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.