Why is it, that when a particularly heavy snow lands on the east coast, it’s called a “killer blizzard”, yet when the same thing occurs in the Midwest, it’s called “heavy snowfall”?

Why does a particularly heavy snowstorm  rate hour-long news reports on at least two major networks? Which, by the way, kept me from seeing a special on The Eagles, which is why I planted myself in front of the TV instead of reading a good book.  Can someone west of the Mississippi answer that question?

I watched at least ten reporters “in the field,”  standing in snow up to their knees.  Then, as I looked in the background, or they began to walk, I realized the snow wasn’t that deep and that they had clearly found a snowdrift in which to stand for their report.  The snow on level, un-drifted ground was ankle-deep at the most.

One reporter criticized the local road crews as he showed us the plowed streets of a downtown area (it looked to me like they’d done a pretty good job of getting them cleared) and then measured the depth of the snow on the side of the street (where the plowed snow had piled up!)  Where did he think the snow GOES, after it’s been pushed out of the way? Did he think it magically disappeared?  Another reporter made “snow angels.”  I guess he thought I’d enjoy that more than The Eagles.

It’s SNOW, people.  It falls from the sky and piles up all around.  The next morning, you dig out and go about your day.  If it’s particularly heavy, then stay inside and be grateful for those who push it out of the way while you slept.  Don’t get out and try to drive when crews are trying to clean your roads and streets.  If you don’t know how to drive in snow, then don’t.  Be patient.  All that’s required to make it disappear are competent road crews and thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit.  It WILL go away.

And don’t pre-empt The Eagles.  Bad call.

I’m not really “into” music these days.  There was a time, though.  There was a time.

I wonder if the death of Glenn Frey tore others of my age the same way it cut into me.  Losing Glenn Frey is like having a piece of me gone.

My generation will always say that the Beatles were—and still are—the greatest.  We all say that.  But the truth is that when I want to sit down and hear a genuine classic, it’s almost always the Eagles.  They were playing in the year I was married, blasting out of the scratchy vinyl LPs that young people think are so cool today.  I took my daughter to see them back when “hell froze over” in 1994.  And I just watched them on YouTube in Australia in 2015.  They don’t look the same. They’ve gotten older and the band has gone through several iterations.  Sometimes they wear suits and they have that wonderful thing called gravitas now. They’ve created wonderful new music through the years, yet they play their old music with no apologies, almost asking “Do you hear how much BETTER this is than when we did it the first time?”

And it strikes me how integral Glenn Frey was to all of that, and to me.  How many of his melodies I hum to myself in the car or the shower or the garage.  I will still sing them to myself, and Glenn Frey will be immortal in that small way.

Life goes on, without Glenn Frey.  But it stumbles, sadly and it will walk differently without him.

I know that I am an irascible, short-tempered and cantankerous grumbler at times.  As I told a good friend yesterday, I understand this, and I’m trying to be a new me.  But I really don’t know how, and it doesn’t work very well.  Maybe I can be judged on progress rather than perfection.  And yesterday was a bad day.

It began well enough.  I went to my pharmacy to pick up a prescription.  This ought to have been a pleasant task on a beautiful day.  The lady at the counter said my insurance had changed.  I replied that, yes, I’m now retired and that Medicare would cover it.  She asked to see my card and I showed her a copy of my card from my smartphone. She said,

“I need to see your Medicare CARD.”

And you see, I don’t carry cards.  I don’t like the absurd waste of weight, paper and time. I don’t like a fat wallet that feels like a billiard ball when I sit down, and this is the twenty-first century, not 1955. But I was trying to be the New Me, so I didn’t say any of that.  What I did say was,

“You ARE seeing my Medicare card.”

“No, I mean I need to see the CARD.”

“You ARE seeing the card.”

“We need to have a copy on file here.”

“Do you have e-mail?  I’ll get you a copy.  No charge.”  When I don’t know how to be the New Me, I switch to old traditional sarcasm because I’m better at it.

“No, I need an actual copy.”

“But that would be an actual copy.”

“No, I need a copy that I can put in the file.”

“Oh, you mean you need paper.”

“Yes.”

(Pause)

“Do you have a printer?”

(Long pause)

“No.”

I could repeat the rest of this conversation, but it ended with me making two round trips to the pharmacy, apparently because I live in the twenty-first century but parts of the Belt Highway are in 1955.

I don’t suppose that, in the end, I really care if business owners think the 1955 rules will continue to work for them.  It doesn’t matter to me if they understand that young people laugh at e-mail because it’s old-fashioned and slow.  That in a few very short years, if you can’t transfer documents and purchases digitally, and I can’t get it done from this phone in my pocket, you won’t have a business.  That electronic transfer is statistically safer than paper, in the same way that flying is statistically safer than driving. It’s an irrational and wasteful fear. For those who enjoy profit, the handwriting is no longer on the wall; it has already crawled across the floor, up your leg and around your neck.  I’m no tree-hugger, but I do hate wastes of paper, time or anything else that occur because of a lack of logic. But I’m the New Me so I won’t say it.

So then, I went to lunch.

Let me say first that waiting tables is an incredibly difficult job.  I have actually done this (once) and was absolutely and completely awful at it.  It’s really hard to do it well, and good service should be rewarded.  Even poor service should have a tip, because it’s still a hard job and poorly paid.  And I really do appreciate good service.

I know, in my gut, that restaurants want, above all, to please their customers.  That’s because they want them to enjoy their experience, and come back again to spend more money.  I also understand that the service I get at a local, reasonably-priced eating establishment is not going to be the same service I get in New York at a five-star restaurant when I’m pretending to be wealthy.  I get that.  But I would like to sit in on the meetings in the corporate training sessions of major restaurant chains to find out how they train their waitresses or waiters or baristum or whatever the term would be.

Why do we go out to eat, be it an Applebee’s or Sardi’s?  Sure, we love good food.  But we also love the social aspect of eating.  The conversation.  The “being with” of it all.  I think this holds true for all generations, though younger peoples’ idea of a good time is much louder than mine.

So if it is true that conversation is important, here are my rules for

Excellent Service:

1. Never interrupt a conversation between paying customers (unless there is a fire.)  If you think something needs doing, then do it.  Believe me, I’ll let you know if I’ve had enough coffee or water.  You’re a nice person, but I didn’t come here to talk to you.  Be nice, be friendly, but unless I know you personally, don’t over-ingratiate yourself.  There’s a difference.  I came here with a purpose.  I didn’t pay for this meal because it’s the only way I can get people to talk to me.
2. This is an adjunct of the “Don’t Interrupt” rule.  Do not ask if everything is OK.  When a waiter comes to the table and asks “Is everything OK?”, it always makes me think there has been a serious problem in the kitchen.  If you’re proud of your product (the food) then assume that it’s very good.  I will tell you if I’m unhappy.  Well, the Old Me would tell you.

Why do restaurants think this is a way of providing good service?  I’m sure that, behind it all, is some sort of training that says “Don’t let your customers think you’ve abandoned them.  Stay in touch with them.”   There are lots of ways to do that.  Just walk by, smile and let them know you’re there, and keep your eye on all your tables.  Any customer with a need or a problem will grab that opportunity like a quarter on the sidewalk.  The New Me would do it respectfully.

 

A recent TIME Magazine article says that the NFL still won’t “come to terms” with concussions.

If I understand the arguments,  they revolve around the fact  that the NFL, while making millions of dollars by letting me watch their games, should do one of two things:  They should compensate players for their concussive injuries or stop the injuries from occurring.

It seems to me that we are not acknowledging the elephant in the room.

I like to watch football.  So I tune in every Sunday.  The television networks know that I like football, so they pay the NFL for the rights to televise the game and I bet I know why.  Advertisers want me to see their commercials. So the advertisers pay the networks.  Here come the millions of dollars that I don’t have to pay.  And of course this doesn’t take into consideration the money that other people pay to get into their stadiums and watch the game without commercials. It doesn’t include the parking and concession dollars. I may not have it exactly right, and I’m sure there’s much more involved, but I’m close, and that counts in everything but horseshoes and grenades.

If I’m not mistaken, there are other people out there like me.  Now here’s that elephant I was referring to.  I really don’t want anyone to have a concussion, but when I see a great hit by a middle linebacker, I make that same “Whoaaaaa” sound that these other people make.  The next day, I’m likely to say to my friend, “Did you see that hit in the third quarter?”  And my friend will say “Whoaaaaa.”

I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but the reason I watch football—the specific thing that makes it different from most other sports—is that a player runs the risk of getting hit while he’s playing the game.  Oh, lots of times I’ll say that Peyton Manning is an artist, or that I enjoy the athleticism of the game, but that’s pretty much window dressing for the fact that the excitement of the game is in direct proportion to the risk involved.

So if nobody knew that there was a risk of injury, why are those guys wearing pads and a helmet? And why are they being paid a gazillion dollars to play this game for sixteen Sundays in a row? And why do they make even more if they survive longer than that?

Surely, somewhere, maybe in fine print on an NFL player’s contract it says “We’re going to pay you eight gazillion dollars to play this game for four years and oh, by the way, it’s a rough game and you could get hurt.  Just saying.”

I have a good friend who is a physician.  (he says “Whoaaa” too.)  He pointed out to me that a concussion occurs when one’s head hits something hard enough to make his brain rattle around inside his cranium.  And that helmets, no matter how hard or modern, will not stop concussions.  They might avoid a cut or a bruise.  But your brain is still going to rattle inside your cranium if you get hit in the head.  The case against concussions is the battle of the rattle. The logic follows that if you don’t want your brain rattling around inside your cranium, then take measures to not get hit very hard in the head, and lacking the ability to do that, you should take up stamp collecting or poker.  Be aware that those also have risk.  It could happen.

I’m guessing I could end all the injuries and all the lawsuits and all the commotion by turning the television off, and refusing to pawn my firstborn grandchild to get inside the stadium.  I’m guessing that without my interest, professional football would fall back into the 1940s when players required a second job to make ends meet and to help deal with concussions.  Apparently leather helmets didn’t help with them either.

I’m guessing we would be rid of these lawsuits from former players:  Defendant:  The National Football League.  Plaintiff: Harvey Linebacher, To Whom You Paid Millions Of Dollars And Who Knew It Was A Stupid And Dangerous Game Right From The Start.

Here’s the dirty little secret about me, apparently known only to the NFL, the networks, the advertisers and the guys with the pads.  Here’s what the elephant in the room would whisper about me:

“He LIKES it.”

I doubt that any of the other millions of football fans will admit it, but I’m letting the secret out.  I suspect I’ll be banned from their midst and the secret handshake will be changed.

Why do I enjoy something like that?  Is it the only way for modern man to enter into battle these days?  Maybe.  That and the fact that they’re  doing it and I get to watch from a chair in my living room.  Do I secretly enjoy a vicarious battle?  Yes.  Yes I do.

Some of you will say I’m two-faced about battle.  My reply is the same as Lincoln’s: If I had another face, do you think I would be using this one?  I’ve said at other times and in other ways that I’m an anti-war protester in my old age and it’s true. War—the real war—is nothing but old men arguing and young men dying.  So I generally don’t care for it.  Each of those young soldiers ought to be quoting Mark Twain and saying “I have no desire to kill people to whom I have not yet been introduced.”

Yet, consider what people have said in the past, before we were timid little creatures:

Patton: “Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.”

Bismark: “The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.”

Hemingway: There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

Churchill: “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.”

Teddy Roosevelt: “Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.”

Finally, Vince Lombardi, speaking specifically of football:

“…I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour — his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear — is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”

To be fair, I found plenty of quotes against going into battle, but maybe these explain why, on Sundays, we turn the television on.  Maybe we invented football because wholesale killing tended to get on our nerves and give us indigestion.

While they’re arguing about concussions, I’m thinking about the dirty little secret.

Time to lay off the NFL.  Yes, I know, they’re not perfect human beings.  I could surely write another full piece on that.  But if we’re going to pile on here, let’s make it about something logical.  Tell me somebody absconded with some money. Make it something larcenous, so I can understand. Don’t tell me that well-paid athletes are clamoring because they got hurt playing a game they knew would likely hurt them.

I’m enjoying the Facebook photographs and tributes to your mothers on Mothers Day, and I added a photo of my mom too.  I wish you’d do things like this on the other 364 days of the year.

 Some of you contribute and make me think.  You’ve taken the time to consider something and speak your mind and I like that.  I may not agree, but I like the idea that you did it. 

 I did a short and unscientific survey a couple of days ago, and too many of you are still showing me your selfies and your food and your cats.  Some of you are young and beautiful, so the selfies are fun for ten seconds.  But really, don’t get so self-absorbed.  It all fades away or starts sagging. Trust me on this.   And enough with the food.  If all you have to offer is a picture of what you’re about to cram into your pie hole, then it is simply not an important day in your life. Go out and enjoy it.  Showing your food to everyone is the beginning of a neurosis of some kind. Seriously.  And your cat isn’t funny or cute to me. He’s your cat. Laugh at him in your living room and leave me out of it.  You see what you’ve done?  I can’t type now. I have to sneeze.

 (Short pause)

 Why have we invented something so splendid as the idea of social media–a marvelous way of communicating thoughts and ideas–and then trashed it with the trivial and mundane?  At one point in history, we invented words like trivial and mundane for things that are, well, trivial and mundane. I thought we did this so the important things could have labels like splendid and marvelous.  I like those labels.  Is our goal to confuse the superb with the inconsequential? Do we want our best thoughts and ideas displayed on the trash heap?

 Or is it just me? Does everyone else spend the rest of the day thinking about that picture of your meal at a restaurant, or the fact that you’re angry about somebody who did something? Usually you don’t even tell us what it’s about or who did it and even if you did, that’s not nice.

 If real life imitated social media, our world would be much more absurd than it already is.  People would be talking publicly and constantly, about nothing.  Our friends—and unknown people—would approach us in public places and shout “I’m quite angry right now and I want you all to know it!  But I don’t want to say anything else about it and oh, here, please have a picture of my breakfast.”  We would hear people in the supermarket shouting “I’m buying some Pepto Bismol right now!”  Most of us would quietly and quickly get away.  I hope we would, anyway.

 Shouldn’t social media imitate considerate life?  Would we not enjoy it more if it weren’t thoughtless?

 The artist Andy Warhol once said that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.  Even a guy who painted Campbell’s Soup cans for a living must have hoped we’d be more responsible with our little notorieties.

 

I watched boxing on TV recently.  A friend was coming over and he wanted to see it.  I haven’t watched boxing since Muhammed Ali quit fighting.  Having not seen it in so long helped me to see the changes that have occurred.

 They don’t wear their bathrobes to the ring any more.  I guess they like t-shirts better. And I had to wait a long time to watch the main event.  There was a lot more money riding on the event.  I would have been happy to have been the loser in this fight.  I would be more than willing to step into that ring and have people whisper “My God, that’s an old man.”  And I would just wait for the other guy’s glove to twitch, and then I would fall to the canvas. Fight’s over. You win. Where’s my money?  And I think I could get away with it because I’m old.

 The most powerful images stuck in my mind are from watching slow motion boxing in high definition.  I’ve never seen it that way. Nothing like watching blunt force trauma to the brain.  It gets pretty obvious.  I don’t think I like boxing as much as I used to. And I’d want to be sure I was getting my money without getting hit. Anywhere.

 My conservative friends may climb all over me for this one, and I need to reassure them that I’m not joining any anti-boxing organizations, and I’m likely to be right there on the sofa beside you watching the next fight. But we all need to watch that slow-mo high def brain trauma and ask why we do this to ourselves.  Men (and I speak only of men here because I don’t understand women) are instinctive warriors, aren’t they?  If we don’t have war, we invent war, just to stay in shape and pretend war. We are walking, talking G.I. Joes.  I think it’s something we need. Women make war too, but their war is treacherous. You never see it coming and if I write much more, I won’t see it coming either.

 We’ve banned dogfighting and cockfighting.  I like dogs, so I tend to agree with that.  Chickens are nothing more to me than arrogant food, so I’m ambivalent there.  So why do we box, to the tune of millions and millions of dollars?  I guess we don’t want chickens to make that kind of cash.

 The argument might be that dogs and chickens get no say in the matter and that, in theory, humans know what they’re doing.

 

I don’t have many unhurried mornings, but I enjoy getting a cup of coffee and scanning the news websites to find out what’s going on in the world.  My wife actually reads the newspaper. I’m too lazy for that, and I don’t like all that paper rustling so early in the morning. I like getting my news from several sources, because they seldom agree on what they think we should know about.

When I was much younger (anyone under the age of twenty should consider this an alternate universe), we could read a newspaper or let Walter Cronkite spoon-feed it to us on the TV at dinner time. Edwin Newman occasionally taught us the English language and Eric Sevareid provided “opinion.”  They weren’t much to look at, but they delivered the news. I think it would be fair to say that, compared to today’s news, they tried harder to be unbiased. They separated “hard news” from “opinion” for us.  We tended to believe that “hard news” was unbiased. That was incorrect, is still false and will never be true. When another human being speaks or writes to us, it is inherently biased.  In sixty-plus years, the only unbiased creatures I’ve ever found were dogs, and even they have their days.

I suppose we thought that when a person wrote a newspaper story or sat in a broadcast studio wearing a coat and tie, it seemed more official. When real news occurred, they were often at their best because they didn’t have time to be biased.  Younger readers may have sensed this in the reporting of September 11, 2001. Those of us who are older remember November 22, 1963 and octogenarians will recall December 7, 1941.  None of the dates are pleasant to recall, but we likely received the most un-biased reporting of our lives on those dates, and the content was real news.

Today’s news doesn’t seem like news to me.  Here’s a sampling of some headlines: 1. “Why We Have Chins” 2. “What Makes The Sound When We Crack Our Knuckles” and 3. “Miley Cyrus: Confessions of Pop’s Wildest Child.”

I actually read these, and I don’t know why.  These days, I feel like my brain time is limited and I wasted part of it on this mindless drivel.  All I ever needed to know about knuckle cracking is what my mother explained in two words: “Stop that.”  Why we have chins isn’t news.  It’s physiology and anatomy, but it’s not news. With the exception of the Windsor royal family, I’ve been seeing chins on people for quite some time now.  I don’t think that what Miley Cyrus did with a wrecking ball is news.  Nothing against Miley Cyrus; she seems to be pleasant enough despite her personal boundary issues and involuntarily reptilian tongue. But should she be front page and “above the fold,” as we once called important stories?

On days like yesterday they should find someone who looks and sounds like Walter Cronkite, and he should say, “Not much going on today, folks. See you tomorrow evening at 5:30.”  Or couldn’t we simply do without news on days when it seems trivial?  What’s the harm in that?  People always say “no news is good news.”  Sometimes we say things without meaning it.  I do that.

When news providers pander to “what we want to see and hear,” then they begin to look and sound suspiciously like Congress. We don’t need two of those.

And that’s the way it is.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I listen to politicians talking, I get a headache.

Listen to what’s been said, publicly, during this election cycle or the previous one, by people trying to convince me that they should be in charge of things:

Trump: “I’m going to build a wall, a beautiful wall.  And it will have a beautiful door…”

Clinton: “I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone.”

Perry: “The third agency of government I would do away with – the education, the uh, the commerce and let’s see. I can’t the third one. I can’t. Sorry Oops.”

Sanders: “We’re going to have a revolution. We’re going to raise the minimum wage and make college education free for everybody.”

Bush: “I have a lot of really cool things that I can do…”

Sometimes I wonder if, during the sixties, all these people attended the same college and took some really bad acid.

But, every once in a while, somebody says something right and I know it’s right. Carly Fiorina did this several weeks ago.  She was talking about cyber security. She said that the government doesn’t understand technology—that it’s afraid of new technology.  She said that anyone who is President ought to go to the CEOs of technology corporations and ask for their help.

If you’re under 60, you may not know this:  At the outbreak of World War Two, President Roosevelt turned to the private sector and yelled “Help! I need guns and ammunition and tanks and planes!”  And guess what?  They did it.  The auto industry is a great example:  In 1941 (the year the war began), more than three million cars were manufactured in the United States. During the next four years of the war, only 139 cars were made. Chrysler made airplane fuselages. General Motors made airplane engines, guns, trucks and tanks. The average Ford car had some 15,000 parts. The B-24 Liberator long-range bomber had 1,550,000. Ford turned one out every 63 minutes.

If you want to know the real story behind WWII, read about how private enterprise became the “Arsenal of Democracy” because the President asked them to do it. It was an astounding achievement that has never been duplicated.  When there’s a dire need, no country can make it happen faster or better than us.  Why?  Because we have smart people.  They’re not running for President, but we do have smart people.

Here’s how I know Carly is right about technology.  I spent a lot of my life in the private sector.  But the last ten years have been spent in a government office, dealing with government organizations and entities.  This is a typical phone conversation on nearly every day of those ten years, and usually several times a day:

THE GOVERNMENT:  “That requires Form 22bx and a copy of any of Mr. Smith’s W2s and his drivers license.”

ME:  “Yes, I have all that here.”  (I probably don’t need to tell you that I have it filed digitally and am looking at it on a computer screen.)

THE GOVERNMENT:  “Mail that to us and we can begin the procedure.”

ME: “That sounds time-consuming.  Is there a faster way of getting this done?”

THE GOVERNMENT: “Our fax number is 123-456-7890.”

ME: “Do you have e-mail? I mean, we might not save an entire tree, but surely we’ll be guaranteeing somebody an extra toothpick or something.”

THE GOVERNMENT: “We are not allowed to send or accept e-mail.”

ME: “Well I just have to ask. Why not?”

THE GOVERNMENT: “I just told you. We’re not ALLOWED to use e-mail.”

ME: “You told me the what, not the why.  I asked the why.”

THE GOVERNMENT: “E-mail is not secure.”

ME: “Listen to me. Please, just listen. The information we are talking about comes to you in digital form.  That means that, reduced to its bare essentials, it’s binary code.  It’s just a whole lot of little ones and zeroes traveling through the line to your office.  The only difference between my e-mail and your fax is that you have a little machine on your end that hears all those little ones and zeroes, and says “Hey! That’s binary stuff!  I always print binary stuff!”  And it does.  Sure, e-mail can be stolen, if you’re real smart and know what you’re doing, and stealing Mr. Smith’s Form 22bx is like the most important thing in your life. Ever.  But think about this: What happens to that fax if it prints out and lies on the fax machine?  Let’s say you walk up to use the fax machine and there’s the piece of paper lying there.  You’re going to look at it, because you can probably drop it off on somebody’s desk on your way back.  And get this: if it’s something you’re not supposed to see—something really juicy, like Mr. Smith’s Form 22bx—I suspect you’re going to read the whole thing.  It’s human nature.  Now, having thought through all of that, which do you think is more likely in your office?  A normal office worker or a wild-eyed, demented hacker in the basement?”

THE GOVERNMENT: “We’re not allowed to use e-mail.”

ME: “I’m licking the thtamp.  I’m licking the thtamp and thalking at the thame time.”

OK maybe that wasn’t verbatim, but you get the picture.  Our government isn’t simply lacking knowledge. Our government mentality is based in fear.  Young people (translate that as “the people who will be running things in ten years”) aren’t interested in e-mail and desktop computers. They’ll be carrying their information, likely wearing it and possibly surgically implanting it.  They sure as hell won’t be faxing it. You show me a fifteen year-old who knows what a fax machine is, and I’ll show you Mr. Smith’s Form 22bx. Our government isn’t years behind in technology.  It’s decades behind.

Private enterprise is not the hideous monster that some politicians have painted.  There are dishonest and disreputable people in the world. Spoiler: They’ve always been there and they will always be there. Get over it, and be cautious out there.  But can you imagine, for a moment, who would be the world leader in cyber security if our government would simply ask private enterprise for their expertise? How would we fare, if we used the knowledge and capability of successful people and companies–organizations that must please their customers or cease to exist? FDR is not my all-time favorite President. But he was smart enough to know when he didn’t know something.

Where is the leadership that knows its strengths and weaknesses?  Why aren’t we the Arsenal Of Everything?