Absolute killer records.

One of my best friends growing up had an unusual criterion that any album had to pass to be considered first-rate. It had to have "no bad songs." It was often the first thing he would tell you about an album -- not that it was terrific or featured this or that number, but that it had no weak links. And you know, he had something. 

He amassed a large record collection, most of which had at least one song he considered unlistenable and required skipping. Such albums could be otherwise boffo music, but they could never be really top-tier records. 

Still, even if a record had a stinkburger or two, you had to consider it to be doing well if it got radio play at all. Generally speaking, a record that had two songs on the radio was a big deal, three was a hit, and four or more? Absolute killer. When radio was king of music, you could tell which records were the killers, because (at least for young people) radio was just in the air, coming out of cars, from boom boxes, the kids in the backyard, the girls on the beach blankets. Off the top of my head, here are some records that were notable for multiple song radio play:

• Van Halen: 1984
• Guns 'n Roses: Appetite for Destruction 
• Fleetwood Mac: Rumors 
• The Who: Who's Next
• Huey Lewis and the News: Sports
• R.E.M.: Out of Time
• B-52s: Cosmic Thing

You notice that the records I've listed all came out before the mid-90s, and that's not a coincidence. Almost as soon as the Internet was launched, radio started to weaken as the responder to and arbiter of taste. Popular music got split into smaller and smaller sub-genres, and music was not played aloud in public places as often when everyone his own lightweight device that held tons of music. 

So it's unlikely that even Taylor Swift can ever top the biggest killer record of them all: 

Look, I never even liked Michael or any of the other Jacksons. Not my kind of sound. But I could appreciate the skill that went into the songs on Thriller. I had to. It was everywhere. Youngsters today may think they know what it's like when a popular song is everywhere, but they only get a taste of what it is like. Songs from Thriller could be heard anywhere at any time. Since it spent more than a year (!) at or near #1, from February 26, 1983, to April 14, 1984 (and has remained on the charts ever since, getting close to 630 weeks as I write), it was unavoidable. The album had seven singles, which is to say, the whole album not only sold far better than any before or since, but millions bought slices and then bought the whole pie. 

Reportedly Jackson challenged himself to better those numbers with his follow-up album, Bad, but he couldn't do it. Nobody could do it. And now that radio is less of a unifying force, it's doubtful anyone ever will. It's not a once-in-a-lifetime thing; it's a once-in-an-industry thing. 

My question to you is: What albums would you count as absolute killers, records that had many hits and near-hits that didn't just make the charts but powered into them? I'm sure you all know a lot more than the few that occurred to me on brief reflection. 

Or, what album is otherwise perfect but had that one crap song that you can't stand? 

Share in the comments!

Brain damage.

I know a few motorcyclists, and all of them love their bikes. All of them also wear helmets. It's the law, yes, but they've also been around long enough to see what happens to motorcyclists who don't wear helmets. Similarly, they wear leather or denim or even high-impact armored jackets to protect them from being mandolined when falling off the bike at speed. 

Then there's this guy.  

I hope Dad's Girlfriend will be all right if they fall off the back and he lands on top of her. 

If they want to take no precautions and defy the law, well, you do you -- it's still a free(ish) country. What really irked me here is that Dad's little boy was riding on a mini motorcycle ahead of them. Now, the boy was properly dressed in helmet and jacket, but it's illegal for kids to ride these e-motorbikes on the streets. You'd never see the tiny tot coming. 

Good thing they weren't on a two-way street with a hill, a hill on which oncoming traffic would not see a little kid in the middle of the road -- whoopsie, that's exactly where they were. 

There was no trouble this time, not that I saw, but the lesson to the kid is: A) If it worked once it will always work (because that's how boys think) and B) Dad is cool with Dad's Girlfriend and they drive a bike with no protection, so it must be what cool adults do. As they say, more is caught than taught. 

Now, I'm not a fan of safetyism; overprotection is clearly leading to neuroses in our younger generations. But these kinds of risks are just dumb. Some parents set their kids up to fail; others set them up to be braindead. 

Part of the problem is that we really don't take concussions seriously. A football player gets his bell rung, we say rub a little dirt on it. A detective gets knocked out cold before the commercial; by the time you're back from the bathroom he's rubbing his dead and asking the Chief if they got the number of the truck that hit him. For a look at the inhuman durability of TV characters, I recommend Mannix. Keith Roysdon on CrimeReads passed along the data from someone who watched all eight seasons of the slick 70's private eye show: 

A 2007 column in the Washington Post by Neely Tucker notes that someone had tallied the times that Mannix was shot or hit in the head during the 194 episodes of the series. Tucker wrote that Mannix was knocked unconscious 55 times and shot 17 times in the series.

I guess it goes without saying that Mannix was not realistic. 

I was editing a novel for a big-name publisher some time ago and one of the characters was knocked out by a blow to the head. After the chapter break one of the other characters said that at least there was no sign of concussion. I hated to tell them that losing consciousness is a TREMENDOUS sign of concussion.

Most guys have had plenty of moments in our lives where we know something is dangerous but we say "Oh well!" and just do it anyway. And that's not a bad thing. Courage is never to be underestimated. But demonstrating foolish behavior to a child is not a good idea. And if there'd been a cop sitting over the hill and Dad got arrested with Dad's Girlfriend for riding improperly and letting his son ride a kiddie motorcycle in the middle of the street, the story would not have been of hilarity or tragedy but humiliation (and Dad's Ex lording it over him for the rest of his life). 

Head impacts cause brain damage. There's no reason to act brain damaged ahead of time. 

(P.S.: One motorcyclist I know who had super maximum protective equipment? I know he raced around the highways like a lunatic, because I once rode across the county with him in his car and I thought we were all gonna die. He was stone-cold sober, too, the only time I thought a sober driver was going to kill me. So he was wise to at least armor up on his bike.)

The worst workers in America.

You may have heard my kvetching in this space about our elites being unable to perform what their jobs require of them, although they certainly keep busy pestering people about things that are none of their business. Health officials ruin health, teachers don't teach, entertainers don’t entertain, and the only thing Boeing means anymore is the sound of things popping off their aircraft. 

But by far the most unproductive members of society are journalists. Some still dig in and get the facts, but most of them just want to be editorialists, swaying public opinion by smearing enemies and disregarding unpleasant information. The bottomless failure of the current vice president being presented as endless victory and the complete lack of curiosity in mainstream reportage is astonishing. 

Since the early twentieth century, journalists have had a commie streak. Why not? Common jealousy would ensure that the bulk of readership would enjoy seeing the wealthy get tweaked. But two things have changed to make the situation far worse: 

1) Rich commies are considered "one of us" by the media, and so only to be covered favorably; and 

2) The media doesn't care what we think now. 

I've heard older people bemoan the fact that there's no Walter Cronkites anymore; Uncle Walter's reputation as a fair newsman has survived even his at best foolish (and at worst treasonous) public assessment of the failed Tet Offensive. Still, by comparison to today's reporters, who ought to be demanding Kamala Harris answer serious questions about policy for her campaign but just play songs of love like the freaking Mambo Kings, Walt was a fair newsman. 

The massive failure of our current crop of top dogs is an insult to dogs, and I can only hope that someone in the left end of the media (95% of them) will be embarrassed enough to demand Harris have a real press conference. In the old days, even reporters who were playing for a team would not want to be caught looking biased. I'm not sure you can shame the current useless crop any more than you could shame cheerleaders for rooting for their team. They're too corrupt or too dumb to care. 

All fall down.

Temperatures have been in the low 50s overnight this week, and you know what that means! 

I'm mostly past the age where my clothes have to be seasonal, beyond the point of survival. My last Hawaiian shirt went to the charity box as a gift to my wife. Now it's someone else's problem. Everything else is just layers. 

But then there's plaid. I have a short-sleeve plaid shirt, but a part of me will always think of plaid as being the color scheme for thick cotton shirts, thus the kind that you leave in the closet until the first day of autumn. And not crazy colorful plaid, either -- they don't wear that stuff in Quito or Honolulu, you know. I mean plaid based on black + one other color.

The sad thing is, that with the loss of my Hawaiian shirt, I only have one other really summery number, a very bright blue that's quite airy and good for the heat. But it also must be ironed after washing, or it looks like it was balled up under the car seat from September to May. That's an issue because 1) I'm lazy and 2) the dog is scared of the steam iron. That hissing really bothers him. Consequently I have worn that blue shirt once this summer, and at the rate things are going it may not come out of the closet again. 

There's another problem with happy colors, and that's you just look dumb wearing them if your countenance is very serious. I used to wear lighthearted ties to work sometimes for that very reason -- to remind me that if I went around grumpy with, say, my Looney Tunes tie, I would look like a fool. And then I got sacked. And then no one was wearing ties anymore. And then I was working from home. So now I just go around grumpy anyway, and wear dark colors. 

This is a lot more than I intended to say about clothes, and I apologize if I've wasted your time. If it made you grumpy, put on a Hawaiian shirt and smile. There's still almost a month of summer to go. 

Twisted!

A lot of writers don't plot out their books. They just go with the flow. Whatever feels right at the moment in the story, go with it. 

There's definitely a plus to that kind of thinking -- you never worry if your book is getting bogged down in the dull part, because you can always just throw in a 'splosion or reveal a character thought dead or, as Raymond Chandler said, "When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." Thus the Rule of Cool maintains -- it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to grab the audience. 

But let's look at this more closely, especially at the Chandler quote. Thanks to the invaluable Quote Investigator, we have context for that line: 

In April 1950 Raymond Chandler published an essay titled “The Simple Art of Murder” in a magazine called the “Saturday Review of Literature”, and he reflected on his background as an author in pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. The tales about police officers, journalists, and detectives sometimes lacked realism Chandler said because they occurred during a compressed time-frame and involved an artificially close-knit group of people.

And the Chandler excerpt that contains the famous quote: 

...the demand was for constant action and if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. A writer who is afraid to over-reach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

So it's very tempting to throw in a plot twist just to liven things up, catch the reader unaware. It unquestionably generates interest. Unfortunately, it also can generate a huge plot problem. 

Fans of the original Dallas were stunned with the dead Bobby Ewing turned up at the end of season eight, quite alive... But how? When viewers found out the past season had been all a dream, and how it messed with continuity going forward, well, let's say that for the show's sake it was good that the Internet had not been invented yet. Still, the show, which had been in decline, managed to continue on for a total of fourteen seasons, so maybe the cool plot twist worked, even though it never made any sense. 

Personally, I like stories that make sense. Sure, I read a lot of nonsensical stuff, but that's different -- you don't expect sense from wacky comedy. But from crime stories, I think the reader definitely wants reason. Part of the appeal, even for books that are very dark, is that the reader can understand what and why. Throwing in crazy twists that cause the plot to fall apart ultimately annoys the reader. 

And that's the thing -- the reader trusts the writer with his time and interest, and he expects the plot to be coherent even if dislikes how it plays out. Most people would rather hear a song or a concerto that was written and rehearsed, not an open-ended guitar or sax solo that wanders around for half an hour and just ends when the cocaine wears off. 

I do plot my stuff out in advance, but I often find that things don't work as I planned when I get into the meat of the thing. For example, seeing everything play out, I can find that what looked like a secret to the characters in the outline would look completely obvious to the characters when enacted on the stage. Then it's back to the ol' drawing board. 

And this is one writer working on one project. You see movies that seem to have more screenwriters and script doctors than cast members -- how can they not screw up the plot? All those cooks throwing lasagna noodles and herring and chocolate icing into the project? Too many cooks spoil the plot, no question. 

Crypto security!

Friends, America is once again in danger of voting for communist leadership, and we know that will mean more towering inflation, more recession, more crime. So, should you invest in gold? Hah! You know as well as I do that with the price of gold these days, your life savings could be reduced to a nugget that you could hide in your underpants. Even if you wear thongs. And if you do, please don't tell me.

No, I know you want to put your American dollars into a good, solid cryptocurrency. One of the big-name outfits like Bitcoin or HodagCoin something, right? 

Heck, no! Not only are those cryptos overhyphed, but they're ruining the world for nothing! Just look at this item from The Guardian. Computer data is sucking energy out of everything, and the world of artificial intelligence is just getting started.  

With the refusal of our betters to make more power plants, use more natural gas, and fire up more nukes, all this computing is bound to help drive your energy costs up. And so much of this computing is just junk data storage. 

Supposedly as much as two percent of all US energy generation is going just to mine cryptos. The useful being wasted on the meaningless. It's a shame. 

Unless you buy all-natural, all-awesome Fredcoin! 

Not only is Fredcoin better for the environment, it's safer, too! 

You think other cryptocurrencies are really secure? You can blockchain all you want; every crypto account is attached to a network, and every better mousetrap invites a better mouse. 

That's where good ol' reliable American FREDCOIN is once again proven to be the superior cryptocurrency!

Why? Because we don't run some fancy juice-sucking AI-empowered computer network, vulnerable to hackers or disgruntled employees or any other kind of jerkface weenie money-stealers. No, we have taken important steps to make sure our database is never in danger from bad actors on the Internet. I absolutely guarantee it! 

But how, Fred? you ask, astonished. Nothing on the Internet of Things is really safe!

Well, you put your finger right on the answer. Behold the secret of our security -- the master computer that runs the whole Fredcoin empire: A Tandy TRS-80 Model 4P!

“Ol’ Smoky Joe”

That's right -- Ol' Smoky is not and cannot be connected to the Internet, so all its information is as secure as a safe deposit box. It would have to be physically hacked, and that's not happening. Anyone who tries to break in here will have to face the jaws of doom (golden retriever Izzy) and my angry wife with a Louisville Slugger. 

Furthermore, the Tandy uses way, way less energy than all those big wasteful computers run by the hypocrites in Silicon Valley, the nerds who want you to keep your A/C at 85 degrees while they suck up all the juice to make lousy art with people with twenty fingers. 

All you do is send in your Fredcoin order with some of that soon-to-be-worthless US currency. Our crack staff (me) will put it in your account, and Ol' Smoky Joe will do the rest. It's a flawless system! It's completely safe! And if the grid goes down, the Tandy can be powered by our emergency crew of hamsters, just standing by to run that wheel.  

So don't go messing around with those ridiculous cryptos that can be wiped out because the founder lost the password. Mess around with Fredcoin, the crypto that's as solid as Radio Shack itself! With Ol’ Smoky, 26 pounds of computin’ fury, you can’t go wrong.

You can pick your friends…

… but can you picnic?

Maybe where you live, you can barely enjoy the five remaining weeks of summer because of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the youths who have already started school. It doesn't start here until the day after Labor Day, but the school supplies have been featured prominently at stores since July 5, so the misery is growing here as well. 

Nevertheless, let us not forget that we're only halfway through August and, despite the Halloween candy in the stores, there's still a lot of summer left. In the socialization department, there's still Labor Day weekend, which means another shot at having a decent backyard party. Maybe it won't rain this time. Maybe Uncle Al won't throw a fist at Uncle Lou this time. Maybe that kid with the purple hair with the snot ring will stay home instead of moping in the corner and grumbling about Trump. Who knows? It could be the party of the year. 

And I am here to offer you a terrific idea for your gathering. 

Barbecues usually have great food, but unlike indoor holiday dining, there's no centerpiece item to make the guests ooh and ah, like a beautiful ham or prime rib or Norman Rockwell-esque turkey, or, for that purple-hair kid, lump of tofu. Well, there wasn't -- until now! Simply follow this recipe for a real show-stopping fruit salad.

Take two (2) blueberries. Cut a slit in two (2) strawberries and insert a blueberry into each. Take two (2) ripe peaches and cut into them halfway; work the pits out. Insert strawberries. Take two (2) mangoes and do the same thing to them, inserting the peaches when the pits are out. Take two (2) honeydew melons; cut in half and scoop out the seeds. Put a mango in each and reassemble melons. Take one (1) very large watermelon. Cut in half lengthwise and scoop out enough to fit the honeydews inside. Put watermelon back together and serve on enormous platter. 

Ladies and gentlemen, you have just presented the Wahonmangpeastrawblu. Slice firmly but carefully and serve in buckets.

I'd much prefer this to a Turducken. Does anyone really like those? They have "turd" right in the name.

So make sure to sling up a Wahonmangpeastrawblu at your Labor Day party! It will get the guests talking, that's for sure. ("What the hell is wrong with Jeff?") You may even help them feel glad that summer is coming to an end. And isn't that what it's all about? Helping?

Be good.

It's been a while since I did a book post on a Wednesday, but don't get all happy -- I am not prepared with time or commitment to bring back the Humpback Writers feature. That, of course, never involved writers with hunched backs, but ran on Hump Day, and was and remains the worst name for a book feature online. So no, I'm not doing that right now.

Nevertheless, it is Wednesday, and here's a book. 

The Good Citizen's Handbook: A Guide to Proper Behavior, compiled by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz and published in 2001, is a look back at handbooks from the 1930s to the 1960s, designed to help Americans live healthy, worthy, happy lives. 

The pages inside are not altered from the original handbooks, except for the addition of headers ("A Good Citizen..."). To the credit of the writer and publisher, the book's endnotes have citations for all of the originals, printed in the smallest type you ever saw in your life. 

So let's get to it: What ought a citizen do in order to be a Good Citizen? 

All right! But surely there's more to it than that?

Hmm. Seems a bit familiar, yes? Like everything being shouted at the citizenry in 2020? Not that it's bad advice for avoiding being sick, but it was also our Civic Duty to ruin our lives to save them in 2020. So is this old pamphlet really goofy and out of touch, when it was exactly what we saw four years ago, just with updated clothing on the models?

In fact, while the book looks like it's intended to poke fun at the earnestness and innocence of the past (à la Nick and Nite's "How to Be Swell"), it can't help but shine a light on the aspirations of an America that wanted to be better and safer for all its citizens. 

Better dressed, too. 

I like the "Clean Play" page. The rules of good sportsmanship are the same as they always were. But the last professional sportsman to follow them that I know of was Barry Sanders, who didn't show off or brag when he scored his many touchdowns and show up the other team. These days we tell kids in school not to be dickweeds, but then we behave like dickweeds ourselves everywhere else. More is caught than taught.

Happiness through purpose, friendship, communication, exercise, and faith. This is the precise advice we still from mental health professionals, except that now the “spiritual values” one is always (and I mean always, 100% of the time) illustrated by photo of a young woman meditating in the lotus position.

This book may have been compiled to chuckle at the innocence of the past, but what sane person would not prefer to live in a society where people really do want to strengthen the republic, help one another, and bolster goodwill? "Today good citizenship means less to us," writes McKnight-Trontz in the introduction. "We worry far more about our demons than our duties.... We belong to fewer civic groups, vote less, and spend far more time doing things ourselves, for ourselves. No wonder it feels like everything is going to Hell." And that was written before the invention of the smartphone! 

Of course, the America of the 1930s through the 1960s had all the problems we can imagine -- tragic family trauma, addiction, racism, poverty, corruption, misogyny, war, whatever else you want to add. Despite that it was a high-trust society, especially compared to the current moment. Two-tiered justice systems, handwave treatment of violent criminals, election theft, tribalism, stores locking up goods, institutions run by fools chosen for the shallowest reasons, children being miseducated if educated at all -- this is all part of our new low-trust society. The Good Citizen's Handbook is a window to the past, not as it was but as those living then wished it could be. We don't even have that now. Whenever I see art depicting a hopeful future now it shows a multiculti group of young people, no children or oldsters, dressed like bums, doing no work, and if a white male is in it, he's probably dressed like a woman or a unicorn. The future is dumb.

Sadly, the handbook is out of print, although as I write this McKnight-Trontz has another Chronicle Books title out: How to Be Popular. Which I know I could use. Perhaps then I could learn How to Be Swell. Nick at Nite didn't really help that much. 

Ain't no never mind.

I've complained about Chinese fortune cookies in the past. In 2016 I opined about the poor quality of the fortunes in our cookies. In 2017 I noted the sad case of Donald Lau, a fortune-cookie fortune writer with a career-ending case of writer's block. In 2019 the crisis deepened as the fortunes seemed to be descending into madness. But in 2021 there was a new hope as the fortunes returned to sanity and even seemed to regain their classic cleverness. 

Now? They look like they have given up. 

What happened here? It seems the message was intended to convey hope -- that you can indeed teach old dogs new tricks -- but instead we got a double negative that is almost unparsable. No one is never too old to learn. So... everybody IS too old to learn? Not only is that demonstrably untrue, it still doesn't really reflect what the message is. You are not never too old. So You are always too old. Nope, no sense at all. 

Don't tell me this is a language barrier issue. The Chinese fortune cookie was invented in America and has been a staple for as long as 110 years, so whoever is writing them is bound to be in the United States. So I'm afraid there's no excuse -- I must give it the alphorn of stupidity.

If you are reading this and you happened to be the one who actually DID write that fortune, please don't take it too hard. Yours was a harmless mistake, one easily understood and dismissed. Perhaps it was just a typo in the heat of the moment. 

On the other hand, our nation is currently unable to bring a couple of astronauts home from space, keep violent criminals in jail, restrict the benefits of citizenship to citizens, make entertainment products that are entertaining, and do a million other things that used to be par for the course but now are beyond our stupid elite class to handle. 

So yeah, no one is getting hurt from a fortune cookie. But that doesn't mean no one is getting hurt. 

Electro Wagon and Batmobile!

I still remember that day in 2013 very fondly -- walking across Midtown Manhattan to get to work and seeing the Batmobile parked on the street. 

 

I was thinking about TV's Batmobile this week, because the subject came up online about George Barris, history's greatest car customizer. You don't think so? Ha ha ha! I laugh. He's the man who also gave us the Hirohata Merc, the Munster Koach and the Drug-U-La, the Beverly Hillbillies' truck, versions of KITT from Knight Rider, a gold Rolls for Zsa Zsa Gabor, and many customized celebrity golf carts. George passed away in 2015, but his company, Barris Kustom, still makes replicas of these and other famous vehicles for deep-pocketed fans. 

But I have to think that none of those fans have yet asked for this:

George still has a lot of followers, but even they were not sure that the great man had designed this vehicle. Electra Woman and Dyna Girl was a wacko Krofft brothers' Saturday morning adventure show starring the lovely Deidre Hall (later a staple on Days of Our Lives) as Electra Woman, and as Dyna Girl Judy Strangis, for whom grown men still harbor a secret crush. This very campy, very Kroffty adventure show had special effects that made Doctor Who is its era look like modern Marvel movies, and mostly non-violent action that was very unsatisfying to the kids who loved the Batman show. Still, it was made with love, as only Sid and Marty could. 

But no one was sure who made the car, until a fan on Reddit noticed that Barris was mentioned in the closing credits as the creator of the Electracar. The titular heroes might have done better chasing crooks in one of Barris's golf carts. 

Barris's Batmobile, constructed on a Lincoln Futura, is my favorite of all the various Batcars we have seen on the screen. It's sleek, it has very cool styling, it has room for all kinds of gizmos, and it looks like a blast to drive. The ones from the Batman movies look more realistic in some ways -- they are vicious vehicles that a man who is a vigilante might drive, as the police would not look kindly on a weaponized race car or tank roaming through Gotham City. But on the campy TV show, Batman was a duly authorized agent of the law, so he could prowl the streets in his hot rod Lincoln. When I saw the Batmobile that day in 2013, I almost wanted to steal it. If only they'd left the Bat-key in the Bat-ignition!

But the Electracar? Ugh. Barris probably had a budget of $100 to make the Electracar. It has a three-wheel design with the odd wheel in front, the very design that caused horrendous accidents on ATVs. With the big disc it might not flip over, but its handling had to be awful. Worst, our electrifying heroines were zooming toward villains' lairs with no windshield. They wore no eye protection in the clips I saw, let alone masks to keep the bugs out of their 10,000-watt smiles. The car could convert into an airplane, too, thanks to the miracle of bad visual effects—I sure hope it had a windshield for that option.

Still, it was eye-catching, and however silly it may have been as a law-enforcement vehicle, it was much less silly than some of the vehicles we saw on Saturday morning hero shows. 

So there's that. 

Boy, I would still love to drive that 1966 Batmobile, just once. C'mon, Bat-owner, please? I promise not to use the Bat Beam or the Ejector Seats! 

You load 16 bags…

Like all manly men, when I go shopping (and have buttered scones for tea) I come back with a lot of bags, and these bags must be brought into the house in one trip if humanly possible. That means that I might carry any number of bags weighing any amount. Because regardless of the bulk and weight, to make multiple trips is a sign of weakness. 

Well, my wife has leaped in to help me out! Or maybe she's just tired of crushed loaves and broken eggs. Because she got me the Click & Carry.  

What is this strange device? 

The Click & Carry is nothing more than a heavy plastic handle made for heaving bags around. The top twists open, the handles of the bags are inserted, and when it clicks shut the bags are, as it were, reduced to being a single bag as they are hefted by a single handle. Clever! 

You can hoist it by hand; you can sling it over your shoulder (it has a comfort gel strip where it meets your shoulder to keep it from digging in and keep it in place). 

A few of these and you can easily get a week's worth of groceries for a family of six on your person. You may not be able to move, but you can do it! 

There are, of course, a couple of caveats for the purchaser. 

1) It only works with strapped or handled bags -- no paper bags. I know some paper bags have handles, but I never trust them. It will work with cans of paint, as seen on the label.

2) The Click & Carry is thick and strong, but that means it itself adds to the weight. Probably less than a can of beans, though.

3) Because you have bags slung together and hanging on your person like humungous Christmas ornaments, your groceries might still get crushed. But your rep with the other dads will not. No guy wants the shame of being a mere "two-bagger."

4) The product was seen on Shark Tank, so it has a label to that effect. But also...

5) Once again we see tribalism in the Certified Women Owned label on the packaging. Nothing against women in business, but who cares? It tells you nothing except they may have gotten SBA loans and other preferences men couldn't get, and so the company could be propped up despite the product being crap because a 51% stake is owned by someone with two X chromosomes. I believe Jeremy Boreing of Jeremy's Razors should have Certified Man Owned label on his product packaging.

6) Caveman that I am, I'd say that it just figures that a woman would invent a product that helps one go shopping, but I maintain that this product is more helpful for men. Men have the upper-body strength to really put it to its maximum usefulness. 

So the bottom line -- Click & Carry is clever and it works. Get a few and bring in so many shopping bags from the car in one trip that you look like a monster from The Dark Crystal. The other men may actually applaud. 

Their new slogan.

 

Hot, wet American summer.

Yeah, don't get excited by the title. It's just been really rainy. 

Saturday I was visiting friends a couple of hours away, and left at the perfect time to hit a torrential downpour. The forecast had warnings about this, but basically said it was a threat of scattered thunderstorms. 

Some scattered. 

I ran into it about twenty minutes into the drive, and it stayed with me until I basically hit the clubhouse turn. Flooding, sirens, flashing lights, huge gouts of water fountaining out from those crazy enough to drive in the right and left lanes and risk hydroplaning. A good time was had by all. (Note: No good time was had by any.) 

You think these August thunderstorms will last a couple of minutes and break up, right? Ha. Ha. He laughed hollowly.

Not my worst driving in the rain, though. I once had to speed eighty miles through the night in an endless Florida downpour to catch a flight. I was not as seasoned a driver then as I am now—had been driving for less than ten years at that point—and had never driven through such a prolonged hard-weather system. You know how you retain brief reels of events in your memory, like snapshots with audio? I had the radio on in the rental car to try to stay focused and calm, and I remember peering intently at road signs while Bob Seeger's "Katmandu" was playing. Wikipedia says, "The song was featured in the soundtracks of the 1985 film Mask, the 16th episode of Freaks and Geeks, the tenth episode of the eighth season of Supernatural, and in the 2009 documentary Journey to Everest." And in my drive from hell. I will always associate that song with that drive. 

This past weekend's drive was longer, but the rain was not as consistent. Still, with the massive shore traffic and the driving skills of others that have made the northeast famous, it was rosary time. 

In other driving memories, the only time I have totaled a car was hydroplaning in weather like that, driving to work. When it happened, I was alone on the highway in broad daylight. I was not surrounded by thousands of other cars in the darkness. 

I tried not to think about that. Instead I kept my focus on the lines and the car in front of me. 

You know how you settle in behind someone who knows what he's doing, going a proper speed? I did. In the darkness I memorized the shape of his taillights. I stuck with him. He was my new best friend. We would part somewhere up the road, and I would wish him well. But for now, he was the greatest guy in the world.   

The last twenty miles were almost anticlimactic, with the rain stopping. But boy, was I happy to see my house.  

So it was a heck of a drive, but by God’s grace I kept my head and made it home. Maybe that's an important lesson to remember for the less immediately dangerous but extremely nerve-racking months ahead. 

Last thoughts: 

1) None of these drives were my scariest. That one was caused by a light snow that was slick as ice. Literally wrecks all over the highway. My one-hour drive home took four of the craziest hours I have ever spent behind a wheel.

2) I was glad that the Beloved Mets' night game was on the West Coast and was only a couple of innings along when I got home. Because if I had been listening to the game later, when they blew a grand slam and lost, that might have caused me to crash. 

Text mess-ages.

 

Markers.

So it's back to school time, even if, like me, you live in a place where public schools won't reopen until after Labor Day. After all, college students have to get shipped off. Kids have to load up with the stuff the school says they will need. And remember, Labor Day is really early this year -- September 2. That means very little September will be available here in New York for kids to enjoy school-free. Then there will be pencils. There will be books. And yes indeed, there will be teacher's dirty looks. 

I used to love going with my mom to get school supplies, even though I dreaded the start of school. But I swear, everyone has gotten more grumpy since Dri Mark stopped selling these. 

I was an inveterate doodler in school -- actually, still am -- and when I saw that picture I got to wondering what happened to Dri Mark since my school days. The company is still around, and while they don't sell colored markers on the store shelves anymore, they do custom orders for these kinds of supplies. But that's not where they get the bulk of their money. If you don't know what Dri Mark makes now, you probably wouldn't guess. 

So I'll just tell you. In 1991, "Dri Mark became the original patent holder and only domestic manufacturer of the iconic Counterfeit Detector Pen. Over the next 25 years, the Detector Pen rose to be the highest-selling, and most success­ful counterfeit detection product in the industry." That's right -- most of the Long Island, New York-based company's dough comes from markers and other products that detect and expose counterfeit money. I would not have expected that. 

When I was in college I had a job for a year that involved handling cash, but I never got one of those pens. I'm pretty sure they were around, because I knew a grumpy old man who ran a soda shop when I was in high school, and I'd occasionally see him run a pen over a large bill to make sure it was real. 

I was taught to check bills for their color, design elements, and most of all feel -- US money is printed on a blend of linen and cotton, not commercially available, and most counterfeiters would spend too much money faking the paper to make money with their fake money. The one counterfeit bill I did find, a C-note, was caught because it didn't feel like currency. Dri Mark's pen takes away the guesswork, leaving a mark if the note is not genuine currency paper. Now the company offers products that can verify modern cash in up to five ways, and even be used on foreign moolah.

I congratulate Dri Mark for staying afloat, manufacturing a desirable product in the United States -- in New York, no less! But I still miss your smiling marker man. His enthusiasm was a little bananas, but infectious all the same. That's a lot of doodling for $1.98.