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.  

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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.