Easter!

 It is Easter! 

I've written about my religiously ignorant childhood before, about how little I knew of Christmas (but not as little as my younger cousin, who thought it was the birthday of Santa Claus). I was so ignorant of Easter that I don't even know if I had any guesses as to its significance. Maybe I just thought it was one of those inscrutable adult things, like banks and insurance. I knew the Easter Bunny brought baskets of cheap chocolate and jellybeans that tasted of nothing but sugar, and those were fine by me. Years later I would learn two important things: 

1) What Easter really means.

2) That even poor chocolate can be coated with peanut butter and made into a tasty mock-Reese's treat. 

About eggs, I had no idea. The association with new life is obvious, but spring less so. Chickens don't just lay eggs in the spring, as other animals have their young in the spring; they pop out eggs all the time. Not a great symbol, but I guess we're stuck with it. 

I'm going to turn to Robert Lynd (1879-1949), an Irish writer who lived in London and wrote reviews, light ephemera, and pieces in favor of Irish nationalism. His 1921 collection The Pleasures of Ignorance contains an article on Easter eggs. It includes some wisdom on the topic that could have been written today, or at least before the Internet removed the necessity to go to actual books to look things up. Nevertheless, just as today, the author begins his search (in the Encyclopedia Britannica) and immediately becomes distracted:

The egg I was looking for was the Easter egg, and it seemed to be the only egg that was not mentioned. There were birds' eggs, and reptiles' eggs, and fishes' eggs, and molluscs' eggs, and crustaceans' eggs, and insects' eggs, and frogs' eggs, and Augustus Egg, and the eggs of the duck-billed platypus, which is the only mammal (except the spiny ant-eater) whose eggs are "provided with a large store of yolk, enclosed within a shell, and extruded to undergo development apart from the maternal tissues." I do not know whether it is evidence of the irrelevance of the workings of the human mind or of our implacable greed of knowledge, but within five minutes I was deep in the subject of eggs in general, and had forgotten all about the Easter variety.

But does he lose hope of finding out anything? He does not:

In order to learn something about Easter eggs one has to turn to some such work as The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which tells us that "the practice of presenting eggs to our friends at Easter is Magian or Persian, and bears allusion to the mundane egg, for which Ormuzd and Ahriman were to contend till the consummation of all things." ... Next Easter, I feel sure, I shall look it up again. I shall have forgotten all about the mundane egg, even if Ormuzd and Ahriman have not. I shall be thinking more about my breakfast egg. What a piece of work is a man! And yet many profound things might be said about eggs, mundane or otherwise. I wish I could have thought of them.

To be fair, the modern online Britannica has much more to say about Easter eggs, some of which you can find in this essay. Personally, like Mr. Lynd, I'm not very much interested in Easter eggs, and not just because, as when I was a child, I am much more interested in Easter chocolate. 

Now I focus on the true significance of Easter -- which, if I believe it, must be the most important thing to have ever happened on this Earth; and if I don't, is of no significance whatever. (But I do.)

Still, there's nothing wrong with Easter chocolate. Even the cheap stuff can be brought around with a little Jif. 

Smart cart? Or dumb?

ShopRite, my favorite local supermarket, has gone beyond testing robots for pushing candy, as I noted with the adventures of Smiley in 2021. Nay, it has gone further, past even the inventory robot named Tally, discovered by me last October. Now we're entering the brave new world of the smart cart. 

Out: Smartcars. In: Smartcarts. 

The Caper Cart, a shopping cart supposedly driven by artificial intelligence, has been developed by Instacart and is being field-tested in ShopRite markets.

Here's how Instacart describes these new wonders:

Caper Carts are part of Instacart’s Connected Stores suite of technologies, built to help grocers bridge the online and in-store shopping experience. By using computer vision and AI, the cart can automatically identify items as they are placed in the basket, allowing customers to bag as they shop and checkout directly from the cart. Customer reception to Caper Carts has been strong with users offering a net promoter score of more than 70. In addition to the new ad capabilities, customers appreciate the ability to link their loyalty accounts to the carts, giving them access to personalized promotions and savings while shopping in-store. 

This doesn't sound like AI so much as old-fashioned computer coding -- the computer reading the bar code on what you put in the cart and spewing ads that are paid for. As I've said before, AI in the 2020s is like dot com in the 1990s, a frosting you have to put on every cake to sell it. Still, the idea of avoiding the checkout would make the shopping process faster and easier, so I can't argue with that advantage. Of course, the upselling of crap while you shop will also make it more irritating. The main advantage to the store is customizing ads based on what you put in the cart, which online retailers have been doing for decades. Imagine putting hemorrhoid cream in the wagon discreetly, and your cart starts bleating an ad for adult diapers.

Lucas Frau of NorthJersey.com took one for a test drive, and explains the supposed advantages:

Some fellow shoppers found the cart amusing, with one saying, "Do you got blinkers on that thing?"

Sure, the build of the cart feels a little heavier than your average metal rolling bin. And yes, it lights up like a Christmas tree when you put an item in the basket. Don’t be alarmed.

He explains that the cart registers whatever you get, even weighing produce, and keeps a running list of what's been put in it. If you put something back on the shelf, its removal from the cart is also noted. At the end, you just wheel the cart to the checkout area designated for smart carts and pay -- no need to unload and reload the cart. 

Loyalty card holders may like the carts the best, Frau says, but the sheer weight of the cart may make it less attractive to other shoppers.

The shopping may be easier if you are a Price Plus member, because you can see the deals and where items are found. The average shopper, however, may not feel that lugging the cart is worth it to save a few minutes at the self-checkout.

I am skeptical, especially since I've used too many carts with bad wheels. If stores can't keep the wheels turning, what are the odds that they can keep delicate electronics working? 

If I get a chance to try one, you'd better believe you'll be hearing about it. Until then, Shopinator II: Judgment Day will have to wait. 

Miscellaneous science stuff.

It's our Tuesday random science feature! Of course, we don't do a regular science feature on Tuesday or any other day. That just shows how random it is! Probably determined by Brownian motion or something. Anyway, here's stuff. 

1) The Can

Today's first item is about the age-old question: Do women really take longer in the can than men? How much longer? And we find that a groundbreaking study back in 1988, woefully ignored by the so-called Nobel Prize committee, answered this question: 

The study, conducted in cooperation with the Washington state Department of Transportation, concluded that the standard 50-50 ratio between men's and women's public toilet facilities is unfair.

[Researcher Ahn] Tran established that it takes men an average of 45 seconds to use a public facility, compared to an average of 79 seconds for women. The study thus recommends a new standard involving a 60-40 ratio of women's to men's toilet facilities.

So there it is! Of course, we know it's just a wee (ha!) tiny part of the real problem women face. If the whole difference was 34 seconds, it wouldn't account for the tremendous lines for women's rooms that exist in places like theaters where no line at all is seen for men's rooms. There is more to it.

If we acknowledge that when a lot of these venues were built, equal space was allotted for men's and women's rooms, that still meant a big plumbing gap -- you can fit a lot more urinals onto a wall than toilet stalls. But even then, we're barely getting into the nitty-gritty. 

When men go to the public can, they go alone, and unless they're up to something shady, they get out as fast as possible. That's why we so often forget to zip up. We're running. Women, on the other hand, still treat the sacred grounds of the ladies' loo as a place to gather, to chat, to fix hair and makeup, to criticize their dates, and so on. Those gals aren't getting out of there in 79 seconds. And even if they're not actively taking up a stall, the sheer number of bodies in the room at intermission means the line is going to have to wait until someone leaves to advance. 

If we really want to give women what they want, their restroom facilities should be planned and built first, and everything else added as secondary -- the restaurant, theater, stadium, whatever it is. Everything is just an addendum to the toilet. 

The Justice Bader Goldberg Memorial Bathroom and Stadium. Is that so much to ask?

2) Animal Testing?

My wife bought some pet wipes for the dog, because sometimes he gets dirty paws (but not dirty enough all over to have to bathe), or he needs his ears cleaned out, or he just needs to have a little stink wiped off him. Toddler wipes work okay, but dogs usually can use something stronger -- and sometimes need to. 

But this was one of the screwier things I've seen of late on packaging: 

Look, I get that your heart is in the right place. You love animals and we love our pets. But seriously -- if you didn't test these pet wipes on animals, you know what that makes my dog? Your test subject. 

I think just this one time you could test a product -- a product meant for animals -- on an animal before you release it to the public. What do you think you're doing, manufacturing COVID vaccines?

📡📈🔭📱🔬

That's all the science we have today! Join us when we randomly do something like this again, if ever!

Assault on batteries.

I have to say, I have been very let down by batteries. The limits of battery capacity have completely upended any hopes of getting away from fossil fuels. No one seems to want to talk about this in the press, but it's true. 

After 9/11, many people (including me) wondered if we could get rid of our reliance on fossil fuels quickly. Nothing to do with the climate -- this was about starving the petrogarchs who sponsor terrorism. Ruining the garbage nations that only had oil to sell and only hatred to manufacture. It has not worked out. 

Even if we lived in a fantasy world where windmills and solar panels were not a useless boondoggle of limited and ecology-flattening waste, and where environmentalists would let us dam rivers and burn garbage and split atoms for electricity instead of suing and sabotaging to demand the end of these facilities, and where all minerals needed for batteries were plentiful and cheap, batteries would still suck compared to gasoline. 

In 2009, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted that "The maximum theoretical potential of advanced lithium-ion batteries that haven’t yet been demonstrated to work is still only about 6 percent of crude oil." Which sucks, because "Renewable energy–unlike fossil carbon–is harnessed dynamically from the environment. Therefore, it won’t be as useful as fossil carbon until it can be stored and transported with similar ease." To carry the magically-generated electricity I mentioned above, cars and other vehicles would have to have a far, far better ability to hold power, resist power loss, and not explode into flames than anything we have currently. So far, no battery like this that I've heard of has even been proposed as plausible. 

We figure that at some point, maybe not for five hundred years but at some point, we're going to run out of petroleum. Assuming Mr. Fusion is not available, what then? All the optimistic science fiction stories tended to have things run on batteries, but it may be as likely as having things run on unicorn farts after all. It may be physically impossible to make the kind of batteries we need for the modern world to rely on them. 

I don't have any answers. I'm just disappointed. You're never going to get a podracer to fly on methane, let alone an Odyssey-class Federation starship. I just don't think the future is working out. Thanks a lot, you dumb ol' batteries.  

Man scammed.

ELDERLY MAN SCAMMED FOR
$3.6 TRILLION

"They Were Very Convincing," Says Befuddled Oldster

WASHINGTON, DC (March 21, 2024) -- The nation's capital witnessed another awful example of telephone scams and elder abuse, as the chief elected officer of the country was bamboozled by an artful trickster. 

"Sounded totally legit," said Mr. Joseph Biden of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. "Said they were calling from the debt service place. Well, I keep hearing about the debt this and the debt that and I was glad that I had started the old ball rolling to get that taken care of. Thought I'd just left the paperwork in Delaware or something. All they needed, she said, was the main treasury account number and some passwords, no big deal. They were very convincing." 

An estimated $3.6 trillion has subsequently gone missing from the United States treasury following this event. Mr. Biden's coworkers were quick to point out that it's not really lost, however. 

"It's not like it's real money," said Janet Yellen, who oversees the treasury for Mr. Biden. "Just a bunch of IOUs, actually. We'll just run out a few trillion on the printing presses and replace it as fast as we can get the paper."

Mr. Biden says he regrets being taken in by a hoax, and intends to find the culprit and press charges. "Sounded like an Indian fellow, or maybe Chinese," he told reporters. "Shouldn't be too hard to track down. Just check the Seven-Elevens and Chinese restaurants in the area code." When asked what area code was displayed when he received the call, he explained that it was from "someplace called Potential Spam." 

Jiggle the handle!

The flush toilet may be the most confounding appliance in the home, at least for non-plumbers. You think, How hard can it be? It's got no electronics, no gears. It's a fixture, not an appliance. And then you have to put in a new gasket or lever or chain, and you try to calibrate the proper length of the chain and height of the float and give in the handle, and pretty soon you're ready to throw the toilet out the window and start doing your #1s out the window as well.  

My dad was not a plumber, but he was extremely handy. And yet even he was reduced to advising us to jiggle the handle to stop the water running when the damn flapper would not close for whatever reason. He got sick of trying to get it to behave.

Toilets are touchy things. A lot of us are confused by fluids anyway. They seem to defy expectations. There's no reason why a siphon ought to work -- but once you start it going, though, the water draws the water behind it in what seems like perpetual motion. Of course, there is a reason why it works, but that involves like knowledge of gravity and air pressure and hydrostatic pressure and capillary action and surface tension, and now your head hurts. All you wanted to do was steal some gas from your neighbor's car and you gotta think about science and math? 

Yes, you do! What, for example, is a ripple? You've seen them in ponds, lakes, potholes -- maybe even a drop in the toilet bowl has created a lovely ripple. But can you describe it mathematically? Well, some very serious thinkers have been working on the ripple situation for some time. It's harder than you'd think. 

Let's face it -- water is weird. Most things shrink when they freeze -- water expands. You can't compress water; there's just no room between the molecules. If water was not so strange, life as we know it would be impossible. Without capillary action, there'd be no plants, no trees, no us. And until we meet the Rock Men of Planet Srumptk, we're looking at our basis of life as the only thing possible in the universe. So thanks, water! 

And don't forget to jiggle that handle. You wouldn't want to waste water!

The lilt of Irish slaughter?

Well, it's that day again.

If I had to guess, I'd say the Irish people have become the most popular immigrants we've ever had in America, and that's not just because they've got a day strongly associated with drinking that goes back to colonial times. Other cultures do just as much whoopin' it up and have more popular food, too. But one thing the Irish people and their US descendants have going for them is their sense of humor. 

At a time when everyone's looking to be angry at on behalf of their long-buried ancestors, do the Irish waste their time doing that? 

You'd better believe it. I know third- and fourth-generation Americans of only partial Irish descent who hate the English as if the English had collectively and personally insulted their mothers last week.

Can the Irish be belligerent? What makes you even ask? 

Look in some dictionaries under the word "belligerent" and you'll see a picture of Paddy throwing a roundhouse. If you're wearin' o' the orange in some places today, you might be wearin' o' the black eye tomorrow. 

But the Irish have a much-admired sense of humor. The Jewish people in America do as well, famous for it going back to the 19th century, but their humor carries more of the fatalism that centuries of pogroms will inspire. Irish jokes are usually intended to show how clever they are, how dumb others are, or just how silly people can be. And who has a problem with that? We're all doofuses sometimes. Even Chuck Norris, I'd wager, although no one has ever seen it. (And lived.) 

(Chuck's about half Irish, BTW.)

Let us give thanks today for the Irish, for managing to keep a sense of humor in this difficult old world. Life is hard whether you can laugh or not, but it's harder if you cannot. 

Upside-down world.

It's hard not to feel like the world has been turned completely on its head. We have a government in the United States that seems to despise its citizens, monetary policy that makes money worth less daily, militaries that can't win wars or defend the nation, government agencies intended to protect Americans that target Americans, fathers who abuse children and mothers who kill them, schools that teach everything but what they're supposed to teach, recycling programs that stuff landfills, and a ruling class that does not rule and has no class. Sometimes it appears that the airheads are all rising to the top by nature of their empty heads, because that's what seems to be in charge. And sometimes that's the optimistic view. The worse view is that only some of them are stupid; the smart ones are all evil. 

We know in our hearts that things are upside-down and have always been, even if it makes no rational sense -- if things always seemed wrong, why would we expect something better, something right? I find the supreme example of this inversion in the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, where we see that everything is a cruel funhouse image of what it ought to be. The religious class that ought to love God instead persecutes Him. He is betrayed by a kiss, a sign of love, and abandoned by His friends. The Roman authority tries to administer justice by scourging the man declared innocent -- I find no fault with this man, so we'll beat him half to death. The crown Jesus deserves is not the crown of thorns He gets; He is exalted, but by being lifted aloft on the scornful, torturous cross. Everything is a cruel mockery. 

It informs me that while life may get better in many ways, we just can't escape the grip of evil on our own. And now, in this utterly unprincipled era, we find less hope that there is anything to fall back on, any law on the basis of which we can hope for justice among men. 

But we have hope. St. Francis of Assisi, they say, saw the world upside-down, or perhaps right-side up by being upside-down. Writing in The Crisis, Michael Warren Davis notes: 

St. Francis called himself the Jongleur de Dieu—God’s court jester—precisely because his virtue was so absurd by the standards of our own convention. But to say that he looked foolish in the eyes of the world is an understatement. His charity gave as much offense as any sinner’s meanness. St. Francis’s spirituality demands such uncommon virtue it’s offensive to common decency.

The most famous take on the Jongleur in the English language must be from our old friend G. K. Chesterton from his book about the saint, who explains that the jongleur is not a juggler so much as a tumbler or acrobat, and Francis came out of the darkness of despair from his crushed dreams of being a noble knight as if he'd been turned on his head:

Francis, at the time or somewhere about the time when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind; which was really like the reversal of a complete somersault, in that by coming full circle it came back, or apparently came back, to the same normal posture. It is necessary to use the grotesque simile of an acrobatic antic, because there is hardly any other figure that will make the fact clear. But in the inward sense it was a profound spiritual revolution. The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the effects of this on his attitude towards the actual world were really as extravagant as any parallel can make them. He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands.

This may have given him a unique perspective:

This state can only be represented in symbol; but the symbol of inversion is true in another way. If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards.

We can rail against the upside-down world, but we ought to remember that in the end it is destined to be flipped and placed on a firm foundation as it ought to have been from beginning. That is the hope, that is the divine expectation. 

Off to a bad start.

 

So today started off with a bang. Walking dog Izzy in the dark, thanks so Daylight &@#^* Savings Time. It's recycling day, but unlike our late party dog Nipper, Izzy is not terrified of trash cans. Or at least he wasn't until this morning. 

This morning he decided to dash to the curb and go around the large garbage can someone had left on the sidewalk. That unfortunately put the can between him and me, and when he closed the loop he knocked over the can, sending recyclables everywhere -- mostly plastic bottles but plenty of aluminum cans. This made what is known as a Loud Noise, which startled Izzy, who decided to put a couple of miles between himself and the source of the noise. I, caught by surprise, still had the leash in my hand, which suffered a small laceration between the ring finger and the pinky as the slack zipped through. It was too dark to see how much blood was unleashed (ha) but there was some. 

After restoring order, putting all the stuff back in the garbage can, we returned home -- of course, all this happened at the point of the circle farthest from our house. But we made it, and the injury was not too bad. However, it was a perfect way to start a very busy day, and I mean that dripping with as much sarcasm as I can muster. 

Help me, Obi Mr. Coffee! You're my only hope! 

Dope fiends!

I have a couple of friends who are pharmacists, and I would not like to do that job. 

Under ideal conditions, it's still difficult. There are about a million drugs you have to know about -- the names (trade and generic), the prescribable uses, the off-label uses, the side effects, the doses, the dosing, the cost, the content, the special warnings for particular populations (pregnant women, kids, diabetics, and on and on) -- and about two million drug laws you have to know about -- the rules for dispensing, your responsibilities (and career-ruining culpabilities), the permissions needed, the requirements for dealing with doctors' offices, and on and on. Then add all the health insurance variations. It might drive you to drink -- and if it does, you'd better have teenage George Bailey working for you or you'll kill some kid by accident. 

And most pharmacists work under less than ideal conditions. Once upon a time a pharmacist might be a drugstore owner, running his own respectable business, a well-regarded figure in town. Now you're far more likely to be a cog in some corporate chain. And in some neighborhoods your CVS or Walgreens will be overrun with crime (especially if your town has a Soros-funded prosecutor); but in any neighborhood you'll probably have to deal with thugs and scammers and no-account losers trying to get at the sweet, sweet opioids in your drug safe. 

Maybe you work in a nice town with a functioning judiciary and constabulary, for a pharmacy that doesn't even stock the really hot stuff (our nearest supermarket has a pharmacy that warns in LARGE LETTERS that they do not dispense opioids). Well, you still have to deal with the public. And the public can be dumb. Also rude and really bad about taking their pills. The medical journals used to complain about patient compliance, meaning patients not following the instructions on their prescriptions, but the term "compliance" was thought to be too authoritative, too patriarchical. So now they call it "adherence," and it's totally different. Now the medical journals complain about patient adherence. 

And if even THAT is not enough to make you want to sample the drugs yourself, Joe Pharmacist, you're now expected to administer shots to the rubes who roll up, because the doctors' offices can't be bothered, or because your customers would rather die than go to the doctor for a routine physical. So you're stocked with vaccines for flu and COVID and shingles and tetanus and RSV and HPV and hepatitis and freaking monkeypox and yellow fever and everything else, and now you are poking around arms, and you don't even have an MD or a heroin addiction. 

It's an important job but maybe not a fun one. You may say "It beats diggin' ditches," but few ditches are dug by hand anymore. And if they are, remember: people pay good money for gym memberships to get that kind of exercise. Of course, they don't actually show up at the gym, but they pay for it. (Is that "gym compliance"? Or "gym adherence"? I give up.)

Whole lotta love?

How well we remember the words of the Impressive Clergyman on that grand and popular topic, marriage:

Mawage. Mawage is wot bwings us togeder today. Mawage, that bwessed awangment, that dweam wifin a dweam... And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva... So tweasure your wuv.

But what is true love, anyway? 

I ask because the question has been lingering in the air since the push began for same-sex marriage throughout the West. Years ago Canadian genius Mark Steyn predicted that this would lead to successful pushes for marriages among multiple partners, as once you start redefining that holy state, there's no natural stopping point. That no argument for same-sex marriage could not also be made also for bigamy, incest, and other such things.

I expected Steyn was right, but the push in the United States for bigamy has kind of stalled. Sure, there's been some desensitization going on -- favorable press for its practitioners ("thruples" and the like), stupid shows like Sister Wives on the Freak Channel TLC -- but it just doesn't seem to be catching on. I think it's more of an issue in Steyn's other home of England, where more of the hordes spilling over the border are Muslims. And the reason that's a big issue is that families with a dad and thirteen moms can apply for vast welfare benefits. Dad is, after all, unlikely to make enough money to pay for his brood of thirty-four children on his own, so the British taxpayer must step in.  

At least that's the state of play these days, and I wonder if bigamy will really be the bridge too far, or at least the bridge too far for now. After all, science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein had predicted future states with marriages among multitudes decades ago. Then again, the more Heinlein I read in my youth, the more I got to think that he'd want any kind of future that would assure him a constant supply of broads for his boudoir. 

On the other hand, long before Heinlein, science fiction writer Jules Verne had something to say about bigamy, although not in one of his futuristic novels. Around the World in Eighty Days is a great book, fast-paced and fun. We in America tend to forget that what made the improbable wager of Phileas Fogg possible when the book saw print in 1872 was the completion of many great railroads -- including the completion in the United States of the Transcontinental Railroad just three years earlier. Because of that, Fogg was able to board a train in San Francisco and cross the continent (with some adventures along the way) to New York City in a week.

The reason I bring up that particular book is a scene that's always stuck with me, when Fogg and his French manservant Passepartout arrive in Utah. Following a short note on the polygamous rules among the Mormons of the time, our heroes pop into Salt Lake City to take in the sights: 

Passepartout could not behold without a certain fright these women, charged, in groups, with conferring happiness on a single Mormon. His common sense pitied, above all, the husband. It seemed to him a terrible thing to have to guide so many wives at once across the vicissitudes of life, and to conduct them, as it were, in a body to the Mormon paradise with the prospect of seeing them in the company of the glorious Smith, who doubtless was the chief ornament of that delightful place, to all eternity. He felt decidedly repelled from such a vocation, and he imagined—perhaps he was mistaken—that the fair ones of Salt Lake City cast rather alarming glances on his person.

Surprising that a Frenchman would be so frightened of the idea of multiple ladies at his beck and call? But Passepartout, like Sancho Panza, is a most levelheaded sidekick, and aware of the many possible downsides of a family with that many wives. 

Then, this:

At four the party found themselves again at the station, took their places in the train, and the whistle sounded for starting. Just at the moment, however, that the locomotive wheels began to move, cries of “Stop! stop!” were heard.

Trains, like time and tide, stop for no one. The gentleman who uttered the cries was evidently a belated Mormon. He was breathless with running. Happily for him, the station had neither gates nor barriers. He rushed along the track, jumped on the rear platform of the train, and fell, exhausted, into one of the seats.

Passepartout, who had been anxiously watching this amateur gymnast, approached him with lively interest, and learned that he had taken flight after an unpleasant domestic scene.

When the Mormon had recovered his breath, Passepartout ventured to ask him politely how many wives he had; for, from the manner in which he had decamped, it might be thought that he had twenty at least.

“One, sir,” replied the Mormon, raising his arms heavenward—“one, and that was enough!”

Ah, mawage! A dweam wifin a dweam. 

Eggcitement.

My wife saw this gadget and thought it looked like Easter fun. 

The Eggmazing Egg Decorator is a clever idea. You put your hard-boiled egg in the battery-powered device, and rollers spin the egg while you color it with the food-safe markers provided. A clever way to decorate Easter eggs beyond just dipping them in vinegary dye and splotching on stickers. It did look like fun. 

It also looked vaguely familiar. 

Back in the stone age, before electricity was invented, there was Dudley's Decoregger -- as seen on TV. (Our televisions were made of rocks -- haven't you seen The Flintstones?) This too was a lathe-type device that spun the egg while food-safe markers made the drawings. The difference is, instead of you holding the marker, you turned the crank to rotate the egg. The markers were held in a clamp. 

Read these dumb directions! 

They were advertised on TV heavily, which is why it was seen there (duh), pitched as a product from a man in a large rabbit costume named Dudley with a dopey voice. Can we find the commercial? Alas, we cannot. But we can find an ad for another Dudley product:

It makes McDonaldland commercials of the era look like an Avengers movie. 

Nevertheless, the Decoregger was not a bad product and worked as promised, although in the hands of small children hardly produced the beautiful results seen in the commercial. What ever did? So you got some eggs with lines drawn around them. Whee! And at least Mom wouldn't have to keep the art up on the fridge forever. Even hard-boiled eggs don't last that long. 

I don't want to sound jealous of today's tots with their electric decorating aids. The little cherubs will also fail to produce museum-quality art, as we know. The whole thing is, will they have fun? I say yes. I quite enjoyed egg-decoration day as Easter approached and remember it fondly. The smell of white vinegar would linger at the kitchen table for hours, but it was all worthwhile. 

Blame Ben.

This weekend we lose an hour of sleep. And for what? Daylight savings time? So we get an hour more of daylight at the end of the day. But we lose an hour of daylight at the top. It seems like "finding money" by taking a sawbuck out of your left pocket and putting it in your right. 

Does it really save energy? Today where I live, the sun is coming up at 6:24 AM and setting at 5:50 PM. The whole workday is covered in sunshine now. If DST had gone into effect, the sun would come up at 7:24 AM and go down at 6:50 PM. Where's the big savings? People will be using electricity and such either at work, getting to or from work, or at home either way. Is it really a big advantage? 

Sam Segal at Stanford found that overall, any energy savings from screwing around with the clocks was minimal and dwindling, that "future trends will make energy savings from DST less likely." He admits that later sunsets may mean less crime and fewer car accidents, but then there's no reason then not to switch to DST all the time and just make it ST. It just seems like a lot of trouble and disrupted circadian rhythms for nothing. 

Blame Ben. 

In William Cabell Bruce's book Benjamin Franklin: Self-Revealed, A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on His Own Writings (G.P. Putnam, 1917), we have this passage:

Franklin enters upon a series of elaborate calculations to demonstrate that, between the 20th of March and 20th of September, the Parisians, because of their habit of preferring candlelight in the evening to sunlight in the morning, had consumed sixty-four millions and fifty thousand pounds of candles, which, at an average price of thirty sols per pound, made ninety-six millions and seventy-five thousand livres tournois. An immense sum! that the City of Paris might save every year by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles; to say nothing of the period of the year during which the days are shorter. This computation is succeeded by a number of suggestions as to the different means by which such of the Parisians as did not amend their hours upon learning from this paper that it is daylight when the sun rises could be induced to reform their habits.

It seems that Mr. Franklin's basis for proposing daylight savings time comes from the fact that Frenchmen are slugabeds who stay up too late carousing. This would be like setting some sort of national policy based on the behavior of people who can't stop binge-watching shows even though they have work in the morning.

I will grant you that 64,050,000 pounds of candles is nothing to sneeze at. That's a lot of wax. And 96,075,000 livres tournois is a goodly sum, something like $1,067,914,981 or a cool billion in modern dollars if you go by the currency converter at Historical Statistics (which requires a few assumptions, but let's say it's close enough). 

On the other hand, electricity and natural gas with an extant infrastructure are not candles; the delivery of the latter is much easier and far cheaper. I daresay that if Franklin did his calculations based on modern technology for a city with the same number of residents as the Paris of his visit, he'd come away with much lower savings -- and that would maintain even if he threw in the price of firewood to warm all those Parisian carousers. 

I'd never spurn old Ben, a truly unique man and definitely a genius, but I believe that even if his analysis was correct for the 18th century, it has led to a solution in need of a problem in the 21st. More trouble than it's worth is the phrase that comes to mind. I know of few things that cause as much universal peevishness in America as daylight savings time, and it should be abolished. 

You may say "What about Franklin's statement on death and taxes? Don't they cause more peeves?" Well, we can't stop death, only slow it down, and taxes inspire hatred, not irritation. If anyone has an idea on how to get rid of taxes short of complete anarchy, I'm listening. 

A plea for reviews.

Well, artificial intelligence and the idiots who use it are certainly trying to make things worse for everybody already. 

Apparently the weenies are cranking out AI-generated books and "flooding" Amazon's publishing platform, among others. They are using it in some cases to take bread out of the mouths of specific writers, as Wired noted, publishing "books" that are just summaries of the actual authors' works but keeping the dough for themselves. 

Even if the work posted is original (meaning, generated by AI as its own piece of garbage, not a piece of garbage piggybacking on an existing work), these "authors" are unleashing a tsunami of computer-generated crap among the actual books, making it harder to find anything worth reading.

Amazon's efforts to combat this so far have been surprisingly low-tech -- asking "Is this AI-generated content?" (Oh, no, I wouldn't do that, Mr. Amazon!) and restricting book uploads to three a day, which for a single account is almost a hundred a month. The bits-and-giggles crowd doesn't care; they just hope to fool enough people to make a few bucks by doing next to nothing. 

My plea today is simple, for all authors, not just me, not just self-published ones: If you've read a book, please leave a review. It's a way to separate a real book from the fake ones, maybe the only way a searcher can find something that's real. Without a number of reviews, search engines tend to ignore books when compiling results. Sure, the weenies can make fake reviews, but that starts to sound like work.  

Seriously, even if you didn't much like the book, leave a review. I think it's fair to say most writers would rather fail on their own merits than because no one knew they were even there. If no one ever finds you, no one can ever read you.  

Thank you very much for hearing my plea. Skynet may not take over the world, but it sure is making it even harder for writers and artists to find an audience.  

Bath or shower?

Commercials sure like to show gals soaking in the bathtub. I wonder. My mom always considered it akin to stewing in your own filth; she was a shower-taker exclusively and encouraged same among the rest of the family. My wife has no interest in baths -- she just wants to get clean, not make a big production out of it. (She saves the big production afterward, for her hair.) 

Me? I used to like a good bath sometimes. Like, when I'd worked out too hard and everything hurt. Or when I drank too much and had one of those killer hangovers, the kind where you have stopped feeling nauseated but want to sweat the remaining booze out of your pores. A bath could be very therapeutic at times like that. These days I don't drink and barely exercise, so I pretty much stick to the shower.

I do remember a bed & breakfast we stayed in years ago in which the bathroom had no shower. It had a huge clawfoot tub with shower attachment on a hose, so you could wash your hair and I guess spray off any filth you'd been stewing in. I loved it -- as a moderately big guy it was great to be in a tub that fit me so well. (Shower/tub combos always skimp on the latter.) My wife wasn't so keen for reasons cited above, but she did admire the decor. 

The last one to use an actual tub in our house was the dog. Izzy had gone beyond the friendly confines of the backyard, into an area where runoff goes from the pond, and became blackened from the chest down. Of course it was very cold outside, so there was no bathing him out there; I had to de-mud him just enough with old towels to get him inside to the bathtub where I could do the rest of the job. Normally he gets a good scrub-down once a month at the groomer, but here his perfidy resulted in an unscheduled and more thorough bathing. Puppy, thy name is mud!

I guess I would tell the would-be homeowner or apartment hunter that it's always good to have a tub in case of such emergencies. You never know. One time when I was a kid, Mom and I picked up a big feast from a restaurant and drove it home -- or rather, not all of it, because a loose lid led me to a bath of chowder in the passenger seat of the car. Fortunately it was not hot enough to cause serious burns, but getting into the tub back home and letting the cold water do its thing may have saved me from worse injury. 

Well, one way or another, you gotta get clean sometimes, a sometimes a bath is the way to go. Just don't forget the ducky, and the soap.