Category Archives: History

Giving Thanks

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Today is America’s primary pagan festival, celebrated to show love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day in which fields are now mostly covered in snow and which George Washington proclaimed as a day of thanks as a national remembrance.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me ‘to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness’.”

While it is easy for this curmudgeonly writer to kvetch about the corruption and thievery stretching from here to Washington or to fret that my truck needs new brake lines and my little house needs new shingles, those are just everyday irritants and (thankfully) I know how to fix them.

I am thankful I have a white truck. Not to mention a (topless)(white) car. And that Anne has white car.

I am thankful my grandfather at age 94 decided to live out his very good life in the Keys.

I am thankful I started my life as an engineer and am now spending some of it as an artist.

I am thankful we will have friends here today.

I am thankful my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren are happy, healthy, and will be well fed again today.

I am thankful Anne is here today and will be here tomorrow.

I am thankful for Anne and for Nancy, two loving, caring, beautiful ladies. I am blessed.

And I have pah!

Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be America’s bird so I’m thankful to have found a big inflatable turkey in a local yard. The original Thanksgiving Perspective is here.

ahh, supper
 

Change Is Good

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If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Lao Tzu
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Winston Churchill

“I’ve been thinking ’bout catching a train
Leave my phone machine by the radar range
Hello, it’s me, I’m not at home
If you’d like to reach me then leave me alone.“
It is fairly well known by now that Socrates hated, hated the alphabet and its portent of change. “…for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves… You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing,” Plato wrote, of Socrates talking to Phaedrus. Since Socrates refused to write things down, we rely on Plato as his scribe. Change is good.

On a much smaller scale, I had occasion to back a pickup truck onto a trailer tongue the other day. I’ve always preferred to do that as a two-person job, one driving the truck and Rufus making obscure hand gestures whilst standing on the tongue. The truck I used had an optional backup camera with video that swivels and points and even has range lines to guide you on far better than watching the expressions on Rufus’ face. Change is good.

Once upon a time, I wished for a (convenient) VCR for radio. See I liked to listen to Car Talk but it aired on Saturday mornings and I was often interrupted by a dump run, so I missed many of those episodes. Change is good. In 1993, Carl Malamud launched his Internet Talk Radio as the “first computer-radio talk show.” Computer users could download his audio files each week and listen at their convenience. Today I can choose from more than 115,000 English-language podcasts including reruns of Car Talk.

Change is good. Except when it isn’t.

My crew chief (not Rufus) munged the Camaro shift linkage one fine summer day and sent me out on the track with 1st gear down and to the right where 4th gear should be, 2nd in place of 3rd, but 3rd up there where 1st should be, and 4th next to 1st taking the proper 2nd slot (this was loooooong before paddle shifters). Just try going up through those gears and back down again at full chat with a horde of other pony cars around you.

“You’re the driver,” my crew chief said. “You’re supposed to be able to adapt to these little changes.”

Um, no. I have better things to do than try to learn a new shift pattern at 160 mph.

I got a new crew chief. That change bit him.

Firefox ScreenshotAnother change. Firefox decided to redo all my taskbars this morning and tell me to upgrade from version 22 (released last month) to version 25 (released the other day). It was not a clean change. I had to rebuild some of the add-ons, fix the task and menu bars, and so on. And for whatever reason the page zoom is no longer “sticky.” Page magnification used to be sticky. In addition to the UI issues, it has also fried all my protected cookies, the tab options, and some other stuff I probably haven’t found yet. Gmail, Facebook, Pandora, my credit card site, and a couple of others all thought I was logging in from a new computer. It loaded my home button page because it no longer differentiates between that and the home page and TVGuide thinks I’m in Fargo, ND, despite the fact that Cookie Culler shows explicitly that I have my location, provider, and favorite channels set. This is one of the least satisfactory single app upgrades I’ve done yet.

I told Firefox that this version may be the worst browser ever, simply because I’m spending so much more time trying to fix it than browsing.

I have better things to do than try to learn a new shift pattern or new browser tricks when I’m already trying to figure out what Facebook has screwed up this week.

I got a new crew chief. I can get a new browser.

And I managed to get through this rant without once mentioning the guy who promised to turn our world upside down and ended up simply stealing our world.

It’s past time for a change there, too. Change is good.

 

Full Moon

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A surgeon friend pulls ER duty at the local medical center on Friday nights and whenever there is a full moon. Last week we had both when a paramedics brought in a man found collapsed in the road, the victim of an apparent hit-and-run.

“This is medicine as it’s supposed to be,” he said to me as he probed the distended stomach of the man he was about to take to surgery, eager as only a surgeon can be to cut and slice and repair.


PLAN AHEAd

My friend the surgeon was wrong.

Coming at that from a different angle, Wile E Coyote should have considered ordering from Zenith instead of Acme. The Acme Giant Rubber Band, for example, never tripped a Road Runner.

“When I was 15, I had a crush on this guy who was really good at magic,” Danica McKellar said, “and so I learned to juggle, thinking it would impress him. I spent hours and hours practicing, planning to show him. And then I never even saw him again. But at least I learned how to juggle.”

Planning.

As far as I know, none of my grandparents ever had a credit card. “When I run out of money, I plan to stop spending,” my grandfather said.

Planning.

My friends Missy and Biff live in North Carolina but they love to spend time in South Puffin. They scheduled a vacation there this week but they forgot to ask where I’d be (I’m nearly frozen in North Puffin) so they arrived this morning with no place to stay.

Planning.

The search term, “Plan Ahead,” gets about 390,000,000 results in 0.27 seconds on Google. 390 million.

Our apparent hit-and-run victim went in to surgery where the doc found no broken bones, no bruises, no trauma. He did find a bowel obstruction that had burst through the intestinal wall, sending fecal matter into the abdominal cavity.

Our victim was a car wreck indeed, but not because any vehicles came close to him. He was a car wreck because he had avoided good medicine.

PLAN AHEAd
“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.”
— Henry David Thoreau

Good medicine isn’t life-saving emergency surgery. Good medicine is preventing the need for life-saving emergency surgery.

“I’m not good at future planning. I don’t plan at all. I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow. I don’t have a day planner and I don’t have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.”
— Actor Heath Ledger

That worked out very well for Mr. Ledger.

The United States Congress may actually be in session this week (although this might be another planned vacation). As we near the 793rd episode of “let’s shut down the Government” this year, I’m thinking they would do better to emulate my grandfather than Mr. Ledger.

 

Jail – the Liberal Paradise?

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My friend Nola “Fanny” Guay is ticked off this morning. Someone sent her this poster by email:

Jail - The Liberal Paradise

“I hate it when people send stuff like this around that just isn’t true,” she said.

Me, too.

Especially when the truth is worse.

No liberal really wants to put the rest of us in jail. Not really. Not even the farthest green protester whose mantra is that the Earth would be sooooo much better without humans.

The poster should read,

“Projects — The Liberal Paradise.“
A little history of public housing in the United States: The first “model tenements” begin to appear in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1870s. Alfred Tredway White, a great believer in progressive reform efforts, built a series of buildings for the people known in the nineteenth century as the “deserving poor.”

The working poor, those hardworking people who couldn’t make enough to live in the nineteenth century were called the deserving poor.

Those first public housing residents were carefully screened. Only employed families with two parents were allowed. Alcoholics and those with social problems were banned.

There were other similar efforts but Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the first permanent, federally funded housing in the United States. His 1933 New Deal program, the National Industrial Recovery Act, directed the Public Works Administration to undertake the “construction, reconstruction, alteration, or repair under public regulation or control of low-cost housing and slum-clearance projects…” Liberal program.

Harry Truman’s Fair Deal dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in public and private housing with the Housing Act of 1949. Liberal program.

All the discontent with “Urban Renewal” led to Lyndon Johnson’s Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965. Liberal program.

Over those years the rules morphed from allowing only employed families and banning addicts to, in many cases, banning employed families and recruiting addicts. Poor, but maybe not so deserving. Still, the ways of keeping the poor, poor, do match the liberal mantra:

  • Each resident is exactly the same as everyone else.
  • Meals are provided free, along with exercise equipment, library services, television, and more.
  • Free healthcare is to be available on site.
  • Weapons are forbidden even for self-defense.

Now that I’ve done my Liberal pounding for the day, it is worth noting that the Conservative Banker approach to public housing is simpler: “indenture ’em with a mortgage.”

Join us next week when we wonder why under Obamacare (“Free healthcare is to be available to everyone”), a Key West family with insurance received two denial letters this past week for their 2-year old son’s Lymphoma treatment.

 

Bell’s Blues: Phone Home

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“What the intelligence community is doing,” Mr. Obama told the crowd at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, “is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.”

And I say it’s about time!

The Guardian broke the news on D-Day that the National Security Agency is collecting your phone records and those of millions of other Verizon customers. The order requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

This came on the heels of the demands for phone records from the AP and Fox News. The blogosphere erupted. The pundits erupted. The ACLU erupted. Fox News went ballistic.

We all need a calming breath.

I wrote about the problem back in 1997 but I knew about it in the 1970s. Everyone in New Jersey did then.

In New Jersey, Ma Bell charged “message units” for local calls. Here in New England, they changed the name to “measured service.” In phone company parlance, either name counts each instant of local phone use. Then they bill us.

Who counts those minutes? The electric company puts their meters where we can see them. When I pump gasoline into my car, the readout tells me how much in thousandths of gallons. I’ve always wondered why I need that kind of precision.

The phone companies have always hidden the counters.

It’s worse now.

According to the Pew Research Center, “91% of the adult population now owns some kind of cell phone … [and] 56% of all American adults are now smartphone adopters.”

Cell phones pay by the minute. Data users pay by the mini-bit.

Are you on a 300-minute plan? Maybe a 1,700-minute family plan?

Who counts how many minutes you use or how long the movie was? You? I didn’t think so.

All that data is available under FOIA. And that is the basis for a really really good lawsuit against these phone companies.

“Nobody’s spying on you,” Mr. Obama said, “we’re just monitoring your phone usage.”

Thank goodness for that. After all, it takes a crook to catch a crook.