A Musical Interlude Showing That the Blogger Is Easy to Please

In the late afternoon I treat myself to a musical interlude via YouTube videos. This is sort of a warmup (or meltdown?) to that time when I amble down the hall to the place in the house where the relaxing beverages are kept.

On YouTube, I listen to just about any kind of music so long as it has a melody and is devoid of spectacle that some people today are fascinated with.  One of my current favorites is l'Orchestre de Christophe Demerson performing two catchy, popular tunes.  The vocals are in French and English.

One song is “Paloma Blanca,” often called “Una Paloma Blanca” (literally “One White Dove”)—a song about freedom.  It was written by George Baker and released‎ in 1975.

That number is followed on the same video by “Comment ça va”—for which I could find no guaranteed universal translation.  It generally means "How are you doing?" or "How is it going?"  The song provides the answer: “comme ci, comme ci, comme ca”—"so, so” in English. According to Wikipedia, the song started out as a 1983 pop piece by a Dutch boy band The Shorts.  It was originally written in English by Dutch composer Eddy de Heer; that was followed by a Dutch version which was written by Jack Jersey.

All that aside, Demerson and his band are playing for a dance-hall group of nicely dressed pre-geriatrics who seem to be doing a sort of low-impact disco shuffle.  My favorites in the crowd are a couple of men near the stage who perform a somewhat synchronized pirouette and a short red-haired woman who is totally into it; she’s not seen until the camera locks onto her toward the end of the video.

Just keep in mind when you watch this video that, hey, I’m easy to please.

The link to this entertainment is here.  The video lasts seven minutes and has just under 6 million views.

***

My Lack of Will Power: A Report in the Stream of Unconsciousness

Listen I’ve been on this horrible I suppose I should say horrific because that’s the word everyone else is using these days because they can’t bring themselves to say or write horrible but take it from me it’s a horrible guilt trip about sugar and sugar has become an item of interest ever since medical science declared I have diabetes which really doesn’t bother me too much because I rarely eat dessert with a meal and I don’t spend money on candy bars or cellophane-wrapped grab-and-go fat tablets and if I want something sweet I like bakery pastries which are expensive and not always convenient so I don’t eat a lot of sugar anyway that is until a month ago at Christmas the next-door neighbor gave us some Ghirardelli chocolates and the guys across the street treated us to a box of chocolate-covered mints that were totally addictive like totally addictive and two weeks later I mentioned to the woman who lives next door to the guys across the street that the mints were great and I didn’t have but a few left and she said oh hers were gone days ago and so therefore I decided I would enjoy the goodies and not worry about the complications of diabetes because with senile-onset diabetes I’ll be dead before I could go blind or my feet fall off so it really shouldn’t be a problem except for the sugar high which pours thoughts and words through my skull like a torrent so fast that I can hardly wait to sign off and go up to the neighborhood donut shop for a chocolate-covered custard-filled thingy.

***

Nothing to Say, But I’ll Say It Anyway

I haven’t posted in several weeks because I’ve had nothing to say.

But two items in this week’s news are worth mentioning.

One, another proposal is being floated to divide California.  This one would sever interior California from coastal California.  The interior part of the state is largely rural, while the coast is heavily urban.  Read as follows:  rural equals Republican; urban equals Democrat.  Would there be Dust Bowl era signs at the urbanish borders saying “Opies [Old Progressives] Go Home”?

Two, the state department of transportation is beginning to favor building traffic roundabouts over planting stop signs at intersections.  If this goes far enough, I see it as a giant piece of symbolism.  No longer will America be a stop-and-go nation but one that that is more circuitous, more circumspect.

More later, when I still have nothing to say.

***

Home Alone; or, How a Dull Man Performed Necessary Tasks to Find Tranquility, Blissfulness, and Nirvana

I wrote this post for the Facebook page of the Dull Men's Club, but the post's meaning and purpose are universal enough to be more widely published.

I had the time of my life a couple days ago, and I want to make sure that my fellow dull men know about it.

My wife was gone much of the day, playing bridge.  I roamed around the house, pausing at the necessary room.  Where I live the usual term is “bathroom,” but I understand that some dull men live where they have “loos.”  By any term, it’s the necessary room.

That day, in our necessary room, there was no necessary paper.  Cradled by chrome arms, the spindle rested there, empty, thin, equally round all the way, reminding me of a girl I dated in high school. 

I replaced it, snapping a new roll into place the way I was taught shortly after the wedding.  I had other plans for those moments, plans that would lead to an activity more beneficial and vastly more fulfilling, but my bride insisted, first things first.  There is only one way to install the roll, she decreed, so I did it now the same way I learned all those years ago, and the way I have been doing it ever since.  When I was finished, the ready-to-use paper hung down in front and not back by the wall.

But then I realized, here I was, home alone, totally unsupervised.  I could do anything!

Driven by some unnamed urge, I removed the roll, and—reversed it!  Now it stood proudly mounted, with the ready-to-use paper hanging down the back.

I hyperventilated for a time.  I was excited, no doubt about it.  I stood there gazing at my handiwork, toying with the idea of bringing in a chair and spending the rest of the afternoon just sitting and worshipping what I had done.  Maybe sipping a relaxing beverage while thus reflecting on the joys of humanity.

And then, I realized I was not finished.  In a flash, I leapt to my feet, reached over and raised the toilet seat until it was vertical, not flat against the bowl.

Now the necessary room was organized and displayed in a manner that was comforting and inviting.  Buddha would have wanted it this way, not that I’m a Buddhist, but I feel it necessary to appeal to a deity of some sort or other, and his name was close to mind.

Alas, the bridge game had to end sometime, and my wife would be home shortly thereafter.  I would have to restore order, which I did, dawdling as much as possible, while softly weeping.

Maybe it was only a fantasy.  Could it have been real?  I don’t know, but my Walter Mitty moment was ended.

***

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?

***

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. 

***

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.”

***