Category: Just Because

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Dust

The house we live in was built in 1948. It still has the original drafty, single-pane steel casement windows that it came with.

While I'm not as assiduous a housekeeper as I was in my youth, I still do make an attempt to keep things clean and tidy. But in this house it's a never-ending battle against dust. It seems like I wipe everything down, and two days later everything is covered again. So I get disheartened at this and two days often turns into two weeks. I used to visit my Dad and was aghast at layers of dust covering everything in his house. "I just don't have the energy any more. I start cleaning and give up halfway through." I couldn't understand it then, but now being close to the age he was when he told me that, it's becoming abundantly clear.

And yes, we've discussed hiring someone to come in and clean…

My office is an especially bad dust magnet, although the living room—where the majority of our tchotchkes reside—is a close second.  One of my office doors leads directly into the laundry room and that in turns opens directly to the back yard. Our back yard is basically bare dirt most of the year with a small patch of grass that has somehow managed to survive under the shade of the single elm tree that sits just off the patio.

If the yard alone weren't enough to send clouds wafting in through our even-when-closed drafty windows, when Raffi gets the zoomies, his favorite activity outside is to tear around in all that dirt doing doggy donuts.

Since we moved back in here I've been threatening to hit a home improvement store and buy a few dozen rolls of stick-on foam weatherstrip and line the inside edge of every window in the house…but I still haven't gotten around to it. After going through the place yesterday and wiping everything down yet again, I really need rethink the urgency and get to the task sooner rather than later because spending the better part of a single day dusting is not my idea of a good time. BUT… if I don't get around to it before the end of January, it will be one of my immediate post-retirement projects.

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Maybe It's Because I'm An Old Fart, But I Saw This And It Resonated

The Internet as a Place to Go, Rather Than a Place to Live

Introduction

The title of this post is not actually an original thought of mine, but a statement I came across on TikTok awhile ago. Unfortunately, I do not remember the username or any other information about the person who stated this, therefore I cannot give credit. I can only be thankful that someone finally stated this problem in modern society so precisely. Nonetheless, this statement is regarding the Internet, that used to be a place to go in the era of the 2000s up to mid 2010s, and from around 2015 up to nowadays, it has become a place to live. In this post will elaborate on that and state my opinion on the matter.

Physical media being left behind

To begin with, I believe that the reasoning behind this is the tendency of people either forgetting about or voluntarily letting go of all means of physical media. Physical media refers to DVD and CD players, turntables and records, VCR players and cassette tapes and digital or film cameras. As all of those means of media became outdated, the majority of people gave up on them and began relying on the World Web as a sourse of movies, music and books, and on smartphones as a main device that not only allows access to the Web, but can also be used for taking photos and videos.

What we let go of along with physical media

Quaility is the first feature we let go of along with physcial media. To give an example, the sound quailty of a vinyl is often said to be the highest. Despite that, very few people are interested in purchasing vinyl records and listening to them on turntables connected to home stereos. The reasoning behind this could possibly be the price – records are, in fact, quite expensive. So what about CDs? Most are relatively cheap and anyone can record a CD themselves from mp3 files on a laptop with a CD burner, making them even cheaper. So it must not be the price that makes people prefer smartphones for listening to music. Another example, regarding a different type of quailty, is about the visual quality of a photo taken with a digital camera, that while smartphone camera quality is constantly improving, an old digital or second-hand film camera will create photos of much greater quality than that of one taken with a smartphone, regardless of the brand and version. And, in spite of this, it is much more likely to come across someone taking a photo at a tourist destination, where photos are meant to be of high quality, with a smartphone, rather than with a digital or film camera. And once again, second-hand digicams are quite cheap. So price here is not a factor. Secondly, we let go of the authentic feeling of incorporating technology into our daily lives. There is nothing that makes you, quite literally in that sense, feel the music better than holding a cd in your hands. Same goes to taking pictures with a real camera and especially reading a book by turning the paper pages. So, despite the higher quality and the authentic feeling of physical media, why people prefer smartphones?

Sacrificing quality and authenticity for the sake of multifuncinality and accessability

The access to a number of actions, that would traditionally be preformed by a few different means of physical media, and those same actions being put together in a single device, makes smartphones exactly what they are—smart. They can be used for many different purposes and are accessible almost worldwide nowadays. Despite that, their muiltifunctional nature means that a person doesn't need to get off of their smartphone almost at all—it provides them with access to a ton of music and movies, pictures of different types of art and online books. It allows the user to take photos and videos quickly and easily, calls can be made and text messages can be sent in a matter of seconds. This is the main reason why so many people voluntarily let go of physical media and before they realise it—begin living their lives online—it is easy, quick and cheap.

Involuntarily living on the Internet

Now that the reason for usage is cleared, we should ask ourselves—what does that usage lead to? Despite smartphones being easily accessible and multifunctional, they are the main reason why the Internet has consumed a huge part of so many people's lives. Relying on a single device for a number of operations, especially a device that gives access to the Internet—a virtual space—really easily causes people to forget about the place where we are meant to live and where we feel best living—physical space. Many people forget about the feeling of real life in the process of preforming so many actions online and living on the Internet becomes something that they don't even realise they are doing.

How do we go back?

There is no actual way of going back to only or mainly using physcial media. Time goes on and we cannot interfere with that. Despite that, there is one thing that should definitely be done—incorporating physical media into our lives as much as we do with smartphones, laptops and computers. Listening to music on CDs, watching movies on DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. Reading physical rather than online books. Taking a digicam with us on trips and vacations. Going to the cinema or theathre. The Internet should once again become a place we visit, where we can talk to our friends, watch a movie or listen to music from time to time—when we don't own that CD or when that friend lives abroad. That is what it's meant to be—a part of our lives—not where we live them.

[source]

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Friday The 13th

From Bustle:

Humor me for a moment, and try to think back to where you were in 2006. If you also unwittingly conjured a bunch of images of frizzy hair, braces, and angsty sing alongs to Taylor Swift's "Teardrops On My Guitar" in the back of your mom's minivan, then you're not alone. Why, you may be wondering, did I just take you on a journey back to your pimple-ridden, t-shirt layering, pre-Gossip Girl youth? Because if you're wondering how often Friday the 13th happens in October, you should first wrap your mind around the fact that we haven't had one since 2006…and according to my good friend math, that means this is the first one we've had in eleven years. [This was published in 2017 – MA]

That being said, you won't have to wait as long for the next one, which will come in 2023. As for how often it occurs, it just depends on Leap Years and our good old friend the Gregorian calendar; we can go anywhere from five and eleven years between October, Friday the 13ths. (For future reference, in case you like to plan your memes ahead: the next few are 2023, 2028, 2034, 2045, 2051, 2056, 2062, 2073, 2079, 2084, and 2090. If you manage to live longer than that, don't @ me, because I personally plan on dying of butter consumption long before then.)

But why, exactly, is it so spooky to have Friday the 13th happen in October than any other month? It's not just because it's rare—it's because one of the more popularly documented origins of the superstition took place on October, Friday the 13th.

A medieval society known as the Knights Templar were arrested on Friday, October 13, 1307 by French King Philip IV; the Knights Templar, a group of mostly unmarried men, were paid handsomely by Christian pilgrims for their protection during the crusades. Apparently they amassed enough of a fortune that when King Philip IV was low on funds himself, he initiated the arrest of hundreds of them on the grounds of heresy, which is—well—bad luck if you're one of the Knights Templar.

This didn't stop people from theorizing that the knights were actually involved in shenanigans within the church, or they discovered legendary treasure, and all sorts of far more interesting fates. But despite their unfortunate arrests and the timing, more documented incidents of that particular Friday the 13th being an "unlucky" day didn't really start to stick until the 20th century, when authors began to reference it in their works (most notably The Iron King in 1955, and The Da Vinci Code in 2003). From there, the idea of October, Friday the 13th being a super spooky day instead of just a baseline spooky one seemed to take on a life of its own.

Friday the 13th may have been causing unease long before that particular one in October, though, because in Western superstition, both the number 13 and Fridays are considered historically unlucky; some people theorize that it may hark back to the Bible, as 13 people were at the Last Supper, and Jesus died on Good Friday.

As for the October factor, Knights Templar aside, October itself is a known ~spooky month~. A lot of the things we associate with Friday the 13th — superstition, magic, black cats (which are pure and good and must be protected)—we also associate with Halloween. It's kind of a psychological double whammy considering that alone; when you put the 11 year wait from the last one into the mix, it's no wonder people are more hyped about this particular Friday the 13th than they have been over others in recent past.

Whether or not you choose to acknowledge Friday the 13th this year, stay safe, y'all—and try not to let any French kings rob you of the cold, hard cash you pillaged and protected for.

And for those of you who (like me, obviously) were curious, we haven't had an October Friday the 13th full Moon (adding to the spookiness) since the year 2000—and the last one prior to that it was in 1905. I haven't been able to find definitively how often this confluence of events occurs, but based on the two dates I was able to dig up, it looks to be approximately 90-100 years.

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I'm Officially OLD

Back in the mid 90s, I seriously doubted I would live to see this birthday. Even though I kept testing negative, after attending multiple weekly funerals and watching friends drop like flies from AIDS, planning for my "retirement" wasn't even a thing I remotely considered having to worry about. When the small architectural firm I was working for at the time set up a 401K for me, I immediately cashed it out, telling them, "I don't expect to live to see 65."

And yet, here we are…

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Digital Hoarding

I am a digital hoarder. I admit it. But occasionally being one pays off.

It took a couple months longer than I initially anticipated, but next weekend I'm finally getting this back from my repair guy in Prescott—along with the distressing news that after he's finished with his current queue of equipment, he'll be hanging up his soldering gun and enjoying a much-deserved retirement. (He noted that since I'd already contacted him about my other Kenwood receiver to go ahead and bring that up as "it's already in the queue.")

What does this have to do with digital hoarding? Well, I asked Randy if he knew of anyone who could fashion some genuine walnut end panels for the receiver to replace the crappy vinyl veneered ones that it came with. He said he did, but after checking with the guy he reported back that he wasn't interested in taking on the project.

Well, shit.

When I got my initial Kenwood KR-7400 back in 2007, I'd contacted someone via the AudioKarma website who fashioned new end panels for me. Unfortunately the AK account I had at the time was long gone and I had no way of tracking the guy down now.

Or so I thought. A cursory search through the website was a bust, but since I am like a dog with a bone and not easily deterred once I'm on a mission, I got to thinking…what about old emails? Problematic, but it might work.

In 2007 I was still on a Windows machine using MS Outlook for mail. On a whim I pulled out the external hard drive where I hoard stuff. While I thought I'd saved all my emails from back in the day, it was still kind of a surprise to discover yearly archive files all the way from 1997 through 2008.

I knew they'd come in handy some day!

While I don't use it, I do have Outlook on my Mac, but I wasn't sure it would be able to read files that old. (Lord knows Word balks at opening any of its own files older than 2003.)

Not to worry. The 2007 .pst file imported flawlessly and almost immediately I found the email string between myself and the gentleman who fashioned the panels. And it turns out my memory really is shit; the panels weren't solid wood as I'd thought; he had merely stripped the vinyl off the existing MDF and applied real cherrywood veneer in its place. I could've sworn they were solid wood all these years, but obviously they were not.

I fired off a email to him yesterday asking if he remembered me and if he'd be interested in veneering these "new" panels for me. As of this morning the mail hasn't bounced back, so the address is obviously still active, but who knows how often it gets checked…or if he's even still alive.

Fingers crossed.

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Mouthwatering

(Click to embiggen.)

Well maybe not the Canape of Anchoves, the Hot Chicken Liver Sandwich on Toast, or the Fig Juice…

The Warner Brothers Studio Cafe menu from February 1941.

But Broiled Lobster for 75 cents? (The prices are in cents, not dollars.) Hell yes! Even in 2023 dollars that translates to only $15. Sign me up!