The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
Learned Helplessness
Weekend Assignment #323: Tech Savvy
When you bring home some new piece of technology, do you usually get it up and running with pleasant anticipation and calm confidence, or is there more likely to be much swearing, wailing and gnashing of teeth? What’s the most trouble you’ve had with a new computer, tv, phone or related tech gadget?
Extra Credit: Who do you call in to help, if you get stuck?
Oh, thank you, thank you, for giving me the opportunity to tell a story that no one I know in real life wants to hear again!
When I was 24 years old, I put together my first “entertainment system”. A stereo receiver hooked up to a TV, VCR, CD player and speakers. I don’t think I even had a DVD player yet, and I certainly did not have cable. I put it all together myself and it all worked. That weekend, my brother, then age 20, came over. I dragged him to the room to brag. Not about the stuff, mind you. But the fact that I did my homework, made good consumer decisions, and put it all together by myself.
He took one look and said, “This is all wrong,” and started pulling out cables.
“But,” I whined. “There’s a picture. On the screen. And it makes noise!”
He claimed that was a coincidence. My connections were incorrect and I should go to the kitchen and make him a sandwich.
He didn’t actually demand a sandwich. But he crushed my little soul.
Since then, I have called him every time I am going to buy anything that has an on/off switch. When I went back to school, I dragged him to Best Buy to find me a laptop. And I wandered around the store saying, “But Scott! This red one is so pretty!” And, “That’s too cheap. It can’t be any good. How about this one!?” Then a year later, when the hard drive crashed, I made him spend an hour on the phone with Toshiba, figuring out the warranty. When he determined it would be at least a week before it got fixed, I dragged him back to Best Buy so I could buy a new one. You know, for him to install right away.
This will continue until one of us dies.
(heh heh.)
The Child Has Snark
The other night I went over to my brother’s house after work because my nephew, Alex, had a T-Ball game. I was holding my niece, Ainslie, age 19 months. The age when they are just picking up words and using them in context. Alex, age 5, was running around like a crazy kid in a Sox uniform, all excited. Ainslie wanted to get down and run around, too. She started to squirm.
Me: Ainslie, do you want to get down?
Of course she wanted to get down. I wanted her to say “down”.
Ainslie: (continues to squirm)
Me: (to my brother) Does she know the word “down”?
Scott: (shrugs) She knows “up”.
Ansline: (mumbles something that might have been) Down.
I put her down.
Ainslie: (to my brother) UP! DOWN! UP! DOWN!
At that moment, Alex came tearing into the room, ran head first into the kitchen cabinet and landed sprawled all over the floor. He was not hurt, and may have done it to amuse his sister in a comic book sort of way.
Ainslie: HA HA! DOWN!
People. She sounded exactly like Nelson Muntz:
Weekend Assignment: Rewind to #313
! The Godfather..or the other Godfather. Jacob Marley, the Vampire Lestat, Hawkeye Pierce…no. I have not named a single woman. Scarlett O’Hara..God, no. Rhett Butler..but I just said women! Garp’s mother
– what was her name? (Jenny Fields). Oh! Clarice Starling..but I don’t really want to know. Professor McGonagall! That is a lame answer. And no Hobbits or Jedi, either. The Countess Olenska
? I guess if the question were, “Pick a fictional character to be your roommate”, she’d be an interesting pick. Anne Elliott would be my “best friend” pick, I think.
. And I would expect her to introduce me to Captain Wentworth, his sister and brother-in-law, the Crofts, her brother-in-law Charles, and…that’s it. I don’t want to know the rest of her family. There isn’t anything in particular I’d want to ask her, but I think those would be some great companions for a holiday in Bath. You know, a couple hundred years ago.Boycotting BP
The Chicago Tribune ran an article this weekend about the effect of the oil spill on independent owners of the BP franchises in the U.S. Many consumers are boycotting the local stations in protest over BP’s failures (for lack of a better word) in the Gulf, and the franchises are asking BP for help.
The article notes that BP doesn’t own very many gas stations in the U.S., so the boycotts are hurting local business owners much more than they are hurting BP. Here’s stuff I didn’t know:
“The biggest hit comes not from lost gas sales but from lost convenience store business. Owners like Juckniess make just pennies on a gallon of gas. But they might make up to 55 cents on a $1 cup of coffee. The margins on candy and chips are about 48 percent and 37 percent, respectively, Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores.
The boycott’s impact on BP is limited. The company makes most of its money exploring and producing oil in places such as Angola, Egypt, the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
“The corner store is the face of BP, but by no means how BP gets its money,” Lenard said.”
On the other hand, I personally like the concept of voting with my pocketbook. I could write to my Congressman, but I think Congress needs to hear from people that actually live in the Gulf much more than they need to hear from me.
Maybe I’ll just sneak over to my local BP for a car wash and a great big Diet Dr. Pepper.
The Wrath of…Someone
Weekend Assignment #324: America 2062
Next Tuesday is my birthday, I am not quite 50 yet, but when I was a little girl I liked to sit and imagine what the world, more specifically, America, would be like when I reached 50! Having nearly arrived at my goal age, I am now aiming for another 50 years! So, in honor of my 48th birthday, I want you to search your imaginations, and tell what I can expect in the year… 2062!
Extra Credit: Tell me, is the world anything like you imagined it would be when you grew up? What’s different? What’s the same?
I have literally never tried to imagine what the world would be like in 50 years. I asked myself why not and my response was:
“Because according to Star Trek, we are hip deep in World War III right now and it is going to get worse before it gets better. I don’t want to think about it.”
I looked it up, and it was actually the Eugenics War that started in the mid-1990s. World War III wasn’t until 2026.
But the grain of truth to that snark is that so much of the sci-fi to which I was exposed as a child involved some kind of apocalyptic war somewhere in the timeline and I couldn’t stand it. I think that since I didn’t want to imagine the how we got there, I didn’t contemplate what was on the other side.
So with my utter lack of imagination on the subject, I will say that the world in 50 years will contain a device that effectively responds to the command: “Tea, Earl grey. Hot.” And there will be No More Homeless Pets.
Two Steps Back
One trip to Washington and a few thunderstorms later and Sigmund has pulled all his feathers out again. But we learned that he liked corn on the cob.
While they Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family, by Kathryn Harrison
I have no idea why I picked up While they Slept, by Kathryn Harrison. While I have done my time with Capote and Bugliosi, I do not consider myself actual fan of the True Crime genre. You know, unless Dominick Dunne was writing about it in Vanity Fair.
However. In 1984, an 18-year old boy in Oregon beat his father, mother and 11-year old sister to death with a baseball bat. The parents were asleep; the little sister interrupted. His 16-year old sister, Jody, was in the house at the time. It was a horribly abusive environment where the system failed the kids a hundred times. Mostly, this is Jody’s story.
I say “mostly” because Harrison tries to do something of a dual narrative. She seems to think that we need to know why she was so emotionally invested in the case. The book jacket calls it, “weaving meditations of her own experience with parental abuse”. At age 20, Harrison met her father and he initiated a sexual relationship with her. It seems to have lasted a couple of years. I don’t want to minimize her trauma, but honestly, her personal interjections ruined the book for me.
Harrison does such a great work in putting together a story from both Jody’s and her brother, Billy’s, perspectives. She does her homework from the criminal case files to the files from the phychological profiles and the CFS records and the interviews with many of the players. I think she does a fine job of separating fact from fiction from perspective. However, her armchair psychology was just too much. For example, Billy tells a story of his father finding him, age 7ish, wearing water wings in a pool. His father tore the water wings off, picked him up and jumped into the pool. He held Billy until he reached the bottom of the pool and then let go, making the boy find his own way to the top. Then he did it over and over again. Harrison says:
“in mistreating his son, Bill re-created the life-threatening incident in which he had been the victim. Five years after he’d been pulled, paralyzed, from the lake in Eugene, he forcibly rehearsed Billy’s entry into and exit from the water, in order to “make him a man”. Perhaps the scenario wasn’t as it seemed to Billy, conceived to punish and terrorize him. It may be that his father was in the thrall of an inexorable psychic demand that he prove and reprove his own manhood, in the form of his small namesake’s ability to save himself from drowning.”
Puleeze.
I was really impressed by Jody’s story. She, also, worked hard to separate fact from fiction from perspective. She owns the fact that her brother’s actions, in a way, set her free from a horrible life. She and Harrison share a life view of Before and After trauma. It is as though the Before person is dead and the After is a rebirth. This is why I really like her:
Billy was appealing his case on the grounds that the abuse he suffered was never submitted as evidence in his original trial. He wanted Jody’s help. Jody doesn’t want her brother released from jail. She thinks he is a fundamentally violent creature and has said she is afraid of what he will do to her if he is released. But she read the transcripts of the trial and determined that he was absolutely right in thinking that something was omitted from the evidence – something that the jury should have known in order to make a fair decision. She personally testified as her own lawyer advised – answer only the questions that are asked and don’t offer up anything. So by omission, her own testimony made worse the injustice. When the book was written, she planned to help correct the record. Whatever the consequences, she values the truth.
You know what? That’s the story I wanted to read. I’m gonna go Google it now.
Driving
The Trib ran an article about the decline in 16 year olds that have driver’s licenses. The point seemed to be a Rah-rah for Illinois stricter standards for the under-18 crowd to earn them, as there has been a drop in crash fatalities. What I found interesting was the rationale of the teenagers that are waiting.
When I was 16, there was nothing. more. important. Than having a driver’s license. Nothing on Earth. For serious. Factoring in that my dad gave me his old Bronco, my parents paid for gas and insurance and I had an over-developed desire for independence – I loved driving more than anything.
So I was really interested to hear that these kids aren’t quite bothering to go through the process:
“Waiting until they turn 18 is a way for teens to opt out of graduated driver licensing. In Illinois and many other states, when an individual turns 18, he or she can walk in to a driver’s license facility, pass the road, written and eye tests and walk out with a license.”
Well. That just seems lazy to me.
However, many kids said that since they can’t afford a car anyway, why bother to jump through the hoops. Some won’t have the permit hours completed. That one makes sense to me – what parent has 50 hours of time to sit in the passenger seat with a kid. Factor in that some parents are really bad at this – such that it is just better for the kid not to drive with that parent – and a great big part of the burden falls on one person.
So they have friends that drive. Or they ride their bikes. One kid said he goes everywhere on rollerblades. Good for them, I think.
But I’ve been driving for 20 years and still..there are few things that make me as happy as the open road.
Hotel Housekeeping
USA Today ran an article in the Travel section on a topic that’s been getting some buzz: hotels trying to reduce costs by reducing housekeeping service. Different hotels are trying different things, but as far as I can tell, it started with hotels asking if it was ok to not change the bed linens every day. There was some obscenely high number for how many gallons of water were used, so in general we all said, “That’s fine.” The consensus of opinion among my co-workers – a population of pretty heavy travelers – is that fresh linens every three days is perfectly reasonable. We sheepishly allow that we kinda like fresh towels every day. We seem to be in line here:
“Bjorn Hanson, of New York University, says customers aren’t buying the industry’s “green” argument but are generally accepting modest cutbacks in housekeeping. “The long-term trend (for companies) is to look for ways to make hotels more affordable and accessible,” he says.”
Back in January, I wrote about a “No Housekeeping” pilot program that the Sheraton Seattle was running. I was left feeling rather negative. And while at the time I thought, “points for trying something new”, I’m starting to feel like it is some kind of lab experiment to see when we, as travelers, start to scream.
The airlines found it to be somewhere between, “pay for priority boarding” and “pay to use the airplane bathroom”.
No One Outside the 847 Area Code Will Care About This
“Retrofitting suburbia” has to be the lamest new catchphrase I have heard in a long time, but the Trib just wrote about the redevelopment of the Randhurst Mall in Mount Prospect.
The short version is they demolished the entire shopping mall (save Carson’s and Bed Bath and Beyond) to redevelop the area:
“in an act of radical design surgery, Randhurst is being remade into an open-air, mixed-use development that will have many features of a traditional downtown, including shops, movie theaters, offices and a hotel.”
You know what that sounds like to me? The Glen Town Center. Built on the site of the old Glenview Naval Air Station, I was determined to forever hate this…suburban retrofitting. But I love it. You know how much time I spend there? Click on that link. You’ll probably find my car in the picture.
Anyway, I’ve been keeping an eye on Randhurst and was last there two or three weeks ago. They are far enough along that I have officially declared it not worth going to Carson’s until they are done. It is too hard to find a reasonable (read as: safe) place to park. But what interested me in this article is the debate going on in Mount Prospect about whether this “retrofitting” (ok, the word is growing on me) will draw people away from the traditional downtown area – by the railroad station.
Glenview had the same debate over the Glen Town Center. If memory serves, the biggest stink was over moving the Post Office to a new building near the new development. We all wanted the second train station. But oh, the drama of moving the post office away from the sacred Glenview Road. The parking is much better now.
I believe – I’m not sure, but I believe – Glenview has gotten over it and we all enjoy our Main Street with an Air Traffic Control Tower (that Main Street is actually called Tower Road).
Ooh! Tangent! The first time I took my friend Austin there, I nearly gave him a heart attack. His Dad is an officer and he grew up on the base. So we were sitting in Starbucks and he was all disconcerted about what used to be where. I said, “Yeah, Dude. We could be sitting in your old living room right now.” He about dropped his coffee. So then I felt terrible and said, “No! We aren’t really in your living room! Look! The Tower is right across the street. We’re, like, on the runway or something!”
I don’t think that made him feel better.
Anyway. The only grumblings I hear are about the tax revenue from the new development. Something about a deal that was cut to encourage people to come here, and the suggestion that they still aren’t paying the same taxes as the rest of us.
Whatever. I can honestly point to the Glen Town Center and say that was when I started to love my town again. I think Mt. Prospect is going to do great.
The Next Dark Age 