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.

Logos on the bogos.

Part one: Logos.

I bought a package of pretty good socks from Adidas. As one would expect, the famous brand logo appears on the shin end.

But these are the first socks I’ve owned where the logo only appears on one side.

It made me think.

1. One purpose of stitching the logo on socks is to remind you what company made this great footwear that your feet are enjoying, so you'll buy it again. 

2. But another purpose is to advertise the socks and the company to any who see the logo. It seems to me that the company knows we will instinctively want to don the sock with the logo on the outer side of the shin. It would look silly with the logos just facing each other, inwardly as it were, right? Careless. Like cross-eyed socks. We should know that one sock is intended for the left leg, and the other, the right, and act accordingly.

3. But the joke's on them because I hate shorts anyway. 

Part two: On the Bogos.

A hundred years ago people were familiar with the goofy term "logos on the bogos." It seems to indicate a kind of mild mental disorder in a humorous way. 

I don't know where the expression came from, and it's so obscure that searches turn up very little. I'm pretty sure I first encountered the term via the Great Lileks's site, but I couldn't find evidence of that on a search. His site has no search feature, and Google is too busy promoting paid links and shadowbanning badthink to do proper searches anymore. 

Nevertheless, here's another example from Two Bells, the newspaper for the employees of the Los Angeles Transit Lines: 

This clip comes from the issue of June 2, 1923, a four-page paper that included industry, company, and member news. 

Like every paper of its time, it also filled space with chuckles:

So, it would have bloomed last year, right? How about that. 

Part three: More Logos. 

In the classical sense, the term Logos refers to reason, as in divine wisdom and/or the controlling reason that has created a consistent universe that may be understood with human logic (logic comes from the same root). The word logo, as in what's on your socks, is short for logotype, but logotype comes from the Greek logos, in the sense of word. Which brings us back to the first meaning -- and the First Meaning -- for as stated in the opening of the Gospel according to John:

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

All of which takes us from socks to silliness to God in less than 450 words. So I'm going to lie down. I think I have logos on the legs or something. 

Pick your own punch line!

So here's a cartoon I whipped up, with a classic cartoon situation. Man vs. Firing Squad is as clichéd (we call it timeless) as Man Gets to Heaven, Man on Desert Island, Man Talking with Animal, Man in Cannibal Pot, Man in Western Shootout, and a dozen other classic situations. 

But today, you get to pick your own punch line! I have listed ten; which is the funniest?

1. "No menthol?"

2. "Just make it quick, I got a date in half an hour."

3. "Seriously, does my hair look okay?"

4. "The Surgeon General says that smoking is bad for you, mister."

5. "Does this stake make me look fat?"

6. "I don't smoke, but -- Say, could I bother you for a knife?"

7. "You know who smokes in bed? Yo mama."

8. "Excuse me! I specifically requested the nonsmoking section."

9. "I really gotta pee."

10. "I signed up for the Desert Island Cartoon."

🤣🤣🤣

Comedy classics, am I right? Of course, you are more than welcome to roll your own as well. Cig, sure, but I mean to add your own hilarious caption in comments. I promise to laugh! Even if it's just a hollow laugh of envy at your superior humorous talents. Ha. Ha. 

Amazing.

When the Beloved New York Mets were formed in the lead-up to the 1962 season, they did not look too good. The team was a huge collection of the washed-up and the never-to-be. Guys like journeyman Don Zimmer, who had had a couple of good years in Brooklyn, were pretty bad by the sixties; still, he was lucky to get out of Queens after 14 games. They ran through a vast number of players; they had two different guys named Bob Miller. Catcher Choo-Choo Coleman was remembered (by Ralph Kiner, I believe) as being a terrible interview, a guy who answered every question with "Yeah, bub." Poor Marv Throneberry made a colossal 17 errors at first base, half his career total of 34, and he hadn't even started the season with the Mets. And 1962 put an end to the career of one of the greatest-named ballplayers ever, Vinegar Bend Mizell, a 90-88 career pitcher who crawled through three teams that year to lose his last two with the Mets.

Casey Stengel was the colorful manager, of course, The Old Perfessor who had played on championship New York Giants teams twice and led those guys from the Bronx to seven more as skipper, including five in a row. While he defended his new team and gave them the nickname "the Amazin' Mets," he was frustrated out of his mind with the constant losing.

“I've been in this game a hundred years, but I see
new ways to lose I never knew existed before.”

People think that the Mets that year finished with a record of 40-120, but they are wrong. The actual record was 40-120-1. On September 9, 1962, the Mets played fellow expansion team Colt .45's in Houston to a 7-7 tie with the game stopped by curfew after eight innings. Since the two teams had a combined record of 91-196 at that point in the year, I guess Major League Baseball decided to not worry about resuming the game another time. Technically only the individual records for the game went into the books, not the team records, thus the usual 40-120 stat for the 162-game season. (There was also a rainout that was never made up.) The Mets couldn't even tie properly.

All that said, I assumed the Mets' 120 losses would be like the Great Pyramid, the Parthenon, the DiMaggio 56-game hitting streak, a monument that would never be equaled. After all, baseball has had many innovations since 1962, such as bonus babies, free agency, more sponsorship, more foreign players, and whatnot that prevented other expansion teams from being so awful. Brand-new teams would always struggle to get their feet, but they would not be forced to pick from the unwanted of the league to assemble a squad. So no one, I was sure, would ever get 120 losses again. 

Detroit came as close as one could fear in 2003, losing 119 games, but just managed to avoid the crown of shame. Surely that was just a fluke; the Tigers bounced back the next year to a more normal 72-90.  

Then along came in 2024 Chicago White Sox. 

They have tied the Mets' 120-loss record. With a handful of games left, they will almost certainly break it. Without having all the "advantages" that the first-season Mets had 62 years ago, how did the Sox do it? 

It depends on whom you ask, but most of the blame seems to go to the owner, who knew the team had to be rebuilt but went about it in a stingy way that was ill-suited to modern baseball, resulting in a 1962-expansion-team-like roster. A Double-A team in big league pants. 

Like most guys who do not labor under the delusion that we could go out there and play pretty well, I harbor the sense that any man who can play ball on a professional level is an exceptional talent compared to the rest of us and could be an asset on a team. Therefore, any group of them assembled with the awareness of baseball tactics and strategy would be able to compete. But that depends on your definition of compete.

Winning only a quarter of your games must be painful, but compared to the 2008 Detroit Lions and the 2017 Cleveland Browns, who won 0 games, it's pretty good. 

Furthermore, if you really did pull together a roster of American males at random and throw us out there, we'd go 0-162, so there's that to consider. 

Ultimately, though, someone has got to be the worst just because that's how numbers work. Unlike football, you can't win 'em all in baseball, and nor can you lose 'em all. But someone has to lose the most. And for now, that someone will likely be the Chicago White Sox. 

Sorry, guys -- I hope it doesn't take you 62 years to lose that title as it took the Beloved Mets. 

So hibernate already.

We got some new neighbors. They're up from the city. Actually, they aren't even here full-time yet. They're still having work done on the house next door. 

The family is friendly. Jewish, very Orthodox. No wild parties on Friday nights. The kids sort of like our big fluffy dog, Izzy, but don't want to get close to him. As I understand it, the Orthodox don't have anything particularly against dogs -- but they are very confused by them. Possibly the idea of a pet as a companion strikes them as odd. I've heard that expressed from other people too, as it happens. 

For his part, Izzy would love to play with them. But the kids are also terrified of him, because their experience with dogs is so limited. They don't seem to get that even a dog who is trained to sit will not do so because someone yells "Sit!" from twenty feet away. 

I discovered myself that there is a big learning curve with dogs, much of which I've detailed on this very blog over the years. 

The kids wanted to see the dog over the fence, which was fine. Even protected by the fence, they'd all scatter like pigeons when Izzy made the slightest move toward them. 

I've seen other kids who came up from the city who also are scared of dogs, but for different reasons. We had a black family who came from a neighborhood where only the bad guys had big dogs, so big fuzz Tralfaz scared the kids silly. I felt bad for those kids, and I still do. Creeps ruin everything -- even dogs.  

Anyway, the Orthodox family went home Sunday morning. Which was good, because if the kids had seen this guy in my backyard, they might never have returned. 

Welcome to the exurbs.

I was bringing Izzy around the side of the house yesterday when I spotted Yogi at the base of the yard. Izzy had not noticed him yet. So turn on a dime we did, and went to use the front yard instead. 

I then monitored the situation through the window. Eventually the big dude did a couple of big yawns and trundled out through the high grass. Later a fox showed up, maybe looking for leftovers, and rolled in whatever scent the bear left behind. I guess that will help the fox avoid being an hors d'oerve himself. 

The bear bottom line is, you move to the country, you get to see some wildlife. I have not heard of any bear attacks in the time I've lived here, even on people who go into the woods on purpose. But my neighbors who turn the cats out at night might want to have a second thought. Ohio is not the only place where cats can be consumed, you know. 

If I see the bear again, I will try to teach him a command. "Hey ber! Ir zol geyn kheyberneyt itst!" ("Hey, bear! You should go hibernate already!" according to Google Translate.) It could work.