Category Humor

What’s your hurry?

Michael 7 Comments

[If you are reading this in your email, especially on a mobile device, the formatting may be a little wonky. It might be better in the browser. Just saying.]

Pull up a chair and don’t go anywhere. This is going to be short and sweet and I would hate for you to miss it. Short short – few words, lots of pictures. Well… three at least, maybe 4.

So now, today is August 26. We’re barely back in school, Labor Day is still 11 days away, Grandparents Day is the following Sunday, and then on October 11 we celebrate what we used to be content to call Columbus Day but now the name changes depending on who the Twitterati feel like honoring that year. The point is, there are three holidays between now and the annual fall excuse for pretend adults to get drunk while the kiddies OD on snack size chocolate bars, but those bars have been out along with décor, decorations, and orange and black barware.

You will notice the date on this actual screen shot is July 13 when there had already been enough ads released to do a comparison to find the best sales for this Halloween

Well, we’re used to Halloween candy hitting the grocery store shelves as soon as the Easter candy is put on clearance so that’s not so shocking. How about this one.

It happens every year, earlier and earlier, those dreaded three little words: Welcome back, pumpkin. Yes, it’s here and yes, that is the actual date and time it was on my scream, I mean screen.

Okay, I did say, it happens every year, so what’s to get excited about over a little pumpkin. How about a little turkey, as in Thanksgiving turkey as in…

… or should I have said as in Black Friday Eve turkey. Yes, Black Friday news is out. If you can’t read that posting date I’ll tell you it says

Thursday,19th August 2021 at 11:24am.

[Sigh]

So what else could there be on this the 26th of August, surely not, no, it can’t be. That’s four months! Is it possible?

Oh yeah, baby, it’s possible. How did I start? We’re barely back in school, Labor Day is still 11 days away.

That’s all I got. You can go now. But then, what’s your rush?

Things I think I think

Michael 5 Comments

Now that I’ve had my fill of ranting for a while here, it’s time to catch up on some thing that have been floating around in my brain and make some room up there for future ramblings.

thumbnail_IMG_0599Have you ever tried to grow a tree from an avocado pit? Let me rephrase that, have you never tried to grow a tree from an avocado pit? I think that’s required in “Things to do in your first adult kitchen 101.” I tried and sort of even succeeded. Sort of. For a while I had an actual tree. It stood about 5 feet tall but was only as big around as a school pencil. Unfortunately, not quite as sturdy. My latest experiment was “let’s grow a pineapple plant from the crown of one.” (The things we did while locked in.) A year later I have not just one, but two.  I wonder if this is how Dole got started.

I recently ranted over the increasing number of loaded guns brought to airport security. The most common excuse for such behavior was “Duh, I forgets I was packing a rod.” I found a story about another feller who forgot he was carrying a loaded weapon. This guy brought his gun not the airport but to his bathroom. As he dropped his pants to drop into the seat, the gun dropped out of his pocket into the floor and went off, sending the bullet through the bathroom floor which doubled as the bathroom ceiling to the apartment below where it met the hand of another young man, unarmed but now not unharmed. You can’t blame the gun guy. There have been alligator sightings in the area and you never know when one might pop up anywhere there is water. (My conjecture, not his explanation. He said he forgot it was in his pocket. Yeah, right.)

Service with aAre there any grandfather clock aficionado out there? I have a contemporary long case that has travelled with me now through three homes and resided in multiple places at each. The years have been kinder to the case than the movement. It is still in great shape, shapewise, but it runs late. Not slow. Late. It keeps a 60 minute hour today as good as the day it was uncrated but little by little it has developed its unique peculiarity of chiming the hour late. We’re now up to 5 minutes late. It’s not unusual for a guest when hearing the chime to comment, “Oh it’s x o’clock, no wait, I have 5 after. Your clock is slow,” and I respond, “No, it’s not slow, it’s late.” It has taken 20 years for the chime to be out of sync by 5 minutes. (Out of synch?) An optimist would note that in another 220 years, it will work its way around and be right on time.

Just two rants ago I questioned what could be more valuable than your own child in response to Consumers Union’s suggestion that until all manufacturers put warning devices to alert to unforgotten children locked in the back of hot cars, one should put something of value there that you would not likely forget. For one young father around here last week, that should have been tacos. Apparently, the good lad had a hankering for tacos. Not just any tacos, he wanted the kind available only at the local casino. There he parked his car, left his children behind just to run in and place the order, then decided he might as well wait for that order sitting in front of a slot machine instead of in front of his steering wheel. Security cameras caught his elation at hitting a jackpot about the same time they caught his kids waiting alone in the car. No word on how long the tacos were waiting.

Okay, sharp witted readers may have inferred that I implied this post might be rant-free, yet 50% was rant-like. Let’s call it rank-lite. Hey, I’m making progress!

Saving SPAM

Michael 3 Comments

Some time ago in the not too terribly distant past but distant enough that a gentle reminder wouldn’t be out of the question, I posted an entry that began with a one-sided discussion about spam e-mail although that wasn’t the focus of the post. Likewise, this one will start with spam – emails and others.

At least once a day I check the spam email folder and more days than not I find an email in there that is definitely not spam. I often wonder how they determine what can and can’t be let through when I also, and usually on the same days, wonder how they determined an email that got to my inbox was let through. What was it about my mechanic’s email reminding me to bring my car in for service that made it suspicious enough to be shuttled into the Junk folder yet the one to me from me declaring I could “lose 61 pounds in 4 weeks” seemed perfectly normal and allowed admittance to the safety of the Inbox? (And why 61 pounds? Did 60 sound too unbelievable?) But I didn’t start this to discuss what got into the Junk folder. But while I’m here . . .

2021-06-23Is it just the email clients I use, and there are 4 of them (the laptop, desktop, tablet, and phone all use different applications to access my email), or does everybody have multiple junk and spam folders to hold undesirable dispatches? Mine has Junk, Junk, Spam, sometimes Spambox, and sometimes Junk Mail, and always at least three of them. How do they decide? And who are they anyway?

Speaking of They, who are they who decides what gets to be called a virus. My anti-virus program pops up at least once a day to remind me of additional services it can provide – for an additional fee. If it was a phone call it would be routed to the “Silenced” folder as a possible spam call by the phone’s version of a Junk folder. (And speaking of viruses, even though we weren’t really, why is virus bad when you’re talking about computers but viral is good? Who makes this stuff up?) Naturally the same thing happens with the phone’s spam filter as the email. Perfectly innocent calls like the automated reminder from the doctor’s office gets tagged as possible spam and silenced while three different people expressing their concern that my car warranty has expired are let through. At least the phone and email “blockers” don’t cost me an annual fee to be wrong.

SpamBut do you want to know what really annoys me about all this? Spam. It’s rendered SPAM as an undesirable. SPAM as in Special Processed American Meat by the Hormel Corporation. Since 1937, SPAM has had its haters too but more lovers for sure. By the way, SPAM does not stand for Special Processed American Meat. That was a sobriquet given it during WWII by non-American troops treated to the canned delicacy. SPAM is actually a portmanteau of Spiced Ham although it is available in a variety of flavors, even (ugh) pumpkin spice.

There have been a billion recipes written for SPAM and a million cookbooks to hold them. (Too hyperbolic? Well, there are a lot!) There is even an annual SPAM cooking competition. At least there was until the pandemic forced its cancellation last year. The point is SPAM is an unexpectedly wonderful American treasure. Naturally we should confuse it with spam, a expectedly awful pile of junk.

Canned ChickenIt’s a good thing there aren’t any filters in the canned meat section of the supermarket. If there were, we’d be reduced to eating . . .

. . . canned whole chicken?

Now that’s some spam!

Mental Meanderings – Get ’em while they’re hot!

Michael 5 Comments

A collection of things I saw/thought/wondered about/shook my head over last week.

I read a new car review. The reviewer loved the car, its handling, style, performance, gas mileage, comfort. Everything about the car. But he could not recommend it because the now ever present touchscreen in the middle of the dash becomes just a screen when the car is put in gear. Apparently the manufacturer values safety and disables the touchscreen function and you have to use either the fingertip controls on the steering wheel or the voice recognition. While I’m driving, other than driving type things like switching on a turn signal or operating the pedals and steering wheel, the only controls I might need to reach are radio station or volume, window control, or possibly to shout “Answer!” to accept a connected phone call but that’s quite rare. What is this guy doing that is so involved or intricate that it cannot be handled without pawing all over a mobile tablet? While moving?!

There was another gun found at the local airport security section. Once again the dipstick trying to board an airplane while toting a loaded firearm used the excuse, “I forgot it was in my bag.” I’m all for innocent until proven stupid and all that, but isn’t the admission of stupidity enough to take these people immediately out to tarmac and have the next arrival land on them?

There are at least 4 states where audits, legislative initiatives, and/or court cases are still questioning/contesting the results of last fall’s Presidential election. I applied for a job in 2009 and didn’t get it. I’m sure the interview notes were switched and somebody stole that job from me. Can I get one of the of the legal wizards behind these election follies to take my case.  I bet their last dollar that I probably have a better chance of winning.

It was 96 degrees where I was yesterday (which is actually where I am today and just about every day). (I don’t know why I felt the need to clarify that but… .) Yesterday was the first day of summer and summer is usually hot but three days prior it was 45 degrees! Doesn’t Mother Nature ever get whiplash from these dramatic swings?

HotSpeaking of summer. Sunday was the first day of summer but not the first full day. That’s today. Summer in the eastern time zone in the US began at 11:31pm, Sunday June 20. That has to be q great job. Figure out when summer start. How much do you think that pays.  Anyway, because summer did not start until after 11 last night, when it was 96 degrees outside my car, technically it was still spring! I’m sorry but that is just too hot for spring. Somebody find a lawyer and get the courts working to revoke that temperature.

Still speaking of summer, am I the only one who remembers when all the calendars labeled June 21 as the first day of summer. Now it can happen anytime between June 20 and June 22. All this exactness about when the seasons start began around the same time the government declared Area 51 off limits. It sounds fishy to me. Somebody should look into that.

Autumn begins on September 22 this year. That’s 94 days after Summer began. Summer is one of four seasons and should comprise one-fourth of the year. One fourth of 365 is 91.25 days. Summer is almost 3 days longer than it should be fairly allocated. No wonder there’s global warming!

Last week a business man in a Florida town I never heard of bought a small building from the town to use as a fitness center. Somewhere along the way when checking with the county about the property he discovered the deed included not just the building and the land it sat on but also the town’s water tower behind the building. Somebody was supposed to split the property and transfer only the small portion of land the building sits on, didn’t, and when the deed was recorded in the county office, the would be fitness trainer got it all. Naturally he didn’t want it. I mean, hydration is important when exercising but there is a limit to how much water one can take in! Long story short (too late) they got the paperwork sorted out and he deeded to water tower back to the municipality. And was charged $10 to do so! Wait. What? The town couldn’t swing the ten bucks without raising water rates? Quick, get another one of those lawyers working on the election. This guy has a better case than that fellow down in Palm Beach. I think he should his $10 back. That’s a steal that should be stopped.

Thank you. My brain feels much lighter now.

Oh, if anybody is wondering, and from the poll results I’d say not, it looks like I have to decide for myself how often to turn out this drivel. You guys don’t like answering surveys, do you?

Buddy, can you spare a spare?

Michael 8 Comments

Hey everybody!  I have a spare tire. No, not that kind. Sheesh. Out in the car. There’s a tire spare there! What, you don’t think that warrants an exclamation point, let along a blog post? Well, pull up a chair, get a cup of coffee, or tea, or whatever welcomes you to the day, and hear my tale.

Before we begin, you must either recall or take as new information now that I bought a new (to me) vehicle just a few posts ago, or a couple of weeks ago depending on your time reference preference. Another prefatory comment, the previous vehicle was the first “car” vehicle, as in sedan, I bought in this century, Other recent and many older vehicles (with the exception of the “little car” which is the little red roadster than lives 8 months of the year in the garage and doesn’t count for this discussion) have been trucks or SUVs and have always been called “car” though they weren’t, not even the SUVs which were the old truck based SUVs, not station wagons with big wheels we call SUVs (which probably are actually CUVs if you asked a car person) (that’s “car person” as in aficionado, not one who drives a “car” versus a truck, SUV, CUV, or any other V currently roaming the streets). So then, are we ready? Good! I’ll get my coffee and we’ll begin.

Previously I had no need to go looking for a spare tire. While I was driving the now former car of mine, I never had neither a flat nor the desire to lift the car off the ground. Even the existence of a spare tire was merely a curiosity, a conversation starter in very, very, very, very, very slow cocktail parties, or perhaps a discussion topic with my therapist if I had been going to a therapist and he/she/it was one always questioning one’s existence and thus the spare tire could be a tangible example. Or non-tangible as it turned out.

2 + 2 5When I was emptying the trunk of all it’s trunk items I wanted to make certain I had everything and thought I should check under the trunk cover and check to make certain nothing had fallen into the spare tire area. I lifted the carpet, lifted the compartment cover, and found nothing there. Not even a spare tire. Nothing is not true. You see, the spare tire was not missing because somebody had absconded with it. There was in its place a small air pump to be used in the event of a flat tire. (It might also have come in handy when I was blowing up pool toys over the years but not knowing of its existence any more than the non-existence of the tire, that consideration never came up.) After a little head scratching and a silent thank you for not having had to discover that on some dark and stormy night with only three fully inflated tires under the car, I gathered up my boxes of trunk things and brought them indoors awaiting their new residency in the back of the new car which is actually not a car but as previously mentioned they are all called cars.

If I may digress for a moment. If you are wondering if that was a typo, no. I typed and intended to type boxes, the plural. I have since streamlined the car trunk stuff to a amore manageable number of items, not including such things as: two wooden yardsticks, a frying pam, three umbrellas, a license plate frame, a can of wood stain, the pole from a pole lamp, and a dust pan.

(Yeah? Why not?)

So, back to our story. Most people are likely familiar with the space saver, limited use, temporary. “donut” spare tire. That thing has more names than British royalty. They seem to be everywhere but only because about 50% of all the vehicles on the roads have them.  If you consider that none of the buses,  tractor trailers, trailer trailers, full size pick-up trucks, truck based SUVs, motorhomes, and motorcycles and scooters don’t have them, that means a lot of cars and SUVs, CUVs, and other Vs do.

Since the 1980s most cars started carrying space saver spares (the first American vehicle to use a space saver as standard equipment was the 1967 Pontiac Firebird). Probably a big chunk of you reading this weren’t even driving before the 1980s so you might not have even ever seen a full size spare even if you ever even looked for one. I was driving before then, quire a while before then, and even though I rarely ever even looked for them I just made some wild assumption that every car on the road not driven by an “I needed to use my spare but I’m not going to replace it because those things are EX-PEN-SIVE” spare tire user had a spare tire. Even. And that’s how I came to be muttering thanks for not having a need for any kind of spare tire on my previous car when I discovered my previous care did not have any kind of spare tire. (Who gives you just a pump?)

2 + 2 5 (1)

But I am happy to report the new to me new car is fully equipped with not so fully sized space saver, temporary, limited use, “donut,” royal spare tire. I checked.

You may now go about your day. That’s it. We’re done here. That’s the end of the story. There’s nothing else. Good day folks.

(I wonder if I should put the frying pan in the new to me new car. It could come in handy. You never know.)

Now scoot. I have things to do. Bye.

Speaking of Others

Michael 4 Comments

Trigger Alert!! Trigger Alert!! Arh-oooo-Gah!!! Warning! Warning! If you’re easily offended get the forlorn abyss of despair out of here. Proceed at your own risk. You have been warned! I’ll save you the trouble right now, the punch line is – Just be nice for Pete’s sake. (And who is this Pete?)

Now, on with the show!

Have we gone nuts? I’m speaking to the Americans now. You others might have also but I have no first hand knowledge of your nuttiness. Here, it’s a whole different story. Pretty close to a hole different story too if you ask me.

Exhibits 1 though 10: Penn State to ditch ‘male-specific’ student titles like freshmen.
That was the headline in one of the local papers on Tuesday. In my day (yeah yeah I know, that was back when “Leave it to Beaver” was considered high art and we saw how they bullied poor Lumpy and mistreated Mrs. Cleaver terribly, made her cook dinner in high heels and pearls!) …as I was saying, in my day we were too busy trying not to flunk out before freshman year was over to worry about what people were calling us. Of course, back in my day there weren’t majors in Surf Studies (as in Surfin’ USA, thank you Beach Boys) and Social Media Management (a whole different sort of surfin’), real honest to gosh Bachelor programs, Surf Studies is even a BS for Brian Wilson’s sake!

It doesn’t stop at Freshman for good old Penn State (who by the way ended up with over $100,000 of my money not terribly long ago – my money, not some student loan company government maybe you can get out of paying back money – so I feel I can call them out on their lunacy). In their eyes, technically in the eyes of the Faculty Senate (like the regular U.S. Senate isn’t filled with enough nut cases), the entire student reference is flawed. According to the Faculty Senate who drafted a comprehensive set of “inclusive and welcoming” recommendations, “Terms such as ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ are parallel to Western male father-son naming conventions,” No word on if sophomore is too sophomoric for sophomores to handle but that goes too. Instead, the classes will be First Year Students, Second Year Students, Third Year Students, Fourth Year Students, and for those in five-year programs, Fifth Year Students (currently known as fifth year seniors or, colloquially, Super Seniors – clearly that has to go).  I mean that’s not such a big deal except it’s going to be hard to fit “Fourth and Possibly Some Fifth Year Students’ Recognition Day” on the football tickets for the last home game.

Shall we continue? Upperclassmen will be no more. Where there are upperclassmen there are underclassmen and that is just so wrong on too many levels that the naming stress must be why so many underclassmen never pass their way to being upperclassmen. The First and Second Year Students will be referred to collectively as the Lower Division. The Third and Fourth Year Students will comprise the Upper Division.

Naturally they recommend doing away with he/him/his and she/her/hers, replacing those with they/them/theirs or non-gendered terms such as student, faculty member, staff member, and presumably coach although there was no mention if sports staff terminology will be an separate convention. (Coach Member may have been discussed and if it was, wouldn’t you have just loved to have been a fly on one of those wall?) I have always had an issue with they/them/theirs as a singular. Besides the fact that it/they are grammatically incorrect no matter what any easily coerced style manual may say, it appropriates the schizophrenics’ culture.

I’ve wondered this before. When somebody brings up the new “proper way” to refer to people so as to not offend, pronounly speaking, how do they feel about languages that have gender-based pronouns for inanimate objects? According to a survey cited in Wikipedia (well, it was handy and I wasn’t going to look up all those languages separately), of 256 languages surveyed, 44% had gender-based pronouns. I don’t know if that means much considering there are close to 7,000 known languages but it does mean that in at least 144 languages the computer I’m typing this on may be male or female and isn’t having any of the fun that goes with being one or the other being with the other or the one.

Hey, here’s a little aside. We’re always so busy “correcting” the male based words like Freshman, why hasn’t anybody been beating the drum to get rid of Girl Scouts, charwoman, showgirl, shopgirl, and Congresswoman. And why do we still have separate Best Actor and Best Actress awards – in California for Oscar’s sake!

I warned you that it wasn’t going to be pretty, so let’s pretty this up a little before we move on with our day. First, I’m not some ranting privileged old white dude, and although even I chuckled at a couple lines here and there, this is a serious problem. Not inclusivity – this pseudo inclusivity that is running more amok than usual, probably because if the pandemic starts to wind down what will people have to talk about. Do you want to include people? Do you want to welcome people? Then welcome them. I, poor little ole under-woke me, am for sure, for certain, know that if you went up to somebody and said “Hi! How are you? Would you like to have a sit and chat for a while? I’ll bring the donuts, you bring the coffee,” they wouldn’t give two rats’ gluteus maximuses if you said while wiping the jelly off your chin, “Boy oh boy that new donut lady at the bakery knows how to fill a donut!”

Maybe we should spend more time welcoming people into our lives than we do figuring what to call them while we keep everybody an arm’s length away. Perhaps it is time to revisit the Golden Rule, Modified: Speak of others as you would like them to speak of you. And do that treating part too while you are at it.

Continuing with my experiment on the WordPress/Anchor partnership, Don’t Believe Everything You Think is available on these platforms. 

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Please let me know what you think. So far I’m still mostly just recording the blog posts but eventually there will be more than that. We might even get into a discussion about how we all got into blogging. 

This post will begin to be available later today, after noon EDT. 

I’m older and have better insurance

Michael 3 Comments

I’m sorry I’m so late today. I don’t imagine there were many of you heartbroken over not being able to share your morning coffee and reading time with me but apologize I will anyway. As much as it may seem these meanderings appear to be quite spur of the moment in composition, grammar, and spelling, I give a lot of thought to them. Sometimes minutes! Often they are ready to post the day before you read them which for today would have been yesterday. Now that I think about it, you could say that about any day that happens to be today. But as luck would have it, and lucky for me that luck was there to have it, yesterday I was busy buying a car.

To buy a car is an event for me. Like the cicadas, there is a long time between my appearances at a car dealership. My last purchase was 7 years ago. Things have changed in seven years! Particularly for confirmed used car buyers like me.  I think perhaps it’s the influence of outfits like Carvana, Car Shop, and CarMax, that for what they lack in company name originality they make up with simplified car shopping. One no longer has to travel from car lot to car lot to explore options. If a local dealer leaves their website incomplete of all offerings thinking the few advertised selections will entice the buyer to visit them personally to see their complete inventory as would they had done in the days of print ads in the Sunday newspaper want ads section, that dealer probably closed up or was absorbed into a mega-dealership shortly after Sunday newspapers joined the endangered species list. No, today, if it’s for sale, it’s online. The only walking necessary while narrowing down the choices is back and forth to the kitchen to refill the ice tea glass and the bridge mix dish. 

thumbnail_IMG_0101 (Just out of curiosity, am I the only person left in the world who keeps a dish of bridge mix on the coffee table?) (Am I the only person who still keeps bridge mix?) (Am I breaking etiquette having bridge mix yet never having played bridge?)  So I did my research, narrowed my choices, and what usually would have taken me 3 to 5 weeks of intense searching took me 3 days.

Now believe it or not, car buying is not the focus of this post. (Meanderings, remember?) It did provide the impetus for it. Naturally when you change vehicles you have to update your insurance. I don’t think of insurance very often. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had to use my insurance other than to prove I have it so I can register the cars and keep them on the road. And so I can put the new to me one on the road, I had to dig up my insurance information for the transfer. The person handling the paperwork for the registration asked me if I was happy with my current provider and I said they seemed to be fine, they take a little of my money every month and give me a little peace of mind in return, mission accomplished. And she got me wondering if they are taking more than just a little of my money.

It’s been years since I ever considered a different insurance provider. Those of you with the longest memories will remember six years ago plus a couple of months, I wrote a post on how to make money by switching insurance companies. What with all the “rates as low as” and the “save as much as” claims back then, if you were shrewd in your choices and diligent in your switching, you stood to save up to $4000. And that was in 2015 money, who knows what it could be today! (No, don’t try it! It’s satire. But then again…)  Well, they are at it again, and bigger this time! Insurance companies are making claims that make those of a certain recently ousted lying President sound reasonable.

The company with the commercial that features the car with the singing hood ornament opens with a shot of the driver’s phone ostensibly opened to their app proclaiming he saved over $700. I don’t know what he is insuring but I don’t pay that much for a full year and I have as full as coverage can be, right down to rental car reimbursement. All I can take away from that commercial is that if you have a car with a singing hood ornament, the replacement cost must be astronomical! Either that or I’m older and can get better rates.

20210512_194146

So that’s my long winded story to get to a rather trivial point. Now aren’t you glad you didn’t hold breakfast for me.

By the way, I’m continuing my experiment on this WordPress/Anchor partnership. They’ve managed to get Don’t Believe Everything You Think on several platforms. With links to the menu page they are:

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And of course, at Anchor:

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Please let me know what you think. So far I’m still mostly just recording the blog posts but eventually there will be more than that. We might even get into a discussion about how we all got into blogging. 

And Now…Something Sort of Different

Michael 2 Comments

A few years ago I had a great idea to change the name of the blog. The Real Reality Show Blog made sense in the beginning as a response to the reality being foisted upon us by cable television so-called reality shows. Come on now, let’s have a show of hands, how many think those housewives are really real. And not to spoil anybody’s surprise, on almost any of those shows where somebody gets surprised, didn’t you ever wonder how the producers managed to get the surprise-ees mic’ed up without them knowing it. So, since the reality of those shows was more than a little in question, the Real Reality Show Blog filled the gap with real stuff, real places, and real people from wherever I really happened to be.

Over time (a lot of time – I started writing this drivel in 2012!) the reality wasn’t any less but it was sometimes augmented with commentary, thoughts, and suppositions. It became more the musings of some old, single, white guy. In fact, the first alternate name I thought of for the blog was just that – Old Single White Guy. Even though it describes me to a T, it really pushes the bounds of political correctness. And then I thought, oh no, I can’t call it that because any time I started following a new blog the blogger would get an e-mail from WordPress stating, “Congratulations! Old Single White Guy just started following you!” and I just don’t have the money to spend on keeping a lawyer on retainer.

It was clear that my first thought was not my best thought. Not surprising considering I recently wrote an entire post about poor first thoughts. And then it hit me! The famous sign from that post, the one I’m looking at while I’m writing this. The one I’ve looked at writing almost every post for the last almost ten years. Don’t Believe Everything You Think. That’s it! I got it and I got it good. Or bad.  Or whichever is good nowadays. That could be “THE” perfect name for this perfectly imperfect nonsense.

Yep, Don’t Believe Everything You Think. But I’ve built a brand. How will people find me? Duh, who the … um, who might be looking for me. I’ve never “advertised.” I’ve never linked from there to here from the various there’s I haunt – cyberly speaking that is. Yet somehow in just the last 4 years people have landed on this site over 20,000 times. If I only had a nickel. [Sigh] Not to worry though. I’m not changing the name of this blog so if you haven’t subscribed but you just know how to get here you can keep getting here however that is. But I am using the name for a new podcast version of this.

You’ve all seen the notices from WordPress, turn your blog into a podcast. Well, it seems easy enough and I want to experiment a little.  If I’ve done this right, you should find a link Don’t Believe Everything You Think on the Anchor platform where you will hear me reading this drivel. And some other stuff. And each time I do this there’ll be more other stuff. Go listen and please come back here and tell me what you think. (This particular drivel you should find right here.)

01a39c24efcfb5bde1debe2de75e473c90853c0da5e44078e88df466a2e22901.0And remember, even though you may not have known it, chances are pretty good that there’s an old, single, white guy following you.

Oh, one more thing. When I set that up over there, or over here if you’re now listening instead of reading, they ask for a category I guess so they can figure out where to pigeonhole you. What could I say about this? There isn’t a category for claptrap. So I called it a personal journal. And that reminded me of something. You’ve heard me speak of my daughter many times. She does many things, including writing. For her though it’s professional. Yeah, she actually makes money writing. She’s written something new that’s not meant to be read but to encourage others writing. I thought of this when I was selecting “personal journal” for my category. She’s written journal prompts, but I think pretty cleverly. She’s developed a card deck of prompts. According to her, “Everyone has a story, but not everyone knows what their story is.” The deck has 52 cards packed in a study box. Go check them out, at Untitled. She doesn’t know I’m telling you this, so if you see her, don’t say anything. Thanks.

Under Pressure

Michael Leave a comment

May is an interesting month. It starts out somewhat Spring-like with weather in the “Not Too Warm Days, Not Too Cool Nights” range, newly planted gardens beginning to flower and promising what one hopes will be a bountiful harvest, lawns fresh from their first cut already starting to show the unmistakable lushness from the early application of grass food, and energetic people everywhere waiting for the first long bike ride or counting the days until the outdoor pools will again open. And then it ends with hot dry days and hot humid nights, the sun so high you’ve already gone through a year’s allotment of sunscreen, weeds, weeds, weeds and more weeds where you were sure you have planted zucchini, that grass needs cut again(!), the bike rack is still in pieces in the garage and the pool looks more like a mosh pit from an early 80s Slayer concert! Perhaps this explains why May is also National Blood Pressure Month. With escalations like these your blood pressure has a good chance of escalating also.

But May is also a month filled with days dedicated to practicing self-care, self-restraint and self-satisfaction, and keeping that blood pressure in the “Make Your Doctor Happy” zone. Seriously, can you imagine stressing yourself to the point of elevated blood pressure readings on Dance Like a Chicken Day?

May’s earliest days have already gone and we may have missed National Fitness Day or World Laughter Day, but you don’t need a special day to stretch out those winter bound muscles or snicker at a corny knock knock joke. We might have missed Garden Meditation Day but meditating any day will increase your positivity.

I’ve listed some of May’s contributions to keeping your blood pressure down. You can keep this list handy whenever your day starts mounting more pressure on you than you are comfortable with and remind yourself of the many ways a little physical activity or mental and spiritual awareness might ease some of that pressure and lighten your heart. (Warning: Visit Your Relatives Day might have the opposite effect on some!)

I have my favorites that I’m looking forward to. Please join me in a discovery of how you can celebrate National Blood Pressure Month and add to your health – body and soul!

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The Shortest Distance

Michael 5 Comments

Let me get my geometry on. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You can say the same for geography and sometimes interpersonal relationships. Apparently, the shipping magnates of the world have not heard of this concept. Or perhaps what I am about to recount explains the mysterious handling portion of the “shipping and handling” duo.

Last week I found myself with the last straw, the one to break the camel’s back even, on my formerly trusty, old cell phone. It was once smart, but the years have not been kind to it and it was time to send it to a memory care center for phones that have run out of memory. And touchpad sensitivity, And a willingness to connect to voicemail. So I marched myself right over to the New an Improved Smart Phone Store and Service Center and purchased myself a New and Improved Smart Phone. Actually I purchased myself to right to have a New and Improved Smart Phone shipped to me because they were out of the one I wanted.

“No problem, We ship 2 day [company that sounds like MedTex].” That was Friday.

Wednesday the phone arrived. Had it been a steamer trunk in a 1940s musical it would have had a variety of stickers from all the ports of call it visited. It had a wonderful time, wish I was there!

Had I known where it was being shipped from I would have driven out and picked it up. It was only a six hour drive. That would have been better than the six day “2 day” nationwide tour it was on. Observe:

PhoneMapThat’s roughly an 1800 mile trek to go about 310 miles in a straight line. Or at least as straight as the Pennsylvania Turnpike can manage. (If you’re wondering, the Memphis to Pittsburgh leg of the journey itself was a foot or two less than 770 miles.)

I suppose somebody figured that is the most efficient way to ship cargo. Somebody who studied the right classes in college might have even chosen the economies of scale in bulk shipping for a dissertation subject.

I’ve always had a nagging suspicion that we tend to make things more difficult than they have to be. I’ve often wondered if that is because the more difficult we make it the less attractive it will be for somebody to compete with us. The less competition we have the less we have to improve ourselves and the less we have to improve ourselves the less we will improve ourselves. Why else would a couple pound package, no bigger than a cell phone, ride on six trucks and 2 planes when I know I’ve passed [Company that sounds like MedTex] trucks on the Turnpike, driving freight directly across the state.

I’m sure there is a better way, not just to ship phones but to streamline life and still reap the benefits of new and improved when new and improved comes along. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of opening our eyes and being more aware of what is around us, having a firm idea of where we want to go and how to get there without undue stress on ourselves and others. Think the goal, make the plan, then go out and do it. In as straight a line as you can manage.

I think I’ll take my own advice today and, having already failed at making a long story short, stop here. Bon voyage!

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