Personal Musings category archive

When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, the typical house had few clocks. There was the kitchen clock, the living room mantle clock, and a bedroom alarm clock or two. Grown-ups usually had watches.

I counted the clocks in the kitchen last night. There is one on the wall, one on the stove, one on the coffee-maker, and one on the microwave; if we had a mixmaster, I’m sure that, these days, there would be one on the damn mixmaster. I’m mildly surprised there’s not one on the slotted spoon.

In the living room, there is one on the cable box and one on the weather gadget. This does not include the clocks on the three computers (his and hers personal laptops and my friend’s work laptop for the VPN to her office computer).

I no longer wear a watch, as there is a clock on the cellphone in my pocket (I sometimes carry the pocketwatch my mother gave me for high school graduation when I want to be pretentious formal, but that’s another thing).

Once not all that long ago, when I was on a gig to design some training materials, several of us were looking to schedule a demonstration so I could collect some information. When we went to set a time for the demo, all three of us pulled cellphones from our pockets to check the time. Not one of us wore a watch.

Time is no longer a river. It’s a flood.

We have too damn many clocks.

Still under 300k.

Jobless claims decreased by 4,000 to 294,000 in the week ended Jan. 3, the Labor Department said today in Washington.

(snip)

The four-week average of claims, a less-volatile measure than the weekly figure, declined to 290,500 from 290,750 the week before.

The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits climbed by 101,000 to 2.45 million in the week ended Dec. 27. The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits held at 1.8 percent. These data are reported with a one-week lag.

In other news, Bloomberg’s experts were on target. I think I’ll run out and buy that lottery ticket . . . .

The factors of “9” are “factorials.” Are the factors of “4” “tutorials”?

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Rockers (as opposed to “rock-n-rollers”) should not try to do Christmas songs. Too much back-beat.

Based on what I saw at Toys R Us, board games are going the way of T. Rex.

Will the time come when industrial designers realize that users would like control buttons and knobs that can be read without a flashlight? Eight-point light grey letters on black doesn’t cut it.

Also, get off my lawn.

In the Charlie Brown comic in today’s local rag, Snoopy is trying to get into the Winter Olympics in Grenoble. They took place in 1968.

Please make it stop.

Don’t go shopping.

Uber and Lyft are nothing more than gypsy cabs with a front office.

Of all the mindless fads–pet rocks, chia pets, low-profile tires–the one that most beggars the imagination is the sudden fascination with kale.

If “Reality Television” represents reality, I needs me some LS and D.

Anyone want to start a pool on when Republicans will attempt to impeach President Obama for the high crime and misdemeanor of being Not White*?

Addendum:

Roy Edroso anticipates the random words.

____________________

*Regardless of whatever random words they use, that is at what they take offense.

Really, what’s the point*? The races are finished, done, over with. All we are waiting for is the accounting.

I’ll read about the returns in tomorrow’s local rag. The results likely won’t change much from now to then.

_______________

*Maybe beer is the point. I don’t drink beer.

Any Scotch is better than every anything else.

If the ads for adult diapers flooding my telly vision are any indication, America is is drowning in an epidemic of incontinence.

It must be a real pis–oh, never mind.

All seriousness aside, assuming that Republican diaper fetishists have not taken over my telly vision, those ads are a clear attempt to create a market where none exists.

Aside:

The new make-up that the cosmetic companies are pushing is even worse and an even more transparent attempt to create a market where none exists. Give me a diaper over blood-red vampire lipstick any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

The “tablet-fication” of websites is a plague and a curse.

Dumbed down becomes SOP, the lowest common denominator rules, and Buzzfeeders rule the world.

Pah!

Why do some campaign types think that I would be interested in emails “From: [somebody]’s iPhone”?

It’s not cute. It’s not clever. It’s not even mildly amusing.

It’s stupid and silly.

How many folks fall for the shysters who try to sell them subscription renewals for publications to which they do not subscribe?

I got one today to renew my subscription to a newspaper that is not my local rag. (It’s the local rag for folks who live on the other side of the James.) It’s good rag, but it’s not my rag, and I’m not ponying up $360+ for it.

In There’s a House in the Land (Where a Band Can Take a Stand), Shaun Mullen revisits the 1970s, that armpit of a decade that gave us leisure suits, adjustable rate mortgages, and, ultimately, Ronald Reagan. He tells of his time living at a group home (no, not that kind of group home–a home in which a group of persons drawn together by coincidence and the need for a place to live resided) on a farm in southeastern Pennsylvania The names and places have been changed to protect the innocent, but the events come alive in this memoir.

The book opens with Shaun’s arrival at the farm and closes with his departure. Other than that, it is in no way chronological, but, rather, thematic, focusing on the persons who lived at and visited the farm and the events they shaped and which shaped them. Shaun brings them to life, drawing you into their lives in this episodic narrative.

Were you to try to outline the book in a “topic outline” (remember topic outlines?), it would appear to ramble. It winds from gardens to goats, from music to musings, from parties to pub crawls. The lack of chronology leads to a sense of timelessness, as if the farm were suspended, like Brigadoon, in its own time and place.

The memories, though, are not all happy and the people are not all nice. There is death and injury and sadness, as comes to all lives, all told matter-of-factly and humanely.

Despite its generally light-hearted tone, the book is tinged with darkness. It is peopled with Viet Nam veterans recovering from that pointless, stupid war; wounded souls fleeing broken homes or relationships, transients passing through looking for their own healing spot. Some of them find it; some don’t. All become real.

Read the book.

Thanks to YouTube’s new practice of force-feeding advertisements, I have realized that I will never ever do business of any sort with “Mass Mutual,” nor wear “Android Wear.”