goodbye twenty teens

Today is the last day of the decade. Some call the decade the twenty tens and equally some call it the twenty teens. I think the latter is the more accurate because it describes all the years whereas the first one only describes the starting year.

The most important decade milestone for me was the birth of my three children, in 2012, 2016, and 2019. I started the decade wondering and worrying whether I could become pregnant. I ended the decade getting a tubal cauterization so I couldn't get pregnant again.

This blog has been something of a milestone, too. I've published an entry every single day of the twenty teens decade. At the start of the decade, the blog was a little more than two years old with some eight hundred entries. Now more than twelve years on, I've made over four thousand entries.

Have a great new year's eve tonight. And remember my motto: if you can't be good, be careful.

the death star's trash compactor

On their website's front page, McSweeney's magazine is featuring a link to their 2002 article called "On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor." This piece, of course, is talking about the trash smashing scene in the original Star Wars movie.

The article's writer lists nine reasons why that scene is implausible. I've always thought that scene was unbelievable and arguably the weakest in the movie but for two reasons he doesn't list.

First, Luke and his cohorts are able to save themselves by using several discarded poles to keep from being flattened. But why would anyone have thrown such objects in a trash compactor given how they so easily muck up the works? That would be like throwing away big steel serving spoons in a home compactor. You know you'd probably break the thing.

And second, why is there so much liquid in the compactor, which really becomes noticeable once the thing is operating? You pour liquids down the drain and toss solids in a compactor. As everyone knows, liquids can't be compacted, so why would anyone put them in there?

IMHO, that story beat would've been a lot more exciting if they had Luke and the gang escaping into some kind of chute, only to realize it sucks them toward a futuristic plasma incinerator. Only by sheer brilliance and pluck are they able to save themselves, with maybe a bit of wookie fur scorching in the process.

cinema barf

In his column last week, writer Joe Queenan laments what he perceives as an increase in on-screen barfing in movies as of late. Apparently such a trend turns his stomach.

In all honesty, I think he's seeing an uptick where there isn't one. People have been blowing chunks in movies and on TV for as long as I can remember. I don't find it particularly disgusting. The grossest part of puking, IMHO, is the stench, not the sight of puke itself.

I'm also wondering if he lives a somewhat sheltered life. Queenan is nearly seventy. It's a long time since he's had small children under his roof.

When you're a woman who recently went through several pregnancies and takes care of babies and children, you're used to seeing puke. Your biggest concern is not looking at it or smelling it but how to clean it up quickly and efficiently.

You're so used to puke that you carry an extra outfit for both your baby or child and yourself in your car in case you need a quick wardrobe change so as not to wear vomit-smeared clothes.

And a final note, Queenan incorrectly identifies The Exorcist as the epitome of cinematic barfing. The truly greatest, most prolific, most over-the-top vomiting moment in celluloid is found in the scene with Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Creosote sprays a restaurant, fellow diners, the staff, and himself with gallon upon gallon of puke.

And then promptly explodes.

skateboarding crimes

A man and woman in Louisiana are facing up to fifteen years in prison because the woman filmed the man skateboarding on a nearly empty Interstate bridge. The pair were arrested after posting the video online.

Now I'm no lawyer, but I have to think the case against the woman is very weak. She never left the vehicle and only filmed the stunt. I would think she could make some kind of First Amendment argument here,

The man, however, is in deeper shit. With that said, unless the pair confessed, how can prosecutors prove the arrested man is the one in the video, because his features are not identifiable. He's filmed mostly from the back. Posting online is not concrete proof, really, of anything.

All of the above notwithstanding, even if it's an absolutely airtight case, IMHO it's wrong to send the pair to prison. Give them a thousand or more hours a piece of community service.

That's a penalty that will cost the taxpayers almost nothing and not turn two silly people into hardened criminals.

a most special snowflake

Somewhere in the middle of a recent Fresh Air episode about the best movies and TV shows of 2019, the host Terry Gross mentioned that the actor Adam Driver walked out in the middle of her interview with him.

I had not heard anything about this, so off to Google I went and learned that Driver fled the interview when a clip was played back of one of his performances.

Gross knew in advance of the interview that Driver had a phobia about hearing and seeing his own performance, so before the audio clip was played, he was given the chance to take off his headphones so he wouldn't hear it. Nonetheless, that somehow ruffled his feathers so much that he had to bolt.

Pardon me for being blunt but what an asshole.

You melted down simply because other people would be hearing your performance that you did not yourself have to hear? What do you think people are doing when they see you on screen — they're covering their ears and closing their eyes?

I have no patience for fools and prima donnas. Quite honestly I never thought that much of Driver's acting work but now I think even less of him.

You can't be your best as an actor if you're not willing to watch dailies and rough cuts of your performance. You can't provide notes to the director to help shape the finished product.

Driver needs to put on his big boy pants and get himself to therapy. I predict things will not end well for him if he doesn't get himself under control.

the joy of box

Our youngest is nearly nine months old now, which is still too young to understand what Christmas is all about. At the same time, he's active and inquisitive and, before Christmas arrived, I suspected he'd like to open presents.

Like I had done for our middle son, who was about nine months old at his first Christmas, I wrapped boxes and lids separately so they would be easier to open.

Needless to say, as it turned out, he has enjoyed opening and reopening his gift boxes to see what's inside. It's like a game with him, even though he surely knows what will be inside. He opens the box, looks inside, and laughs and laughs,

If you take the gift out, he stuffs it back in the box and then tries, not always successfully, to put the lid back on. Once that's done, he breaks into a big smile, then pulls off the top again to see what he just put inside.

Little innocent joys like this are what make children wonderful. Before I had children, I couldn't imagine being so entertained watching a child do this. Now that I have my own brood, I can't imagine what life would be like without them.

merry, merry christmas!

Merry Christmas to all you out there in internet land. I hope your holiday is everything you wish it to be.

We will be having the usual morning at home with the boys and then afternoon and evening at my inlaws with a sleep-over into Boxing Day. It's wonderful to have married into a big, loving, happy, sharing, and caring family.

Today is also our eleventh wedding anniversary. We never do anything special because it's already a holiday but it nonetheless makes for an extra special day. The eleventh anniversary is the steel anniversary, an apt metaphor for the strong-as-steel bond with the man of all my heart.

Merry Christmas!

missing snow

Having grown up in a cold Midwestern city, I have never regretted living in the warmer climates of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and now Sydney, Australia. When I lived in those first two cities, if I needed a snow fix during the winter, a frozen paradise could be found within a two-hour drive during winter.

So if I couldn't have a white Christmas, I could always drive to one.

Alas, here in Sydney, that's not possible and I miss that. I haven't seen snow in person for more than a decade. My children have never seen it

While there are some areas Down Under that do get snow, that's only in the winter months of June, July, and August. Right now in the country's few mountain ranges that see snow part of the year, it's the height of alpine summer.

When our youngest is perhaps three, I think we should plan a winter vacation and see some snow. A drive about three hundred miles southwest of Sydney takes you into the mountainous region of winter snow, so maybe we should head down there for a week or so.

Now chance of a white Christmas there, of course, but perhaps a white Fourth of July.

Seen below is a picture I found online of Australia's snow-covered Kosciuszko mountain range on a cold August morning (enlargement).

holiday whining

I've seen people posting online about how they hate Christmas is in the middle of the week this year. That they still haven't finished their shopping. And in the US, that Thanksgiving was so late that meant one less weekend between then and Christmas day. And on and on and on.

Get a grip, people. Talk about first-world problems.

The world will not end if you do not finish all your shopping in time. Life will not cease to exist because you have not hung every decoration. People will somehow be able to move on with life if you don't cook and bake everything you wanted to for Christmas.

This should be a happy, joyous time full of love and happiness. Stop making it into hell for yourself.

a dementia miracle drug

I made homemade cookies and fudge last week to take to the elderly woman who owns our house where she lives in the care home. She's been in a lockdown memory unit for several years now.

While I was there delivering the goodies on Friday, another of the residents went into a dementia meltdown. I've seen this happen a few times to different residents during my past visits and it's never pretty.

I imagine someday years or decades in the future, scientists will develop an effective dementia medication that will slow or even reverse the disease. That would make the meltdown I witnessed a thing of the past.

A few years after that and people will talk about the dark ages of our era before the drug came on the scene. It would be like how we think of the time before antibiotics.

Until then, people will continue to be diagnosed and suffer from dementia every day. It's a tragedy striking families throughout the world, rich and poor. This dark age needs to be over for them with a medical miracle.

two tits and a bee

This woman's scrapbooking her body with monochrome tattoos is bad enough. That enormous honeybee holding up her tits is the most noticeable and also the most unfortunate.

This makes me curious about what the decision-making process was here. Did she plan for months to get a huge bee tattoo? Or plan for mere minutes?

I want to see what she thinks about this tattoo when she's in her sixties and her tits sag so much you can barely see the bee.

pigs in hell

Last night, my husband and I were discussing an event to which he had been invited. I asked if he planned to go.

"When pigs fly through a frozen-over hell," he said.

I asked if he had just made that combination up. He said he had then added surely someone else has thought of it before that, too. Maybe, maybe not.

"When pigs fly" and "when hell freeze over" are both examples of an adynaton — hyperbole immediately recognizable as impossible. I don't know what it's called if two are combined into one — a double adynaton perhaps?

a glimpse of a past life?

I'm currently reading a mystery thriller that seems to be heading in the direction of a major character being reincarnated. (I'm about three-quarters of the way through the book, so I can't be certain.)

There are people who are absolutely convinced reincarnation is real. Equally, there are those who are certain it's a fiction. And then there are some like me who don't know what to think but sort of like the idea that reincarnation might exist.

With one possible exception, I've never had any sort of a glimpse of a past life. No dreams about being Caesar's mistress. No memories of being a French Resistance heroine. No sense of having once been a bug in a rug.

Except for one time I had an experience that was so intense that I've never known what to make of it.

Flash back to when I first moved to Los Angeles. I was driving to see a room for rent in a house near Paramount Studios. There was a crash on Melrose Avenue that was slowing traffic, so I turned right at the next available intersection and started driving south.

And then I was hit smack in the face with the certainty I had been down that street many times before. The houses were familiar. The trees were familiar. Everything was familiar.

Yet I had never been there in my life.

I did not end up renting the room on offer — I found a much better one in Studio City — but I never forgot my impressions on that street. It was much more than déjà vu.

I would occasionally go down that street when I was near Paramount to see if anything else was triggered. But nothing was, except the sense it was a deeply familiar street to me.

So for a reason I've never understood, North Windsor Boulevard spoke to me. I just never understood what it was trying to say.

Seen below is a glimpse of that street I found online.

nylon smuggling

I thought this piece was a fascinating glimpse into a curious history — the hows and whys of nylon stocking smugglers during and after World War II in Britain.

If I were living at that time in Britain, as perhaps an American expat, I could see myself getting involved in a little smuggling. A visit to the United States could pay for itself by bringing back a few hundred pairs.

I love social history pieces like this. It really brings to life the idea of what life was like for the ordinary person in a previous era.

laundering money

Let's say you sell a nice vintage car for $12,000. Because you don't know the buyer, you insist on an all-cash transaction, and they're happy to comply.

When you take that $12,000 to the bank, you must complete a lengthy form and be questioned about the source of those funds. That's to curb money laundering and other illicit activity.

Now let's say you own a nice building lot in your town. You sell it for $12 million. The buyer is a mysterious holding company based in the Seychelles. You have no idea who controls that holding company, but the funds promptly are wired to your account at closing.

In this latter example, you don't have to report that transaction to anyone. Yet the proceeds could entirely consist of laundering funds.

Herein lies the problem. The laws as described above can stop small illicit transactions but not large ones.

This came to mind while my husband and I were watching The Laundromat, a sprawling mess of a movie that's nonetheless very interesting.

A simple fix would be to require all beneficial owners of holding companies doing business in the United States to be publicly recorded with all property transfers. That information would end up in databases that could be search by law enforcement and others whenever necessary.

murder-for-hire online

Soon after starting a fascinating piece in the latest Harper's Magazine called "Click Here to Kill, The dark world of online murder markets," I was struck by a thought about how one could monetize such activities for greater profit without actually killing someone.

Let's say, poking about online at the places the article mentions, you find someone who is looking to hire a hitman. You strike a bargain with that person, promising to soon provide the service.

Rather than kill the intended victim, however, you contact him or her and extort protection. "I won't kill you if you pay me X hundred thousand dollars." Presumably some of those people would agree and also agree to go into hiding to fake their deaths.

At that point, you go back to the person who ordered the hit and extort from him or her a large sum of money to keep quiet about the killing. Presumably that person agrees.

Ergo, you've made a large sum of money without actually doing any killing or much hard work, for that matter. The person who ordered the hit certainly isn't going to complain about your extortion to law enforcement. And the intended victim will be in hiding and not likely to make any noise, either, for fear it could generate publicity and out them.

So it's a Hollywood happy ending: no messy killing and a tidy profit earned.

I never liked Mister Rogers

The children's television presenter Fred Rogers is the subject of a new Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks. The movie has been garnering generally very positive reviews, so I'm sure I'll see it at some point.

Reading coverage about it reminded me that I never liked Mister Rogers' Neighborhood when I was a small child. I can see now how Rogers was charming and harmless, but at the time I guess it just seemed like unwanted pablum to me. Out of choice, I did not watch much television when I was in my preschool years, preferring to read or to play elaborate scenarios I spun out of my imagination with my toys.

As a mother, I would let my kids watch the show in a heartbeat. But if they didn't want to watch it, I wouldn't force them, because I imagine their thinking might be much like mine was once upon a time.

pigeons in cowboy hats

This is one of those things that I know I shouldn't laugh at because animal cruelty may be involved, but I just can't help myself.

Someone is going around Las Vegas and gluing tiny cowboy hats on pigeons' heads. Why remains a mystery.

It is probably cruel to do this to the creatures. And while I love animals and wish them no harm, I can't say I have a great deal of sympathy for pigeons, either.

They are called "rats with wings" by many people, including me. If the world had 90 percent less of them, I wouldn't cry, given they're such an invasive species.

invasion of the penis fish

It's a good day when you learn something new that you didn't even know existed. Yesterday, I learned there's actually something called the penis fish that may have been hiding underneath you in the sand the last time you went to the beach.

Although they look like a human penis that's been lopped off its owner, the fish isn't a fish and more correctly referred to as an innkeeper worm. They usually are hidden in the sand in U-shaped burrows, where they spend their entire lives, but can be exposed to the surface after a strong storm, which has happened recently in California.

And, yes, penis fish are eaten in certain countries, where they're considered a delicacy.

incredibly touching

This is an incredible story: more than a thousand serving US Navy personnel, both officers and enlisted, lined up and stood at attention along a roadway in Florida to honor their fallen comrade as his family and body arrived at the naval base.

They were not ordered to do this and all volunteered. It was a spontaneous event organized shortly before the arrival and scores of service members immediately signed up to participate.

Wow.

michelle's hair

Former First Lady Michelle Obama is currently touring Asia to promote education for girls. The media is along for the ride, of course, but they didn't cover an apparently big story right under their collective noses.

She has a new hairstyle.

I think she looks terrific. Gone is the overprocessed, straightened look. Now she's sporting a natural look.

I've never understood why Black women want to have their hair straightened. (For that matter, a lot of white women do the same thing, with theirs left looking limp and lifeless.) I think they look so much better when they leave their hair in its natural state.

Michelle's new 'do makes her look younger and with a slimmer face. You can't get any better than that.

white island volcano

The news cycle here in the last day has been dominated by coverage of the White Island Volcano explosion in New Zealand. As of this writing, five people are confirmed dead and eight are missing, including some Australians, and at least thirty-four were injured.

Considering only four dozen people were on the small island when it erupted, most of them tourists, a little math shows you that the eruption was very serious.

The volcano on White has been active for many years, with four eruptions alone since the year 2000. More recently, volcanic tremors and gas eruptions were at an elevated level, strongly suggesting a serious eruption was imminent.

That leaves you wondering why tourist boats and cruise ships were still calling at the island and unloading tourists. Mother Nature was providing all sorts of warnings yet they were ignored.

Australians and New Zealanders are far less litigious than Americans, but I wonder if this disaster will trigger an exception to that rule.

hotel room trashing

I read something offline about various musicians and actors who have trashed hotel rooms and suites over the years. Such behavior seems to be emblematic for certain swaths of celebridom, but it's actually just fucking childish. Some people think it's cool but I'm not one of them. It's become such a cliche.

Take the case of Steven Tyler and other Aerosmithers who used to lug a chainsaw on tour specifically to cut up hotel furniture. They also brought extension cords so they could drop televisions into swimming pools. Obviously they didn't give a rat's ass about other hotel guests and apparently were never prosecuted for their vandalism.

And then there was The Who'd Keith Moon, who blew up toilets with firecrackers and drove a car into a hotel swimming pool. And the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards, who tossed a TV off a tenth-floor hotel balcony onto a parking lot below.

And it isn't just men who do this kind of thing. Courtney Love, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, Edie Sedgwick, and more have had a history of hotel room trashing. But the only celebrity who apparently faced criminal prosecution for hotel hijinks, based on a Google search, was Johnny Depp.

I think when celebrities do things like this, the most effective criminal sentence would be very heavy on community service in some unpleasant task, like shoveling up roadkill and cleaning litter off highway embankments. A good dose of humble pie might knock the smug out of them.

chatty tats

I don't get the point of long text tattoos, particularly when they're on the side of the abdomen and under the arm, where they often seem to be.

If I see you on the beach and you have one of those on your midriff, am I supposed to stop and read it? Or is that only reserved for your lover?

But then how is your lover meant to really look at that — by holding up the covers and reading it by flashlight? It certainly wouldn't be readable during oral sex.

Sometimes people have so much text they can't fit it on their belly. That's when the back tat comes in handy, if you want to call such a verbiage dump handy.

The example below (enlargement) is arguably close to the extreme limit of text one can wear as a tat. But one is reminded of the old rule — just because it's on the page (here, the skin) doesn't mean someone will read it, particularly where there are no paragraph breaks or columns.

The tat below seems to be some kind of article about bicycle racing or at least something to do with bicycles. He couldn't have printed out copies on a computer and just given it to people?

erroll garner

I was listening to some jazz this week, including legendary pianist Erroll Garner. On my computer and backup hard drives, I have a bunch of MP3 rips from CD reissues of his classic albums so I load and unload them from my iPods when the mood strikes me.

Garner was only five-foot-two, so he sat on large books or phone directories so he could reach the keyboard. And he entirely played by ear — he never learned to read music.

a little more grape

I was reading something offline that mentioned Zachary Taylor's 1848 campaign slogan, which was: "A Little More Grape."

Come again? Without context, it sounds like nonsense. So I had to look that up.

Turns out "a little more grape" was a misquote of a famous order Taylor gave in the heated Battle of Buena Vista, fought during the Mexican-American War. Taylor's performance during that war is what propelled him into the White House.

It does seem odd to me to build an entire campaign around a misquoted order. But perhaps nineteenth century voters were more forgiving than today.

Nonetheless, Mother Nature was not kind to Taylor once he was in office. He died a little over a year after he was inaugurated. Alas, he may have had too many grapes because he fell seriously ill after eating fruit at a fundraising reception.

question time

Parliaments around the world, notably in the United Kingdom and in commonwealth countries, have a nearly daily event when in session called "question time," where the prime minister and various other ministers in the cabinet are peppered by questions from ordinary parliament members. It is something like a press conference except reporters aren't asking the questions.

Questions from members of the PM's and cabinet ministers' parties tend to be softballs, but questions from the opposition can be particularly challenging and expose problems. It's difficult for the respondent to gild the lily when answering because he or she can immediately be challenged and cross examined.

Thinking about question time the other day gave me a brilliant idea — this should be done in the United States, too. A President should stand before all members of Congress and answer tough questions. Yes, it couldn't be mandatory like in a parliamentary country and once a month would be more practical than daily. But it might force more honesty, and if a President refused to appear for question time, that would be harmful for public relations purposes.

All Presidents dissemble but some much more than others. By requiring a President to respond to legislative inquiries, he or she could immediately be called out for any deviation from the truth and nudged back towards greater honesty.

winter in madrid

Last night I finished reading Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom, a historical espionage thriller set in 1940 Spain, the year after their brutal civil war ended.

First published in 2006, the book is a very engaging page-turner. My only quibble was with the ending. I didn't feel it rose to the level of the first 95 percent of the book. But the rest of the book really is superb, with beautiful writing, complex characters, vivid settings, and often lyrical prose.

So if you're looking for a skillfully written thriller that's also an artful suspense novel, look no further than Winter in Madrid.

stylishly impractical

The image below is from a 1958 fashion shoot for Givenchy by the legendary photographer Frank Horvat, who is still alive and working (enlargement). He took the models to various ordinary locales around Paris and shot them in Givenchy couture, a radical idea for the time.

The one below as shot at the racetrack with real gamblers watching a race. This is such a wonderfully stylish photo and she looks fantastic.

It's also an utterly unpractical outfit. You couldn't keep the scarf wrapped like that for more than a few minutes even if it was heavily starched. And the hat might last a day, if that.

So ten out of ten for the look. Two out of ten for practicality. Not surprisingly, sixty-plus years later, that's still the case for a good bit of Givenchy couture. What looks nice on a runway doesn't always wear well in the real world.

apostrophe catastrophe

Realizing it was losing the battle to prevent apostrophe abuse and constant public confusion of possessive and plural forms, the Apostrophe Protection Society is throwing in the towel and shutting down.

"We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won," lamented the founder of the organization that attempted to educate the public on correct use of the much maligned little punctuation mark.

There's a very simple rule for correct apostrophe use: to indicate missing letters and always with the possessive form but never in a plural.

I remember in the United States how it was not uncommon to see fancy home mailboxes with printed signs on the side like "The Watson's" or "The Smith's." Somewhere in America is a company that wholesale abuses poor defenseless apostrophes and makes a buck doing so.

the dali do

Salvador Dalí was best known as a painter, but did you know he was also a fashion designer? This work also included unique hairstyles he created.

Needless to say, the "Dalí Do" never caught on. I wonder why. Don't all women want to look like Medusa?

IMHO, a hairstyle should be both flattering and easy to maintain. The Dali Do was neither.

neck rings

I know it's not politically correct to knock another culture for their traditions, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm sorry but I think the practice of making your neck appear freakishly long is cruel and wrong.

This is done by the Kayan People, originally from Burma, but now many of them live in neighboring Thailand. Girls as young as five are pressured into beginning with a few rings. From there, more and more are added over time.

Although the practice makes their necks appear unusually long, the neck isn't actually lengthened, Instead, the collarbone and the ribs are collapsed. In short, they're permanently disfigured on purpose.

The resulting freakishness has made them into tourist attractions for travelers from North America and Europe.

I would have no problem with this if it was started when the women were adults and was done with their adult consent. But a five-year-old child does not have the intellectual capacity to understand that wearing the rings will disfigure her for life.

belated thanksgiving greetings

You can tell I've been an expat for too long — it completely slipped my mind that Thanksgiving was yesterday. I made a mental note last week to remember to write an entry to post yesterday but that note got lost somewhere in the laundry baskets full of stuff inside my brain.

So I hope you're having a happy holiday weekend. I remember reading somewhere that a third of Americans don't even celebrate Thanksgiving on the actual holiday date and instead do it on Friday or Saturday to accommodate traveling and work. So maybe you've not yet had your Thanksgiving.

As has been the case for the last several years, we did not do anything to celebrate the holiday, since I'm the only one in the house who has any reason to. We used to go to expat Thanksgiving gatherings but, like many things, that was put on the shelf once we had multiple children.

Seen below is Diane Arbus's legendary photograph "Two Ladies at the Automat," photographed on Thanksgiving Day 1966 (enlargement). This was taken when nearly the entire world was a smoking section.

a portfolio diversification horror story

My uncle told me on our most recent Skype session that my grandfather's youngest brother — my great uncle who I believe I only met once — was selling his home and liquidating other assets because he was having serious financial troubles.

I was surprised because the uncle was always known in the family to be rather affluent. He had been a mid-level executive at General Electric for a number of years and earned a tidy income.

Turns out he was doing very well for a while in his retirement. But it also turns out he had invested his entire portfolio in a single stock — General Electric.

If you know anything about the market, you probably know GE has not been doing well. They recently slashed their dividend by some 95 percent, and my uncle relied on that income to maintain his lifestyle. He is only left with his pension and Social Security, which is at least something, but nothing like what he was earning before.

He made the classic investor's mistake — he did not diversify his portfolio and instead held everything in one asset.

This is why so many people were so badly hurt when Bernie Madoff was exposed as a fraud — they had invested their entire portfolio with him. So when he came crashing down, so did their entire life savings. But even investing only in a legitimate company is highly risky, too, because the company might hit the wall.

Always diversify. Always.

fake fruit

The husband and the boys and I stopped by to visit an elderly aunt of his over the weekend. Her modest, very tidy house is a temple of tchotchkes.

The place is always spotlessly clean so she must regularly dust all of the knickknacks. That's no small task, considering how many of the have tiny details.

The absolutely silliest of these are the three compotes she has in the dining room that are brimming with plastic fruit. With the exception if the pears, the rest of the fruit is obviously fake. The pears look actually real and a bowl of just those might not look bad.

She obviously dusts the grapes piece by piece because they're spotlessly clean. Either that or she keeps them covered by plastic bags when no one is visiting.

My rule on fake fruit or fake flowers or fake anything ornamental — if it doesn't look entirely real and genuine, don't have it. Purge it from your life. Because a bowl of plastic fruit impresses nobody.

This is not the actual fruit in question. It's not quite this bad. But it's close.

queen lowers the party boom

Queen Elizabeth has cancelled a sixtieth birthday bash for her son Andrew because of his worsening dumpster fire scandal growing out of his friendship with disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Ouch. Punishing your kid by nixing his party sounds like something you'd do for a six-year-old, not a sixty-year-old.

Of all the wastrels in the royal family, Andrew has always struck me as the top of that class. He is now eighth in line to succeed the throne, which means his chances are slightly better than yours or mine.

This, of course, is not the first time he's found himself in the middle of a scandal growing out of his associates. The man is clueless about picking friends.

He will never want for food or clothes or entertainment, but his life has to be emotionally wretched. He's like Britain's mascot that keeps crapping on the carpet.

What he should do is separate himself from the royal family and go out on his own to do something noble and valuable, like fund a clinic in some woebegone corner of the third world. He'd hire some doctors and nurses and then run the thing. Then he'd feel like he had some real purpose in his life.

the opposite of smartphone

I was using my mobile in public over the weekend in a store and when I disconnected a woman next to me said, "that thing is an antique."

I wasn't offended. I never realized how old it must look to other people. I got it in 2009 and it still works fine for me.

Both my husband and I have what are known in the communications trade as "feature phones," meaning they're mobile phones but not smartphones. They are what sometimes are called dumbphones. His is newer than mine, about five years old.

Neither of us have a smartphone because they're more expensive both to buy and also to use, if you have internet access. So why spend the extra money? Both hubby and I use a pay-as-you-go service, meaning we don't pay a flat fee per month but instead a per-minute charge.

I rarely text and the husband even less frequently. If we need to access the internet, we do that at home or a wifi hotspot. So our monthly mobile costs are close to nonexistent.

I see no reason to change to a smartphone. I guess that makes me a Luddite. Or a cheapskate. Or both.

nuke the moon

How's this for crazy — in the late 1950s, the American government considered detonating a nuclear bomb on the moon as a show of strength to the Soviet Union and to boost domestic confidence.

Fortunately, the top-secret program, known as Project A119, never got off the drawing board.

It's amazing how something that seemed like a good idea in the 1950s now sounds monumentally deranged six decades later. It also sounds like the stuff of a 1950s B-movie scifi movie plot — humans detonate a nuke on the moon and the resulting radiation reawakens an alien species dormant in suspended animation. Chaos ensues. Blouses are torn.

"Nuke it to see what happens" should never be acceptable policy.

tesla truck

Tesla introduced their new all-electric "Cybertruck" this week. It's a pickup designed for consumer and light industrial use.

The radical design seemed to be what's causing the most chatter. It's all abstract angles and makes it look more like a toy than an actual vehicle. It has quite a few interesting innovations, including the fact that it has no paint and a extremely sturdy body. Smash it with a sledgehammer and it leaves hardly a dent.

Some have called its boxy style ugly. I don't know if I'd say that yet. It certainly is distinctive.

When it was unveiled to the media, the presenter made a big deal about how the windows were virtually indestructible. To prove his point, he threw two steel balls at the glass.

The windows broke.

human guinea pigs

I started reading an article offline about people who are paid to be infected with flu viruses and then studied by medical experts and a thought immediately popped into my head two sentences into the piece — what kind of money are we talking about here? Yeah, I'm a bit mercenary.

Turns out they're paid from $2,500 to $3,300. You also have to agree to a week's quarantine in a medical school facility.

Not to trivialize this extremely important work that they do, but you'd have to pay me a lot more than two or three grand to get sick for a week. I'm thinking ten grand. But then I imagine they'd say thanks but no thanks.

When I first went out on my own and had to make my way in the world, I was a paid guinea pig for medical researchers doing audiology experiments. This did not involve getting sick, however — I just had to listen to white noise recordings and then report when I could hear certain faint sounds under the white noise.

I seem to remember I was paid $500 for a ten-hour study. It was boring but harmless work. They did have to stop the study and wake me up a few times, however, so I could continue.

a thousand words

I thought the picture seen below was quite striking (enlargement). It's telling us a story as the past warns the future.

The gentleman on the right is a decorated 67-year-old Vietnam veteran. The gentleman on the left is a decorated 23-year-old lance corporal currently serving in the United States Marines.

This photograph was taken last week at a Veterans Day commemoration in New York City. The photographer is Andrew Kelly with Reuters.

seven years old

Our oldest child turns seven this week. Every day he seems more like a boy and less like a little boy, if that makes sense.

When I look at him, I am reminded there once was a time, before I became a mother, that I thought I'd be bored by my children if I had any. Was I ever wrong.

Every day, they're fascinating to watch and hear and observe. All on his own, Joey has taken on the role of big brother for both of the younger boys and never seems to tire of entertaining and instructing them, notably the three-year-old.

I think the most surprising thing about having children is how much they teach you about yourself. I believe I've come to know and understand myself far better now that I'm a mom three times over.

how a modern classic was born

The current issue of The Atlantic includes a fascinating essay about Margaret Atwood and her latest book.

At the beginning, the writer includes an anecdote about how Atwood's most famous book, the modern classic The Handmaid's Tale, was germinated:

In 1980, "Atwood was appearing at a poetry festival in Portland, Oregon, when her trip was disrupted by natural disaster: Mount St. Helens, in nearby Washington State, began erupting for the second time that spring. Plumes of volcanic ash and gas grounded all flights in Portland, and with trains booked up as well, Atwood joined forces with the poet Carolyn Forché to find a route out of town. The pair ended up driving south to San Francisco, and over the 11-hour car ride, Forché told Atwood about the horrors she’d witnessed as a Guggenheim fellow during the lead-up to the civil war in El Salvador: sexual violence, men kept in cages, torture, death squads. What was happening there, she told Atwood, was going largely unreported."

Five years after that road trip, Handmaid was published.

The linked essay details how that trip transformed Atwood's life in important ways, a metamorphosis that resulted in her now most famous work. While the book doesn't bear any resemblance overtly to the El Salvador tragedy, you can see how that opened Atwood's eyes to the evils of totalitarianism, which ultimately inspired a massive research effort where she collected carton after cartoon of news stories about people living outside democratic societies.

Were it not for that serendipitous roadtrip, would Atwood have ever written Handmaid? After reading the linked essay, I came away convinced she would not have. And I don't think she would have written many of her other novels, either.

man's body makes its own booze

A man in North Carolina in 2011 was arrested for driving under the influence but he hadn't had a drink. That's because he had an extremely rare condition where his body converted carbohydrates into booze.

So if he ate a pizza or bowl of pasta, that made him drunk, even though the food was totally nonalcoholic. The condition is called auto-brewery syndrome and also gut fermentation syndrome.

The North Carolina man's condition was probably triggered by antibiotics he had been prescribed after an injury. The cure for his booze-making gut was not a quick process. He had years of anti-fungal therapy and a probiotics regimen before the condition was abated.

Hopefully he didn't go out drinking to celebrate when he was cured.

teleportation troubles

Last night I finished reading a not particularly compelling scifi thriller that included teleportation as a plot element.

The story is set in the year 2028, so not very far into the future. The idea that teleportation could be nearly perfected within the next decade is highly implausible and one of the reason I wasn't thrilled about the book because it wasn't grounded in common sense.

Teleportation seems to me a technology that's so advance and complicated that it would be centuries before humans could develop the science and engineering to make it work, if ever. For teleportation to work, you'd need to break a body down atom-by-atom within a few dozen seconds, somehow broadcast those atoms far faster than the speed of light, and then reassemble them without any errors.

I just don't buy it.

If you're wondering about the book, it was Obscura by the American writer Joe Hart.

brawling judges

This week, the Indiana Supreme Court censured and suspended three trial court judges in the state who had been involved in a drunken brawl and shooting in a White Castle parking lot at three in the morning. Two of the judges were suspended for a month without pay and the third for two months without pay.

The one with a longer sentence had already been convicted of a misdemeanor battery charge and was sentenced to a year in jail but only ended up incarcerated for two days.

In my opinion, all three judges should have been suspended permanently and removed from the bench. Perhaps the state supreme court lacks the power to impose that sort of sentence and it's up to the state legislature to impeach them. If so, then that's what should be done.

We can't expect judges to be perfect angels. At the same time, then can be expected to behave in a civilized manner and with some basic common sense.

I could not find a photo of brawling judges. So the next best thing is three drunken women brawling in the street after a dressy horseracing event (enlarged).

the unicorn puppy

A Missouri-based animal rescue organization has taken in a puppy with an unusual feature — the critter literally has a tail growing out of his forehead between his eyes.

The tail does not wag like normal dog tail — which the pup also has. It just flops around on pooch's forehead as he does his normal dog things.

This led me to wonder if the unicorn myth was founded in an actual horse with an odd birth defect. There's also something called a teratoma that appears in both humans and animals — it's a benign tumor found anywhere in the body and be made up of muscle cells, teeth, brain tissue, or even an eye.

My grandparents had a dog that, several times during her lifetime, had a complete dog's toenail growing out of her ear flap. The thing would just start to grow and, after six months or so, would just fall off. A year or two or three later, another one would start to grow in at the same place.

to airpod or not to airpod

I've been having a discussion with myself about whether to buy a set of Apple AirPod Pro or one of the competitors, a product collectively known as wireless earphones. I listen to my iPod several hours a day, so they're definitely something I'd use.

You've undoubtedly seen people out and about wearing them — they look like traditional Apple EarBuds with the wires cut off.

They are not cheap. A set of Apple AirPod Pro retails for $399 Australian or $249 American. The convenience factor is obvious. But they also have some drawbacks.

The biggest issue, from what I've read, is battery time. And from what I've researched, battery time deteriorates from month to month, so you might get four hours a charge in your first month but only ninety minutes by month ten.

There are other cheaper wireless earphones on the market but they have more drawbacks, particularly sound dropout. So it may be a matter of you get what you pay for.

Right now, I'm probably 40 percent sold on buying a pair and 60 percent against buying some. I imagine my thinking might change if Apple puts the Pro model on sale sometime in the next year or so.

the dead passenger

Back in May, Oklahoman Rodney Puckett was arrested in Arizona for driving around with his naked dead wife in the front passenger seat. Police were initially alerted to the situation by workers at a drive-through who saw the nude body when Puckett picked up a food order.

An autopsy revealed the wife had died from natural causes, specifically heart disease.

Puckett was sentenced on Monday to two weeks in jail plus time already served. He also was sentenced to three years of supervised probation upon release from custody.

IMHO, this case sounds like one of unnecessary incarceration. Better to have sentenced him to a thousand hours of community service. Hopefully he also received some psychological assistance, too.

This aside, the case does sound like the plot to an absurdist Hollywood comedy. Art usually imitates life, but sometimes it's the other way around like it is with Rodney here.

libraries without fines

I've seen several articles recently about how some public libraries are doing away with fines for the late return of materials. IMHO, this is a mistake.

The general idea behind this is that some people feel "shamed" for failing to return material on time. I don't buy that. If you felt such shame at a trivial matter like this, then all the more reason to return your material on time.

I think fines work both as an incentive to return material on time so that other patrons may borrow it and also as a great way to raise funds for a library.

Under the typical no-fine system, you can't borrow any more materials until you return late stuff you already have. But if you don't attempt to borrow anything more, then you can take months before returning what you already have.

This could be a particular problem with a library's new books and other materials for which there's a waiting list. Those people must wait until the tardy individual brings back the wanted item — are their wishes less important than the overdue person's hurt feelings at being "shamed"? I think not.

janis joplin

Over the weekend, I listed to an episode of the Fresh Air podcast that featured the author of a new biography of Janis Joplin.

The author notes several times during the piece about how Joplin worked incredibly hard on her music and was really driven by perfection. This came at the same time that she was regularly using heroin.

And that, of course, would be her undoing. Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970 at the age of twenty-seven.

Why is it that someone could be so diligent about their music and yet so careless about their body? Unfortunately, the otherwise excellent interview never reveals the answer to that mystery.