“You have to make something explode to truly understand it. You have to examine the tiny particles while they’re on fire.” — Charles, mental patient in Sling Blade
After school I experimented in my room with various combinations of the three ingredients of gunpowder, purchased at three different drugstores. In article Library Card, I said “There seemed no limit to the information available in the library. Here I found the recipe for gunpowder…”
Fortunately for my eyesight and my fingers, there was a limit to the information available in the library. Although the three simple ingredients of gunpowder have been known since the 14th century, without a Wikipedia or an internet, I never found the proper portions for maximum explosive power.
I tried various mixes, a little more of this, a little less of that, placing tiny amounts of each ingredient on a sheet of heavy glass, mixing them together into an slightly larger pile, then applying a match to see which combination produced the biggest flash.
My experiments never came anywhere near the “correct” 75%, 15%, 10% ratio the article mentioned above spells out. Even the best mix I found was not very powerful. If I had had Wikipedia, I could have earned myself a nickname, like my friend Jimmy, who stole blasting caps from a construction site and tried to get the insides out of one by tapping it against the sidewalk. They called him Jimmy Three Fingers.
Fuses were hard to make. I can’t tell you how to make one because I honestly don’t remember, beyond a lot of trial and error and sparkly experiments with doctored twine.
Another buddy and I had some thoughts about making guncotton, a fairly powerful and uncomplicated Civil-War-era explosive. Again fortunately, we couldn’t figure out where to get two of the key ingredients.
My mother never asked about the burnt sulfur smell lingering in the house when she came home from work at night. I guess she trusted me not to do anything crazy.
I won’t mention any other lame-brained experiments, actual or proposed. It’s all out on the internet now, kids, and ten times more dangerous. Be careful to wear safety glasses.
About ten years ago there was a news story about a woman whose grandfather had died, and while cleaning out his garage, she found a hand grenade pushed way back on a shelf. The Army sent someone from Fort Dix to collect it, and sure enough it turned out to be a real, live, WW II grenade. My wife wondered why someone would want to keep a thing like that around, and I explained that you never know when you might need one.
At the onset of World War I, my Aunt Alice’s family in England sent her here, at age 15, to live with relatives to avoid the bombing and anticipated invasion of England by the Hun. Here she met and fell in love with my Uncle Rob, a horse-and-wagon milkman and professional golfer who for a while was good enough to be on the tour with Bobby Jones. After they married, Uncle Rob entertained Aunt Alice inexpensively by bringing her along on the tour to watch him play, something she wasn’t enthusiastic about. After his golf game stopped earning a living, he went back on the milk wagon for the next 25 or 30 years.
Alice
Looking back, Aunt Alice was probably the most cultured woman I ever met. I think my Uncle Bert and his family thought she was putting on airs when she broke out the candelabra for Bert’s annual visit from Michigan (Bert would move it off the table “so we can all see better”), but she wasn’t being snooty, she was just being her sophisticated self.
When Uncle Rob’s company eventually sold their dairy farm to real-estate developers, he retired and became a school crossing guard. After he had a few accidents driving, his children forced him to give up his license. He said at the time “Well, that’s it, my life is over.” But it wasn’t.
Milkman and his horse
Their daughter Helen babysat me during her teens, and years later enjoyed teasing me about it. An elegant woman who called her mother “Nonny”, she was a model and bridal consultant for Hahne’s department store.
Their son Robert Jr., aka Bobby, who was also a milkman, served in the infantry during WW II. When he got back from Europe, his much-hated-by-the-family wife Vera told him, in effect, “If you think I’m going to stay married to a milkman, you’re crazy.” So, Bobby went back to school, worked hard, got rich and became a genuine big kahuna in the insurance industry. In fact, his portrait still hangs in the boardroom of the insurance company he built. True story, kids. Stay in school.
1920s Milk Picnic, Eagle Rock Reservation: Grandma, Alice, Aunt Ruth. Bobby, Helen, Uncle Rob
In the tiled passageways connecting New York City subway lines are colorful posters advertising businesses and products. One endorses The New School, a progressive university in Manhattan with a goal of supporting continuing education. Above a lush Gauguin painting, it counsels “IT’S NOT TOO LATE”, and reminds commuters that “At 35, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker.” In the margin, someone has written “At 35, Mozart was dead.”
I’ve mentioned this before, but I believe it is the HEIGHT of disrespect, and a //form of passive aggression, to not wear one’s hearing aid/s, unless home alone. One theory is that your mom is afraid strangers will think she is old or infirm if they see she’s wearing a hearing aid. I remember that feeling from back in my 30’s when Igot my first aid. After a while I adopted a different-but-still-cool haircut. Perhaps your mom should talk to her hairdresser. Barring that, it’s time for a family intervention. Or, each time she says “What?”, refuse to raise your voice except to tell her to please put in her aids.
Remind your mom to clean her aids every night before she goes to bed. This will keep her molds from getting mouldy and leading to an ear infection. I favor “Audiologist’s Choice” hearing-aid spray. Spray it on a tissue first, not directly onto those pricey electronics.
This article is about food, but this site is not a food blog, where you might expect to find a photograph of my lunch every day. In fact, I don’t think this is a blog at all, it’s more like a magazine, an online magazine, yeah, that’s the ticket. An online magazine.
A peanut butter lollipop makes an easy, healthful midday snack. It’s tasty and filling, and requires minimal cleanup.
Simply take a jar of your favorite peanut butter and with a clean tablespoon scoop out an extra-large glob. Holding the spoon like a lollipop, lick it until every trace of peanut butter is gone. Enjoy.
I meant to post this months ago when I finally accepted I couldn’t be part of normal society without getting vaccinated. I gave up, lined up, and got it done.
I’m now waiting the two weeks it takes after the second shot to be considered “vaccinated”. But it’s starting to look like we’ll be getting booster shots for the rest of our lives, like getting a regular oil change. Covid rules and regulations seem to be made up as we go along, so we’ll see.
There used to be a great donut shop, Hoffman’s, on a side street near the railroad station here . They made long, solid custard-filled donuts they called Hindenburgs, or maybe Heidelbergs or Hindemiths, something like that, even longer than the “Long John” model pictured below. Sadly, Hoffman’s closed years ago due to a family squabble.
Once I can go out into the world again, I’m looking forward to walking into the surviving local bakery and getting a dozen donuts (not Dunkin’, although Dunkin’ is okay in a pinch).
I’m also looking forward to seeing the nice lady who works the counter there. I like how quietly appreciative she is when someone leaves a tip that’s more than just the few coins they get back in their change. Some people don’t leave anything. I’m looking forward to leaving her a generous tip as much as I am to getting some donuts. After all, we’ve been separated for almost two years.
I don’t understand why some people think it’s okay to leave a cheap tip, or no tip at all. They’ve probably never worked a service job. I have a low opinion of cheap tippers like our Canadian neighbor in Florida. He was a CPA and owned his own accounting practice, so why so cheap? What does it take to leave a little extra?
Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Here at the Jersey shore, we get a lot of Canadian tourists, and the locals have always considered the Quebec license-plate slogan “Je me souviens” to translate as “We don’t tip”.
In general I don’t like cheapskates, but I allow some leeway for girls. Girls don’t seem to consider what it’s like to work a crappy job like waiting tables or being a counterperson. Once I had lunch with two girls from work and we split the tab three ways. When we were leaving, I saw they had left lousy tips and I suggested they put more money down because we might want to go back there some day.
Mimi and I and some other couples from Insco went to a restaurant called “What’s Your Beef?”, where butchers help you pick out your own cut of meat from an old-fashioned butcher case. We agreed ahead of time we would split the tab. The bill was fairly stiff and I guess this one couple was economizing, because the husband (not the one that worked with us, the wife did) didn’t want to leave a tip. There wasn’t anything wrong with the service, it was fine, he just didn’t want to. We basically bullied/shamed him into leaving 15% on his share but he wasn’t happy about it. He said “let her dive for it” and dropped his tip into a half-full glass of water.
Well, I started out talking about donuts but ended up talking about tipping, sorry. Actually, I started out talking about the pandemic, but that was mostly a way to lead into talking about donuts and giving people decent tips for decent service.
“Long John” – custard filled, chocolate iced. Courtesy Prairie City Bakery, Vernon Hills IL
Oh, one more thing. Our government, that’s always giving money away to people we don’t know in other countries, says we should limit our mailman’s holiday tip to $25. Say what?! This is a guy who brings us our mail faithfully, never missing, six days a week, rain or shine, Try and keep me from giving him a decent tip. Merry Christmas, Henry!
Okay, here’s a tested method to snoop freely anywhere you’d like. Use it to explore interesting places where you have no legitimate reason to be.
Get a cheap wooden clipboard with a metal clip. Add a pad of standard-size lined paper; yellow works nicely. Rumple the paper a bit so it doesn’t look new. Carry your board in the crook of one arm so it looks ready for use. Keep a few pens in your shirt pocket. Walk with authority, as though you’re going somewhere, but don’t rush. Look around. Act like you don’t expect to be challenged. You won’t be.
Please don’t everybody try this at once, you’ll ruin it.
I got my last real haircut back in February, from Susan, a licensed barber who will do a conservative, not-too-short businessman’s haircut. The coronavirus was already taking over the world, so along with everyone else I began avoiding unnecessary human contact. Now, six months later, the virus was fully in charge and I had a whole lot of hair. I wasn’t quite Walt Whitman yet, but I was on my way.
Cutting my own hair wasn’t all that hard, just time-consuming, and (in my opinion) the result was pretty close to a regular haircut. As long as you’re careful and take your time, your hair will not end up unbalanced, lumpy or otherwise weird.
There are how-to tips and videos all over the internet, and I took bits of advice from several. The only equipment I used was barber scissors. I chose scissors over electric clippers because clippers can cut hair too short. For other virus hermits out there who want to try it, here’s what worked for me. Like Whitman, I am an older guy with semi-wavy gray hair that’s fairly thick.
Watch the davidgpo YouTube video “How to Cut Your Own Hair with Scissors” a few times. David is also an older gent, and he shows you how to eyeball the results as you go along. Does his resulting haircut look totally professional? No, and neither does mine, but it’s not embarrassing, it’s a decent haircut and I don’t feel the need to wear a hat if I leave the house. He uses only his fingers and the scissors, and that’s what I did. You’ll get more ideas from his video.
Get a good pair of barber’s scissors, aka “shears”. I paid about $25 on Amazon. Don’t try to save money by using your old kitchen scissors, you’ll be sorry. Be careful, these are razor sharp – not a figure of speech – and you can cut your fingers or nick an ear if you go too fast.
You’ll need a mirror setup that lets you see yourself from the side. Luckily, my medicine cabinet has two mirrored swing-out doors. Keeping my head more or less between the two doors let me see everything, with the added benefit that 98% of the hair I cut off fell straight into the sink, avoiding floor cleanup.
Wash your hair, comb it and blow dry to get the hairs separated and straight before you start cutting,
Start low and work upward.
Lift and cut only a small tuft of hair each time.
Don’t cut the tuft straight across, tilt the scissors sideways so the hairs are not all the same length.
Most importantly, take off only a little bit at a time, maybe a quarter inch, don’t go nuts. Then reassess and go round again.
I feel guilty taking work away from Susan; she and salon/shop workers like her are among those hurt worst by the closings. Hopefully the virus won’t be around too much longer. See you then, Susan.
“All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws.” — Konstantin Stanislavski
Here are a few things that bug me when I see them in a movie. Allow me to get them off my chest.
First off, let’s think about things that are heavy – luggage and packages and other things that get carried, thrown, or otherwise moved from one place to another. The audience can tell the difference between a full suitcase and an empty one, simply by seeing how the actor interacts with it. The audience will not be fooled.
Think about the great actors who have played Willy Loman, the self-deluded traveling salesman in Death of a Salesman. Willy carried cases of samples to show his customers. Arthur Miller never told us what Willy sold; some people speculate it was only lingerie and socks, but whatever it was, Willy’s sample cases were big and packed tight full, and they were HEAVY, you could tell by the way they pulled his arms straight down and rounded his shoulders and put a bend in his back. That wasn’t acting, it was gravity.
Willy Loman didn’t bob along swinging his arms as he walked, he couldn’t. If you are putting on a production of Death of a Salesman or some other work where there’s luggage or bags of ransom money or anything else that has real weight, you need to go and get 60 or 80 or 100 pounds of yesterday’s newspapers to make that weight be real.
Relatedly, in the movie Three Kings, each of the stolen gold bars is roughly the size of a carton of cigarettes, and the actors handle the bars as though gold and tobacco weigh the same. THEY DO NOT. A bar of gold that size would weigh about 60 pounds, so your actors shouldn’t be handing them off to each other as though they’re shaking hands. As a moviegoer, how am I supposed to suspend disbelief when I see something like that on the screen?
The f-word: Whatever happened to the word “hell”? Where has it gone? Scene: A young suburban husband comes home and sees his wife is working on, say, a semi-abstract painting. It is not very good. Instead of having him jokingly ask “What the hell is that? “, or even the softer “What the heck is that?”, he asks “What the fuck is that?” and the joking is over. Point: The f-word does not fit in everywhere. Unless you’re Quentin Tarantino or some other writer with a great ear for dialog, which you are probably not, take it easy with the f-word. Also, remember that in the real world, a person of lesser authority will cut back on f-words when a person of greater authority is present.
Some of the best dialog ever written comes from The Sopranos, but even those writers go over the top sometimes. I have known some real-life lowlifes, and in general they did not use more than one f-word in a single sentence, or more than ten in a single speech. IT JUST DOESN’T RING TRUE. Getting back to “hell”, when’s the last time you heard a Sopranos character say “hell”?
I suggest not trying to write working-class dialog until ypu have worked a while as a member of the working class. Listen closely. Make notes.
Read your dialog out loud. Can you imagine a real person, in the real world, ever saying those words to anyone? People don’t just spout words; they assemble sentences that make sense, it’s not poetry, but it’s an ability we begin developing at age two, and we know when it sounds fake. Does it sound fake? REWRITE. Does it lack a realistic pace and cadence? REHEARSE SOME MORE.
Vincent and Jules have a conversation on their way to work. Courtesy miramax.com
In-car conversation: when we see two actors having a conversation in a moving car, we know the car is actually on a low-slung trailer being towed through the scenery by a professional. The actor “driving” isn’t really driving at all, but he needs to LOOK like he’s driving. That means not engaging with the passenger as if they’re seated in a living room somewhere. Drivers, drive! Adjust the steering wheel to stay in your lane. Turn the wheel as you get towed around a corner. Yes, glance at your companion, but keep your eyes on the road, so the audience isn’t always anticipating a collision.
Lastly, our mothers taught us to look for traffic before we cross the street. Teach your actors to do the same. I always think “BAM!” and expect a plot twist in 3 – 2 – 1 when I see an actor walk into the street without looking.
This article is sort of an addendum to Please, no more empty luggage, where I list careless or sloppy things that directors allow, and say “Here are a few things that bug me when I see them in a movie. Allow me to get them off my chest.”
There are several things that can show us an actor is not actually dead, breaking the movie magic; looking dead isn’t just squeezing your eyes shut and clenching your jaw. In fact, those things only serve to prove you’re still alive, and probably not a good actor. First, make yourself comfortable. You don’t want to have to adjust your underwear halfway through the scene.
To look truly dead, relax, completely. Let gravity happen. Let your body lose its tension and fall in on itself. Relax your facial muscles and let your face sag. Let your mouth fall open, let your tongue loll as gravity wills it. Let your eyes go ‘soft’ – look at a single spot on the wall without bringing it into focus. There’s a YouTube video called Acting Deadwhere actor Doug Fahl gives extensive tips on how to play dead on stage or screen, including simple methods of breath control.
I never saw a truly convincing on-screen strangulation until Tony Soprano killed Ralph Cifaretto. Ralph had it coming, both for engineering the racetrack fire that killed Pie-O-My and for beating to death Tracee, Tony’s young friend from the Bada Bing. As Tony strangles Ralph, he shouts in his face “She was a beautiful, innocent creature!”, leaving us to wonder whether he means Tracee or the horse.
When the fight ends, Ralph is dead, and certainly looks it. Not for the faint of heart, here’s a YouTube video of Ralph’s murder.
Hey, special-effects people, here’s an idea: how about a neck wrapper made of flesh-tone Play-Doh so we can see the killer’s fingers really digging in?
If a script requires a captive be kept quiet, remember that gagging someone with a rag or article of clothing does not work in real life, no matter how you do it. “Mmmmglurrrgg!” Hello, we can still hear you!
This leads us to duct tape.
Lifetime Movie Network is the primary offender against duct-tape reality. On Lifetime at least twice a week, weeping kidnap victims wear a neat rectangle of duct tape barely wide enough to cover their mouth. Is there a shortage of duct tape? I’ve never kidnapped anyone, but when I do, they’re going to get at least two yards of duct tape wrapped around their head to keep them quiet.
If I ever get to be a Lifetime director, we’ll have rolls and rolls of fake duct tape, standard gray on one side but no adhesive on the other, and you better believe you’re going to see the bad guy walking around his prisoner at least twice, tightly wrapping their head, mouth and hair. Sorry if this disturbs anyone, remember it’s only a movie.
Neptune Blue 2020 Kia Soul EX, somewhere in Colorado
My car was recently in the shop but I had some appointments to get to. Based on everything I’d read and heard, Uber was the answer. I was a new rider, although I’d installed the app on my cell phone “just in case” two years ago. Using it was a little confusing at first, but I managed to schedule a ride to my favorite destination, LabCorp, without embarrassing myself.
Uber sent me a text twenty minutes before my ride arrived, then again about five minutes before. My driver was a pleasant woman of about 40, not that that makes any difference. I sat in the back on the right-hand side, as recommended by Uber and common sense for everyone’s safety in these days of the pestilence. When you schedule a ride, the app asks you to check a box stating that both you and the driver will be masked up. I wore the shoulder belt on all my rides, because I’ve seen some highway carnage.
That first ride was in a small, older Honda, or similar, that rattled going over every bump. When arranging my rides I chose the least expensive, smaller-car option. The cars were decent; they were all clean, inside and out, and fairly new. I used to laugh at the television ads selling the undersized, semi-fluorescent Kia Soul, but my ride in one like the one above was the smoothest and most comfortable of the seven rides I had during the week.
When you’re ready to go home, just select “Now” for the pickup time and your next ride will soon appear. I never had to wait more than ten minutes — maybe there are a lot of people trying to make a living, or just earn some extra money, driving for Uber these days.
My rides were all short, under five miles, with fares ranging from $13 to $17. Uber takes a variable booking fee of 15 to 20% out of the fare, and the driver gets the rest. The charges go on the credit card you signed up with; you’ll get an email receipt later in the day.
At the end of each trip, the app asks you to rate your ride on a scale of 1 to 5. It’s rare for anyone to rate their ride less than 5, resulting in a sort of grade inflation, with every driver carrying a 5 rating or just a shade under. My rides were all 5’s anyway; the drivers drove safely and were friendly but not chatty. In general, a driver will only chat if you initiate the conversation. I thought for a moment about rating my rattle-y first ride less than 5, but the owner-driver already knows her car isn’t brand new, so what’s the point.
When you are asked to rate the ride, the app also asks if you want to tip the driver. I prefer to do that in cash rather than through the app. I try to tip enough that they’ll be happy to see me again. The fact is, most Uber riders don’t tip at all, and the drivers don’t expect it. I think when a driver picks up an old guy like me, they expect it even less. They seem surprised when they do get a tip, and genuinely happy if it’s halfway decent.
“A 24-year-old Barnegat man was driving with a blood alcohol level over the legal limit when he crashed his car in Stafford last month, killing a man in the passenger seat, authorities said.“
Not to blame the victim here, but if you go out riding with somebody that’s drunk, put your damn seatbelt on. That goes for people in the back, too.
I never lived in California, but I visited there many times on business trips and came to love it. Here are a few things that stayed with me from those visits, arranged in no particular order. If I have some details wrong or backwards, apologies to my companions on those trips, who became my friends. Writing this, I couldn’t remember a lot of detail about the actual work we did as a team, and didn’t try. But I remember very well the good times we had on side trips sightseeing and exploring California—or just hanging out—when we were not working.
Cars make their way down Lombard Street
Most of my California trips were to San Francisco, Santa Clara or other towns in “Silicon Valley”, the hub of America’s high-tech computer business. On a different trip I got to visit Los Angeles, but only for a three-hour layover between planes. I was alone on that trip and took a walk from the terminal building down to the bottom of the main road in, where I sat on a low wall to catch some sun. Sitting there alone, I felt as if every person who turned onto the airport road that day was checking me out. That’s no credit to me – in California everyone is checking everyone else out all day long. It is the land of opportunity.
Job interview
My first California trip was for a job interview. After working for Continental Insurance/Insco for a few years, I was looking for a change. I saw an ad for VM programmers at the Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, another Silicon Valley town. Amdahl was the new kid on the block then, making full-size mainframe computers and giving IBM a run for its money. I sent them a resume, we had a short interview over the phone, and before I knew it I was on a plane headed west.
The San Jose airport was so small that the entire rental car fleet sat right outside the terminal door. Japanese cars were just becoming popular, and the one I rented was the first I ever drove. I spent the evening getting a feel for California —just driving around the hilly green countryside, no other cars in sight. I forget what make it was, but it was peppy and fun to drive, and I gave it some exercise.
Fact sheet courtesy Wikipedia
The next morning I drove to Sunnyvale for my interview. First I met with the personnel manager and we had a nice, friendly conversation, mostly about California, its hot housing market, and our families. He seemed to be a happy person, but at one point surprised me by dropping “You’ll find that most people in California are very shallow” into the conversation.
Next I met with a pair of technical managers and told them about all the cool software modifications and tools I’d designed and added to Continental’s VM operating system. Unfortunately I got caught up in trying to show that I wasn’t just the usual inward-focused bit-jockey systems programmer, but also a team player and leader. I shot myself in the foot by injecting the words “we” and “my team” into the conversation too often. Free advice to job seekers everywhere: don’t be modest. I didn’t take enough credit for my own work that day, and I didn’t get the job.
Housing boom
On a different trip, I shared a taxi with a gent from back East who was headed to the same hotel. We were talking about the booming real estate market, and I mentioned a newspaper story that said many Californians were stretching to carry mortgages on second or even third houses, counting on big future profits. We were still shaking our heads over the madness of this when our driver, silent until then, said “I’ve got six.”
The project
For a while, Continental had a sort of flirtation with several computer companies to decide which could best replace the aging workstations in its 40 branch offices. Our team would test and evaluate proposed replacements.
I sometimes had my doubts about whether the project to find a replacement branch office machine was on the level. Our management was very conservative about choosing computers and computer gear, seeming to honor the adage “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” —meaning, if you chose IBM and it somehow didn’t work out, it was still a reasonable choice because IBM was the world standard. Any fault would be IBM’s, not yours.
IBM didn’t yet offer a suitable small machine, so maybe our management was stalling in hopes they would have one soon, solving the problem for everyone.
The team
Our first team trip will be to Convergent Technologies in Santa Clara. We’ll be testing their latest minicomputer. In a few weeks, we’ll do the same thing at Hewlett Packard.
There are four of us on the team, representing four different Continental departments. We don’t know each other yet. As team leader, I get to drive the rental and am generally deferred to. When our plane lands in California, it’s a sunny, pleasant day. Once we’re out of the airport and on our way to the hotel, I ask “Would it be a good idea to open the windows?” There is a happy chorus of YES PLEASE!
In the Castro
We have a free day before testing begins and decide to go to San Francisco. Looking for a place to have dinner, we wander into a busy neighborhood and get in line outside a restaurant that seems popular. We are three men and a young woman only two years out of college. She is pretty and sweet and smart, and by the end of the day each of the men is half in love with her.
A sign tells us we’re in the Castro District. She says “Oh, the Castro District! That’s the gay section!” Many of the people in line with us or passing by appear to be of the rainbow persuasion, some very much so. In an excited whisper, she asks “Do you think we’ll see any gay people?”
At Convergent Technologies
The Convergent people have set up a row of their workstation computers for us in one corner of their factory floor and we get started. Our hosts make us think of the Avis “We try harder” slogan – they are desperate for our business and it shows, sometimes to the point of being embarrassing. Spotting my half-empty cigarette pack on the table, one of them offers to go buy me another.
Convergent has a cafeteria, but a Mexican food truck visits our side of the factory several times a day and we come to favor the exotic food off the truck.
None of us has ever seen the Pacific Ocean, and one day after work we take a drive west to the nearest beach.
Not the same beach, but like it
The beach is wild and rocky, not at all like the friendly, flat beaches back home in New Jersey. No one will ever play in the surf here, or lie on a towel to work on their tan.
We roll up our pants legs, stow shoes and socks in the car, and walk into the chilly water. The ocean here is calm, with flattish boulders washed over by low, polite waves. As the tide goes out, tiny crabs and other marine life are stranded for a while in shallow pools on top of the boulders. If you put your hand into one it feels alive, and the salt water hot from the afternoon sun.
Free weekend
We’ll be testing at Convergent for two weeks, which gives us a weekend in between for sightseeing. Driving out of the city, we cross the Golden Gate Bridge and continue north. We are like children, staring and pointing at things not to be seen in New Jersey. We drive into a touristy redwood forest, where we sit together on the colossal stump of a thousand-year-old redwood as we eat lunch and marvel at our surroundings. We follow signs that lead us to a winery tour, then wear out our welcome at its sampling bar. On our way back we shout out in unison a town name we see on a highway sign, “SNAVELY!”
Lombard Street
Another day we take our rental for a ride down San Francisco’s Lombard Street, known as “The Crookedest Street in the World”. Lombard Street got that way in the 1920s, when the city installed eight hairpin curves to reduce its dangerously steep downhill grade. Over the following years, taking a slow ride down Lombard Street became a favorite tourist thing to do, with the street eventually becoming so congested it created a quality-of-life issue for its homeowners.
When Lombard Street is not too crowded, it’s a fun, careful drive, offering scenic views of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, and the suspension bridges to Oakland. When we took that ride years ago, we enjoyed it so much we made our way back to the top and went again, drawing annoyed looks from a few homeowners who remembered us from our earlier pass.
On the fault line
A few weeks after finishing up at Convergent Technologies and writing our report, we return to California to run the same tests at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, a town halfway between San Jose and San Francisco.
Much of California is on the 800-mile-long San Andreas fault. Map courtesy adobe.com
Hewlett Packard wants visitors to be aware its buildings in Palo Alto are on the San Andreas fault, the earthquake-prone sliding boundary between two of the Earth’s major tectonic plates. Hewlett takes earthquakes seriously and thinks visitors should too. Their buildings are low and stubby, and thus less likely to fall over. They are laid out around a central open quad with enough space for all employees to gather safely during a quake. If there’s not enough warning to get out into the quad, the next best thing is to crawl under a desk or other furniture. If that’s not possible, stand in one of the reinforced doorways.
Survival poster
I won’t detail the testing we did in the two weeks we were at Hewlett Packard because it wasn’t much different from what we did at Convergent. Nor will I detail any of the side trips or other fun we may have had outside work hours while at Hewlett. To any of my former management who might happen to have lived long enough to read this, rest assured that we all worked very hard and didn’t have anywhere near as much fun as it sounds.
What’s next for California?
I’m disgusted by the way California has gone downhill. The city I’m most familiar with, beautiful and livable San Francisco, is now often referred to as a third-world shithole. After following the news over recent years, I have to agree, and California is off the list of places I might ever want to live. Collectively, California’s problems seem unsolvable.
Smash-and-grab looting, consequence-free shoplifting, acts of violence against strangers (the knockout game). Release without bail of criminals with lengthy arrest records. Providing free drugs to addicts instead of forcing them into treatment. The criminal class has taken over, and the rule of law has ended.
Add uncontrolled wildfires, the end of standardized testing, the leftward tilt of the education system, the general failure of the schools to educate. I could go on and on.
I guess there’s always hope that something or someone will come along to fix California. Short of martial law or outright civil war, I don’t know what that might be. But I’m glad I got to enjoy California a bit before its destruction.
I’m tired of people saying that some eager person is “chomping at the bit”. No, the expression is “champing at the bit” and it’s what horses do when they are eager to run; they bite down, or “champ”, on the metal “bit” in their mouth.
And if you think I’m going to let this go, you’ve got another THINK coming. Not another THING coming, another THINK. Think about what you’re saying.
Thanks for listening.
“Bridle,” I say. I hold it up to the window and look at it in the light. It’s not fancy, it’s just an old dark leather bridle. I don’t know much about them. But I know that one part of it fits in the mouth. That part’s called the bit. It’s made of steel. Reins go over the head and up to where they’re held on the neck between the fingers. The rider pulls the reins this way and that, and the horse turns. It’s simple. The bit’s heavy and cold. If you had to wear this thing between your teeth, I guess you’d catch on in a hurry. When you felt it pull, you’d know it was time. You’d know you were going somewhere.
After I left my first after-school “real” job at Kingsway because they expected us to come in on Sundays to clean the store, I got a job at the Mega Foods in Glen Ridge, where I was again grocery clerk , shelf stocker and sometime cashier.
I eventually gravitated to a job I’ll call “cellar man”, for lack of a better name. I listed grocery items that needed restocking, pulled the corresponding boxes out of the stacks, price-stamped them, and put the box on the conveyor belt leading back upstairs. Simple-minded, predictable and repeatable. Working without any immediate supervision, uninterrupted and alone with my thoughts, that cellar job turned out to be good practice for my later career of programming computers.
Not that I was totally alone down there. The conveyor belt rose from a spot only a few feet from the ladies’ room, so I often got the chance to see and kid around with the cashiers. In particular I remember flirting with Myrtle
Hmm, did anybody else in the history of the world ever type in those exact three semi-rhyming words? Let’s ask Google… …dang, I am disappointed, someone has, “About 1,960 results (0.75 seconds)”. Tom, best friend of “The Great Gatsby”, has been “flirting with Myrtle”, the wife of the owner of the garage halfway between Gatsby’s place and New York City. It’s also something Harry Potter does in chapter 19 of the fanfiction “Harry Potter and the Daywalker”. It all goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun.
But I digress – back to the real Myrtle. She was 29, shy, petite and sexy in her coarse cotton wraparound company smock. She really knew how to hold a man’s attention. On the downside, she was married and about 10 years older than I, so nothing ever came of our talks except the pleasure of flirting.
There were other temptations associated with being cellar man. Who has not wanted to sample those fancy jarred pickles and olives on display? In the privacy of my cellar, I did just that, popping one or two vacuum seals every day, maybe unscrewing a maraschino-cherry lid as well. As far as I know, no customer ever complained. Kids, if you buy a jar of something and the lid doesn’t pop when you open it, take it back. It probably won’t kill you, but why find out?
Relatedly, on my earlier, Kingsway job, Tuesdays were a special day for us part-time clerks. It was the store manager’s day off, and assistant manager Freddy went to class in the afternoon. On a typical Tuesday afternoon, we’d destroy one or two sheet cakes and several large bottles of soda. It was like being invited to a birthday party every week.
JustRite self-inking price marker, amazon.com
There were no scan codes then, so every item had to be hand-stamped with the price. Like any job, no matter how menial, stamping prices on groceries can be interesting and fun if you make it a challenge. For example, a case of single rolls of toilet paper contains 100 rolls, in five tiers of 20 rolls, 5 by 4. Sounds like it would take a long time to stamp, right? Ha, not the way I did it!
Upstairs is the bottle-return station, where a cashier counts customers’ empty, usually dirty, glass bottles and refunds their deposit money, two cents for small bottles and five cents for large. (A Seinfeld episode touches on these values.) There’s a sort of vertical conveyor belt with buckets big enough to hold two or three bottles lying down. The cashier holds down a button and the buckets head for the cellar, where they invert and their contents clank into a sawdust-padded carousel. Not every bottle survives the trip in one piece.
Emptying the carousel involves picking through the sawdust and sorting the bottles into crates by brand and size. Nobody in their right mind wants to do that, not even wearing gloves, so management assigns each part-timer a turn at it. Part-timers are expendable and band-aids are available. Only rarely does anyone need to go get stitches.
Our sister store in East Orange had a fire, with much water damage. After the insurance adjusters left, one of the Mega Foods executives apparently decided that the damaged stock in the cellar was still saleable and could go back on the shelves, likely double-dipping the insurance settlement. The remains were trucked over to Glen Ridge and heaped up in my cellar. Although there are companies that do fire remediation for a living, yours truly was assigned the task of cleaning up those soggy piles and getting the goods back on the shelves.
The boxes were soaked and falling apart, the goods inside were wet, and everything stank of smoke. For two days, I made an honest job of cleaning up some of it, but it was hopeless. There was just too much; it was enormous and depressing. I called in sick for a few days, then quit. Hmm, I wonder if Mom could get me an introduction to one of the trade unions like she did for my brother?
