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. 

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.  

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. 

Tires me out.

I know it's not like this in every state, but in New York you have to get your automobile inspected once a year. It's not a big deal, and I think it isn't a bad idea. People are often not aware that they may have problems that may be more expensive down the line -- or even dangerous. Plus, my car's inspection generally coincides with its need for an oil change. 

Of course, if the Oil Change light comes on before that, I do what anyone would do -- put in a quart and reset the idiot light. I ain't got time for all that blinkin' and flashin'.

As usual, my car passed inspection -- or would have, but for the rear tires. Those showed signs of serious wear. The mechanic passed me anyway, but said I should get them replaced. Since he didn't have to give me the Passed Inspection Sticker but did, I was now honor-bound to seek out new tires. 

How old were the tires, anyway? I couldn't quite remember. But I realized I had a way of knowing. The last time I got new tires, only a couple of months had passed before I was run off the road by a total idiot and ran into a spoon, which ruined my new front tire. Sure enough, I blogged about it at the time. I was surprised that all that had happened seven and a half years ago. My memory of changing out the tire for the spare and discovering the spoon wedged deep in the old one will be fresh forever. 

Rich guys have people to change their
spoon-wrecked tires. 

That was the weekend of the Supermoon, and it seemed to be bringing me Supercrap Luck. Can you believe it's been that long already? November 2016 seems like some mythical land, a happy place where no one had ever heard disgusting words like "COVID-19" and "Antifa" and "Soros D.A." A place, however, where twisted metal spoons might lie around in gutters, waiting to leap out on unsuspecting tires and burst them like a grape tomato on an archery target. 

On the whole, I think I got off lucky with just a couple of new tires on this inspection. Any engine problem would likely cost more. The thing is, as a freelancer, I have a habit of looking at any expense in terms of a bad assignment I completed to get the dough. "I spent countless hours on that stupid job, and now I have to blow the whole check on tires?" (Yes, Fred, that's how adulthood works.)

As for the spoon that busted my tire in 2016, I still have it. Sometimes you want to have visual aids when you tell a story that loopy.

Please clap.

 

E-Z guide to home cooking.

 

Trouble on day 3.

Hands vs. face.

Does this happen to you? I always think I have more time on an analog clock than on a digital clock, even if it's the same time. 

For example, suppose I know I have to be out the door by 10:30 to get somewhere on time, and I'm still getting dressed. I look at this and feel confident I can make it. 

I look at this, and I panic. 

But they both mean the same thing: I got seven minutes to haul ass. 

I think there are two related reasons for this, one reasonable and the other not. The reasonable one is that on the analog face, you see the second hand move, or at least how far the minute hand is from the next minute, but on the digital face you don't know when the next minute will click. However, digital faces that show the seconds are no help, and can actually be worse because I feel the passing of time more acutely. 

I thought at first that the clock face, being less intuitive than the digital, didn't make me panic because I didn't grasp the lack of time as immediately as I do with the digital, but I think that's wrong. I've been reading clock faces for as long as I knew my numbers, so they're both instantly understandable. The actual unreasonable reason is that mechanical motion itself is itself intuitive, where as movements of light particles are not. I don't see the workings of the clock but I know it's a mechanical motion, like a wheel turning or legs walking. With the digital clock there's nothing but electricity resulting in lights, no motion to understand by watching. So I think the digital clock looks to my lizard brain like it is striking down time at random speed, while the mechanical clock is understandably at a steady pace. Does that make sense? 

I hope so, because I went looking into this online and there may be even more to the situation. A news story from Australia notes a few differences in perception between clock-face time and digital time, including that clock-face time is circular and digital time is linear. So I'm seeing the sweep of the hand as a circular (and, I imagine, more relaxing) movement, whereas the digital clock is shooting in one direction like a bullet. And the site Zapier notes in an article that "A simple instrument such as a digital clock affects your perception of time differently than an analogue one. The latter represents time as a process, with visual cues as to what has passed and what comes next. A digital clock just shows the time in this moment."

On the whole, I think I'll stick with my analog watch and digital alarm clock. I need the alarm clock to get me moving, but the rest of the time I'd rather see time as a process -- I can get more done that way. 

Guesstimate.

One of the things that scrolls my nurd is when clients ask for time estimates for editorial work. Not the deadline; they mean how many paid-by-the-hour hours will it take. 

I understand that they have their own paperwork to file, and that the bean counters think that estimating time to copyedit or proof a book ought to be as straightforward as estimating time for a delivery of rocks. But it doesn't work that way.

Actually, the proofreading is not too difficult to estimate, since by doing a couple of pages quickly I can figure out how long and messy the job will be. Copyediting is a little harder, since it involves editing for sense and continuity, which can be an issue if the book turns out to be complicated. Estimating for fact-checking is the worst, though, because it's hard to tell right away if the author is a know-nothing dumdum who is going to ensnarl me in a world of irritation. 

The estimate I'd like to send

You can give a book a quick going-over, but that won't tell you if the author is using half-baked or completely unbaked sources, is mistranslating foreign words, is making wild suppositions hidden by passive language, or a hundred other things that make a book a pillar of lies. As a fact-checker it is not enough to say "WRONG!" like Dom DeLuise in Blazing Saddles, although it would be satisfying. I'm expected to provide the right information, or exhaust all efforts to find it. 

The problem is, unlike your plumber who discovers hidden problems, I have little recourse when an estimate is entered. One large company in particular makes it very hard for everyone if a job comes in over estimate, and it delays payment by weeks or even months. They make strong incentives to get me to provide on-target estimates, even though there's no certain way to do it. Either I overestimate and get a rep as an over-charger, or I underestimate and wind up working free hours. 

Anyhoo, it's made me more sympathetic to the contractor who finds unexpected issues like asbestos or bad wiring or unknown leaks or any of a number of things unexpected in a renovation. Sometimes you just can't tell where the big problems are hiding, in homes as in books.

New Year's devolutions.

I was inspired yesterday by this meme on the Great Lileks's comments, posted by our friend Mongo:

I find this is pretty true for me as well. In that spirit, I've decided that my best course of action is to resolve to do exactly the opposite of what I ought to do this year, in the hope that it will result in me doing what I ought to do as I break the resolutions as normal.

In that spirit, I hereby resolve:

📅To gain at least thirty pounds, if not more, by letting my diet go to hell and exercising as little as humanly possible. 

🙌To do as little work as I can while seeking lower pay all the time. 

🥳To stay away from church and avoid all forms of spiritual growth, stuffing myself instead with pop culture and stupid timewasters. 

🔔To allow my dogs to run wild and undisciplined, and do whatever they please with no training from me. 

📅To neglect family, friends, and all other personal relationships to the point where they wonder if I died.

🙌To let my finances fall into complete disarray and spend, spend, spend. 

🥳To let the house go to hell and stuff every room with garbage like I'm auditioning for a hard case episode of Hoarding: Buried Alive.

🔔To be as rude to my fellow man as I can without getting beaten up or killed.

📅To achieve nothing more intellectually challenging than sitting through an episode of a Real Housewives show. 

That should do it. Check in next December to see how it's going, if I live that long. 

I feel the same way.

 

Time's up?

I was alerted by Mr. Philbin to this story -- it's from 2019, citing a story from 2018, and it's from Mr. P, but it's still interesting.

Schools Are Beginning To Take Down Analogue Clocks 

Because Kids Can’t Read Them Anymore

...Should we be at all surprised to learn that kids today are having trouble reading analog clocks? Unless their parents have these types of clocks hanging on the walls of their homes, why would the children ever need to use them to tell time? So even if someone teaches them how to read an analog clock, the children might quickly forget again if they never get any real practice.

This has become so much of an issue that a lot of teachers in the UK have taken down analog clocks in classrooms and replaced them with digital clocks. They are afraid that students would otherwise waste too much time wondering what time it is and stress themselves trying to figure out how much longer they have before they need to turn in their exams.

The source of the story is questionable -- something called APost -- but it links to The Telegraph, so I assume there's some basis for the piece. The 'Graph story is behind a paywall, alas. 

Is it true that kids can't read a regular analog clock these days? I guess it's possible that no one ever taught them. Still, I remember my mother teaching me the basics -- the Little Hand is on the Hours, the Big Hand is on the Minutes -- before I even started school. How hard is it to remember that?

Of course, the piece about children freaking out about the time during exams has the ring of truth -- not because the kids do panic, but because teachers might think the little perishers would, and our whole goal in life is not to educate and challenge the next generation but to coddle them like fresh eggs.

A follow-up piece in USA Today, however, quotes Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, who says telling time the old-fangled way is still valuable: 

"The skills that you need to read an analog clock are skills that kids when they’re young begin to learn," she said, citing concepts such as counting by fives and fractions.

Good for you, Carol Burris! Her answer is similar to the old answer to "Why do we have to learn algebra?" which has always been something like "Learning algebra helps to develop your critical thinking skills. That includes problem solving, logic, patterns, and reasoning." (Quote from Wonderopolis.) So being able to understand the face of a clock is not only easy and interesting but useful. Look at some of the things schools are expected to teach kids these days -- music, drama, cheerleading, sex ed, environmentalism, hating America -- are any of these necessary to produce citizens capable of conducting themselves in the world? No, but our teachers think they're important. Well, I think being able to read an analog clock is, too. In advanced classes they'll learn to read the ones without the numbers. 

Roman numerals are graduate-level stuff, though.

It's nice to know that in an era where schools and libraries are dumping world classics, and teaching woke history and even woke mathematics, that there's still support in the United States for something that isn't dumbed down. So there's hope that when the little brainwashed know-nothings emerge to hang us all in an American cultural revolution, they'll be able to determine the time for the public hangings in both digital and analog. 

In the UK, the oldsters will be able to send messages to one another with a clock cipher and escape. 

Fred's Book Club: Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?

Greetings, book fans! Welcome again to our Wednesday book feature, the Humpback Writers, called so because of the day of the week on which it falls (Hump Day), not because of any actual hunchbacks. We might have called it the Full of Woe Writers, but knowing writers as I do, I think that might have been a little too on the nose. Alas!  

Today's author should not be full of woe anyway. Dava Sobel accomplished a number of things with this book, giving us a brief and riveting history and becoming a best-seller that has remained in print since first publication in 1995. I refer to Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. 

This is the tale of John Harrison, a clockmaker in the 18th century who invented the first accurate chronometer that could be used at sea. This was a huge deal -- while latitude could be calculated from the sun at noon, longitude could only be calculated if one knew the time at a fixed point (like the ship's point of origin) at a known time aboard (such as noon). As Sobel writes, "Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degrees. And so each hour's time difference between the ship and the starting point marks a progress of fifteen degrees of longitude east or west."  

And therein lay the problem: "Precise knowledge of the hour in two different places at once -- a longitude prerequisite so easily accessible today from any pair of cheap wristwatches -- was utterly unattainable up to and including the era of pendulum clocks." A pendulum is more useless on a rolling ship than I am. So Parliament offered a prize of up to £20,000 to the inventor who could solve this vexing problem. Harrison not only solved it -- he solved it five times, each of his chronometers getting better and smaller as he progressed.

Fascinating, especially since he came out of nowhere: "Harrison started out as a carpenter, spending the first thirty years of his life in virtual anonymity before his ideas began to attract the world's attention." Not unlike Jesus in that regard. As a youth hungry for knowledge, Harrison borrowed a textbook on natural philosophy and made his own copy of it by hand. And clocks seemed to compel him early on:

Harrison completed his first pendulum clock in 1713, before he was twenty years old. Why he chose to take on this project and how he excelled at it with no experience as a watchmaker's apprentice, remain mysteries. Yet the clock itself remains. Its movement and dial -- signed, dated fossils from that formative period -- now occupy an exhibit case at The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers' one-room museum at Guildhall in London.

      Aside from the fact that the great John Harrison built it, the clock claims uniqueness for another singular feature: It is constructed almost entirely of wood. This is a carpenter's clock, with oak wheels and boxwood axles connected and impelled by small amounts of brass and steel. Harrison, ever practical and resourceful, took what materials came to hand, and handled them well. The wooden teeth of the wheels never snapped off with wear but defied destruction by their design, which let them draw strength from the grain pattern of the mighty oak. 

It's hard to escape the idea that Harrison became obsessed with the longitude project. It took him five years to build his first sea chronometer, H-1, and three years for the second, H-2. When he set forth to build the third sea chronometer, H-3, it took him nineteen years. Sobel points out in the text that this was five more years than the Statue of Liberty from conception to building, five more years than the carving of Mount Rushmore. But hey -- those great monuments didn't require things like an innovative friction-free design! 

Sobel's book is not long, and every page is fascinating. She goes through the history of time measurement and sea exploration in short order to bring us to the problem of longitude, and studies how the single-minded Harrison attacked the problem with a perfectionism that seemed to admit no end to the amount of time available. Every page of the book has some beguiling detail on the man, the mechanisms, and the history. And later editions, like the 2005 one above, also include a foreword by Neil Armstrong, worth reading on its own.

Harrison did eventually get some money out of Parliament, but the whole prize was never awarded to him or anyone. Maybe it would have been if Harrison had been a big name like Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley, but Harrison was little more than the autodidact whose genius was matched by his persistence. We've seen that sort of expectation again. It was, after all, Professor Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian who was supposed to solve the problem of powered flight, not a couple of young bicycle mechanics from Ohio. 

If you heard of John Harrison and his clocks after the year 1995, it's probably because of this book. In addition to the number of prizes it won, and a large illustrated version that followed, a dramatic television series with Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons aired in 2000. 

Harrison would have been surprised but probably pleased by this belated popularity. Sobel writes, "When John Harrison died, on March 24, 1776, exactly eighty-three years to the day from his birth in 1693, he held martyr status among clockmakers." She notes that by 1860, when the Royal Navy had fewer than 200 ships, it owned almost 800 sea clocks. Harrison's idea of using clocks for longitude at sea had taken over so thoroughly that the man himself had returned to obscurity -- until Sobel's book made him famous.

I can't recommend the book enough to people who like a good popular history book. There is a reason this one has been so popular in the last quarter century -- it's a terrific science history and a ripping good yarn. 

Fear and loathing.

Today is August 10, and therefore it is Halloween again, right?

Must be. This picture was taken in the supermarket last Thursday.

Eek. Glow-in-the-dark monster toys inside Kinder Joy eggs. That doesn't sound too summery, does it?

Nope, we've clearly skipped the bulk of August and the totality of September and dropped right into Halloween country.

But maybe it's just candy, right? They have to make their money where they can, and summer's not a big candy time like Easter and Christmas. So they push the envelope a little, so what?

Oh yeah, strawman-who-is-probably-a-Halloween-scarecrow? This was in the supermarket Saturday:

So pumpkin spice has begun its annual sprinkle onto anything and everything. Pumpkin spice cereals, muffins, pancakes, deli meats, condoms, whatever. Like MacArthur, it has returned.

The year seemed to be dragging quite a bit until I saw this stuff. It still felt like March. Now suddenly it feels like it's going to be Christmas in no time, and we'll have endured a year of lockdown-drag-out fights over masks and money and the damned Chinese Death Virus. Instead of being stuck in time, I feel like it's been a huge waste of it. And that's unnerving. Because whatever you think about time, we each only have so much of it.

So that seemed pretty scary. And then I was on the highway, and New York scared me again:

Obey the sign? It's bad enough we have to obey Sonny "Evil-Eyes" Corleone in Albany; now we have to obey his inanimate objects as well? 

I know what they mean (speed limits were being enforced), but this is a haughty attitude, not appropriate for a supposedly free people. 

Man, everything's getting scary out there. 

PITA.

Naughty language alert, I guess.

The other day I was expected at an appointment in a nearby town, and as soon as I left the house it looked like I was going to be late. The problem was that our town is still recovering from the effects of Tuesday's tropical storm, so it seemed like every way I pointed the car, I wound up facing a road that had been closed.

I hate to be late.

As I tooled around, a spark of inspiration struck, and I began to sing this song. I figure it as a jazzy little number, but it would work well with early rock or country too.

"Everything Is a Pain in the Ass"

by Frederick Key

Who Knows All About It

Everything is a pain in the ass
Every little thing is a pain in the ass
Ol' Daddy used to say as he signaled to pass
"Everything is a pain in the ass"

Car won't start 'cause the battery is dead
Now you're late so you take the bus instead
Waiting at the stop and it starts to rain
You know what it is and where's the pain

Everything is a pain in the ass
Every single thing is a pain in the ass
The story of our lives on this side of the grass
Everything is a pain in the ass

You get to work late and the boss isn't glad
The coffee cup leaks and you start to feel mad
Everybody dumps all their projects on you
You want to explode, but what can you do?

Everything is a pain in the ass
Every blessed thing is a pain in the ass
The teacher used to say as she turned to face the class
"Every one of you is a pain in the ass"

[spoken] All right, everybody, put your hands together! Keep the beat! Try not to suck at it, people! And now tell me what you think of these!

The guy who lives next door?
[crowd] He's a pain in the ass!
The checkout at the store?
It's a pain in the ass!
The boss on the job?
He's a pain in the ass!
Your daughter's boyfriend slob?
What a pain in the ass!
The traffic on the street?
It's a pain in the ass!
The bunion on your feet?
Sorta pain in the ass!
The bill that's in your mail?
What a pain in the ass!
The numbers on your scale?
Such a pain in the ass!

That's right!
Everything is a pain in the ass
Every bleeding thing is a pain in the ass
Nothing really works and it's all broken glass
Everything is a pain in the ass!

I think it's a peppy little song, a tune for our times. I'm pretty sure I've stolen the melody that was in my mind; when I was a dopey teen and tried to write songs I inevitably did that, to my chagrin. I have no knack for music. But such awesome lyrics!

I'll have more to say on this topic tomorrow, regarding the spiritual component of krexing and moaning. Doesn't that sound enticing? Or is it just a you-know-what?

Fred's Book Club: Get 'Er Done!

Welcome to another Wednesday Hump Day meeting of the Humpback Writers, thus the stupid name. No one has humps, although some may have lumps. We all take our lumps in life. Anyway, you could call it Fred's Book Club, but that might be even dumber. I don't mind either way.

I was barely able to get a post together today because Tuesday was nutty, with work coming in and the router acting up and a dog needing to go to the vet (Tralfaz got a hot spot from the injury I mentioned on Monday, but he'll be all right after pills pills pills). Anyway, it was a good excuse to look at time management, which brings us to:

Alan Lakein is no slouch when it comes to time management -- which, for that matter, is not a field that really rewards slouches. How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, first published in 1973, is a plan for the scatterbrained to do exactly as the title says. In 160 pages, Lakein gives a brisk run-down of all the principles one really needs to decide on priorities and goals and give them the one thing that cannot be bought or sold: time.

"Time is life," he writes right up front. "It is irreversible and irreplaceable. To waste your time is to waste your life, but to master your time is to master your life and make the most of it." He goes on to outline his plan in a way any writer could envy, with powerful, economic words.

I'm not a "time and motion" organizer, trying to get everything done in the shortest time with the fewest waster motions. That kind of efficiency means taking the thinking out of an activity and reducing it to a series of mechanical routines. There is no attempt to keep it fun or interesting, so you might even say that such extreme clockwatching takes the life right out of an activity, along with the thought.

Lakein is all about deciding what your priorities are and planning your time to push those first. "Control starts with planning," he writes. "Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now." He is impressively quotable.

Of course he is aware that plans go awry, just as I didn't intend to spend an hour and a half at the vet yesterday. That's not what this is book about. This is planning over the long haul. Know your goals, resolve their conflicts. set lifetime priorities.

Take your Lifetime Goals list in hand and spend one minute selecting your top three goals. Label the most important of these A-1. The second most important is A-2. The third is A-3. Do the same for your three-years list, and your six-months list.
     At this point you have nine goals culled from the three lists. To pick out the three most important long-term goals of this nine, write on a fresh piece of paper, "My three most important long-term goals are..." Then write them in order: A-1, A-2, A-3. You have now finished a preliminary Lifetime Goals Statement. You have zeroed in on just what it is you want to do with your life as you see it at this time.

It doesn't get much more complex than that.

I don't think there has been a single book on organizing for success that really had more to say than Lakein has here, but most authors pad their books with cute names for complex tasks, endless anecdotes and testimonials, and misattributed quotations swiped from the Internet. If you just want to get your life in order, I say, stick to Lakein.

And there is the rub. I bought this book more than twenty years ago, when I had a demanding job and a scattered personal life and was trying to get things in order. The problem is, like any good program, it only works if you put it into action. I don't know what became of the notebook I was using to work out my life plan back then, but it is gone. It may be in my desk. The fact that I have no idea tells you how well I practiced the program.

In fact, one glance at my desk (which I shall spare you) is enough to prove that I have never followed any advice on organization for long. I won't say that my desk looks like you took a bunch of books and papers and pens and things, stuffed them in a huge ballpark T-shirt cannon, and blew them at it. I will say that if you did such a thing, the results would be indistinguishable from the current condition.

Perhaps I ought to give this book a second glance. If I can find the time.

Fred's Book Club: Book of Future Past.

Happy new year! And welcome to the first edition of the Humpback Writers, still called that because it falls on a Wednesday, and despite the new year and new decade (depending on how you count) it still has the same dumb name.

This week we have an interesting book, almost thirty years old, that addressed concerns many people had about the futuristic year of 2000:

Gail Collins -- who later became the first female editor of the New York Times' editorial page -- and her husband Dan, a news writer and CBS news producer, published The Millennium Book in 1991 as "Your Essential All-Purpose Guide for the Year 2000." It is important to note that at the time Ms. Collins had been writing for the New York Daily News, and had demonstrated to me during that tenure her sense of humor. Which is why I came into possession of this book, lo those many years ago, when I was a chipper young chap. Well, the Times sucked the humor out of her, but not before she wrote this book.

The Millennium Book is a neat handheld compendium of information on the previous thousand years, 1000 to 1991, and a look forward at the next thousand. Best of all, it's a look at the year 2000 by people in the past. In the introduction, the authors quote John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdine in their book on the topic, Megatrends 2000: "For centuries, that monumental, symbolic date has stood for the future and what we shall make of it. In a few years that future will be here.... operating like a powerful magnet on humanity... amplifying emotions, accelerating change, heightening awareness and compelling us to reexamine ourselves, our values and our institutions."

"Whew," the Collinses reply, "It's going to be hard to live up to that kind of billing."

I think it's safe to say that considering how the Internet has amplified emotions, and how our values and institutions are getting the bejeezus kicked out of them by know-nothings and Twitter mobs, that the Megatrends 2000 authors may have been at least partly correct, and it's a completely miserable thing, not the dawning of the goddamn Age of Aquarius.

As you can see by the cover, the book features amazing names of people from the previous millennium (such as Eric Bloody Axe, Sancho the Fat, and the now-famous Harald Bluetooth) and discussions of how your life would have been in past eras (nasty, brutish, short seems to be the consensus). There are plenty of cracks against Christianity, Western culture, and humanity in general along the way, because the authors, as members of the press, can't help spreading the hate. But compared to what goes on today, especially in our institutions of "higher education," it's pretty mild.

In addition to lots of lists by then-big-now-deceased people like Liz Smith ("Ten Best Parties") and Roger Ebert ("Top Ten Films") and Jack Newfield ("Most Corrupt Public Officials"), the book features plenty of interesting and "useful millennial prophecies." Nostradamus is included, of course, and boy, he was certain that something bad was definitely going to happen in July 1999! And... no, not so much.

The Collinses summarize famous prognosticatory utopian novels as well, like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and William Morris's News from Nowhere. Characters in these hopeful tomes usually work hard only because they want to, or maybe not at all, spending time instead on the development of the mind and spirit; usually everything is owned by a beneficent government that barely has to do anything, as everything runs so well. Funny that the closer we got to the year 2000, the more prophecies turned dark; the Collinses also look at books that had the world collapsed by world war, plague, pollution, and/or environmental devastation, or ground beneath the heel of brutal dictatorship. All I can say is, it's a wonder I and all my science-fiction-reading friends didn't die from drugs before 2000.

The book also includes some of its own prophecies, and it's interesting to see how some of them turned out, at least so far. We're told that deforestation was killing us, and the Chinese were trying to stop the spread of the Gobi by planting a "great green wall" of trees, because the Chinese government is synonymous with environmental concern. (Apparently they've been continuing this effort for more than thirty years, but one suspects it is just for show while they pollute the crap out of everything elsewhere.) Or maybe overpopulation will do us in by 2020; "The population of Kenya is expected to jump from 23 million to 79 million in the next thirty years." (It is actually at 48.4 million at last estimate, so those Kenyans better get busy if they want to meet quota.) The ozone layer's thinning was "doing fundamental damage to nature" including breaking the food chain by destroying plankton; plus, "the entire ozone layer had diminished 2 percent from 1969 to 1986 -- way faster than anyone had anticipated." (In 2018, The Guardian reported "The ozone layer is showing signs of continuing recovery from man-made damage and is likely to heal fully by 2060, new evidence shows.")

But don't worry, climate change is sure to slaughter us by the carload soon enough.

The last chapter in the book has predictions from the children who would be the Class of 2000 -- that is, they were no more than eight when the book was written -- about what the year 2000 would hold. These include gems like:

• There will be Wiffle Ball in the World Series.
• There will be purple, green, blue, red and orange-colored wheels. But there will only be green cars.
• Everybody will give food to the poor. Nobody will litter.
• I will get a job that pays twenty dollars a day, five days a week. I will try to get rich and live in a mansion. With a huge pool. I will have a maid and butler. I will have a whirlpool. And a hot tub. I will swim in my money.
• The food will be good. The teachers will be robots.
• When I'm grown up, bread might be ten dollars.
• Children will be born in space.
• There will be yellow cornfields and blue driveways and purple streets and a black moon. But I don't know why.
• All the people will be taking drugs.

I think those last two predictions might be related.

All those children are middle-aged now. I wonder if that one kid ever got his maid and butler.

One thing the authors of the book and the people they spoke with did not see coming was this little doohickey called the Internet. A fellow named Robert Olson with the Institute for Alternative Futures (still around) predicted that people would be voting via home computer, which indicates the anticipation of a widespread home-accessed computer network. But server farms, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (not Harald), Google, Amazon, the Hampster Dance, streaming services, amazing blogs, smartphones, were all completely unforeseen, at least by anyone willing to share the vision. It shows you that no matter what you expect, how well you plan, some smart-ass is going to upset the apple cart. Some people think that the future really began just four years later in 1995, and for most of us it seemed to take the world by storm.

One fun final note: The book tells us that Edward Woodyard, a writer, decided to book a room in the Times Square Marriott (which was not built yet) for New Year's Eve 1999 in 1983. Well, I'm happy to say that not only did Mr. Woodyard stay in a large suite in the hotel on 12/31/99 with his wife and two children, but the hotel gave them the accommodations free of charge. (As far as I can tell, Mr. Woodyard is still around, too, and three cheers for his foresight.)

I know that our little book club here often looks at books that are out of print, and considering how dated this one is, it is fair to say it is extremely out of print. But with a new decade upon us, I couldn't resist featuring this one.

Next week I'll actually feature a book that you won't have to get from Abe Books! Probably!

Good-bye, old timer.

Can I get sentimental about anything?

Yes, yes I can.

Every year I dig out the decorations for Christmas, determined to be ruthless in weeding out whatever is broken, ancient, stupid, or otherwise useless. And every year I part with fewer things than such a resolve would anticipate. I hate throwing away anything having to do with Christmas.

But I've had to let go of two wired-up swags with broken cords and a busted snow globe already. And then, if that hadn't already broken my heart, there was this. I think it was bought by my mom.

Doesn't look like much, just the kind of timer one might use to set decorative lights or the kind of "really! someone is home" lights used to deter burglars when one is away. I have to say it is one of the best timers I've ever had, easy to set, with a big manual override switch, and totally reliable. 

I also think it reached the point now where it might burn down the house.

Mysterious scorching in multiple places on electrical devices do not fill me with confidence.

I know that this little object has earned its rest. You can almost guess its age by the font used for the numbers. Also, it says it is a product of Toastmaster's electrical devices division, which also serves to put it well in the past. Toastmaster, the famed maker of, well, toasters, active since 1921, is now a brand of the Middleby company. But when you click on Middleby's Toastmaster site, it takes you to Star Manufacturing, which makes toasters and other kitchen machines for the trade, not the private consumer. The Toastmaster history is very confusing, and Wikipedia's summary appears to end in 1992, which is not helpful.  Although Walmart sells a lot of home appliances under the Toastmaster name, Middleby doesn't include it in their list of residential product lines. So I don't know what the hell is going on. All I know is, if you try to look up Toastmaster timers, you wind up with helpful tips on managing time for presenters by the Toastmasters International, the speaking coach group with no connection to the toaster company. One thing for sure, no one is making Toastmaster electric timers like mine anymore.

And now mine, old Model 12-925, heads to the socket in the sky. Perhaps overdue. The thing is as loud as any plug-in timer I have ever heard. It gives off a constant whir, like a mouse blender. With its two-prong plug, it is ungrounded. It does not accept three-prong plugs, either. It is hopelessly out of date and may very well be a fire hazard.

It also may be partly discolored by the old man's cigarette smoke, the smoke that filled every room he was in, until it silenced him itself.

Oh, well. Things are just things, after all.

How have I been wasting time?

Summertime, the silly season, the time to waste time. Even though the seasonal aisle in the grocery store says it's Halloween, we all know it's still summer. So how've I been wasting time?

Not too well, I'm afraid. Summer's been okay, and I have been appreciating not wearing coats and mukluks and big woolly hats, and not having skin that cracks like an egg whenever I move, and I bear these things in mind when the bugs annoy the hell out of me. So that's good, but appreciating/not appreciating doesn't take very long.

Funerals and other death-related things have taken some time, sad to say, but that can happen in any season.

I've been wasting time on room-escape games. Par for the course. I do enjoy these games, which are usually free on the app store, and sometimes the translation from the Japanese is almost decent. My wife likes a good hidden-object game. So she's a treasure-seeker at heart and I'm a... guy who wants to run away from everything, I guess.

I've also been wasting time on a trip down memory lane, reading the Attack of the 50-Year-Old Comics blog. Back when I fancied myself a collector, I loved the Silver Age books the most. This blog reminds me of some books I had, and shows me some I never got. I sold my collection a long time ago and have no intention of starting up again, but it's fun to read about this stuff. Seemed so important to me back then, especially on hot summer afternoons. (A couple of years ago I was reading through Benton Grey's Greylands blog for similar material, but he seems to have shut it down for the time being, alas.)

I've done a little reading, but not too much. Started another book on World War II. Maybe you've heard of it? It was in all the papers at the time (1939 to 1945). I mean, if you're not a modern journalist, or a college student, you probably have. The book is interesting, but I keep looking to read it before bedtime and I seldom get many pages in before I'm asleep. No offense to the book; I'm just tired. I'll be glad to put in a plug, but I have to get a little deeper into it before I can tell if it's plugworthy.

I was thinking about rereading Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, which I haven't read in decades but remember as being fun. Will they still hold up? Last year I read a book by Zelazny's sometime collaborator Robert Sheckley, a book I remembered fondly, and it was pretty bad and very dated. Had its moments, but it was hard not to think Man, lay off the drugs for a week, all right? I had a lot more tolerance for that stuff in high school and college.

I've also been working on my own book, and having spent an extraordinary amount of time hammering out the plot, I discovered a second act problem and a shortness problem. Eventually I realized that the solution to the first also would solve the second, but for a while I looked like a strange visionary of some sort as I walked the dogs, blank eyes, seeking answers from the clouds and the trees.

We didn't travel again this year, for two reasons: 1) The need to buy a new car ate into the budget a wee bit, and 2) We've yet to find a kennel we really like, and you can't ask someone to look after your two gigantic hairy dogs for a week. Nor have we found any kind of vacation place that says "Please come visit and bring your multiple gigantic hairy dogs." A few look promising until you find out that they only allow dogs small enough to fit in the average handbag. Well, Samsonite doesn't make a bag big enough for our guys.

Plus. my preferred destinations -- Bedrock City, Storytown USA, and the World of Sid and Marty Krofft -- were all unavailable this year. Phooey!

So I've been working. Not even a staycation. I'm glad to be able to work, but as a freelancer, if I don't get work I don't get paid. It's one of those immutable law of nature -- gravity, light, matter, money. And if you don't think money is one of the immutable laws, try telling high school physics teacher you're cutting his pay. You'll get an equal and opposite reaction, all right.

It doesn't bother me that fall is on the way, as evidenced by the aforementioned candy and the baby Muppet fruit I've been seeing.

I love the fall and enjoy the weather. But I feel like I just put away the Christmas stuff. Well, in four months I'll be hauling it out again. What the heck?

Live a little.

I recently read that human beings cry up to 30 gallons of tears annually. That's each of us, not all together. And it's a good thing that we don't do it all at once, or we'd be dead. In fact, we'd be worse than dehydrated, like we got zapped by the Kelvans; 30 gallons of water weighs more than 250 pounds, so a lot of us would disappear up the spout, as it were.

The fact is, we live out our entire existence on earth incrementally, one meal, one breath, one tear at a time. Years ago I heard about the "bologna loaf" method of tackling large and daunting projects -- no one can just sit down and eat an entire 10-pound loaf of bologna, but anyone (except perhaps the most bologna-adverse) can eat one slice. Do that every day and eventually: no more bologna.

Now, I don't know why someone would need to consume that whole loaf, nor how it could stay fresh long enough for such a period, but the point is illustrated well. You can't do it all at once, so do a bit now.

People sometimes like to advise us to live one day at a time, and there was even a hit country song along those lines in 1974. And while this doesn't mean to go hog-wild and throw away all your money today like Don Ameche leaving for space in Cocoon, it does mean that there's no day in which to do anything but the day we are in. So focus on that.

The mathematics of increments are always mind-boggling, though. Based on an average lifespan, the American male will brush his teeth more than 57,000 times, eat more than 86,000 meals, take something like 576,700,000 breaths. Hell, I'll probably spend 100 hours playing a game on my phone that I don't even like that much. And yet we think life is too short.

The Huffington Post's more useful Australian site addressed this topic two years ago, and their calculations provided some weird figures: You'll spend:

• just over 13 years of your life at work 
• with an extra year on top in unpaid overtime
• more than 11 years looking at screens
• 16 months exercising
• 4 and a half years eating
• 26 years sleeping

Man, just looking at all this makes me tired. I think I'm about six months behind in my sleeping, so I'm gonna lie down and catch up, k? See you at Christmas.