Why did they sabotage the invention?

The heat pump thermostat

For the technically challenged, the heat pump is the greatest invention ever for heating your house affordably with electricity. For every kilowatt-hour of energy it consumes, it delivers as much as four kilowatt-hours heat equivalent to your home interior. This is because it fetches heat energy from the cooler outdoor environment, raises it’s temperature by a compression process, and delivers it into your home. At the flick of a switch on the thermostat, it reverses itself to become a central air conditioner in the summer months.

The fly in this miraculous ointment is the stupid thermostats that they install with the heat pump. These all have a feature called “emergency” or “auxiliary” heat. This feature turns on an array of cheap energy-hog resistance heating elements to help the heat pump speed heating the house when the temperature setting is raised or in case the heat pump mechanism fails.

Now, I admit some benefit in having emergency back up elements in case your heat pump compressor fails on a frigid night in Fargo. The stupid part of this feature is that the thermostats are designed and default programmed to almost guarantee that the energy-hog emergency heat comes on eagerly all the time when it doesn’t need to. Apparently the vendors, installers, and thermostat manufacturers have a terror of getting complaints that the heat pump does not blow out warm enough air or that it just takes too long to warm up the house after the temperature has been set down for the night or a weekend away. So, your thermostat is configured to bring on the emergency heat when you tweak it up as little as one or two degrees higher than the current house temperature. Then it keeps it on until the house temperature rises to one or two degrees above the set point. Also there is a manual setting for turning on the auxiliary heat any time you want to as well as accidentally whenever you change modes from cooling to heating. Take heart; there is some relief for some thermostats. Check your thermostat manual; you will have to download one from the Internet since you lost it or were never given one. Actually you may have to download the installation instructions, which is often a separate item, intended for the installer. Many models have a well-obscured procedure to increase the difference between the set point and the actual indoor temperature that triggers the automatic energy hog to come on to maybe five or more degrees. Increase this setting to the maximum. Sometimes it is labeled as a choice between “comfort” and “economy”. Choose “economy”. Then when you’ve had the temperature way down because you’ve been away you may still have to raise it back up in increments so you don’t trigger the energy hog. Be patient though. The mass of structure and furnishings in an average house weighs 40,000 pounds, more or less. It takes a lot of energy to reheat it after it has chilled down. That means a whopper cost if you let your auxiliary resistance heat do it.

Finally here's a tipsheet from my former employer that will give you an option if your thermostat can't be adjusted to reduce the eagerness of auxiliary heat.

Why did they uninvent the...

...single blade shaver? I’m talking about the human powered shaver, a.k.a. razor or safety razor, not electric shavers. They used to have one-blade safety razors in a reusable handle that was advertized as well-balanced. Balanced?! Are they afraid you’re gonna hoist it to your chin and stick it up your nose or maybe fall over into the sink? Ha! OK, I diverged into ranting about balance. Pretty soon in modern time this safety razor evolved into the plastic throw-away type that taxes our landfills, but still I’m diverging from my point. After a couple of years, the throw-away plastic shaver started appearing with two closely spaced blades for “closer shaves”. Not to be outdone, competitors came up with the three-blade model and now they are up to five blades or more. Not even one electron of a whisker extends above the skin line after the final swipe until a few seconds later when it has already grown out a micron’s length. STOP the blades! Haven’t they heard that it is now fashionable for the elegant sexy well-dressed man to have day-old to week-old stubble? The worse thing about all these multi-blades is that if you wait more than 24 hours between shaves, as fashionable and lazy men do, the whiskers jam between the blades and clog the stupid multi-blade shavers. You have to stop after every stroke and use your toothbrush to clean them out. OK, single-blade ones are not quite totally uninvented yet. I did manage to find one product at Target that is still single blade, the Bic 12-pack of single blade shavers. The package even says “Single blade for easy cleaning”. Go out and buy these.

Why did they uninvent...

...home economics? OK, so it’s not exactly uninvented, but it has fallen out of popularity. Maybe it needed some modernization but it should not have disappeared from the mainstream of education. I’m not sure why it has nearly disappeared, but I assume it is because it was always considered a girl thing. Guy stuff like changing faucet washers and buying lawn mowers was not included in any significant degree. Then, with the feminist movement and more women validating their self worth in the work place instead of in the home, it lost status. I assert that it is, and probably always has been, more than just learning how to bake a delicious and attractive cake or artfully display Christmas decorations. For example, in Hand Jr. High School, Columbia, SC in 1958, it was a conduit for girls’ sex education. I know this because my seat in social studies class was next to a hole in a new wall to accommodate a radiator that predated the remodel that made two small classrooms from one bigger one. I heard all the stuff they taught the girls about the birds and the bees in the home ec class on the other side of the wall. I got a D in Social Studies. But, there I go diverging into sex again. Lets get back on track.

While we’ve forgotten home economics, we have gone ape over global economics. This is the great disaster of everybody on the planet trading with or hiring everybody else, especially on the opposite side of the planet. You can read more about why this only works on a micro scale. This global economy thing is showing itself to be unstable and able to turn some former winners into losers because there is little regulation of global markets and finance. As we all end up unemployed or underemployed, or at least way underpaid from this monster genie being let out of the lamp, we need to do some rethinking. As individuals there is little we can do to stuff the genie back in the lamp or teach him some manners. However, we can reduce the power he has over us if we get smarter on home economics, the economics of our household and the households of our friends and family. This doesn’t necessarily mean baking tastier cakes. The 21st century home ec should be more like what its name says. It might cover stuff like getting the most nutritious greens and beans to feed our loved ones with the meager twenty bucks in our pocket. We need to reinvent home economics for the 21st century and teach it in school. We need to cover diverse things like:
• What to eat and drink because it’s good for us and what not to eat and drink because it will kill us or bankrupt us.
• What we need and don’t need in a house and how to finance the house we need.
• How to shop for and buy stuff to outfit and care for the house and yard that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, break down prematurely, poke our eyes out, or drive us nuts with superfluous features.
• How to make stuff we need instead of buying it.
• How to get the best deal on a credit card and how we should never carry over a balance month to month.
• How to find a mate to share the shelter and expenses, how to bring joy to the mate and keep him/her forever, and (above all) how to have a good time with the mate without making more babies than you can feed.
• How to get an employer and keep him/her happy no matter what our skills are.
• How to create or at least participate constructively in neighborhood and community associations.
• (Last but absolutely not least) Become media literate.

I need to elaborate on this media literacy thing. Defining it properly would take up more than I want to put in this post but you can Google it. Start with the Wikipedia description. Basically it pertains to learning not to be so freakin’ gullible to all the media conduits that the genie uses to turn us into zombie slaves. The “poster child” of media illiteracy is probably the sticker you see on so many products and ads in magazines and catalogs, “As Seen on TV”. Do you know what that means? It means the majority of cabbage brains out there believe the stupid television is actually credible, that it furnishes valid and reliable information. God help us.

Maybe there is some hope. We seem to be figuring out finally that nearly all politicians and people in the finance industry (a.k.a. Wall Street) are lying sorry sacks of slug slime. The problem is (although the Tea Party might disagree) we can’t just get rid of these characters and expect things to gravitate to harmonious prosperity. We do need to select leaders for ourselves. We have to educate ourselves in how to detect their lies, unmask their lies, and hold them painfully accountable for their lies. That’s where media literacy comes in. It’s all about recognizing and rejecting lies that come to us in an overwhelming barrage of mostly electronic media. Let’s reinvent home economics for the 21st century with a good chunk of media literacy education.

Why did they uninvent the...

...energy absorbing car bumper. We had ‘em in the late 70’s and early 80’s by federal regulation until a sweet old president with dementia decided to excuse the car manufacturers from this requirement. I had great ones on my ’80 Civic. They were mounted on shock absorbers and covered with scratch resistant black rubber. The current car bumpers should be called the senile Republican bumper in honor of the president who allowed the manufacturers to make painted plastic bumpers that cost $500 to $1000 or more for repair or replacement after one’s wife has a 1 mph contact with a concrete post in a parking garage.

Why do we need a better mousetrap...literally?

We’ve had fine mousetraps all my life. Aside from a pesky little habit of sometimes snapping your finger when you set them, they did the job, executing the little rodent painlessly in about a millisecond. But now we have the sticky mouse paper inspired, no doubt, by fly paper. With the sticky paper, the poor little sentient beings (What does sentient mean anyway?) get stuck, trapped in terror for hours until you find them. Then, what do you do? They’re still alive, looking up at you with pleading little beady eyes, hoping you’ll at least drive them across town to your insurance adjuster’s house and set them free. You can’t peel the paper off so you’d have to cut around their little feet leaving them little paper slippers for the rest of their mousy life. But no, you’re too busy so you have to drown them in the toilet while they struggle in agony as if they were being water-boarded by Dick Cheney, or worse yet, you just toss them in the garbage can to agonize for hours while ants eat their eyes out. Yep the original was much better.

Why did they uninvent the...

...ordinary toothpaste cap. The ordinary toothpaste tube nozzle and cap were perfected at least as far back as when I was a small child and Dodos and Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers filled the forests. You just unscrewed the cap, squeezed out the paste and screwed the cap back on. But, they couldn’t leave it alone. They had to devise nozzles that dispensed different colors of paste through little sub nozzles. You’re supposed to believe these different colors are actual different ingredients (like epoxy glue) that can’t be mixed until they’re about to enter your gaping maw. They also had to add a flip up cap that won’t stay closed and copiously ejaculated toothpaste into your travel bag on air flights until toothpaste on flights was finally made illegal. The flip up caps usually break off before the last of the toothpaste is used up too. Bring back the ordinary toothpaste tube and screw-on cap.

Why did they uninvent the...

...car that uses a one size fits all round sealed beam headlight?

There are adults alive today who don’t remember this. There used to be a one size fits all standard headlight for all cars and trucks; Chevrolets, Fords, Plymouths, Mack trucks, even the imports like Volkswagen Beetles, Triumph sports cars, and Opal Cadets. They cost about one dollar and constituted the whole thing from illuminating filament to integral lens of thick non-yellowing, scratch proof, pebble-resisting glass. There were some improvements as the years passed. They started to make them with permanent quartz halogen bulbs inside for greater efficiency but they were still round, under five bucks and above all, one size fit everything. If one burned out or took a rock, replacements were still available at any gas station even in Nowheresville. Then it started to happen, first innocently enough. The car manufacturers’ stylists figured we needed some new shapes; rectangular and small rectangular.

Then things started to get out of hand. They figured we’d like two lights per side on some vehicles and they added extra small and small round to the increasing numbers of sizes. Suddenly somewhere around the early 80’s each car manufacturer started designing custom component illumination systems with separate bulbs, reflectors, and protective (ha ha) clear plastic covers that scratched and yellowed. And, they leaked too, fogging up and corroding the reflector. What a great ADVANCE! When my wife hit a deer and cracked a custom protective lens on our ’85 Subaru, they wanted $180 for the replacement. Of course I got some junk yard parts plus some screws, rivets, and epoxy glue to make a mount for a one size fits all replacement. I had to do it again when I bought and “restored” a wrecked Civic for a few months transportation in Washington State a couple of years ago. So what if my cars were asymmetrical. I’ve heard of “illumination systems” on higher end models of today’s cars that cost over $800. As consumers, have we gone nuts to accept this? We’re scared to death of federal standards requiring greater fuel efficiency because they might make the cars cost more. Of course we’re happy to pounce on the newest all fluff and no stuff squinty-eyed illumination system proffered by free enterprise innovation.

Why did they uninvent the...

This post inaugurates a series on laments about great things of the past that were uninvented. True to form I shall probably drift off topic onto some other twists like “Why didn’t they invent it right?” and “Why did they have to make a better mousetrap when the original was perfect?”

Have you noticed that your fitted sheets never fit? That’s because the bed industry has gone bonkers making mattresses and box springs thicker and thicker. If you get a new set today (They nearly always come in a set.) the combined box spring and mattress thickness almost require you to have nine-foot ceilings. Why do you even need the box spring at all? You could put bowling balls under the mattress and you wouldn’t feel them. Heaven help you if you have to get up and go to the bathroom at night. You’ll need a stepladder. You’re liable to fall off the ladder since you’ll be suffering from hypoxia at the extreme altitude. I know why beds all have that pile of sham pillows now. You need to throw them down around the base of the ladder in case you fall climbing down. Why did they uninvent the sensible thickness mattress?

Thinking about Whales

You’re wondering, “Why is he thinking about whales and putting up pictures of bears?” Simple answer. I’m thinking about whales because I’m reading Moby Dick. It was a free download on our iPod Touch and I’ve never read it before. I don’t have a convenient recent whale picture so I used a picture of the largest mammals that I have photographed recently, the shy gentle bears that somewhat regularly visit our backyard.

Moby made me think of two impressive whale experiences that predated my blogging habit. I felt they needed to be recorded since whales, along with everything else in the ocean, appear soon to be extinct if we don’t change our ways. Hopefully not, but possibly in the next generation or two, nobody will have any more first-hand whale experiences.

OK, first whale experience: We lived many years on Eld Inlet, the southern tip of Puget Sound. We saw lots of harbor seals there. That was novel to me as a Carolina boy where, growing up, I thought you had to go to Eskimo-land to see any seals. One day soon after we moved into the Eld Inlet place, my parents came to visit. I quickly got my father down to the gravelly beach that we semi-privately shared with four other property owners. I proudly pronounced that we could dig our own clams, grow our own oysters, and sometimes we even saw seals. As if right on queue, directly in front and close in to shore, a huge mass rose to the surface and blew a V-shaped spout. My father frowned and opined, “That ain’t no seal!” Clearly it was a gray whale, the only huge thing other than the distinctly-finned Orca that might venture so far south in the sound. We watched it spout several more times and it clearly was hanging around for a bit. Leaving my father there, I ran up to the house to fetch down my kayak and camera. My mother was hollering after for me not to get into the water with any whale. I chased it around the inlet racing toward each spout to get a close snapshot but each time it rose in a different location hundreds of feet away. There were no good pictures.

I got another chance for a close encounter a couple of years later. The neighbors reported that a grey whale had been hanging out all day feeding in the bottom muck in the cove across the inlet from us. Wife and I again mounted kayaks and crossed the inlet. This time the whale was working a much smaller area and it was easy to get close. More sensible kayakers were also there to observe from a sensible distance. With all the good sense of a guy who climbs wet ladders barefooted, I charged up right over the location of the last couple of spouts. Suddenly the whale rose beside me and exchanged breath with a huge, “Chug; suck” sound. Mist from the spout drifted over me. I have to say I did not smell the foul odor that some people report from close encounters with whale spouts. However, what I will never forget was the deep resonance of that sound. It sounded like someone had briefly vented a steam valve in a mine tunnel. It gave me a sense of the huge volume of the breathing tube and lungs in this gentle but mighty creature.

Second whale experience: This one concerns Orcas. Orca whales are cute, smart, and relatively small as whales go, though hellishly much bigger than about anything else that isn’t a whale. They’re the ones that, if unfortunate enough to get captured, end up doing tricks in sea aquariums until they get disgusted with the life and decide to drown their trainers. Most Orcas live in pods, don’t roam too far from home, and enjoy a good diet of fish, like salmon. However, some Orca pods are the real rouges of the sea. They are transients and roam far and wide to munch on big animals like seals and even other larger whales. Several years ago the town of Brinnon, WA on Hood Canal (not really a man-made canal but a fjord wide and deep enough for submarine traffic) was experiencing a seal problem. Normally popular and welcome, the seal population had grown way too big for their local habitat. They were gobbling up lots of fish, fouling the water with their excrement and causing commercial oyster beds to shut down. Well, one day we were driving along the canal near Brinnon and saw a crowd of cars pulled over to the side of the road. We pulled over to see the attraction. The rogues had come. The water was filled with tall Orca dorsal fins racing back and forth, singly and in groups. No boats were out. We didn’t see this ourselves, but some friends who live in Brinnon told us they had seen seals far from the water and still heading for higher ground. While walking down to witness the spectacle our friends passed a seal that looked at them curiously as if to say, “You guys are going the wrong way. Are you nuts? Get further inland.” When the rogues had left the seal population had been culled down to a fraction of its size.

Naked Girls Reading

Naked Girls Reading! That’s the name of a play my wife and I saw here in Asheville last night. I spied the ad for it and figured it would make an ideal Friday evening outing that both of us could enjoy. Wife has master’s degrees in both drama and librarianship, and I… um… also like reading.

The play was in the old, fashionably seedy, artsy west side of town at a tiny theater squished into an ancient vintage storefront strip. They were selling $1 raffle tickets for an original oil painting door prize. Wife sprang for a ticket then actually inspected the prize (a choice of two very naked female nudes) and commented, “Ick”. I figured then that we’d probably win the door prize.

The play action was exactly what the title said except there was also some singing and celebrity impersonation, e.g. Elvis and Dolly Parton. I enjoyed the performance very much except the venue was not air-conditioned on an uncommonly hot evening in this mountain town. I began to envy the performers who had the privilege of stretching out naked, drinking their ice water.

Oh, I almost forgot! Of course we actually DID win the door prize raffle (a lifetime first). I was about to choose a standing nude who had a cupcake levitating in front of her public parts but wife nixed that one. We got the one you see in the picture above. I think I’m gonna have to get my own man cave before I have a place to hang it.

Gun hater stuck with gun

My loyal buddy of 55 years was kind enough to drive my car from Charleston to Asheville for me. Friendship is a wonderful thing and there is much more that unites us than divides us even though he is at the opposite end of the political spectrum from me. He’s like a serious Republican NRA-supporting dude and I am a kind-hearted enlightened Democrat.

Anyway, to get on with the story, Bud (not his real name) got home and realized he’d left his Glock 27 bad guy-whacker pistol in my glove compartment. (What's with these GOP NRA types that they can’t take a day drive up the interstate without deadly weaponry?! Do they think some deranged bleeding heart, liberal, government-lover is going to assault them at a rest stop?) All right, back on topic, I can't just leave it in the glove compartment because I think it's against the law to be packing heat in your car without a license unless you're in South Carolina where it's actually smiled upon. Now I have to get the damned thing out of the glove compartment and find a safe place to stow it. I guess I just carefully pull it out by the butt end while keeping the nozzle pointing away from anything I don't want to shoot. Apparently guns are liable to spray out bullets spontaneously at any time judging by the number of my friends and people I've met who have managed to accidentally get shot by their own gun.

Later: I got the gun out of the car and into my office. Now I've got to figure out how to safely take the bullets out and ship it to Bud. He tells me the bullets are in something called a magazine, which is not the same kind that you read. He said there is a little button on the left side that I can push to make the magazine drop out. I pushed the hell out of it and nothing drops out. Maybe I’m pushing the wrong thing. That’s scary.

Voila! I got the bullets separated from the pistol and didn’t shoot any holes in anything. Following Bud’s direction I was able to eject the magazine by pushing a little thumb button on the left side of the handle in a certain forwardish downward direction while carefully avoiding pulling the little pointy-finger lever under the bottom.

Uh oh! Turns out those sissy second amendment-hating liberals in government of all levels have made it very difficult for an innocent law-abiding person to ship a firearm to another innocent person. Bottom line: Costs over $50 and must be shipped from a licensed firearm shipper to a licensed firearm receiver.

I will just take it to Bud on my next trip past his town, currently scheduled for next month. If he has to shoot anyone before then he’ll just have to use his turkey gun.

A spider made me do it

I’m in the rehab hospital. No, I’m not a celebrity druggie; I’m an idiot. Here’s the story. I was up on a ladder pressure washing the pilings and girders under our Edisto Island house. Hot day, good fun, bathing suit, barefoot. Almost done when a huge black spider dashed out from a crevice right over my head. I don’t like spiders so I commenced a high-speed emergency descent. When I got to the bottom rung I stepped back off onto the concrete floor. Just one problem! It wasn’t the bottom rung and I stepped off into thin air. Suddenly my frail nearly naked body was speeding toward cruel hard concrete at about 900 miles per hour. Fractured left side humerus and femur near the top of each. Sassy spider looked down at me writhing on floor for ten minutes awaiting rescue. Spouse found me and kindly hosed off dirty floor all around me so things would be tidy for the ambulance guys.

Fast forward 17 days. I now have some metal pins in my femur and am just able to walk on a cane with a spotter. Left arm still strapped tightly to my side. Nice ladies help me go pee and poo. They promise me hellish agony when the time comes to unstrap my arm and start cranking it around. Due for discharge and further outpatient therapy beginning on June 15. Will convalesce at my sister’s house until well enough to travel to Asheville for the rest of the summer. Good news is it’s supposed to heal completely to original strength and I got out of my dreaded trip to Spain.

Fast forward again 58 days from fall. I can drive, walk in almost a normal gait, ascend and descend stairs normally, and scratch my head with my injured arm. Punishing physical therapy and home exercise continue and I continue to slowly improve. No jump rope or pull-ups though. I think I will be as normal as anyone my age eventually.

The South Carolina Light Bulb

Failing schools, genocide in Libya, budget deficits, drunk drivers killing 17,000 people per year nationally, earthquakes, tsunamis, scary unions wanting to bargain collectively. Just when we thought we had heard it all, we learn that the government wants to tell us what kind of light bulbs we can buy, starting in 2012. They want us to use those sissy energy saving “Curly Friggin’ Lightbulbs” (CFLs for short) Isn’t that the coup de gras for our personal freedom!

We in South Carolina don’t have to take this. Representative Bill Sandifer (Republican Oconee County) is going to attract a manufacturer here to build a factory to make old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs like Thomas Edison invented in the late 1800’s. Apparently if they are manufactured here, we can still sell them here. Heck; we should take this to the next level and make it a state constitutional amendment. We already have a “right to hunt” amendment. We could have a “right to buy horridly inefficient light bulbs” amendment. Yeah! And even a “right to eat junk food while praying in school” amendment. OK, I’m getting off topic. Just got a little excited about how SC could set the nation’s pace for freedom.

How will we get a manufacturing facility for obsolete light bulbs here? Easy! Give them giant tax breaks, and fund training programs for their workers. We did it with Boeing. We can do it for obsolete light bulbs. If need be we can even give them big subsidies. Everyone knows that if you give money to rich businessmen they will invest it in ways to create jobs and stimulate the economy.

Why should we support this effort to keep ourselves in the 19th century? There are lots of reasons. Everyone knows the 19th century was the best century. The old fashioned light bulbs are only 10% efficient so we can get 90% heat out of them in the winter at only three times the cost of heating with a heat pump. Two out of three women say the 19th century bulbs make their skin look better and warmer. In fact it really is warmer because they are so inefficient they give off tens times more heat than light. If you think that doesn’t make you look good, go to Light Your Face and have somebody look at your face. It lights up your face like a super inefficient 19th century light bulb. Oh! Don’t make video calls to movie stars with this; they’ll fall in love with you and start stalking you.

Funny Superbowl Commercials

I watched the Superbowl XYZ (or whatever the Roman numeral for 45 is) along with the rest of you. The commercials were truly entertaining. There was one where a fellow fell through a rotten wooden bridge and smashed his testicles. There was another where a whole bunch of different guys were getting violently kicked and kneed in the testicles with near lethal force. There was one where a baby got smashed into a glass window and another where a giant log smashed into an elderly lady. There was one where a robber had a gun in the face of a guy in a convenience store threatening to take his life while another guy lay writhing in agony on the floor with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Ha ha ha ha! Isn't it fun to watch other people get painfully injured?! Oh oh, another great one was the one where somebody threw a pop can with such force that it smashed a young woman in the face and completely knocked her off her park bench. Oh, crack me up! Ha ha, get it? CRACK me up. How will they top this next year? I can’t wait. Maybe they can have people getting their eyes gouged out or actually killed completely dead. Sooooo funny!
Actually I’m being sarcastic, which is supposed to be the lowest form of humor. That’s probably why you aren’t laughing. I miss the gentler more refined commercials of a few years ago like the Budweiser one where the greatest violence was when a couple just got singed a little when they accidentally ignited a brewery horse's bowel gas. And wardrobe malfunctions! That one with Janet Jackson was GREAT. I know that was the half time show but why can’t we have more of that in the commercials?

Boo may come to Edisto Island

Brace yourself. He wants to move to Edisto and bring Boo. I am speaking of Kiawah resident, Graham Banks, a self-described poet, investor, day-trader, and dog owner. Mr. Banks is fed up with getting big fines on Kiawah Island for repeatedly having his dog Boo on the beach unleashed. According to a February 9, 2011 Post and Courier article, he plans to teach Kiawah a lesson. He aims to sell his Kiawah house and move to Edisto Island where he figures it’s more “laid back southern”.
I am a very laid-back grits and collards-eating Edisto Island resident, born and raised in the middle of South Carolina. However, I really do not need Boo or others of his species scampering unleashed and sandy-footed on my beach towel, shaking water on me, and shoving his big wet sniffing nose where I do not care to be sniffed. My two-year-old granddaughter does not like getting body slammed by affectionate forty-pound carnivores laying siege to her and her sand castles. Few of us good old freedom-loving southern boys and girls on Edisto really want unleashed dogs digging up turtle nests and defecating big steaming piles of disease-causing coliforms in the sand, even if their owners do scoop when watched.
Town of Edisto Beach rules require that dogs on the beach be leashed May 1 through October 31 and of course owners must scoop year-round. Dogs anywhere in town anytime must be under “verbal command” of their owners when off leash. If Mr. Banks does not intend to live by the democratically established rules of the community, perhaps he and Boo can seek their Utopia somewhere far away. Maybe there is a place where the prestige of having a poet and day-trader for a neighbor outweighs all else.

Man's Best Friend

She yaps at me every day to go for a walk with her. Then she scampers all over everyone’s yard inspecting their new shrubs and things while I holler for her to come back before we get into trouble with the neighbors. At least this ritual ensures that I get my daily exercise. She’s not always nuts about me watching television but she will sometimes reconcile and flop partially across my lap to be stroked. She’s very protective of my children and grandchildren although she gets restless in the car when we drive to visit them; we sometimes have to stop for exercise breaks and it’s hard to round her up again. She’s a good early warning alert because her acute hearing and sense of smell pick up anything unusual long before I can detect it. My friends all adore her. Most heartwarming of all, she is very loyal and comes bounding to greet me when I return from a trip. Yep…though I sometimes complain about her, I really really love my wife.

Shameless: Coarse language and Insufficient Nudity

Last night we watched Shameless, the much-hyped new edgy Showtime mini-series. Normally we don’t get Showtime but our cable TV provider is doing a free week of it for promotion. Anyway, the show is well named. It is about a trashy single-parent family where everyone uses coarse language to discuss their sex lives and even normal everyday events like going to school or getting arrested. The Dad is drunk most of the time and passes out on the floor every night. They’re just the type of family we all wish we had. Right?

Why does the entertainment industry think viewers are dying to hear coarse language? I’m not a prude; I just don’t see the entertainment value in it. I don’t use coarse language in normal conversation and neither do others with whom I associate…too much. Coarse language should be reserved for special moments like dealing with an inane robotic call director when trying to report a lost credit card, or getting your finger snapped in a mouse trap you’re trying to set – both of which happened to me yesterday. If I become habituated to coarse language in ordinary conversation it will lose its efficacy for these important moments.

There are scant moments of sex and nudity in the show. But somehow the producers think the most exciting sex is on the kitchen sink with dishes getting broken with every lunge. Obviously they have a lot to learn.

The bright spot in the show is Fiona, a lovely young woman and the only character with a shred of discipline and responsibility. She also happens to be smart and deliciously curvy. We need to see more of her…not just more screen time but more surface area. She should be innocently nude in all the scenes, while speaking with a civil tongue of course. It wouldn’t matter what she’s doing. She could be baking cookies, doing her income tax, or practicing her yoga. I’d subscribe to Showtime for that!