Crunchy Phone

Praline: Lark's vomit?

Milton: Correct.

Praline: Well it don't say nothing about that here.

Milton: Oh yes it does, on the bottom of the box, after monosodium glutamate.

Praline: (looking) Well I hardly think this is good enough. I think it would be more appropriate if the box bore a large red label, “WARNING, LARK’S VOMIT.”

Milton: Our sales would plummet.

Crunchy Frog Sketch, Monty Python

Why do we put up with this?

Before mobile phones, cell phones, and smart phones, a telephone was a heavy device that sat on a counter or was mounted to a wall, usually in the kitchen or living room. It never, ever broke down. It worked even if the power went out. And not getting coverage meant there were no telephone poles in your neighborhood; you wouldn’t have to hold your phone up like an Olympic Torch and spin around waiting for coverage.

Now we have phones which are really computers. They browse the web, run a million different apps, take increasingly higher and higher resolution photographs, and even make calls. But there are tradeoffs for all these conveniences. The tradeoffs are things like the incomprehensible service restrictions, charges that change depending on your use and where you are when you use it, having no service from one place to another, and batteries that run out.

We wanted to get phones for our two boys, just for emergencies. We purchased two AT&T Go phones and $25 refill cards, that boasted “Unlimited talk, text &web; Nationwide.” We purchase a new refill card for one of the phones the other day but when I tried to load it, I got the message, “Sim not provisioned MM #2.”

I called AT&T and dutifully recited the above message. That message, as it turns out, means the SIM card in the phone has expired. When this happens you can no longer add minutes to the phone and must go out and purchase a new SIM card; at $25. That error message should read, “Phone is broken, go buy new stuff.” I’m beginning to think that either AT&T or I don’t understand the meaning of “unlimited.”

The phone when we purchased it only cost $15 and it came with this SIM card. The customer service rep asked me, “Did you read all the paperwork that came with the phone?” I said I didn’t and added that I doubted if anyone has read that small print, going all the way back to when the second “T” in AT&T stood for telegraph. If I had to guess, there is probably a line of text buried in that literature that says something like, “You’ll have to buy a new SIM card in awhile because this phone expires.” Like the avian vomit in the sketch above, the customer would be better served if it said that on the front of the phone, but AT&T's sales would probably take a hit.

Maybe it one of those you-get-what-you-pay-for things. Maybe spending $15 every couple of months – plus $25 for the refills – isn’t that big a deal. But I don’t know. Why can’t we just get a phone that works, continues to work, for X dollars a month? Maybe we can. To be perfectly honest we may be able to, but I find when I talk to a sales person about mobile phones, my mind starts to wander after about a minute or so and his/her droning on starts putting me in a coma.

Shingled White Male

An open letter to the makers or Tylenol:

Dear Sirs,

Your product does not work. It does not relieve the simplest of discomfort not to mention outright pain. It does nothing for headaches, sore muscles, joint pain, bumps or bruises, not to mention the pain associated with shingles for which your snake oil was prescribed to me. I was even given the version that is mixed with codeine which seemed like surrender on your part because isn’t codeine a pain reliever in its own right? But it matters not; it didn’t work either.

Congratulations on producing a product that does not work yet is recommended by medical professionals that must number in the millions. Kudos to your staff of lying-ass sales people and marketing pukes for fostering upon those of us who actually could use some relief something that works less often than a placebo. You must be very proud.

You guys are brilliant for making something that not only does not produce the results promised, but also something that you can never be called on for the obvious fakery of it all. Imagine if you produced airplanes that didn’t fly or fire extinguishers that didn’t put out fires. You’d be out of business in minutes and maybe even face jail time.

Well done and go to hell.

We thought it was poison oak. After all, about a week before we had been staying at a hotel on the Merced River just outside the Highway 140 entrance to Yosemite, and I’ll admit I went off the path once or twice during those two days, and even though poison oak bushes are leafless in January, I’ve caught it from the branches alone before. So Andrea put Biofreeze on the blisters/bumps sprinkled along the part in my hair, and I fully expected them to be just a memory in no time.

Then new ones showed up on the left side of my face. I remember reading a Sherlock Holmes story years ago where the detective said that the Latin root word for sinister (sinistra) also meant left, so it makes sense that the left side of my noodle would be the one to betray me.

The doctor introduced himself and before I could reply he said, “Shingles.” He prescribed ointment, anti-viral pills, and the aforementioned Tylenol with codeine, and said something about a “Month of Misery.” Then he sent me to an opthamologist who prescribed drops for my left eye.

The first week was the worst. I was exhausted all the time, the sun had become a hated enemy, and the “sinister” side of my face looked as if I had been bird hunting with Dick Cheney maybe a week before.

Nighttime is the worst of the worst. The Phanom-of-the-Opera affected area from the top of my scalp, down the left side of my face to just under my eye, pulses between pain, numbness, and itching if you can believe that. It’s just enough of each to keep me awake; the “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself” of symptoms.

2012 actually started out pretty good. I had gone to City College to see what the quickest path to a degree was with the courses I’d already taken back when my future was still my future and Stevie Ray Vaughn hadn’t gotten on that helicopter. It turned out that I only needed four lousy classes to get an AA in English. Not an MBA from Harvard but much, much more than nothing to me. I would have to sit in though since it was late in the process an hope there was room to add. I sat in on an American Lit class during the day and a Creative Writing class at night. When the shingles hit, I couldn’t attend either so now I’ll have to wait until summer session.

A week later I had the best job interview since perhaps September. I never got a call back and if I did, I couldn’t have gone in for maybe two weeks, probably longer.

As if the 6 months of unemployment didn’t put a strain on my most important relationship, now my “not getting any better” added pressure to that strain. Before I just wasn’t a provider now I’m a take-away-er. Tempers are shorter, my interest in pretty much everything is dulled, and I’ve applied for a total of three jobs since the start of the year, whereas I applied for nearly 200 in the proceeding five months.

An open letter to God, or whomever:

To Whom It May Concern,

WTF?

Mapped

“I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.”
― Steven Wright (Not that one)

I was once told that the difference between a map and chart is; maps are something you look at, charts are something you work on. That obviously came from someone with campfire, canteen, and cot firmly in the chart camp. I spent a few years “working” on charts, manipulating compasses, dividers and parallel rulers, learning dead reckoning, and counting flashing lights on lighthouses and buoys. I enjoyed predicting when we would be here or there and being right. I always said that if I ever got a tattoo it would be of a compass rose. I ended up not getting any tattoo but their popularity has skyrocketed so maybe it’s not too late.

But getting back to maps and their “use,” I read an article today on the “Best of Show” award at the annual meeting of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. I know most of you want to wait for the primetime television broadcast hosted by Ricky Gervais so I’ll understand if you stop reading now. For those of you who don’t mind spoilers, the winner this year was a map of the United States from Imus Geographics of Eugene Oregon. Imus Geographics employee roll consists of a single man named David Imus and he drew the winner on a computer, by hand. I know, I know. How does one draw by hand on a computer? Well, Mr. Imus did it without using any computer assistance software. He just picked fonts, selected what would be left out and what would be put in, and did it all in just under 6,000 hours over a two year period.

What sets his map apart from entries by the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Census Bureau is his abandonment of tinting the states different colors and instead putting thick, green lines along their borders, his use of colors to show forestation and population centers, green and yellow respectively, and relief shading to indicate terrain. His map while still functional comes across as more a piece of art than a reference tool. He shores up the argument that charts are for working and maps are for looking at, and if you enjoy looking at maps, his will thrill you.

As I look at the map from far away, the population centers of America pop out at me like I’ve never noticed before; the megalopolis from New York to Washington, the constellation-like smattering from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, the lonely dot of Denver, and two big blobs of California. You can see the history of our expansion west and the leapfrog to the West Coast. I became aware of the green areas only when I’ve stopped concentrating on those cities and take another 30-thousand-foot view; a wide swath from Maine to East Texas, a crown across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and a long wax dripping from Seattle that splits in two at the north end of the San Joaquin Valley. And I got all that from the small representation on the Internet. What this map must look like in person.

Last week I used the GPS on my phone (amazing right?), to find not the quickest but the least stressful way through Los Angeles from San Diego. I found it by the way, with help from my brother-in-law. Here’s a hint, it goes through Pasadena. But the GPS while incredibly useful and functional will never be mistaken for art, even if I switch the pleasant woman’s voice to French. (prenez l'ouest d'autoroute de colline à Pasadena?) The GPS is like spell check in its ability to hide all but the exact information I need while using it, and we have lost something in that efficiency. In the old days if you needed to find out how to spell a word you’d look it up in a dictionary, and find half a dozen other words that were new to you on the way. Also in the old days, you’d look up a place on a paper map, and find half a dozen other places you’d never heard of around it. Maybe even visit one or two.

Some day, when I have something that might be considered a den, I hope to get a copy of Mr. Imus’ map and display it where I can look at both closely and from across the room. Where I can run my fingers along the crooked border from San Diego to Port Isabel, Texas, and the razor-straight border from Bellingham, Washington to Roseau, Minnesota. I hope that map will prompt me to look up night life in Port Isabel or find out how a town Minnesota got the name Roseau.

My parallel rulers and dividers have long ago been relegated to a box somewhere and I don’t remember the cadence of buoy lights, but maybe someday I’ll have this beautiful map and a compass under the skin on my arm to complement it.

Six Blade Knife / Two Edge Sword

"Took a stone from my soul when I was lame."

Dire Straits, Six Blade Knife

Back in the very early eighties I had a cassette of Dire Straits 1978 debut album; Dire Straits. It’s the one with Sultans of Swing on it. I played that cassette in my Walkman until it wore out, then I bought another and sent it, via that same Walkman plus a cassette player in my truck, to the same fate. When I moved to a place where I had a turn table, I bought the LP. These days, when I clean the kitchen or fold laundry and I need to create a playlist on Spotify or build a station on Slacker or Pandora I often start with the song Six Blade Knife from that album to set the tone.

I was the only one of my circle of friends back then who listened to them, and I felt very protective of “my band.” But when their album Brothers in Arms came out in 1985, and with it the astronomically popular single Money for Nothing, it seemed everyone bought that album, cassette, or newfangled compact disc. In fact, Brothers in Arms was one of the first albums recorded digitally when most other bands were still recording in analog. Suddenly everyone was a Dire Straits fan. I tried to explain how I’d been listening to them for years and how these newcomers hadn’t “earned” the right to enjoy what a guitarist friend of mine once described as the, “blues guitar on ludes” craftsmanship of lead guitarist Mark Knopfler.

I have since abandoned my crusade to enlighten others as to my superior appreciation of the band. Because of the popularity of Brothers in Arms, Mr. Knopfler and the rest of Dire Straits have amassed enough wealth to free themselves up to produce whatever kind of music they want, without the worry of whether it is “marketable” or not, which should be the way all artists create, but more often than not, it is not. Other people’s appreciation, celebration, or elucidation of the band doesn’t change my enjoyment of them one whit, and with that freedom afforded to those musicians comes superior music/art. It’s win, win.

This time of year certain TV pundits or even politicians are ranting about what they describe as the War on Christmas. They are upset about retailers using phrases like Happy Holidays in their commercials, banners, flyers, and other marketing material instead of Merry Christmas. They are offended when governors from the other end of the political spectrum speak of “tree-lighting” ceremonies without the word Christmas preceding it. They suggest that there is a conspiracy to rid the holiday season of all Christian tradition and references, and to eventually turn the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years, and our fair nation into a secular paradise.

Businesses use Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas to maximize the reach of their advertising dollar. Tree-lighting ceremonies are worded in that manner as a way of inclusion; of inviting all members of the community to participate. There are people who would love to see this country as completely secular, but they are not the people who make the decisions about TV commercials for an oak furniture store’s “Holiday Sales” or who write copy for tree-lighting ceremonies at state capitols.

No one is preventing those who see the birth of Jesus as the “reason for the season” from celebrating in that exact fashion. But are those folks trying to prevent those who don’t subscribe to the celebration of a saviors birth during December but instead just give presents, hold dinner parties, and put up lights from celebrating in that manner? Is that a two-edged sword?

There is also the idea that some people who attend church, service, or mass every Sunday complain about the people called CEOs (Christmas and Easter Only) showing up and crowding their parking lots and pews a couple of times a year. Perhaps they don’t feel these CEOs have “earned” the right to the choice seats at what they see as the most important services of the year, just like I didn’t think newcomers to Dire Straits earned the right to be a fan back in ’85.

I can’t see the harm in allowing some people to only attend church twice a year. For those two days are not the collection plates fuller, is not the message reaching more ears? Can that be anything but a good thing in the steady church-goer’s eyes?

My Precious

About a week and a half ago, someone paid 2.16 million dollars for a comic book. It wasn’t as if this comic book was gold plated, held the cure for baldness, and rested on a bed of Kardashians; instead it was a simple, newspaper quality, first issue of Action Comics from 1938, originally selling for a dime. It boasted within, the first appearance of Superman. If you want to, you can read it here. For free.

The buyer has chosen to remain anonymous, but I don’t care to know the identity of the buyer anyway; I would just like to know where he lives.

I’d like to know where he lives because there must be no homeless in his town making him obviously unaware that homeless people exist and that ignorance has freed him up to spend millions on something that can’t feed him, house him, or warm him at night. His village must also have no food banks or full food banks, all the children in his cozy hamlet have got to all have warm coats and sturdy shoes, every library is certainly stocked to the ceiling with books, and music and art programs must be bulging with funds at every school. The local university is surely turning away offers of scholarships in this man’s burg, and women’s shelters, mental health institutions, and playgrounds are all modern, clean, and empty. Unemployment in this Bedford Falls of the 21^st Century must be at absolute zero because this man chose to “invest” his many millions in a risky venture that if it profits at all, it will only profit him.

What a wonderful municipality this must be. Why, everything must be so perfect there to allow such Caligula-esque spending, it’s as if Superman was real and he has come down from Heaven and made the world right. Please, please, please tell me not who he is, but where he is. It’s certainly not Los Angeles or San Francisco because I’ve been to both and neither meet the criteria of the previous paragraph, it can’t be New York or Chicago, and Atlanta (traffic) and New Orleans (hurricane devastation) are obviously out. Could it be San Antonio, Texas? I hear that river walk is pretty nice. What about Utopia, Texas, it has the right name? Maybe it’s Louisville, CO; voted 2011’s Most Livable City. Perhaps it’s right in my neck of the country like Tulare, Visalia, or Bakersfield.

I have to know where a man can feel good at spending what amounts to a good yearly salary of 50 families for…well for nothing really.

What's the Catch

Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

-Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Here’s a new one for you. We all know that employers, in their job postings, will put qualifications like specific experience, specific education, sometimes “experience in lieu of education,” and catch phrases like, “team player, go-getter,” and “motivated individual.” Now the newest must-have qualification showing up on job postings is, “currently employed.” Companies, fearing that a worker’s skills will deteriorate while off the job, only want people who are working to apply for the jobs they post. With the unemployment rate in California at 11.7 percent as of October, that means that these employers are discriminating against over 2 million people. The 2011 job hunting Catch-22; if you want a job you have to have a job.

And what does that say about the applicants? That while employed, they are browsing Monster.com for another job? What’s to stop them from doing the same thing after they get hired by Mr. Must-Be-Working-To-Work-Here? And at the next place, and the next place, and so on?

In New Jersey it is illegal to post a job ad that requires applicants be currently employed. There are movements in other states to make it illegal there too. In California, Assemblyman Michael Allen, a Democrat from Santa Rosa is so upset he is going to introduce legislation that parrots the New Jersey law; but not until January when the legislature comes back from Christmas break. (Meanwhile, the Christmas break of the unemployed will be considerably longer.)

Until then, people who are unemployed cannot apply for some jobs, but if they are employed then they can apply for those jobs, but they wouldn’t need to apply for jobs because they have jobs, but since they have jobs they can apply for those jobs. Can you hear Yossarian whistling?

I suppose Mr. Allen is sincere in his attempt to protect the unemployed job seeker, but as far as I’m concerned, he needn’t bother. If it becomes against the law to “post” the requirement that an applicant be employed, the employers will just leave that out of their postings. Then behind the closed doors of their HR departments, they would still be free to make their hiring decisions in any manner that they fancy. Not working, not considered. Is that different than round-filing a person’s application because of race, sex, age, or religious belief?

I haven’t configured a router, switch, or server in five months but if you sit me down in front of one today I’d still be able to do it. In a year? Probably. In five years? Who knows? Who knows how to know? Is there some kind of algorithm out there that you can plug in the months out of work and get a chart that tracks the degradation of skills? Probably. Is it accurate? It doesn’t have to be. HR managers just have to believe it is. Maybe I should write a program that does that. If I put some bright colors in the graphs, most managers and vice presidents I've met would just about pee their pants to look at them.

I’d laugh but people might think I was as crazy as a B-25 pilot who wants to continue to fly missions.

Call Me Sunday

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room."
-Raymond Chandler

Dream job three; writing pulpy detective novels.

Of course I’ve read the works of Dashiell Hammett and James Elroy and I’ve seen enough film noir to get the gist of how a successful, fictional detective behaves, so to create a good one I’d need certain character traits.

He needs to have a drinking problem. Not a beer or wine drinking problem but hard liquor drinking problem like bourbon or scotch, or Nyquil. A gambling problem can be used as a substitute but that’s harder to feed seeing as how bars and liquor stores can be found on nearly as many street corners as people spinning signs that advertise “We Buy Gold!” or “Oak Furniture Liquidation,” whereas casinos and bookies require a little more work to root out. Although I suppose a good detective shouldn’t have too much trouble locating either of those.

He’ll need to have a whip smart, young, tight-skirt-wearing, brunette, girl Friday, who is pinning for his affections. She needs to have an innocent name like Annabelle or Hedwig, but have a less than innocent side to which he is blind. She needs to be able to do crack research, provide bail, and deliver coffee and aspirin at the drop of a hat. Oh, He’ll need a hat too.

His cases will have to either have a client who is a, or involves a femme fatale. This woman needs to be mysterious, ooze a cocktail of sexual tension and indifference, sport either a large hat or a shock of hair covering one eye, smoke almost continuously, and deposit her fingerprints on murder weapons and doorknobs at crime scenes or leave the aroma of her distinctive perfume at these same locations. Wine glasses with her lipstick turning up in the same room with dead bodies wouldn’t hurt either. She should be blonde (which is why his assistant needs to be a brunette). A redhead can be substituted for the femme fatale but not for the assistant, unless the assistant has freckles. When he first meets her the running dialog in his head should say something like, “I tried to pay her as little attention as possible but with those porcelain legs, those red lips, and that silver .38 cal police special in her hands, she was about as easy to ignore as a trombone player in Bible class.”

He’ll need a longtime friend who can be counted on to provide information that the police, FBI, or Scotland Yard couldn’t unearth in a million years with a million shovels. He can be a bartender, former partner, obscure family member, or run a diner. His drinking problem should be worse than my detective’s and he should always need rent money or “just a few bucks to get by.” Occasionally he should take over for my guy on stakeouts or following leads. If he ever is assigned to follow the femme fatale, he should either end up discovering she is lying about everything she has told him or end up dead.

My detective will need an office in an old building on the rundown side of town. It should be upstairs, no elevator, and have a door with a semi-opaque window through which he can only discern the silhouettes of anyone in his lobby. The furniture should be wood, secondhand, and uncomfortable. No air conditioning but instead an oscillating fan that moves with the speed of a man driving to the dentist, and a pulsing, red neon sign just outside the window over the large sofa where he sleeps (passes out) most nights. His ink blotter will have nothing hidden under it but everyone else’s will hide case-turning clues. The bottom right drawer of his desk should contain two dirty tumblers and that bottle of bourbon or scotch. The bottom left drawer should be stuck closed.

There should be goons. Big guys with high testosterone levels and low IQs. They should work for the femme fatale’s husband, boyfriend, or employer. He should meet them when he’s yanked off the street and stuffed between them into the back seat of a large, dark, American car. After delivering a message/beating from their boss, they should dump him in an alley or down by the harbor where his assistant or that longtime friend should find him, take him back to his office, and patch him up; all the while lecturing him on his line of work. Even though they were born and raised in the United States, they should speak English like it’s a second language. Saying things like, “I should ought to have knowed.”

When he dispatches a bad guy by either getting the drop on him or tossing him off a building, he’ll need to deliver a proper catch phrase. I’m thinking of, “That’s going on my resume.” He’ll seldom carry a gun but when he does it will not be something modern and dependable like The Sig Sauer P290 Two-Tone sub-compact 9MM, with integrated laser module and removable grips. He’d have the Browning M1911 .45 instead. It’s square, clunky, and not particularly accurate but it’s loud enough to garner the most jaded denizen of the lower parts of town’s attention, and if you happen to hit your target it does a lot of damage. He will constantly have it taken from him before he gets a shot off.

He’d also need something to set him apart; a quirk that in turn makes him both distinctive and slightly snarky. Perhaps he could quote Shakespeare, live on an old tugboat in Oxnard, or always be popping junior mints in his mouth, or all three.

He’d have to work in Los Angeles. Although it’s the last place I’d choose to live in California, I must admit the best detective stories, both book and film, are set there. William Faulkner called it, “The plastic asshole of the world.” Talk about your ringing endorsements. Los Angeles seems like a city where the majority of the population just ended up; gathered from the rest of the country, pressed and pushed out of Mr. Faulkner’s orifice of choice until they found themselves at the edge of the continent, stuck against the waves without means of surmounting them, and no desire to turn around. Once those people came to grips with their plight, they started figuring out ways to get by. Some do honestly and others not so much. My detective would protect the former from the latter.

I’ll need proper and attention getting titles. I looked up the top 100 crime novels to see what the titles have in common. Forty five of the 100 start with the word “the” (The Third Man, The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, etc..) so that will have to be in there. Eighteen either have the words dead or death, or a reference to it like The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, or Game, Set & Match, so a reference to death needs to be included. Thirteen mention a woman’s name or a reference to sexual desire so add that to the pot. Eleven have some variation of “man” in the title if you include postman, policeman, and Chinaman, so “man” is in. So I plug all this information into the detective story name generator (The, woman’s name, death, man) and get the title: The Madonna Murder Man. Yuck. Maybe I’ll just give the book an incredibly obscure title to get people’s attention, like writer Paul Gosling did when he wrote a book that made the 100 list titled, “The Running Duck.”

Finally my detective will need a name. Days of the week make good names but Monday played for the Hated dodgers, the actress Tuesday Weld – who would make a great girl Friday if she dyed her hair – has that day, Wednesday is taken by the charming girl from the Adams Family, Thursday is brilliantly used in Jasper Fforde’s work, and Friday is already taken by Dragnet’s Joe. That leaves Saturday and Sunday. Saturday seems a little too cheery for a detective so I’m stuck with Sunday. I don’t know if Sunday would be his first or last name so maybe I should go with a single name, like Cher, Sting, or God.

Here is the probable first sentence of The Madonna Murder Man, “It was a hot, filthy, and miserable Sunday in Los Angeles, and so was I.”