Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Say Cheese

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A short collection of whine.

I needed to replace my clock radio because the buttons have stopped working. The radio plays, the clock tells time, and the alarms sound at the appointed hour but the snooze and the alarm set and the time set buttons all do no more than make satisfying mechanical clicks. They don’t change or set anything.

For Sale: good clock radio for someone on a rigidly fixed schedule who likes to listen to 94.3 FM. Click the Paypal button. ==>

The most amazing online store offered an RCA RC40R Dual Wake Clock Radio with Large Green LED Display by RCA with all the features I want:

Product Features

  • Auto time set for seven different time zones, six more than I live in.
  • SmartSnooze converts all top buttons as snooze button when alarm has been activated to confuse me when I want to turn the radio back on.
  • Dual wake features two different alarm settings for two different users: radio or buzzer and turns off one when the other activates.
  • Programmable snooze; Programmable sleep
  • Graduwake ramp-up alarm makes waking from a deep sleep easier and annoys the neighbors until you do.
  • AM/FM clock radio with a large LED 1.4″ display for clear viewing
  • Graduwake Ramp-up alarm eases your awakening
  • Programmable Sleep feature plays the radio for up to 2 hours before automatically turning off the radio, allowing you to gently fall asleep to music while your neighbors enjoy techno.
  • Programmable snooze feature turns off the alarm or radio for an extra 9 minutes of sleep or for 1-30 minutes

35 customer reviews gave it 3.4 out of 5 stars. Not bad for $19.99. Did I mention it’s an RCA? And that it has a Graduwake ramp-up alarm?

I was about to click the Buy Now button when the most amazing online store piped up that

There is a newer model of this item:

The RCA RC141 Dual Wake Clock Radio costs just $20.89 and is also In Stock.

Product Features

  • Automatic time set
  • Large 1.4-inch LED display
  • FM radio with digital frequency readout
  • SmartSnooze – multi-button snooze activation
  • Wake to radio or alarm

I’ve seen this marketing technique before in the ice cream wars put less of the juicy stuff in the tub and charge more for it. And the airlines deciding to charge for the overhead compartment space where babies could previously sleep free. Now we’re going to suffer with squalling babies down in the rows with the rest of us.

The optometrist ordered me a new set of specs on my VSP vision plan. It’s a lousy plan but, as he says, “it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”glassesThe new replacement glasses arrived a few days after I left so Anne had to mail them to me. They look nice. They don’t look through nice, though.

The optometrist had to send the first set he received back to the vision plan to correct an unspecified error. I don’t know what was wrong with the originals but I do hope the replacements have someone else’s prescription because I can’t see through them. Either the new Rx was ground incorrectly, the pupillary distance is wrong, or the optometrist got the wrong numbers from the refraction.

I’m wearing last year’s glasses as I write this and hoping that the Aviator sunglasses I ordered at the same time are correct. They should be in the mail any day now.

Speaking of shipments, !@#$%^ Comcast has done it again.I spent more than half an hour on the phone with !@#$%^ Comcast because I got back here to find no cable TV. We had a little power outage. Not unusual. Both cable boxes dropped out. I hope that’s unusual. One required reset from their end, necessitating a call all by itself. One would not power back on, necessitating a replacement.

There’s no excuse for that. I told the customer service rep (she offered to send a tech out but said it would cost me $30 to FIX THEIR EQUIPMENT) that I’d better not have to call them every time the power goes out. She didn’t care.

Comcast ShipmentShe ordered one shipped. It didn’t come overnight so I was out of service but it did get here. In two boxes. Two very large boxes.

I don’t have a DVR in South Puffin so to “time shift” requires setting up both the VCR and tuning the newly replaced digital box. For a reason I don’t understand I got the Special Audio Program on both Criminal Minds and CSI. The voiceover kept saying this was for blind peeps and I could turn it off except there is no SAP setting on the recorder I used and I don’t get SAP from any live broadcast, either from Dish or Cable on the TV. Both VCRs played it back on the tape though.

I’m thinking it was !@#$%^ Comcast. Good I didn’t order the special X-Ray vision glasses they were advertising, too.

Literature?

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“Little men are covering my street with political ‘literature’,” Liz Arden complained this morning.

I’m maybe the wrong writer to tackle this. After all, my high school English teacher made us memorize John Donne’s birth date and Stevens Institute of Technology didn’t even know how to spell the word in the 70s.

Miss Spocketpump, the high school English teacher whose name I have changed to protect myself, taught a “Survey Course in English Literature” for us kids in college prep. I don’t remember much from that course other than a dense textbook with reams of writings by the greats of history. When she told me I would fail the final exam, I did something unparalleled in my academic history before or since. I anticipated how she could structure a test that would trip me. Then I memorized exactly what I needed to beat the test. It was half the grade.

quarryI spent all day on the Sunday before the exam at the Quarry, our “swimming hole,” reading and rereading the quarter-page biographies of more than 100 writers included in that tome. I knew Donne’s birthday (sometime between January 24 and June 19, 1572). I could tell you who Robert Browning married and when Tennyson died. I knew how much Dickens earned per word. But I had no Great Expectations stored about Morte D’Arthur or any words of metaphysical poetry.

Not a great introduction to literature or literary pursuits, I’m thinking.

“Little men are covering my street with political ‘literature’,” Ms. Arden had said. “Why can’t they just call it spam?”

Literature has a much broader definition than I remembered:

Literature (from Latin litterae (plural); letter) is the art of written work, and is not confined to published sources (although, under some circumstances, unpublished sources can also be exempt). The word literature literally means “acquaintance with letters” and the pars pro toto term “letters” is sometimes used to signify “literature,” as in the figures of speech “arts and letters” and “man of letters.” The four major classifications of literature are poetry, prose, fiction, and non-fiction.

The art of written work. Art. That’s more what we mechanics think of as literature. The O.E.D. points us to written works with “superior or lasting artistic merit.” Expression and form, topics of universal interest, and some degree of permanence are essential to my definition and to Ms. Arden’s.

booksBut there is more. We allow the writings of a country or on a particular subject in the broad category of literature. It can be English or scientific or music or it can concern a group of items such as automobiles.

When my mom earned her B.A.-English, she read literature from Shakespear to Saroyan. She used the word properly.

When your doctor says he’ll “consult the literature” to determine if your symptoms show you have sarcoidosis (They do. Trust me on that.), he uses the word properly.

When I need to know the allowable deflection in a frimjamb or how to hardwire a network conniption, I “consult the literature.” OK, I Google™ but the results are the same. And I used the word properly.

The four major classifications of literature are poetry, prose, fiction, and non-fiction. Both Homer and Herodotus explicitly excluded spam, the fifth element in the written classes, from the list. After all, there may be considerable art in selling a sexual aid by email or a candidate by door hanger, but literature it ain’t.

Are Republicans Really Anti-Science?

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In Mother Jones, Kevin Drum takes on Chris Mooney’s stance In The Republican Brain. The question both writers pose is “Who has been anti-science, and why?”

I know some people who are anti-science but they seem to come from all over the political spectrum. In fact, I know more liberals who support the false god of political science than conservatives who denounce the real thing. And that is the crux of the problem.

When Buster Door said to me, “You’re anti-science” he and his friends are mostly saying “You’re against what I oh-so-strongly believe.” They have no rigorous proof to back up either the claim or what they believe. NPR’s Ira Flatow who “barely grasped chemistry” is a good example of that.

“The science of climate change is fixed,” he says regularly on his weekly radio show, Science Friday. “Why can’t people just accept that [man causes it] and move on?”

I don’t think anyone would argue for a static climate. I don’t understand how anyone who has ever seen a 5-day weather forecast could argue that we know enough about climate to “fix the science” in Mr. Flatow’s favorite concrete.

Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time, “A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.”

The theory of anthropogenic climate change describes a smaller-and-smaller class of observations on the basis of a model that contains an increasing number of arbitrary elements. Many proponents ignore historically larger climate swings that do not fit the theory. Many proponents ignore solar influence that does not fit the theory. Many proponents ignore the inconvenient truth that new temperature data shows the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years which does not fit the theory.

Mr. Drum makes some good points but he overlooks the most obvious when he writes, “Doubt about climate change is obviously motivated by a dislike of the business regulation that would be necessary if we took climate change seriously…”

I just can’t see that.

I see that doubting anthropogenic climate change means we understand how science works.

And I see the political scientists of anthropogenic global weirding as worshipers of Ptolemy.

Pretty bright guy, our Ptolemy. His Harmonics defined music theory and the mathematics of music. His Geographia not only compiled world geography in the Roman Empire, but also used coordinates and established latitudes and longitudes. But he also believed the Earth was the center of the Universe. It took 1500 years before Copernicus could dispel that.

I know these pieces are always All About Me, but I also know I am not the center of the Universe.

If it takes us another 1500 years to understand that bankrupting ourselves on political science so we have nothing left to adapt to the looming colder or hotter lands and seas, we have indeed met the enemy.

He is us.

Everything I Know

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Everything I know about history, I learned from Thomas B. Costain.

That would truly annoy Frank Wright, the exceptional high school history teacher from whom I also learned a lot. I tell the Costain story often. It is mostly the truth.

Canadian journalist and editor Thomas B. Costain published his first best-selling historical novel, For My Great Folly, at the age of 57. He had toiled in the writing trenches for most of his working life before Folly. Mr. Costain’s fiction relied so heavily on historic events that one reviewer said “it was hard to tell where history leaves off and apocrypha begins.” Mr. Costain made the story of Joseph of Arimathea and the lowly Basil of Antioch come alive for millions of Americans, including me. The Silver Chalice may have been the first historical novel I ever read.

I had read Chalice, the Tontine, Below the Salt, and the Last Plantagenets before leaving for college. My mom, a Swarthmore alum, also knew American writer James A. Michener and introduced me to his work as well.

Mr. Michener penned some of the best known sagas in literature, novels that spanned the lives of uncounted generations in exotic or previously under reported locales. He was known for his meticulous research which let him work the entire history of each region into his stories. I can almost say I know more about the Chesapeake Bay from reading Mr. Michener’s Chesapeake than from growing on the water there.

The Italian government lauded biographical novelist Irving Stone for the way he highlighted Italian history in the Agony and the Ecstasy, the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

So.

How do we separate fact from fiction when our favorite novelists leaven their rising stories with actual history in search of a truth? Or in search of a good story?

It is hard, after reading Costain, not to mistake the Grail story as truth. It is hard, after reading Michener, not to mistake the many generations of the Buk, Bukowski, and Lubonski families as real.

Fast forward.

Jon Stewart is a brilliant satirist. Pew Research Center’s search for the most admired American journalist has Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, at Number 4, tied with actual news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS, and Anderson Cooper of CNN. Dan Rather? OK, it was a 2007 poll. The Daily Show does have pieces of substantive news but satire can’t handle the whole truth and Mr. Stewart has repeatedly insisted that he is only a comedian on a fake news show.

Monologist Mike Daisey played the Lane Series at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont, this weekend. His The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs has caused a national foofah over what is and what isn’t true in his monologue about Apple and its manufacturing practices in China. In January, NPR’s This American Life and its host, Ira Glass, published a critical 39-minute story that detailed the appalling Chinese iPhone plants, a program adapted from Mr. Daisey’s theatrical monologue.

Last weekend, Mr. Glass retracted the story.

The most admired reporter of our times, Edward R. Murrow said, “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.” From Costain to Michener to Stewart to Daisey to Survivor we’re blurring the line between truth and fiction.

We in the news business must be truthful. But most of all, we must remember that entertainment has no such need.

“Get the facts, Dick,” Frank Wright would tell me. “It’s not the truth without the facts.”

Of course, I’m not sure Mr. Wright ever watched “reality TV.”

A Crane Point Zip Line?

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At first glance this is a perfect project! 1.1 million dollars of Other People’s Money! Tourists screaming down a wire behind the galloping spiders and raccoons! 21 new full time jobs!

But wait. There’s more.

“A zip-line (also known as a flying fox, foofie slide, zip wire, aerial runway, aerial ropeslide, death slide, or tyrolean crossing) consists of a pulley suspended on a cable mounted on an incline… Zip-lines come in many forms, most often used as a means of entertainment. Longer and higher rides are often used as a means of accessing remote areas, such as a rainforest canopy. Zip-line tours are becoming popular vacation activities, found at outdoor adventure camps or upscale resorts…” 1 

The Florida Keys Land Trust’s mission is to save the tropical woodlands called “hardwood hammocks” in the Florida Keys. The Trust purchased 63 acres at Crane Point to save the unique homestead from development, about five years after we moved to the Keys. I don’t think the two events were related. The tropical forest there is home to rare and endangered species, a series of unique archaeological and historical finds, as well as a large thatch palm hammock, a hardwood hammock, a mangrove forest, tidal lagoons, wetland ponds, and the associated animal life.

Unfortunately, money is tight and conservation doesn’t grow on trees.

Crane PointThe Crane Point board wants to install six zip lines starting at the Cracker House and passing over the historic Adderley House and the Crane family’s 1959 home. Riders would zing over the butterfly meadows, the mangroves, and the Gulf of Mexico.

The Board asked the City of Marathon for a $735,000 state Community Development Block Grant and an additional $85,000 Tourist Development Council grant from the County.

Crane Point Supports the Entire EcosystemThe Monroe County Commission last week found a “significant cost discrepancy and heard residents’ concerns” so they tabled the Tourist Development Council grant.

I’m in the “Let’s not zip over the Hammock” category but I’m also in the “Let’s Bring in Some More Visitor Dollars” category.

I reckon that zip lines do indeed fall outside the Crane Point mission of preserving one little sparkling piece of the natural Keys. And there is that nagging little question of scaring the spiders.

If Crane Point wants zip lines, let’s install them over to Survivor Island instead. We could start from 20th Street (which ends at the now defunct Boot Key bridge) or from Sombrero Country Club. Maybe both, to go downhill out to Boot Key from 20th Street, then back to the golf course. I could see zip lines criss-crossing Boot Key itself and then making the long run up the verdant length of the golf course to cross the Overseas Highway and terminate at the Crane Point parking lot. I volunteer to take the first ride!

Let the Land and Sea Trust install and run the thing as a profit center for Crane Point.

We’ll just need to be careful of the dangly bits going over Boot Key Harbor.

See, a saltwater crocodile jumped a Key Largo dock to snatch a 65-pound dog named Roxie last week. The owners heard Roxie bark once. Then they heard a splash. Witnesses who included Florida FWCC officers, estimated the saltwater croc to be at least 10 feet long. It sprang at least four feet out of the water to snatch the mutt headfirst off the seawall.

Oops.