Happy Daddy's Day

"It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him." - Mark Twain

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished in how much the old man had learned in seven years." - maybe Mark Twain, maybe not.

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So, a dear friend posted to Facebook a very thoughtful comment about how "any male with functional gonads can be a father, only a full grown man can be a 'Daddy.'"  He'd lost his father at a young age, and I'd also lost my father at a young age, and so a discussion ensued.  Much of it centered on the distinction between "Daddy" and the other forms of fatherly address.

To him, "Daddy" is what fathers are, and I get that.  In my case, I lost my father after I was at that middle age where I'd asked him--to a mirthful reply, as I recall--whether I was old enough to switch from "Daddy" to "Dad." See, to me, it was a big deal to make the change.  A boy, I thought, calls his father "Daddy."  A young man calls his father "Dad," at least in the literature and the environment I was in at the time.  To me, it was my change, not his, that sparked the switch from the childhood "Daddy" to the youthful "Dad."

It was a milestone.

Similarly, as I read the many Facebook tributes to Fathers, Dads, and Daddies old, young, and no longer with us, I'm struck by the differences.  Some, like my afore-mentioned friend, lost fathers at a far-too-young age--four, in his case.  At that age, my Daddy was one very important thing to me. 

As I got older, though, Daddy, and then Dad, became more.  I got ten years more with my Dad than my friend did with his, and I can't imagine not having had the time to discuss, to learn, to grow.  Yes, with his illness it was some rocky times, but Dad was the one who taught me, with a simple banana, what it means to love.  He's the one who taught me not to jump at emotional arguments, but rather to examine all sides.  He taught me to canoe, and to swim, and to read the lay of terrain without ever needing a map.  He was a great Dad.

And then I remember my twenties with my Mom, how the relationship blossomed into one between two adults, and I wonder what that would have been like with Dad.  I read posts and see pictures of friends taking walks with fathers who made it to the autumn season of their lives, and I can't help but wonder what that would be like.

I'm not envious, not really.  I do hope they recognize how special the time they have with their parents is, though.

- TOSK

2013 Accomplishments and 2014 Resolutions

Remember how 2013 started?  I do.  It started right on this post of mine, the January 1, 2013, missive in which I resolved to accomplish several awesome things.  That, incidentally, was the first post of my friend Cricket Walker's 365-day posting challenge.  You know, that challenge for which I was going to post 365 blog entries, one each day, in 365 days, thus creating a travelogue for the year I'd just finished traipsing across.

Remember all that?  Well, I do.  And now, watching the tail end of 2013 gallop past me like Secretariat with a jet engine up his butt, I'm pretty sure that "I blew it" is an understatement.

Don't go getting all soft on me, now.  I cut my professional teeth in the U.S. Army Infantry, where if you can't handle a "your performance sucked so much shit, you were farting pastures" in an after-action review, you aren't going to last long.  Granted, I didn't last long, but my anti-longevity wasn't due to thin skin.  

So anyway, first, I need to review all the stuff I didn't accomplish last year.  Then, and only then, can we get to all the stuff I'm not gonna accomplish next year.  Trust me, that's the best way.

Chief Blog Goal #1: post a blog entry each and every happy little day of the happy little year.

Nope.  Not really even close.  I was 115 entries short.  114, actually, once I post this one.  Oh, I kept up for quite a while, with one post for every day right up to the end of May.  That's nearly five months of consistent blogging, I'll just point out, and that ain't bad.  It's also 251 posts in a year, which really ain't too shabby at all, as blog activity goes.  It's also helped me see the importance of back material--many days my most-hit post wasn't even from that day.  Oh, and also, I doubled my total hit count.  All in all, not bad, then, but as goal attainment goes, it sucks big fat ogre toes. 

The rest of my 2013 resolutions:

1. Write every day.  Nope, didn't do that.  Wrote a lot of days, and a whole lot more of what I wrote in 2013 was a whole lot better than the crappola I scribed in 2012, in my own less than entirely humble opinion.  Still: fail.
2. Publish four books.  Nuh uh.  I got one, and then a boxed set.  That's it.  One novel and a marketing device don't equate to four novels in any realm.  I did press on quite a bit, with Elf Queen nearly ready to go and its successor's first draft done.  Still: fail.
3. Take risks.  Well, hell, I did that the very first day, making crappy goals like this one.  I did some other stuff that can be considered risks, too, but--ah, hell.  Final score on this one: indeterminate.
4. Operate smarter.  What the hell was I thinking with this one?  "Operate smarter"--really, big guy?  Okay, show of hands: who thought I was smarter this year?  Who thought I wasn't?  Yeah, I'm gonna fail myself just for writing this unmeasurable-as-hell, stupid goal down.
5. Freelance each week.  Just--no.  The time I was spending doing freelance, though it made me a better writer, paid off in very small ways, while the time I have spent writing novels, embarrassingly for the freelance sites, is already paying off better, and will hopefully in the future pay off heads and armpits above the freelance rate of pay.  Smart fail, but fail nonetheless.
6. Dozen short stories written.  Or, um, not.  Fail.
7. Social network weekly.  Hey, I've played Facebook games weekly; does that count?  I think the main purpose of this goal was to pull my weight in APG, and since they and I are no longer associated, I'll just rate this one a nice big juicy ball of fail, okay?
8. Move.  Now, this one makes me giggle in a way that would probably lead you to suggest that I need professional help if you were to hear it.  I did it.  I frickin' moved.  But.  The goal was to move into a house from the craptastic apartment we were renting.  Nowhere in there was I suggesting a journey of a thousand miles.  While I'm not saying it was bad that I moved to where I did, I gotta give myself only half credit for this one.  And half credit, on a goal, is--yes, you guessed it.  Fail.
9. Exercise once a day.  Not even close.  If you strung 'em out it would probably be closer to once a month.  Big fat floppy fail there, with whipped cream and sugar on top. 

Okay, so now that I've proven the exercise, let's sum up.  I suck.  I either suck at setting goals, or I suck at achieving goals, or I suck at both.  You can't miss nine out of ten goals, though, and have a good year.

Wait.  Let me rephrase that, because it's patently untrue.  2013 was, in fact, a pretty dang good year for me.  I moved into a great job opportunity.  I met some great neighbors.  I accomplished more writing than I've ever done before, and a lot of it is sweet awesome sauce.  Heide's health continues to improve.  Jessa graduated from high school, and Vinny graduated from a college program.

I guess you can miss nine out of ten goals and still have a pretty dang good year.

Oh, yeah, and I got a Gandalf lunch box for Christmas.  That, and a TARDIS throw-blankey.  How many of you got a Gandalf lunch box or a TARDIS throw-blankey, hmm?  Pretty dang good year?  Nah, pretty dang great year!

Okay, so I've had a pretty good few years, honestly.  It's been a lot of cases of not accomplishing what I set out for, but what I did accomplish has made me happy.

So with all that being said, what should I vow to do in 2014?  Keep in mind as I ask the question that I haven't accomplished much of what I vowed in 2013, 2012, or other years in the past.  So--maybe--maybe I should just play the odds?  Since history tells me that I'm most likely not going to do what I say I'm going to do, maybe I should work it like this:

In 2014, I resolve to:

• not INCREASE my income by any substantial measure.
• not COMPLETE four novels that are rockin' good.
• not BREAK THROUGH to world wide publishing success.
• not ACHIEVE every goal I'm assigned at work.
• not LOSE most of the weight that I've gained over the years.
• not GET IN SHAPE.

Take that, Cosmos...

Now, we'll see whether I accomplish what I've said I would, or what I've said I wouldn't. 

To tell you the honest truth, though?  If I merely succeed in spending the next 365 bright and beautiful days under the sun with the love of my life, Heide, I'll be the luckiest man on the planet.  I can only hope, for your sake, my friend, that you have someone who brings the sweet awesome sauce to your life like she does to mine.

Goals or no, here's hoping you have a great, happy, and, above all, safe New Year!

- TOSK

I Love My Shoelaces

Okay, okay, I really don't have any sort of weird fondness for the inanimate string-like objects that hold my shoes securely on my feet.  The title of this post is only slightly tongue-in-cheek, though, as it is quite refreshing to renew my relationship with said inanimate objects in addition to the animated appendages they serve.

There was a time, see, when I was in quite good shape.  I ran a marathon, a triathlon, and an iron man event, all while studying physics and electrical engineering.  I graduated from West Point, in fact, at 180 solid, muscular pounds, and though I certainly wasn't the greatest athlete to complete a course of study at the military academy -- not even really close, honestly -- I was still in good physical condition.

Fast forward to today, over twenty years later, and quite nearly a hundred pounds heavier.  There's several reasons I've let my physical condition go, but they're all pretty much just excuses at this point.

Oh, and I used to be flexible.  So flexible was I, in fact, that I had to stop doing quad stretches before I ran, because I'd always over-stretch and the subsequent run would hurt my knees.  Now?  Not so much.  When I started the workout regimen I've been on for the past week, I was surprised to find that I couldn't even do a quad stretch.  No, seriously -- I couldn't bring my left leg up high enough to grab the top of that shoe.

My overall shape -- round, it is -- has gotten to the point where "Oh, you graduated from West Point?" always sounds like more of a shocked exclamation than an expression of approbation.

As if that wasn't bad enough, just tying my shoes was an exercise in embarrassing exertion.  I mean, it was hard enough to do it before my ill-fated trip to Bermuda, but after breaking my collarbone and three ribs on my left side, that achievement was darn near an impossibility.  I went with slip-on shoes for months after, and only recently went back to tied-on shoes despite the effort involved.

Tying my right shoe wasn't too bad; I'd find a nice high perch and throw my foot up onto it, reaching down and deftly working the laces into a knot.  The left, though, was the problem.  I used the same perch, but in order to get that one tied I had to roll myself up into a tight ball, holding my breath tightly while I rapidly did up a bow knot with my quivering, bluing fingertips.  Once the shoe was tied, I sprang back up into a straight position with an explosive breath in.

It was downright embarrassing, really.

I'd had enough of it this last summer, but after buying a workout regime I got caught up in moving, changing jobs, and all that stress, and the disks lay on the mantle for months, gathering dust.  Besides, when I tried the first couple of exercise routines, my left shoulder still crackled and popped when I used it.  While it's fine for breakfast cereal to do that, it's alarming when it's your formerly broken shoulder.

Then, in early December, I weighed myself.  Two hundred eighty pounds, with zero clothes on.  Enough was enough, I decided.  After talking it over with the family I set out on a diet and exercise routine.

I started last weekend.  Oh, my, it hurt!  The pops and crackles were gone, finally, but the glutes and shoulders and calves hurt so bad for a while that I had a hard time climbing the stairs to the parking garage at work.  Even walking down the hallway brought enough pain that I grimaced with each step.

You know the good thing about workout muscle pain?  It's going to go away, one way or another. Either you work out through it, as I have, or you stop working out, and either path leads to less pain.  Besides, the burn of a solid workout is a good pain.  I used to enjoy it.

Turns out, I still do.

This weekend?  I've only lost a few pounds.  Now, that's pretty good for the start of a workout routine--those who know best have always told me that it's unsafe to lose more than a couple or a few pounds in a week. 

The best part, though?  I can tie both shoes without needing SCUBA equipment.  I can also do quad stretches once again, though still not nearly as quickly as I used to hop into them.

So yeah, I'm happy I started.  My Facebook friends know which workout regimen I'm talking about, because I've been mock-complaining about how insane this Insanity workout is.  Fact of the matter, though, is that it's perfect for me.  It's the younger cousin of P90X, which is a successful strength-building process, but Insanity is focused on cardio and sweating more than muscle building, and that's precisely what my fat tuckass needs.

So -- wish me luck.  That, and years of happiness in my newly renewed relationship with my feet in all their surroundings.

- TOSK

Memories Part Two

Today I wanted to continue on the topic from a previous post: memories.

I recently took the fam to do some diamond mining.  Woo hoo!  See, there’s a place in Arkansas called the Crater of Diamonds State Park.  Because it sits atop an ancient volcano, diamonds can be found on the surface; hence, the name. 

It is, according to advertisements, the only public diamond mine in the world. Heide learned of its existence years ago while watching Treasure Hunters.  To her bucket list was thus added a diamond hunting trip in Arkansas, then, in addition to a sapphire hunting trip in Montana and others.

Hey, it’s just over four hours from our new home in Memphis. We had to go.

Heide’s birthday is in November, and the weekend after is one of the easiest to get into the park with short notice due to its location between the summer – “high” – season, and the winter season.  Thus it was that a few weeks ago I put the plans together to enjoy a nice weekend away from the Internet and get our diamond-hunter mojo going. 

That’s all worth its own post.  This one’s about the drive there.

To get from Memphis, Tennessee, to Murfreesboro, Arkansas, you first take Interstate 40 west, driving across a tall bridge over the Mississippi River and then through Arkansas to Little Rock.  From there you jump onto Interstate 30 toward Texarkana. 

Somewhere between the Mississippi River and Little Rock it hit me: I’ve been on that route before.  It was over three decades ago, mind you, but suddenly memories of that particular stretch of road came flooding back. 

I was as excited by the trip back then as I was the more recent weekend.  Oh, this weekend we were heading out to find diamonds, and hopefully lots of them, but that other journey long ago was in search of a whole different type of gem: a gem of a lifestyle, one where the days were always warm and the nights always cool, one set in a land of milk and honey (or some might say fruits and nuts), one where Mom could start over in life from the safety of her mother’s home.

Specifically, this Mississippi boy was moving to California.  Technically, Mom was moving to California; I and my brother were along for the ride.  But what a ride it was.

I’d kept vague memories of Mom talking to truckers on the CB radio as we crossed over a towering bridge, and now I know that it was the I-40 bridge over the Mississippi.  That was one of the most exciting times on the journey.  It was just the second hour, for one thing – you know, honeymoon phase and all.  I hadn’t traveled much; I’d only been west of the Mississippi a few times, in fact. 

A grand adventure awaited, we were all certain.

It had to wait a little longer, though.  We pulled into Texarkana, which isn’t exactly a huge city, and smelled antifreeze.  That was, matter of fact, the first time I found out what antifreeze smelled like when it was outside of the engine.  We ended up overnighting there while waiting for a replacement water pump, but hey, nobody had included this teenage boy in the actual plans and so I had no idea it wasn’t a planned stop.  It was actually a lot of fun for me; I don't recall the restaurant across the street from the mechanic, but I do remember the nachos platter we ate there.  Similarly, I don't recall the hotel we stayed at that was also across the street from the mechanic, but I do remember how much fun it was to spend our first night of our grand adventure there.

New water pump in place, we went on to Dallas, where a set of cousins I'd never met awaited.  Home movies--what a kick!  They’d recently been to Hawaii, and we got to watch all the videos (done on VHS tapes, which were actually a very new thing, themselves, back then).  At the same time I met my second cousin, who’d been some kind of runner-up in some sort of beauty pageant, and boy, was she beautiful.  That led to a whole lot of conflicted agony as teenage hormones squared off against ingrained taboos: “but she’s beautiful",“but she’s my cousin.” 

We stayed a blissful few days in Dallas and then headed on to El Paso.  Again, I don’t remember much there but for the highlights, one of which was learning just how far you can see in the desert air.  “Yay, we’re almost to El Paso!” I remember crooning, and my mother explained that the map said we were still nearly a hundred miles away, and then she told me how it is that the desert makes that illusion happen.

Oh, I also remember how we locked the keys in the car at the restaurant in El Paso – Denny’s, I think?  I don’t remember the menu or the food so much, but I do remember how interesting it was that the first two people we asked for help happened to know how to break in to a car, both efficiently and effectively.

We made it to SoCal fairly straightaway after that incident.  And then came the boiling over – not the car, but the driver.  Ever watched somebody who’s used to cruise control follow somebody else who isn’t using it?  It’s not something you’d think would be that funny until you’ve actually seen it happen.  My mother nearly blew a gasket on the last leg of the trip.  We’d stopped off at my uncle’s house, and he led us the last 100 miles or so through Riverside and on in to Upland, where my grandmother lived.  Only, he didn’t have cruise control, and every time he sped up or slowed down my brother and I were treated to a few words that I don't recall knowing our mother was familiar with till then. 

Funny, isn’t it, the things we remember and the things we don’t? 

- TOSK

Christmas Commercialism

There was a song I remember from my earliest years that celebrated the Christmas season.  I hope you'll indulge me a moment of nostalgia as I repeat the words to it:

"Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fa la la la la, la la la la"

Sound familiar?  I remember not really knowing what a bough of holly was, and then once I found out, I didn't know why one might consider decking any halls with it, since "to deck" in those years referred to the act of punching some other guy in the face.

"Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la, la la la la."

Yes, indeed.  Jolly, I got.  I liked jolly back then.  Still like it a lot today, in fact.

"Don we now our gay apparel, fa la la, la la la, la la la"

Whoa, now, gay meant something really not-cool back in the 70's in Mississippi, but once it was explained to me that gay had an entirely non-sexual-orientation-related meaning, I was okay with that.  I mean, who wouldn't wanna wear happy stuff, right?

"Troll the ancient Yuletide carol, fa la la la la, la la la la."

My childhood mind glossed right over that line, still buzzing as it was on the word "gay," but it's the most interesting of the bunch, really.  Back then we didn't have "Yahoo Answers" to look up things like "What does 'troll' mean in 'troll the ancient Yuletide carol'?" and read the results as people go back and forth over whether or not the letter r belongs in the word.

Woo hoo!  Carol fight!  Carol fight!

*ahem* no, not really.  It actually is supposed to be the word "troll," from way back before that word referred to doing something ugly on the Internet.  According to the online etymology dictionary, the word "troll" began its life as a verb in the Germanic tongue in the 15th Century, when it referred to walking about, wandering. Which is, I have to point out, pretty much what you do when you go caroling, and even more so if some yummy wassail is involved.

Neat stuff, right?

So this morning, getting ready for work as I was, I heard a new, modernized version of the song on TV.  This one had the following catchy lyrics:

"Shop, shop shop shop shop shop shop shop, fa la la la la, la la la la."

Neat, ain't it?

Or--not.

I'm about as grumpy of a curmudgeon as they come.  I remember fondly a time when you wouldn't hear a Christmas carol, see a wreath, or get prodded to spend money you didn't have to get people stuff they didn't need, until after 12:01 am Friday morning of Thanksgiving weekend.  It was improper, it was gauche, to advertise for Christmas too early.

And now?  Everybody's doin' it.

Oh, I don't mind the TV commercials too much, unless/until they slaughter an old favorite carol of mine.  But "Black Friday," as it's been called forever (or at least since the 1960's) is now becoming darkly-gray Thursday as retailers open earlier and earlier in order to capture as much of the Christmas overspending cash manna as they can.

It's a practice that, to me, is just plain wrong.  Thanksgiving should be a day to spend with your family, if you have one, and/or friends, if you have those, eating lots of food and drinking lots of--um, drink--if you can afford it.

No, I'm not being sarcastic with that last bit.  I've been there, done that, bought the extra-cheap thrift store t-shirt.  Made the Thanksgiving meal out of cans that said "green beans" and "ham with water added" right beside a simple bar code.  Not for long, but I was certainly there in that economic demographic.  Back then, if my employer had offered me extra pay to work on Thanksgiving, I'd've taken them up on it in a New York minute, because hey, I needed the money.

So no, I have nothing at all against those who choose to work on Thanksgiving.  More power to 'em, man.

Further, I'm honestly not sure I have anything against the employers who choose to open their doors on Thanksgiving.  After all, if the demand wasn't there, they wouldn't be doing it.  Pleasing the customer is, after all, what drives the cogs of capitalism, right?  And as far as I'm concerned, as long as it's not dumping poison into my rivers or fouling my spinach with the latest strain of deadly microbe or making it so I can't afford to take my kid to the doc, I'm all for capitalism.  Yes, some of them Capitalists have fewer people on staff who need the extra money than they require on-site in order to maintain operations, and so they have to force workers to come in when they wouldn't have otherwise.  I hate that, but being an employer and manager myself I see the point.

So all that said, who should we really be cranky with regarding the invasion of our Thanksgiving space of cheerfulness and, um, thankfulness?

I think, the customer.  Frankly, until we get to the point where people aren't willing to spend Thanksgiving away from family standing in long lines in order to enjoy the chance to potentially win the purchase of an iWhatzit for a few bucks off the regular price, we'll continue seeing Darkened Weekdays creeping earlier and earlier.  Is that a problem?  For the employees who need the money and are happy for a chance to work for it, no, it's kind of a good thing.  For the ones who don't and aren't, it's not.

And for me--I guess I can stand to see a few more commercials that butcher my favorite Christmas tunes.  But don't expect to see me at a store on the fourth Thursday of November. 

- TOSK

Fifty Years Ago Today

Writing is an incredible activity.  On one hand, it's a method of seeking entertainment for the writer--lots of us write because it's fun, or because it feeds our souls, or some such.  But on another, much larger hand, it's been a writer (the orator or another) who has crafted some of the greatest orations in the history of the world, and also some of the greatest speeches in the history of the United States.

I'm reminded of that sometimes when I see or hear reference to great speeches of old.  For example, on the battlefield near Gettysburg where, in a mere three days, tens of thousands of Americans died battling each other over things that they, likely, couldn't enunciate, an embattled President of the United States stood and delivered a pre-written speech that, though intended to be a fairly minor event, is still today repeated by schoolchildren and adults. 

You know: the Gettysburg Address.

You know: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

And so on.

The reaction wasn't really surprising.  Those who sided politically with the President praised the speech.  Those on the opposite side panned it as the "silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States."

That last bit sound familiar?  Yeah, it could easily be the Democrats' response to most of George Bush's speeches, or the Republicans' response to most of Barack Obama's speeches.

Gotta love partisanism, right?

Speaking of partisanism, President Lincoln that day referenced a document he'd signed into effect on January 1, 1963.  You've probably heard of that one too: the Emancipation Proclamation, the document that declared slaves free.  In, um, the states that were fighting against the Union, some historians will remind us, because, well, you know, what he signed that day wasn't a Congressional action.  It wasn't a bill at all, actually.  It was what we'd call today an Executive Order, issued by him under his authority not as President but rather as Commander in Chief.

Yes, that's right.  Lincoln freed the slaves in the United States in much the same type of action that has had Democrats calling for Bush's impeachment, and today has Republicans calling for Obama's impeachment.  The authority, specifically, of the Guy In Charge, doing something he felt needed done.

That was right at a hundred and fifty years ago.  Jump ahead now: fifty years ago.  Today.  August 28th, 1963.  Over a quarter of a million people gathered at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to hear Doctor Martin Luther King deliver a speech marking the emancipation of the Negro a hundred years prior.

It, too, is hailed as one of the greatest speeches in history.

I can't repeat it here due to copyright concerns.  That's okay--go read it here at BBC News, where they've done the work needed to obtain licensed permission to reproduce the speech in its entirety.  Especially, read down to the paragraphs that all begin "I have a dream...."  Really read those.

Keep in mind as you read them that, in those days, Mississippi and Alabama really were actively exerting effort to keep the black people segregated from the white.

We've come a long way, I think.  No, really.  There was partisan bullshit then, and there's still just as much partisan bullshit now (only now it's presented and promoted and propagated by entire electronic media networks).  But today I have black students sitting next to white students sitting next to students with other skin colors.  I expect them to all behave not as black students or as white students but--as students.  All around the nation there are deans who bear the same expectation as I.  That wasn't a general thing back then; now, it is.

Yeah, we still have problems.  You can't live for long in Memphis, or likely anywhere else in the deep South, and fail to witness the still-held resentment and anger on both sides of the color divide.  It'll take a while to get past all that, really--after all, slavery existed for longer than it has not existed in the colonies/states over here.

All I can really do about it, though, is to keep smiling at my black neighbor and my white neighbor equally, and treating them both as neighbors--not black neighbor, not white neighbor, just neighbor.

That, and I can honor the great speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, written extremely well and delivered fifty years ago, today.

- TOSK

The Moon And Its Influence On Our Calendar

So, I started out today to write about why Monday is called Monday.  Among, I should add, other things, including quite a few more derogatory terms.  Monday is, after all, the redheaded stepchild of the weekdays--and trust me, I know a redheaded stepchild when I see one (in the "takes one to know one" logical vein).

I'll just get the obvious out of the way first, okay?  Monday is named after the moon.  Nearly every web site out there elucidates upon the English, the German, the Spanish, and the other (official) names for the day, and how they each point to the moon for their origin.

Why's it named after the moon?  Because, of course, the moon was a pagan goddess, that's why.  Ancient cultures knew that some day humanity would boil itself down to a five day work, two day off cycle, and they naturally wanted to name the first day of work after the moon goddess, knowing that we'd kick the crap out of that day in our oral and written lore.

Okay, okay, I made that last bit up, mainly because it's more interesting than the truth.

Modern lore suggests that the Romans, penultimate calendar designers that they were, crafted the seven day week and started it with the sun, the moon, and then five planets.  That's apparently not entirely accurate, as a) there were other cultures, including the Babylonians and the Hebrews, who followed a seven day week before the Roman Empire spawned, and b) as they conquered along, the Romans became a polyglot of other cultures, and at times they actually kept several calendars, including a seven-day and an eight-day thing, going at the same time.  They also swiped much of the basis of their calendar as well as their deity system from the Greeks.

So, um, yeah.  One thing the Romans did do, at least indirectly, though, was give us the designation of Monday as the first day of our work week.  Thanks, guys!  How so, you ask?  Well, there's seven days, and God said to rest on one of them, so of course until industrialization and Henry Ford came around that gave us six days to work and one day to rest.  By default, then, the first work day (ick) fell immediately after the day of rest.

A day of rest which falls on Sunday.  To us.

To some of us, anyway.

According to Hebrew lore, the day for rest is actually Saturday.  More precisely, it's Friday nightfall to Saturday nightfall.  Other cultures hold that Friday is actually the day of rest.  So when did Sunday become the "official" day for resting and relaxing prior to the Monday blues?

When the Council of Laodicea said so, that's when. Apparently Julian Caesar (not to be confused with Julius Caesar, the guy after whom Julian dates--as well as July--are named) led Rome into an attack in 363 A.D. against the Persians.  He won the first battle pretty handily, and then started to run away from the main Persian army but--well, this isn't a military history novel.  Long story short, he died in the retreat, and his successor, Jovian, who also didn't rule very long, still lived long enough to reverse Julian's anti-Christianity policies.  Then the cleris of Laodicea got together and decreed, in their 29th Canon, that Christians shouldn't "Judaize" by resting on Saturday, but instead should rest on the day of the Lord, which was Sunday.

Hmmph--two hours of research for one pretty unremarkable paragraph. 

So anyway, the word "month" also comes from the moon.  It works out to be a strange date system we have on this little planet here, matter of fact.  Bear with me....

Imagine, if you will, being a pre-GPS, pre-telescope society trying to figure out how to track when things occurred.  You can certainly just wait till it gets warm to assume that winter is over and that agriculture such as you know it can begin, but that's problematic, as anyone who's lived in the great white north will know.  It's entirely possible, in fact, to have snows all thaw in Anchorage in February, only to re-fall in March.  It's similarly possible to have the snow not give up its ground till well into May.  Therefore, you need something far more countably reliable to go off of.

The rotation of the Earth around the sun, of course, isn't all that easy to keep track of on a daily basis.  I mean, it is, but you kind of have to know something about it first.  Therefore, it makes more sense to try to keep track of the travels of the moon.  Right?

Problem is--which travels do you keep track of?

See, the moon takes just over 27 days to travel around the Earth.  That is, if you're watching the moon's track compared to other stars in the heavens, you'll see it return to the same spot after just over 27 days.  That said, it's a lot more obvious to track the moon's travel according to its phases, since, like tonight, you can always tell when there's a full moon happening.  But that isn't just a function of the moon's travels; the moon's phases are also based on the position of the Earth, which is also moving.  Thus, it takes just over twenty nine and a half days for the moon to circle around the Earth and then catch up to where it was in relative position for the previously similar phase. 

Incidentally, twenty nine and one-half days are tough to track for months, but one month of thirty followed by a month of twenty nine days is just about right.  Sound familiar? 

You still need to involve the sun in this crazy time calculation method, of course, because if you don't you'll find January starting later and later every winter, up until it's a mid-summer month.  That would be pretty silly.  Thus, years are set to coincide with keeping a stable seasonal rotation, and months roughly follow the moon's journey, and the strange length months and leap days and so on are the result of all of the jinksing around between the two. 

So there you have it.

And once I figure out what "it" is, I'll be good to go.  By then, though, it'll probably be Tyr's Day once again.

Have a great-as-possible whatever-remains-of-moon-day-where-you-are.

- TOSK

So Bad, It's Funny

There are some human experiences that are so bad, they're funny.  Similarly, there are some that are so funny, they're bad.

The first statement, I can prove.  The second, I'll just toss away with the apology that it sounded good at the time.

Anyway, this whole move has been full of the first set of experiences.  I mean, how often do you move somewhere only to have, in your first week in the new house, the air conditioning, the dishwasher, and the refrigerator all go out?  Add to the confusion the fact that the washing machine we'd been overjoyed to take out of storage and start using again had a dried carcass of a small mammal tucked away inside it, and the little bugger really gave off some powerful aroma when rehydrated.

Yay.

Believe it or not, there have actually been other, bigger, disappointments.  Those, though, we're still in the midst of discussion with the companies involved, over relative responsibility.  Once the talks have been concluded you'll likely get to hear the gruesome details.  It's going to amaze some of you, I would hope, that companies can go so far beyond normal incompetence and into completely baffling disregard for any customer service type of concept in their operations.

In the meantime, I need to get to resting and relaxing after yet another day of trying to get moved in.

- TOSK

Open Minded

"By all means let's be open minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out." - Richard Dawkins

Ever notice that when someone asks you to have an open mind it's because they want to ram something into it unimpeded by logic or experience?

That comment over on my personal Facebook page is rapidly becoming a well-liked, well-commented-on post.  Funny how that happens; apparently I hit a nerve.

It makes sense, though.  Open-mindedness can be a good thing.  It's defined by Merriam-Webster merely as "receptive to arguments and ideas."  There are a bunch of quotations out there extolling the importance of being open minded, as well as the positive results many famous people have seen from its application.

Why the negative commentary, then?

I suspect it's because of people's expectations in regard to what it means when they're asked to be open-minded versus when they're asking someone else to be the same.  I, personally, feel like I'm quite receptive to many arguments and ideas.  Others, I admit, I dismiss immediately.  For example, if you were to argue that the Earth is actually flat, or that the moon is made of cheese, well, I'd not seem very open-minded to you.  Sorry, but I've already seen evidence that I trust to the contrary.

It doesn't help, of course, that "Can I ask you to be open-minded for a moment" is often followed by "while I share with you the words of (insert religious leader here)."

Oh, sure, I figure I'm expected to say.  Let me go get a Phillips screwdriver so I can open up the portal past logic and experience straight into the belief system I've constructed over the past 45 years.

On second thought--no, I don't think I can be open-minded for a moment. Sorry.
Fact is, we're all open-minded, and we're all not.  Each of us is the product of our own experiences, like it or not. We're receptive to some ideas, and not to others, and where that line falls is entirely dependent upon the ideas that have come before.  Sometimes we're readily receptive, and other times we're hesitant.

Part of the hesitation, really, rests in the fact that the flip side of being open-minded is being gullible.  You know what I mean, right?  I see it all the time: people who are so "open-minded" on a particular topic that they post stuff that make you wonder if they have any neurons firing at all up there in their grey matter.

"For every forward of this e-mail (now share of a post), Microsoft will donate money to xxx charity." (no, Microsoft can't track forwards of e-mails or shares of posts)

"The term 'rule of thumb' originally came from the width of a branch a husband was allowed to use to beat his bride." (seems nobody is really sure where the term came from)

"PRIVACY NOTICE: blah blah blah UCC 1-103 blah blah and the Rome Statute." (Geez.  Get a Snopes, okay?  And while you're at it, look up UCC 1-103 and what the Rome Statute actually is--does the privacy of your Facebook posts really have anything to do with international crimes such as genocide?)

So all that being said--sure, sometimes and to a certain extent being open-minded is good.  Sometimes, and pretty much always beyond that little line between it and gullibility, it's not so good.

- TOSK

The Paula Deen Incident, Verse Two

Okay, I'm not sure why I'm adding a second verse to a discussion that borders on insanely silly to have on my blog in the first place, but I saw another person's blog today that tweaked me the wrong way and so I figure I need to write about that.

The post, by a guy who claims to be an attorney, started out by saying that if the defenders of Paula Deen only knew the full scope of the allegations against her, they wouldn't be defending her so much.  It then went on to list the allegations against her to drive the point home.

First off, as I said in my post yesterday, I don't intend to defend her.  She doesn't really need my help, and if the allegations being leveled against her have any degree of truth to them, she certainly doesn't deserve it, either.

That said, the fact that (someone who alleges to be) an attorney would make that sort of a case blew my mind.

Normal folks who haven't been through a lot of legal wrangling and/or education, I can kinda see.  "It is alleged that..." might make a difference to some people.  But I don't care, and neither should you, and here's why.

First of all, you've heard the term "innocent until proven guilty," right?  If you're reading this from the United States, I'm fairly sure you have.  Nothing is more American, I've heard some assert, than the presumption of innocence so beautifully stated in that phrase. Except that it was coined by an English lawyer.  No matter; many of America's Founding Fathers were actually British lawyers before the events (fortunate or unfortunate depending on which side you're on) of the 1770's came to pass. Besides, if my understanding is correct, the presumption of innocence actually comes from Roman courts.

But all that is pretty much a moot point, isn't it?  Fact is, many of us Americans pride ourselves on having a justice system that is about as fair and equitable as it can be. 

That's what shocks me so much about the allegation part.  An allegation is just a statement.  You can make allegations all day long, frankly, and you don't technically have to prove any of them (unless you have an annoying Facebook friend like me).

It shocks me even more that an attorney would use allegations to make a point, because an attorney more than anybody else should know what is required to put forth a legal allegation.  What does it take?  In most jurisdictions, a trip to the court house and a filing fee.  How much the filing fee is depends on the jurisdiction.  I just looked it up and here, in Shelby County, it's $499 for a case as big as the one against Paula Deen; cases less than $10K are $299, and others in between are different amounts.

That's right--for a few hundred bucks I could go down to the courthouse and legally allege that my neighbor is a poopy-head.  I wouldn't, of course, because I have nothing against my neighbor (and quite a bit for; I happen to like my neighbors).  But my point is how much an allegation is worth in terms of Truth and Justice.

Not a lot.

Look, I'm not saying Paula Deen isn't a racist.  I'm not saying she is.  What I am saying is that we need a little bit more patience to let the facts play themselves out before jumping on one bandwagon or another.

I know that if I were the one being alleged to have done those things, I would sure appreciate the public's patience.  Wouldn't you?

- TOSK

Racism and the "N" Word

I'll never forget the day I realized that my parents could do, and had done, really dumb stuff.

Now, I was raised in a very non-racist household in Mississippi.  It wasn't like we had "non-racist" nights at the dinner table or "non-racist" monthly talks, but rather that we lived a lifestyle which was non-racist.  We didn't do or say racist stuff.  The kids in the neighborhood were neither black nor white; they were just kids in the neighborhood.  The kids at school were similarly colorless.  The adults in town, at least from the perspective I was given, were neither black nor white; we were all Corinthians. 

I remember my mom recounting, with a pride that I shared, the time when she'd been a teacher at a public school down in Mississippi and they'd introduced forced integration.  The buses, she said, had pulled up at the school, and they'd let the kids of both colors off, and the news cameras had been stationed there to record the unrest that--well, that hadn't happened.  According to my mother, the kids had all gotten off of the bus and gone to class, and eventually the reporters had gone home without stories, and that was that.

At school I led a similarly colorblind life.  I don't recall there being much in the way of forced political correctness; we just did stuff together, as classmates. Sure, we had all the typical jocks and bullies and stuff, but there wasn't any underlying skin color issue. 

And then I learned, from my father's own mouth, that he'd participated in the Ole Miss race riot.

He defended his actions.  It hadn't been about race, he argued.  A bunch of folks going to Mississippi State had heard of a great big event going down at Ole Miss (right down the road, ish) and they'd been quick to jump on the proverbial bandwagon. It was, he explained, a southern boy's idea of a grand party.

Hmmph.

My father's been gone from us for many years, and so for lack of better evidence I'll have to just say that I'm skeptical.  It's true that they didn't have Twitter and Facebook and such back then to tell them what was really behind the "party" at Ole Miss, but they had to have known something about what was up.

All that said, he was a young man, and it was the 60's, and I'm really not in a position to judge the man who later on taught me to accept people no matter their skin color. No matter why he did what he did back in 1962, he ended up being a father who raised a couple of sons who would never consider making judgments about someone based on race.

My grandfather was a different story altogether.  That man was of an entirely different generation, to be certain.  From what I remember, he couldn't speak of a person whose skin tone was different from his own without a epithet containing at least one derogatory word, and the "N" word was his favorite.

You know, that's our history.  Was it right?  Absolutely not.  But all that history taken up together, the fact is that many of us in my generation would rather not even mention the color of a person's skin, less because being Caucasian or colored is an unimportant distinction and more because it's a sensitive issue.  Fact is, I'd never dream of using the "N" word.  Period.

That leads me to the current news regarding Paula Deen. I've been watching it unfold, unsure of how I really feel about it.  I mean, I've always liked Paula Deen's on-screen personality.  And yes, I'm also certain that few of the on-screen personalities are the same as the off-screen ones, on the Food Network or elsewhere.

What I've heard about it has been fairly vague.  She admitted that she'd used the word in the past, years ago.  That, I certainly can't condone--but should something she said years ago make a difference as to whether or not I enjoy watching her cook on television now?

I think the issue is compounded by all the racism accusations flying back and forth in the political undercurrents these days.  Seems like a politician these days can hardly mention that someone is of a certain color skin, or even that someone has characteristics others believe belong to those of a certain skin color, without being called a racist.

Yet they often get to keep their jobs, even when the accusations have some truth to them.

Racism, like most other isms, we don't concern ourselves with until it evidences itself in words or actions.  We don't, for example, look at someone walking down the street and say "I wonder if he's a racist," unless of course he's wearing or saying something that gives us reason to do so.  Paula Deen could in fact be a racist through and through, but none of us would've ever known it if not for the deposition.  She might not be, on the other hand, despite the use of a derogatory word years ago.  I'm sure her close friends know the truth, but frankly I'm not looking to be her close friend.  I just enjoy watching her cook. 

What do I think?  I think she should never have used derogatory words in the first place, of course.  But I also think that her business partners were a little hasty to distance themselves from her over the matter.


- TOSK

Real Life vs. Dungeons and Dragons

I woke up this morning to the symphony of a thunderstorm.

I'd missed thunderstorms. The Tacoma area, where I was stationed last in the Army, got months and months of rain but very little thunder and lightning activity that I can recall.  Phoenix, where I moved after Tacoma, was the opposite: lots and lots of thunder and lightning but not very much storm to go with it.  In the desert it seemed sometimes like Odin forgot to turn on the sprinklers when he started his fits.  Then I moved to Anchorage, where the atmospheric conditions just never do get riled up enough, thanks to the general lack of heat up there, to coax out the full fury of nature.

Not so down here in the South, though.  Biloxi, Richmond, and now Memphis, all do get some terribly awe-inspiring, wicked t-storms.

I love 'em.  Most of the time, I should say.

It's funny how differently our reaction is to these events depending on our own plans, isn't it?  When I'm at home, snuggled into the sheets, hearing and feeling the natural fireworks outdoors is awesome.  When I'm headed out to golf or to fish, though?  Not so much.  Baseball players and fans are well known for being disappointed by stormy weather.  With farmers, meanwhile, it depends on the timing--storms while planting or harvesting can bring disaster, but at other times the crops desperately need the rain.

Laying there snuggled in as I was this morning, I couldn't help but expand mentally on the differences in reactions to storms and then to think about my old Dungeons and Dragons group.  Strange connection, I know, but the fact that came to mind is that they never experienced good ole' thunderstorms.

At a certain level--why would they?  After all, D&D is a game about going places, meeting people and monsters, and figuring out which ones you need to kill to get the maximum lewt and that most important of awards, the ex-pee.  There's really no need to bring up the fact that in order to get to those places, our noble band of heroes might have to slog through a few miles of miserably-pounding rainfall on a freshly muddy road while dodging lightning bolts.  There's no Challenge Rating (that I know of, anyway) associated with storms, nor is there (again, as far as I know) a lewt table associated with beating (aka surviving through) one.

It's just assumed, I suppose, that sometime during the twenty-three second pause in the action while the Dungeon Master gleefully describes your trip by way of "You all walked for three days and then arrived at..." that the party just kind of travels.  There's no good travel days, no bad travel days, no good weather, and no storms.  There's just a beginning, an end, and a hazy stretch in-between. Unless, of course, your party meets a band of bandits or ogres or dragons or anything else with a Challenge Rating along the way--but in that case, that becomes a stop in itself.

That's quite the opposite of how life treats us, isn't it?  Take, for extreme example, my family's most recent journey down the Alaska Highway.  The Dungeon Master would've said, "you drive for two weeks, and then you arrive at the dungeon--er, house--you do think it's just a house, one you would never suspect might face an infestation of massive insects--in Biloxi."  That's it.  No mosquito scourge.  No driving through a forest fire at 20 mph.  None of the good stuff, or the bad.  Just--You Arrive.

Hmmph.  And that, I must add, is our fantasy world, the world we use to escape into, a world in which the journey is rather boring and normal and, thus, overlooked.  The only thing that matters, it seems, is the destination.

Or is it?

Anyway, that's something to think about for today.  I'm expanding the idea for a post in the future, one in which I hope to present an actual set of D&D characters going through a real-life start to the day.  You see, as I lay there in bed this morning, what I was really thinking about was how much I wanted to stay there, snuggled in beside my wife and puppies, instead of tackling some (albeit interesting) stuff at work.  Rain does that to me, really; one one level it's spiritually invigorating, while on another it saps my desire to leap out of bed and face the world.  Wouldn't it be likely to do the same to our characters?

Of course, the scenario I'm writing won't likely ever appear in a book.  After all, who wants to read a fantasy story where fantasy matches reality?  Hopefully what I'm in the midst of creating, though, will be humorous and interesting enough that you want to read it at least in short doses.

Till then,

- TOSK

My Favorite Line?

Part of the reason I moved to Memphis recently was to take on the challenge inherent in a new job.  I'm quite happy with the new office, too--bigger school, more students, bigger paycheck, etc.  It has been a positive move, professionally.

That said, I landed right in the middle of an assignment.  The college's current professional development effort centers around the leadership reading and working through the application of a management book named The Oz Principle.  It's a well-written book, and (surprisingly to me, at least at first) it's not by Dr. Oz.  Instead, the Oz in the title refers to the fictional world created by L. Frank Baum so many years ago and populated by a trio of witches, a wizard (spoiler alert: he's not all he seems to be), and in at least one installment of the story a young girl from Kansas, her little dog too, and a lion, a tin man, and a scarecrow, oh my.

If you're as confused as I was at first, take heart.  The book actually does a thorough job explaining, both with actual quotes from the masterwork and with references to the "behind the scenes" part, how Dorothy and her cohort followed appropriate management principles in the areas of individual and organizational accountability to successfully cast the unknown aspects of the wizard aside and, um, achieve the ultimate success in business, which is--um, going home.

If you're scratching your head, welcome to the proverbial club.  To me, the authors took what could've been a perfectly good metaphor and tied it down, beat it to within a hair of its life, and then tarred and feathered the poor thing.  It's been so bad in that arena that I've had difficulty reading more than a few pages without either giggling or throwing the book across the room. 

The current assignment, though, stopped me short.  I was asked to identify my favorite line from the book.  Me, an author!  My favorite line out of a vessel that is full of them.  I.  Can't.  Do.  That.  To me, that's like asking a guy with lots of offspring to identify his favorite child.  No!

I even got the joke wrong.  My first response, based on my level of appreciation for the metaphor used to push the underlying management principle, was "The End."  Nope, there isn't one.  If you flip to the end of the actual material, prior to where the "we're trying to sell you the follow-on stuff" begins, it actually says "The Beginning."  Useful sentiment, that.  

All that said, an assignment is an assignment.  I'm gonna complete it somehow, even if I have to close my eyes, open the book to a random page, and point.

- TOSK

A Little Kindness, A Long Way

Yeah, so it's been a rough week here.  We finally finished, physically anyway, this 800 mile move.  We successfully managed two households for five weeks, on budget.  The drive from Richmond, Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee, went without a hitch, twice.

And then it fell apart.

The night we got back we assembled the furniture that the movers' delay hadn't left us time to assemble prior to the drive.  That's when I noticed that it was overly hot upstairs (I hadn't really been upstairs for any significant time up to that point).  So I found the upstairs thermostat and turned it on.

Bad move, apparently. The house's air conditioner stopped cooling the next day.  We called and got a service appointment, but the soonest that could happen was the following day.

The following day, the air conditioner guy showed up and said it was working just fine, we just needed a new (thirty dollar, ouch!) filter.  Then the refrigerator stopped working.  Then the dishwasher stopped holding water inside itself.  Then the washing machine started smelling like a dead mouse.

*sigh*

We replaced the filter in the A/C, and it worked for a day.  Then it stopped again.  Meanwhile the refrigerator guy came out to work on that unit.  He got it running again by defrosting the coils and ordered a replacement part, to be installed when it arrives.  The dishwasher guy ordered new gaskets.  The washing machine--well, my wife removed the dessicated remains that had apparently entered while it was being stored, ran a few cycles of bleached water through, and it seems to be just fine now.

As the long week finally ended, and I merrily departed work on Friday after a long day, I found that my tire was flat.  Somewhere along the drive it had picked up a screw and held it closely.

Wow.  Whaddaweek.  A friend of mine replied to my rather annoyed post on Facebook with "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger."  Yeah, I've used that phrase before on other people, and I agree with it in general, but right then I was a little bit tired of getting stronger.

I got up this morning, and first things first--I drove the car, on its doughnut spare, to the closest tire shop.

Sort of.

Actually, my lovely bride, sensing my overall "tired of putting up with crap"edness, did me the favor of looking up the closest tire shop.  She plugged that into her own GPS (we both call ours Bertha) and set off in the Jeep with me following.  Sure 'nuff, Bertha led us wrong.  Way wrong, in fact.  She led us up the road to where it passes over Interstate 40 and said turn right there, right in the middle of the dang overpass. 

Yeah--GPS's.  Don't trust 'em.  Luckily, we didn't.  We continued on to the next safe spot and discussed what to do.  There happened to be a Firestone across the street from there, and so we tried them.  No luck; they were booked up for the rest of the day (a fact attested to by the presence of what seemed to be the entirety of Memphis in their parking lot).

Disappointed and kind of hungry, we went to the second-closest tire shop, Gateway Tire.  Dropped the car off and drove around the corner to try a new (to us) Vietnamese restaurant. 

And that's when the day turned around.

The restaurant, Green Bamboo, was great.  Good food, good service, and all.  I left there full and happy, taste buds content to face the rest of the day.

By the time we finished lunch, the tire was repaired.  And back on the car rather than where I'd had it in the trunk, having been put on to replace the doughnut spare.  And which had also been put back where it goes.  And--get this--at no charge to me.  The guy at the counter smiled and said, "This one's on us."

Wow.  Holy crap.

Granted, a store that sells tires probably doesn't even notice the profit a tire repair brings.  I certainly could've afforded the normal repair cost, at that.  Yes, I found out from my neighbor that Gateway makes a policy of repairing a tire the first time "on them."  None of that mattered, really.  What really mattered to me was how that simple act spun my day completely around. 

How about if we all tried to do that?  If we just once a day, once a week, once a whatever, tried smiling at someone else and announcing that this time's on us?  Would that not make one heckuva difference in the world?

- TOSK

A Slacker Am I

"If we aren't failing, we aren't doing anything interesting." - Kristen Lamb

Just finished reading my daily dose of OPB's (Other Peoples' Blogs) and was struck by what I read in Ms. Lamb's commentary on her new book, self-publishing, and stuff.  I've never heard/read anyone compare self-publishing to herding crack-addicted chickens; I thought that feeling was unique to us college deans.  But I do see what she's talking about, having now dealt with the self-publishing process for five works (and, incidentally, you never stop dealing with it).

Anyway, I'm probably getting back in the swing of things after way too long a period of slack-ology.  Oh--by "things" I mean writing; I've been in the swing of working the day job and working on the house for a while.  But I haven't been writing.  You can probably tell that already; my last blog post was made on Monday, and prior to that it was a few more days back.  I'm two posts behind just for May, and with three posts on June 14th that makes me eleven posts behind for this month, which brings me to the nice round number of thirteen posts behind!

Eh, I'll catch up.

I did write some, creatively, last night.  It was only a few hundred words on my Spaceman Spiff--er, Professor Kinder (sorry, Calvin!)--story, but they were a few hundred good words.

Well, okay, honestly, the last few sucked.  But they'll be replaced tonight, trust me.

Problem was, I'd gotten hung up on details.  See, it's one thing to know where the eventual story is going.  The heroes get trapped and imprisoned by the bad guys, but then they escape and win the day!  (sounds like nearly every Star Trek episode, minus the part about Kirk getting it on with an alien girl, right?)  Problem is--how do they escape?  How in the heck do they escape, that is, given that they're imprisoned by a technically and physically superior race?  Hmm, didn't think much on that, and it stopped me cold last night.

Hmm, maybe if Cap'n Kirk talks the three-boobed green-skinned girl into releasing him in the name of love....  Oh, c'mon, Stephen--no, no.... *smack*

But I got it now.  Worked it out while I was driving to work this morning.

So tonight and this weekend, back to writing.

No, we're still not settled into our new house.  That saga is surely going to generate a whole string of blog posts once the plot arc is done.  For now, I'll give you the chapter headings:

• Furniture Proves Breaking Up Isn't Hard To Do, After All
• Air Conditioning Blows, Not Cool
• Dishwasher Washes The Floor, Too
• Refrigerator Prefers Room Temperature
• Flat-Screen TV: So Thin It Disappeared
• Tech Works For Half An Hour, Causes A/C To Work For Two Days
• Spiders Spiders Everywhere
• The Great Ant Visit of 2013
• Maybe They Should've Screwed The Light Fixture Up Differently

So.  Still writing that memoir, but overall it sounds like fun, right?

- TOSK

An Ending Point, Sort Of

Whew.  Move is done.  Family is back together under one roof, here in Memphis, with most of our stuff in one piece.  Found several companies to be incompetent.  Found a few to be awesome.  Got lots of blog fodder for the next several days.  My wife once again proved herself the strongest woman I've ever met.  Got lots of unpacking to do, but only after we've gotten some sleep for tonight.

I look forward to beginning the spinning of this tale.

- TOSK

A Tale of Two Companies

"Your goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary." - Sam Walton

"It is not the employer who pays the wages.  Employers only handle the money.  It is the customer who pays the wages." - Henry Ford

Customer service.  It's pretty easy to define, isn't it?  After all, we know what a customer is, and we know what service is.  Put the two words together, though, and some business people just completely forget them.

I had two completely opposite experiences today, and the lesson paints a stark picture of what a customer's takeaway from an exchange can be.

The first one was positive.  Very positive, in fact, and it started from a negative.  When I moved into the house we're leasing, the gas company guy couldn't get the water heater's pilot lit.  I called the property manager and he sent someone who once he finally made it to my place (he couldn't make it the first day because he had a court date, a bit of knowledge that left me a little concerned) replaced the thermo-doohickey-whidget.  Yay, I had hot water.

For a day.

I noticed it was out again and called the property manager again, and in the meanwhile he'd figured out that there was a home warranty in effect.  He called the proper company out, and they did what they needed to do to reset the system and relight the pilot.  Yay, I had hot water.

For a few days.  It went out early in the weekend.

I left a message over the weekend, and it took till today for the property manager to get back to me with the appropriate approval information.  The result is a few days of irritatingly chilly showers.  Thus, I was primed for a fight when the service company rep told me they couldn't have anybody out till tomorrow morning or afternoon.  I didn't get one, though.  She apologized for the schedule, put me on it when she could, and promised to see if they could get someone sooner.  She checked and there was a tech in my neighborhood, and he dropped by and got the water heater back up and running within minutes.

Happy Stephen.

It bears pointing out that I had no financial interest, personally, in the transaction; the payment is made by the warranty company to the service company.  This company is specified in the warranty document, so it's not like they needed to please me to keep doing the work.  They could've kept going with their normal scheduling procedure and faced no negative consequence to speak of, and yet instead somebody thought creatively and solved my problem.

Then there's my moving company.

They're already on my bad list.  We'd scheduled a pickup at the old address several weeks ago, with the pickup to occur on the Tuesday or Wednesday after Memorial Day.  They called me that Sunday asking if we could do Thursday instead; it was challenging, but we rearranged what we were doing the rest of the week and called back--yes, we'll do Thursday.  Didn't hear back, so we assumed Thursday was probably it since they'd told me they would call with a schedule once Dispatch had it figured out.  Then they called me Tuesday morning saying a truck was on its way and would be there in an hour.

Grrrr.  What's on first and Who's on second, and neither one is paying attention to the coach.

So then they called me yesterday saying they'd deliver my stuff today between nine and one.  Yay!  I can't get my work done while I'm waiting on our stuff, but at least I'll have furniture again.

When they hadn't shown up by one, though, I called to find out why.  "You did mean nine to one in this time zone, right?"  "The driver will call you right away," the service rep told me, and I believed it as I watched my phone not ring for an hour.  I called back, a little more perturbed this time, and asked her if "right away" meant something different where she was.  She put me on hold for nearly fifteen minutes.

When she got back to me it was to ask who called me yesterday.  Hell, I don't know.  It was a girl, I remember that.  Apparently there wasn't any record of the call, though, and unfortunately my delivery would take place on Thursday, not Tuesday.  So sorry.  See you on Thursday, though, and make sure you take another half-day off of work so you can be there when the truck arrives.

See the difference?  One company, the one I'm not paying anything to directly, responded to my need and went above and beyond to meet it.  The other company, the one I'm paying thousands of dollars to, gave me bad information and blew me off a couple of times when I was trying to check on it.

- TOSK

Popular Myths and Legends, Continued: USA, Japan

I remember growing up hearing about how those dastardly no-gooders over in Japan were either much better or much worse manufacturers than we were, and how in both cases it meant the end of the American Dream.  I mean, that's how it felt, with Japanese brands like Toyota, Datsun, Sony, and so on excelling in what used to be U.S.-dominated markets right here in River City.  Buy American! the cry arose, not so much because of any particularly clear knowledge of how the international import-export economy worked, but because by gosh we were Americans, and we were the best.

Indeed, it didn't matter if a Japanese-made car could run twice as long on less gas than the American car could, if it didn't have Ford or Chevy (or any other American brand, now--hey, don't hate on me for not listing all of them) on the back, it wasn't worth a hill of beans.  That's good ole' American pinto beans, for sure for sure.  With bacon.  And "tuhmater" sauce and just a bit of brown sugar.

(Ah, heck, now I'm hungry again.)

It was during this time that I heard one of the more interesting of urban legends.  It seemed, according to the story being told, that a town in Japan, anxious to be more accepted by Americans (and, we were sure, knowing that Americans only look at the 'made in' label when making purchasing decisions), decided to rename one of their towns "USA" in order to say truthfully that products made there had been "Made in USA."

Granted, had the deception been a real desire, they could've just put "Made in USA" labels on the products without renaming the town, but for an urban legend to prosper it needs a twist of the sinister, right?  Sinister is to urban legends what bacon is to beans, after all. 

The amusing part is that accepting that this could happen implies either labeling the entirety of the U.S. Customs force as a bunch of incompetent knuckleheads, or not knowing what the job of Customs is.  While I grant that there have been instances of sleepy Customs agents letting something past, by and large our friendly(ish) border agents are pretty good at making sure that incoming products meet labeling and other legal import requirements.

Granted, back then it wasn't possible to go online to look up the tourist sites in Japan, including this one for the Usa Shrine, a beautiful structure which is noted as a Japanese National Treasure and is considered one of the most significant Shinto shrines in the world.  Named after the town nearby, it was called the Usa jingu back when it was built in the early 8th Century, which does just happen to be a few years before Japanese companies started manufacturing electronics and cars for sale.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures, but Google Images does.  It's a beautiful shrine.  

So, like many other myths, this one bears a kernel of truth--that there really is a town named Usa in Japan--and is borne through the air on whispers of distrust for others. 

- TOSK

Myths and (Urban) Legends Example: Skim Milk Causes Fat Kids

A couple of days ago I wrote about health-related myths and urban legends.  It was a fun post to research, and a fun one to write as well.  I enjoyed watching the video by Tom Naughton, linked at the end of my post, quite a bit; not only did I learn a lot about different types of studies and different code words to look for in evaluating the study results, but I also found his sense of humor to be engaging.

Didn't you?

"Okay, I admit, I don't follow links from blogs very often," I can hear you saying.  That's okay; I don't either.  But please do, in this case--go back to the blog post I linked above, and down at the bottom follow the link to Naughton's video.  It's 46 minutes of goodness.  I'll wait; heck, I'll probably go enjoy it again myself in the meantime.

Okay, now that you're back, he makes some good points, doesn't he?  Butter, for example, might be relatively solid (though squishy, in my experience) at room temperature, but it's perfectly runny at artery temperature.  Bananas, meanwhile, are rather solid at artery temp.  Bananas bad, butter good.  See how cool science is when you really get into it?

And then there's that word "associated."  I hadn't thought much about it, but he's right.  Using the word "associated" to describe a statistically significant correlation (in other words, enough members of the population who have one thing also have another to satisfy statistical tests) is one thing, while using it to then suggest causation is another.  After all, having red hair is associated with sunburns, since people with red hair are also often fair-skinned, and people who are fair-skinned are more likely to get sunburned, but red hair neither causes nor is caused by sunburns.

So all that said, I was a little surprised to come across an example presented this morning, so soon after my own blog post.  And I wasn't even looking for it; rather, I was checking online to see the caloric difference between whole milk and 2% milk.

Here's a link to the blog over at NPR.  It suggests that, surprisingly enough, giving kids milk containing less fat makes them fatter.  The quoted researchers seem sincere enough in expressing their own surprise at the results.

Giggle, giggle, snort, snort.

I mean, c'mon, we all know that consuming things lower in fat are better for the weight conscious folks than consuming things higher in fat, right?  Or, um, do we?  Hopefully you paid attention to Naughton's video and glared at me just a little when I said that.  After all, basic nutritional science tell us that a human body needs to consume a certain--albeit low, for most of us hard-charging desk-jockies--amount of fat regularly in order to operate.  The more active, the more calories burnt, and thus the more fat needed.  The extremely active Eskimo people consume a great deal of fat, after all, and they're just fine.  So why would removing fat from an active kid's diet be a good thing?

Bottom line: are you really gonna tell me that skim milk causes more fat kids than whole or 2% milk does?  With a straight face, even?

I guess the two doctors from University of Virginia are.  Their study, or at least its abstract (a term used by academicians for "making a long story shorter but no more readable") is linked from the blog post.  Turns out they did a longitudinal study (a study in which the same population is checked over time) and found that the kids fed skim milk had more weight problems (defined as being overweight or obese) than those fed normal milk.  Yeah, there are a lot of numbers in the abstract, and as I've already pointed out on this blog, Americans in general don't know math.  But generally speaking, "p < .01" means that the probability of the hypothesis being true is less than 1%, which in turn means that the researcher is more than 99% certain the hypothesis (generally that there's no relationship between the variables) is false, which means they're 99% certain that there's a relationship between, in this case, kids who drink skim milk and kids who tend to be overweight.  Similarly, "p < .0001" means the researchers are 99.99% certain of their results.

See how easy that is?  The researchers are at least 99% certain that there is a statistical correlation between consumption of skim milk in the studied population (2-4 years old, diverse demographics) and weight issues.

So skim milk causes fat kids?  Really?

Let's think about it.  I'd love to see a study done on how many kids despise skim milk.  Hell, I do, and I'm not even a kid.  Skim milk is like watered down plaster, no offense intended to the skim cows.  But why on earth would parents, in the aggregate at least, want to feed their kid something that's fairly icky unless the kid is trending toward being overweight anyway?

In other words, sure, I'll buy that being overweight might cause skim milk consumption.  But I won't buy it going the opposite direction.  Sorry.

- TOSK

P.S. (caveats):

1. The researchers in question did, in fact, put in their conclusion what I said in my next to last paragraph.  But people didn't read to the conclusion in school, nor do we do so at work, and so seldom do we do so in the other parts of our lives either.  
2. I admit, I did not read the entire report of study.  I'm too cheap to pay for the download.  I'll bet most agencies reporting on the story are the same way.
3. No, skim cows are not used to make skim milk; centrifuges are.  Was fun to say, regardless. 

More Myths and (Urban) Legends

After writing about food yesterday, I ended up being hungry nearly all day.  Next topic, please....

While researching about food myths yesterday I came across a site that listed the "25 Most Popular Urban Legends."  Going back to the discussion of observational vs. clinical science in the video I linked yesterday, I have to wonder how the "List 25" site knew they were the most popular, rather than just popular ones that hit the author's radar, but regardless some of them are interesting to me since I, personally, held onto them tightly for a long while in my youth.

I acknowledge what snopes.com has to say about the titillating desire to see public figures as "not who they say they are," but that wasn't really why I bought into these myths.  I remember, back when I was young, how wonderful it felt to believe that people who were already pretty awesome could be heroes, too.  There were two separate myths whose bandwagons I recall leaping right onto:

• Mr. Rogers was a Navy SEAL who served heroically in Vietnam, and
• John Denver was a military sniper who served heroically in Vietnam.

Now, Fred Rogers, of the Mr. Rogers Neighborhood fame, did in fact once receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which you must admit sounds kinda like the Congressional Medal of Honor, the ultimate award for a military hero.  But--well, but it's not.  The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award the President can give, and unlike the Medal of Honor, which can only be awarded for valor in combat, the PMoF is awarded for "meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, or any other such and all that jazz."

Okay, I admit, I rephrased that last bit to make it easier to swallow.

The dates kinda sorta work out, ish.  Mr. Rogers was born in 1928, and the SEALs were formed in 1962 and first used in Vietnam in 1963.  Granted, one might imagine they'd initially go for younger men, since by that point a lot of military folks are winding down into less physically active parts of their careers, but there's no reason to believe a 34-year-old couldn't have made it. 

Of course, that suggests that the 34-year-old wasn't already doing other things.  1963 was a bit of a milepost year for Mr. Rogers.  That was the year he graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and subsequently packed his bags to head to Toronto (yes, Canada--not really a participant in the Vietnam War) to do the very first few years of Mister Rogers on a broadcast network.  Kind of fortunately for us, that show didn't last, but he learned what he needed to and three years later moved the show to WQED in Pittsburgh, and then two years later to PBS, and the rest, as they so annoyingly say, is history: four Emmys, a Peabody, a Lifetime Achievement award, the afore-mentioned PMoF, and even an asteroid named after him.  Not bad for a non-Navy-SEAL, eh?

Meanwhile, the age thing works much better for John Denver, who was born in 1943 and therefore could easily have been a young, strapping and eager 19-year-old when the SEALs were formed.  But the legend doesn't have him as a SEAL; what I've heard places him as an Army sniper.  Eh, a hero's a hero, right?

There's a little more of a military bent to Denver's case, too--while Fred Rogers probably never, ever, considered the military as a career, Denver wanted to follow his dad through a career in the Air Force as a pilot.  He was turned down, though, due to his eyesight--as was I, once upon a time (the only reason I add that is to note that I have something in common with John Denver). 

Regardless, in the early years of Vietnam, Denver was comfortably (ish) ensconced in college at Texas Tech School of Engineering in Lubbock.  At about the same time the Navy SEALs were leaping to service over there, Denver decided (and rightfully so, in his case) that he could do better for himself as a singer than as an architect, and so he dropped out, moved to Los Angeles, and joined a group.  Then, at the same time the war was peaking and winding down (1968-1969) Denver reached a point where he'd learned what he needed to about the music business, and so it was 1969 when he broke away from his group and released Rhymes and Reasons.  And the rest, as they say, is....

Nah, I'm not gonna say it.

Have a great Memorial Day.

- TOSK