Caroline Cartwright, 48, a Tyne and Wear woman whose raucous lovemaking earned her an Anti-Social Behaviour Order and multiple arrests, declared that the order is a violation of her human rights.
According to court records, Sunderland City Council installed “specialist equipment” that recorded noise levels of between 30 and 40 decibels, “with the highest being 47 decibels.”
Lowest limit of urban ambient sound … 40 dB
Bird calls … 44 dB
Loud sex in the neighbourhood … priceless
“I have a cupcake in my briefcase,” I heard Missy say.
Missy and her husband Biff are here in South Puffin for a couple-three weeks of fishing. Missy loves her bling which dangles and jangles and actually seems to attract fish when she leans over the transom. She still has her job with the state but Biff is out of work for the first time in about 20 years. Naturally, they each brought a cellphone.
In the game of Telephone, according to the Wikipedia, “the first player whispers a phrase or sentence to the next player. Each player successively whispers what that player believes he or she heard to the next. The last player announces the statement to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first. The game is often played by children as a party game or in the playground.” Or by the Congress.
Missy actually said “My son got a cupcake for his birthday. I found it in the fridge.”
The game of telephone has become the game of cellephone.
Everyone in America today has at least one. It is impossible to walk down the street without tripping over Biff yelling into his hand or cupping his earbud to hear a friend at the beach or instruct a partner in Pipeline-istan. If people are far away or speak a different language, Biff knows they can understand him better when he yells.
I hate cellephony.
But it’s cheap! Every cellphone company in this country advertises the best network and the lowest rates. The average $39.99 cell bill last month cost the consumer $103 and change.
But it’s reliable! T-Mobile blamed a software glitch for the outage that left about 5% of its customers unable to send or receive calls or text messages last week. Of course, no cell carrier mentions the millions of individual dropped calls unless some other network does the dropping.
But it’s perfect for people watchers! I love to eavesdrop on conversations; cellphones make too too it easy to listen to just one side.
The game of cellephone we play doesn’t bring more cumulative error, rumor, and gossip than, say, Facebook or television or the blogosphere because our errors are personal, not viral. In the end, though, it’s all about me. Or thee. All I want is for my call to go through when I push send. All I want is to be able to tell if it is Missy or Biff who answers. All I want is to hear the words they say. After all, the simple copper line attached to a Bakelite speaker and microphone and the magneto my grandfather cranked did that with amazing accuracy and 99.72% uptime.
Meanwhile, I’m still trying to get a bite of that cupcake. I hope it’s chocolate.
Wall Street bankers got yet another bonus thanks to the U.S. Government. Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and others received thousands of H1N1 vaccine doses ahead of doctors, hospitals, and senior centers.
CDC Director Thomas Frieden is now urging health officials nationwide to make sure the vaccine goes only to high-risk groups.
So. Is this is the G.R.A.F.T. Act or ObamaCare in action?
It pleases me enormously that my nearly 20-year old granddaughter is not embarrassed to call me Boppa. She does it not only in public but even on Facebook.
“Boppa” has a history.
Wilbur Groendyke Dunning was Bill to his family of four other brothers and a sister. All the boys sounded alike on the phone, so when one called us in Westtown, he would say, “Hello, Art, Bill, Pres, Sid, June.” June was Frank, Junior, named for their father. He usually stopped when the right one answered. He was the second eldest.
He married Ethel Barnard and raised a couple of kids in the stone manor house of her father’s farm. They had chickens, a lot of grass to mow, and a dog named Monte who would lick the butter off a piece of toast and bring it back for more.
Bill Dunning started teaching chemistry at Temple at the beginning of time. He retired, then returned to teaching at PMC (now Widener) until his second retirement about the same time I was flunking freshman Chemistry at Stevens. I was not at the time smart enough to ask for help. He enjoyed working with his hands in the dirt as much as he enjoyed working with college kids. We had a pretty serious vegetable and flower garden in Westtown.
All the Dunning boys were athletic. Sidney, the tallest, turned down a major league pitching contract because they played ball on Sundays and the five of them together were tall enough to have fielded a pretty fair basketball team.
Interesting man he was. Ordained an elder in the Presbyterian Church of Frankford six months before my mother’s birthday. Invented and patented “red gas,” an anti-knock ingredient for gasoline that might have prevented our pumping tetraethyl lead onto our roadsides for decades. Rode the train every day to school. Transcribed hundreds of books into braille for the Pennsylvania Association for the Blind.
I had it good as a kid. My own folks moved back to the family home shortly after my grandmother whom I called “Da” died in 1953. Everyone shared the chores and I always had a built in babysitter. Boppa was usually home when my folks were out and vice versa. And my dad’s parents were just down Street Road at the station house on the Pennsey.
He made sure I had my own copy of Christopher Robin while I lay on Da’s bed eating Fig Newtons and pulling Jason’s tail. Jason was a great, golden-fleeced tom cat, the kind that comes but once a generation. I’m often not sure whether to identify with Christopher Robin or Pooh but I learned enough to make sure our cat, Ruff, was another.
He bought me my first slide rule when I entered Stevens. Keuffel & Esser manufactured its last slide rule in 1975. I still have Boppa’s first and my last. A slide rule does not depend on batteries.
He taught me, years before I had figured out that I would teach, too, that the teacher must stay a chapter ahead of the student. And he taught me how to coil an extension cord in a chicken laying box so it would not tangle.
Boppa was a quiet, private Victorian gentleman of strong will and strong opinion. I only once heard him complain — about a truly lousy honors chemistry course my high school snookered me to take — and that was after I had been graduated from college. He did not accept specious logic at the dinner table, at church, or in the news. He did volunteer at church, in the Township, and with friends. He did not like Dial soap because their commercials promoted “wishing everyone did.” He did speak Latin and read German.
In 1982, after living in the same house for more than 60 years, he took stock. “All my friends have died,” he said. “All of my brothers except the oldest have died. I have nothing more to keep me here. Let’s move to Florida.” 18 months later, after selling the farmhouse in Westtown, he and my folks started another great adventure, one that would last until his 100th year. He bought a little house in the middle of the Keys. I’m sitting there now, watching an egret preen on the rail of the boat next door.
Barnard/Dunning/Harper generations ran about 30 years each for a couple of centuries so he was 60 years old when I met him for the first time and he became Boppa. I guess I’m old enough to grow into it now, too.
Buying the first text book. $1.95
Buying a slide rule. $29.94
Remembering history. Priceless.
Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
It’s the Keys, mon. The sweat rolling off my back doesn’t turn into ice cubes before it hits the floor.
I had a mostly uneventful trip from North Puffin to South Puffin last week. I bought half a sailboat and didn’t buy a motor home.
Half a boat conjures a Wiley Coyote image of a bald guy hanging onto the mast, trying to keep the chewed off after end out of the drink. That would be a small error. Rufus bought the other half, so we’re probably safe as long as I can keep him away from the chainsaw. We spent a couple of days completing the purchase, getting the trailer tags, making sure everything would stay connected. He fed me well.
Speaking of chewed off after ends, my neighbor Joe went fishing yesterday and almost boated a pretty nice mackerel. Except he had reeled the fish in to withing spitting distance of the boat when a much larger mackerel saw dinner on the hook and chomped off the back half. No shaking, no rending, no tearing. Open wide. Bite down. Swim away. ‘Nother reason I pefer fishing for cow.
I tend to listen to podcasts and talk shows while driving so I discovered a surprisingly conservative broadcast about a news media watchdog’s 40th anniversary on C-Span, of all venues. Of course, C-Span is kind of the public access television for inside the Beltway, so perhaps it is not so surprising.
The trailer towed easily at all speeds and neither the tires nor the bearings got hot. The traffic cooperated. I even drove right through D.C. and, other than the G.P.S. scolding me about “better routes,” had no tie-ups. Even the rain wasn’t too bad to drive through. The motel yard cats liked the boat at each stop.
Gas 
prices climbed through the entre trip. I stopped for gas at a 7-11 in Port Charlotte, Florida. The road signs advertise a $2.589/gallon price for regular. The actual price at the pump was $2.739/gallon. The store clerk told me no manager was at the store but one would “probably” be available on Monday.
Later, I checked in to a Red Roof Inn in Naples. The Florida Roomsaver ad promised “It’s all new under the Roof” with gourmet coffee, a free USA Today, and WiFi Internet access through T-Mobile.
Not every motel in the Florida Roomsaver offers Internet access but all that do offer it just as they do a complimentary hot breakfast or the towels — included the cost of the room. After I checked in, the clerk told that the WiFi Internet access through T-Mobile would cost me $8/day. I could buy the T-Mobile card then, he said, and ask for a refund in the morning. I spent the evening without any ability to check mail, plan my route, or download porn. I never saw a paper, either.
I’ll write the usual nastygrams. I can pretend that 7-11 will sanction the franchisee and Red Roof will give me a free night somewhere. I can even file deceptive advertising complaints with the Florida Attorney General and, as an ExxonMobil shareholder, I will ask that company to pull Exxon and Mobil gasoline from all 7-11s nationwide. It certainly leaves me not liking what’s “all new” under the roof. Or at the 7-11.
I ‘spect the most I’ll get is this blog entry.
Running the Tamiami through the Everglades in daylight was the best part of the trip. I stopped at the Collier-Seminole State Park just to see what is there this week and discovered the 1924 Bay City walking dredge. It is on the National Register as the earliest remaining dredge of that type. Designed to work in the swamps that bog down traditional wheeled or tracked construction equipment, it dredged the canals for the roadbed fill that created the Tamiami Trail at a rate of 80 feet per 18 hour day. There are several heron rookeries along the way, so I stopped a couple of times. The herons in the Glades are less trusting of people so they flushed as soon as I walked along the shoulder. On the other hand, the observation deck of the Oasis Visitor Center at Big Cypress National Preserve gives a bird’s eye view of eight alligators, plus active fish, herons and cormorants, and other wildlife such as tourists.
The Styrofoam “Omaha” meat cooler still had northern ice — I did not refresh its ice during the trip. That may not make the record books but it sure worked for me. On the downside, I can’t pick my nose any more. A neighbor is sitting in his living room across the canal, looking in my living room at me looking in his living room at him.
Good thing I didn’t tarry any longer on the road, though. I ran out of clean underwear.
Ah, heck. Who needs underwear? It’s the Keys, mon.