Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd—dummies used by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.

The TV monitor at the back of the room caught my eye.  People were doing something with a watermelon.  It was a food channel, or a cooking channel, something like that.  A man put a chunk of watermelon in a glass and then poured gin over it. Or vodka.  Or some phony booze.  It’s the concept that counts.  That appealed to me.

It was time for me to go.  I could check out Houston on the Google news feed at home, and what daytime television I'd seen still left me overwhelmed with ennui.

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What Would (Did) Mencken Say?

"The White House will be adorned by a downright moron”—H. L. Mencken.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English.   He preferred a shortened form of his name, H. L. Mencken, and was nicknamed the "Sage of Baltimore."

Snopes.com checked the authenticity of the quote used at the start of this post and verified that, yes, Mencken did in fact write those words.

Snopes went further and put the remark in the paragraph in which it was originally composed, thereby showing the context, which was not at all flattering to Americans: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Mencken was a skeptic.  He was acerbic. His barbs lived long lives and are scattered around the internet.

He distrusted humanity: “Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.”

He had a low opinion of his fellow Americans: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

He disliked the American form of government: “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

He thought little of the GOP: “In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

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As a Good Ole Boy Might Say . . .

I enjoyed my air force days stationed with young men from the rural south, people today called Good Ole Boys.  They could do entertaining things with the English language, such as creating a simile like this:

 "His brain is so small that if you wadded it into a ball and shoved it up a gnat’s ass it would rattle like a walnut in a boxcar."

That remark can be applied to whomever you might think of.

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