WooOOOOooooOOOoo.

I gave up my office upstairs, and in return got a wireless mouse that I don't use. 

It was a sensible decision. I almost never have online meetings or business calls; I have never seen the faces nor heard the voices of most of the people I work for. It's all e-mail, and that suits me. But my wife has constant online meetings and calls, and the distraction of baby puppy Izzy was too dangerous. She could very easily be on an important call that suddenly turned into a Korean-expert-on-the-Beeb situation, our dog rushing in to play, me (unshowered) flailing in after him and tripping on something.

It made sense to trade offices with her. Hers was downstairs, where the dining room would be if we had a dining room, and mine was directly above it in the spare bedroom. Izzy is not allowed upstairs during business hours, and a gate on the stairs enforces the rule. So, we made the swap. 

I had to leave a lot of stuff upstairs -- my books, my posters, my framed photos of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and, oh, some family members -- and in exchange she left her old wireless mouse. The kind where you plug a USB nub into the computer and the mouse sends it the signal. 

Well, I tried it, and I didn't much like it. BUT I had an idea for a prank. 

First: Sneak upstairs and stick the nub in her computer (and no, that's not a euphemism). She has a Mac, so all the USB ports are in the back where they are not visible. Next: Remove her mouse's nub. Third: Change her computer's wallpaper to a Ouija board.  

Then I wait. When she sits down at her computer, I start moving the mouse she left me around on the ceiling, hoping it will point to various things on the board. It would be great if I could spell out something, like R-U-N or G-E-T-O-U-T or M-A-K-E-M-E-A-S-A-M-M-I-C-H, but there's no way I could do that, even if I sneaked a spy camera into the room so I could see what I was doing. I'd have to be happy with commandeering the pointer and making it look like a specter was trying to get her attention.

Thing is, I don't even know if the signal from the mouse can penetrate the ceiling. I'd need a second pair of eyes to check. Unfortunately there's no accomplice handy to help, except Izzy, and he's A) not allowed upstairs during the day, B) a bad liar, and C) a dog. My prank will have to wait until I get some flunkies to help. 

Maybe I'll put an ad on Craigslist: Henchmen Wanted. No Pay, Just Laughs. Worked for the Joker!

Choco Dotsties!

I don't want you to think I get all my Many Deep and Varied Thoughts from the New York Post. But it an interesting paper. Sometimes they have the best exposés, of course, and are willing to publish stories that the rest of the media would rather bury. Sometimes, though, they're just dumb. 

As we barrel down the chute to the various candy seasons of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, the paper thought it was time to shock its readers with a bit of information that has always been readily available online and isn't all that interesting. Brace yourself: 

M&M’s fans discover meaning behind the chocolate’s name

And here's the bombshell:

The two ‘M’s in the name actually represent Forrest E. Mars Sr. – the founder of Mars – and Bruce Murrie, the son of Hershey Chocolate’s president William F. R. Murrie.

Now, to be fair, this article was originally published in Australia by another Rupert Murdoch outlet. M&M's is the little candy that started in the United States and spread all over the world, and the story of how it was invented may be less familiar to our friends down under. 

In a nutshell, or in a candy shell as it were, per Wikipedia:

Forrest Mars Sr., son of the Mars Company founder, Frank C. Mars, copied the idea for the candy in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War when he saw soldiers eating British-made Smarties, chocolate pellets with a colored shell of what confectioners call hard panning (essentially hardened sugar syrup) surrounding the outside, preventing the sweets (candies) from melting. Mars received a patent for his own process on March 3, 1941. Production began in 1941 in a factory located at 285 Badger Avenue in Clinton Hill, Newark, New Jersey. When the company was founded it was M&M Limited. The two 'M's represent the names of Forrest E. Mars Sr., the founder of Newark Company, and Bruce Murrie, son of Hershey Chocolate's president William F. R. Murrie, who had a 20 percent share in the product.

I got to thinking about this story, about the famous names connected to candy, namely Hershey and Mars. Both became famous because the inventors put their names on their popular chocolate bars. You didn't ask the candy butcher for a slender American-style milk chocolate bar; you asked for a Hershey bar. Back then, companies were named after their founders, men who wanted fame for a successful venture, but also were proud to back their products for quality. If you put your name on something and it sucked, people knew whom to blame. Further, putting your name on a product helped protect it -- someone could steal the formula for the Mars bar, but they wouldn't steal the name of its inventor.

Interestingly, that doesn't happen with a lot of confections now. Now, for ease of soliciting a trademark and for consumer memorization, companies tend to name their products something weird that will indicate in a way what it is. For example, Smash Mallow, which I sampled here in 2018. You know it's going to be a mashup by the name, and that it's going to be marshmallow. And it's a phrase that didn't exist before, so that makes it easier to obtain trademark. If M&M's were invented now, they might be called Choco Dotsties!

The exception to this rule is snacks. Those carry the inventors' names. The Great Lileks mentioned these "boo-teek" snacks the other day on the Bleat, "Amanda's Kettle-Baked Chips or Monica's Pita Fragments, the ones that always have a story about someone who had an idea and a passion".

This seems to have started with Annie Withey, who founded Annie's Homegrown in 1989. Her products became quite popular -- so much so that General Mills bought the company for $820 million in 2014. Now everybody wants to come up with a snack idea that will get popular traction, get the attention of a food conglomerate, and cash out. 

I know I do. If I can just perfect my recipe for Frederick's Chocolate Lima Bean Snack Surprise, I can retire, I just know it! Watch for it in your local supermarket. 

Meanwhile, I wonder if the Mars company is ready for a big takeover. This photo also ran in the Post: 

Sure, Elon may have been talking about the planet Mars. Or maybe he's in the mood to snap up some chocolatey goodness....

Crypts and Cryptos: Or, Death and Taxes.

Greetings, friends! It is I, Fred Key, your friendly neighborhood cryptocurrency tycoon, with another exciting update about Fredcoin, the Crypto for the Smart Set!

I know what's concerning you, my clients and prospective clients. I always have my ear to the ground. I was taught early on that keeping your ear to the ground means money. And sure enough, I got up and there was a nickel stuck in my ear. 

This is a nickel that has seen things.

But that's not important. The thing is, you're worried about taxes on your cryptocurrency earnings. And you have reason to be. As reported on Monday in the New York Post, the only American newspaper with any integrity, the Internal Revenue Service is stepping up efforts to collect earnings on cryptos:  

The Internal Revenue Service is going to court to get its hands on cryptocurrency transaction records as part of its continuing efforts to collect more taxes from Americans who fail to report profits from digital coin trades.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced that they had successfully obtained a court order allowing the IRS to obtain information from M.Y. Safra Bank about American taxpayers who did not disclose crypto-related income.

Your first instinct may be to feel alarmed. Or perhaps to take a deep breath and let the calmness slide over you. Or to stick your head in a bucket of sand. I say thee Nay! None of these are necessary. I can assure you that none of this will affect Fredcoin dealers and traders this year.

"Why Fred," you ask, "how can you possibly know this? Our institutions have gone insane, prosecuting people for political thought and freeing people for violent action. Who knows what the IRS will do?"

You see, friend, there's a magic word in that story I quoted that should put your mind at ease. And that word is: profits. Fredcoin customers haven't had to worry about any profits! In fact, that other word, income, is further assurance that there is "no problemo," as they've had none of that stuff either. See? As they say, Mo' money, mo' problems; no' money, no' problems!

So just take it easy and put more of your money in Fredcoin, where the IRS won't have any reason to look. 

Fredcoin! It's the ultimate tax shelter!

Those who can do, can't teach.

The old George Bernard Shaw line is "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." More cranky Shavian wisdom, dumping his usual load of, uh, Shaw on the heads on lesser humans. 

Nevertheless, the fact that that line survives in common wisdom while many of his other pithy remarks do not shows there's some truth to it. Actors who are rolling in offers to perform don't have time to teach acting classes, but others who struggle do, and need the money. That's just one example, and I hope it isn't actually universally applicable. Do you want a brain surgeon who was educated entirely by people incapable of doing brain surgery? Do we want mathematicians on space programs who have been taught by those who can't calculate? 

Maybe it only applies to the arts. And, I'll say other skilled work, like sports. But there is a flip side, as the title of this blog entry makes clear -- many who can do actually can't teach. 

Aaron Judge may be challenging Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, but the Bambino is still the greatest home run hitter who ever lived; if he played entirely in the live-ball era with today's relatively dinky ballparks he'd have probably hit a thousand dingers. But could he teach someone to hit?

Apparently not, and the baseball people knew it. Ruth had hoped he would be selected as a manager for the Yankees, but he only got to be a first-base coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers. And that didn't go too well, according to the site DodgerBlue:  

Ruth made his coaching debut with a doubleheader but his overall time with the Dodgers was largely unassuming. Anecdotes detail Ruth’s interest in relaying signs as non-existent. He was ejected from an August game due to arguing a call with a first-base umpire.

     Ruth’s arrival did improve attendance but the team’s play largely remained the same. They went 47-49 after he joined the coaching staff and finished 11 games below .500. Brooklyn went 16-13 in July, which was just one of two winning months that season.

What about Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, the last man to hit over .400? He was a proud and clever man, a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea. Surely he had some wisdom to impart that would make his team better. 

Nope. Williams's stint as manager of the Senators/Rangers from 1969 to 1972 left him with a record of 273-364, and that was it for his managing career. 

How about the brilliant-hitting Cardinal, Stan the Man Musial? He had some sophisticated advice for the aspiring hitter: "You wait for a strike, then you knock the shit out of it." 

So basically we can see that not everyone is cut out to impart practical knowledge to the next generation. The reason I was thinking about this was that my dad was like that. He could fix anything, but he was incapable of teaching anything. It wasn't his fault. Good teachers really are a gift in any field, and not everyone has the knack. 

I hate the way our nation is expected to slaver over professional educators as a class. Forget it. As we've been discovering, a lot of them suck at teaching (we may have remembered that from our own schooling) and some should not be allowed near children. But if you or your kids had a truly good teacher, be grateful for that. Knowledge alone isn't enough, and theory probably does nothing but get in the way. You have to have the knack. 

Sorry!

I was having trouble with Google Docs, because most people have trouble with Google Docs unless they spend a lot of time using Google Docs, but I have avoided that because I hate Google Docs. Nevertheless, it is sometimes the price I pay for working from home. Thing is, I thought I had screwed something up for a client because of my inexperience, and I apologized. The client asked me why I was apologizing, since I had done nothing wrong. 

I explained that I had just passed a big wedding anniversary, an if I had a secret to being a good husband it would be: Apologize first and ask questions later. 

"Just assume I'm sorry and then tell me what I did!"

There have been times when I've taken a different approach. Early on in our marriage, I usually thought: Well, if it was something important, I'm sure she'll tell me. This only prolongs the agony, at least for me, because she could fume a lot longer than I could ignore. She's of Irish descent, you know, and they can hold a grudge five hundred years after they're dead. 

Later, when I got more used to the things that really triggered this fury, I might think: I know what I did wrong but I feel embarrassed enough without rehashing it, so if I act contrite maybe it will go away. Oh, no, brother -- another rookie mistake. They never forget. They may forgive, but they never forget. (I'm not sure if I'm talking about the Irish or wives here, but it probably applies to both.)

My next tactic, going on the offensive ("What did I do wrong NOW?"), gets it out in the open, but not in a constructive way. It takes much longer for the whole situation to find resolution when you go from 0 to shouting in five seconds.

In the end, I have found that when I encounter The Scowl or the Wall of Cold, it's best to brace myself for whatever and ask what the problem is. Most of the time it's actually not me, but if I don't crack the ice I'll have to wait for the explosion. 

On the other side of the coin, when my wife does something that makes me sore, I usually just suck it up and refuse to talk about it. Never complain, never explain, right? Unless it's a real doozy, in which case I may go do something constructive, like clean up the cellar, in the LOUDEST WAY POSSIBLE.

Maybe my real secret to marriage is that both parties have to be able to put up with each other's BS. It takes two to tango, as they used to say, and everyone is full of BS sometimes. But if one side won't tango, there's not much that can be done. 

Ha.

Several of my friends are devotees of the dad joke, the sometimes-clever pun or other play on words that makes some people happy. Other people will look at you like this:

As does my wife. 

Poor thing: With no children within target range at the present time, she has to absorb the brunt of my dad jokes. And I am constantly tempted to fire them off, even when I know she's going to get mad. Not kidding -- she has run upstairs in disgust, cursing the day I ever thought I was funny. I don't recall what the joke was; it wasn't the classic about the agriculturist who is outstanding in his field, nor the golfer's favorite socks that got a hole in one. I'm sure it was a groaner, but still -- just because she was having a serious conversation doesn't mean she should be mad at attempts to lighten the mood. Sheesh.

And don't try to tell me people don't love dad jokes. The Internet is a cornucopia of dad jokes these days, and guys like my friend Wink (not his real name) memorizes them to spring on his children. I'm talking beauties like these: 

And my personal all-time favorite:

On Instagram there are many purveyors of dad jokes, but my favorite is FitDadCEO. He sets up his jokes as something he asked his son, who responds with a bad joke -- and is topped by a worse dad joke. (I've tried to link to a good one.)

PLWoodstock, who frequently comments on this site, is a walking library of bad jokes. I wonder if he maintains a secret presence online as a writer of dad jokes under another handle, or if just steals them like I do. 

Either way, all of us dad jokesters can agree on one thing -- our audience. 

But I'm afraid if I keep this up, I'll be like the calendar -- my days will be numbered. 

Technicalities.

"Well, in that case, dude, your store rests on a foundation of LIES!"

 

Fall, and I can't get up.

So autumn pulled in yesterday and did doughnuts on the lawn, or maybe that was dog Izzy. It crashed the last of summer's party at nine last night, and this morning the temperature was in the forties. The torch has been passed. The equinox has been equinoxed.  

In other words, Fall has Fell, and I'm next. 

The problem is not autumn, of course, but that it is followed by winter, and that's where most of the trouble starts. Regular readers -- however irregular they may be in other ways -- know that I have a bad back and a tendency to collect concussions, and it's all made me down on winter. Worst of all, it's sucked a lot of joy out of autumn, which was always my favorite season. 

If that's not enough, Creeping Holiday Syndrome is beginning to overrun autumn entirely. I am intending to brave the shores of Walmart today, and I'll bet you I find Christmas decorations already on sale. They just can't help themselves. 

If you're in the neighborhood for the next six months, I'll be the guy with the Golden struggling to remain vertical through thick and thin. Those being: snow and ice. Stop and say hi, and give me a hand up if I've become spontaneously horizontal, will you? I thank you for your support. 

UPDATE: This morning.

Voting test.

Friend and pest Mr. Philbin asks (I'm paraphrasing), "Why did you post that screed yesterday about efforts to get morons to vote without providing a solution?"

Well, I suppose he's right -- we can't stop Rock the Vote from trying to help idiots to go vote, let alone Google. They have a right of speech and assembly, although they and others like them would be happy to deny those rights to those who oppose them.

Aside from are commonsense fraud-prevention measures, like voter ID and requiring states to maintain updated voter rolls (and other racist! stuff like that, I know), I would suggest an exceptionally modest citizenship test for anyone who wants to vote. It would require no more than the broadest knowledge that could be gained from watching the "America Rock" section of the classic children's education series Schoolhouse Rock!, which was targeted at children of grammar-school age. Each episode is three minutes long, and there are twelve altogether (expanded from the original nine), and they explain some of our history and the reason for the structure of the government outlined in the Constitution. 

All I want is a test that would show that the voter has the slightest grasp of what the country is all about. Multiple-choice questions include things like:

1) Which document makes us a "nation of laws," meaning we have no monarch who can do whatever he wants?

a) Monroe Doctrine

b) Gettysburg Address

c) The Constitution

d) Hardee's Menu

2) What are the three co-equal branches of government?

a) Active, Passive, Aggressive

b) Executive, Legislative, Judiciary

c) Commons, Lords, Crown

d) Rich, Poor, Middle

3) In what century did adult American women win the right to vote?

a) 21st

b) 20th

c) 19th

d) 12th

4) Which is one purpose for the Electoral College as a means of choosing a president? 

a) To allow the Judiciary a voice in government.

b) To steal elections.

c) To give New Hampshire the first presidential primary.

d) To give smaller states a better chance of expressing their needs to the nation.

5) Who was the author of the Declaration of Independence?

a) Thomas Jefferson

b) B.B. King

c) Abraham Lincoln

d) Betsy Ross

Anyone who can't answer these really has no business voting,

The problem with a lot of modern elections is that our current tribalism is shattering us the way it did at the Civil War, only it's not just along state lines. We have no sense that the nation itself is important; only a demand that we get what we want from it. 

If you want to get biological about it, the orbitofrontal cortex of our brains is where we store our relative values, and if we have no ingrained sense of the "cool" values, the "hot" ones will win every time. Such as:

Cool value                                   Hot value

I want to lose weight.                   I want that doughnut!

I want to save money.                  I want to SHOP!

I want to be sober.                        Bad day and time to get my DRINK ON!

I want a strong nation.                 I want government to FIX MY [fill in blank] NOW!

I want my rights protected.         I want government to FIX MY [fill in blank] NOW!

The cool values were always taught to children and young adults by mature society; that ship has not entirely sailed, but it's down the river and heading out to sea. And young people and others who don't know all that much show it in their voting. Plus, they're being told in school that America is a big lump of crap anyway, so why not just get what you want from it?

"America Rock" could help fix this, in just twelve three-minute lessons. Then voters who pass the test can vote legally for the rest of their lives. And maybe they'd think a little better about the sacrifices and character of their ancestors as well. 

Get out the dopes.

I see Google is getting into its usual act, trying to make it easier for people who are too dumb to vote to get out and vote. 

The company would deny that it's trying to get only one particular kind of voter -- Leftist -- just as it would deny that its search results skew toward liberal media sources on any topic. But we know. 

Leftists, who think they are smarter than us idiots, somehow always do things to try to get the least-informed people to notch a ballot, and do it as many times as possible. This has been going on since the big Democrat machines of the Boss Tweed era, but has been institutionalized since Bill Clinton's Motor Voter Act of 1993. The idea then was to latch on to dumdums who wouldn't cross the street to vote but had to go to the Motor Vehicles department in their state, and get them to register to vote. It was opposed at the time by Rightists, but not very strongly, because no one wants to say that people who couldn't care less about voting should be discouraged from doing so. 

Well, I'll say it. 

MTV got on the bandwagon back when its M stood for Music (I think now it stands for Moron). Back in 1990 the station promoted the Rock the Vote nonprofit to get know-nothings off the sofa and into the voting booths. It was nominally nonpartisan, but we all know the way dummies who think the government exists to rob from the rich and give to everyone else will vote -- "Robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul," as Kipling put it. Back then it was assumed that all the rich people were white-shoed Thurston Howell IIIs, who would be made to pony up so college students and dropouts alike could have a cornucopia of free stuff. 

Things look rather different now. The rich people are all into radical chic and the nation is a lot farther in debt -- and the welfare state has expanded far beyond the fever dreams of FDR. 

An uninformed -- or worse, misinformed -- population is not fit for representative government, and this was a key reason public education was accepted nationally. But now we find that public education is becoming a large source of misinformation for youth. Some things voters ought to know but don't include:

✅ How government spending and debt affects the value of money itself;

✅ How rich people hide their money to keep it safe from taxation in ways the middle class cannot do;

✅ How the middle class is the only thing that keeps serfdom at bay, by having the wherewithal to stand up for itself;

✅ How the rotten history of any other country on this earth compares to that of the United States;

✅ How bills really become laws in the current degraded state of Congress (see for example the monstrosity called Obamacare)*;

✅ How much harder life is for the ignorant;

✅ How stable marriage is the best defense against poverty for men and women;

✅ How education has been directed toward frivolous tribalism and away from important facts -- facts of life that continue to operate whether we are aware of them or not.

Unfortunately, the more our stupid citizens (and others), educated in terrible schools, get out there and vote, the more stupid government we are likely to have. The basics of civilized society are not that hard to master, and yet somehow people can get through graduate school and know nothing about them. Alas!

*For example, how Charles Rangel introduced a spending bill in the House (where all spending bills must originate) with the friendly and anodyne title of "Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009"; the bill got to the Senate where it was completely stripped of its title and all its innards, stuffed as full of pork and socialism as a Thanksgiving turkey, then reconciled with the House under its new monstrous form -- a Trojan House virus, if you will -- to pretend that the spending bill originated in the people's House as demanded by the Constitution. It should have been thrown out by the Supreme Court just for that. 

Anti-cooking tip.

I don't know if you've ever made a recipe using prosciutto crudo, but if you ever do, don't do the stupid thing I did. 

Ah, yes, that delightful Italianate baconesque smoked pig, razor-thin slices of which are often found wrapped around melon, topped on bruschetta, or infusing salty wonder into recipes like this one. If you've ever eaten it, you know it's the best thing to come out of Italy since Marconi. If you've ever prepared a dish with it, you might be able to guess what double-dumbass thing I did. 

So there I am, cooking away, the prosciutto sitting patiently in its packaging on the counter, waiting to be chopped and then make its big entrance into the pan. When there's a break in the action I peel open the airtight plastic, and -- thinking this was like ordinary bacon -- I take my sharp little paring knife and zip zap zup run a crisscross pattern over the ham, cutting through all the slices. 

And also the razor-thin plastic sheet that separates each slice. 

Now, instead of peeling each bit of porcine goodness off the plastic sheet by sheet, I have to peel each tiny square off a tiny square of plastic -- and with the numerous slices in a three-ounce pack, that means maybe a hundred tiny squares. And I have to work fast, before everything gets cold or wilted and the pasta turns into a solid lump. Prosciutto sticks to plastic like a bum on a guy who's buying, and I have very short fingernails, and this turns into a production quickly. I'd ask my wife for help, but this is a woman who won't eat fish because of the one-in-a-thousand shot of getting a fishbone, so I'm thinking if she knows she might get a little piece of plastic stuck in her throat, that's going to put a damper on dinner. So I peel, peel, peel, cursing myself for a fool like Mr. T at a Fool Convention. 

The thing is, this was far from the first time I've ever used prosciutto, and I was well aware of the plastic between the slices, but I forgot just long enough to make this boneheaded error. 

Somehow I manage to get all the plastic off the prosciutto and serve the dinner with no incident.

Then she mentions that the dish is very salty; maybe it would be better without the prosciutto. 

I hang my head. My work here is done. 

Izzy nuts?

Some dog-loving friends have asked me how Junior Varsity Dog Izzy is coping with the loss of his big fluffy pal Tralfaz. It's a good question. Dog behavior can seem pretty strange, especially when something important in their environment has changed. And Izzy's always been a little strange to begin with.

Izzy was named for Isaiah, my wife's favorite O.T. prophet (you may recall mine is Jonah), but the name Izzy had taken on other meanings. Such as: Izzy chewing the stairs again? Izzy gonna behave tonight? Izzy gonna be better when he's done teething? Izzy gonna drive us up the wall again?

As it turns out, the whole ordeal has in some sense helped him grow up. He seems to know that he's been promoted to Dog Of The House, and has taken on the duties of barking when someone comes to the door, guarding the hall while we have dinner, and watching the wildlife suspiciously.

These dudes are pretty sus.

 

On the other hand, Izzy has been more clingy than he had been. He wants to be with one of us all the time. He's been an affectionate fellow from the day we picked him, but he's now doing things like jumping in the bed and refusing to leave even to do his morning yard run (no worries, he's not using the bed as his toilet). If he can't be right next to us, he wants to be surrounded by our scent.

Weird dog behavior, in other words. 

Honestly, it seems weird to us, but is no doubt rational to them. Dogs don't just operate on a binary system; there's a lot going on in those hard little heads, and I am convinced everything is logical in some way to them even if it's unfathomable to us. 

So there are some odd things happening, but I do think he's adjusted well. He's just getting used to his promotion. Izzy is a very sweet boy, and he trusts us, and that is a great gift from any dog. 

Culture Sunday.

We here at Vitamin Fred like to think we are encouraging culture through our blog, and so this Sunday we're devoting it to the Arts. In fact, we're exposing you to some famous paintings. Whether you choose to expose yourself to them in turn is up to you.  

Emanuel Leutze, Columbus Explaining to the Queen That There 
Is Nothing Italians Will Not Cover in Cheese, 1843

Pablo Picasso, Chick with Screaming 
Hangover, 1937

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Dorothy Swears Off Dining Al Fresco, 1743

Mark Rothko, Big Sale on Black Paint at Sears, 1969

Joseph Wood, Francis Scott Key Scoffs at the
Idea He Is Related to Any Silly Bloggers, 1825

Tough day at pest control.

 

Midvale's world.

One of the most famous -- maybe the most famous -- of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons is the Midvale School for the Gifted. 

I must have seen this a thousand times and it's still funny. 

What's not funny is that we now live in Midvale's world. We live in an era in which our elites are stuffed with self-confidence but are demonstrably incompetent. They seem to think that all their problems can be solved if they just believe in themselves, and when they fail anyway, it was all the fault of those bastards on the other side, just as the Soviet Union blamed masses of saboteurs and hoarders when their miserable plans came to nothing. The idea that our elites know nothing but charge in like blundering clowns anyway never occurs to them. How could they fail? They always did so well in school!

As Nathanael Blake wrote in January: 

The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us.

You can say that again, brother. Also: 

This combination of arrogance, incompetence, and malice undermines the legitimacy of elite power. A prudent ruling class would be self-aware enough to realize this vulnerability. It would be wise for them to be less culturally aggressive, economically greedy, and politically domineering, but our elites lack the coherence and self-restraint to do so.

There's that word: Incompetence. Since the Kennedy Administration's "best and brightest" led us into a war in Vietnam that by structure and fear of World War III we could not win, our country has been led by dumbbells who have the utmost confidence in their mental superiority. It was bad enough in the sixties; later, the institutionalization of these morons in permanent government agencies made them completely unaccountable. They can perform like idiots, completely screw up their assignments, lie, lash out at the little people, break the law, deny everything when their policies ruin and kill people, and pay no price -- even be hailed as heroes by their companions in the inner circle. Nothing matters to them as long as they remain in the inner circle. 

C.S. Lewis learned about what he called the "inner ring" at boarding school and beyond. He knew how hard it was to be an outsider, but also the horrible and perilous temptation to be an insider. As he wrote: "Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things." He considered it one of the most deadly temptations: 

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.

But this is Midvale's world, where it's even worse, because not only are those in the inner circle flirting with damnation, but also their stupidity and entirely unearned confidence is killing the rest of us. 

We shouldn't send these dummies to the Pull door. We should send them to the Exit door, and fast. 

Fazzy.

We had tried to get a dog from a breeder a few months earlier, but the breeder was an idiot and it didn't work out. She had let the puppy bond with her family, and when we brought the girl home she fought us every minute she was there. We took her back two days later, and I hope they didn't try to sell the dog to someone else. 

I expected that that would be the end of the Dog Experiment. I was working in Manhattan, a long commute; I had no time for dogs. My wife was working from home, yes, but there was always the chance her company could yank that chain and bring her back in. And we'd just proven that dogs were a mistake for us, right? So I put my foot down on trying another. 

Well, my wife wasn't having that.

Then she found the guy pictured above, and everything changed. 

We brought the little umlaut-eyed fuzzball home during a very cold and snowy February, and I made up my mind that I would not become attached, because he was her dog and I didn't want him to bond with me. I would be friendly and helpful, but I would not love him because Fazzy was supposed to bond with her.

Well, Fazzy wasn't having that. 

"I'm gonna make you love me" was his rallying cry, and of course it didn't take long. He would jump in my lap -- not entirely, because he got huge fast, but with his forepaws on my legs and his grinning face up to mine. If I laid on the sofa he would put his chin on my head. He picked me as his person, and my wife was okay with that, because she knew I had not wanted him but I had fallen in love. 

We took him to training classes, which were really about training us. I took him for long walks. When my wife did get called back into her office, as I'd feared, I left my job and went freelance so he wouldn't be alone. (Her recall lasted less than a month, BTW.) 

We got puppy Nipper so that my wife would have her guy, and after Nipper passed away from cancer much too young, we got Izzy. Fazzy took the intrusions of the new puppies like a pro; he even once stopped baby Nipper from running off-leash into a busy street, like the fuzzy hero he was. When he flopped in my wife's office we called him her executive assistant, Mr. Gooboy. 

Fazzy was such a handsome dog, so appealing, that everyone wanted to pet him, even people who were a little scared of big animals. He loved meeting people and other dogs. His fur was the finest, softest hair I've ever felt. Except for the two Skunk Incidents, over which we shall draw the veil, he usually smelled pretty good. He was one of those dogs with human-like eyes, brown and radiant, soulful. A lady once told me he looked like a dog from a fairy tale or mountain epic. He did.

When Fazzy got cancer last year, at the age of seven -- which is not unusual for big dogs -- I just prayed he would have one more of his beloved winters. I've never seen anyone or anything love the snow more than that dog. 

He got that winter gift and more. He responded so well to the chemotherapy that it looked like he'd be with us a long time, but that was wishful thinking. Whether it was the toll from the cancer or the cure, or something completely unrelated, I can't say, but over this year he steadily lost weight and showed new signs of illness. He was always picky about meals -- irritatingly so -- but soon he was refusing most kibble, then soft food, then some treats, ultimately everything. His bowel movements were like the flow of the River Styx. He had little time left. 

That last day my wife said he was suffering, and I said let's just take him out, see how he's looking outdoors. He was on five prescription drugs at that time, including one that required an oral syringe three times a day. (He didn't seem to mind the taste, but he hated the syringe.) After lunch we took him and Izzy out, and Fazzy did his business, but then sat on the lawn looking down, a real hangdog look, like he was defeated. I gave him half a soft chicken Milk-Bone, his favorite, and he spat it out. 

I called the vet from the porch. 

I'm so grateful we have Izzy. He's still a huge handful and when he gets overtired, which is every night around nine, he becomes a menace. But he's improving daily. After we left the vet, and Fazzy's remains, I thought I would go out of my mind with grief, but with a puppy to care for, who has time to dwell? 

Izzy is exceptionally affectionate and demands attention. Fazzy was not like that, being more independent and even a little hand shy, but he had his own ways of showing affection. He'd just look at you with those beautiful eyes, or shove his head into your underarm or crotch (eek!), or rub his head against you like a cat. If he wanted to play, he might ROWRF at you and prance around like a puppy, which is great fun with a big fuzzy dog. When he settled down, especially later in life, he'd let out his grunts and harrumphs like an old man. He made a lot of interesting sounds; he could yawn like Chewbacca or a rusty gate. He could whine like a pesky Chihuahua. He could grunt like a piglet if petted just the right way. 

I miss him already and always will. He's curled up in my heart now, asleep for the time being. Or maybe what they say is true, and he's crossed the rainbow bridge. If he got there, St. Peter might have asked, "Who's a good boy?" and Fazzy might say, "Me! I'm Mr. Gooboy." 

"No," would say St. Peter. "You were the best boy."

Sunset.

I remember one winter evening, before sunset, when our canine friend Tralfaz was maybe two or three years old. He and I walked up a hill toward the light gray sky, flat and uniform as a coat of paint, and before us was the snow-swept landscape, equally gray. It looked like we had come to the end of the earth, maybe the end of the universe, and there was no one I would rather be with there than my fine, fine dog.

Well, he got there before me, alone. We had to put Tralfaz down last night. 

More tomorrow. 

It was a long shot anyway.

 

Sports heck.

I won't say sports hell, but sports heck will do, I guess. 

An overly optimistic friend of mine has been watching the Beloved Mets coast along in first place all season, expecting a neat slide into the playoffs. An overly pessimistic friend has been expecting another September crash and burn. If you've been reading this blog for a while I'm sure you can guess where I fall. 

You must never underestimate the power of the S.S. Mets to hit an iceberg on a warm September day. Not that everything is over, but the Hated Braves have had an incredible winning streak, and this past week the Mets decided to start losing to poor teams, and we landed in second place over the weekend. The Mets rebounded, and it could be an exciting back-and-forth battle right down to the wire, but I expect the Braves to leap over the Mets and pull away, and the '22 Mets to become the Baxters in another legendary Atlanta season. 

As for football, meh. In years past I would be over the moon by the Giants' gutsy play that won their first game of the season, but I'm still disgusted by the NFL's descent into wokeness. The last places you'd expect to find political correctness were the Marines and the NFL, and they're both becoming riddled with it. I enjoyed the piece by America's Newspaper, the Babylon Bee, on this topic: "NFL Hoping 3rd Year of 'End Racism' Painted in End Zone Will Do the Trick." 

"This is the year that the NFL ends racism, once and for all. Third time's the charm!" said Commissioner Jim Hardleather at a press conference while surrounded by a dozen other old, white members of the NFL executive committee who also showed the courage to not dare recommend removing "End Racism" from the end zones for fear of being canceled.

Yeah, no doubt. 

My overly optimistic friend is a Giants fan, and he thinks the team looks much improved. My overly pessimistic friend is a fan of the Redskins Commanders, so he's already miserable. This is a guy who knows all the words to the original Redskins fight song: 

Hail to the Redskins!

Hail Victory!

Braves on the Warpath!

Fight for old Dixie!

Run or pass and score -- we want a lot more!

Scalp 'em, swamp 'em -- We will take 'em big score

Read 'em, weep 'em, touchdown - we want heap more

Fight on, Fight on -- Till you have won

Sons of Washington. Rah!, Rah!, Rah!

I kind of expect the fans to sing the old words (maybe the revised version that doesn't mention Dixie or use fake Indian talk though) instead of the "Hail to the Commanders" lyrics that have the Official Sanction. 

I don't think this team name controversy means a hill of beans to actual Native Americans compared to more serious issues, but the National Congress of American Indians cares. Mostly, though, it's another scalp -- uh, victory -- for sniffy college types who can't throw a football ten yards, have never been to a reservation, and never done a day of real work. But you know, if it makes the actual tribes happy, that's fine. 

I do wish the Cleveland MLB team had picked a better name than the Guardians. They're in first place now. It would just figure if Cleveland won its first championship since 1948 with that dumb name. 

Twenty-one.

 Psalms

Chapter 137

1  By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

2  We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

3  For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

4  How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?

5  If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

6  If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

7  Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

8  O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

9  Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Dog reviews.

SynaMutt™ Synthetic Leash
Unbreakable Security for You, Comfort for Your Dog - $10.95

0☆  tastes bad too tuff no g ood don't buy

DogGog™ Liver Flavored Wood Stick Chew Toy

Looks Like a Stick, Tastes Like Liver! -  $6.00

1★ look like stikk mmm yum wait livr what ? flavr good but am confus

Yumpossible™ Doggie Chicken Treats

Delicious Treats for Your Best Friend! 100% Organic! - $21.00

2★★ tayst lik butts 

Securomutt™ Dog Gate

Keep Your Pup Out of Dangerous or Unwanted Places, Guaranteed! - $35.00

0☆  no gud cant get in bad bad bad gate bork bork bork BORK BORK

Sleepi Poopsi™ Dog Bed

A Soft But Supportive Bed for Your Canine Pal - $25.00

3★★★ is gud for naps but still goin on the bed wit you

Manolo Blahnik™ Ibrimu Silver Nappa Leather Open Toe Mules 

Silver Nappa Leather Open-Toe Mules - $965.00

5★★★★★ delish! o so gud chew chew chew an you get 2 at a time oh so tasti

Panic sandwich.

My wife and I react very differently to upsetting stimuli. If there's something worrisome happening, she loses sleep while I can barely stay awake. If an important decision must be made, her bowels turn to jelly while I seize up like sand mix. And if there's something really bad hitting, she can't eat, while all I can do is eat. 

Why are we like this? I have no idea. Her family is Irish straight up the potato tree, and she says that maybe when disaster struck, like an English invasion, they went into starvation mode because the English were going to burn the crops and take everything else. Me, I know I get my habits from my mom's side of the family, a real genetic mixed bag, including a lot of Jews. When the pogroms were looming, my ancestors probably ate everything in sight so they wouldn't have to carry it as they fled. 

This was on display yesterday as we received some worrisome news (more about that as it develops). My wife could barely choke down a cup o' Campbell's soup at lunch, whereas I wiped out a sandwich and sucked down tortilla chips like a tortilla-powered Humvee. 

According to the Yale School of Medicine, 

...while everyone feels stress at times, reactions to stress can be different for women and men.

     In general, women are more likely to think and talk about what is causing stress. Women also are more likely to reach out to others for support and seek to understand the sources of their stress.

     Men typically respond to stress using distraction. And men often engage in physical activities that can offer an escape from thinking about a stressful situation.

Does eating chips count as a physical activity?

I'm not actually sure the description is accurate for me and the men I know. I agree that women are more likely to talk about stress, I'm not sure they always want answers so much as to blow off steam. We're all like that. And just because a guy isn't talking about stress doesn't mean he's not thinking about it. He may be brooding from everything about maintaining ethics in a cold cosmos to the unfairness of life to the best way to punch someone in the nose and get away with it. You know, deep thoughts. 

And failing that, he might just tie one on. (So might the woman, but she's more likely to call it Girl Time.)

But I hadn't meant to make this a men-and-women-sure-are wacky blog entry; no matter whether you're male, female, or one of Baskin-Robbins' 31 genders, you undoubtedly have some unique combination of methods to deal with the inevitable stressors of life. 

Now, pardon me, as it's breakfast time, and I'm going to get a bowl of cereal big enough for Scrooge McDuck to swim around in. 

And now, we pause and reflect with Igor.

 

We have just paused and reflected with Igor. 

Logo trouble.

Hello, friends! It's your old pal Fred of Fredcoin, here to share one of our latest promotions. You can help us, and we can help you! It's the Fredcoin Way!

You're all familiar with our symbol, of course -- the Fredcoin coin with the smilin' founder on it. 

Accept no substitutes!

But now we're looking for a logo. I asked the senior executives to come up with some ideas, and their ideas were so bad I had to fire them. So I asked the boys in the mailroom to whip of a few logos, and here's what they sent in. 

Not bad, huh? They were told to use some trademark green, and I think they did a fine job. The first one has some retro cool; the second is sharp and easy to read. The third has a cute little slogan. There's something a little foreign and suave about the fourth one. And the fifth one, in addition to little green accents, uses Comic Sans. Who doesn't love Comic Sans? Only Hobo might be better. 

After long deliberation I decided to promote those mailroom guys to senior vice presidents, and after I decide which logo to use will fire the other four guys. So what do you think? If you choose the winner, we'll add fifty Fredcoin to your account! 

Whoziwatsis?

Cast your minds back to the sad-sack seventies, my friends; it wasn't all ABBA and Happy Days. We had fuel shortages, stagflation, Communism on the march, fearmongering of every sort in the media (disaster would soon strike from ice age / aliens / nuclear war / complete economic collapse / overpopulation / starvation / running out of oil / labor strikes / nuclear plant meltdown / crime / government corruption), and polyester as far as the eye could see.  

Into this grim landscape appeared something that would provide a turning point. Picture: It's 1978. We're a year away from Carter's Malaise Speech, but things look awful. The Great Blizzard of 1978 strikes the U.S. The Soviets are pushing "Russification" on all their republics. Aldo Moro is assassinated. Paul John Paul I dies after 33 days in the Chair of Peter. The Afghan war begins and is still going on to this day. Ashton Kutcher and Hannah Gadsby have been born and Charles Boyer and Louis Prima have died. But then a light shines in the darkness....

Yes, Hershey introduces the Whatchamacallit, a candy bar made with peanut butter crisps and chocolate (later to include caramel and whatnot inside to create the bar sold today, according to NEPA Scene). The Whatchamacallit was touted with the slogan, “It’s almost as much fun to say as it is to eat!”

Am I saying that the Whatchamacallit is what turned the misery of the seventies into the dynamism of the eighties? Well. not exactly, but it didn't hurt.

Let's bring the timeline up to date. Here we are in 2022. Everything looks like crap. The government is compromised and can't be trusted. The Chinese threaten war. The Russians are bumbling around with heavy ordnance and still have those nukes. Global warming has pretty much pushed the other world-ending disasters off the front pages, except that we all saw how a (likely Chinese engineered) virus spread quickly and probably accidentally -- maybe the next one will be a lot more fatal. Inflation is out of control; we have a labor shortage and high unemployment at the same time; the younger generation is hopeless and the older ones just want to hang on to what they have until the Grim Reaper comes. The music is terrible. The movies are worse. Incompetence by people convinced of their own value is the order of the day, and it shows. 

And now, into this bleached and burned landscape, Hershey brings us....

The Whozeewhatzit is a new candy bar, and it's great. It has a layer of peanut butter under the chocolate coating, not enough to dominate the flavor, and a thick brick of Krackel-type chocolate crisp below. The flavor balance and the texture are right on target. I say this one is a winner. 

Will it be enough to turn the tide? Who can say? We can't be cocky. Hershey introduced the Thingamajig bar in 2009, another bleak era, and discontinued it in 2012. Sometimes the problems are not done getting worse, and that was surely the case in the tremulous oughts and early teens. 

But like its ancestor, the Whatchamacallit, the Whozeewhatzit could be a harbinger of a prosperous age to come. And if the age doesn't arrive, at least we can eat good candy while we shiver in the dark. 

Hands vs. face.

Does this happen to you? I always think I have more time on an analog clock than on a digital clock, even if it's the same time. 

For example, suppose I know I have to be out the door by 10:30 to get somewhere on time, and I'm still getting dressed. I look at this and feel confident I can make it. 

I look at this, and I panic. 

But they both mean the same thing: I got seven minutes to haul ass. 

I think there are two related reasons for this, one reasonable and the other not. The reasonable one is that on the analog face, you see the second hand move, or at least how far the minute hand is from the next minute, but on the digital face you don't know when the next minute will click. However, digital faces that show the seconds are no help, and can actually be worse because I feel the passing of time more acutely. 

I thought at first that the clock face, being less intuitive than the digital, didn't make me panic because I didn't grasp the lack of time as immediately as I do with the digital, but I think that's wrong. I've been reading clock faces for as long as I knew my numbers, so they're both instantly understandable. The actual unreasonable reason is that mechanical motion itself is itself intuitive, where as movements of light particles are not. I don't see the workings of the clock but I know it's a mechanical motion, like a wheel turning or legs walking. With the digital clock there's nothing but electricity resulting in lights, no motion to understand by watching. So I think the digital clock looks to my lizard brain like it is striking down time at random speed, while the mechanical clock is understandably at a steady pace. Does that make sense? 

I hope so, because I went looking into this online and there may be even more to the situation. A news story from Australia notes a few differences in perception between clock-face time and digital time, including that clock-face time is circular and digital time is linear. So I'm seeing the sweep of the hand as a circular (and, I imagine, more relaxing) movement, whereas the digital clock is shooting in one direction like a bullet. And the site Zapier notes in an article that "A simple instrument such as a digital clock affects your perception of time differently than an analogue one. The latter represents time as a process, with visual cues as to what has passed and what comes next. A digital clock just shows the time in this moment."

On the whole, I think I'll stick with my analog watch and digital alarm clock. I need the alarm clock to get me moving, but the rest of the time I'd rather see time as a process -- I can get more done that way.