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2008, DECEMBER |
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December 31 I was going to put up one of those “the year in review” pieces, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be just as well if 2008 slunk off to a quiet corner and died without anyone noticing. So I have consigned my notes to one of my many waste paper baskets. I seem to be accumulating an unusually large number of wastebaskets. Just looking around this one room, I count four of them, and I think Jeanine has taken a fifth to use somewhere else. It’s not that I make that much trash. The thing is, I don’t even buy trash baskets. I buy shredders. It’s a sad commentary, but no home can afford to be without a paper shredder these days. And when the thing croaks, which they all do fairly early on, you throw the machinery away (even if it dies before the warranty is up, paying to ship it to the factory would cost more than a new one) and you are left with yet another waste basket. My last confetti maker gave up the ghost a couple of weeks ago. It was probably a 25¢ switch that failed, but what do I know? With a growing pile of stuff to be shredded, I went to Office Max to pick up a new one yesterday. I thought if I bought their house brand, I could bring it back to the store when it crapped out instead of shipping it back to someplace in Ohio. And indeed, that is what you do. If your new shredder fails before the 14-day warranty expires, just bring it back. 14 days? FOURTEEN DAYS? Sorry, Office Max, but if you don’t think your machine will last longer than 2 weeks, I don’t either, and I think I’ll look elsewhere. I found one on sale at Office Depot (no relation) that promises to last a year. And because I got such a good deal, I spent the 8 bucks for an extra year replacement guarantee. Now, we all know that extended warranties are a scam intended to benefit the warrantor, not the warrantee, but experience (and five waste baskets) tells me it’s a good gamble this time. Office Depot was so pleased to have my business, they even gave me a coupon for $5 off my next purchase. All I have to do is spend more than $25 on anything in the store. Except gift cards. Or TVs, monitors, printers, networking devices, peripherals, cameras, memory, software, postage stamps, HP ink and toner. Or wireless, satellite, or internet technologies, installation, mailing, shipping, or services. Or extended warranties. Oh, yeah: the coupon’s good for the rest of the month.
December 26 Merry
and a Happy New
As the prolonged disintegration of Mervyn’s Department Store finally draws to a merciful close, an explanation of why they failed seems in order. Many will point to the general economic collapse, but Mervyn’s was a discount store and might have benefited, as have Wal-Mart and Target, from higher-end shoppers lowering their expectations. No, it was not the contracting economy that did them in; Mervyn’s did it to themselves. A letter (from the acclaimed collection Notes From A Crank) I wrote to them some years ago should make it clear. November 23, 200x To Whom It May Concern: This morning I went into Mervyn’s to buy a gift for my wife. I found what I wanted immediately and went directly to a cashier. And then, God help me, I Took A Number. I spent the next twenty minutes in pleasant conversation with the woman who took the next number. Eventually, she became frustrated and decided to shop elsewhere, and I had nothing left to do but watch. For another 25 minutes, I watched the three employees who seemed to be responsible for the entire second floor as they rang up purchases, accepted returns, took care of restocking, opened charge accounts, and asked each other which key opened the cabinets. And, of course, went on break. They could not have been unaware of the long line of increasingly irate customers, but they managed to pay us no mind as they proceeded, steadily and ever so slowly, about their duties like dancers moving through molasses. And I watched several customers crumple their numbers and drop them on the floor as they headed for the exit. I don’t know how much you imagine you are saving by cutting back the number of employees, but I doubt it will compensate for the loss of business as customers decide it isn’t worth the aggravation. Rather than writing, I thought I would mention this to you while I was in the store, so I asked for the manager’s office. But when I got there, the line was too long.
December 20 Sir Gerald Fisbee, the National Geographic Society’s top expert on Antarctica, was on a speaking tour of the American southwest, giving lectures--accompanied by some wonderful slides—about penguins, particularly Adelie, Chinstrap, and his personal favorite, the adorable Gentoo. He had finished his talk in Phoenix and was checking out of the hotel to move on to his next engagement in Yuma when he discovered his slides were missing. He was frantically checking everywhere—the closet, under the bed, the bathroom—when his mother called from her home in Bath, England to see how her boy was doing. He was distraught and told her he didn’t have time to chat. “What am I going to do?” he wailed, “I can’t possibly..." *
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(TO THE TUNE OF "GOD REST YE, MERRY...)
"Address Yuma re: gentoo Mum, with nothing to display."
December 17 Looks like it’s time for the one-trick pony we lovingly call the Federal Reserve Board to find another trick or find another gig. They have publicly admitted that cutting interest rates hasn’t worked, so the solution is to do it again. But this round of cuts is like shaking the crumbs out of the bag before you fold it up and put it away: they can’t drop interest rates much below zero. If you consider that they have already donated a substantial chunk of money to the banks, the cost of funds for financial institutions is actually negative. The new trick—sorry, the next move in the meticulously planned and carefully orchestrated financial strategy—is to buy up the banks’ bad debt. The banks, of course, are still charging you 25-30% on your credit card balance. Boy, what a great time to be a bank! Now they can take the money and go buy CDs from other banks. I think I see a solution here. It’s called the National Credit Card. If the economic geniuses in Washington want us to spend more, why screw around with banks at all? Why not issue credit cards to us consumers and charge zero percent on the balance? I’ve never understood how running up more debt can be good for the economy OR the debtor, but if that’s what the Fed wants us to do, it ought to work.
December 14 It’s getting to be the season again, when churches all over the nation put out their nativity dioramas and people come from miles away to steal baby Jesus. It seems a particularly unChristian thing to do, but I don’t think you can blame the Jews. It could be pure vandalism, I suppose, but we never find a bunch of broken or discarded Jesuses, so I can only conclude that people take the figures for their own use. I can’t imagine there is much of a black market for this sort of thing. Stealing the Christ child from a church for your own selfish purposes: now there’s a concept to boggle the mind. If that doesn’t buy you an express ticket to Hell, it must be all but impossible to get in. I heard that some churches are preparing this year by placing a GPS tracking device in the baby’s diaper. This is hardly an original idea--after all, the Magi used the original OnStar to locate Him the first time. Still, that’s not really a solution. It allows you to locate the missing Jesus after the fact, but doesn’t prevent the theft in the first place. I was thinking an electrified creche to deliver a mild shock to anyone who gets too grabby. Or maybe even a serious, fibrillation-inducing jolt; kind of a plug-in Wrath of God. Would that be unChristian?
December 11 Once upon a time, before the enlightenment, science was the despised stepchild of society. And, before the enlightenment, perhaps justifiably so. But one way to tell that Science with a big S has become king is the fact that we call the beginning of the change “the enlightenment.” Another way is that people call whatever they do “science” to lend it respectability, acceptance, or credibility. Like Economics, the “dismal science.” It’s called a science, I guess, because economists use numbers. But in any inquiry, regardless of how rigorous your method, if your initial assumptions are guesswork, your conclusions will be guesswork. Maybe economics should be called the dismal philosophy—or is that term already taken? Medical science has come a long way from leeches, and I suppose much of it is in fact science now. At least medical research uses the scientific method. Or something similar; it’s hard to be completely objective when the source of your funding tells you in advance what your conclusions are. Anyway, medical science marches on: when I went to med school, my professors knew what was what and were good enough to share their knowledge with me. It’s taken 40 years for me to unlearn most of it. Then there is boxing, the Sweet Science. It’s about as scientific as it is sweet. Belongs right up there with Social Science and Political Science. Oh, and the stuff they teach in MBA programs, Management Science. Math isn’t science, either. Schools that can’t support two departments recognize this and lump them together as one department of “Math & Science.” Math is pure reason, and the only requirement of any mathematical system is that it be internally consistent. Personally, I think any field of study that involves concepts like infinity and irrational numbers really belongs in the Philosophy Department. I remember when I discovered calculus, I thought it was magic; they probably teach it at Hogwart’s under a different name. The scientific method involves objective observation, experimentation, and reasoning. So why do you suppose we call it “Creation Science?” I’m not going to argue against God—there are certainly things that are not provable or subject to investigation by the scientific method. But it gets back to my initial thesis: to promote Creationism in today’s society, we call it a science. If it’s science, it must be right. But there are signs that the tide might be turning, that we may have gone as far as we are going down the road of Science. This may be entirely the work of G.W.Bush, or it may be that his success in disregarding, overruling, or misrepresenting his scientific advisors on such matters as, well, everything, has been made possible by the public’s disillusionment. And when the rest of the country finds out that mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps were the invention of mathematicians and physicists hired by Wall Street firms to come up with something nobody could understand, we could see the beginning of The Disillusionment. Maybe that will be the era that comes after the Not-So-Great Depression.
December 8 Online poker: what a concept! I’ve played a few hands now and again, but I’m not a poker player. It’s a game of chance that requires considerable mathematical skills and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to read your opponents. I’m not smart enough to play serious poker, but I am smart enough not to play with people I don’t know. Or with people I can’t even see. Which is why I have a hard time understanding the success of online poker. You turn over your credit card to the “house” and watch your cards come up on the screen. It becomes much more a game of chance when you can’t see the other players sweat and all you can do is try to figure the odds and hope you get the cards. There is, of course, no way to be sure the game you’re playing is not rigged. With a sharp eye, you might be able to spot a guy dealing seconds, if you could see him. But you don’t get to see him. There’s nothing you can do about it anyway, since the companies running the game are out of the country and not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. You could hardly complain to the authorities in any case, because gambling is illegal. You don’t even have recourse to the remedy of the Wild West: your six-shooter doesn’t have an internet connection. It may not help in the hand you’re playing, but over the long haul, if you have information on a very large number of hands and some grasp of statistics, you actually can determine if the game is legit. Somebody did. It isn’t. According to Sixty Minutes, somebody (or somebodies) made off with twenty million dollars after hacking the system so they could see everybody’s hole cards. They are immune from any remedy in law, although CBS did publish one guy’s name and address. He lives in Vegas, where .45 caliber justice still occasionally prevails and cement overshoes remain a style choice, but where cheating at poker is regarded as less abhorrent (and less dangerous) than jaywalking across The Strip. We’ll see. But hey, speaking of turning over your credit card, every time you pull it out (your card, I mean) in a restaurant, you put yourself at risk. Computers are much safer; they are very secure and getting more so every day. Cryptographers use bigger and bigger prime numbers as the basis for encryption systems that are virtually impenetrable. Right, virtually. As in, not literally. Ask the Pentagon, which just admitted that somebody, they think from Russia, recently hacked into the Defense Department’s security system. They’re not saying what was damaged, or compromised. Their response was to tell the company commanders in the field to stop using jump drives to store and transfer data. Every communication I have with my bank, or my broker, or even Medicare eventually comes around to the pitch: “Go paperless! Do your banking/trading/bill paying online. It’s fast, easy, and completely secure.” Virtually completely. If you bank online, go check your account. See if it’s still there.
December 5 A VERY small part of me is disappointed with the election results, because it spoils my plan to start off with my favorite political quote: “The American people have chosen their leader and he will serve them right.” (Why, look at that! I got it in anyway!) In the first presidential election that I can remember personally, back when I could count up my age with my shoes on, Adlai Stevenson lost to Eisenhower. It was seen as proof that the American people will always choose a fighter over a thinker, a proposition that had held true until now. Why this should be so is left as an exercise for the reader. (If you are unable to solve this problem or unwilling to try, it proves the point.) In his concession speech, Stevenson made the remark cited above. Or maybe he didn’t, since I couldn’t find the exact quote in any of my sources, but if he didn’t say it, he should have. He did say, in a speech given in Los Angeles, prophetically, on September 11, 1952, “your public servants serve you right.” Stevenson was also responsible for the phrase that was so much in the public mind toward the end of the recent campaign: “The Republican Vice Presidential Candidate ... asks you to place him a heartbeat from the Presidency.” He was referring, of course, to Richard Nixon. While poking around in the Stevenson archives, I did find a number of other noteworthy quotes from the man who made the term “egghead” a household word, and I thought some of them might be worth sharing.
Ah, those were the days.
December 4 It has been suggested--mostly by your children--that one sign of declining faculties is the inability to remember to take your medicines. I think that’s exactly wrong. As one gets older, the regimen becomes increasingly complex: more pills to take, some twice a day and some thrice, some in the morning, some at bedtime, some with meals and some without, some every 4 or 6 or 8 hours. If you can keep it all straight, it’s a sign of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I think it’s actually a good thing, though. The mental exercise, like chess or crossword puzzles, keeps your mind active and likely slows its deterioration. I need that little boost, too: my faculties don’t have tenure….
December 1: More Words I Just Don’t Understand
What the heck is a “hermitage”? A place where a hermit can live with other hermits? Why is it that if you throttle your car it speeds up but if you throttle your wife she slows down? When did “awesome” become the opposite of “awful?” You can pipe up or pipe down, buckle up or buckle down. If you buckle your belt, it holds up your pants. But if you buckle you knees, everything falls down. You can hold off or hold on or hold up, and they’re all pretty much the same thing, but holding down is something different altogether. Overheard around town: “they should just give the banks the money and get out of the way. The banks just need to be ‘reincentivized.’” Please tell me that’s not really a word. I’m not sure, but I have the feeling that the problem is that they have been too incentivized. Maybe I misheard, and he said “deincentivized.” I’m also rather fond of a term coined by UC Irvine’s Chief of Anesthesiology who was suspended for filling out the forms describing the course of the surgery and the patient’s post-op recovery before the operation began. In his defense, he said that “there was no patient injury, no compromise of care…associated with the pre-documentation.” Legalizing gay marriage has had one interesting lexicographic effect: for the first time, the word “bridegroom” makes sense. Until now it has been, at least as far as I am aware, the only one-word oxymoron in the language. Some people, particularly the frequently-married, have said that “gay marriage,” is itself an oxymoron, but they are using “gay” in the more traditional sense…. And then there’s the term so popular with economists right now, “negative growth.” This is an oxymoron that really belongs in the list I started back at the beginning of the year, in with euphemisms like “pre-owned” for “used” and “gaming” for “gambling.” So I think I’ll just slip it into that piece in the archive (are you going to remember it wasn’t there originally?) and say no more about it. And finally, in the Onomatopoea Division: “Ping Pong” is allegedly so named because that’s what it sounds like. Not when I play it. “Gnip Gnop” would be much better. Maybe it sounds different in Chinese….
The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do. all materials on this site ©michael grossman. all rights reserved. |
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