My Notes

At work some folks were talking about the cost of living nowadays. I was not really listening until I thought I overheard Kathy say, “I can remember when gas was thirty-five cents a gallon!”

“Hell, that’s nothing,” I interrupted. “I can remember when gas was twenty-five cents a gallon!”

Kathy replies, “That’s what I just said!”

“Well, I can still top that,” I said without hesitation. “I can even remember when I could hear what people just said!”

Pause, as it sinks in. Then it brought down the house.

Everybody’s favorite pasttime becomes more popular in a heat wave. On Thursday we had a heat wave that set some records for the date, and, according to the National Weather Service, for all time. Oh, we’ve had hotter days in the SF Bay Area, I suppose, but it hit 107 in some of the interior regions of the “East Bay”. It hit 101 right here in Castro Valley, which does often catch the last of the sea breezes before the hills block off the counties in the eastern interior.

The thing is not the absolute temperature magnitude, but what folks are used to. It will hit 112 in Phoenix today, not bad for June. On those days when you folks along the plains states and eastern seaboard get triple digits AND 100% humidity, you’d welcome a “dry heat”.

Here, 101 “feels like” 111. But the spell is broken. I had to put on a T-shirt this morning. It’s 70 outside, 80 inside. It took all night to cool the apartment down from 88. Once the massive frame of a house or apartment soaks up the heat, it takes days for that heat to be released with ordinary, non-air-conditioned ventilation. You can feel residual heat when you walk near a wall.

Near the ocean in northern CA, very few people have air conditioning. In the interior, anyone who can afford it, has it. In Phoenix, it’s not just a quality of life issue, but it can be a medical issue. When it’s over 120, you go outside as little as possible. If the planet continues to lose ice caps at the currently accelerating rate of breakup and melt, the southwest US could become largely uninhabitable by 2050.

I’ve updated Summitlake.com’s Weather page to include regional and national  links to the NOAA - National Weather Service. NOAA offers much more detailed weather info, including an old-fashioned text summary and weather overview, so you can see where we’ve been, and why, and where the weather is headed. I retained the at-a-glance weather.com summaries, though there is really little content there beyond the daily high-lows.

• Last Sunday, I was queued up at the TSA security portal at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport. Ahead of me, a young lady tried to barge through the walk-thru metal detector, cell phone cradled to her ear. Security stopped her. She gave him a really annoyed look. Without waiting to see the outcome, I made an end-run around her and passed through. She could still be there, for all I know.
• In other news, we today received an apologetic email from our web host provider. It seems they had a brief loss of service at 2pm MDT, after a power failure, during which a backup generator failed to come on line automatically. As it happens, at that exact time (4PM PDT), WE had a 1.5 hour power failure in Castro Valley, California, while I was online, so I did not notice. I called Pacific Gas and Electric to get details, but their automated voice response system could not match up my phone number or utility account number to any known outage in the area. On a little battery-powered portable radio, I tuned in KCBS, which serves most of Northern California, to discover there had been a power outage that blocked traffic on Castro Valley Boulevard. Perhaps PG&E knew, but their telephone didn’t. Or, perhaps they get their outage reports from KCBS like everybody else.

Last month Jim Toomey , author of the syndicated daily cartoon “Sherman’s Lagoon”, published a strip urging readers to write in to the NOAA to help save the sharks. Thanks to the craze for shark’s fin soup in the Far East, sharks really are close to hitting the endangers species list. The item here is that the strip encouraged kids to draw a picture of our favorite shark and mail it in to the NOAA. Thinking the NOAA might get a kick out of it, I drew a stick figure shark with a toothy grin and mailed it in, signing it “Alex F. - age 64″. I forgot all about it until the postcard arrived today (below, after the original 04-20-08 strip). Apologies to Jim Toomey for using his strip.

Mercifully, I did not scan the drawing I sent in to the NOAA.

There’s an unremarkable little one inch ad placed in the New Yorker: “Fear of public speaking? Gone. Quickly. Guaranteed”. On a close read, there is something remarkable: “Executive programs now $2,497″.

If I or my company were footing the tab for this sort of seminar, I’d have a lot more on my mind than rhetorical nervousness. At this price, who wants to go to the boss and say, “Guess what? We’re getting our money back on that course you sent me to.”

I took a public speaking class in college. I was terrified of speaking before groups of any size. That was the topic of my first classroom speech. I was nervous as hell, but the topic resonated with my classmates. I learned two things: (1) Know your topic so you don’t have to fake enthusiasm (2) Like cold showers, public speaking isn’t so bad if you just wade in and do it.

Today’s ramble concerns the name of the course’s website: ConfidentlySpeaking.com”. Clever, that. What other stock phrases could we turn into a $2,497 executive course?

• “Confidentially Speaking” - for CIA management
• “Figures of Speech” - for Jenny Craig executives
• “Strictly Speaking” - for pedagogues and prison wardens
• “So to Speak” - remedial speech therapy

Speaking of which, this last on dips close to the bottom of the barrel. We don’t make fun of people with speech impediments. Grown-up folks don’t, anyway. At a much younger age, I did. At the time, I hastened to point out I was making fun of the person, not the impediment. Ah, the mindless cruelty of youth. Actually, it turns out I can develop a mild stammer when my engine of excitability is flooded with overenthusiasm. Always could flood the engine. Others were just too grown up to point it out.

But you can’t sell widgets by communicating nervousness.

The sales seminar is America’s ever-popular panacea for folks with foot-in-mouth disease. Think Dale Carnegie. Think Zig Ziglar. At worst, the sales seminar teaches the aggressive and pushy the fine art of manipulativeness without the necessity of ever having to say anything too specific. This is like preying on the disarmed before they have any inkling what’s really going on here. 

At best, sales seminars teach courtesy, tact, and the art of perfecting a genuine rapport with the listener. This is like my two modest points on knowing your subject and projecting your enthusiasm, with the added kicker that it’s not all about me, it’s all about you. Wouldn’t you say that’s an ability that’s literally priceless? What will it take for you to sign up for this opportunity right now?

I managed a garden shop and a paint department in one of my previous lifetimes - my early years in the retail business. A fellow named Ward, a little older and more experienced, ran the Women’s Fashions department. He did very well. Both our departments posted admirable sales figures every year, but I worked my tail off every day, while Ward drifted around the store being nice to everybody. I asked Ward how a nice fellow like him ended up merchandising fashions. He told me that you don’t have to know anything about a product to be successful in sales.

How true. I ran a successful department by learning the paint industry better than most “professionals.” Ward did the same thing by being a nice guy who was intensely interested in every customer and coworker as people. I had technical skills. Ward had people skills.

Of the lever, Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.” Better he should have taken a cue from Demosthenes, who was said to have practiced the perfection of the oratory art by learning to speak with pebbles in his mouth. The Archimedes archtype only moves the world, briefly, before the laws of celestial mechanics swing it back into its original orbit. The Demosthenes archtype persists in persuasive oratory until the world swings over to his side.

Politicians have always known this. It’s not what you do, it’s what you have to say about it. The noblest deed in the world pales in comparison with others’ estimation of its worth. NASA, take heed: rhetoric rules. And you can say that again.

I was playing Solitaire and monitoring an old CD released by Jerry Jeff Walker, “Hill Country Rain” (1992). One take on the album might be that it’s partly  a rehash of favorites from 30 years ago: “Curly & Lil” and “Hill Country Rain”. Gone are the hard-drivin’, rowdy whiskey-throated lyrics belted out to an insanely toasted crowd. Nothing here that could hold a candle to “Pissin’ In The Wind”, my personal favorite of those years.

If the name Jerry Jeff Walker doesn’t quite ring a bell, and you’re old enough to remember “Mr. Bojangles”, Walker wrote it in 1968. Nitty Gritty Dirt Band took the song to #9 on the charts in 1971. However, Walker was most popular in Country Western circles for his takes on songs like “Hairy Ass Hillbillys”.

What struck me: “Hill Country Rain” is still Jerry Jeff, and a very good mellow Jerry Jeff. Like the real Mr. Bojangles after whom the song was penned, Jerry Jeff sounds like, somewhere along the line, he had the stuffings beaten out of him. From what I’ve read of his personal history, he did, but he’s done very well for himself since. You can read a short Walker bio on Wikipedia.

On this CD, the song “The Man He Used to Be” reflects - somewhat autobiographically - on the old days. Walker asks the question “what was I trying to prove?” Looking back, as I myself catch myself doing these days, Walker’s refrain summarizes it this way:

There’s no man stranger to himself
Than the man he used to be.

I couldn’t agree more. When I look back on all the fool stunts I pulled, I can feel a little gratitude for being here at all.

Originally, based on a conversation earlier today, I had thought of writing a short piece called “Top 10 Dumb Things I’ve Done”. I changed my mind. To limit it to 10 dumb stunts would hardly do justice to my youth. And that doesn’t even count the mean things, thoughtless neglect of good friends, the cheap shots, and all those legendary embarrassing personal failures that never should have been spread all over town. Of course, there are also the good things I’ve done. I could write a “Top 10″ list for those, but I do have days when I wonder if I could actually get to 10.

It’s been a hell of a ride. And it sure as hell ain’t over yet. Carry on, Jerry Jeff.

I remember the year it snowed in the Oakland hills - 1976. I remember the Week of Thunderstorms, when the SF Bay Area had more or less continuous heat lightning and thunder for a straight week. This was in the late 1990’s - I don’t remember the exact year. This little exercise of my faculties establishes two things. We don’t have a lot of extreme weather in this area. And I don’t remember those few very well.

This week, the SF Bay Area experienced record three-digit temperatures and some Severe Weather Alerts. Yes, we do get heat waves, but they’re unusual in May. No, citizens of Phoenix, you would not have found anything remarkable about this week, here up north, but it’s rare to find days when it’s hotter up here than down there.

Air conditioners are rare up here, so the trick is the old one used in homes of thick adobe walls in the old Southwest: open up all the doors and windows at night, and seal in the cold air by closing everything up during the day. Even so, I found myself working late “on call” at home the other night. It was still 86 in the computer room.

The heat wave is about over. Opening the apartment to the night air got the place down to 70 degrees. Early this morning, there is a slight breeze running through the apartment. I had to go and toss on a T-shirt. They’re calling for a high of 82 today. I can certainly welcome that!

Remember Marvel Comics? It seems action comic books have kept pace with technology in the last 50 years, the rational-yet-crazy plots have never grown up, and … Iron Man, a truly fortunate marriage of the imagination of Marvel with the staggering computer-generated imaging and resources of Paramount Pictures is now cooler than ever.

First of all, the plot has to have bad guys, else what do we need the good guys for? The action seems to begin in Pashtun territory in the high mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Add some truly nasty terrorists with a thirst for blood and hi-tech weapons of mass destruction. Throw in the latest missiles, manufactured and sold in the United States of America by Stark Industries. Give genius inventor Tony Stark a taste of his own medicine: let him be captured by the bad guys, see first-hand what his company is doing to women and children in the region, and let him figure out a high-tech solution for both escape and eventual neutralization of the bad guys.

Robert Downey Jr. does a wonderfully believable and likeable casting as Stark.  We don’t get to the movies that often, but our introduction to Gwyneth Paltrow as the Girl Friday was delightful. Supporting cast and other assorted good guys and bad guys were masterful.

You can click the Iron Man link to see a trailer and particulars about the film, released May 2. People who don’t ordinarily like action films might well like this one: when you want a good action film, team up with the folks who invented the action genre more than half a century ago.

 By the way, web searches on this topic suggest there will be a sequel. Well, Tony Stark stopped the terrorists, but (true to action comic form) he didn’t finish them off. Nor did he actually destroy the Iron Man prototype Stark used for his escape, and it was patiently reassembled by the bad guys …

Recommended.

A shaft of sunlight hits the cut crystal of the chandelier. It refracts into a rainbow of dots of color around the room: red, magenta, orange, yellow, and so on through the far end of the deep violets: thousands of little shards of the spectrum flood the floor, walls and ceiling.
 
“Look at me!” said the magenta. “Here I am, the sunlight!”

• Naizulam Vazerbeium, please call back and leave a message. We know it was you because our answering machine annunciator said so. Or was it Vaiuleranium Luzainnermon? Your call is important to us.
• US Rep. Tom Lantos’ passing was memorialized this week. A WWII resistance fighter who emigrated to the US in 1947, Lantos worked tirelessly as a champion of human rights. Much to the chagrin of conservative detractors, he saw gays and lesbians as humans who also have rights. His voting record won a perfect 0% from the hatemongering front group Family Research Council  — good enough for us.
• American Airlines grounded their entire fleet of aging MD-80’s, joining the ranks of other major US airlines in the limelight for flying aircraft that might be shunned by self-respecting Third World nations. No, it wasn’t the jackscrew problem this time, it was wiring harnesses. Meanwhile, a Texas consortium is negotiating to purchase the entire fleet of MD-80 fuselages for conversion to industrial rotisserie cookers.
• US Airways wasn’t one of those airlines. They had their own publicity problems with a pilot whose loaded handgun discharged in the cockpit of a flight on final approach to landing.
• This could actually be seen as good news for US Air, as it will help the public forget the incident with recently merged America West where one of their pilots was busted for flying while intoxicated.
• Tata Motors bought Jaguar and Land Rover from ailing Ford Motor Company for a song, at 1/3 the purchase price of what Ford paid to acquire the prestige British manufacturers some years back. You might think this is funny unless you know that Tata is one of the fastest rising industrial stars in India, one of the fastest growing economies in the world. There is, then, no truth to the rumor the vehicles will be converted to scooters or pedal cars, nor will they be rebranded as Jagutata and Land Rotata.