Interesting Poll Results

Someone, somewhere,( I admit to forgetting) posted the following: "There are 10 different kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don't". After a pause for the gears to click, I laughed out loud. I thought it was hysterically funny. My ego also kicked in as it considered my reaction a sign of a brain younger than the bod - which is aging rapidly.

Now as most know, we live in a community of senior citizens. We all eat in the same dining room. The wait staff is made up of youngsters still in high school or just graduated and waiting for college. It is the one time of day that we get to interact with youth and these are delightful kids. I decided to do a survey. I typed the joke alone on a piece of paper and took it to dinner.

In a poll so unscientific and lacking in validity as to make a statistician quake, I got the surprise of the day. More senior citizens than high school scholars understood the joke.

All you youngsters, put that in your pipe and smoke it. And if you don't understand the joke, ask the grey haired one who walks with a walker.

Riding Running Boards

When I was in high school very few of my classmates had their own cars. The war had started and you needed a ration card to get gasoline. Besides that, most of us were too poor to be able to buy a car. My job ushering at the playhouse paid 67 cents a night and even in those days, that wouldn’t finance a car. My folks had a 1933 Ford, but only an “A” card entitling the family to three gallons of gas a week. I couldn’t do a lot of joy riding on that. Under those conditions in summer, we thought our friend, Ted, was a looney when he said that he had gotten a job delivering the yellow page phone books door to door. Then we realized that he had managed to upgrade his mother’s gas card on the basis of the delivery job. He drove his mother to her job in the morning then had her car to use all day until time to pick her up.

His territory for the delivery was in a section called Short Hills. The name should be your clue that most houses were up or down steps from the road. It was also a well-to-do area and the houses were big, far apart and a long way from the road. But Ted had that all figured out (in true Tom Sawyer fashion). Every day he enticed several of his friends to help with the lure of riding on the running board, a feature of all cars in those days. You stood on the running board and hooked an arm around the pillar between the front and rear doors. It was more fun that riding in a rumble seat. Anyway, the upshot of all this was that Ted got to sit behind the wheel getting paid to play supervisor while we knocked ourselves running up and down hills carrying phone books that got awfully heavy before the end of the day. By then our main motivation was to empty the car of phone books so there would be room to ride sitting inside on the way home.

What One Doesn’t Know, Can Hurt

While I was working in Paris a zkillion years ago, we had a big party one night. It was to celebrate the finishing of the annual budget. Spouses of Paris folks were invited, while the representatives of the other European countries came single. Previously I had been bemoaning the fact that I worked in Paris but saw very little of the high fashion that was reputed to have its roots there. That evening dashed that complaint. The big boss had invited his secretary who had worked hard on the number crunching in that day before computers. She was very French and far and away the youngest lady there. And she was the very picture of fashion personified. We all met on the second level of the Eiffel Tower at a then fancy nightclub. Unbelievable entertainment including an Edith Piaf-like singer and a meal supplemented with many wines, especially a steady flow of champagne. Our secretary danced the night away with a large percent of the men there and not a few of the women. The representative of the Italian company was a proud lady’s man and he demanded more than his share of dances with her.

Finally we all retired to the bar of a nearby hotel to slow down in order to manage the drive home. Now, the fellow from Italy was a known womanizer who thought himself quite the most dashing charmer there. He had come on to the lady-secretary all evening and since he had a room right there in the same hotel, he turned up his “pitch” to high. The rest of us found this very amusing. Finally, another single at the party spoke up. He was a certified nerd, a geek. He announced to the glamorous lady that he would be happy to drive her home. She accepted in a flash and the Italian went silently ballistic. When they had gone he really lost his cool. The international group that was left conspired, with only glances and facial gestures, not to tell him what everyone, including the geek, knew. She and her partner were, happy, well-adjusted Lesbians, respected and well liked by all that knew them.

Random Thoughts

I have a bunch of things I should be doing, but…

We drove down A1A yesterday to Fort Lauderdale. It was a beautiful day. There is much to see along the way but the ride isn’t what I would call scenic. Most of the scenery is manmade. The so-called Gault Miracle Mile is awesome. It is a line of gigantic condo buildings snuggled up to each other and rising up twenty stories or so. Not for me, but obviously a lot of folks think of that as sunny Florida. The way buildings and homes are going up, it will be true in future years.

Contrary to the forecasters we have had three beautiful days in a row. We have a delightful breeze coming in off the ocean. That keeps the temperature in the livable range. What I don’t understand is how come a breeze that comes from the ocean can provide low humidity. It is about 47% this noon and the temp is 87. Nice.

Our pool was frigid this morning. I like it that way but the majority of the residents here will be unhappy.

This is the first day for a new executive director of this fine institute. I wish her well and hope that the old bitties here can hold off on their griping and let her get off to a pleasant start. The army isn’t the only outfit that is happy only when it has something to complain about.

The shuttle landed safely this morning and we could hear the sighs of relief all the way from Cape Canaveral. It was a beautiful landing.

Why I Hunt and Peck

The other night in the middle of the night I was awake and out of bed with aching legs. I suppose it was the legs that got me thinking about my mother (she suffered from a similar malady). In turn, I began wondering about some of the simple mistakes we make without a semblance of a reasonable excuse. When I was in the early high school years, my mother tried to teach me Gregg shorthand and touch-typing.
Remember this was before the concept of computers had even appeared in “Popular Mechanics" or "Popular Science". I was aware the only people that took typing or shorthand in school were girls. Mom tried to convince me that these skills would be very useful in college, but I would have none of it.

I know, in the next generation, I would be called a male chauvinistic pig. I know and I suffer for it. On ordinary keyboards I see today’s youth (no matter the gender) type like the wind. These young people can type on a tiny blackberry with two thumbs almost faster than I can think. And I go along hunting and pecking with two fingers and an occasional thumb on the spacebar.

One thing leads to another. I bet if I had overcome my macho-ism and learned to type, I wouldn’t be so dependant on “spell-check” today. Of course, another misplaced some-thing-or-other had effects long after a simple goof. In my first years with a secretary I got fairly proficient at dictating memos, reports and the like. I could use a Dictaphone at home and bring the tapes in or at the office dictate directly to the secretary.

When I arrived in France, I was assigned a secretary. She was older and of the "bath-every-Saturday ,needed-or-not club". She also felt brushing the teeth was “sissy”. Her English was not the best and the dictating sessions were long. Air conditioning was rudimentary and these long sessions of the intimacy required for dictating became painful. I was too chicken to fire her. (There are corporate truths. She and the higher hierachy were long time buddies.) I requested a Dictaphone, but none was forthcoming so I (thinking to be out of options) took to writing out what needed to be typed. I got out of the habit of dictation and never really picked it up again. Of course, in retirement a secretary would be a ridiculous luxury so this message is brought to you via the same hunt and peck process first mastered in high school. Who says we were the generation of progress?

Cereal Boxes

This morning there was a time constraint on my getting breakfast. After 8:00AM I was not to eat or drink again until after a test scheduled for 12:00 noon. Since that meant nothing more to eat until 2:30 or so, I decided to eat a larger than normal breakfast. I would have an English muffin AND dry cereal. It was a new box of cereal, never opened. The box opened quickly and easily. There was my “Smart Start” right before my eyes protected by the plastic bag common to dry cereals. I tugged and I strained, my poor old arthritic thumbs could not open that pseudo-wax paper bag. Finally, in desperation I resorted to scissors, something I have never before had to do.

Have you ever noticed that packaging engineers cannot achieve a consistent amount of glue to seal cracker boxes, cereal boxes, detergent boxes and anything where the glue has to be applied after the product is in the container? I have never had much respect for packaging engineers. They are so imbued with the thought that their mission in life is to “protect the product”, that they ignore the consumer who must have the product in hand to use or eat it. But they don’t seem to monitor the volume of glue nor its tenacity used on a packaging line moving at the speed of a space shuttle. Bah!

Genius with Humor

I should save this story until Christmas, but it just popped into my conscious memory. Six months from now surely it will be back to where memories hide from us.

About fifty years ago I was living in a cozy suburban community in North New Jersey. We were only a mile or so from the vast research campus of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The result was that a big part of our social scene was made up of “Bell Lab” people. We participated in a little theatre group and one of our stars was a very unique Bell Lab engineer. He had a mind like few I have ever known. He would drive the director of a production to the brink with his habit of never learning his lines during rehearsals. On the night of the dress rehearsal (with an audience) he suddenly knew his part and everyone else’s too. But that isn’t the story I started to tell.

Gus, our actor friend, did not have a college education and worked midst thousands of PhDs. Some treated him with distain for his lack of formal education, but they didn’t know Gus’s wild imagination and skills. He had a lab of his own and one November he locked himself in his lab and relocked it whenever he left it. This went on for several weeks. In December he came out in the hall and accosted one of the snobbish PhDs. Gus asked him if he thought it might be nice to write a holiday message on an oscilloscope tube. The PhD explained to Gus (patronizingly) that it was an analyzing device. Aside from some known voltage patterns; a specific pattern could not be created. (see dictionary definition:

oscilloscope |əˈsiləˌskōp| |əˌsɪləˈskoʊp| |əˌsɪləskəʊp|
noun
a device for viewing oscillations, as of electrical voltage or current, by a display on the screen of a cathode-ray tube)

Gus waved this fellow into the lab and asked him to throw a switch in front of his oscilloscope. It wrote out in script :
"Merry Christmas" and after a pause, added: "to all" on a second line.

Over the coming weeks there was a steady stream of people, including the President of Bell Telephone, who came to see this miracle that Gus had accomplished. Meanwhile Gus had gone home to play with his kids for the holiday. He was also the first that worked flex-time with management tolerance. They knew genius when they saw it.

You also have probably seen an example of Gus’s genius in a novelty shop. Bell Lab licensed this one to novelty manufacturers. Remember the small coffin with a switch, like a light switch, above the coffin. When you throw the switch, the lid of the coffin opens and from it a forearm and hand rise up and turn off the switch, then descent back into the coffin and the lid closes. A silly gimmick, which uses new electronic principals never conceived of previously. The original was the outcome of another sojourn of Gus in a locked lab. The original arm was lifesize and wore Gus’s watch and wedding ring.

Gus was another proof that humor can share a genius’s brain and be a part of true creativity.

Camping in Luxury

There are two things about our going to Disney World.

First and foremost – we have great fun. The service is great, cleanliness is a hallmark, we can “do” or not as the mood strikes us. We can visit new attractions in the parks or revisit old favorites. We never run out of places to visit or books to read. OK, I didn’t read this trip, having taken the laptop and indulged in several hours of FreeCell. It is addictive.

The second observation that looms large is: old age sucks. At least some of the ailments that come with old age are annoying. I used to run miles just because it felt good. Nowadays my walking is so bad that we rented a golf cart for use in Fort Wilderness where we stayed. In Epcot and Magic Kingdom I rented electric wheelchairs. I admit that I love to pretend I’m practicing for Nascar at Daytona. Tourists scatter when they see me coming.

In Fort Wilderness we had a cabin. We were able to do steaks and hamburgers on an old fashioned charcoal grill. They were delicious. There was a full kitchen so we could have what we wanted to eat. In the woods, surrounded by trees we were beneficiaries of constant bird songs. All and all, a restful and delightful way to spend a few days.

Personal Notes

Just a few personal notes because I still can't get this new computer to send e-mail. It receives fine, but no out-going.

Happy Birthday, Scott. Wherever you are.

The doctor has said the boo-boo on my arm is healing nicely, so we will be going away for most of next week. We are off to Fort Widerness for a short break in life's routine. They are talking tropical depression so we will push the magic storm shutter buttom before we leave.

Birthday

Today is my Birthday. Guess what I had for breakfast.

On this occasion I prepared a short speech. I want to thank those who sent cards and greetings. your thoughts are appreciated.

I want to thank my teachers and preachers who have taught me it is a large and wonderful world.

I want to bless my kids and their mothers who have made life so worthwhile and so much fun.

I want to thank friends who have enriched my life with their wit and wisdom.

I want to thank the doctors, nurses, and nursing aids who have made this birthday possible. A word to them, Please keep up the good work!

Most of all thanks to Sally who accepts my love and gives so much in return.

Balloons!

The other day I saw a big bunch of balloons and the sight took me back to thinking about one of my first big disappointments. I don't think it altered my life or created a harmful flaw in my personality, but I must admit to a lifetime of ambivalent feelings about balloons. (Now this HAS to be a serious blog, doesn't it?)

Seventy five years ago children didn't have their desires crafted by TV commercials. A vivid imagination sparked by friends' experiences or a momentary glimpse of something new was all it needed to picture future joys.

Each year, sometime before Christmas, my mother would take me along as she shopped for presents for relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. It was on one of these trips to a department store that I saw the thing I wanted above any thing else. It grew in my mind. I told my parents I just had to have it. I wanted it above and to the exclusion of anything else. I was a total pest and spoiled brat about it. Finally, a deal was reached. If I got my wish, I could have nothing else for Christmas.

I agreed to this in the belief that if I had a kit with which I could make balloons, I would be the hit of the community. I could sell my balloons for classmates' parties and get rich, too. I would make the biggest, best, most colorful balloons that the town had ever seen. I would be more popular than the Good Humorman!

My ballon kit was under the tree Christmas morning. By afternoon I was in production. The burned hand I got from the hot latex was hardly an impediment. But then reality set in. By the next day I realized my balloons were disappointing small - about the size of a little orange. I couldn't seem to blow them up. The skin seemed too thick to expand and tended to have thin spots that broke when an attempt was made to blow them up. As I labored to learn the art of successful balloon manufacture, I quickly ran out of raw materials. When no one volunteered to finance further experimentation, I slunk off to school at the end of the holiday vacation knowing I had made a very bad deal and hoping no one from school would remember my premature bragging before the holiday.

I no longer wonder why I have this urge to take out my pen knife and pop every balloon I see. I've lived all these years as an anti-balloon man. The shame of it!

AM Twisted Thinking

Ever had one of those mornings when you wake up, you sit down at the computer, your mind is running, but there is no one at the wheel? I call it rambling rumination. This began for me this morning with the extraordinary photoblog, “A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania” by Kathleen Connally. Her latest photo-essays concern the abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant near her home. Go look. durham twnshp
As I aimlessly appreciated her pictures and what they represent, I was struck by an urge (unfulfilled) to get up and exercise. I realized that if that happened to a steel plant unused for just 10 years, think what my poor, frail human body would look like if left untended to.

While the first cup of coffee got some of the gears in mesh, I went over to Google News to get an update on Alberto just off the coast. If you have ever visited Cedar Key, the apparent target; you know why my tummy went tight. Even a small storm surge there could cause a painful situation And you know the folks there will not obey the evacuation order.

Next I read a Florida news commentator that was thanking Alberto for the wake-up call. His point was that ignoring preparation is easy when life is easy. We need incentives, like a scare. We need to be kick-started to insure a comfortable future.

Good Heavens! Does this mean that our six months of hurricane season actually help the old-timers of Florida and the Gulf Coast stay healthy? It does provide purpose – to go out and stock up, tighten down, be active and be alert. I don’t feel much better yet, but I will admit to less visible rust that that steel plant.

Shakespeare et al

So many people are shy about Shakespeare, Milton, and even modern poets. I attribute this to plain everyday (unfortunately it is everyday) poor teachers. Kids and even young people rather self-consciously make fun of the classics with an occasional “to be or not to be”. Many kids and young people also do not realize that their favorite movie and stage actors are accomplished actors of Shakespeare and GB Shaw, etc. The problem is that today’s teachers probably had rotten teachers. And as this progression continues generation after generation we, as a civilization, will lose appreciation for genuine talent. Lord knows there is little of that in our cultural world today. It has not disappeared, but it is rare and could approach extinction.

If you like poetry and know how to read it out loud, offer that talent to your local school. Read to high school kids. I know they will enjoy it because I had an English teacher who every day read us Romeo and Juliet, Chicago, The Congo (read that to a class today and they will think it is their kind of “rap” and love it). He varied from lusty for the boys to sentimental for the girls and stories and descriptives for all. He covered the gamut and each of us went away with favorites we never forgot. Some days they could hear him two classrooms away and some days it was a strain to hear his whisper. But, he gave poems meaning!


There endeth today’s exhortation. (I admit, the same could probably be said about the French horn, but I never had a teacher passionate about it.)

Haircuts !

For reasons not really beyond my control, I am far overdue for a haircut. My hair doesn’t cover the top of my head any more even when it is what I call long. But these days it is tickling my ears and the back of my neck. It is not long enough to be stylish. It just plain looks like I need a haircut. Maybe this week, but I have five days’ worth of things I am doing, so maybe not. When I passed eighty I found that scheduling more than one major event a day was a trial and was apt to interrupt my nap schedule.

Besides, to use a today buzzword, I think I have “issues” about getting my hair cut. One of my first memories is of the day I found out that my usually calm mother had a fiery temper. (The gene for which I am told she passed along to me.) I was sitting up on that board-like thing the barber put across the arms of the barber chair to prop up little people enough to be shorn. Mother took offense to how the barber was trimming my bangs (do boys have bangs?) or something. Suddenly, she grabbed the “sheet” over me and tore it away. In those days Velcro was unheard of. Big safety pins fastened it together around the neck. The pin opened and threatened my jugular.


Oh, but the embarrassment of being led down the street to another shop with half a haircut and a bloody neck. The explanations were hard to sit through also.

Alas, being little wasn’t always fun and games.

Paper Mill Playhouse

Whenever I think about what to blog about, my mind goes back to high school and the job at the “Paper Mill Playhouse”. Lots of events and adventures influenced my life. I think this contact with real life “show business” left a real interest, if not a passion, for “backstage”. One of our best friends, some one we enjoy being with enormously here at the “institute” is a veteran of a professional singing career in radio, television and recording back in the Golden Age. I know that her stories fascinate me and wonder if it is a throwback to the Playhouse days.

In addition to learning that without makeup show people were real folks and a lot of fun to be around it was by real first opportunity to observe work habits. I learned to respect those players putting their all into a job even when they didn’t feel at 100% or the job had to have become boring. Conversely, I took on a distain for those who cheat.

I am having a reverse Senior Moment this morning. I even remember the name of the guy that used to show up just in time to throw on his make up over a two days’ beard and slur his lines through out at least the first act. It didn't play at all well in "Babes in Toyland". Boy, I disliked him --- while having utmost respect for Dotty Sandlin who did her best to keep the show on track in spite of him.

Somewhere I also learned that a menial job could influence the success or failure of an undertaking. I watched and tried to copy fellow, but more experienced, ushers who could move a whole row of mis-seated patrons to the correct seats without ruffling a feather. (Not easy.) Now understand, the first endeavor was to get them in the right place, but having to know the alphabet backwards and recite it while leading folks down an aisle in the dark sometimes leads to honest mistakes.

At the beginning of the last act all but two of we ushers could leave and go home. When I was one of the two remaining, I used to worry my way through a reread of the emergency manual that covered duties in the event of fire or serious illness. I cheered like mad at the closing curtain, but not for the reason people thought.

Later I might or might not write about the hints I gleaned about flaring hormones among young artists.

Dance

Dance
Originally uploaded by Lantana Lad.

Hey, that worked quite well! I will be able to start illustrating blogs again.
I'm going to ride this horse yet. Three c heers for Flickr and iMac.
Any one for Ice skating?

Path to Beach

Path to Beach
Originally uploaded by Lantana Lad.

This picture has almost nothing to do with anything. Un less you want to go to the beach which is down there at the end
. I am again just testing. I could not get picture on my blogs from the iMac computer so I am trying delivery from Flickr, a wondeful
invention by two fine people ./

Reality Shows

As a kid I listened to certain radio programs faithfully. One of my favorites was Tom Mix. I sat in front of the “big” radio in the living room and imagined I was right there on the range beside Tom. My visualization of the range was a large open area. The widest space I had ever seen was a golf course near our home. So I had Tom and I galloping down a fairway and hiding in a sand trap to have a shoot out with the bad guys.

My mind couldn’t make sense of what I was told about those radio shows though. Bobby Benson, another of my hit shows, was not a real person according to my mother. He was just a man that was acting as though he was Bobby Benson. His stories were not real, while surprising, but logical since Bobby Benson wasn’t real. However, I knew Tom Mix was real. So how can you say that his adventures were not real. I used to mull this business over at night in bed. Was Errol Flynn a real person or was he really the pirate I saw in the movies. Maybe he was Blackbeard acting like he was Errol Flynn for the newspapers. He was in the newspapers a lot, but I didn’t understand those stories.

This question of what’s real and what’s not in show business has followed me at times all my life. Just recently I saw a picture of Jessica Simpson and my first reaction was, ”That CAN”T be real!”

PS. Disillusionment came into the scene when I later learned that Tom Mix was so rich that he refused to play in the Tom Mix radio show. He felt it didn’t pay enough to be worth his while. I am still wondering about Jessica.

Conspicuous Consumptiion

When I was 21, I got a real rush out of wild driving. We tore along the roads of Europe freezing our toes off in an open jeep and assuming there were no rules of the road and that jeeps never rolled over. Actually, we knew the rules and saw jeeps roll over, but I couldn't happen to us! In the Philippines we climbed up mountains and accelerated down the hills with the driver blind folded and just taking verbal instruction.

At the age of thirty, we got a Pontiac Gran Prix and proved they could exceed 100 miles per hour on the New Jersey Turnpike.

When our son was 17, we bought an old International S cout with rusted out floor boards and springs and shocks that increased it's height by more than three feet.(as a second car to go with the second home). Before the state inspectors forced us to restore its normal stance, we proved that raising the center of gravity too high is a bad idea. It turned out to be a rotten beach-buggy, it kept getting stuck in the sand.

By age 60, I had discovered the joys of "My Father's Oldsmobile". I marvelled at gas prices, but didn't really care.

At 70 I was driving a comfy Buick Park Avenue. We purred along at the speed limit (right!) without a care.

The knees were really acting up by 76, and a Buick Rendezvous made it easier on the knees than the lower sedans. Now at 80, I get that rush when I pass a cop at 3 miles over the limit.

I Think I Have Been Collected

If you happened by in the last day or so, you know that my post before this was about some horsing around I was involved with in the army 63 years ago. I posted it at about 2:30PM yesterday. Now like a lot of bloggers, I have a site meter that records the domain of everyone that tunes into my blog. It doesn't tell me who it was nor record an address, but it does tell general location - city, state and country usually. It also gives the time someone starts reading and when they quit. Oh yes, and it tells how they got there, links, search engine, and search words.

With all the talk of your telephone records being collected by the NSA, you might be interested to know that my story of Army Hi Jinks was read this morning at 7:25 by someone at the domain named "pentagon.mil". The domain was further identified as "Army Information Systems Command-Pentagon". The location given was "Falls Church, Virginia, United States, North America".

The search engine used was "search,blogger.com" and the search words were "us army".

You'all feel safer now?