CSotD: Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight
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There’s plenty of politics, so we’ll do comedy instead.
The woman in Batch Rejection echoes my thoughts even without the Doge Boys penetrating government sites. My computer continually pesters me to put everything up in the Cloud, and even though I don’t, I’ll occasionally start to pay for something and discover they know my credit card number.
It’s not that you can’t remain private. It’s that privacy should be the default, and it’s not.
I get some comfort from TurboTax emails telling me they can access my W2 and do my taxes, because I haven’t had a W2 in 16 years, so they obviously don’t know everything. But still.
Politics is hard to avoid. Pearls touches on the decline of local news coverage, a business item that has strong political ramifications.
We talk about the decline of newspapers, and that’s a large part of it. When I was a reporter, our newsroom staff was more than double what it is today, so I could spend a day hanging out with Geraldine Ferraro if she came to town or drilling down on cross-border shopping trends (Gerry was more fun).
Now short-staffed reporters leap from story to story and never get more than ankle-deep in anything.
Radio is worse. The night we went to war with Iraq (the first time), younger son had a hockey game, so I went to the car between periods to see what was going on. But it was futile: There was absolutely no live news on the dial. Even NPR was running regular taped programming.
They speak of “news deserts” in rural America, but the whole country is becoming a news desert, and now moreso if anyone dares say “Gulf of Mexico” instead of “Gulf of Dear Leader.”
There’s no escape anymore, either. I’m with Katy in thinking it would be nice to work from home if home were under a palm tree, but its not gonna happen on Social Security and my meagre earnings from this blog.
Granted, it’s no surprise that living in a Polynesian paradise is expensive. But a decade ago, you could find some isolated rural community and settle into a cheap house and a reasonable cost-of-living.
Somehow, prices have equalized across the nation and, while it’s still ridiculously out of the question to move to Southern California, “affordable housing” is unaffordable nearly everywhere for a lot of people.
Woody’s advice no longer applies: If you ain’t got the Do-Re-Mi, boys, you can’t even go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee anymore.
Fortunately, I don’t mind winter. I like it less the older I get, but the older I get the faster time flies and it’ll be over soon enough. Best of all, the landlord hires a plowman and all I have to shovel is the three steps down to the driveway.
But Caulfield reminded me of the farmhouse I rented in Maine, which for some inexplicable reason had its door on the side of the building under the slope of the roof.
This was what I came home to one February evening after work. The door is under there, but you can see a path off to the right because there was a backdoor on the sensible side of the house. One learns to adapt, and not to complain, because the standard reply up there is “Wall, yuh live in Maine …”
I loved Maine, but didn’t get a lot of sympathy from those droll Yankees. In fact, I covered a major housefire back then on this week, and I worried that all the volunteers would be off in Orlando for the break. But there was a full contingent of firefighters, because they were using the week off to enjoy snowmobiling and skating and skiing.
On accounta they lived in Maine.
I also covered an ice-fishing tournament in Industry, Maine, on a lake with a diner at one end, from which they were running out pizzas on snowmobiles to the fishers’ shanties, which were insulated, lit and heated, and those fisherpeople were pulling up the biggest trout I’ve ever seen in my life.
Jef Mallett is a Michigander, so I suspect he’s pulling our legs with this one, though I’ve also seen ice fishing on Lake Champlain where the quest was to get buckets full of perch so tiny that they used maggots for bait.
Perch are good eating but you’d need to be a watchmaker to clean fish that size. That ice-fishing I don’t get.
Bub must be a country boy, because you have to take that thing about a tree falling in the forest with a very large grain of salt. Even if it’s rephrased to a tree falling in the desert, there’s somebody to hear it.
Anthropocentric is a word, and that’s what it is: Anthropocentric. Even a tree that fell in Antarctica would be heard by the penguins and the midges there, unless it was way inland, at which point its taproot would have quite a challenge getting down to dirt.
In my first metaphysics class, the professor held out his pen and asked, if he let it go, would it fall to the table? I wanted to pass the course, so I didn’t invite him to put money on it.
I had my annual physical Tuesday and the nurse did my blood pressure by hand, which surprised me. Elder son has done some hospital teaching and finds that there are a lot of medical folks who don’t know how the old-school method actually works. They can do it, but they don’t necessarily understand the biological principles.
This Gen-Z nurse not only knew what he was measuring but said he thinks the machines take too long. I guess I was experiencing artisanal health care!
Almost all my girlfriends were rescues, though none of them found me to be their forever home. I suppose I did more fostering than actual rescuing.
And I suppose that, as a rescue myself, I required patience and a little retraining, since I’d been harshly treated.
The good thing about rescues is that they are grateful and affectionate, though, as she remarked in 2002, Janis apparently felt that way about puppies, too:
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