Monkey wrenches.

A company I work for was recently purchased by some firm you and I never heard of. While being tangentially in the same business arena, one is a publisher and the other one is an investment firm. 

Knowing the track record of the money mooks at places like Boeing in recent years, I am not optimistic. My main contact says that so far there's been a little departmental shuffling, but no major changes. 

I will be the first to admit that publishing is a mug's game these days, the overeducated spooling the unnecessary to the uninterested. It had reached a grand height in the 1990s, when Condé Nast built its new tower on Times Square, and has been in precipitous decline since. (Condé had its own tower by 2015.) Still, some ends of the business are attached to lucrative industries like finance and healthcare, so they have reason to continue to expect profitability. The company I work for is like that, so there's no reason to think it was bought to be sold off in parts, or to have the stock price run up and then dumped for profit by buccaneers of finance. 

However, there is every reason to fear that, once the dust clears, the new owners will move in the monkey wrench crew to improve things. 

These improvements are very much like artificial intelligence. They are forced onto the unwilling to perform functions that are unnecessary and wind up costing jobs for people who have performed well for years. The work is then outsourced or given to cheap hires that perform poorly. The bottom line is temporarily improved, the stock price rises, then clients flee as everything gets weird and shoddy. Then it's sold off for parts.

Improve Back Better

Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of capitalism. The profit motive in a high-trust society like America has been until recently is the best means of raising people in large groups out of poverty ever devised.

I'm against stupid capitalism, however, where companies are run by people who neither know nor care about the actual business and everything goes to hell. I'm sure you can list a dozen examples of companies that died that way, usually the death of a thousand cuts rather than a staggering collapse. Often companies are just caught by surprise by technological advances. But in the end, it mostly comes down to a lack of the intelligence and devotion that made the companies great in the first place. 

If your company is bought out, as has happened to me in the past, I wish you very good luck. Keep an eye open for the monkey wrench crew, come to fix things. It's usually a sign to get the résumé together, if you haven't already. 

Eat the children!

Sometimes I wonder if people celebrating Halloween even want trick-or-treaters to show up at their door. The little kids, anyway. The yard decorations are absolutely horrifying, and a long ways from the stuff that was around even twenty years ago. 

The Angel of Death prepares to bite the head off a little girl

 

How can a ghost have stitches?
I always heard "Witches get stitches."
Or something like that.

Stack o' skulls and the Murder Clown
Acrobatic Team

I realize that compared to a lot of over-the-top yard displays, these folks are barely more than a papier-mâché pumpkin and a green witch Glitter Plaque. But I think when I was a little kid I would have had to at least screw up my courage, maybe shut my eyes and run to the front door -- less for the candy than from the greater fear of being labeled a chicken or a baby. 

Skeletons scared me when I was a boy, I can admit now, and no rational discussion of the utility and importance of human bone structure could cure me of it. I went through a phase where every time I had to turn a light on in a dark room, I anticipated a skeleton waiting for me. I never told anyone, and God help the kid with that same phobia today, because there are plenty of lifelike skeletons to be had for prank purposes. Fortunately, after a couple hundred skeletonless light engagements, I stopped worrying about it. But let's just say that having a vivid imagination is not an unmixed blessing. 

The other confession I have to make is, scary as this stuff is, it was nothing compared to the shooting gallery illustration. This "fun" bit of artwork was in an arcade, either in Seaside Heights or Coney Island -- I have not been able to find it online -- and featured an idiot man with a rifle barrel turned backward, as happened in Looney Tunes many times. But instead of just being blackened with gunpowder, the rifle had blown a hole in his head and a hole in the abdomen of the woman behind him. Both reacted with some surprise. I could not look at it; it would ruin my day if I did. The concept of "body horror" was not so well known then, but that was how it affected me. What made it really sickening (like, made me want to throw up the contents of my mind) was that it was supposed to be funny. 

Maybe I was the weird kid, I don't know. But to my credit, no matter how scared I was, I would get up to every door on Halloween to demand my candy. I could not back down in front of my peers. Plus, candy comes first on Halloween. The pumpkins and ghosts and the rest are really an add-on. You gotta get the good stuff.  

Battle of the cheesians!

Like a lot of Americans, my wife got through college with the help of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. The same is true for Canadians, except for them it was Kraft Dinner. Same powdered cheese product, different name. Beloved staple of families with young children, immortalized in the Barenaked Ladies' classic song "If I Had $1000000."  

But is Kraft Mac & Cheese (as it is styled now) still the big boy on the block? The kids who used to demand it for dinner are adults now, and do they want something more out of a boxed side dish like this (or in a pinch, a main course)? 

That's what my wife asked when she heard about a product called Goodles, a new contender trying to take on the old pro. Goodles isn't the first to try -- Annie's Homegrown has been at it since 1989 (now owned by Nestlé) and corners the organic market. Goodles' gimmick is higher nutrition, though. Specifically higher protein.  

But is it really better than Kraft? 

We thought we'd find out. 

In the left corner, the reigning champion, Box Blue, Old Faithful, your childhood reliable... Kraft Mac & Cheese! 

And in the right corner, the Groovy New Guru of Goodness, the challenger... Goodles Cheddy Mac!

Right off the bat there is a price issue. At Walmart, the Goodles box cost $2.98, whereas the identical size Kraft box was a paltry $1.24. Is Goodles' quality enough to make up for the more than doubled price? Well, you note the award leaves in the lower left side of the box, indicating that Goodles is "Clean Label Project" certified -- in other words, it tested clean for pesticides and heavy metals and other stuff you may not want the kids to eat. 

Unfortunately, the part of the label that warns you that the food is larger on the label than in real life has to have some third-grade cutseyness attached, unlike the same thing on the Kraft box. 

"Enlarged to show YUM" -- this is not the last we'll see of that kind of stuff. 

On to the cooking! 

Both K and G cook up similarly, with 6 cups of water. Boil the pasta, drain (but don't rinse), add 1/4 cup milk and the inserted powdered cheese pack. Kraft calls for four tablespoons of butter as well. Goodles says no butter, but notes that if you want, you can add a couple of tablespoons for richer flavor. My wife said to go ahead and add it -- to give Goodles every chance to take on Kraft in the same weight class. 

I was quite surprised to see that the Kraft powder looked less phony than the Goodles powder, which was bright orange. My wife, looking at the pots, guessed wrongly that the more orange one was the Kraft. There may be a legit reason for that, as I will discuss below. She is convinced that Kraft's used to be more bright orange, like a Syracuse linebacker, and indeed she is probably right. They dropped the food coloring in 2016. 

Kraft

Goodles

While we wait for the tasting, here are the comparisons of the nutrition facts. Kudos to Goodles for listing every possible vitamin and mineral like it's a bottle of Centrum. We also see that has only 5g more protein per serving (15g) than Kraft (although with the optional butter it would be a smidge higher). But that is an issue with the kiddies. A grown man needs 52g of protein daily, but a kid between four and eight just 19, so 5g is not nothing to them. 

One curious factor when these products were prepared is that Kraft's box seems to make a lot more. Seriously, by volume it looks like a quarter to a third more food than the Goodles package. And yet the serving sizes and number of servings per box are comparable. I assume that the Goodles pasta and sauce are weightier, since these things and serving sizes are measured by weight rather than volume. 

Finally, the main event -- the taste test. What tastes the best?

And my answer is: The fun-size Twix I ate while cooking. 

But of the two contenders? They both taste good, but in different ways. I'd go with Kraft, but Goodles' product tastes more like real cheese. I think that the basic Kraft Mac & Cheese is made with something approaching American cheese, though -- it may have been a more fair test in that regard to use Kraft's white cheddar variety. Goodles' cheddar-centric flavor may account for the more orange color, and led my wife to prefer it to Kraft's. We agreed that the higher protein content probably made Goodles more satiating.  

But picky-eating kids usually prefer bland food, as in the Kraft classic. Such a dish, however, may be a canvas upon which one can create -- adding chicken or broccoli or something to get the kids to eat healthier. Of course you could do the same for Goodles. 

Either product would make a fine side dish. I'm not saying either is health food, though. They each left the pot and the wooden spoon with a very yellow, very sticky coating, the sort of thing that makes you think This is the kind of highly processed stuff that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics warned me about.

I'm going to ultimately give my award to the box that annoys me less. The Goodles' use of YUM puts it at a disadvantage, but look! Kraft getting out over its spiritual skis!

Seriously, I know your grandma probably made Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for you, because she couldn't really cook, and that's a warm memory, but if you need a boxed pasta kit to feed your soul, get your ass in a pew. You need more help.

Does that make Goodles the winner? Not necessarily, because they use a unicorn on the box. Poor unicorn, once a medieval symbol of purity and light, now the unfailing sign of weird, smirky self-regard. Plus the word "community," which equals Communism Lite, and "love," which means "nothing we thought of as love until ten minutes ago." 

I call it a draw. Maybe next time Annie's Homegrown can leap in off the top ropes and make it a free-for-all. Get Bernie the Bunny to do a throwdown on both these guys. 

Scary time.

For little American kids, the journey from the start of school in the fall to the next big event, Halloween, takes approximately eight years. Not so for adults. 

Hallowhine

As wise person once noted that life is like a roll of toilet paper; the further into it you are, the faster it goes. There's no better example than seeing how quickly life moves for adults than children. As I've noted here before, how could it be otherwise? For a man of fifty, one year is 1/50th of his entire life; for a kid of four, it's an entire quarter, and he doesn't even remember the first half. The kid would have no way to understand the internal reference of time's passage that an older man has. 

That's the scary thing about time -- you don't have to be Einstein to see that it's a relative phenomenon. No wonder even the ancients tried to invent timepieces. No one could agree on how long anything took. 

"You said this would be over in a short time!"  

"It was! Wasn't it great?"

"It sucked! And it lasted for ... a very LONG time!"

"If only we had some means of knowing how long things took, we could see who's right."

"There's the passage of the sun."

"It's cloudy."

"Well -- I'm right and you're wrong and it lasted a WHOLE LOT of time!"

I was thinking about relativity recently, Einstein's little killjoy for universal exploration. Before he got all smarty-pants about the speed of light and everything, we could think that if we only could make something fast enough, we could get to other stars in no time. Then Albie is like, "Wait, there's a speed limit! No going past C." And we were like, "Oh, man! At that speed, the next galaxy is more than two million years away!" And he's like "Sorry, dude. Better pack a lunch."

But it gets worse. Now we know that time would pass differently for the people moving near that speed than for us on Earth, moving at Earth speed. What kind of craziness does that lead us to? It's why space-faring capitalist companies like in the Alien movies would never work. You'd launch from Earth as an employee of Earthy McEarth Enterprises (EME), and by the time you got to your destination, EME had merged, failed, the pieces bought up, a new company planned, created to fanfare with various funding rounds, had an IPO, got absorbed in an LBO, the main company failed, tried to get a government handout, crashed, and everyone is dead because the sun went nova. 

Don't be fooled by so-called Universal Time. It doesn't apply to the universe. Is it ever the same time all at the same time throughout the universe? If at my house it's Monday, August 15, 2033, 8:09:12 a.m., is it something different all over the place? I can't understand it. 

Well, one thing young and old can both agree on with time, and that's when it's something fun, it's over too soon. And that's true on whatever planet you happen to be on. 

Dips and drips.

As long as there have been people and language, there have been ways to call people losers. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. 

English has a very impressive list of synonyms for losers. For starters, Merriam-Webster gives us disaster, failure, catastrophe, disappointment, bust, flop, washout, bomb, fiasco, has-been, mess, lemon, miss, dud, shipwreck, debacle, clunker, turkey, débâcle, bummer, fizzle, clinker, frost, also-ran, dog, hash, shambles, botch, near miss, nonevent, nonstarter, muddle. That doesn't include others like never-was, failure to launch, useless, trainwreck, wet match, doofus, wet lettuce, dip, and drip. Also, fill in your own favorite. To the connoisseur they have their differences; a turkey is more annoying than an also-ran, a bomb more of a spectacular loser than a near miss. Whether they tried and failed or failed from lack of trying, or even (like the has-been) have enjoyed past success, they have this in common right now: failure. 

Still, there is a lot of overlap between failures and other kinds of problem people. A doofus and a goof might have a lot in common, but it seems that while both are dopey, the goof may be lovable and even stumble into luck. A jerk is often not a loser, but like a bomb, is dangerous in proximity. 

It's funny to me that Merriam-Webster has many words for loser that imply spectacular failure, like catastrophe and shipwreck. Usually we see loserdom as a chronic rather than acute condition. A fiasco may pull things together for another try, but a loser can never win. We may avoid them in real life, but we like them and kind of root for them in the funny pages. Charlie Brown is the best example, but since 1965 the Born Loser has been sharing his hopeless case with the reading public.  

I thought about adding Joe Btfsplk of Li'l Abner to this list, but he's not a just a loser, he's a jinx -- a man whose loserdom is so bad that it extends to those around him. 

Always have some sympathy in real life for the losers you may meet. Sure, some do nothing but loaf, smoke weed, or krex and moan, but others keep plugging even though it's hopeless. Tenacity is a virtue. Besides, the most loveable loser many of us know is staring back out from the mirror, brushing his teeth (and doubtless finding a new cavity). I have read recently that from 1947 to 1950, Jackson Pollock painted in his “drip period.” My drip period has lasted from approximately nursery school to the present day.

When it's bad, it ain't bad enough.

The bear situation has been getting to me. 

If you're just joining us, there is a black bear that has been roaming the neighborhood, making himself quite at home in daylight hours as well as in dusk and dawn. It was seen most recently by me from the porch last Wednesday as he sauntered down the street. 

My wife wants me to call the state fish & wildlife office. The local authorities have no interest in bear matters, so it must be referred to the closest state office -- one county and forty miles away. So you can bet they'll just come racing down here with sirens wailing, ready to capture a big ol' bear. Yeah.

Every time I take out the trash or take out the dog in the dark, I also take out my big ol' cop flashlight, the kind you can use to beat the fight out of a fleeing felon. Probably would not give me the edge in a fight with the bear, but it's better than nothing. I believe it when they say bears would really prefer not to get too close to humans -- but this guy is already taking liberties. 

Meanwhile, we have Eastern Coyotes again all of a sudden. Do they follow bears, looking for scraps? I don't know, but my wife has heard them howling, and I'm pretty sure I saw one in hot pursuit of three deer through the gloaming.

So last night I dreamed I was outside the house (not my actual house) and looking into the backyard (way larger my actual backyard) while on the phone with my friend Will (my actual friend). Dog Izzy was in the back. Suddenly through the high grass bordering the yard came a multitude of wild critters -- a rhino, cheetah, a gigantic African elephant, and other assorted miscreants. Izzy froze at the sight. I said, "Will, I'll have to call you back," and got the only useful-ish thing at hand, my three-pound sledgehammer. I wished like the comic book Thor I could use it to shoot lightning, but I figured if I screamed enough and bopped the right people in the snoot, I could give Izzy a chance to run for it. Just as I made my move, I woke up. 

I have to say I was a little proud of my dream self, ready to plunge into danger to save my beloved dog. Most of the time I consider myself the kind of guy who, in a crisis, looks around to see who else is stepping up to solve the problem, and if no obvious problem solver appears, to kind of shuffle sideways out of the area. So, yay for dream me, I guess. 

Yeah, there I am.

Should I call the government about my bear problem? Not because of my own worries, but because it's dark when the teens are on the school bus stop now. Plus Halloween is coming, and that means little kids at dusk carrying sweet, sweet candy. I'm afraid our bear will think it's like a frozen dinner with the dessert in a separate compartment. 

Have you had to deal with bear business like this? Anecdotes and advice are welcome. 

Stunad time.

You know you're getting older when you think of something you have to do and you know you will forget to do it and then it comes up and you forget to do it even though you knew that was exactly what you were going to do. 

Makes me wonder sometimes if I got one of those Abby Normal brains. 

But then I'll come up with a memory of something so far back that I can't believe I pulled it not just out of left field, but out of left field in a ballpark of a foreign country where they don't even know what baseball is. Some core memory, often of a person or place or product, that I wouldn't have recalled on a bet, but that some trigger has set off a memory cascade and there it is. Like one of those guys who remain awake during brain surgery, and when the surgeon pokes him in a particular spot, he remembers the girl with the red sunglasses who tried to get him to take the brown acid fifty-six years ago. He hasn't thought of her since then and is amazed that that datum is still floating around in the attic.

And that's what a lot of people in the hinterland of years will say, that the reason they are forgetful is not senility, but that there's so only so much capacity in the old hard drive and they've been socking data away for decades like the Library of Congress. If it's useless information, well, welcome to the club. A ten-year-old still has lots of data storage available but is using it for character profiles from Dora the Explorer and episode details from Paw Patrol. By now she'd like to offload that for more room, but sorry, kid. No cloud storage available for the brain. 

Another age-related issue I think is misunderstood is falls. Falls are a danger to everyone, but especially old people, and yet they seem to enjoy them, as they fall almost as much as toddlers. But really, why? Poor vision? Muscle loss? No, I think the main reasons are pain and data storage failure. Pain, because even though you've been down those steps a thousand times, that new pain in the hip/knee/foot/back causes an involuntary hitch in the giddyap that ruins your rhythm, and down you go*. Data storage failure, because (and I'm not joking about this) even though you've been down those steps a thousand times, at a crucial second in the journey the brain will toss up Cal Ripken's batting average in his final season** and you will literally forget how many steps you've walked. Your brain will think five but you've done six, so you hit that ground like you're going down another step and blam! Flat. 

Our best bet is to do things more (ugh) mindfully, a word I hate as much as yummy, belly, or inflammation.*** But Mom always did say to stop daydreaming and pay attention. Back then it was so I'd do better in school. Now it's so I don't stumble into the road and die.  

🧠🧠🧠

* I remember a ballplayer with a chronic back injury that ruined his career. He was still strong and otherwise healthy, but the pain would ruin his mechanics. With the strongest will in the world, it is still hard to do something you know will hurt, and when it's something like hitting a baseball -- the most difficult feat in sports -- that little difference makes all the difference.

** .239

***Everything wrong with you is caused by chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is because of your bad living. Broken leg? It's because you eat too much bacon, lardass. 

Whither Fred?

Sorry I've been around less than usual. The main cause of my absence has been a large project that engaged a lot of us freelancers for a publisher that needed research done. It's for an annual award that attracts a lot of buzz, and so there is an intense screening process to kick the bums out and keep the stars. It was a lot of work. Not enough to pay the mortgage this month, but a lot of work. 

It's discouraging to feel like you're in a race not to get ahead but to lose ground less quickly, but alas, that is where I and so many of us are running these days. 

If you're having a banner year in your business, good for you! I am not jealous. Besides, if the government confiscated all your dough and that of a dozen like you, it would not even pay for ten minutes of its spending. Years ago, when I was blogging on another platform, I ran the numbers for how long the United States government would be funded if it just up and stole every nickel from every billionaire in the country, all assets turned instantly into cash. I think it was about a week and half, if that. Feel free to do the figures yourself -- it's too depressing. 

So the nation at large is losing money at an enormous rate, and so are most of the nations on the planet. There's going to be a reckoning somewhere along the line, I imagine. The only thing I know for sure is that the people who caused the problem will not be the ones suffering from it. 

Meanwhile, the black bear situation remains unresolved. Twice since I reported it here last month, I saw the bear head down to the wooded area behind the house, passing through each neighbor's yard once. I was outside with the dog one afternoon when a guy walking by with his own dog yelled to me, "There's a bear up the block!" To which, like the man in the famous joke, I could reply, "Yes, I know." 

Here's the results of the informal bear poll I took around the neighborhood: 

It's a little nerve-racking that the bear is out and about when it's dark in the morning, because so am I with the dog, because I have insomnia and when I'm up the dog wants to be out. It's also nerve-racking that three times in the last month I have had to remove piles of bear poop from the backyard. It's enough to make Captain Poopy resign his commission. 

I guess that's a new skill I can add to my résumé: bear scat removal. Although considering a lot of the books I've worked on, trying to clean up clumsy language or poor research, I think that's a task I've been doing for years. 

All of this may sound like a lot of whining, unless you happen to be British, in which case it sounds like a lot of whingeing. And that's fine. One day I'm going to compile a book from my most popular blog entries as the Best of Fred, and the title will be Always Explain, Always Complain.  

Advertising.

 

When life gives you lemons…

…smash them lemons, I say! And make iced tea!

My iced tea skills have improved over the years. I abandoned sun tea for fear of bacterial contamination, and traded orange pekoe for black. But fresh lemons instead of bottled lemon juice really seemed to put me in the big leagues.

The question today is: Which lemon abusing tool gets the most from your lemons? The extractor or the reamer? 

Yellow to make you think
lemony thoughts

You’d think the extractor would be better just because of the more technical sounding name:.exTRACTorrrr. But is it? Let’s put them to the test!

I shall juice two lemons with each—1 small, 1 large, as seen at the top of the page—into the measuring cup. That should even out any tiny deviations among the test subjects. Then we shall see which tool yields the most lemon juice.

First, the extractor, which uses a lever action to squash the lemon pulp flat. It is fast-acting and seems to leave nothing behind.   

The pulp remains in the peel and any seeds are generally left in there as well. 

After the large and the small lemons, we have just 

Slightly under a third of a cup. 

Now the reamer. 

This definitely takes more effort, requiring a twist action to get the most out of the fruit. The colander-like basket catches seeds and any large pieces of pulp. But the lemon half does not seem to be as crushed by the reamer as by the extractor. 

To my surprise, however, the reamer is the victor with slightly more than a third of cup of lemon juice produced! 

This may seem unlikely, but the difference can be explained by one small problem with the extractor that I did not take into account -- it has a bad habit of shooting juice out the side when you initially press the lemon. The only way to catch the loose juice is to hold the extractor's head in a bucket, and I'm not making tea or lemonade on an industrial scale. 

On the other hand, the extractor is faster, so if you were to want a lot of juice, that would be the better way to go. Maybe you want to become the next Nedick's or Orange Julius. Just make sure to get a food-grade bucket -- those Home Depot buckets just won't do the trick. 

For the birds.

Dog Izzy and I often have wildlife encounters on our little adventures. Usually squirrels and deer, although we've had near-misses with skunks and racoons and foxes, and that bear I mentioned a couple of weeks ago is still hanging around. Izzy usually has no interest in any of them. 

Birds being birds, one usually does not get close enough to them to have a tête-à-tête. But then we came upon this guy. 

He (I'm assuming it's a male, since it's got some color) ain't from around here. You may know what he is. I had to look it up. This is a budgie, native to Australia. Specifically this appears to be a recessive pied budgerigar, unless I miss my guess, going by the experts at the Budgie Academy. And since he didn't hitchhike here from Adelaide, I suppose he is someone's escaped pet bird. 

I have a feeling he's not going to make it in the wild. He was picking at something by the road and failed to notice the giant nose of my dog until it was close enough to inhale some feathers. Then, alarmed, the bird flew off like an arrow, peeping in panic. I'm glad his wings had not been clipped, although that would explain how he escaped -- one seldom sees pet birds shinnying down drainpipes. 

Can he survive a New York winter? Can he find food to his taste? Can he avoid being eaten by our local predators? Will he die pining for the scrublands, unable to find a mate in this asphalt jungle? Good luck, pal -- they say everything in Australia is trying to kill everything else, so I hope that means you have some good survival techniques. 

This crow, for one, did not. 

I'm not sure I've ever seen a dead crow before. They seem to be too annoying to die. And yet, this one is not sunbathing. The funny thing is, with all the scavengers around here, including its fellow crows, nothing has gone after it but the bugs. Maybe crow meat just sucks. 

Even the homeowners upon whose property the crow rests aren't interested in getting rid of the corpse. Or, as I have found from these folks on occasion, they are oblivious to anything outside their home beyond the walkway and the driveway. 

Package for you!

Well, if they give the grass another cut before the fall gets fully engaged, they're in for a surprise. I might have done a good deed and performed the last rites myself, but the wasps had gotten involved in the corpus and I'm sensitive to yellowjacket venom.

Man has always envied birds for their flight, but it's not an easy life. You have to eat a lot to survive and power that flight -- half their own weight each day -- and everything is still trying to kill you, including other birds. I think I'd even rather take my chances with Boeing. 

Education and frustration.

Year in, year out, we hear the same laments from people who have put some distance between themselves and high school. 

"WHY DID I HAVE TO STUDY X? I'VE NEVER USED IT!"

Values for X include science (biology, physics, chemistry), foreign languages, writing, or history, but mostly math (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus).

I have an answer for the question, but people don't like it. That answer is:

It wasn't for your benefit, stupid; it was to find the kids who would do well in it and go on to make great contributions to society -- and lots of money. 

I absolutely count myself in with the stupids on this. For all the good higher mathematics has done me, I might as well have spent those hours in school playing miniature golf or watching game shows. So I am not without sympathy to their complaint. And they are not really stupid, although they are complaining out of ignorance here.  

They need to understand that this is a downside of universal public education -- the kids all get tossed into the various subject pools, and the ones with the interest and aptitude -- and support at home -- will swim. Everyone has to take algebra, biology, etc. so we can find the future engineers, mathematicians, doctors, chemists, and so on. 

A tailor-made system where every child is eased into what he knows and likes best might seem ideal, but like most ideals it is impossible in practice. What the kvetchers would prefer in fact is to have never had to study these things, but we need people who understand them -- and how else will we produce them? 

It doesn't mean that the kids who struggle in math or English are useless dummies. Hardly. They may feel like way when they struggle, and I sure as hell did in trigonometry. It doesn't mean that they have nothing to offer. It just means that they don't have a knack for that kind of subject. Even most smart kids if pressed to study higher mathematics to its limits will reach a level where it becomes a fight. 

Schools used to know this. They used to have plenty of vocational training for kids who really weren't interested in college but could make a good, even great living doing other things. Then we all got buffaloed into thinking everyone had to go to college except for the hopelessly stupid. Those people we could look down on.

This has led to the sidelining of vocational classes and the ballooning of college costs and college debt. It also has led to the foolish disregard of occupations that once held esteem in our culture, jobs that required knowledge and skill but not a degree. 

So when I call someone who complains about having had to study algebra in high school stupid, I don't mean they were stupid about math. I mean they're being stupid about this particular question. 

The end of an era.

When I was a youth, recently out of college, my mom gave me some good advice. She said I ought to get a couple of "starter" credit cards to start building a credit history. 

Tell kids now that it was not typical for college students to have credit cards even a quarter century ago and watch the blank stares. 

Anyway, for my starter cards we went to the shopping centers, I applied for cards from those titans of retail, J.C. Penney and Sears. 

There were no fees for the store cards, and so I held on to them year after year, using them occasionally. I canceled the Sears card when, essentially, Sears got canceled. But I used the Penney's card at least a couple of times a year. You could get deals, and the clothes usually looked pretty good on me. "Pretty good" is the best I can hope for; the clothes can only make so much of the man after all. 

Periodically I would receive a new Penney's card, activate it, chop up the old one, and off we went. Year in, year out, literally for decades. I had that account before I met my wife. I had that account before I bought my first new car. I never lived more than 17 miles away from a J.C. Penney. It was always good to know that JCP was there for me. 

This past week I got a new Penney's card, as usual. This one looked a little different. Mastercard had gotten involved now. So I bothered to read all the paperwork that came with it. Hideous interest rates, minor fees for late payments, the usual stuff. And then I saw the thing that really irked me:

$1.99 fee for paper statements. 

Could that be right? I mean, they only sent me a statement when I had a balance, and when I had a balance I paid it. The vast majority of the mail I ever got from JCP was catalogs, coupons, and unsolicited advertising. My little mail statement was a tiny bit of postage for them. Were they really penalizing people who still want to write checks? People who grew up before 2000? People who, in other words, are the kind of folks who actually still like department stores? 

I called customer service, fighting through the computer phone tree every step of the way. When I got a live human being, whom I was determined not to take this out on, I asked politely: Are you really charging me two bucks to send me a bill? Yes indeedy. Well, please cancel my card immediately. 

She didn't even try to get me to stay. Just checked that there was no balance and closed the account on the spot. 

I don't know if old-fashioned department stores have a future in American retail. I do know that charging people to send them the bill is not a way to keep customers, though. I think we're going to see a lot more of this kind of thing ahead, because our retail companies, like most of our institutions, are run by dummies these days. 

Sorry, J.C. -- I was a steady customer for decades and you blew it. When you go the way of Sears, don't come crying to me. 

What's cooking?

I was nuking up some leftover Chinese food for dinner the other night. I was minding my own business, getting the table set, as the microwave oven hummed and my chosen meal spun on the turntable. 

Suddenly it stopped, and there was the sound of a crunch.

Did the door come ajar? This unit is well over a decade old, and the door doesn't have a programmed lock; opening it on purpose or by accident will pause the cooking. 

No, the readout was blank. Huh?

Well, try, try again, right? So I started it going, and the crackle came out louder, and smoke began to spew from beneath the machine. 

This, as we say in the trades, is not good. 

The machine stopped on its own again, but the smoke continued, so I carefully reached for the plug. All I could think of was that warning video I'd posted a couple of years ago about the hideous dangers of the electrical components of microwave ovens. Fortunately, I was (spoiler alert!) not electrocuted, or even mildly shocked. 

I removed the still-cold food from the interior and turned the machine on its back so that if there was an actual fire going I could find the source. But no, whatever was burning had ceased. The bottom plate was warm to the touch, but it would have been that way just from the cooking. 

Whatever else this appliance was, it was dead. Really most sincerely dead. Dead as an armadillo run over by nine wheels of an 18-wheeler dead. 

I've had microwaves die on me before, but usually they just refuse to start -- they don't start heaving smoke. I was sorry to see it go. I wound up heating my dinner in a pot on the stove, like some kinda hobo. "King of the roaaaad!" I wanted to sing. 

Unlike most kids today, I did not grow up with a microwave oven. My dad loved science fiction but did not trust microwaves. I'm not sure if that was ironic or logical. So my mom couldn't get one until Dad had passed on. At least the microwaves didn't kill him. 

We got a new one within a couple of days. It's the same brand and it works just fine. It's supposed to air-fry too, and if it actually does that well, it will be the first air-fryer I've used that did. But it's not the same. The old one -- carted away the next morning by the garbage men -- was actually big enough to fit an entire lasagna pan. A full-size Corningware lasagna pan. You don't see that everywhere. The new one? Maybe a quart casserole. 

 

Well, that's the way the water boils. At least the new one works. No more cookin' over a campfire and fightin' with the other bindlestiffs over my beans. This is the twenty-first century, you know. 

The path ahead.

This is a nice path. 

It's used for walking, biking, jogging -- the usual low-tech path stuff. Well made, I think, dotted with benches, running through the wooded areas of several towns. It goes almost twenty miles along the former railway line. It's popular, and it's an example of the kind of things local governments can do well. 

I can't think of a thing that the federal government has done this well in many years. Its response to Hurricane Helene is making the Katrina response look like a model of logistics and efficiency. How could it have gotten worse since 2005?

voilà

Of course, it will probably turn out that some of the funding for our local trail project came from the National Institutes of Health's American Bicycle Path Fitness Initiative, a $20 billion slush fund that donated $10,000 to the county. Who knows anymore. I just made that initiative up, but you know it sounded legit. Who cares? It's just money.

Our money.  

We've been building a lot of bike paths in America, but the actual number of bicyclists is declining. Around here we have a handful of serious bike riders, a small group of oldster bikers-for-exercise (they like to use the path), and the rest are kids, or illegals without cars, or guys who got their licenses yanked for DUI. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, said while running for office that he was going to bike to work at City Hall, and he did -- the second day he was in office, with the cameras rolling. Since then? Well, with the weather and traffic in New York and the idiocy of city drivers and other bikers, I think he'd be a fool if he did. But I doubt he has.  

Of course the campaign statement was just posing. It's all about appearances, and to hell with appearances. Appearances are ephemera, mist on a windy morning, nothing more than the emperor's new clothes, and the emperor is not someone who you want to see naked. 

This is how we get things like this:

What's her foreign policy plan? "Friendship is magic"?

I can't forecast what's going to happen in the election, but I will make one prediction that I think is ironclad: If Trump is elected, Antifa and all the other wannabolsheviks will go back to the only things they know how to do -- throw bricks, burn things, attack bystanders. The so-called insurrection of 2021 will be nothing by comparison, but of course it was nothing compared to the human injuries and billions of dollars in damage these commie cosplayers caused in 2020 anyhow, the one Governor Walz's wife and daughter enjoyed so much. The iron fist in the sparkly pink glove.

I can't lose hope for America, but I'm certainly not as optimistic about it as I once was. I know nothing lasts forever -- but it would be nice if the world's oldest constitutional republic could show itself to be more resilient than the ancient Roman Republic, which lasted almost 500 years. We'll be halfway to that mark in 2026 and it's looking grim.