Great Gift Ideas

I just received a wonderful gift catalogue in the mail. It was called Harriet Carter. The messages therein are made possible by the USPS policy on very affordable bulk mail (BM) rates. This supports the free enterprise system, which is a system wherein the best and brightest creative inventors can realize their dreams and yours. It is a fabulous partnership of government and free entrepreneurial spirit. Here are some of the most creative and wonderful gift ideas.

Here’s a great idea for getting clogging leaves out of your gutter! I’m not sure how it works exactly without the directions. From the view of the hand holding the device it appears that you need something to levitate you ten to twenty feet up into the air. Perhaps a small crane with the hook attached to your Super Kegel Exerciser could get you up where you can reach your gutter.

Gotta go now and check my mailbox for more BM.

Swimming pool closed? Are you kidding?!

Swimming Pool Closed. SWIMMING POOL CLOSED! What the heck! That’s the sign on the apartment pool after we mounted our expedition to my daughter’s apartment pool this morning.

Some of my gentle readers may be thinking, “What’s the big deal?” Those are the readers who are my age or older. When we took our kids swimming in Washington State nearly 30 years ago, it was simple. We grabbed four towels, took our kids by the hand, walked down to the inlet, disrobed, and went swimming. That’s not the way it works now. Not by a long shot.

Nowadays we have learned that the sun’s rays will kill you. They will store up their evil effects over the years, eventually eat your skin off, give you cancer, and (worst of all) degrade your beauty with wrinkles, giant freckles, liver spots, and hideous moles. And, you don’t just expect today’s kids to play in the water when you get to it; you need toys to play in the water…lots of toys. This is how it goes when you mount a family swimming expedition in 2012.

First you have to wait for the right time. Nobody can be taking a nap or be in a bad mood and nobody can be due for a nap in the next two hours. Everybody has to be sufficiently fed to not have a hunger attack in the next two hours. Then you have to prepare everyone’s skin. My daughter has thoroughly researched the ingredients in sun block products and has selected a special suitable product that is about SPF 400, has no known carcinogens or allergens, and has the color and about twice the viscosity of lithium brake grease. Today I drew the task of having to smear it on the granddaughters. Every exposed square centimeter of the granddaughters must be generously covered and rubbed in because if my daughter detects even one tiny exposed pink spot after the solar exposure, I will be a dead man. Of course they are wiggling like crazy (especially Yaiza the toddler) and much of the product goes into their hair or eyes, which is a serious mess. Yaiza’s swimwear begins with her “Little Swimmer” disposable diaper, which is purported to trap and retain any accidents during the swim. Ha ha, fat chance. After that, both little girls must be inserted into their swimsuits. Their life jackets are mandatory so they are added to the two strollers that it takes to carry Yaiza and all the gear. The other gear includes two plastic floating tubes, which first must be topped off in air pressure. Then there is the diaper bag, acres of towels, and lots of toys including many cups, and pails and toy horses with rainbow-colored mane and tails that need to be washed and rewashed if we ever reach poolside.

So you should be able to understand now, that when daughter and I wheeled the expedition the 300 yards to the pool and found it closed, we were ready to kill somebody on the apartment staff, or at least hold them under water until they were blue. I stayed outside to keep cool in the heat while daughter went in to demand an explanation of the staff. The water had too much chemicals in it (medicine she said to our preschool age granddaughter) in case she didn’t yet know what chemicals were. TOO MUCH CHEMICALS!? I thought chemicals were what you were supposed to put in the water to kill the germs and make it safe. My friend who is a chemist says chemicals are good for you and you should embrace them without fear.

The irony of all this hyper preparation is that you still cannot remove all danger. Two days earlier on a successful granddaughter swimming expedition Ayla the elder (at age 4) was standing on a bit of smooth wet concrete safely outside the pool near the ladder. She was well prepared with a quarter pound of sun block and a snug well adjusted life vest. Suddenly without warning her feet shot out from under her and she smashed down on her face. She wasn’t wearing a helmet and face guard. I strongly suspect some of that lithium brake grease on the bottom of her feet was a contributing factor but I can’t prove it.

Sex Attitudes Then and Now

A couple of things happened last week in Asheville that caused me amazement. Remember Reverend Fred Phelps of the gay-bashing, military funeral protesting, Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS? He brought a troupe to Asheville to protest Billy Graham’s liberal tolerance of gays. Say what? The other thing was when we took our daughter’s family to the Western NC Nature center and witnessed a ridiculous scene at the men’s room. A woman in charge of children on a YMCA outing was blocking a man from taking his small son, who badly had to pee pee, into the men’s room. It was because there were boys in the men’s room and the little tyke’s father was a man. Say what again??

This all set me thinking about the changes in sex attitudes from before I graduated from high school 50 years ago until now. (Yow! Was it over 50 years?) First of all, I never witnessed or heard of gay bashing. In fact I was in college before I learned that some people were homosexuals by choice or nature. I think most people figured it was just a rare practice that low class prison inmates, extremely ugly dudes, and desperate sailors stuck at sea for months indulged in due to prolonged isolation from wives or prostitutes. It was a time of major “Don’t ask; don’t tell; never enters your mind.”

Homosexual issues or politics were so far off the radar screen in the 50’s that people never talked about it in polite (or impolite) society. The hot issue was how to keep young women virgins until marriage…or (depending upon one’s perspective) how to erase that pesky virginity. If people went on a business trip, unrelated people of the same sex were expected to share a hotel room. In family or personal visits, you might even get stuck in a double bed with a friend or relative of the same sex. Nobody thought that was encouraging of anything contrary to Leviticus.

How about pedophilia then versus now? We knew about what we called “child molesters” in those olden days. People figured they were just rare ridiculous perverts deserving of scorn. People didn’t seem to worry that the child (particularly a same sex child) would suffer lifetime psychological damage in situations short of actual forced rape. They certainly didn’t perceive any problem with a child merely seeing or being seen naked for innocent reasons by an adult member of the same sex. The YMCA was actually males-only at the time. You didn’t have separate dressing rooms for adult men and youths like they do now here in Asheville. In the Columbia, SC YMCA, males of all ages used to swim nude in the Y pool because there were no females allowed. I’m not kidding on this. Most people would have never dreamed that one of their own friends or family members (or a school teacher) might be a child molester.

Now, fast forward to 2012. Virginity after age 18 is almost unheard of and most people are somewhere between tolerant and totally accepting of adult heterosexual cohabitation. But, we’ve become obsessed and polarized over the issues of homosexuality and pedophilia. At the same time you have some states passing laws to grant marriage and other rights to same sex couples, you have a berserk reaction from Fred Phelps and many conservative politicians. They fear we are on the verge of all turning into pillars of salt or getting eaten by a locust plague because we are becoming more tolerant of sexual behavior between same sex consenting adults. Lord knows…if the locusts don’t get us we may still end up depopulating the earth because everyone is going homo.

Pedofiliaphobia! Today we are discovering numerous Catholic priests and Jerry Sandusky types popping up like toadstools after an autumn rain. Amazingly, these characters seemed to have been operating vigorously for years with plenty of witnesses and victims who kept mum. Obviously we have been way under-vigilant on this issue in the past. Fortunately this may be changing. The ultra conservatives who hate sin and sex are united with the ultra liberals who are obsessed with child welfare, health, and safety on this one issue. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, eh?! Don’t get me wrong. Serious sex predators deserve to have their private parts twisted off and fed to the hogs except that would be unconstitutional, so I don’t support it. On the other hand the new pedophiliaphobia seems to have gone way over the top, like some of those mis-aimed strategies combating illegal immigration or in the war on drugs.

Let’s move to a lighter subject and talk about swimsuits. At the same time women’s swimsuits have been getting skimpier and skimpier (thumbs up on that) men’s swimsuits have been getting bigger and baggier. They must come down to a man’s knees or he will be suspected of being a homosexual, foreigner, or a nerd, whichever the observer chooses to find most disgusting. Ironically, although the legs are down to the knees with enough loose fabric to entangle and drown you, they are worn with the waist about nine inches below the belly button, barely clinging to the pubic bone. When I walk into the surf for an ocean swim, so much air gets under my baggy swimsuit that the first wave buoys me up with a giant wedgy and tries to flip me ass over teakettle. It’s an amusing reversal of the men’s swimsuits of the 40’s. Those were snug Homer Simpson-style briefs with no leg coverage, but with a little white canvas belt that kept them secured well above the belly button.

Do I like today’s attitudes better than those of yesteryear? Generally yes, but the devil is in the details. As far as swimsuits are concerned, generally less is better for both genders and I’d be fine with none at all. Adults should be able to make whoopee or marry mutually consenting partners regardless of gender or any other attributes. And… at my age, if I have to make pee pee, there better be an available facility real nearby that satisfies the public’s apparently intense desire to NOT see me do it.

Why did they have to uninvent the governor?

No! Not the kind in the photo, the kind that kept your car from going too fast. I couldn’t find a picture of the car kind and you wouldn’t be able to make sense of it if I did. Here’s the story. You used to be able to buy an after-market governor for your motor vehicle. You set the maximum speed and simply drove normally with your right foot on the accelerator pedal except it would not let you exceed the set speed. “Isn’t that the same thing as a cruise control?” you might say. No. When you set a cruise control you can take your foot off the accelerator and keep going the same speed until you go to sleep or you have to tap it off because someone in front of you momentarily slows down or you reach a tight curve (usually in less than about 20 seconds). Sooner or later you forget to reset the cruise control. The next thing you know your speed creeps up, then whoop whoop, blue lights are flashing. Advantages of the governor are: If you go to sleep (not recommended) your right foot usually relaxes and you slow down and crash with less momentum. You don’t have to keep tripping it off every time you need to slow down briefly. You’re probably saying, “Yeah but what if I need to go a little faster to complete a pass?” No problem; they could just have a little solenoid in the accelerator linkage that would operate to push back on the accelerator if you exceeded the set speed. You’d be able to push hard to push through the resistance but you wouldn’t inadvertently push through it with normal comfortable cruising accelerator pedal pressure.

Stop the Deadly Retreads

Catherine was feeling safe and happy last Friday night, after a long day on the road. She was cruising down Interstate 95 doing a legal 70, looking forward to arriving home to her beloved husband (me). Suddenly a large truck tire retread appeared in the middle of her lane. Too late to swerve and too much close-following traffic to stab the brake, she hit it. Thank goodness she was OK! But, this is the SECOND time this has happened to us and damaged the plastic shield, air dam, spoiler, or whatever it’s called under our flimsy front bumper. Anyway, she pulled off an exit and into an Arby’s parking lot. She crawled around on the ground tying up the remaining pieces of plastic panels so they wouldn’t drag, and made it home safely.

Big dangerous retreads are all over the highways everywhere and I’m ##^&**#* sick and tired of them. I can only infer that there are no regulations forbidding retreads or shedding of them. If there is any regulation pertaining to this, enforcement must be meager with no significant fines levied. That is a travesty. In addition to the two above incidents we have had other close calls when we’ve witnessed a flying retread close to us or had some retread crumbs hit our windshield. Fortunately we’ve never been injured in any of these incidents but we have sustained several hundred dollars damage to our car. Of course you have to think twice about making a claim on your collision insurance for this. A couple of no-fault claims and your insurance company drops you like a hot potato or jacks your rates up.

There is something called the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. From it’s name, it sounds like it ought to regulate this. I don’t know why it’s not doing its job. My Republican friends will of course say it’s guvmint, therefore intrusive, incompetent, and inefficient, so it should have its budget cut or be eliminated. What a crock! I’d speculate that it’s either already underfunded to do what needs to be done, or more likely has been captured by the powerful motor freight industry lobby to do their own bidding.

Has anyone else had bad experiences with the forest of retreads that trucks liberally sprinkle on our highways? Do you know what laws and regulations exist for retreads and the shedding of them? If so, please comment below and tell your story.

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.