Packing

Just saw an article titled "how to pack like a pro'.

I would much rather an article titled 'how to have staff that does this as effectively as a British butler'.

Just saying.

Being Square

The question: what is the US postage on a square envelope?

From the ever-clear US Post Office site:

1.2 Nonmachinable Criteria

A letter-size piece is nonmachinable if it has one or more of the following characteristics (see 601.1.1.2 to determine the length, height, top, and bottom of a mailpiece):

a. Has an aspect ratio (length divided by height) of less than 1.3 or more than 2.5.

b. Is polybagged, polywrapped, enclosed in any plastic material, or has an exterior surface made of a material that is not paper. Windows in envelopes made of paper do not make mailpieces nonmachinable. Attachments allowable under applicable eligibility standards do not make mailpieces nonmachinable.

c. Has clasps, strings, buttons, or similar closure devices.

d. Contains items such as pens, pencils, keys, or coins that cause the thickness of the mailpiece to be uneven; or loose keys or coins or similar objects not affixed to the contents within the mailpiece. Loose items may cause a letter to be nonmailable when mailed in paper envelopes; (see 601.3.3).

e. Is too rigid (does not bend easily when subjected to a transport belt tension of 40 pounds around an 11-inch diameter turn).

f. For pieces more than 4-1/4 inches high or 6 inches long, the thickness is less than 0.009 inch.

g. Has a delivery address parallel to the shorter dimension of the mailpiece.

h. Is a self-mailer that is not prepared according to 201.3.14.

i. Is a booklet that is not prepared according to 201.3.16.

 

Oh sure, that's intuitively obvious.

 

Interview

Today my daughter has her first ever interview for a job.  Well, unless you count the interview for a summer job working in a warehouse, three years ago.  Basically, she just had to be able to put two words together in order to be qualified, based on the calibre of her coworkers.  The job was tedious but she earned enough to still have some of her funds left, even now.

She dressed up for that interview.  In retrospect, she really didn't need to, but she did.  I was glad - about that.  Today, she is really dressing up.  This is not the job she wants, but it kind - of is, and she could live at home until her boyfriend graduates from college.

Here's hoping.

Observation

If Clinton wins, fervent Trump supporters will claim that the election was rigged.  But if Trump wins, they're going to regard it as totally believable.

My Neighborhood

"SO CLOSE to the stage that Donald Trump could almost have touched it, a notice on the school wall in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, carried this message: “Welcome to Cumberland Valley where sportsmanship is an expectation. So please …let the spectators be positive.” No chance of that. Even before the Republican nominee appeared, late on August 1st, on a pit-stop between Ohio and New York, the 3,000-odd people packing the gymnasium were spewing hate.

“What should we do with Hillary Clinton?” hollered a local politician, as if this crowd, of young people wearing “Trump that bitch” T-shirts and older ones who apparently did not mind the slogan, needed warming up. “Kill her!” someone shouted. “Lock her up!” the chant began.

This is Mr Trump’s achievement."

--www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2016/08/presidential-race

Watching and Hoping

Despite the perky comments in political blogs, I suspect that it's still too early to forecast the results of the election with any confidence. 

Hillary could shoot herself in the foot, or have some more nastiness from her past appear (her own version of Swiftboats).  Trump could listen to his advisors and actually buckle down to a core, consistant message - or even quit entirely, leaving the RNC able to insert a new candidate who only has to be marginally acceptable to the party, and not an idiot, for three months, maximum.  Granted, that seems to be beyond Trump's abilities, but its not beyond Ryans, or other players. It could happen..

So its not in the bag.  But I do suspect that it's trending in that direction, ever so slightly.

Verizon

"I understand and agree that Verizon is not liable for erroneous bill statements or incorrect debits/charges.  If an error in the bill statement should occur, Verizon will be responsible for correcting it if and when I notify Verizon of this error."

Nice.  They make an error, they're not liable, and they don't have to correct it if I don't tell them.

And, of course, I know what the bill should be, right? 

Networking

Found out that our new, faster router can have three networks = two 'primary ones', one that puts out a stronger signal but in a limited area, and one that puts out a weaker signal but more generally accessible, and a guest one which can do the whole internet connectivity thing but won't give access to local files.  Fine.

Turns out that printers can only connect to one network.  Your device, like your computer or tablet or whatever, has to be on the same network as the printer; otherwise, no go.  The printer might as well not exist.  According to a brief search I did, lots of people think wait, WHAT?  Only one network can have the printer, unless you want to do some magic or have a dedicated print server or whatever?

Well, crap.

What's Up?

Well, I have finally finished unpacking.  We've been home about two weeks now.  It usually doesn't take that long, but this time I just had no urgency about it.

I see where Air France is on strike again. A news article says that about 30,000 people per day are affected.  Its not clear to me whether it's the flight attendants or the air traffic controllers or both that are on strike, but its a moot point.  I'm here, they're there, go strike all you want.  But don't expect me back on your airline unless I don't have a viable alternative. Next time we go there -- which, I am sorry to say, will likely not be until 2019, since next year we are planning to go to Italy, and the year after that, to do a little traveling in the United States (let's hear it for airport departure announcements in English) -- we will likely take KLM or Lufthansa, at least if we're going during the summer.  Air France just likes strikes too much.  Of course, that's not just AF; other municipal services, like SNCF (the intercity trains) also like to play that game.  But only Air France, by going on strike, could keep us from actually getting home.

Went to see Star Trek Beyond.  Much better than the second one -- much more like the feeling of the first.  Some sad parts, including being aware that the guy who played Chekov won't be in any future ones (the actor died), and some of the really bad things are happening sequences were a bit painful to watch, even knowing that, of course, its all fake. And every so often there was a miracle. But still, overall, it was good. Quite glad to have seen it.

Souvenir

We have an email ID that we use when we are in an insecure environment.  On this trip, it proved its worth.  We have received about four hundred emails to multiple organizations, all with different user names but all allegedly coming fom our email ID.

Very glad we did not use one of our primary IDs....

Three Weeks Is a Long Time

Yesterday we returned from a trip to France.  Much of it was lovely.  I had the best bowl of strawberries I have ever eaten, while I was visiting a friend at her farm in southern France (the strawberries actually came from a neighboring farm, but who's counting).  Driving to the Jura region of France to see the girl who had stayed with us was prettty delightful, though having to go up a windy mountain road, dodging bicyclists in packs, was a little scary. (They are likely always there, but I suspect that their numbers were augmented by people pushing to be able to say they had biked on the same road as the Tour de France, which is starting soon.)  I could see several white-capped mountains in the distance, including Mount Blanc, which my wife refused to believe was named after the pen.  Go figure. Northern France, in the almost-Belgium part where Lille resides, was fun, especially when we encountered happy-but-not-rowdy groups of Belgian fans on the Lille metro, heading for the stadium and the Euro2016 football matches.  (France did pretty well, getting to the final, before being knocked off by Portugal.)  We were in Nice, thinking about how terrible the traffic was, two days before other events there led to Solidaire avec Nice signs on the highway.  Paris was good, even with the weather.  My wife fnally got to see the Musee D'Orsay, which I thought was pretty, and we both spent time chilling in the Luxumbourg gardens.  So that was fun.

The trip was not without incident -- mostly, nasty surprises as the European GSM phones we'd gotten failed to just work - turned out one phone was incapable of using a new SIM, while the other worked okay in Paris but only intermittantly in the countryside.  We swore a mighty oath not to look at our credit card charges -- at least, at the part that shows how much we were paying for connectivity that was inadequate at best and non-functional at worst.  Frequently, it was just irritating. I don't know how people get those awesome photographs from cell phones -- ours ended up looking as if it was raining or foggy, even in bright light.

The best part of the trip was seeing my friends.  Their awesomeness cannot be overstated.

Travel talk

I wonder how often you have to go overseas before you actually understand how to buy and use their mobile phones? I thought i did, but apparently i was wrong. Before we left the US, we bought 2 SIMs with french phone numbers, only 1 works. Could be the phone. Could be the sim. Could be sunspots.

Packing

There is nothing like packing for a trip that makes one realize just how much stuff one uses on a daily basis.

Travel

I'm sitting in the kitchen with one foot on the table, watching Star Trek videos.  It's a little hard to believe that in a little less than four days, we will be in France.  Paris, Lille, Toulouse, Aix-en-Provence, Nice, and a small town in Bourgogne.  Three and a half weeks, what with travel time between here and there, not to mention within the country.  Things are not calm, per se, but apparently the French government has decided to clamp down on some of the protests and marches.  You can imagine how well that's gone over.

I'm really looking forward to seeing my friends again, and introducing some of them to Joan for the first time.  Paris, I don't care so much about, but Lille is lovely, and Bourgogne is delightful, as is Toulouse and Aix-en-Provence.  Rainy and cloudy in the north, slightly rainy but also brilliantly bright in the south.  Gonna be tough to handle. Somehow, we'll manage.

Forecasts

In a series of vignettes in the comic movie Airplane!, Leslie Nielson''s character says "Guess I picked the wrong time to stop smoking. ..to stop drinking...to stop taking methamphetamines..." Well, apparently, I picked the wrong time to return to France.

In the last month, they have had multiple strikes, bad weather, flooding in Paris, and hooligans at their international soccer games. The strikes included airlines, and future strikes are projected to include train service in Paris.

Still, I was optimistic. They got it out of their system, I thought. The flooding will recede, people will relax - hey, its summer!, the weather has to improve!  I'll be able to get there, get around. By then, things will calm down.

Wrong. Another 4 day airline strike called for this weekend, by the fine pilots of Air France - neatly bracketing when my flight is scheduled to occur - and that strike was bracketed by 2 more national strikes. No Air France for YOU, this weekend. Or, possibly, other services. And it's still wet in Paris.

And later? Will SNCF, the rail system, have a strike? The hotel in Paris? The car rental? My French friends say Don't worry. There are always alternatives. We know how to deal with it. I'm not so sanguine. When you've got a schedule, one thing can throw the whole thing off. You find yourself stuck someplace, thinking what do I do now?  Where can I go? When you live in that area already, its an inconvenience.  When you don't.... 


A perky column in The Local (French news, in English) written 'by an American' (I say 'an American' because the author calls herself that - and mentions that she's lived in France for the last several years) implores Americans  to come to Paris.    We will go again, probably.  Though not soon..  And when we do, almost certainly not with Air France.

We're probably not going to go. (Though we might.  Don't you love the precision?)  Fortunately, we should be able to get our money back -- though how long it will take, who knows.  I don't feel badly for Air France and SNCF, but I do feel badly for the small businesses that aren't going to have our money.  I don't think that we will be the difference between success and failure for them.  But if enough tourists think as we do?  Then maybe, yeah. 
===========

Fun fact:  due to the United States' antiquated rail and airline system, it takes as long to get from Pennsylvania to Montreal as it does to get from Washington DC to Paris. 

Overseas

The sister of my daughter's boyfriend just returned from an overseas study program.  She said that several times people came up to her and said a variant of this:

"I don't speak English very well.  Please do not vote for Trump."

Image

I know its simplistic, but this image pleases me.

http://www.slate.fr/story/119653/fbi-musulmans-menaces-terroristes

Film reviews

From an article about best foreign films of 2016:

Catherine Breillat is among the most ferocious chroniclers of female sexuality in all its variations, as she shows in practically all her titles up to her most recent, 2014’s Isabelle Huppert-starrer “Abuse Of Weakness.” But this tough watch, with its graphic teen sex, themes of sisterly envy (between the overweight Anaïs and her beautiful, desirable sister Elena) and shocking denouement involving murder and rape, is the marker for how uncompromising, ironic and complex her vision can be.

I don't agree that a movie which requires murder and rape to make its point is 'uncompromising' and 'ironic'.  I think it's evil and horrible.  Artistic license is not a licence to do whatever the hell your 'vision' tells you to do. Sanity and morality exist to put a brake on those base impulses.   Or as Katharine Hepburn's character says in The African Queen:

Nature is what we are put on earth to overcome.

C'est vrai

Wallets

Apparently, if you are going to wear a travel , aka anti-theft, wallet, its much much better to be skinny.

Tech

I am a technically minded person, though I don't consider myself a geek.  My wife is a technically minded person.  Both of us are comfortable with technology, though perhaps not as comfortable as someone twenty years younger. We wanted to buy a new tablet, and we were both surprised.

For our trip, and for general use in the US, we wanted a lightweight laptop or tablet that had the ability to connect to the internet via either WiFi or a cellular network, so that you could connect to the internet while stationary (at home, in a coffee shop) or while moving.  The Wifi part is standard, but the cellular connectivity is a bit unusual.

(Cellular capability appears to have multiple names, including 'cellular ready', 'LTE', and xG, like 3G and 4G.It appears that 3G and 4G are shorthand for 'third generation' and 'fourth generation' mobile technology.  Each 'generation'  introduces new capabilities while incorporating the capabilities that already exist.  'LTE' stands for 'Long Term Evolution', which seems to be a way of saying 'better than 3G, not quite as good as 4G, though we hope to get there soon." So 4G LTE isn't really 4G.... but it's close.)

We have cellular service with Verizon, so we  checked with a local Verizon rep to see if they sold the Surface 3, but were told that they did not. "AT&T and T-Mobile do", he said.  I asked if this had anything to do with the fact that Verizon is a CDMA network, while AT&T were GSM, and he agreed.   "If you get one", he said, "make sure that the box has the Verizon symbol, meaning that it is compatible with our network, and also that it has a phrase like 'cellular ready' "  As it turned out, this was correct but not complete.  As a precaution, I did a chat with a Microsoft rep, who confirmed.  Microsoft Surface 3 - none of the other Surface models - had cellular capability. 

Verizon didn't have it, and AT&T would want a new contract to sell the service.  At this point, I said well, the hell with this, I'm ordering it from Amazon. And two days later, a thin box showed up with a plain white box inside that had the Microsoft Surface logo and very little else.  Remembering what the Verizon guy had said, we checked the box before opening it (and I was hot to do that!).  No Verizon logo.  In fact, nothing about cellular connectivity capability at all.  This was a Surface 3 without the ability to connect to a cellular network.What?

I went back to a transcript of my conversation with the Microsoft rep.  Yep, that was what they said.  Surface has got it.  But the box didn't show it. WTF?  So my wife looked at a Microsoft site. Yes, the site said, the Surface 3 has cellular connectivity -- to AT&T, T-Mobile, and some other networks. Not Verizon.

At this point, we came to a realization. The Microsoft site did not say that every Surface 3 had cellular capability.  It said that cellular capability was available with the Surface 3.  In other words, if you don't ask for it, you don't get it.  You don't order 'Surface 3', you order 'Surface 3 with LTE'.  Otherwise, you get what we got.

And we realized something else. A Surface 3 which included cellular capability that worked in the United States would have to have connectivity to either CDMA or GSM networks, which are the only two kinds available here. Well, mainly. (CDMA stands for Code Division Multiple Access; GSM stands for Global System for Mobiles.  They are incompatible.  A phone, or a laptop cellular connection, that works with one will not work with the other. ) If the Surface box did have the Verizon symbol, indicating compatibility to a CDMA network, it would not have worked with GSM networks (which is what France has;  no CDMA networks there); if it had compatibility with a GSM network, it would have worked there, but not with Verizon here (though it would work with an AT&T or T-Mobile network). 

So we said screw it.  We mailed it all back to Amazon.  And we cursed the network weenies who can't merge the two network protocols. 

Boy, that was fun.

Libraries

I donate money regularly to my local library, but when I realize how often I ask them to get books for me that I've seen at the local MegaBooks, and they do it, without a charge to me of any kind, I think "I should give more."

Getting Personal with the Tech

Trying to find information about phone service connectivity to a small tablet that we have.  Found this on the Verizon web site:

Verizon's Products & Apps allows you to embrace your device and your Verizon account.

Wow.  Embrace the device.  Excuse me, me and the tablet are having a moment here, could you give us some privacy? 

Post Secret

I found this one today.  I don't actually have a mental image of God -- not even sure if there IS that entity -- but I have to say that you could do a lot worse.  She looks smart, caring, and no-nonsense.

-Ade

Trying a recipe that it says makes a better lemonade or limeade. Basically, you squeeze the juice out, then chop the half rinds into quarters or eights.  Weigh them, then mix them in a bowl with half their weight in sugar. Let it sit for a couple of hours, then mix with the juice and some water (according to taste).

We'll see tomorrow.

Of course, what I really want is some authentic limonade in France.  Right now, its about a 70% chance that we'll go at the end of the month.  The floods are receding, but the big strikes - in particular, Air France and SNCF - have no end-dates. 

I'd like to say that getting stuck in Paris would not be so bad, but at Parisian hotel rates -- um, yeah, it totally would. Looking at this site a lot.

http://www.cestlagreve.fr/calendrier/

Friends

Learned tonight that a friend has a kind-of new boyfriend.  Kind-of because he feels it more strongly than her, and because she'll be leaving the area in two months, which would make it hard for him to keep in touch.

I was glad for her, and sorry about the keeping-in-touch part, until she mentioned that he's a Muslim.

And now I'm a little scared for her. Glad about the idea of a relationship -- she's had a tough time -- but -- scared.

Travel

This is a very perplexing time for me.

The plans - for which we have reservations, tickets, all of that -- are that we go to Paris at the end of June, spending three weeks visiting people whom I know in several cities, and coming home after a quick visit to the family who sent us their daughter, years ago.

Now I read about -
- strikes, affecting various portions of the country and/or its infrastructure, including the availability of fuel, inter-city train service, and possibly air travel.

- ferocious weather, such that the Seine is actually flowing over its embankments

- the possibility of terrorist attacks during the Euro soccer tournaments in June, and the Tour de France in July.

The US State Department has issued a warning for Americans to be very careful in crowded areas, and to be aware of the possibility of danger at or near the locations of sporting events.

We're supposed to be in Paris for five days, then either staying with friends or at a hotel in a quiet section of the country.  I don't feel any particular danger.  Yet the confluence of all of these has preyed on my mind, and made me uneasy. I don't want to find that inter-city rail has suspended service from one location to another (but you can take a bus, probably), or that our rental car needs gas (which you can probably find -- you can speak French, right?), or that the air traffic controllers are on strike.  Or the pilots -- they've been talking about that, too.

Maybe this isn't a good time to go?

Sanders

I like Sanders.  I voted for him in the primary.  I hoped he would beat Clinton.

He didn't.

Now he comes across as a whiny little kid who is trying to delay his bed time just five more minutes.

Give it up, Bernie.   Just give it up.  Even if you did somehow manage to pull this out of the fire, through manipulation of delegates rules, you're not going to get Clinton supporters, because they'd feel robbed.  By you.  And they'd be right.

Just give it up.

Airborne Robbery

How is it that an airline can charge you for a flight that you have not yet taken, then charge you a massive fee to cancel said flight?

Worrying

I tend to worry about elections.  Major elections.  It seems like the older I get, the more I worry.  I'm not sure if that's a function of age or the quality of the contestants, or both.

Six months ago, that Trump was even in the running was laughable.  Now, suddenly, he's their nominee.

Six months ago, that Clinton could not easily beat any of the opposition was unthinkable.  Now, suddenly, she's looking weak and indecisive.

That Trump is a lying braggart is obvious.  That a rally of bikers is not a good measure of worth is obvious.  Yet, he spoke to the Rolling Thunder congregation, and they loved him.

That Clinton lies, has lied, and continues to lie is obvious.  That her history shows her to be better qualified by far than Trump should outweigh that.  And yet, it doesn't sound that way at the moment.

I worried about McCain, only to hear his campaign manager say, after he lost, that the manager had known for months that McCain didn't have a chance.

I worried about Romney, especially after that first debate, only to see him, with all of his polish and money, go down in flames in the second and third, not to mention the election.

I want desperately to believe that people will see how shallow, vindictive, and wrong Trump would be.  And yet -- we did elect George Bush.  Twice.

So I worry. .

Weaselicious

"Trump Now Says Debate With Sanders Would Be 'Inappropriate'" 

And if there's anyone who knows inappropriate, it'd be the Master of Lies and Denier of Inconvenient Reality, right?

? Song ?

I really, really, really don't get rap.  Really.  I would rather listen to a garbage truch being loaded, crashing metal, high-pitched beeping, and all.  I really don't understand why people like it.  Which astonishes my daughter.

Observations

A coworker from when I was at EDS, who was about five years younger than me, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in January, and died this week.

My sister in law, who does all the right things, found herself abruptly weak and feverish, and with periods of either double vision or vision in just one eye, before they found a lesion on her spinal cord that could be part of the problem.  She's four years younger than me.

Live now.  Exult now.  Tomorrow, you may be too weak, or too dead.

Novel

Death in Brittany, by Jean-Luc Bannalec.

Okay, I read it in English,  not French.  It's *stll* a good read.

Hostage

Okay, benevolent hostage, but still.  When a doctor says they won't renew a prescription for a drug that I need (though, maybe that overstates it a bit) until I go have a little visit with her -- you know, just to touch base -- that's the word that comes to mind.

I'll go.  I have to go. But I'll resent it. 

I hate pushy doctors, I truly do.

NZ

I See No Problem Here

Spend HOW long?

ToR

Finally getting around to reading Team of Rivals.  Forgot how good the writing is.

Thinking about getting a Microsoft Surface 3.  Really don't want to -- I like the Lenovo laptop -- but the damn thing has a faulty switch that causes it to shut down if you touch it the wrong way when its running on battery. (Plugged in, its fine.)  And, you know, we'll need a laptop for the trip. Harrumph.

Three days till my daughter's graduation from college. 

Une Semaine

It's a little hard for me to realize that in less than a week, my daughter will graduate from college.

Though she has already mentioned the idea of graduate school, what keeps resonating in my brain is Do you know how many times I could go to France with the amount of  money that I've paid twice a year for tuition?  Heck, I could go to AUSTRALIA!!!

Not that I would.  Immediately, anyway.  But after Italy, next summer?  Hmmm.....

Royality

Not a big fan of The Royals, per se, but this is such a cool picture....

Support

Is it weasel-like of me to say that I will support Hillary, and will donate to her campaign, but wish there was a way to do it without getting my name on ten thousand mailing lists?  Not the least because I really wish Bernie had won?

Ah, Bernie, we barely knew you.....

Here, Taste This

From Saveur Magazine:

"Imagine a cult pét-nat crossed with a Belgian gueuze or any other on-trend sour beer, yet with a distinct, low-alcohol personality all its own. "

I have no idea what most of those words mean. 

Spotify is MUSIC?

PCs are never fast enough.  Well, in the first two hours after you start one for the very first time, yeah.  But after about six months of updates, no.  I had read once that Apple had (has?) a habit of deliberately slowing down its PCs just before a new operating system was released, so that the new system would feel faster.  I think Windows has known that trick for years.

And when you go to use someone elses PC, you find that they are configured inexplicably  -- All I want is WORD, dammit, where is it? - and they have weird applications with non-intuitive names. Spotify is MUSIC????

Humor?

Liatening to the jokes told by Obama and Wilmore at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, I have to conclude that my sense of humor is either atrophied or attuned to something completely different.  Obama seemed tired, and Wilmore - whom I gather is a professional - seemed to be relying on the idea that he's a professional funny man, hence what he says must be funny.

I'd rather listen to Obama talk about ecomomics, or politics.  This was just sad. 

Happiness....

This is the first sentence of this excellent presentation.

"J’ai appris une nouvelle incroyable il y a peu de temps."

Took me 5 tries to be able to hear and understand that sentence.  Once again, the conclusion occurs to me: with French, I cannot try to hear and understand individual words. They have to exist just as suggestions as they flicker by. If they don't make sense immediately, move on. Quickly.

I am SO grateful that TED talks tend to have English transcripts and subtitles, because this  presentation is really worth hearing.

Tivo

Tivo just got bought by a company called Rovi which, among other things, says that they can increase the value of your audience, and better position your advertising.

Look forward to non-skippable ads and possibly notices that Sorry, but your old Tivo won't work with this service any more.

At which point, I guess we'll look back at Netflix.  Or Hulu.  Or, you know, books.

Uncanny Valley

A depressing look at what its like to be in your 20s, surrounded by wealthy, successful people - and you're not.

NPLUSONE Magazine

Headlines

While jumping from site to site, I came across this headline on Alternet:

Gutless Democrats Fear Fights: Why Triangulating 

Neoliberal Clintonites Back Big Business Over People

when it suddenly occurred to me:  sites which use characterizations such as "Gutless Democrats" and "Neoliberal Clintonites" to describe people or groups deal in hieroglyphics - in images, not nuance.  It suggests that they've given up thinking; 'My mind is made up, and that's that'. 

There are treehouses, and then there are ....

mapped

Garmin has decent GPS maps but their download process feels like it was designed in the Soviet Union, circa 1950....

Books

In the grand scheme of things, its not that big a deal when someone writes a book, you like it, and then they write a sequel which -- well, sucks, more or less.  Like Oh, crap, I have to write another one? Um, let's see, what did the first one have, lets do more of that, only like MORE, lots more.  And maybe no one will notice how thin the plot is.

Then again, perhaps it just happened.  Certainly, for the first, things went reasonably well for about 75% of the book, and then the lead character, who always had these semi-magical gifts, now had MORE of them, and was stronger, faster, smarter....  so maybe it was just hey, thats the trend.  And if I write a third book, the character will be able to fly, and to bend steel in her bare hands.

Whatever.  It's depressing.  Because I liked that first one.

Observation

I don't like that many people.  I don't dislike people, its just that there are not all that many people about whom I care, whom, if something goes wrong for them, I will want to help, on the high end of the scale, or at least be willing to help without misgivings, at the low end.

As it happens, most of the people about whom I feel that way are French.  One is Canadian.  And two are American.  You can probably guess who those two are.

I am surprised that the people I like tend to be people I've met through Conversation Exchange.  That's not meant to imply that all of the connections there are without fault; I've met people there with whom there's been no emotional connection, no I like these people feeling.  But for several of them, right now -- one living in Lille, three living in Paris, one living in Toulouse,  one in Aix-en-Provence, one in Nice, one in Villelaure , and one in Lyon, plus one in Montreal -- I really like them.

Which is unusual for me.

Observation

I'm male, and I'm retired, and I'm old enough to be getting Social Security payments, not to mention being alarmed when I see the occasional article about pension funds that are cutting payments because, you know, their math sucked, go figure.

In other words, I get it that I'm not young enough to get away with snarky comments about old guys.

But, hey?  When I went to the grocery store this morning, and the aisles were just filled with slow moving guys peering at shelves as if they'd never been in a store before, or stopping right at an intersection so as to have a leisurely conversation with a friend, or just moving really, really, slowly....  apparently, I'm still of an age when I can mutter God's sake, dude, get out of my way.  Softly, but intently.

I know, my time is coming.  Probably sooner than I think.

Like Hillary?

Language

This evening I found out that when I have been saying that I have some difficulty in understanding French when spoken quickly, or in a noisy environmennt, or by multiple people simultaneously -- I was understating the level of difficulty.. 

Dramatically understating it.



So much so, the thought why even try has lodged itself in my head.

TARDIS

I posted this before, about 3 years ago, but I just came across it again, and I liked it.  What a surprise.  So....

No, Really

I love when people who write articles extolling a vacation spot include a phrase like this:

Although I enjoyed a media rate during my most recent visit to the [insert name of fabulous destination here], my opinions are my own.

Oh, really?

What He Said

Bernie

People like to say they're "taking our country back". They never say from whom, or from where.  And they frequently seem angry.

People who support Bernie usually aren't angry.  And they aren't trying to take the country back.

They're trying to take the country forward.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is an okay email application, but their method of saving and restoring profile data --- ie, emails, address book , settings -- stuff that you could not possibly want to save securely -- is the absolute pits.

And you can't automated, either.  Oh, I'm sure you could write a script to do it, or even buy one, but the product itself?  Heh. Suck it up. Their theory seems to be If it was hard to code the product, it should be hard to use the product. 

Not that they're alone in that opinion. 

Looking for Slack

Here's the thing.  I think that most -- off the cuff, lets say 70% - of new technology is crap.  I'm talking about personal technology.  Who cares if the new iPhone is .00017 millimeters thinner?  Who cares if it can give GPS directions and offer short cuts based on an average of the last twenty-seven people who went down this particular road?

But some of it, I hear about, and I think Really?  Thats a ... a thing?

I heard the other day about an application (I'm sorry, I just hate the word app) called Slack, which apparently can be used in multiple marvelous ways, some of which are actually useful, like doing a job search.  According to the gasping-for-air-they're-so-excited article in Fast Company (which I like but don't normally read unless I'm over at the college in their library cafe, having a not - bad - and - decently- priced mocha coffee), Slack is a wonderful little communications tool that people use to know whats up in their field, and to link their own abilities and desires with the jobs that are available (and I gather available is a nebulous concept).   I must admit, I was impressed by what I read.

So I sent a note to four French early-twenties people I know, none of whom are tech wizards, asking if they use anything like that to become aware of jobs.  One said no, I wrote to the hotel and asked if I could work there, and I had an interview and they hired me.  One said I went to the offices of this company and asked what they had available and said I would do anything they needed, just to get my foot in the door.  One said I really don't know, I just kind of lucked into this job.  And the fourth didn't reply.

So what I think is:  things like Slack (and its equally clearly named brethren, all of which will be joyously proclaimed this year and derided as old, fat, and slow next year (or perhaps later this year) are useful.  But only for a subset of people.  And those people look remarkably like the character profile of the people who build such things.

Where's the Slack for the masses, to make their lives better?  People who don't want to be cutting edge, but do want solid, sustainable value in the software they buy?  The people who buy a car and keep it for seven, eight, nine years, or more?  Who buy shirts from Lands End, but keep them for years?  Where's their Slack?

Wondering

Haven't heard from my friend in Paris in about a week. Didn't think she was going anywhere, and if she does, even a short trip to another part of France, she usually tells me.  So I'm wondering.... and not liking the direction of my thoughts.

==========

My friend's okay. 

Mycroft and Kareem

It would never have occurred to me that Kareen Abdul-Jabbar could write.  No reason not to think so, just -- never occurred to me. Until I picked up a copy of Mycroft Holmes, by Abdul-Jabbar, with a co-writer / dialogue coach of Anna Waterhouse.

Even then, I would have thought well, this will be trivial reading.  And certainly, it's not your standard Holmes novel.  For one thing, Mycroft is young, athletic, and resident at Cambridge College.  Foe another, other than a passing reference, Sherlock has not made an appearance - but he is not missed. Three chapters into it, and I'm still asking And then what happened?

This book is good.

Seating and Dreams

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking of two things: Ayant and chairs.

AYANT is the present participle for the French verb AVOIR, or TO HAVE.  It means HAVING.  I have no idea why I was thinking of that, or why it was driving me crazy that I could not remember.  I looked it up as soon as I awoke, today, and now I've got it. HAVING. 

The other thing had to do with an experience when I was a junior manager.

One day my boss told me that he had ordered new chairs for my group.  He said that I would be notified when they arrived.  In due course, I got the message, and trundled down to the shipping department.  Chairs? they said.  We don't have any chairs for you.  We did get some chairs, but they were for Ed.

Ed was another manager, been one for years.  This is the kind of manager he was: the data center would bill him (and everyone else) once a month for the storage that they were using on that day.  They'd assume that the usage didn't vary too much during the month, which was right.

On tthe day before that day, Ed would back up all of his storage to tape (which was much cheaper).  The next day, he'd restore it all to disk. This meant that he paid the data center much less than he should have.  It was legal.  Unethical, but legal.  And since Ed had been a manager for years, everyone  knew him. Oh, that's just Ed, they would say. They'd laugh about it.  So would he. He laughed a lot, as I recall.

So I went to Ed and said Hey, I understand that you may have my new chairs.  He didn't even look up. Go talk to your boss, he said. So I did. My boss was a friend of Ed's.  And what he basically said was Oh, that's just Ed.  Too bad.  We'll order some more. 

My group never did get the new chairs.  I considered going to Ed's area one night and stealing them, but this was at a time when I took the principles of ethical behavior seriously.  Ethical people don't steal.  This, despite the fact that I'd just gotten an object lesson in how deeply people in management believed in ethics.

For some reason, Trump reminds me of Ed.

Still don't understand where AYANT figures into it, though. 

 

Reading

Okay, here is an indicator of how weird I am.

I bought a book from the remainders table at a bookstore in Illinois (I think, smiling, of that bookstore, from time to time; my bank account is lucky that it isn't closer).  The title was 52 Loaves (still is, in fact); the story of a man who had a simple desire: to bake a perfect loaf of bread.

I haven't been reading consistantly, but this morning I dipped back into it, at a section where he talks about planning to visit a French abbey where he will have some quiet time, and be able to bake bread the way they used to do it, and, by the way, teach one of the brothers how to bake, too.  Oh, and speak French, all of the time.

And I sighed.

Doing Languages

This summer, if all goes well, we are going back to France.   We will stay in three private homes and two hotels,  we will take the TGV three times, and we will rent and return a car.  Each of those events will to a certain extent involve talking in French to French people.  I'm terrified.

Its not that I don't think I can do it.  Its that I don't think that I can do it easily, effectively, without sounding like someone who just got out of French 101.  I remember when I was checking into a hotel, the last time, and I was speaking in French with the desk clerk.  It was going well until she rattled something off that I did not understand.  I said Sorry, I do not understand in French, and she replied in English Oh, you're fine with French until I talk about payment, huh?

I hate looking stupid. 

Elections

I just saw an article wherein a writer said that the best candidate that the Democrats could offer is the one who's currently in the White House, because his ratings are up, and how it's stupid to kick someone out just due to an arbitrary time limit.

To me, the stupid thing is to let someone continue to run as long as they have breath, and a machine that makes it easier for them to run than for a contender.  Even worse, to let them stay in office forever, without review or evaluation.

I do like Obama, and I would like to keep him in power, but saying yes to that would have meant saying yes to keeping Bush -- so no.  I'll take my chances.

Hoping for Bernie, resigned to Clinton, afraid of Cruz, and terrified by Trump.

Observation

I'd like Rubio to get the Republican nomination.  I doubt he will.  The radicals won't like him, and they have the keys to the Republicans' car. 

Of the remaining two, I'd prefer Trump, because if Cruz gets the nomination, he could fire up the conservatives enough to actually win.  At which point, liberals and conservatives alike, we're all screwed.

I still prefer Sanders, though, of all of them.

Stupidity

" We Can't Be the Stupid Country Anymore. " -  Trump

Well, voting for him would certainly secure that distinction for us.  

Not that he's entirely wrong -- we can't assume that the world is going to do the right thing -- if it did, Sanders would be in a much stronger position, and Trump would be hawking newspapers on a streetcorner.   We have to see the world clearly, as it is, not as we want it to be.  We have to push forward, against a lot of obstacles.  We won't always win.  But we can make progress.  

Having him even running is as strong a vote for stupidity,  and against progress, as I can think of,  at the moment.  But we like stupidity, right? Keeps us docile.

Politics

I am once again scared for my country.  The demagogue Trump is doing so well in the political primaries, I find myself wondering if this is what it was like at the early rallies for the Nazis.  I really do.  He is a bigot and a racist, but he is also wily and smart (despite having some very stupid opinions and having said some very stupid things; astonishingly, people feel that this makes him trustworthy - he "says exactly what he thinks"), and he is good at playing negotiation games.  He actually said that he could kill someone on a crowded street and it would not affect his standing with his supporters.  Now tell me that that isn't something that Hitler could have said.

And even if Trump does not get the nomination (which he seems very likely to do), the other two contenders on that side are bad -- well, one of them, Ted Cruz, is; he's superbright and he wants to drag the US back to the 1950s, when it was a 'Christian nation' and where, by god (figuratively and literally), foreigners knew to be afraid of us. The other, Marco Rubio, isn't as bad, but in this environment, that means that he isn't doing as well, either.


Society doesn't seem to reward being reasonable any more.

Cosmetics

My daughter has a lot of cosmetics.

She's in the Corps of Cadets at her college, so she's limited in what she is allowed to wear, and when she can do as she wishes, she doesn't wear a lot.  When she was a teen, and I would see other teen age girls, I admired that about her.  They sometimes looked like clowns in training, whereas I frequently could not tell that she had any on, even when I knew that she did.

She called today and asked if I could mail her a specific item,  and I said sure.

It was not in the stack of cosmetics on her bureau.
It was not in the stack of cosmetics in her bathroom.
It was not in the stack of cosmetics next to the TV.
It was not in the stack of cosmetics next to the fireplace.
It was not in the stack of cosmetics on the coffee table.

To be fair, only one of those is a massive stack.  Some are just five or six things.  Still, she seemed surprised that I could not find the lip crayon.  Excuse me, the Revlon Color Stay Just Bitten Balm Stain.  So I bought her one and mailed it to her, along with something else that she'd asked for. Based on the price that I paid,  I now know why Charles Revson was wealthy.

Next time, I'm mailing her an actual crayon.  What the heck, the 64 pack, with the sharpener. 

Evaluation

Basically, I think that any current Democratic presidential candidate is better than any current Republican presidential candidate.  I can't imagine either of them having flaws as heinous as those of the Republican candidates.

And yet, and yet....  there are people willing and eager to vote for the Republicans.

Custom

I had no idea that there were actual companies -- small but viable -- who sell PCs which are guaranteed not to have bloatware on them.  A search for "windows 10 no crapware" showed me that I was wrong.  The selection isn't as good, but man, the idea of getting just the tools, none of the ads?  Thats worth a lot.  (As I found when I had to reinstall Windows and discovered to my surprise how much software with the name Lenovo went away....)

Observation

We're willing to do things to help others - send money to migrant relief foundations, for example -- but not a lot, and not often.  The pool of our compassion can be deep, but it refills slowly.

But when helping affects us -- when it is possible that one of a hundred refugees clamoring for entry into our country is in fact a terrorist who might hurt us -- then the immediate question is our safety.  Those others -- well, they were poor and likely to die anyway. And even if we're pretty sure that they are as they seem, our resources get drained quickly.  And somehow that country's problem, which we can easily live with, becomes our country's problem.  Thats not something we can handle.  We feel aggrieved.

Its been a long time since we offered to house those yearning to breathe free.  Somehow, its a lot more dangerous these days.

Performance

Last night, I dreamed about computer performance.

For part of the time that I worked at one company, I was in their 'performance' group.  I was supposed to make the computer run as quickly as possible.  The faster the computer ran, the more work that it did per minute, which meant they were able to charge the customer more per minute, which meant more profit to the company.

I never really felt that I was good at it.  I understood the general idea, but somehow I never was able to translate the idea into practical terms. 

For example, I knew that when you press enter on your keyboard (to do something at an ATM, say, or to make a move in a computer game, or to write an email), the computer had to start a program which would do what you wanted.  Doing what you wanted at the ATM might mean telling the bank to transfer money from one account to another, or making a move in a computer game might mean taking the character on the screen and moving it two inches, or writing an email might mean taking the text that you had written and sending it to someone else.   Each of those actions would have smaller steps that had to happen - for example, telling the bank to transfer money from one account to another would mean confirming your identity, then reading a file to find out what your bank account information was, then determining if you had enough money so that it could be transferred, and so on.  Each of those steps breaks down further.  The fewer of those steps that you can do, and the faster that you can do the ones that you need to do, the faster the computer can do work - it ran faster.

I dreamt that I was still working at that company, and someone asked me to set it up so that he could keep track of how often a specific problem occurred.  I knew we used a specific form for that.  I looked for the form, but we had no more.  A coworker told me that I would have to print more, but when I went to print them, the printer had controls that I did not understand, so that after four hours, I had wasted a lot of paper and still did not have what that guy needed.  About that time, he saw me and asked what I was doing.  When I told him, he expressed astonishment, saying, but I didn't want the paper form?  Why would I want that? Its just a waste of paper.  And in thirty seconds he told the computer to start keeping track of what he wanted to know, and to alert him when it became a problem.  Done.

I was stunned.  I have to remember this, I thought. Someone else might want to be able to do that.  And then ten minutes later, I tried to remember what he had done....  and I could not.

I'm a smart guy, but I don't think that I was an effectual guy. And up to today, the difference never occurred to me. 

At least, I don't think so.

Positions

I got a request from a French girl I know -- not a conversation partner, but a friend -- to see if I could help her get the word out that she's looking for a job.  Things continue to be tough in France -- the most recent unemployent rate is about 10.6 percent -- and she's been looking for at least a year. 

Of course I said I would -- I sent notes to four or five French people I know, none of whom work in her desired field (import/export), but all of whom said sure, they'd look at her resume, and if it rang any bells, or if they knew of anyone who'd be interested, they'd pass it on.

It reminded me of a comment that my daughter made to me not too long ago, asking why there wasn't a national database of available jobs, or at least a way of evaluating your skills and desires against jobs that were currently filled.  It seems like everyone has some kind of evaluation criteria, and everyone has suggestions, but when it comes right down to it -- the only consistent comment is network.  Get the resume out there.  Spread it all over the place.

If you happen to know of anyone who needs an eager 22 year old who's fluent in French, competent in English, speaks a little Mandarin, and has been an intern in China..... drop me a line.

Thanks.

Email

Complained to Verizon about erratic email performance.  They assured me that it would improve very soon.

Yes, its because of email upgradation only and it will be there for 3 to 4 days more as whole email client user intersection is changing to make it much more easier for our customers

It is our responsibility to serve Verizon's esteemed customers like you in the best possible way. 

Upgradation, huh?  Intersection? Why don't I believe them?

Creaky

When I worked for IBM, they gave me a Lenovo laptop.  My impression was that it was a tough, solid piece of hardware.  I liked it, to the point where, having need of a new home laptop, years later, I bought one.  This was after IBM no longer made them, having sold the brand to a Chinese company.  This laptop still had the cute little almost-useless track-pointer set down between the G, H, and B keys; still had the bold THINKPAD logo.  I liked it.

This may be news, but laptops tend to get moved around.  And since they don't come with handles, they tend to get grabbed by the edge. 

It turns out that there is a microswitch inside the Thinkpad -- specifically, the Yoga 14 Thinkpad -- along the front edge, that is intended to warn the PC if it is under abnornal stress - the kind that can cause a head crash on the drive.  If the microswitch gets depressed, it will immediately cut power to the spinning hard drive, protecting it.  As a side note, it shuts down the PC, too.

My Thinkpad creaks and flexes.  And every so often, I squeeze it at just the right spot....

Money

The other day, my daughter informed me that she was doing some serious budgeting for her upcoming trip to Florida (Disney cruise), and the long and short of it was that she needed funds.  She said I don't want to sound like the classic kid who says Oh, I'll just ask my parents for the money.  I assured her that she was not, and that I thought she had a good grasp of financial essentials.

As if to nail that one down, she called today and said Hey, I got this call, they said it was someone's fraud analysis department, and they wanted to know about this charge on your credit card for a hotel in Florida?  Well, as it happens, she does have access to my card, but she had not ordered anything -- so I called the credit card people and said hey, this isn''t valid, we object....and while I was talking, I noticed another charge on the card, for food from Jimmy Johns! So we objected to that, too.  I made sure to tell my daughter that she'd done exactly the right thing in her reaction to that call.

Odd, though.  I have one of the new credit cards -- the ones with a chip, but without a PIN?  Who would have guessed that the lack of a PIN might mean that someone could still hijack the card?  Clearly, not the people who issued my card!

(Though I do wonder -- how do you keep a card secure if its being used online? )

Backup

I'm in the last stages of restoring my PC after it died (specifically, went into a 'reboot loop'.  I am sure that Microsoft does some amazing things, making them look easy, but 'system restores' don't appear to be in that category.)  I do regular backups, and yet I still find that there were things I did not have -- for example, a current set of email addresses for my friends.  Not to mention, emails I sent, emails I saved.  Totally gone.

Software guys like to stash stuff in obscure places.  Their favorite is the APPDATA folder (which is, by the way, a hidden system folder; you have to say SHOW before you can see it and its contents), but there are others.  The data file for a database I use to keep track of stray info (Personal Knowbase; its really quite good) likes to put its file in one place but then stick a 'fake' file somewhere else, so that when you go to copy it -- there's nothing there!  And Calendarscope, my PC calender (also highly recommended); you can tell it to back up routinely, and it will - at the end of the day. But suppose you make a change at 2PM and you crash at 3PM - is that change saved anywhere?  Don't be silly.

Argh.  I would ask that software designers include backup and restore functions (other than the simple ones that many do have), but that'd get into the well, where shall we hide it, what shall we call it, hmm, do we really want to users to be able to get to it discussion.

And don't get me started on Window's 10s System File function, which LOOKS awesome and WORKS .... almost not at all. 

So, for anyone who is interested, here is my current list of backup actions I have to take routinely.  You will notice that some are incomplete -- I know I have to do them; I just don't.  At least, I am not sure.  Its all confusing, and thinking about it hurts my head.


Any software with a key goes into KNOWBASE/Software Licence Keys
Any friends email address goes into OUR EXCEL FILES / ADDRDB spreadsheet
Firefox bookmarks go into BILLS FILES/FIREFOX BOOKMARKS
Firefox Passwords go into BILLS FILES/FIREFOX PASSWORDS
BILLS FILES gets copied as part of overall data grab 
Thunderbird emails, folders, email addresses, profiles, message classification  rules go to ??????????
Calendarscope ACTIVE file is in BILL FILES/CALENDARSCOPE DATA FILE
CALENDARSCOPE BACKUPS go to CALENDARSCOPE CLOUD
KNOWBASE DATA FILE GOES TO BILL FILES/KNOWBASE DATA FILES AND BACKUP
OUR EXCEL FILES  GOES TO...???????
EXCEL MACROS REPOSITORY GOES TO ???
WORD MACROS REPOSITORY GOES TO ????

Oh, and my Network Attached Storage device?  The My Cloud?  Its really quite nice, but every so often....Windows says NAS?  What NAS? NETWORK PATH NOT FOUND.  A few minutes later oh, there it is!

This is why French flummoxes me

This is a headline from the French version of Slate:

La démocratie américaine a encore beaucoup à nous apprendre

Translated directly, it is
The democracy american has still a lot to us to teach.

Or as we would say
American democracy still has a lot to teach us.

Took me five minutes to translate that one bitty sentence.....

And so....

Hillary will say I won.  And she did.

Bernie will say Close enough! And it was.  But not a win.

Cruz will say See, they all love me.  But they don't.  Yet.

And Trump will say It doesn't matter, I'm going on.  And he will.  And on, and on.



Ain't politics fun?

Reinstallation

I usually don't mind Windows 10.  But when I say yeah, do a system restore back to before your last critical update,  and Windows replies Oh yeah?  Well eat this -- REBOOT LOOP ERROR, so that I have to completely reinstall Windows (easy to do, since the PC has a Recovery Partition, though why it felt it necessary to throw away parts or all of several applications, I have no idea) -- well, then, I'm not too fond of it.  Good thing I am retired, with lots of spare time.

As it turns out, having to reinstall windows is a (relatively) painless way of updating the applications that you use... and trashing the ones you don't. Still would not recommend it as a fun time activity, though.

And for those people who say that you don't really need a CD copy of the software, because hey, you can just download it, right?  -- just about everything went right back in *except* the one that was acquired via streaming download. I'll probably end up buying it again. (It's Quicken, whose idea of customer service leaves a lot to be desired.) So, yeah. You need the CD.

Conundrum

Do you vote for the candidate whom you honestly like the best and think would be the best for the country, or for the candidate whom you honestly think has the best chance of winning in the general election?

Don't Tell Him

"Don't Tell Me" featuring Bernie Sanders from rodd perry on Vimeo.

Late Night

Lying in bed with the headsets on, listening again to the brief news article in French that's this week's homework.  Thinking There's no insanity in my family, I've got it all...

Pity That It's Only Digital

Speaking, Sure. Understanding? Ummm.....

For the last two weeks, I've been working with a French teacher to improve my ability to understand spoken French, particularly rapidly spoken French.  I can understand, if the other person speaks at a moderate pace, but if they speed up, or use vocabulary with which I'm unfamiliar, my comprehension goes way down.

Several people have told me that they learned to speak English simply by listening to English-language songs, repetitively.  I've found that hard to believe, and impossible to replicate.  I think that they probably do learn the rhythm of their new language,  and possibly some words,  but they don't know what they're saying.

KIRK: Spock, could the humpback's answer to this call be simulated?
SPOCK: The sounds, but not the language. We would be responding in gibberish.
- Star Trek IV

For example, a friend, in an email, used the phrase notre quatre, and though I knew those words ('our four'), it was only because I'd heard a similar phrase on a CD, played while a French friend was with me,  that I learned that notre quatre is a way of referring to all of the people in the speaker's family - in this case, four. Or, if you happen to listen to a song that's in French, and hear the word trois,  you'd reasonably assume that it is spelled as twah, or perhaps trwah, but you wouldn't have a clue that it means three.  You have no reference!

As part of this language work, I've been listening to very short -- perhaps forty seconds to a minute -- Youtube news articles, selected by my instructor, who listens to them and writes a very detailed script of what's been said.  For example, if the speaker hesitates while saying We need to address this problem, saying in fact We need, uh, to speak ab -- to address this problem, that's what my instructor writes.  As a result, I have a fighting shot of understanding when a given sound is just a hesitation or mispronunciation, and when it's actually part of a word. 

(Which reminds me of the joke about the actress who was going to try out for a role on Broadway where she'd be required to speak with a Swedish accent.  Not being happy with her ability to emulate that accent, she hit upon the idea of routinely going to a local cafe where the cook was Swedish.  She'd linger over coffee, just listening to him speak. When the time came for the audition, she performed flawlessly.  At the end, the director said That was really great, you really nailed that accent.  But, tell me -- why'd you do it with a lisp?)

Sometimes my ability to understand French is like that. I kind of get it -- and then I don't.

But I'm working on it. 

Cooking Follies

As a rule of thumb, having your mixer's rubber gasket fall into the chopped chocolate and get blended in is a somewhat discouraging event.

Learning

I am never going to understand rapidly spoken French.  Ja-frickin-mais.  I should just accept it.

Being Blue

If you don't know the word 'blue', what color is her hair? 

Mortality

Found here.

Disappearing Fathers

by Faith Shearin 

Sometime after I turned forty the fathers from my childhood
began disappearing; they had heart attacks
during business dinners or while digging their shovels
into a late April snow. Some fathers began forgetting things:
their phone numbers, which neighborhoods belonged
to them, which houses. They had a shortness of breath,
the world’s air suddenly too thin, as if it came
from some other altitude. They were gone:
the fathers I had seen dissecting cars
in garages, the fathers with suits
and briefcases, the fathers who slipped down
rivers on fishing boats and the ones
who drank television and beer. Most of my friends
still had mothers but the fathers
were endangered, then extinct.
I was surprised, though I had always known
the ladies lasted longer; the fathers fooled me
with their toughness; I had been duped
by their jogging and heavy lifting, misled
by their strength when they slapped
me on the back or shook my hand. I kept imagining
I would see them again: out walking their dogs
on the roads near my childhood house,
lighting cigars on their porches, waving to me
from their canoes while I waited on shore.

Blacked

It's always nice when my daughter comes home, always a bit sad when she leaves.

When she announces prior to departure that the Tivo remote control that she'd carried upstairs seems to be missing,  but she's positive that she didn't pack it with her stuff..... mixed feelings.

Why are the things you are prone to losing always black? Keys, wallet, remote control....

Voting

Unless he makes an incredible faux pas between now and the presidential primary, I think I'm going to vote for Bernie. Its the flip side of my vote not really counting -- why not spend it on someone whom I really like? And I like his attitudes much better than Hillary's -- the more I hear of her past, the more I think that she is lying about significant items. ( Which appears to be a requirement for national political office held for more than, say, six months - you just naturally fall into lying, obfuscation, and *well, you really have to understand* oblique explanations.... I know that the world is not nearly as simple as I would like to think, and there are times when you really do have to take them on faith -- but lately, it seems to happen a LOT. I don't like that. ) 

I know that Bernie is very weak on foreign policy. Further, I know that his election would severely shock lots of businesses, who will take the economic equivilent of those people who stock up on guns, every time there is a shooting -- *well, Sanders MIGHT impose draconican taxes, so we'd better move our businesses to Bolivia NOW rather than in six months!* Still, I prefer his attitudes to those of people who are quite comfortable with private jets and secret handshakes. His first impulses seem to be along the lines of *what's best for the most people?* Businesses have legions of lobbyists and bought-and-paid-for politicians. Maybe we should have Bernie on our side, just to balance the scales.

Voting for a Republican isn't out of the question -- but it has to be an intelligent, insightful, thoughtful person. Yeah.  Good luck with that.

Pithivier

My life is complete -- I now know what a pithivier is.   Even if it is pronounced pee tee vee ay, it looks like it should be pronounced like something that Yosemite Sam would say!

Politics

I was amazed by Paul Ryan's admission that he was wrong to refer to people as 'makers and takers', and that in fact while some people do prefer to live on the dole, most do not.  I still am not fond of him, but his comments raised my opinion of him.

I happened to see his comments shortly before coming across this phrase, here:
"I am not a supporter of the minimum wage. I believe it is better to start at a lower wage and get lots of raises for good performance rather than have everyone start at a higher wage. I do not support the minimum wage because it doesn't help with poverty and instead hurts people that it is supposed to help. I'd rather start at a job where my wage is a bit low but I know I can get raise through hard work and exceptional performance than one where my wage is essentially set in stone no matter how hard I work."

I think the speaker is honest; I also think he's wrong.  To hope for an increased wage based on performance is reasonable; to hope to get to a livable wage based on performance -- and not just performance but exceptional performance -- is wrong, because it means the employer is accepting that people are not being paid enough to live, and that they have to do exceptionally well to get a raise.  Most people don't do exceptionally well -- thats why we call it exceptional -- so most people won't be paid a livable wage.

But even if the 'exceptional' in that quote is just hyperbole, like the people who describe everything they like as outstanding and superb, it's still wrong, because a higher wage does help with poverty.  How can that hurt?  (If a way is found, I'd like to see some CEOs stop hurting themselves, and slash their own salaries.  I won't hold my breath.)

Parties

From a New York Times article about the election:

“The Republican Party has never done anything for the working man like me, even though we’ve voted Republican for years,” said Leo Martin, a 62-year-old machinist from Newport, N.H., who attended Mr. Trump’s Claremont rally. “This election is the first in my life where we can change what it means to be a Republican.”

Do something for the working man?  Perhaps it means that he should be a Democrat...

Observation

Is it weird that I feel sorry for her?

Reaction

Of course the GOP will challenge Obama's leadership (granted, mostly symbolic) in gun control.  They think unfettered gun ownership is more important than keeping your kids alive.

These are the same people who are violently against a government that can give aid in a disaster - until its their state that needs aid.  But they're not entirely hypocritical: they're still willing to vote against aid for other states.

GOP.  Genuinely Outrageous Politicians -- and proud of it.