Posts

Posted on

Tennessee Turned Tables On T-Shirt Teasers

Well, it’s Thursday so as has become a bit of a tradition here, it’s time to go to a weekly writing challenge from John at The Sound of One Hand Typing. By the way, it’s a great exercise to get you thinking and writing! Anyway, today I’ll see if I can come up with a response to one of the prompts he had – write about something “trivial” .

People sometimes think being diehard fans of a sports team is “trivial”; a waste of time and energy. Likewise, Social Media is also in many cases pretty trivial and for many, a big waste of time…but occasionally it turns into something wonderful. Take this case for example.

A young boy in Tennessee was a big fan of his local university’s sports teams and wanted to show his allegiance when the school had a “colors” day in which the kids were encouraged to wear U. of Tenn. gear to show their pride. Only this lad came from a poorer family who couldn’t afford licensed shirts and other apparel. So he tried to be creative. Unfortunately, some of his classmates didn’t admire his homemade creation and bullied him. Enter his teacher, and that trivial social media. She posted his story on Facebook and a photo of his shirt and before long, official merchandise was rolling in for him to enjoy. But that wasn’t all…

As you can see, the university knew lots of people were big enough fans to buy their shirts in stores. But not as many would make their own out of dedication mixed with desperation. So they honored him by using his design to make the shirt his schoolmates had poked fun at an official design… with proceeds going towards anti-bullying campaigns.

Sure sports is a diversion and not that meaningful to the true course of our everyday lives. But it can create bonds and bring together people who otherwise would have nothing in common and no reason to speak. And yes, social media tends to be a way to spend hours watching “talking” huskies and cute kittens doing kitten-y things, or worse to spout hatred to like-minded individuals. But every once in awhile it gets to do some real good for everyone. And that’s hardly trivial at all!

Posted on

A Not So ‘Thrift’y Purchase

As you might have noticed by now, some weeks I get an idea from a weekly writing challenge posted by John at The Sound of One Hand Typing. This week he asked about the best thing readers had bought at a thrift store.

Now, of course, exactly what is, or isn’t a thrift store is open for debate I guess. I like looking around the real ones like Goodwill, and little second-hand clothing or book stores. Once in awhile I find something decent – a shirt, a little end table, a used CD by some band I semi-liked in the ’90s for a dollar – but haven’t really lucked into any super finds. I always hope I’ll come across an authentic concert t-shirt from Springsteen in the ’70s or R.E.M. in the ’80s, or an original redline Hot Wheels car from the early-’70s in great shape, but never do. People are wise to discarding such items these days, I think, and if they do, chances are the staff know their value to a collector and buy them themselves before the doors open. The days of finding a toy car or Nolan Ryan rookie baseball card that would fetch $200 online for 50 cents are gone. So although I’ve found some decent items in those stores, nothing every really knocked me out and excited me. However, if we include pawn shops, I have a story.

Pawn shops have a reputation for being dingy and seedy places, and I’m sure many of them are. But in Canada at least there are some that are chain stores, bright and airy and staffed by knowledgeable enough people. When up there, I’d sometimes look to them to get bargains, or else trade in things like point-and-shoot cameras I’d upgraded. Now back in the ’90s, you might recall if you’re of a certain age, computers were pretty expensive. So were their peripherals. So while I shot the budget and bought a ridiculously over-priced tower computer in around 1995 to get me into the game, the printer that came with it didn’t fare nearly as well as the PC itself. Within a year or two I needed to replace it, so I thought that pawn place might be my way of doing so for, well at least less than half a week’s pay.

I found one at a decent price that looked fairly modern and good. It was an Epson. That I remember, because probably entirely unfairly, it gave me a bit of a bad impression of that brand. I’m very sure they make good ones and many people have fine experiences with theirs, but this one was a bust. After buying new ink for it, long story short, it didn’t work at all. Out the price of an expensive inkjet cartridge, I tried to recoup my losses somewhat and at least return the printer itself.

No big surprise, the pawn shop wasn’t pleased to see it come back in through their doors. They declined my suggestion to plug it in and try it for themselves and pointed to a “no refunds” sign on the counter. They did however agree to give me a store credit for the amount. Seems like it might have been around $50.

Well they had probably half a dozen other printers stacked up, but I figured “once bitten, twice shy.” Best to shell out for a brand new one in a box with a warranty. They didn’t have fifty bucks worth of DVDs or CDs I craved on hand, but while looking around, one thing did catch my eye – a mandolin.

Now I love music, but sadly am not very musically inclined. As a teen, I’d acquired a few low-end keyboards and played a few songs, barely passably (some who heard me might have debated my assessment of “passably”) but had given that up years before. I’d never played stringed instruments and was one of the rarest of rare young guys, the one who never aspired to being the lead guitarist in a band. But there was something about this instrument that really jumped at me. Of course, by then R.E.M. had huge success with their song “Losing My Religion”, featuring a mandolin in place of where a guitar might normally have been – and I loved R.E.M. But what was more, this one looked great. It was an attractive, curvy little instrument, seemingly darn near new, shiny and made of multi-toned wood with little chromed tuning keys. It wasn’t the one pictured above, but it looked very nearly the same as it.

Well, “what the hell?” I thought to myself. I like the way that looks. And there’s no point letting this credit go to waste, so I bought it.

Now if this was Hollywood, I would have taken to it, learned to master it, written a few songs, become the most popular guy in my city’s Open Mic crowd and ended up with a record contract and video that in time would get a million views on You Tube. Years later I’d be interviewed by “where are they now ?” entertainment shows who’d want to discuss that glorious mandolin song. This isn’t Hollywood.

Instead, I did buy a book that was supposed to teach me how to play a mandolin. I felt like I was reading Swahili translated from Klingon. I couldn’t figure out one chord, let alone read a bit of the music printed in the book which looked a good deal more complex than the music I used to buy for the piano (or electric keyboards in my hands). That effort lasted maybe an hour and a half over less than a week. However, I did keep strumming it and picking strings on it from time to time, and in time could play a little riff or two of my own. And yes, believe it or not, I pretty much picked up “Losing My Religion” just by ear. I’d listen, try to find the strings that sounded like that, and worked along. It was fun and gave me a tiny bit of pride.

Mostly though, I just had it hanging on my apartment wall, not far from some plak-mounted record covers. A little music wall. It looked good, it was a conversation piece. I liked looking at it.

It wasn’t life-changing, or even that much of a story. But it was a good reminder to once in awhile, do something a bit nutty, something people don’t expect you to. Splurge on something you clearly do not need… but might like to have for a whim. Looking at a beautifully made instrument that I couldn’t master was a lot more uplifting than cursing over a stupid piece of non-functioning computer equipment!

 

Posted on

Radio, Radio

Well, it’s time for the weekly writing challenge again, as suggested by John at The Sound of One Hand Typing. I skipped the last couple of weeks but one of his suggestions this week was too close to home for me to pass up. Write something about “radio.”

Some of you might not know it but I write a daily blog about music, primarily the music of my life – the mid-’60s on, although not so much about the last decade or so. A time when great new music has become scarcer for me to embrace and perhaps not coincidentally, a time when radio has become marginal and marginalized.

A little about me. I was a sickly child – asthma, bad immune system (my mom’s chain smoking in the house doubtless did nothing to improve that, but it was the ’70s. What do you expect?Her doctor at one point apparently suggested a nice smoke or two would calm her nerves) I was in hospital a lot, and off school at home even more. Now, my mom was a teacher by trade so she made sure I got some schoolwork in there even when my lungs were being practically wretched up through my mouth every few minutes. But there were weekends, and evenings and so on. I wasn’t allowed to go out and hang out with the neighborhood kids if I was sick, nor if she deemed it too cold, too rainy, etc. My parents fought a lot, my older brother didn’t have a lot in common with me because of the age gap and perhaps because of his extroverted nature that led him to be “out” most of the time. (Ironically, in later life he’d become one of the most utterly antisocial people I’ve ever met. Lots we don’t understand about the autism spectrum still ) It could have been a totally garbage, horrible piece of soul-crushing life for young me. But by and large, it wasn’t. I had my books to read and Lego and Hot Wheels to play with and.. the big one… I had a radio.

When I was maybe five, I was given a little transistor radio for either Christmas or my birthday. Tiny one, about the size of two boxes of raisins, with a little dial on the side to tune in the AM station of your choice. I soon found CHUM in Toronto, then Canada’s top-rated pop or top 40 station. Actually they had a top 30, not 40, but you get the idea. I was in love with it. Some of my earliest memories, when I was maybe two or three, involve hearing music in our house I liked. Glen Campbell, Bobby Goldsboro, the Beatles. Oh yes, the Beatles. My mom was British and she seemed to really like the Fab Four and I remember hearing ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and staring in awe at the colorful album cover when I was maybe all of three years old. Hospital could be scary and lonely for a five, six year old… but at least I had my radio, and my friends. Elton John, Harry Chapin, America, Jim Gold, Bread. Nights weren’t so dark or all alone.

Needless to say, a few years on I had been upgraded to a little all-in-one stereo with a turntable and my allowance was going not to candy or comics like many kids my age, but to saving up for Elton John or Wings LPS or the latest hot 45 from the Eatons department store. And my spare hours avoiding the family turmoil were spent listening, learning the names of every singer and band on my radio. Soon, I was collecting the CHUM top 30 charts, by then in a newspaper and compiling my own charts , week by week, based on how many times I heard songs on radio coupled a bit with my own choices. 1974- #1 song, “Bennie and the Jets”. 1975 – “Philadelphia Freedom”. 1976 – “Silly Love Songs” and so on through about 1985,

The ’80s rolled along and I found FM stations and by the middle of the decade, I found groundbreaking alt rock station CFNY in Toronto. That was before they even called it “alt rock”. Few people here had heard of Depeche Mode, the Stranglers, Madness, the Cure or even REM in 1984 or ’85, but I had and was visiting the local cramped indie record store to buy their records, thanks to that CFNY influence. The late-’80s rolled around and I got through who knows what weird circumstances a job looking after a run-down downtown hotel on the night shift. Wide-eyed me dealing with bikers, cokeheads, teenaged hookers, shifty street folk, night after night… but being kept company by endless coffee and a soundtrack of CFNY night sounds, from the Sex Pistols to the Silencers, .

CFNY was at the time run by David Marsden. He wasn’t on air much by then, but he ran the show. And what a show. As luck would have it, he would take a job on air two decades later in my suburban hometown on the rock station and he and I would become good friends, even though he is old enough to be… well, let’s say for generosity, my father. This guy was at John and Yoko’s “Bed In” and hung out with they guys who’d be The Band before they even heard of Bob Dylan. A wonderful man, with an encyclopedic knowledge of music. A passion for it, A passion for radio. Not only have I had the happy chance to go to many of his parties, he’s let me sit in on his radio show once or twice. (Usually I helped him carry in boxes of CDS…he wasn’t going to limit himself to what the station had on their computer!)

The same station had a number of DJs who were nearly as in love with music and as good at dealing with fellow fans as David. I ended up meeting several of their DJs and becoming friends. Many a time I had a beer at a bar with Matt, who was an aspiring musician in his downtime, and a hell or a nice guy. Pretty decent songwriter too, he’s now given up commercial radio to concentrate on his music and his little children. He loved music and cared about his listeners. Sarah, the 20ish girl who was third fiddle on the morning show but occasionally got her own shift if someone phoned in sick. Shoulda been a prime-time DJ. I reprimanded her one time for making her home so obvious when she was a single gal. She’d often drive the wrapped company truck and park it in front of her house, on the city’s main north-street thoroughfare. Not too safe, talking about how she was single and lived alone and then parking a virtual billboard in front of her place on a street with about 50 000 cars a day driving by it. She actually seemed to take that advice to heart. And invited me to a party there one night. Good people. Great voices on the air, who were as good in real life.

I miss all that. And I feel sorry for the younger generation. They don’t know the feeling. They don’t have the connection. They have their phones with Spotify that play precisely what they want to hear every minute, but they don’t have radio. They don’t know the excitement of waiting all afternoon to hear that one new song that you love and have it blast out just before you had to go to dinner. They don’t find cool new songs that a DJ, much like themselves, found and threw on the turntable or in the CD player. They don’t know what it’s like to be lonely, or scared at 4AM and pick up the phone and talk to the local DJ who’s putting on a whole side of a Tears for Fears album and is happy to talk about it, the weather and the meaning of life to you for as long as the first four songs take to play. They ain’t being invited to a bar or a party by Spotify.

Radio itself has a lot of the blame. Somewhere along the line, the stations began getting gobbled up by conglomerates who decided it was easier to have one top 30 for all of North America than worry about what individual stations’ listeners wanted to hear. And that having 300 songs total on a computer was more efficient than having a 40-foot wall of albums and CDs to confuse the disc jockeys…if they had one. Because computers could duplicate them at a lower price. Fox could give them weather reports, once a day, so who cares if once in awhile a surprise thunderstorm spun out a tornado on the city and their were no people in the office to warn listeners? Their I-phones would do so anyway.

Many of my real friends in adult life have worked in radio. And radio, itself, was a good friend of mine for decades. It still is, but I’m getting old and it’s not aging well near as well as me. It makes me sad. If only the local station had a DJ playing his own collection of records and was watching that radar for that black cloud on the horizon, I’d switch him on and feel better. I’d buy him a beer at the local watering hole this weekend and find out what he’s heard that’s new and cool this week.

Radio, radio.

Posted on

Lucky 13 ?

Well, it’s time for the weekly writing challenge again, as suggested by John at The Sound of One Hand Typing. One of his suggestions was to write a whole post in 13 sentences…which made me think of the number “13”. Here goes:

Many people consider 13 to be an unlucky number. This probably dates back to the Last Supper, when we’re told Jesus had a dozen friends or disciples with him; of course as we know it was his “last” supper since he’d be betrayed and killed soon after. That’s rather bad luck and thus, 2000 years later as a result, many of our office buildings skip from 12th Floor up to the 14th one.

I can’t say I don’t believe in “luck”…but I think often times we attribute other things to “luck” because it’s more convenient to do so than think about the situation. Stephen Leacock said “I am a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” Exactly. We might attribute a band selling millions of copies of their first record to “luck” but that misses the obvious other factors like the amount of work they put into practicing, then writing and recording it, the number of phone calls they made and e-mails they had to fire off to get noticed. Leacock wouldn’t miss that fact. But, as a counterpoint, there are 292 million possible Powerball number combinations, so if the ones drawn all match the ones on your ticket, that has to be “luck”. However, it doesn’t have to be good luck. Many a lottery winner soon got hooked on drugs, or had children kidnapped, or were filing for bankruptcy a year or two later. So maybe “luck” is really what you choose to do with the chances handed you.

The bottom line is this – if you’re happy and feeling healthy today, have a roof over your head and someone who loves you, you’re in luck.

Posted on

My Two Cents On Coins And Awards

It was a fun little exercise and mental jog the last couple of weeks, so why not do it again this week? Write about something, John at The Sound of One Hand Typing‘s suggested in his weekly “writing prompts”. This week he’s asked about awards we’ve won.

The first awards I won, and the ones which got me big trophies at times, were from an activity many would find bizarre – coin displays.

So, that requires a little back story. When I was little, my family didn’t do a whole lot together outside of summer vacations and occasional trips to a park with a swimming pool nearby in the warm months. But there was an exception – coins.

My dad was a big coin collector. I don’t know how he stumbled onto that hobby, but he was quite avid and knowledgeable when I was young. I think he liked the idea of perhaps finding a very valuable coin in change; he liked the hunt for a rare one to complete a collection (say every year of Canadian dime, for an example) , figured they were a good investment and probably just liked looking at some of them. Somewhere down the line, when I was likely only five or so, he gave me a coin album or two, and some coins and got me collecting them too. For awhile Canadian nickels were my big thing – cheaper and easier to find than say, silver dollars. He got me somewhat into it, and tried to do the same with my older brother who was more half-hearted about it. Eventually my Mom joined in, just to be part of the family “thing” I guess; she got very interested in the esoteric subject of “primitve money”. Many indigenous peoples around the world have used things like sea shells or rings as money and she was fascinated by such “money” and would try to find and collect some of that.

Back in the 1970s, it was a pretty big hobby, as I found out. My dad belonged to a local coin club and would go to monthly meetings, where various dealers would have binders full of pages of sleeved coins of every denomination, year, country, quality, for sale, and usually there was a short talk on some coin-related topic and refreshments. Before long the whole family usally tagged along with him and I was on my way to having a whole collection of the nickels and various other odds and ends.

Serious collectors were very serious, and with good reason I suppose. Rarity makes for a good demand vs supply situation and some coins that weren’t minted in big quantities were remarkably valuable. A 1925 Canadian penny for instance – a one cent coin – could be worth over $100. Some 1929 ones, I just looked up, are worth about 20 cents…but ones with a different “9” could be worth $100. Some coins had pressing errors and a number would be out of place or a part of the king’s crown would be missing and obsessive collectors would pay through the nose for such things. My dad was always on the lookout for such things, and taught me to as well. I don’t know if I always had a good eye for detail or if that is where it started, but noticing small differences between seemingly similar things can be useful in real life and has carries over in a number of ways. It makes it easier to know if a common garden Chevy pickup is my friend’s or a strangers; I notice things like the license plate holder or scratches on the side. It also applies to a hobby I enjoy far more than coins now, birding. When there could be 30 different types of warblers, little colorful bug-eaters smaller than sparrows, high up in the trees of a spring woodlot, noticing little things like a stripe across the wing or the color of the outer tail feathers makes it a lot easier to know what I’m seeing!

Anyway, to the awards. The local clubs would usually have big annual shows they’d try to get locall media to cover and encourage newcomers to visit. And there were several big provincial ones, sometimes in cities a good few hours from our home. My dad loved going to those, so we’d be along with him. Some were real treats because they’d be in a city 200, 300 miles away and we’d get to eat in restaurants and stay at a hotel overnight.

The shows would have displays for the public as well as the dealers selling coins. People could display their collection, or part of it. Most used big wooden cases with glass fronts, to display, say the set of Centennial year coins or the old Canadian pennies (which in the 1800s were “large cents” because they were physically about the size of a 50-cent piece). My dad made a few of those cases, and gave me and my brother one, and encouraged us to take part. I did, quite avidly, often with my Mom’s help. While many would just stick the coins in the case and maybe scrawl out a title , we were creative…made them something to look at. My dad liked to have a velvet background to set the things off, and put little writeups and pictures to go along with the coins themselves. I got into that, I loved the creative challenge of making them visually appealing. I’d cut out arcs in cardboard, have my mom cover them in fabric, put coins on them and display them in rainbow-shaped curves, with symmetrical little neatly typed, concise writeups – what is on the coins, how many were made, and so on. Maybe it was the first inkling of how I’d decades later write a daily music blog with details about what’s on the record, where it was made and so on!

It might be hard to believe, but many of the shows would have several dozen people taking part and entering displays, and they’d judge them and give out awards to the best – sometimes large trophies! Every one of us won a good number over the four or five years we went to such things regularly.

I think coin collecting, like many other hobbies, is becoming a thing of the past. It doesn’t have the appeal of Play Station games to today’s youth, that’s for sure. And I myself still look at the coins in my change, and try to keep one of each quarter when a new design comes out, but that’s about as far as my interest will rise these days. The trophies are long gone, as are any photos of me, or my family members showing off the displays. My dad is gone too now; the last few years I was up north with him I’d go to the monthly coin meeting in town with him most of the time. By then I found the meetings tedious, and the crowd to be mainly geriatric, but I liked spending the time with dad doing something he liked. We’d go get a donut or burger after and it wasn’t a bad afternoon.

It was a long time ago. Several of the larger shows we went to got me to “gopher” – go get snacks or drinks for the dealers who didn’t want to leave their tables. Most would tip quite nicely. My first sort of “job” , back when I was about six, or seven years old! How it taught me to pay attention to design and aesthetics. But mainly, how one hobby could bring a family together . Memories of that are the real awards, it turns out.

Posted on

In Every Castle A Heartache

Well once again, John at The Sound of One Hand Typing‘s come up with an interesting topic to write hastily about – a castle you’ve visited in real life.

I don’t really envy Europe on many things, but one thing I do concede is that they do have some really cool old castles. The type of storybook, Prince Charming ones like Neuschwanstein in Germany above (I don’t envy German kids having to learn how to spell things like that however!). The so-called castles over here I find, are rather lacklustre and underwhelming by comparison.

For instance, I live not far from one that locals call “the castle” – in fact, the whole neighborhood is referred to as “Castle Heights”. It was famously renovated not long ago by TV’s favorite get-things-done couple, Joanna and Chip Gaines. It is a fairly impressive stone building complete with a small turret that took over 20 years to complete, though that had more to do with finance troubles for owners than the complexity of it. While it is a noteworthy and impressive structure indeed, it hardly seems like what some little girl would have envisioned say, when hearing fairy tales of kings and queens and long-haired princesses. It doesn’t help that rather on a splendid estate it sits on a rather small lot overlooking a row of used car dealers and appliance repair shops. You can take tours of it, but I’ve yet to do it. But I have been inside one “castle”.

The town I grew up in had a “castle” we could see merely by standing on our driveway and looking to the west. It was built in the 1850s by a low-level nobleman who’d come to Canada. It was the largest individual residence in the country for years, and had it not been for his reputed gambling addiction, it might still be some blue-bloods private estate. However, in the 1870s he was in debt and sold it to the Methodist Church and in time, it was made into a school. It is an impressive looking building, long and stately looking, built of yellowish bricks and featuring a grand-looking entrance way up stairs from the grounds and topped off with little mini turrets. Impressive but no Disney World castle. It’s been used for shooting a few movies and TV shows, and the grand interior through the front door, elegant sweeping wooden stairs leading up to a huge window, is a popular setting for wedding photos. However, its main function is still being used as a private school for high school girls. Which is where I came in… but the story isn’t as fun or risque as that might suggest!

My mom was a teacher, but gave that up for years to raise my brother and I. By the time he’d moved thousands of miles away and I was well into my teens, and she and my Dad had divorced, she decided to go back to it. Initially she was a substitute teacher for the local school board, but after a year or two of not knowing if she’d be working the next day (and often finding out by being woken up around 6 AM and told to report to a school that could be 30 miles away to teach kids she’d never met before) she decided to try for something more stable. She got hired on at the private school. Though she did teach a class at times, her main job was to be a “house mother.” The school is a boarding one, with many kids living there. Many were from wealthy families overseas. So they needed adult women to stay there and stay in built-in mini-apartments overnight to make sure the kids were all accounted for, take care of any medical emergencies that might arise and so on. My mom did that for a few years, and boy, did she have tales to tell! Turns out teenaged daughters of millionaires from Europe and Asia often behaved like … yep, teenaged girls. Many a time my Mom would have to try and track down the source of a whiff of ganja floating down the hallway, and call police when suddenly one or two girls hadn’t shown up by curfew or an hour or two later. Conveniently, there was an inexpensive motel a block away. Police seldom had to look further than it to recover the errant lasses, and disappoint many young lads no doubt in dragging them out of said motel rooms.

It wasn’t a place males were supposed to be inside of, except for one or two male teachers and maintenance guys I guess, but occasionally I went in, helping Mom move some things to her “apartment” or taking something she’d forgotten at home to her. I was probably college-aged at that time, and she told me several of her students wanted to meet me in a bad way. She successfully endeavored to make sure that never happened. Err, thanks Mom?

Anyway, the thing about the building was that once you got off that grandiose staircase, it was a pretty run-of-the-mill old, slightly rundown building. Hopefully they’ve redone it and modernized it by now, but it was rather grubby looking, the rooms were small and a little dark. It was poorly insulated, thus rather cold in winter no matter how hard the noisy radiators tried. Windows had no screens so bugs including bees regularly got in and they weren’t surprised to see bats winging their way down the hallways at night. The electrical grid was not designed for late-20th Century appliances I think, and there seemed to be power outages more than one would expect in a fancy school.

It reminded me of Prince Harry. When I read his book last year, one thing that stood out was how he described many of the old castles the Royal Family resided in – old, dirty, stuffy, small-roomed, narrow-passaged, drafty and lacking many a modern amenity people in new mobile homes would take for granted.

I guess it goes to show. A man’s home might be his castle, but his castle might not be all that it seems. Everyone has their own problems and no matter how the “castle” looks outside, no matter how big or stately, it’s probably not all fun, wine and roses inside.

Posted on

Life In Six Sentences?

Well last week’s was fun, so why not try it again? John at The Sound Of One Hand Typing sometimes puts up Writing Prompts and invites us to use one of them and post something based on the suggestion. This week I’m doing his idea about “write a whole post in just six sentences”. So here we are:

Do unto others as you’d like them to do unto you. Something is always better than nothing. Follow your passions and you’ll be surprised what they’ll lead to. Perception is reality. Realize other people think their opinions are right just as much as you think yours are. Follow those rules and you’ll have a good, rewarding life to look back on and probably have others looking back at it fondly too.

Posted on

Does It Pay To Think About ‘Stuff’?

John at The Sound Of One Hand Typing is an interesting blogger who posts more or less daily about a variety of things. Sometimes he puts up “Writing prompts”, inviting other writers to put down their thoughts on a particular topic. This week, one was “stuff”. A word that means many things to many people! Telling someone to “stuff it” isn’t very nice, but when you stuff a turkey, it generally makes it even better. Mostly though, “stuff” is everything we collect physically, isn’t it?

It’s been on my mind this month as I just paid the storage unit rent again. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

About five years ago now, my family – my lovely wife and her daughter and I – moved in with her sister and brother in law. They are a bit older than us, had kids who’d left home, leaving them the proverbial “empty nesters”. At the time,we were renting a nice, but small house in the main city. The in-laws had a much bigger house in the suburbs. Moving in with them was, and largely is, a win-win. We help them out with the bills and buy many of the groceries, help with the cooking and the yard; they have that help and people around to watch the place when they go on vacation. We still end up paying somewhat less than the rent and utilities we used to pay. So, basically it’s good all around. Of course, there are occasional sacrifices on both halves but for the most part it’s been good. But, of course there is a catch.

Even though the old house was smallish, we had a lot of “stuff” in it. For instance, the big “stuff” – living room sofa and arm chairs, coffee table, a good stove, frig and of course all the small “stuff” – clothes, shoes, more shoes, pictures on the wall, mementoes of this and that collected over the years, books, electronic gadgets, cookware. That all wasn’t going to fit into our new accommodations of two bedrooms and a bathroom besides the shared kitchen and living room. They had their own sofa, they didn’t need ours. Same goes for the coffee table, stove, pots and pans, lawn mower… you get the idea. So , like every other Texan it seems, we rented out a storage unit to put the excess “stuff” in. There’s a joke I’ve heard that you know you’re NOT in Texas if you can say “I haven’t seen a storage unit facility in two miles!”. In it went. Boxes and boxes as well as the furniture, appliances, Christmas decorations, you name it. It was an arduous job moving stuff in there.

I packed away about half my CDs, many of my books, some photo albums, framed photos, a lot of clothes that were out of season then, my Toronto Blue Jays salt and pepper shakers… they’re there somewhere in the concrete-floored 150 square feet . I thought, quite frankly, I was being a bit more clever than my family. I made a point of putting a big letter code on each box I packed, and having a little journal in which I noted what was in each. Only my cleverness didn’t extend to packing the seemingly most valued things in first…ergo, burying them in the back behind about a ten-foot deep wall of more boxes, sofas, lawn mowers…

We did somehow put the Christmas tree near the door, and most years have rescued it at the appropriate time; this past December however, we were feeling a bit collectively lazy I guess and I just went out and got a new, smaller tree to use. Other than that, much has stayed in place there. My sweetie did give the lawn mower away to an old friend of hers whose machine had bitten the dust and whose husband was out of work. From time to time, I find myself thinking “I know I had that Sting CD, but I can’t find it” and I realize it’s probably in box D11, stacked against the rear wall of the unit. “Let’s check Amazon…” . Likewise, my wife often says “I wish I had” this shirt or that jacket but it’s not in the closet and she figures it must be packed away in storage. She usually adds, ever-so-optimistically, “rats have probably eaten it by now!” . I certainly hope not!

But it does make me think, “why?” . After several years of paying well beyond $100 a month, the price we’ve paid for that rent exceeds the cost, or insurance value, of everything contained within it. I sometimes think about buying a smaller storage shed, putting it out back, and moving the important “stuff” into it. The rest could get donated to Goodwill or other friends whose husbands might be out of work, sold in a yard sale, or thrown out if indeed rats have eaten it. It would pay for itself in less than a year. But we don’t. At least not yet. The largely metal storage unit gets blisteringly hot in summer, so we don’t want to visit it then. Right now, the weather is pleasant so we actually probably could stand to work in it , or work through it perhaps, a few days, but we always seem to have more important things to do. But we keep paying on it, because it’s too important to lose. With me, the clothes I have in it… well, if I haven’t worn them in four or five years, I can probably do without. I could probably order new a copy of every book that I actually want but is in storage for far less than a month’s rent. But my photos, and a few other things, those I want to get back one day. Same with my wife and the kiddo; they both have things too valuable to them to lose. More often than not, they aren’t the priciest things in there. Sometimes the most important “stuff” is not the expensive “stuff.”

Someday soon, maybe we’ll go over there and start digging through that wall of boxes. But it may not be this weekend, or next. I guess it turns out time is even more important than “stuff” when you get right down to it.

Posted on

No More SI? Sigh.

Another sign of the times, and one which like too many others says “closed forever – no longer relevant”. This time it appears to be hanging on the door of Sports Illustrated.

Although there’s still a final nail to be hammered into the once-venerable and profitable magazine and its offshoots, it appears to be only a matter of time… and not much of that… before it officially is done for good. About two weeks ago, at least 100 staff members – most of the payroll – got e-mails telling them they were “terminated immediately” by their employer, something called Authentic Brands, and the few remaining people would likely be finished within six months. If the publication was already in trouble, one can’t possibly conceive of a way it will improve by firing most of its writers, photographers and editorial staff. Authentic Brands however, tweet optimistically about it being “A cost-cutting measure to initiate a transformative shift towards a streamlined business model.” Apparently the writer in charge of, ahem, corporate BS, wasn’t one of the ones let go.

A sad ending for a publication Adam Shafter of ESPN rightly notes “was an institution.” Indeed, it was the first large-circulation magazine to win the National Magazine Award for Excellence twice. Sadder still, it’s likely to be an increasingly common occurrence over the next few years as fewer people take to traditional, tactile media and do and live more and more of their lives online. The culprits for SI’s demise are many, and basically “the usual subjects” for publishers these days. Fewer sales, fewer markets to sell the publication in, indifference from phone-obsessed types, particularly younger ones. In this case, it also was predictable because younger, Gen Z-type people, have in general far less interest in the subject matter (organized sports) than their parents or grandparents. And you can add in a dash of political correctness working towards eliminating the most lucrative arm of the company for good measure.

Some would say the troubles began when Time-Life, the long-time publisher, sold Sports Illustrated to Meredith Publishing in 2018. Meredith are one of the few remaining big players in the magazine world, putting out many lifestyle titles like HGTV and Magnolia Journal as well as Good Housekeeping – titles you pick up and flip through at the grocery store checkout – but perhaps lacked the expertise to run a specialty, news-oriented (even if the news involved sports) mag. Whether or not that was the case is largely irrelevant, as within two years Meredith in turn sold it, to Authentic Brands. They in turn, for whatever reasons, licensed it out to a company called Arena Group for (according to Forbes) $15 million a year. Arena published it and presumably sent a portion of the “profits” back to the owner. Only, recently they defaulted on the payment, creating, Authentic says “substantial debt” and having that company pull the license. If you’re thinking that all sounds complicated, and wouldn’t it be simpler for a company with a knowledge of magazine publishing and an interest in the subject matter be better-suited to running it, well, what can I say? Business apparently doesn’t run that way anymore. That’s not efficient, they say.

Of course the writing’s been on the wall for Sports Illustrated for years, and more morosely, they’re far from the only vulnerable print “institution.” The internet fired the first salvo through its bows; once full scoreboards and articles about games were readily available online within hours of them taking place, there was diminished interest in waiting upto a week to get a magazine to recap it all. That accelerated with the universal adoption of smartphones by about 2012 or ’13; the same online coverage was literally at your fingertips while you sat on the john, or crashed your car while texting about the great stories you were reading. No longer did you have to go your desk and boot up a computer. It was the same kind of reason paper editions of Newsweek bit the dust in 2012.

The signs are all around us. Hop on a bus or commuter train ten years back and chances are every third or fourth person would have a magazine in front of their face… and they could pick up that glossy at the bus station, or any old convenience store, even if they didn’t have a subscription. Nowadays it’s a crowded vehicle full of people getting a crick in their neck staring down at their phones. And of course, even if they wanted to flip through SI, or People, or National Geographic or Old Guys Who Like 1954 Dodges Journal they likely wouldn’t have a chance unless they got it mailed to their home. Poynter point out that in the glory days of magazines (the late-’70s) about 35% of all mags were sold at newsstands. Nowadays, its only 3%. No wonder. Unless you live within close range of a Barnes & Noble you’ll probably not see any magazines for sale save for those handful of Meredith ones and a Life magazine special edition or two (the Grateful Dead! MASH! Betty White!) at your supermarket. What’s worse, that 3% is three percent of a much smaller pie than it used to be. Words Rated suggest between 2019-22, “total audiences for magazine companies have decreased by 38.5%” and even more shockingly, even the online audience for them has shrunk by 28.3 %. People aren’t giving up their paper copies to read it on their phones. Even when dropped onto your phone, a well-written article about a subject you care about has trouble competing against a 10-second video of a yawning cat or girl bouncing around to the latest Tik Tok trend.

There was a time when 19% of all males in the States reported being regular readers of the publication. That’s pretty close to a common language for males; a shared bit of culture that any guys who were strangers could probably have bonded over instantly. Sports Illustrated as recently as 2016 had an average circulation in the U.S. of just over three million copies per issue. At the time it was the seventh biggest-selling normal magazine in the land (twelfth if you include publications sent directly to organization members like the AARP Bulletin.) By late 2020, that had dropped to 1.6 million. But wait – it gets worse. Back in ’16, it came out weekly, as it had since appearing – Eddie Matthews of the then-Milwaukee Braves at bat on the first cover – first in 1954. But Meredith decided once every two weeks was plenty; Authentic, you guessed it, shrunk it to a once-a-month thing. Oh boy, your team just won the semi-finals game! Can’t wait to see what Sports Illustrated has to say about it…in 26 or 27 days!

Mind you, if it kept delivering well-written articles and interviews that gave real insight into the stars and the workings of their teams and leagues, there could still be an eager market for the magazine. Maybe get it back to a time when being named its “Sports Person of the Year” (Tiger Woods, Stephen Curry, Tom Brady and LeBron James the only ones to have been named such more than once, if you’re keeping track) really meant something. Unfortunately, as circulation shrank, and number of pages did likewise, and writers were lost due to attrition and disinterest. There’s a distinct feeling the quality of journalism has suffered, to the point where recently they were accused of making up false names and running some articles generated by AI rather than real, should we say “authentic” sports writers.

And of course, we haven’t even mentioned the hot potato, the elephant in the corner of the jock’s room, the Swimsuit Issue. But it should be, since for years it was the most sought-after issue of the year and the publisher’s biggest cash cow. It first came out in 1964 and by 1980 or so, SI was synonymous not only with predictions about football rankings the coming season and great photos of leaping catches by outfielders but with cute gals in skimpy swim suits. Now, there were always some naysayers and indeed, it may be a valid point to ask what girls in swimwear have to do with “Sports” but still, it is what it is. Or was. It was a hugely successful arm to the thriving body of the publication. As recently as 2005, it was reported they took in over $35 million in ads in the one edition alone. You could hire a lot of writers, not to mention photographers, for $35 mil. At the height of its popularity, it also spun off an annual TV special, later released for home viewing on VHS or DVD, and arguably the most seen calendars in the market. One source (Must Read Alaska) suggest upto 80% of the company’s total profits came from that once-a-year issue. It also made household names out of models like Elle MacPherson, Cindy Crawford, Heidi Klum…and Kathy Ireland. Other women may not have liked it that much, but I venture that the likes of MacPherson (who went on to an acting career) and Crawford (for years a red-carpet A-lister) hardly felt exploited by being photographed in nice locations in limited clothing. Kathy Ireland, for one says she’s “forever grateful” to SI for putting on the cover of the Swimsuit edition three times and that it was a big part of “the foundation of everything our company does.” What her company, Kathy Ireland Worldwide, does is license out products, have a clothing line, a record label (EE1) and other ventures that take in over three billion bucks a year. All run by her. Makes one think that there were some big brains behind those attractive bodies and the magazine gave them a springboard to rise and make the most of them.

Although the ’22 edition still sold a very good 2.5 million copies “on the street” – newsstands, Walmarts etc – on top of the paid subscribers, no one denies that its sales have plummeted and it’s hardly an item of note anymore. There are many reasons, of course. Overall there’s perhaps a sense of “been there, done that” among many and young readers may not be as attracted to it as their dads were when they were their age. But one can’t help also note, to quote Must Read Alaska again “first they went woke, then they went broke.” In the late-2010s, there was a movement complaining about the magazine. Not entirely on it existing, but rather the choice of models. They were too White. Too Female. Too slim. SI paid attention and started changing the models used. Now we have plus-sized ones in tiny swimsuits, more people of color, some men even and of course, transgendered individuals. Last year they even put 81-year old Martha Stewart – yes, that Martha Stewart – on the cover. Perhaps those who’d protested cheered, but they didn’t stampede to the stores to buy it up. Nor, one might think, did many 20 year-old frat boys even if they were curious as to whether Martha might be sharing some nice tips on decorating their dining room table for Easter.

That too, leads into perhaps the final trouble dooming SI. Fewer and fewer young people – Millennials and especially Gen Z’ s (born in the first decade of the 2000s) care much at all for sports, let alone traditional organized ones like baseball, football nor the Olympics. If they pay attention at all, it’s often to the X-sports like skateboarding, not quite in the SI wheelhouse, but mostly it seems the NBA, MLB and British football leagues have been replaced by X-boxes more than even X-games. The Score noted recently “Gen Z-ers are consuming sports less than U.S. adults” (them referring to “adults” as those over 35).” Among their findings, 33% of the young never watch live sports, and 50% say they’d never attend a live pro sporting event. The NBA is losing young fans slower than other major sports (NHL hockey has suffered the most in that category in the past decade or so) but even it no longer has the same following or cachet with the under 25s that it did a mere decade back. Put that together with the generation’s utter disinterest in conventional magazines, or it might seem, hard-copy print products of any sort and it becomes harder to see a bright future for Sports Illustrated.

So, just like that, it would seem there goes another once-proud American institution … and part of my younger years. But in its place… well, I hear there are some funny 10-second cat videos on Tik Tok.

Posted on

Pragmatic? Word!

Happy New Year! It’s astonishing to realize we’re already over a week into that new year…and the year is 2024! Doesn’t it seem like it wasn’t long ago we were all worried about it being 1984 and all the literary implications one could read into it?

Thus far, ’24 doesn’t seem all that different than ’23, which hardly comes as a suprise. Changing a calendar rarely makes for automatic changes in lives, let alone the world at large. But I remain optimistic that just maybe it will before we ring in the next “Auld Lang Syne.”

If people seemed more divided and polarized than ever last year, it even seemed to reflect itself in the “words of the year.” For those unfamiliar with the concept, several organizations pick a word (occasionally a phrase rather than just one word) that best signifies the year behind us; sometimes it’s a brand new word, other times its just one that suddenly jumped to prominence. The two primary purveyors of the “honors” are Oxford University and Merriam-Webster, the dictionary people. In some recent years, Oxford chose words like “selfie” (2013) and “GIF” (2012) while MW have used ones like “pandemic” (2020) and “feminism” (2017). But last year, Oxford chose “rizz” while MW went for “authentic.” Which in some ways are approximately opposites of each other. Even the English masters are divided!

“Rizz” came as a surprise to me, as I’d never heard the term. They tell us it basically means charisma, from where it’s derived, much like “flu” comes from “in-flu-enza”. They say it means ”pertaining to someone’s ability to attract another person through style, charm and attractiveness.” I don’t have a lot of “rizz”. But I can take consolation in knowing that I’m not alone – the word jumped in popular usage and many more people’s lexicons in summer after actor Tom Holland said in an interview “I have no rizz whatsoever.”

Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster went for “authentic.” They noted that words like “rizz” and “deep fake” were also popular but “we’re thinking about, aspiring to and judging more than ever” things which aren’t authentic, be it AI or celebrity culture. People who have a lot of rizz at times may not be rich in authenticity, it would seem. So people are longing for things that are authentic, from celebrities to ethnic foods to things as simple as photos we see in publications.

So do we want “rizz” or want “authentic”? Seems to me the answer might be a little of each. My hope is that the word of the year for 2024 will turn out to be “pragmatic.” I love the word. It seems like that is what we all need more of around us these days. As the Rolling Stones once said, “you can’t always get what you want, but if try sometimes, you get what you need.” We need pragmaticism.

MW define “pragmatic” as “practical as opposed to idealistic” adding “a person who is pragmatic is concerned more with matters of fact than with what could be or should be.” I call it “maturity”. Realizing that compromise is often necessary, that not everyone is going to have the same opinions or desires as us, and that getting part of what you’re hoping for sure beats getting nothing. A message politicians could take to heart more than ever. No matter which side of the great divide you may be politically (or if you’re one of the silent majority still somewhere near the middle) you have to agree that both sides are getting more extreme in their demands, more dug in in their positions… and getting less and less done in the process. Cooler heads and compromises are what we need to get things progressing, no matter what the topic, from taxation to immigration to the justice system, Globally, wouldn’t we all be better off if the Israelis and their Arab neighbors simply pragmatically agreed that the other was there to stay so it would be best to look for a way of getting along peacefully?

Pragmatic. If we all embrace it as this year’s word and perhaps the word of 2025 might be “excellent.”

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started