They don't call me a great man
for nothing.
In fact, they charge me quite a bit!
OK, I said. What does she want to buy? Nothing in particular. I just want to have my own money. She hadn't any money, she said. She wanted to have some. I Haven't A DimeAt the moment, I haven't a dime, I said. Uh, let me correct that, I said. I have that little thing I carry around coins in. What I don't have any of is currency. She doesn't want my money, she says. She wants her own money. This confuses me. I never think of her stuff and my stuff, except when it comes to underwear and such. "Is this your cheese?" she will say, standing in front of the open refrigerator. Yes, and yours too. If you want to eat it, fine. If you want to throw it away, please don't. Eventually, I Buy A ClueIt eventually got through to me that once she starts getting her Social Security, she wants to have some Walking Around Money. That's not something she should have to beg for. In the past, when she's brought home an income, she would ask me for some WAM as she was leaving for work, as if she was pleading with me. It's your money too, honey. I just happened to be the one who passed by the bank and used the ATM. And I preferred that she ask me for currency rather than use an ATM because she couldn't remember which bank was ours, and she'd use an expensive ATM when there was a free one 30 feet away. But I couldn't deal well with the conversation this morning, because of the tinnitus I have this morning. That's a ringing in the head. It's not an affliction that bothers me very often, and even when it happens, it's not particularly bad. Some people get it bad, and to them, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. To me, it's like a window salesman phoning at meal time: annoying, but I'll get over it. Jotting Down TittlesThe phrase "jot or tittle" is often used to refer to minutiae. I'm told today's college freshmen never took penmanship in school. Too bad it took so long to get rid of it. I hated that class. But Miss Reeb always scowled at me and insisted that I remember to dot my is. In the days of Chaucer, students were told to tittle their is. And just as the words jot and tittle have become obsolete, just as penmanship and cursive writing have become obsolete, I have found myself becoming obsolete, and my life consumed by these jots and tittles of minor disfunctionalities. I feel like a car where the knob keeps falling off the radio, a toilet whose handle constantly needs to be jiggled. Earlier this week, I convinced Blondie that I wanted soup beans. She doesn't care for them, and it took quite some convincing. It's no real effort to make them myself, but she's increasingly defensive about her role as homemaker, since her advancing senility doesn't let her work outside the home, or even drive safely. I had to teach her how to make them. Here's HowTake a couple of cups of Great Northern beans (yes, dear, the dry beans) and rinse them. (No, dear, you don't throw them out simply because there's foreign matter in the beans, because there will be. You need to rinse beans, and when you do that, you throw away any beans that are discolored, any little stones, anything that doesn't look right.) Cover the beans with water, and simmer them all day, and if they're soft an hour before at supper time, add some pork fat, maybe some sausage or some bacon, to give them flavor. And don't salt them in the pot or they'll never get cooked. So instead of being slightly covered with water, she had an inch of beans in the crock pot in five inches of water. ("These are OK, but next time....") Are you sure you want to eat these, they're awfully mushy. ("They're spozed to be moo-shie. They keep getting better for several days.") And I added some dried onions and some chives, which I never do, and when I went to eat the beans an hour later, with crumbled up cornbread and a lot of butter, they were as good as any I've ever eaten. Boy, will these be good in another day or two! I thought. Did I Say That?She wasn't interested in even tasting the beans. And when I wanted some the next evening, they were gone. She threw them away because I told her that they weren't any good, they were all mushy. Except that's not what I told her. Jots and tittles. Nothing really worth complaining about. And I'm not complaining about life with Blondie. It's just the constant drip, drip, drip like a faucet that needs a new washer, that's annoyingly annoying. Boy, there ought to be a better term for that. Annoyingly annoying is a terrible phrase. You'd think a fifth-grader was writing this - except that we're talking about a repetitive stress injury to the psyche, a carpal tunnel syndrome of the soul, and yet if I say "carpal tunnel", I suddenly sounds like a whiner. Carpal tunnel can be terribly painful and debilitating, while I'm merely being annoyed, and not even a major annoyance at that. Just annoyingly annoyed. My Printer Won'tI'm without a functional printer at the moment. A couple of years ago, I upgraded to a new computer because it was cheaper than buying more RAM for the old one. My new computer doesn't have a parallel or serial port, only USB ports, so I networked by old computer and new computer together, using my old computer as a print server. I'd rather have a printer directly attached, or a network printer, but I'm too much the cheapskate to do that. The only thing is, for the last month or so, my old computer has had a black screen. I really don't know what it isn't working, and because I have such difficulty getting up and down (all right, this time, I am whining, because I really resent my inability to get around like a 35-year-old kid) I haven't investigated. So I couldn't get download a PDF of the form I wanted, and print it out. I had to stop by the Social Security office to get it. No problem, not at all, because we had to go there to drop off paperwork on Blondie anyhow, but they don't have the forms available for people to help themselves. Instead, you have to get a number and wait in line to ask a clerk for the form. That's stupid. I resent it as a customer of the office, and I resent it as an owner of the organization that wastes clerical labor that way. What About The First Amendment?So I resent the law that makes it impractical to express my outrage at such stupidity in any meaningful way. There's a federal law against making terroristic threats, which means that they arrest anyone who waves his cane in the air and makes meaningless noises about thrashing the knucklehead who set up such a stupid system to within an inch of his life. Not only would it be good for my blood pressure - and thus reduce the costs of Medicare - if I could vent in such a manner, but the knucklehead who set up the stupid system needs to hear how outraged his customers are about his stupidity. Instead, the jots and tittles of everyday aggravation pelt me. And because I felt deprived of my beans, I headed for Pho Lancaster Cafe for lunch, but they were closed. The sign made it look like they ought to be open, but they were closed. How dare they take a day off! Are they not slaves to my convenience? More jots and tittles come raining down on me. The Weather Bureau's Ganging Up On Me, Too!And that reminds me. We had some wet weather. I won't say that I was getting drowned, but I did end up doing a Google search on riparian rights, so maybe I felt that way. More jots and tittles. "I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person." - Linda Loman, referring to her husband in Act I, Death of a Salesman Sometimes, it feels like I'm being nibbled to death by Muscovy ducks. I'm just so pitiful. Other Bloggers On Related Topics: |
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Well he got his white house And we'll have fuck, fuck, fuck Well the right can't stand him And we'll cry fuck, fuck, fuck Well he knew all along But he can come along with me And we'll cry fuck, fuck, fuck now Obama's fighting three stupid wars now Thank you to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. |
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Ann Coulter's March 16 newspaper column, "A Glowing Report On Radiation" says radiation above the government cutoff is good for you. What she wss talking about was "hormesis", although she didn't use the word in her blog, only in her interview with Bill O'Reilly, and she certainly doesn't understand it. Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst developed hormesis theory. He's a toxicologist, and believes that small doses of harmful toxins help protect us, much as vaccines protect us. The idea is that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Supposedly, low levels of radiation is a stressor that can stimulate your defenses, much like exercise does. They've Done ExperimentsThey've done lab experiments on zebra fish, on mice, and on other humans. The results are intriguing. The theory, however, is hard to study, is often confusing, and is impossible to generalize as a basic biological principle. Think of solar radiation. If you get a little bit of it, you get a sun tan, which makes you look healthier, and may make you feel better - but it takes little more than that to give you a sunburn. Sunburns are known to cause skin cancer - and they are connected somehow to Lupus. Sunning causes lupus flares, and my late first wife, Em, thought her lupus was related to a really bad sunburn she got at the age of 12. Her body never was the same after that. Why Did Smoking Ever Become Popular?I might point out that the reason white men took up smoking, a filthy habit engaged in by a group of primative semi-humans (at least in the opinion of European whites), is that smoking was thought to improve your health. Indeed, in the very low levels involved in "smoking the peace pipe", it may well do exactly that. In the days prior to prohibition, Carrie Nation supposedly went into a saloon in Kansas and started lecturing the drinkers there on the evils of liquor. She placed several fishworms in a glass, and poured in a shot of whiskey. The worms initially squirmed, but within seconds, they ceased all motion altogether. "What does this show us?" she cried, and from the back of the saloon, some guy yelled, "Drink whiskey and you'll never suffer from worms." Neither the neo-cons nor the neo-libs approach nuclear energy with a rational thought in their noggins. The neo-cons are reckless proponents, and the neo-libs are scared shitless. It's just a tool, folks. Any implement with the power to do good also has the power to do harm. And you need to make decisions about nuclear energy based on engineering data, not religious conviction. Other Bloggers On Related Topics: |
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What do you fix first>? In today's world, everything in interdependent, and the famous "just in time" manufacturing system that made Japan such an economic powerhouse makes them especially vulnerable to a disaster such as they've experienced. What Do You Fix FIRST?So I'll tell you. What you need first is energy. From a humanitarian standpoint, food and medicine come first, but from a recovery standpoint, that's futile. Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish... Japan needs to produce fishing poles and fish nets if they expect to make any gains on this devastation. And nothing else works unless you have energy. Japan will have rolling blackouts for a long time. They need new electrical production capability, and they need it three days ago. |
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Recently, it was a lawsuit over The Real Estate Zebra that got our attention. An east coast realtor using that name for his blog and his domain was sued by a company on the west coast for trademark (well, "trade dress") infringement, since the westie had been using a similar term for himself a year after the eastie. The eastie officiated at basketball games, and he thought his blog would make decisions on real estate questions. I decided the eastie was in the right, although he ended up caving in to the westie. Not A Clear Case |
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