Shake, Rattle and Roll

Hello World,

Strange days indeed, as the late and lamented John Lennon once said, and he wasn't far off the mark, I can tell you that. People in these parts could be forgiven for wondering if Armageddon isn't coming a little bit earlier than the doomsayers have predicted in 2012, the way things are going around here, and you don't know what to expect next - which is probably just as well, because it could easily be something extremely bad, and you wouldn't want to know. It seems that somewhere along the line, what was supposed to be the Dog Days of August have turned instead into the Werewolves of London, and suddenly stocking up on silver bullets and wooden stakes doesn't seem like such a bad idea after all.

Anyone would think that a 5.9 magnitude earthquake in the rural Virginia countryside would not make much of a splash outside of the immediate area, and treated as a passing curiosity by everyone else. Not so fast! This unfriendly quake was felt from Florida to Maine, and as far west as Ohio, besides knocking out communications in the nation's capital, and shaking up everything in its wake. They evacuated buildings in White Plains and New York City, while closer to home, the old flea-bag rattle-trap where I work shook on its foundations in a manner that was not at all reassuring, believe me. Luckily there was no damage at this distance from the epicenter, and everyone could go back to relaxing and enjoying the beautiful day. Not so fast! We found out later that there was another separate earthquake earlier in the day upstate around Albany, plus a completely different one that rocked the Rocky Mountains, and another one yet still that punched Peru - and all on that same fateful day. Hmmmm. Does it occur to everybody that the new "earthquake option" has just been installed on the Kremlin's infernal weather machine, courtesy of our old nemesis Comrade Mischka? I don't know about anyone else, but here I'm thinking "da," and for the record, may I just say, I love Mother Russia.

Probably all of the earthquakes would have gotten a lot more long-term press coverage, except for the imminent arrival on the scene of Hurricane Irene, which has turned into the kind of media circus usually reserved for declarations of war or high-profile crime sprees, so you would think that there had never been a hurricane before in the history of the world - in fact, I'm sure by now it has its own FaceBook page, Twitter account, and interactive web site. Everyone has battened down the hatches, moved to higher ground, or at least taped up their windows for the big blow. So far, my favorite was a picture in the newspaper from a coastal town where someone had boarded up their store windows and then painted a message of "Good Night Irene," one supposes, for the storm's amusement along the way.

Meanwhile at work, I had bigger (or rather, much smaller) fish to fry. I have an old metal desk in my office, and one day I noticed that a piece of paper must have fallen behind the bottom drawer, because I could hear it brush against the drawer whenever I opened and closed it. Since I couldn't reach over the back of the drawer for it, I figured I would have to take the whole drawer out to get to it - but first, I would have to take all of my various bags of candy out of the drawer, where I keep them handy for therapeutic mood enhancement, as necessary. Now, I have always kept boxes of cracker and cookies, and bags of candy, in my desk or on the shelf in the closet, and never had any trouble with it, except for the occasional melted chocolate from the extreme heat in that old fire-trap. So I was understandably chagrined (and here, the term "appalled" might not be too strong a word) to discover the tell-tale tooth-prints of furry varmints chewing on the candy in my desk drawer, and leaving little plastic and foil crumbs all over the bottom of the drawer, and thanks so very much not. So now I have to don my plastic gloves and face mask, tossing out half-eaten candy and trying to salvage what's left, and muttering imprecations under my breath that were not for sensitive ears. I finally cleared everything out of the drawer, and wiped it down with alcohol pads inside and out, even the gooey caramel trail the varmints left behind them down the back of the drawer, and it goes without saying, thanks so very much not.

The first thing I noticed when I took out the drawer, was that the piece of paper that started it all was stuck to the drawer itself, which is why it made noise every time I opened or closed the drawer. But after that, I discovered that there was another whole pile of papers that had fallen completely under the drawer, and I never would have realized they were there, because they made no sound at all as the drawer glided smoothly above them. In fact, a couple of them were recent important papers that I would have been looking for, and sooner rather than later, if I had realized they were missing in the first place. Others, well, as the saying goes, not so much. I found some mis-delivered junk mail from 2006 that I was supposed to bring back to the Mail Room, and copies of old memos and forms that should have been filed. Now, it's easy to say that I'm a hopeless loser, and a serious detriment to the organization, but it turns out that I wasn't the only person with this problem. Many of the papers under the bottom drawer were lost by the supervisor who had the office before me, and hasn't worked there since the beginning of 2001, so that can't be laid at my doorstep. My personal favorite was the collection of perfectly preserved business cards from a previous Director of Material Management (who obviously had the same desk) that I never knew, but when I showed them to a co-worker, said he hadn't worked there for the last 35 years. So I guess in the end, we have to thank the furry varmints for inadvertently uncovering this treasure trove of lost documents - and not to mention, the boost to the local economy as I hurried out and bought bunches of plastic containers to keep the varmints away from my snacks, because anyone can tell you that my Indian name is Shares Not Chocolate, and that's not just the caramel talking, believe me.

Speaking of the local economy, I had a little too much of it in the past week, in more ways than one. It all began with some mail trouble at church, where we would find our mail out in the bushes, or in the garbage, instead of being in the mailbox as it should have been. So when I didn't receive the bank statement when it was expected, I figured that it had been the victim of some mischief, and if it hadn't turned up in the bushes by now, it was probably lost for good. So I hurried out of work last Thursday when the bank has extended hours, and stood on line waiting to get a reprint of the July statement, which is not an option that is available on their web site, probably because they want to charge a fee for this. The teller was very understanding, and leaped into action, printing out a replacement copy on her printer in short order. I had some other errands to run, so I dashed off, glad to get one thing out of the way. It wasn't until later that night when I was working on the financial reports that I noticed for the first time that the replacement statement I had picked up was from July 2010 instead of last month, and once again even yet still, thanks so very much not. So Friday morning, I flew out of the house early, since the bank isn't open late on Friday, and went right back to the same bank, and stood on the same line, and tried it all over again. I explained to a different teller that I had requested a reprint of last month's statement, but instead got a statement from 13 months ago, and was taking another crack at getting the right statement this time around. He hopped right on it, and handed it to me hot off the printer, only this time, I checked the dates before I left, and once again, glad to get it out of the way at long last. I admit that even I wasn't expecting the punch line to this story, which is that I went to church on Sunday as usual, and bumped into the worship assistant, who handed me the envelope with the original July bank statement, and I don't mind saying, in a very off-hand manner, which she said she had taken out of the mailbox previously and forgotten to give to me sooner. Well, it's obvious when the gods are toying with us, it does no good to complain about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and there's no point in crying, heaven knows. At this rate, the Werewolves will have the last laugh after all.

Elle

Flight of Fancy

Hello World,

Well, the thermometer may say that it's still the depths of the summer doldrums, but for anyone who watches television, you know that they've already been playing football, of all things, for the last three weeks in cities all over the country, and campuses far and wide. Here in the local area, we can listen to The FAN, a 24-hour sports radio network, and keep up-to-date on everything sports, from the most popular to the most arcane. As soon as the NFL labor dispute was settled, and teams started making deals for available players, the sports commentators couldn't hurry up fast enough to bury the New York Giants for the upcoming season, and this is without a single game having been played, even in pre-season. It seems that the biggest challenge for the team is not going to be their opponents on the field, but winning over the critics, who have apparently already written off their chances as a lost cause, even before the first official coin toss. I guess the good news for the Giants is that they've got no place to go but up.

And as long as we're all looking up, here's another one of those curious headlines that can't help but make you wonder, and scratch your head, if not worse:

========================

Westchester-bound jet lands safely

========================

Now, if this was the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright taking off from Kitty Hawk for the first time, I can see how landing safely would have been considered newsworthy enough to rate a front-page headline. However, in this day and age, when literally tens of thousands of aircraft take off and land all over the world on a regular basis, this would seem to fall into the "dog-bites-man" example of headline writing, which is to say, it leaves itself wide open, with no indication of what makes this remarkable in any way.

Speaking of the wide open spaces, as much as I hate to pick on our woeful local newspaper, when the blunders come in triplicate, as this bunch did, well, it's just too much to resist. It all started in the TV Section Best Bets, with this review of the FX series, "Rescue Me" -

===========================

Tommy takes the time to write his inner

most thoughts and feeling to his loved ones

===========================

Well, splitting up "inner" and "most" there really tends to suck all of the meaning out of that phrase, which you would think would be impossible after all this time. But at least they got both halves of the word right, which is better than they did in this next synopsis of TNT's "The Mentalist" -

===========================

Patrick Jane and Lisbon learn that the Red

John case has been taken away from them

and reassigned to a straight laced officer

===========================

Talk about sucking all the meaning out of something, I tell you, sometimes you just don't even know where to begin. It was another holiday for the spell-checker, since all of the words were spelled correctly, as far as it went, and since they were lacing up an officer, I suppose it was better to be straight rather than crooked. In an odd coincidence, the exact same problem occurred in the Life & Style section, in an interview with author Andrew Gross, explaining why he introduced a new protagonist in his latest thriller -

==========================

"I didn't want to be straight jacketed

into a particular character or role"

==========================

These people obviously needed more help in navigating the straits of better journalism, rather than taking the straight and narrow homophone shortcut that led them to disaster on the rocky shoals of language abuse in their straight laced straight jackets. And I don't mind saying, that's exactly where they would belong, if only there was such a thing, alas.

Very alert readers may recall our old friend Bob T. Yokl of the Savings Beyond Price Newsletter, whose whimsical "antidotal evidence" is still a classic of the genre. In the latest edition, Bob introduces the largely untapped area of utilization management, which he first describes as "a new supply chain discipline" to promote cost-effectiveness. But later in the same paragraph (our friendly Yokl obviously has a short attention span) he explains how "to receive the full payback of this power cost-control disciple." Here I'm thinking, this would probably come as a big surprise to St. Peter and St. Mark, not to mention, the rest of the disciples, by golly. But my favorite part is when he delves into the safety issues that plagued the company that "grew to become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world."

=========================

Toyota skimped on inspectors and inspections

and compromised their once ridged quality standards

=========================

I can see the problem immediately, because everyone knows that only R-r-r-r-r-ruffles have r-r-r-r-r-ridges, so when it comes to quality standards, they could possibly say that T-t-t-t-t-toyota has t-t-t-t-t-talent, but they would have to be rigid enough to leave those ridges alone. And the rest of the disciples, it goes without saying, especially if they're wearing straight laced straight jackets, which would bring a whole new meaning to the concept of "supply chain discipline" that I find particularly odious. At least, those are my inner most thoughts on the matter, whatever that means.

Elle

Weekend Warriors

Hello World,

Well, the Ides of August will be upon us before we know it, when the fabled Dog Days could really start barking in earnest. Although I don't know what they could do that would be much worse than the weather we already had in July, with day after day of triple digit temperatures, and humidity that was off the charts, so that even the most robust electricity providers were no match for it. The recent weather around here has been positively pleasant compared to that, but with enough freakish spontaneous storms to remind us that our old pal Comrade Mischka is never far away from the controls of the Kremlin's infernal weather machine, da?

In fact, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it was Comrade Mischka and some of his evil cohorts who managed to turn what should have been a pleasant weekend getaway into something that was not at all the way it was intended. We had plans to visit our friends around Albany, for a splash in their pool, and they were so eager to have us that they actually invited us to come, rather than us just forcing ourselves on them as usual. We had to work around their schedule of being away, and our other friends being on call, so we settled on last weekend when everyone was available, and we had high hopes for good weather. Although it started out with the forecast somewhat inauspicious for our purposes, and we thought we were prepared for a bit of a bumpy ride, it turned out that was not even the half of it.

We started out bright and early on Saturday morning, because we wanted to have plenty of time at the pool, and be ready to dive right in as soon as we got there around lunchtime. Not so fast! It turned out that our hostess had been felled with a severe stomach infection, and had been confined to her bed and no contact with the outside world. This was an unexpected blow, and punched more than a few holes in our plans for the rest of the day, although it must be said that our host did his best to entertain us on his own. We resolved to make the best of it, and waited for our other friends to arrive and join us at poolside for an afternoon of aquatic delights. Once again, not so fast! Our other friends had errands and obligations that took longer than they expected, so they didn't show up until almost 2:00 PM, and since no one had any lunch (here is one place that our hostess really would have come in handy) we headed off to the nearby Circle Diner for a quick bite. Alas, and even yet more once again, not so fast! Although we were seated promptly, they apparently couldn't find anyone willing to serve us, and we sat for 20 minutes as if invisible to the staff, until we finally prevailed upon one of the busboys to send a waitress our way - who they must have dragooned straight from the head of the class at the Surly Waitress School, whose icy manner put the building's air conditioning to shame. I was happy with my fried ravioli, but we found the portions skimpy and over-priced, although luckily served on good sturdy dishes, since our snarling waitress essentially threw them at us from across the table. We hoped that a nice swim might salvage the rest of the day, but by the time we left, it was already so gloomy and threatening that the thought of being in a pool seemed not only unappealing, but downright dangerous, and we reluctantly gave up on the idea.

So instead, we went to check in at La Quinta Hotel, where we had stayed before, and our other friends decided to join us overnight, rather than drive all the way back home on their own. We had some time to relax and get settled in, which was more complicated than it would have been, if they hadn't put us on the 3rd floor in order to get us two rooms together. It's simple enough to get from the parking lot to the 2nd floor by taking the handy stairs, but to get all the way up to the top floor, you're at the mercy of their painfully slow and wheezing elevator, which made the derelict elevators at the hospital where I work seem positively supersonic by comparison, and that's saying something, believe me. I figure that the inconvenience of being on the top floor was in exchange for not being able to assign us rooms next to the elevator, ice maker and vending machines as they usually do, so this was the best they could come up with.

Once all of that was out of the way, we all piled into the car and headed to the 76 Diner for dinner, and the only advantage to our hostess being sick was that we could fit 5 of us in one car, rather than splitting the 6 of us up between two cars. The threatening weather broke loose with a vengeance, and we splashed in and out of the diner in a pelting downpour that got worse as the night wore on. We found their service was much better (although in fairness, it could hardly have been worse) but I was disappointed in the baked ziti, especially since their fettuccine Alfredo is very good. After dinner, we hurried back to La Quinta and jumped in the hotel pool - even our host for the weekend, who already has his own pool at home - and settled in for a relaxing soak in the hot tub. I won't say that it exactly salvaged the day, which was well on its way to becoming a full-blown disaster, but it was a step in the right direction. Then we all turned in for a well-deserved good night's rest.

Did I hear someone say, "Not so fast!" Bill and I were fine, but our other friends had an over-enthusiastic air conditioner that turned their room into a deep freeze, and in the middle of the night, the man of the house was so achy and congested that he had to pack it in and head for home in order to get some sleep. So it was just the 3 of us to enjoy the hotel's buffet breakfast in the morning, and we didn't shy away from the muffins and bagels, mini Danish and donuts, fresh fruit and hard-boiled eggs - although we had to carry it back up to our room to eat it in peace, since the breakfast room was such a madhouse that Bill aptly described it as a "feeding frenzy." After we checked out, we headed over to our weekend hosts to bid them a fond farewell, and found our hostess still under the weather, but well enough to at least wave at us wanly from a distance. The outdoor conditions had dried up somewhat, but not enough to entice anyone into the pool, and we thought it best to leave quietly so our poor bedraggled hostess could continue her recuperation without a bunch of noisy hooligans underfoot, even if they did invite us in the first place.

Since we had to take our other friend home anyway, we were relieved to find her husband much improved after his ordeal, and well enough to join us for lunch at the Kinderhook Diner, where we found both the food and the service were hit-or-miss, especially considering that we ordered nothing out of the ordinary. From there, we spent the rest of the day wandering the capacious aisles at Ocean State Job Lot, which we don't have any of near us, and snapping up bargains on every side. We finally ran out of steam around 5:00 PM and had to call it a day, so we packed up our treasures for the long drive home. It soon became a nightmare of heavy traffic and torrential rain, and the only bright spot was stopping along the way at Denny's in Newburgh, where we were glad to find that the food and the service were both excellent, for the first time all weekend. We finally arrived home, late and tired, but at least the cats were happy to see us, and we were glad to get back in one piece. The way things had been going, that was not something we were going to take for granted, that's fur sure.

So in the end, we drove 300 miles and spent $125 to swim in a hotel pool, which was certainly not what we originally envisioned for the weekend, I can tell you that. But it was nice to see our friends, when they weren't sick, and we tried to make the best of a bad situation. I guess it was just a lucky thing that Comrade Mischka, who loused up the weather to spoil the whole pool party plan to begin with, didn't have any more nefarious cronies than the Germ Genies, the Hotel Hobgoblins, the Diner Despoilers and the Traffic Trolls, or things could have turned out even worse, although I shudder to think how that could be possible. I suppose he might have collaborated in league with the Petroleum Pirates, so that the price of gas would be over $4 a gallon for regular, or something equally outrageous, so nobody would be able to afford to travel in any case. Oh, wait a minute .....

Elle

Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Hello World,

Happy August! I hope that you have been enjoying all the pleasures that summer has to offer, and good weather besides. Although it's true that it is about 6 weeks too late to buy a swimsuit, and the Back-to-School displays have been in stores since Independence Day, there's actually still plenty of time left for hammocks and lemonade, ice cream and watermelon, swimming pools and corn on the cob. The season is short, but packed with opportunities that don't come along at other times of the year (unlike our friends at the car dealers and retailers touting their "Annual Summer Sale" as if they would be having it more than once a year) so get out there and grab it by the lapels with both hands while you can. While you're at it, book an expensive vacation, trade in your old clunker for a brand new model, and take a chance on the home of your dreams. The President's economic advisers will thank you, I'm sure.

Just in case anyone thought that things were getting just a little too quiet and complacent in the local area, along comes this startling headline from last week's newspaper:

====================

No evidence of shots

fired at school

====================

Now, I hate to be the kind of old fogey who's always complaining about the sorry state of modern life, and bemoaning the fact that things were so much better back in the good old days, so that even our old friends the dinosaurs are tired of hearing about it, much less the young whipper-snappers of this day and age. But I do have to say that this headline is a textbook example of what us old-timers would describe as a "non-story" and one that begs more questions than it answers. I can understand that if shots are fired at a school, it certainly deserves a mention in the local press, except perhaps in some wild and woolly far-flung outpost of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where anything goes and usually does. But when there are in fact NO shots fired at a school, in the heart of the bucolic and circumspect suburbs, I wouldn't expect to find that newsworthy in any way, and in fact, I would like to consider it more the rule than the exception on a regular basis. I tell you, you just can't make this stuff up.

Speaking of things that get your attention, it was in June that I noticed this curious tidbit in the TV listings for WNJN, a public broadcasting station in New Jersey:

=====================

Primary Election Night Coverage 2010

=====================

I can assure you that there is nobody more enthusiastic about getting out there and exercising our French fries - I mean, franchise - than yours truly, but even I would have to draw the line at sitting through 3 hours of election coverage in prime time, of primary races from over nine months ago. I mean, many of those candidates have probably already had to resign from office in disgrace by now, the way things are going in politics nowadays, and that's not just the old fogeys and dinosaurs talking, believe me. The political scene fared no better in this review of ABC's "The Killing:"

==========================

Richmond's campaign hopes rise along

with his popularity in the poles

===========================

Either this is another case of homophone trouble again, or this gentleman has limited his efforts to the denizens of the North and South Poles, and frankly, I don't know what it would take to appeal to the elves and reindeers of the North, and the penguins of the South, and I probably wouldn't want to know either. Obviously the spell-checker was no help at the polls, or perhaps they made the mistake of asking Santa Claus instead. They seem to have called out the highway department on this next synopsis of TNT's "Franklin and Bash:"

============================

Franklin and Bash take on a difficult

case that requires them to use their

unique style of courtroom flare

============================

I will have you know that I am not a legal professional, and I don't even play one on television, but even I know that they don't want people to take flares into court, for heaven's sake, and that's really not just the old fogeys and dinosaurs talking this time. The networks may love a flamboyant lawyer's flair, but for everyone's safety, they'd better leave their flares at home. There's no sense making the litigation system even more incendiary, I'm thinking.

I can't close without this perplexing notice that we received from our neighborhood association, about a couple of long-term residents who are relocating out of the area. Except for the fact that I personally know the individual who prepared the notice, I would think this was a recent arrival at our shores, whose grasp of the English language was painfully tenuous:

===========================

Friends are organizing a farewell cocktail party to cheer joyfully to their new life in Connecticut.

You are cordially invited to share cocktails, appetizers and good time.

RSVP by email, phone or in person (walking dog times are great!)

As usual, the wheelbarrel will be on duty for support as needed.

============================

Cheer joyfully? Good time? Walking dog times? And what the heck is a wheelbarrel? (That last one sounds particularly objectionable, like something you would go over Niagara Falls in.) Frankly, it sounds to me like the hosts got a little bit of an early start on the cocktails before they ever started working on this notice, and apparently dragged the spell-checker right along with them, because anybody can tell you that wheelbarrel is not even a word. In any case, I had to tell them that I would be unable to joy cheerfully at the good time, because the dinosaurs and I would be busy watching election coverage from the late Mesozoic Era, when the incumbent Yog of the Dirt Party, was narrowly defeated by the Cold Front's challenger Thak, on a platform of "A Fire in Every Cave." Of course, this was eons before the invention of paper ballots, so the eligible voters had to cast their lots with rocks, and for those of us on the Election Board, dragging those votes around in wheelbarrels was no fun, I can tell you that.

Elle