Category: our world

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Adolescence. For Once ‘Must See TV’ Lives Upto Description

Alright, I’m on the bandwagon, a vehicle I usually avoid when it comes to television. In many cases TV dramas that everyone’s talking about and are raved about with phrases like “appointment TV” or “brilliantly dark” thrown at them don’t seem to appeal to me at all. But this week, I’m on board with the critics because Adolescence is an extraordinary piece of cinema in every way. And the critics agree. It has a 99% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s already being touted for Emmys and in a few short weeks has become the fourth most-watched “series” in its streaming service’s history. Netflix has made a masterpiece here.

Adolescence is a British drama set very much in the here and now. It could be called a “crime drama” or maybe a “psychological thriller” but neither one does full justice to the extent of the show. Some wrongly call it a “Whodunnit?” but the show’s producers rightly say it’s much more of a “whydunnit?”. The answer to the “who” comes reasonably early on in the four episodes. Each one of the episodes covers one aspect of a horrendous crime that was committed on the streets of an unnamed north English city. And here’s the kicker, the “can’t look away for a second” thing that makes it an extraordinary experience to watch – each of the four, approximately one-hour episodes is shot in a continuous manner done in real time. There are no pauses or edits. It’s rather breath-taking the way the camera follows the actors wherever they go. No, “insert commercial break” then have an entirely different set hours later for the next scene. If the action begins in Point A and gets to Point B an hour later, we’re along for the ride to see how. And what transpired in that hour. It’s brilliantly done and as The Guardian newspaper puts it, “it’s no flashy gimmick.” It’s a unique technique that “ratchets up… the real time tension.”

It deals with, as I noted already a grisly crime, but then explores what led to it and some of the consequences it had that few would ordinarily think of. As such it’s a fine piece of psycho-analysis. The acting is first-rate and scarily believable; relatable even for the most part. By the first action sequence, about four minutes in, I was on the edge of my seat the rest of the way.

SPOILER ALERT : Now, I’ll give you an idea of what the show is about, and what each of the four episodes entails, but if you haven’t seen it, you might want to skip over to end of this post , where the italics end, so as not to lose any of the element of surprise when you do watch it… and you should do that. Even the video trailer might spoil some of the more intense moments the first time you see it.

The show involves a teen or tween girl who was viciously stabbed to death one night in a parking lot. Police quickly apprehend the suspect… a diminutive, cute lad a bit younger than the girl was. In the first episode, you are beside him as he gets taken into custody, processed and put into a police interrogation. His shaken dad is with him and wants desperately to believe in his child’s innocence, and does until he sees the evidence the police have.

Episode two takes the police to his school, to talk to his friends and other classmates as well as the teachers, some of whom appear entirely disinterested in their job or the kids’ goings-on. The lead detective has a son of his own in the same school, and gets to see what school is like these days, gets an inside look at just how important social media is in most of their lives and how bullying is an everyday occurrence, both on the yard and on their phones.

The third episode has a psychologist, played by a tough-on-the-outside when she needs to be, breaking on the inside young woman. Erin Doherty should win some sort of award for performance as “Briony”, the psychologist here. It’s right up there with the Silence of the Lambs interviews. She gets him to open up a little about his motivation, and what his life as a rather unpopular 13 year old is like; gets the full brunt of his mercurial mood swings.

The fourth episode is arguably the most wretching one, following the killer’s dad (played by Steven Graham, called “the best actor working today” by the Guardian) on his 50th birthday, about a year after the murder. We mostly know how a crime like this can rip apart victim’s families, this time we see the effects it has on the killer’s kin too as they try to maintain some normalcy but fear that’s too lofty a goal to ever achieve again.

Graham, one of the leads, came up with the basic idea for the show after noticing a string of violent crimes that were being committed around Liverpool, his hometown, by young “boys” most would assume too young and innocent to be cold-blooded killers. “I just thought ‘What’s happening? How have we come to this? What’s going on with society?” Good questions indeed, equally applicable on this side of the ocean.

Adolescence. Five stars, two thumbs up from me. Not a cheery watch, but a very intelligent, even-handed one shot in memorable fashion that will make you wonder “what’s going on with society?” as well. And more scarily, if you’re a parent, perhaps make you wonder “could that be my kid?” I hope the show starts a few family discussions that perhaps might stop that one kid from becoming “that kid.”

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Can You Tell The Difference?

Once again John at The Sound of One Hand Typing came up with some good writing prompts for people last week. One was to write a post in a mere ten lines, so here we go…

I got a counterfeit coin in my change at the supermarket this week. Actually, not so much counterfeit as an obvious fake – a medal the exact size and weight of a quarter, but gold-colored and with some sort of angel on it. When I looked at this, at first I thought it was one of those Presidential dollar coins you occasionally see which stores don’t like since their cash registers don’t have a compartment for. But upon looking more closely, I saw it wasn’t. It might have been a casino token, or maybe a little “good luck” medal some religious charities send out with letters asking for donations. It doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t mad, I was more incredulous. I felt sorry wondering how hard up you’d have to be to try and pass off a fake 25 cent coin at a store. And also wonder how those high-tech coin sorters they utilize missed something that a human eye could pick up on at a glance. Maybe people are still better than machines after all?

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Customer (Dis)service

Once again John at The Sound of One Hand Typing has come up with some good writing prompts for people this week. One was to talk about something I learned this month. So here we are –

They say you learn something new every day, and hopefully that’s true, so I must learn a lot in a month. Even a short one like February. One thing that I learned this week was I made a good call not buying an HP printer last month!

Our Canon printer was acting up, not printing evenly or at times, at all. This disappointed me greatly as it wasn’t very old and I’ve been a loyal fan of Canon – Canon cameras, Canon printers, Canon you name it – for several decades. Generally they’ve always been top quality – when I nudged customers towards the brand when I worked in camera stores, it wasn’t because I got incentives to do so.

But this was the second straight printer by them we’ve had issues with. My sweetie saw an HP on sale at a good price and had me go check it out. I almost bought it based on price and the theory that “maybe it’s better quality than my Canon. Likely couldn’t be much worse.” It was supposed to come with something like a month’s free ink too. Sounded too good to be true, but when I read the box’s small print, I began to think it was. The “free” ink was only if you subscribed for a year to their service. They’d track the printer online (hmm – sketchy!) and mail replacement inks when they deemed the inks were running low. Of course, that meant paying the price they chose for the inks, without competition from other vendors or companies and relying on their opinions on how much ink I’d be needing. What’s more, it clearly stated that the printer was set up to not function at all if their own proprietary ink cartridges weren’t used. Forget about trying to save a few bucks getting a store brand equivalent. Those factors alone made me decide against it.

Well this week, my opinion seemed extra validated. Not only were those two very points highlight by PC World magazine as HP negatives but thanks to some whistleblower in the electronics company, we learned about their policy of bad customer service. Yes, policy! The lack of service customers might have experienced with them wasn’t a result of understaffing or reps who would rather look at tik Tok on their phones than answer calls. It turns out that at least their European branch had an actual policy in place to make any customers phoning to ask for help wait a minimum of 15 minutes!

Their corporate talking head tried to put a good spin on it and explain it away as a way to help the confused callers. “We found that many of our customers were not aware of the digital support options”, they declared. By making them wait… and wait… while hearing a pre-recorded message assuring them their call was important to HP… but why not look at their FAQ section on the website while you wait, they were doing their customers a favor. Thanks HP. As the old saying goes, “with friends like that, who needs enemies?”

After the story broke, they say they’ve revoked that policy and they also haven’t said whether such was the North American business model as well. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.

We all know that we are being fed a line of you-know-what when we have to wait on phone lines for ages to get to talk to a real person when phoning large corporations for help and they’re telling us they’re having an “unusual call volume” and are doing their very best to assist us. What we didn’t know was that, in the case of HP at least, it wasn’t indifference to us or our time. They were deliberately trying to annoy us and not provide the service we wanted.

That Canon printer? I grudgingly put new inks in it, did a couple of printer head cleans and now it’s working – mostly – again. It will hopefully do so for a few years more and when it inevitably quits for good, will be replaced. Another Canon? Possibly. We do know what brand the new one won’t be!

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A Surprising Super-power

Today I again thank John at The Sound of One Hand Typing for his weekly writing prompts there. One such idea this week was to write a post about the word “surprise”, so let’s go with that.

Color me surprised. The U.S. government thinks I have a “superpower”. Or at least one independent branch of it does. Because the National Archives are in the midst of a growing crisis… they have some 300 million digitized pieces of paperwork that need transcribing and fewer and fewer people are able to decipher them anymore. That, because the old ones, some as recent as the 1950s mind you, are mostly hand-written. Emphasis on “written”. And most of today’s youth can read that as easily as they could decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. In fact, Suzanne Isaacs of the Archives calls reading cursive a “super-power”.! Wow, who knew I was so gifted with such a rare talent? Funny, when people have asked me if I could have one super-power, usually things that come to mind are like being able to become invisible or be able to fly or have a healing touch or perhaps have irresistible, magnetic charm for super-models (or at least was before I got hitched that is!) but I never really picked “be able to read curly handwriting.” But a super-power is a super-power, I guess, so lucky me!

It does point out a real problem though and illustrates another sign of the times. When I was in school, we had to learn how to “write”; we’d be chastised and probably lose grades if we handed in a report or test written in block capitals, at least until high school when some teachers preferred we typewrite our essays or reports. At the time, I was constantly praised for how neat my writing was; that’s now as long gone as the corduroy slacks I was usually sent to school in. Now should I actually “write” something, I have trouble reading my own work an hour later. I still do put down a lot of notes and thoughts on paper with pen, but I scribble them out in block letters. However, the grade school skill hasn’t left my eyes; I still have no trouble reading cursive. Unless it’s penned by someone of my current penmanship levels. And that’s always been a chunk of the population. One of the Archives spokespersons said going through page after page of old government forms, immigration paper, census data and so on was tough because of spelling mistakes, obsolete words or terms and of course, messy writing. “Justices of the Peace, their handwriting is atrocious!”, she exclaimed.

I should also point out back when I was in school, I think we just called that form of communication “writing” or “handwriting.” Presumably “cursive” only became the preferred term recently, since it provokes much cursing in young people who encounter it.

It’s logical that cursive is becoming a rarity in today’s computerized, digitized world… who (besides me I guess) still writes out notes for articles or random thoughts with a pen or puts a note inside a greeting card? Do you ever go to a grocery store and see anyone under-65 who’s not me with a shopping list on a piece of paper rather than their phone? I drive by Walgreens stores and wonder how many of their under-40 customers even actually know their logo says “Walgreens”? Many school boards dropped it from the curriculum by 1990, although recently some 14 states have added it back, including California for the very reason the Archives are describing. Whether its your grandparents’ old correspondence or the nation’s constitution, it’s better if people can actually read it and not have to take mere guesses or rely on someone else’s interpretation.

It makes me wonder just how many other super-powers I have without knowing it. Being able to tie up my shoes? Being able to place a call on a phone that has a dial instead of a touch-tone screen? Being able to find the number to call in a physical phone book? Maybe I will be Captain Codebreaker and Hollywood will make movies starring Ryan Reynolds, or some dude who’s considered a hottie these days, as me!

Yeah, “vivid imagination”, another one of my super-powers!

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Honesty Is Seldom Ever Heard. Particularly In This Arena

This week take a cue from John at The Sound of One Hand Typing and his weekly writing prompts for a bit of inspiration. One of his suggestions this week was a post on “honest”. Boy that got my mind thinking right away!

”Honesty is such a lonely word, everyone is so untrue, honesty is hardly ever heard…” so opined Billy Joel in one of his great early songs, simply called “Honesty”. Well, I don’t know that everyone is so untrue, but man, it sure does seem to apply rather well to one branch of society, doesn’t it? Politicians!

Now let me state right here clearly – << I do not intend this to be a political blog. I have my opinions and preferences but this isn’t the forum and I don’t want to be having a lot of sniping opinions insulting one politician or trumpeting the praises of another here, be they American, Canadian, British, Zimbabwean… you name it. >>  But I want to talk in general about the field of politics.

Now, possibly at the grass-roots, local level you might find a totally honest, clear-speaking… alderman. Or school board trustee. Or so on. But when you get to the level of  big stages, politicians running for the top offices of a state, province or the country itself… well, that seems to be a rare commodity, like Billy Joel sang, doesn’t it?

Part of that comes from a bit of delusionism that I think is common among most of us and even more so when one rises to those levels. We tend to over-estimate our own abilities and overlook obstacles in our path. Male, female, left, right, it doesn’t matter… it takes a lot of ego to truly think you are the best person possible to run an entire country.

There’s also probably a certain under-handed honesty involved, which is to say, being wise or pragmatic perhaps. Jimmy Carter was probably the last American president who basically said things were a mess and he couldn’t fix it all by himself and the public couldn’t wait to show him the door and go for someone much more optimistic. So it is logical perhaps to over-simplify and exude optimism if you want to be elected.  That said, I would so love to hear something like this from a candidate running for a high office:

“We have a lot of problems to deal with and frankly, I can’t fix them all – especially not in just four years before the next election. There are no dead simple, easy solutions to things like inflation, the economy, crime, immigration, the environment and climate change, our energy needs and supplies, rising costs of health care, fixing our infrastructure, homelessness and so on. These are complicated problems that have developed over decades and they won’t be fixed in months by any one simple measure. If there was a simple solution to these problems, they wouldn’t be problems because my predecessors would have done them years ago.

We need to develop long-term, multi-tiered responses to those problems and be patient because improvement is going to be gradual, not overnight. Some of the solutions will involve some measures you won’t like, and I won’t like either because we simply can’t keep everyone happy on every issue and still get things done.

That in mind, I will listen to my opponents and if they can contribute useful ideas, I won’t hesitate to accept them. But for that they need to be constructive and develop ideas, not just criticize others.

Even with all these caveats, we still need to realize that some problems can never fully be solved and our progress might be stalled along the way by unforeseen events. In 2018 or thereabouts, no one truly expected a new disease becoming a pandemic and shutting down so much of our world for a year or more. We don’t know what lies ahead and though we can take advice from experts and come up with contingency plans for probable disasters or surprise events, unexpected things will occur and may require deviation from out plans. To be effective we need to be flexible.

If you elect me, at the time of the next election, we’ll still hear of senseless crimes taking place in our cities, gasoline may well cost a bit more than it does now, our summers could well be a degree hotter than they are now, there’ll be people on our downtown streets that seem impervious to assistance offered, and though there’ll be new industries and jobs being made by the day, very likely some of our current factories and services will have closed. Our highways may still have potholes, but there will be fewer. More people will be able to access affordable health care and good education, but some will unfortunately still fall through the cracks. But we will be making progress and walking forward, not backward. Wars will likely still be raging overseas, and some of them we may need to offer our assistance in, while in more we will have no realistic option but to sit on the sidelines and let things transpire. But we’ll speak for what is right, here and everywhere.

That is all I can promise and all we can realistically hope for.”

I for one would vote for that candidate. But I don’t hold my breath on having him or her emerge through the ranks any century soon. But wouldn’t that “honesty” be refreshing?

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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.”

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40 Years On, What Have We Learned?

Someone on the portal formerly-known-as Twitter recently posted a question like “if someone had fallen asleep 40 years ago and woke up now, what would surprise them the most?”

An intriguing question, it generated hundreds of responses. Many were political – Joe Biden still being around (he actually made his political debut back in 1973), a buffoon like Donald Trump having become president, that sort of thing. Quite a few commented on how bad hit music is now… hmm, can’t argue with that. Surprisingly, no one I saw mentioned the fact that the Rolling Stones are still here and just put out a new album! People’s fascination with or addiction to celphones was frequently mentioned. How rude people were and how little they interacted with those around them also made a number of appearances on the list. Several noted how few places you can smoke these days, which to me is an improvement. Maybe the best one I saw was “probably the fact that they woke up in 2023!”. That would be a bit of a surprise, now that I think of it!

It got me thinking about how much life, and the world, has changed in that span, let alone my lifetime which goes back 16 odd years prior. The popular responses were valid.

People are ruder than they were back then, by and large. You see it on the roads with drivers behavior, you see it on the streets, in the schoolyards, in the stores. You hear it in their vernacular, you see it on their faces, you see it clearly on a bus or in a coffee shop when no one looks up from their phone or dare talk to anybody else. There are plenty of examples of it, and of course it’s extended now into politics, where the other side of the floor is increasingly seen as demons and mortal enemies rather than people who just have some different opinions than us.

People might be surprised to see how big cars are these days, if you count SUVs and pickups as “cars”, per se. They’d guess that the “Energy crisis” had been solved while they snoozed. They’d definitely notice that you don’t see public payphones on city streets anymore, and would quickly find out why. They might be equally surprised to see when they go into many stores these days, they have to check themselves out and bag the products on their way out.

But really, I think the hugest surprise would have to be the internet and how everything revolves around it these days. Forty years ago, home computers were big, clunky, slow and capable of little more than making a grocery list or playing Pong. The internet was the thing of science fiction. Now? Newspapers are increasingly rare because we can get up-to-the-minute news online. Many shopping malls are deserted and two-thirds empty space because we can order stuff cheaper and have more variety online. TV antennas are a rare sight and even Cable TV is on life-support because we can stream any show or movie online… and that means we don’t have to go to the theater anymore if we don’t feel like it. If you do find a mall still active, you won’t see a record shop in it because nine out of ten people don’t want to own physical copies of music anymore when they can pick and choose their tunes online. Feeling ill? There’s a reasonable chance you’ll see your doctor while staying in bed. House calls are passe, but we can interact with the good doc online.

Of course, there’s also the aspect that you now might not know your next door neighbor but you could have close friends on a different continent thanks to social media. Which is nice, but kids now don’t have to limit their worries about bullying to the maladjusted lug up the street but can be harassed anonymously from anywhere on the globe. And worse still, it wouldn’t take the person long upon awaking to learn what “cybercrime” is and how some nefarious kid in Russia (or Raleigh, for that matter) can empty their bank account or close down the hotel they registered at, mostly without detection.

Of course, it the sleepyhead were in Ontario, their biggest surprise might be that the Maple Leafs still haven’t won another Stanley Cup!

It’s hard to gauge it all or measure the impact the internet has had on so many aspects of life in the past 25 years, let alone 40. I love some of the things it’s done. I met my current sweetie online and ended up moving to a different land to be with her. I’ve also made some good friends in farfung places as Scotland and New Zealand that I’d never have come in contact with otherwise. And of course, I’m presenting this to you via that same internet, and every day I have dozens, sometimes hundreds of people reading a music column I write on it. That makes me feel quite good and has helped me gain appreciation for all sorts of different music I might never have found thanks to their input and commentary. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d had to try to type it up, photocopy it and mail them out.  I love that there are more reference “books” online than there were at even my best-stocked public libraries of my youth, although finding them can be even trickier than going through stacks of shelves. Still, it’s nice when I’m wanting information at 10 o’clock at night and it’s rainy outside.

Yes, it’s changed everything and that person would be shocked at how different 2023 is compared to when they went to sleep. But the real question is would they think it’s a better world?

If the answer to that isn’t a clear-cut “Yes!”, then people, we’re not doing a great job as a species. Let’s do better before that next 40 year nap.

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Bass-ically Much Ado About Nothing?

Another “baseball” story that’s really not about baseball at all. But it does start an interesting discussion for those whether sports fans or not.

If you watch the “trending” news lists on Twitter or news portals like Yahoo, you might have noticed Anthony Bass trending in the last week. This obviously got my attention since he happens to be a pitcher for my favorite team, the Toronto Blue Jays. But the reason he’s trending has nothing to do with his performance on the mound, nor actually about himself per se. Instead, it’s his wife and kids that are fueling heated debates far and wide.

Bass tweeted that his wife, Sydney Rae James, was on a United Airlines flight last week and… well, we’ll just quote him : “The flight attendant @ United just made my 22-week pregnant wife traveling with a 5 year old and a 2 year old to get on her hands and knees to pick up the popcorn mess (made) by my youngest daughter. Are you kidding me?”

Bass added that the airline crew handed out the popcorn. He included a photo, probably taken by his wife that showed the two sweet-looking children sitting properly with a small amount of popcorn spread around on the floor. Sydney’s sister, singer Jessie James Decker chimed in that her sister was distraught, “humiliated” and crying in the aisles.

United for their part haven’t weighed in other than to say they’re reviewing it with the flight attendant, and the union the staff belong to wisely say “our experience tells us that commenting on this specific incident without all the information likely won’t help.” They’re likely right!

The debate was on, and both sides got hotter than the golden topping poured over movie theatre popcorn. Many accused Bass and his wife of being “entitled” and even bad parents. Bass retorted that that’s why the airline has cleaning staff, while others, including a former flight attendant who now runs an etiquette school suggest the staffer was way out of line and on some kind of power trip of their own.

For me… I dunno. I can see both sides. It would be nice to hear the staff member’s take on it , or better yet, other passengers on the flight.

On the one hand, if the pitcher and his wife are shooting us straight, it does seem downright ridiculous, rude and perhaps even offensive for her to be “made to” get down on her hands and knees to pick up a handful or two of popcorn kernels. As some mentioned, ushers in movie theatres don’t do that to patrons who spill in the aisles. Popcorn seems inoffensive, so there wouldn’t be a safety risk having a bit on the floor for part of the flight. No one’s going to have an anaphylactic allergy reaction from it and a kernel or two of soft popcorn isn’t likely to trip anyone. What does United expect if they give away the snack, especially to kids?

But there’s the flipside too. Did the food just get spilled a little or was the child throwing it all around the compartment? Having a temper tantrum? Had the flight attendant had to talk to the mother already before this about the kids’ behavior? If so, the odd request might make more sense. And as others have said, perhaps mom could have/should have told the kids to clean up their mess themselves… teach them a bit about being responsible.

It put me in mind of comedian Sebastian Maniscalsco who jokes that he hates parents who take their kids to restaurants and let them run around, throwing food around and say “isn’t that cute?” “No!”, he retorts, “what’s cute is that two year old Japanese kid sitting quietly in a suit, eating with sticks!”

In the end, it seems like two things stick with me about this whole brouhaha. One, both the mother and the plane’s staff probably could have handled it much better and more politely. The attendant must know that in today’s social media world, that such a stunt is going to lead to bad publicity for their company even if the lady wasn’t a star athlete’s wife. And Mrs. Bass could have probably reacted more calmly and if she was in discomfort due to her pregnancy, explained that politely to the crew member. Instead she seemed to fly off the handle and let her celebrity husband and sister ramp up the battle. It makes me wonder how she’d react to something like a car cutting her off in a parking lot.

The second thing that occurs to me is this – in this day and age, I am very happy the biggest scandal hanging over my favorite ball club involves messy little children.

To pick up or not to pick up. What do you think?

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Older And … Wiser?

Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn once had a song which went “the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.” Sometimes it’s hard not to think Bruce was right. I was reminded of that while looking at a story on Bored Panda recently about “40 People Share Things They Used To Love That Have Become Less Fun With Age.” I was nodding along in agreement faster than you could say “hey you kids, get off my lawn!”

Among the lengthy list, “leaving the house – I used to be a social butterfly, but now I have to convince myself to go get the basic necessities”, which led into another suggestion, “shopping.” Yep, I get that, even if I was never precisely a social “butterfly”, Saturday nights used to be for going out and hanging with friends. I used to live near one of the country’s biggest malls and would go walk around it for recreation if I was bored when I was young. I enjoyed looking at the new clothes rolling in and could spend countless hours in the three record stores.

Now, there are no more record stores, I don’t live anywhere near that mall and my attitude is largely “I have clothes, why would I need more?” If eventually something doesn’t fit or has holes in it, there’s a Walmart close by. I did splurge on a blazer not long ago; found it online. I have a nagging fear that one of my deathbed thoughts will be “I wish I hadn’t willingly spent so much time in stores when I was young!”. And Saturday nights? For quietly watching Netflix or reruns with my sweetie in our room. Her employer used to have Christmas parties, I used to look forward to them. It was the one night to be out with a large number of people, which to me was a good way of filling the annual quota. But they’ve not run those for a couple of years. I think the pandemic showed us there are two types of people. One type went stir-crazy and bounced off the walls counting the days til bars would re-open and they would have to shove their way through the crowds in department stores once more come December. The other had a lightbulb go on in their heads and realize “hey! There’s a lot that I can do right here at home!” Guess which category I fall into.

Several people mentioned loud noises and places. Gotcha. If I go to a bar, which is a real Whooping crane-type rarity these days, I want to be able to talk to whoever I’m with without shouting or pressing my ear upto their face. I used to go to a few concerts a year. The Stranglers, Bob Mould, both in the ’80s left my ears ringing the next morning. Now, there might be about half a dozen artists I’d think of going to see in concert and I’d be happy to be well back from the stage. Probably wearing earplugs. And movies? Turn it down, I’d be thinking…if I went out to them, which led to another suggestion “going to theaters to watch movies.”

I must admit, I thought Covid would actually bring about the death of the field of movie theaters. It hasn’t but neither is it a thriving enterprise these days. Why would it be? The reasons are pretty obvious.

First off, now most of us seem to already have a theater in the house! When I was a kid, when my parents got a 26” color TV in the late-’70s we felt like royalty. Livin’ large! Of course, that was the one TV in the house. Now? We have a 42” TV in our room and I recently saw them marked as “small TVs” in a big box store! Watching a 42” TV with stereo sound in a dark 15-foot room isn’t that much different than looking at a 30-foot screen in a 20 000-square foot auditorium. But, the floor isn’t sticky, I don’t have to eat popcorn and if I do want popcorn, I don’t have to pay $10 for a garbage bag-sized container of it, half of which will surely be thrown away. And for the $14 admittance, we can pay a month of Netflix or HBO and watch movies every night. Not to mention, the kicker – if a new movie comes out that I really want to see, it’s probably on the TV the day it hits the theaters. Gone are the days of waiting six months for a VHS tape of it to get to Blockbuster.

Another person noted “commercial radio is unlistenable.” Sadly that’s close to true too. Too little variety, too much repetition, too few people on it with personalities. I could write pages on that topic alone. In fact, I have on my music blog so I won’t bother here.

“Junk Food” someone opined. Check! I was never a huge chips and candy type guy (maybe that’s why I’m not a huge guy in fact?) but the older I get the less inclined I am to want any food that comes in large bags filled with air or that is colored day-glo orange. I still enjoy a chocolate bar once in a blue moon, but for the most part, I’d rather have a salad, or a sammie (which I grant you isn’t the healthiest of snacks when if features salami and Swiss cheese , but sure is tasty and full of stuff that actually looks like food rather than a Dupont chemical tanker manifest in the ingredient list).

But that leads to my next point. Sure there’s a lot I, and many others it seems, don’t like much now that maybe we did years ago. But the flipside is true. There are things I appreciate much more. Fresh vegetables being one.

I appreciate open-minded and pragmatic people more than my firebrand 20-something version did. Especially politicians. The way to get things done isn’t to try and find the extreme zenith of any position and try to shout down everyone else until you get your way (usually soon to be reversed entirely by the next election or change of the tides). Trying to reach a compromise that everyone can live with works so much better whether it’s in the kitchen, at the grocery store, the office or Capitol Hill.

I enjoy “my” music more than I once used to. It’s a paradox, because I listen to it less. When I was young and single, I’d have the stereo on most of the time I was home. For a few years I even typically left it on at night while I slept. I would buy new music weekly.

Now, people are often at work in the house, or sleeping, or we’re watching something together. Not music time. Not so many nights do I put on CD after CD or tune the computer to a fine internet station. But… when I do, I often find myself mesmorized, continually marveling at how good some of those records I’d forgotten or once took for granted are. Soaking them in, in awe and appreciation.

I appreciate now that I can improve other people’s days. Or at least I hope to. Often the best way to feel better if you’re a bit down or stressed is to simply pretend you’re not. Which doesn’t come naturally to me, I might add, but as I get older I learn that sometimes a few good words can change the mood altogether. Just the other day I was in a large store and the cashier, a middle-aged lady looking both rushed by the previous customer and surly, rang me through, barely looking at me. Until she came across an item with A Christmas Story markings on it came up. She brightened up. “Ohh, that’s my all-time favorite Christmas movie” she exclaimed. I told her I loved it too and asked if she’d heard they were making a sequel. She had and we marveled at how little Ralphie still looks the same 30-odd years later and how we hoped it could match the charm of the original. If there hadn’t been a lineup we would have likely dissected Elf, which she volunteered was her second-favorite seasonal film. As I walked away she was grinning and made sure to wish me a fantastic day. 45 seconds, a minute, of idle chit-chat turned her day around, temporarily at least. And mine too to some degree. That in itself gave me some satisfaction I wouldn’t have cared about a few decades ago.

Mostly, I think though the older I get the more I appreciate how special, and many, the good things in my life are. I’ve had bad days, losses, as we all have but I’ve come to realize not to take things that are great – big or small – for granted. That was a message largely lost on 1990s me. Perhaps lost on any teen or 20-something. And for that, I’d say getting old isn’t a bad thing at all.

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Counting Blue Cars? Good Luck With That

Hallelujah! Finally we’ve found something that everyone apparently agrees on. Bland cars.

We might not be able to, as a people, agree on whether abortion should be a woman’s choice or a serious crime, on if marijuana is a fine consumable item, a cash cow to tax or a reason to send people to jail, or if our climate is changing, let alone if people are the cause of it. We can’t quite come to concur on whether Fox News is a sell-out to the liberal Left or a radical arm of the self-righteous Right or whether we should cut off Russian oil or buy more of it because Putin might have a glut of it and it could put the price at the pumps down by a dime. But it seems when it comes to our vehicles, there’s no argument – make it bland, just like our neighbors!

Such is the conclusion one might reach driving around any city or highway these days but it’s confirmed by Autoblog. com which recently noted “despite vibrant choices, people stick with bland” when it comes to car colors. In 2021, 24% of all new cars sold were white. 18% of them were black, and fully 34% were gray or grayish silver. Thus over ¾ of new cars weren’t even what the report classified as “real colors.” By the way, blue was the most popular of those “real” colors, edging out red by 8% to 7%. Both have seen serious declines in popularity recently, but not so much as green. Kermit-kolored kars represented over 7% of sales back in 2004; these days it’s barely 2%…which still heavily outperforms yellow, orange and pink which combined represent about one lone percent. One in a hundred to leave the lot. What’s more, we’re adventurous compared to the rest of the world. In Asia, 40% of all cars hitting the road are white, and 20% black. All this despite what PPG describe as a huge variety of “special colors, tinted clear coats and matte finishes” available to “better reflect vehicle owners individual personalities.” Back in the ’90s, the band Dishwalla had a hit with a song called “Counting Blue Cars”, and a line in it went “we count only blue cars.” It’d be pretty easy to do these days. They might have to re-write the lyric as “we count blue cars. Zero, all white.”

Not that many years ago, I lived close to a GM plant that made Chevy Impalas. They had a huge – football fields galore–sized – parking lot of them sprawling between the factory and the rail yards, waiting hopefully for some dealer somewhere to want them. An island of misfit cars. There’d be a gray one here and there, maybe a black one, but almost all were plain white. At the time, I thought one thing they were doing wrong was having such boring car colors. At that time Ford at least offered a few interesting oranges, and coppers and metallic primary colors. Turns out I was wrong. The uniform, boring look was the one thing they did right, it would seem.

Now, mind you, there are some advantages to having a blend-in, white or gray car (or pickup). If you are an aspiring bank robber, it’s probably much better to make your getaway in one. Good luck to the police looking for the getaway car that was “white. A car, a sedan. Maybe a Toyota. Or a VW. Maybe it was a Chevy. Or a Nissan. They all look alike.” If you are wanting a life in crime, a yellow convertible Tesla or two-tone ’70s Lincoln is probably not the car to have. But for the rest of us… it makes me nostalgic for my childhood with all its lime green Novas, sun yellow VW bugs and orange Dodges lining our street. Cars that had a bit of character and which you could actually find when you got back out into the mall parking lot.

I think the world would be a little bit better place if people would agree for inoffensive, middle-of-the-road choices for things like policing, taxes and immigration and go wild with passion for extreme car looks. And spend time counting… mauve cars!

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