Category Life

Don’t Wait for the Movie

Michael 2 Comments

The people at My Recipes put out their Christmas Cookie Christmas Movie pairings this week. The question why do we need to pair things notwithstanding, nor the other question why are these mostly just different shapes of sugar cookies neitherwithstanding, we really need to address, like as in once and for all dammit, is “Die Hard” a Christmas movie? Let me say, I like Die Hard. I even like its four sequels (and there aren’t a lot of people who can say that). But “Die Hard” is no more a Christmas movie even though it takes place on Christmas Eve yet was released in July, any more than “Die Hard 2” is a Christmas movie even though it also takes place on Christmas Eve yet also was released in July. Why doesn’t anybody ever argue to include “Die Hard 2” in the Christmas movie debate? You actually get more of a sense of at least winter in “Die Hard 2” than in “Die Hard” but it just hangs out there with all the other movies set at Christmas time that nobody willy-nilly-y sticks in the Christmas movie category.

For instance, when did you last hear an argument for including “The Poseidon Adventure” among Christmas movies. At least on the boat they made use of the Christmas tree. Technically “The Poseidon Adventure” and its sequel “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure” were set on New Year’s Eve and Day, but still. A Christmas Tree. As a ladder. Really. Now that’s Christmas don’t you think?

“Three Days of the Condor” didn’t have anybody climbing a Christmas tree but Good King Wenceslas and Silver Bells are unmistakable on the soundtrack. Like “Die Hard 2” it is clearly cold and snowy out there and wherever Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway go, Christmas decor is in full swing. The movie is based on the novel “Six Days of the Condor.” Nobody ever explained where those other three days went but I bet you’ll find them in somebody’s stocking hanging by the chimney with care.

The Oscar winning “The Apartment” starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine is so filled with Christmas images there is even a scene with people decorating their Christmas tree. So what if the plot has nothing to do with the holiday. By the “Die Hard” measuring stick, “The Apartment” decks the halls more than many modern “real” Christmas movies. If you haven’t seen this classic give yourself an early Christmas present or late Hanukkah present or whatever present getting holiday you celebrate and put a copy of this movie on your TV screen now! Spoiler alert, nobody is going to mistake Jack Lemmon’s bosses for the Wise Men.

And how can we leave “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” out of the discussion. George Lazemby’s only portrayal of the venerable Bond, James Bond portrayed him in pre-Christmas Switzerland rescuing the world from biological weapons released by 12 unsuspecting women who go home for the holiday from the villain Ernst Stavros Blofeld’s allergy treating institute. And yet nobody considers that a Christmas movie. Tsk, tsk!

GManOn the other side of the ledger, “You’ve Got Mail” and its grandmovie inspiration “The Shop Around the Corner” are probably the most Christmas centric movies that never get credit for being Christmas movies. The story of two people who cannot stand each other’s’ physical beings but are head over heels over the inner selves they anonymously reveal in letters between pen pals (in 1940) and by email (when we get to 1998) culminates on Christmas Eve with each pair expressing their love for the people they really are, not the people they thought they knew. That’s the spirit Christmas.

Proof several times over that just taking place in late December is not enough to propel a movie into the ranks of Christmas fare. Maybe if we culled the chaff we can get some movies that really do capture the spirit of Christmas back in the theaters this time of the year.

For the record, My Recipes paired “Die Hard” with Snickerdoodles. Apparently we’re going to have to begin the discussion what constitutes a Christmas cookie.

 

 

Join the Club

Michael Leave a comment

Last week was special for me. I got mail, real USPS delivered mail that wasn’t addressed to “occupant,” wasn’t a bill, and didn’t include a detailed accounting of all medical procedures from the previous month. Oh, and it wasn’t a Christmas card either although we’re getting to that time when all the businesses I deal with send their cards out. After those come the cards from real people. But I digress. But that’s not unusual.

So, back to my tale, the mail came and therein was an envelope and within was a check. Not a bill. A check! Somebody was giving me money! It wasn’t a lot but it was mine. Coming to me. Income, not outlay. I felt so special. I practically beamed!

Now to be perfectly honest, this wasn’t anything unheard of. It happened before. In fact, it usually happens about once a year. The check in question was a disbursement from my insurance company. (Home and auto, not health or life. Those guys never give anything back. Well, technically life insurance does, but it’s usually too late to be much use.) Usually around this time each year I get a little check from the insurance company that reflects something they saved because they had fewer claims than they expected or some such thing. I don’t understand. I just spend. It’s like a Christmas Club.

ChristmasBankAh ha! Now we get to the heart of this post. Christmas Clubs. Do they even still exist. Those of you under 40 may have to find an even older adult to explain Christmas Clubs, right along with Broken Records. To be fair to the financial institutions of America, most credit unions still offer Christmas Clubs although Vacation Clubs are by far more popular. But neither have the favor they did before the credit card explosion of the early 1970s.

So when I opened the mail that day last week and pulled out that little check, my first thought was, “Wow, just like a Christmas Club.” My second thought was, “Wow, just like a Christmas Club.” My third thought was, “Okay, now you’re sounding like a broken record.”

And then I went out and spent.

 

 

Yes, Virginia

Michael 8 Comments

Santa Claus exists. In movies, books, cartoons, traditions, stuffed stockings, and the hearts and minds of children of all ages. Whether known as Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Babbo Natale, Father Christmas, Father Frost, or one of many other names, he is going to visit kids sometime soon. Just ask Virginia. The only problem with Santa is that there is always some spoil sport claiming there isn’t any proof that he exists. He’s just a story. Nobody gives away something for nothing. Blah, blah, blah.

So maybe Santa does have a teeny identity problem. Or maybe not. Maybe the doubters can poke holes in Santa’s existence but not so with Jolly Old St. Nick.

Jolly old St. Nick really was jolly, really was old, and really was real. Nicholas was born March 15, 270 A.D. in the Lycia province, part of present day Turkey. His parents died in an epidemic when he was young and he was raised by his uncle who was a monk at a local abbey.

StNickAlthough the beneficiary of his parents’ significant wealth, Nicolas was raised simply at the monastery and eventually was ordained a priest and distributed his wealth among the poor. After many years in the Holy Land he returned to Lycia and was consecrated Bishop of Myra.

There have been many stories of his generosity but one of particular interest involves a poor man and his three daughters. The man had no money for dowries for his daughters and without them he feared the girls would remain unmarried and be forced to work as prostitutes to support themselves. Nicholas threw a bag of gold into the man’s window as the oldest daughter came of age and again as each of the other two did likewise. And so began the tradition of St. Nick secretly giving gifts to children.

Nicholas died a martyr on December 6, 343 and his feast day begins the Days of Giving. One particularly old custom was that children could receive gifts anytime from December 6, the Feast of St. Nicholas to January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany.

So yes Virginia, there is a St. Nicholas. If you’d like to celebrate in style, give something to someone every day for the next 30 days. You might run out of bags of gold but just a golden word or friendly gesture will do.

Wishing you the blessings of St. Nicholas today and always.

 

  • Nicholas Icon by Jaroslav Čermák (1831-1878) via WikiCommons

Day In and Day Out

Michael 3 Comments

Yesterday was a glorious day in my neck of the woods. Sunny and warm, with temperatures in the mid 60s. Very April-like which was a relief from the February-ish November we just escaped. If you didn’t know better (unless you live in south Florida) you’d not know there were only 23 days until Christmas.

SantaWhen I was a kid we always knew how long till Christmas. That goes with childhood. You could have asked any random 9 year old on May 6 how long till Christmas and without hesitation would have gotten “only 233 days!” in reply. Parents got a little extra help. Beginning the day after Thanksgiving the morning paper posted a happy Santa holding his nice or naughty list proclaiming “20 Shopping Days Until Christmas!” That’s what yesterday’s paper would have printed. Yes, back then there was a difference between days until Christmas and shopping days ‘til Christmas.

This isn’t a post about how great things were in those good old days. I just want to point out that back then the stores weren’t open on Sunday and on Christmas Eve it wasn’t unusual for many to close before dinner time so the employees could be home with their families. Not every day was a shopping day. Of course today the stores can be closed and still shopping gets done through the magic of on-line retailers and electronic charging or cash transfers. Still those places with real doors will be opening them every day until Christmas.

Except …

Not everything is open on Sunday. And I don’t mean the post office. You can receive and they do deliver mail on Sunday. No, I mean banks. Banks, those financial institutions that try very hard in their ads to convince us that they are just ordinary people like the rest of us mere mortals working to make our money work hard for us. Uh huh.

Over the years they’ve made it handy enough for us to do most banking without their input. Automated teller machines have been around for years along with on line money transfers and automated recurring payments. Just like you would expect in the 21st century. Then why in a day when a merchant can determine whether you have enough in your checking account to cover that new OLED TV with your debit card even if it is 2:00 on a Sunday afternoon, and manage to reduce your balance by the price of that TV (plus tax and extended warranty) they still make you wait three days with you make a deposit “for the check to clear.” And why do they never tell you what they are doing with that money in the interim. It seems like they don’t have to long for the good old days. They never left them.

Back to shopping though. With now just 22 days till Christmas (and if I recall last year some retailers were actually guaranteeing same day delivery of select items ordered by noon on Christmas day making it now 23 shopping days till Christmas) I better get myself in gear. I have a lot of preparations to make. No, not a lot of shopping to do. I don’t do much shopping for Christmas. I’ll still put together a small stocking for my daughter (after 29 years the Santa fantasy is now more mine than hers), but otherwise the gifts to and from the rest of the family are our love and company.

The preparations I have to make are keeping my recycle bin empty for the daily onslaught of printed “gift guides” and my “Delete Finger” limber for elimination of the electronic version of those same and similar guides from my email inbox. Has anybody noticed those gift guides all seem to bear recommendations for anybody on your Christmas list with gifts from the same store? Who would have thought your 96 year old aunt and your 7 month old great nephew can be satisfied in a single trip to the same hunting and camping emporium. And no I am not receiving that email because I requested it. I never heard of you before and where is the “click here to unsubscribe” line?

One thing I don’t have to prepare for is an unusually warm Christmas. In fact we get back to December weather later today with falling temperatures and snow by morning. For those of you living in south Florida that’s the white stuff Frosty is made of.

All Washed Up

Michael 1 Comment

I have an absolutely, completely, positively, almost surgically clean apartment. Vacuuming, dusting, mopping, disinfecting, and laundering (yuck) are all done at the same time. Actually these were done all at the same time yesterday. Today I went to the hospital to have that pesky fistula declared kaput and a new one fashioned in my “other” arm. But wait! This is NOT a depressing “oh I’m so sick” post. If you want to read about my latest medical escapades, go read the kidney transplant journey posts. This post is about lint.

Right. Lint. I’m sorry, I’m starting in the middle again. Let me back up a few steps. You see, because I have an embarrassment of available time I spread housework out over the whole week. Typically each day has its own domestic torture. Oh I will wash, dry, iron, and put away the laundry all in one day, but usually it’s one day, one job. But because of this morning’s procedure I can’t lift or carry anything heavier than say, oh, a toilet brush. But I can’t really reach or swing with either arm so even if I wanted to pick up that toilet brush, the most I could do with it is gesture with it. So this place is so spotless today because for the next week the most strenuous activity I can pull off (like that word choice?) is manipulating the lever that raises the footrest on the recliner. So if I didn’t want to live in progressively slovenly environs, I did the next week’s work all in one day.

I know for many, because of work and family obligations every week’s household chores get done in one day but I’m old and feeble not to mention lazy by nature and as I said, with a lot of time in my hands. Being faced with a week’s worth of cleaning in just a few hours significantly challenged my efficiency. A big loser to my running around with my head threatening to be cut off was the dryer lint trap. Thus, today’s post about lint.

Right. Lint. (Sorry for repeating myself but the post really cried out for a couple extra and those fit the bill nicely.) (Speaking of words, I was thinking of you Angela when I worked “fistula” into a post about lint. Not bad, huh?)

You see, I have this love/hate relationship with fall/winter laundry. I hate how cold weather increases the volume of dirty clothes but I hate doing laundry in general. Hmm. I guess you could say I have a hate/hate relationship with fall/winter laundry. (Go back and check out “Visions of Fall” for more on that.) Regardless if I hate it or hate it, I had a lot of laundry to do. In a typical week laundry actually gets two days so yesterday I not only doubled my laundry activities, I did that on the day I was doing everything else.

So in order to get all the laundry plus everything else done I spent the day multitasking. I’m not a fan of multitasking. To me, multitasking is akin to compromise which to me is just another way of saying “nobody wins.” (If you are wondering, even though I don’t care much for compromise, I am a huge fan of collaboration. Someday I’ll do a post on that. Stay tuned.) (If you don’t understand “stay tuned,” find an old person to explain it along with “broken record” and “let’s go to the tape.”)

Well, to make a long story short (but then if I ever really did that all my posts would be just shy of 10 words), early in the laundry portion of our domestic extravaganza, I missed a tissue in a pocket. Ugh.

Launderers know the significance of that. If you don’t, go ask your mom!

LintTrap

Disbelievable!

Michael 2 Comments

The suspension of disbelief, so Aristotle says, is that theatrical principle which allows the audience to accept fiction as reality and fully experience the moments. I’ve always thought it should be the suspension of belief because what’s so hard about not not believing. Fiction by definition is that which is not real (though not necessarily unreal, at least as of the mid-1960s), or as Lawrence Block so well put it, “telling lies for fun and profit.” But I guess if you’re willing to shell out the money to have someone lie to you, whether at a play or through a novel, you’ve already surrendered at least some of your beliefs. To give up disbelief is the willingness not to stand up in the middle of Act III shouting “Oh come on now!”

Of course the author has some responsibility to make it not absurdly unbelievable except perhaps in a good farce. I thought of this while watching television the other night. It was a new age television drama that is supposed to reflect life itself. But I’ve seen this particular problem is lesser dramas, comedies, and even movies of the theatrical release type. That is the vibrating cell phone.

I am willing to disbelieve when our hero shoots it out with 5 or 6 bad guys all outfitter with automatic weapons against his pistol compact enough to slip into his tuxedo breast pocket. I can disbelieve with the best of them that someday man will fly faster than the speed of light. It even doesn’t stretch my discredibility that a fresh faced girl from Kansas can move to New York and beat out the actresses who have trained since they were 4 for the lead in the new Broadway musical winning a recording contract, and a Tony, in the process.

CellPhoneBuzzingBut I cannot disbelieve close to enough that everybody on TV and in the movies can hear their phones on vibrate from 2 rooms away. Seriously.

Seriously, is it only the programs I watch and the movies I go to that even the actors take the notice when we are instructed to mute our pagers, phones, and other electronic devices?

Maybe in the movies I can see the director being paranoid that if he or she were to call for a real ringtone too many audience members would reach for their phones and miss whatever nuance is playing out in the screen as we watch the character carefully traverse the rooms to the buzzing handset. I guess on the television shows a ringing phone would distract us to the point of missing the next commercial. Although I might be tempted to go looking for my phone thinking a) nobody in the show has a phone on them and b) holy crap, where did my phone get to?!

So I’m willing to not disbelieve in ghosts that run roughshod over New York, to take on non-unfaith that mild mannered bartenders double as CIA operatives, and to really buy that a computer can inhabit the body and soul of a foreign exchange student. But…

If anybody out there is working on a screenplay, please keep in mind that the suspension of disbelief goes only so far. And it stops at the end of my cell phone.

Bzzzzz bzzzzz

 

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving 2018

Michael 4 Comments

Tradition has it the first American Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621. I don’t know if that’s true. I wasn’t there. That’s the trouble with tradition. Nobody around now was there when they started. We take them on faith and faithfully we follow them.

Thanksgiving 2018 will be a year many who had been here for 2017’s are no longer around. That’s the trouble with time. We take on faith today day will have another to follow.

They tell us that Thanksgiving is for friends and family to gather to be thankful they are still friends and family. I know. I said that at Thanksgiving 2011. Our friends and our families are truly the best of ourselves. How we love us is how we love them. This year, be thankful you are still here to love.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving

 

Caution: Rough Road Ahead

Michael 9 Comments

I don’t think I’ve ever started a post apologizing for not posting. As much as I find myself an interesting fellow I can’t imagine any of you (if there are any of you still reading) working yourself into a lather because I’ve deprived you of my drivel these many days. But that’s just it. It’s been many days. Many more than I’ve ever gone without posting unless I was unconscious in a hospital bed. That’s just plain rude so for that I apologize.

Technically though, I have been unconscious in a hospital bed but just for a couple of hours. And I’ve been awake on a hospital bed a few days but not any of them in a row. Let me start in the middle for you and maybe that will clear things up.

When we last left our kidney transplant journey there were potential donors being poked and prodded, tested and vetted. They still are but all are nearing their finish lines. Will any be found as able as they are willing? The best I can say is we’ll see.

Until then, dialysis continues to be the means by which my own, slightly overworked and underappreciated kidneys are given a hand doing what they used to do best. Smoothly is generally not a term used to describe how dialysis goes. And it isn’t. Three weeks ago at an anything but routine dialysis session (routine also not descriptive of the dialysis procedure) my fistula imploded. You remember my fistula. It’s a pair of blood vessels surgically connected then anchored just below the skin so the dialysis nurse can shove two needles about the size of ball point pen cartridges into the arm to get the blood to and from the dialysis machine. Repeated stabbings cause scarring and plaque to build up inside the fistula and about every six months the surgeon runs a catheter through my arm by which he can clean things up in there. There is a fairly descriptive description (which is truly the best kind of description you can have) along with a couple truly disgusting pictures (and when describing a fistula, disgusting is truly the best description you can make) in a post from earlier this year.

Even with careful maintenance, sometimes the fistula just fails. That’s what happened to mine on November 6 which just happened to be the day after the last day I posted anything. Coincidence? Umm, not really. After repeated attempts to get a needle seated properly in the fistula with nothing but resistance to show for it, the nurse declared my arm a no dialysis zone. Unfortunately that did not give me carte blanche to swap the dialysis recliner with a seat at the Chinese restaurant down the road although lunch would have been welcome since I rushed through breakfast in order to participate in the American election process. Instead I was able to swap that chair for a bed at the hospital outpatient surgery area and await an emergency clearing of the fistula.

To make a long story short (I realize I’ve already exceeded that marker but it sounds good and I rarely get to use that as an opening line), after two more attempts with equally poor results, everyone admitted that the fistula was no longer a viable and a temporary catheter was tunneled into the right external jugular vein. It was during that procedure I had my previously noted period of unconsciousness in a hospital bed. (I get to be awake during the cleaning procedure, known as a fistulagram, and can actually watch the progress. It’s fascinating stuff but I’d still rather see a Bond, James Bond movie any day of the week.)

CVCThe unfortunate thing about dialysis catheters is that unlike say administration ports one might receive chemo through, they terminate outside the body and do so on a pair of tails. I’m posting a drawing so you can better see what I am trying to describe. (I could take a picture of my actual catheter but it’s not a selfie I’m anxious to snap and if you just type “dialysis catheter” into your favorite search engine you’ll get no end of new disgusting pictures to peruse at your leisure.) The part of the catheter inside floats and can actually be felt depending in where the tip resides at any particular moment. Reaching for anything higher than one’s shoulder, which given my modest height is anything off the counter, means moving the catheter around in there, also rather obviously noted. And because there is really no good way to anchor the outside tails, any movement or position change comes with a reminder that there is a part of you that isn’t really a part of you.

Fortunately I have the opportunity to be unconscious in a hospital bed again next Thursday when a new fistula will be fashioned into my other arm and I’ll get to have the catheter removed as soon as the new fistula completely heals and toughens enough for dialysis use. That shouldn’t be much after Ground Hog Day.

Just because I was having so much fun at the hospital, last Thursday when I was preparing to return to the world of blogging, I received a call from the dialysis center. The labs drawn earlier returned with a critically low calcium level endangering my health on any number of levels and I was instructed to return again to the hospital, this time to the emergency room where orders would be waiting to repeat the test and administer IV calcium if still returning a lower than normal level. It was, they did, and I got to recline on the sixth hospital bed (but conscious for five of them!) in 11 days.

And you thought getting on a transplant list was going to be boring between the listing and the planting.

Related Posts:

Transplant Journey Posts

First Steps (Feb. 15, 2018)
The Next Step (March 15, 2018)
The Journey Continues (April 16, 2018)
More Steps (May 31, 2018)
Step 4: The List (July 12, 2018)
Step 1 Again…The Donor Perspective (Sept 6, 2018)
And The Wait Goes On (Oct. 18, 2018)

Other Related Posts

Walk This Way…or That (March 9, 2017)
Looking Good (May 18, 2017)
Technical Resistance (May 25, 2017)
Those Who Should Know Better (July 24, 2017)
Cramming for Finals (May 3, 2018)

 

 

Memorably Forgettable

Michael Leave a comment

Enquiring minds want to know. You know that’s the actual what – quote, slogan, motto? Slogan. I think most people would say “Inquiring minds want to know” and it really doesn’t matter much what those minds want because both mean essentially the same thing. Typically people inquire on this side of the Atlantic and enquire on that, assuming you’re on the same side as I am and you’re not prone to paving your speech with Anglicisms. I’m not sure exactly what they do in Canada even though they would be with me on this side.

fingersI’ve used the inquiring minds line quite often over the years although I couldn’t tell you where it came from. My first thought was E. F. Hutton but at the same time I knew that wasn’t right. If wasn’t E. F. Hutton or the recently resurrected EF Hutton. That was “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.” They came up with that slogan about a year before they were forced to admit to an elaborated check chaining scheme (the corporate version of passing bad checks ) right before being bought up and disappearing into the investment miasma and setting the stage for an eventual rebirth without the periods.

But I digress. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Enquiring minds was the brainchild of the National Enquirer, the American tabloid with the British name. I suppose regular readers of the Enquirer know that but they probably don’t know that tabloid was originally a trademarked layered tablet developed by the Burroughs Welcome drug company who sued for copyright infringement but lost for a reason I was never able to discover.

Often copyrighted names get sucked into the public domain because of a lack of attention to protecting them by their respective owners. Kleenex and Tylenol are two biggies that rarely get seen with their (r) or (c) or whatever it’s supposed to be to project the fact that there are particular brands of facial tissue and acetaminophen. Dumpster, aspirin, and thermos are just three of many that have already lost their letters. Maybe that’s what happened to tabloid although I don’t see the relationship between a gossip rag and a drug delivery system. I guess some things aren’t supposed to be understood.

Like who can understand how or why certain numbers are so memorable. Some things make sense in context – four horsemen, seven seas, twelve days of Christmas. But what about 8003253535. Let me put that another way.
8-0-0    3-2-5    3-5-3-5
Add a catchy little tune and you have the first toll free 800 phone number ever featured in an advertising campaign. And it still gets you the Sheraton reservation system fifty years later even though Sheraton is now part of a more diverse corporate family.

747100While Sheraton was revealing a new way to reserve a hotel room, Boeing was introducing a new way to get there. It might not have a catchy slogan or memorable phone number (at least I don’t know that it does) but what Boeing revealed that fall in 1968 has a memorable number of its own and quite an unmistakable profile, the 747.

So thanks to Boeing more people can get from here to there without walking. For generations, people have let their fingers do the walking. That famous symbol on the cover of so many yellow pages was never trademarked, nor was the term “yellow pages” so I can print them here with impunity. As far as I’m concerned, yellow pages have it all over enquiring minds even if you don’t need them look up the number to reserve a room at the Sheraton. I wonder why nobody ever got around to protecting it.

I guess they forgot.

Let’s All Fall Back a Bit

Michael 5 Comments

This weekend Americans (and some others) go through that twice yearly madness of figuring out exactly how to open the back of the antique mantel clock or adjust the electronic version in the middle of the dash of your mid-nineties jalopy while reciting (mentally, hopefully) “spring forward, fall back” as the debate over the necessity for Daylight Saving Time and/or Standard Time plays out on the nation’s talk radio shows.

While that is going on I’d like to ask everybody to fall back just a little more than the proscribed one hour. Let’s shoot for, oh how about 60 years. That would make it 1958. The legendary ’57 Chevy Bell Air would be just a used car (and it’s Nomad counterpart a regular old (eww) station wagon, Jack Paar was hosting the Tonight Show, “It’s All in the Game” was in its 6th and final week as the Billboard #1 Single, and I was not yet allowed to cross the street by myself.

Ok, I’m not a nostalgia freak. I could really care less that Conway Twitty would wrest the top spot in the charts from Tommy Edwards next week with “It’s Only Make Believe.” (But I was pretty tickled that later on in the year The Chipmunks with David Seville would have the top selling record with their iconic Christmas song.) And 1958 had a lot going against it also. Unrest was escalating in Vietnam, the U.S. and Russia (then the USSR) were both putting the finishing touches on the first intercontinental ballistic missiles while they and Great Britain began conducting atmospheric nuclear tests, and a three year famine would begin in China ultimately taking 30 million lives.

Something that happened in 1958 that could be good or bad actually went on a little earlier than early November. September 12 actually. That’s when Jack Kilby discovered (developed? perfected? made usable?) the microchip, the heart of integrated circuitry. Because of him we have cars that can let you know when you wander out of your lane, phones we can carry around with us, computer assisted tomography that allow doctors to see inside us (that’s the CAT in CAT scan in case you – yeah, you knew, sorry), and (drum roll please) the Internet.

Most days I’m OK with the cars and the phones and even with the CAT scans. But lately I’ve been really ambivalent about this Internet thing. Of course if it wasn’t for it you’d not be able to read these ramblings, and for that you might be more grateful than I’ll ever know. But without it I’d not be able to see firsthand just how two faced, insincere, hurtful, and to be blunt, disgusting people have become. To not be exposed to such constant streams of hatred I’d gladly give up everything new from these 60 years.

It’s not been a week since eleven congregants were gunned down in a Pittsburgh synagogue. A day after that horrific occurrence a vigil was held to remember the victims and speaker after speaker including local politicians stood before the community and said hate cannot win, everybody should be and is welcome here. A day after that momentous event those same politicians were denouncing members of the opposing party, urging other politicians to stay away, and continuing to air the most vile political ads to date  while jockeying for position ahead of next Tuesday’s general election. It only took two days for politicians to revert to being their typical unsavory selves, to letting the public know how unsuitable, untrustworthy, and dishonest their opponent is and oddly saying little about themselves (or perhaps much about themselves) at the same time. With the help of the Internet and news sites’ comments areas, the followers of this party or that have marched in line spewing the insults that they’ve taken the last two years to perfect.

It’s in everybody’s best interest to live kindly and peacefully. Yes, you get to pick and choose who you are going up like just as others can decide to like to you or not. But nobody – NOBODY – has the right to hate. Lies are hate. Saying what you think people want to hear then doing the opposite is hate. Being a sheep isn’t hate but it is stupid. If we can’t rely on those we look to for leadership and guidance to take the time to demonstrate their commitment to not letting hate win, then we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

Maybe a starting point would be to spend some time face to face with your neighbor. Of course you’ll have to put down your phone to do that. Fortunately because of the efforts of Mr. Kilby, you can fit it into your pocket while taking that time.

Fall back this weekend. However far you’re comfortable going.