Ghost stories

At dinner the other day, my son asked his sister whether she knew any ghost stories. She began reciting a number of stories she'd read in a book of ghost stories from her school library. It dawned on me as I sat their listening to her that I don't know any real ghost stories. I have never really experienced something that I could truly call an encounter with a ghost (though this is the second time I've pondered this in my blog...the first time was in a post called I ain't afraid of no ghosts back in 2005).

It isn't without trying. Before we were married, I used to take my wife on trips and stay at reportedly haunted hotels. We stayed at the Del Coronado in San Diego, the Queen Mary in Long Beach and Geiser Grand in Baker City, Oregon. We also stayed at Thornewood Castle in Lakewood, Washington. All reported to be haunted places. But I didn't see nary a ghost or ghoul.

Unoriginal thought

I was listening to a TED podcast (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) the other day on original thought. The basic premise was that there really was no such thing. All of our art, music, literature, movies and inventions are derivative of things that others had already thought of. We, as a species, don't create. We tinker and add on to things.

This fits with my posts about Googling great ideas I've had only to discover three million other people have already had them. Apparently, the Big Bang (not the television series) was the only original thing that has ever happened in the universe.

I'm the king of the world!

All my blather about Trump wanting to be king conjured up these memories of the good ol' days of my blog when I had themed weeks of Photoshopping my face onto famous people's images. It was 2006 and I was giddy about the newness of blogging. It was in a post called It would be good to be a king that I first considered making myself a king.

The man who would be king

I can think of no conceivable reason for anyone to want to be President of the United States. Yet all of these people pump millions of dollars into campaigns trying to get nominated for a job that lasts four to eight years and basically opens up you and your family to constant scrutiny and criticism. Okay the salary and benefits amounts to about $600,000 a year. And you do get a $200,000 pension for the rest of your life. But is it worth it?

I don't think Trump is wanting the job for the money. And he certainly doesn't strike me as someone who wants to make a positive change in the world. So I can only conclude that he wants to be king. And the revolting peasants are rallying around him caught up in the demigod's rhetoric of hate and fear.

I'm going to read a book

And what book, you may well ask: Infinite Jest, the 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace. It is a 1,079 page novel that is said to be the "defining work of the 1990s" by people who say such things.

And why am I going to read this book? Because I just watch the movie, The End of the Tour last night. It is based on writer David Lipsky's memoir, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself which is basically the story of Lipsky's experience going on a book tour with Wallace in 1996 to write a story for Rolling Stone.

It's a great film, BTW.

The unbearable lightness of bean

Aging brings with it these unexpected thoughts about identity. It goes beyond asking "Who am I?" It's just that I feel like I am in a time warp and the world around me has passed me by.

When you age, the world around you speeds up. All of your points of reference seem to be in the past. Communicating with someone 20 or more years younger than me requires a great deal of energy and explanation. I begin to understand why my parents would often stare at me with a confused look when I'd talk to them growing up.

For a person in his late 50s, I like to think I'm more savvy than most about technology and social media. Maybe it is because I've been exposed to computers from the beginning. Not like current generations who've always had them. I watched them evolve.

Prince of Ides

I survived the Ides of March without nary an attempted assassination by the Roman Senate. I toyed with ordering a Caesar salad at the local diner last night and saying, "Etu Flo," when it was served, but I decided not to tempt fate.

It is now March 16th, a day of no particular note other than it is one day before St. Patrick's Day. Yet I still feel the slight bit of anxiety I've alluded to that comes with every birthday. Part of it is likely due to the bulging spot that appeared on our basement ceiling on Sunday indicating something, somewhere was leaking. My wife poked it with a paint scrapper this morning and apparently a large chunk of the ceiling fell down.

So the Ides of March did bring a small disaster after all and Chicken Little has been vindicated. The sky...and my ceiling is falling.

Well Ides-ey Ho!

You can run, but you can't Ides.
--Time

Today is the Ides of March. Which is to say it is the middle of the month of March, the day Julius Ceasar was assassinated, two days before St. Patrick's Day and three days before my birthday.

I suppose that doesn't mean a lot to most people.  But if you follow the link above you'll see I've put a great deal of thought into it over the years. Because the hint of doom that the Ides of March carries with it taints my impending birthday like a worm hole on an apple you just bit into.

It's not like this is a milestone birthday (other than turning the same age as my year of birth minus one thousand years that I pointed out in a previous post). But 60 is on the horizon wagging it's wrinkled butt at me. Not a pretty picture I can tell you.

To Kill a Mockingbird

“Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
 ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird is dead at 89. I watched the 1962 black and white movie based on the Pulizer Prize winning book the other night in her memory. It is a classic movie that I remember watching many times as a child. And it is still a great film.

Boo Radley is my favorite character. He is the mythical boogeyman of neighborhood children that lives in the run down spooky house and can only be seen in shadows and rumors. And then he turns out to be the hero and totally misunderstood.

He still has a few marbles missing from the game. But don't we all.

Lost music

Since I got my iPhone, I rediscovered iTunes and music I'd accumulated in the past there and then forgotten. I used iTunes a great deal when I bought my first iPod. I dutifully loaded all of my CD collection onto iTunes and then my iPod.

It was one of the first iPods and now is the equivalent to one of those early mobile phones that was the size of a toaster. At the time I was pretty impressed that I could load thousands of songs on it. But eventually the iPod became a dinosaur of technology and ended up in a drawer. The battery is pretty much shot anyway.

I had other mp3 players over the years. Some the size of a postage stamp. They all eventually became toast and I ended up listening to Spotify or Jango or Amazon Prime music. But music in the cloud is pretty limited to the vagarities of the Sprint network and my train goes through cell dead zones to and from work.  I have been frustrated on more than one occasion by have a three minute song take 20 minutes to play.

You can't fix stupid

You have to take a test to get a license to drive a car, so why shouldn't you have to take a test to determine whether or not you are qualified to vote. At the very least it should be the same test they give people who are becoming citizens of the United States. Then you could at least say the person voting has some idea how our political system works.

But no, we allow anyone over the age of 18 to randomly cast a vote without any proof they know the consequences and the responsibility they have. It is why we end up with president's like Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush and now horror of horrors, possibly Donald Trump. At least George W.  was just a buffoon with dangerous advisers. Trump just seems crazy in a "I shouldn't be trusted with my finger on the nuclear weapons" way.

I did not watch Super Bowl 50

I tend to only watch the Super Bowl if the Seahawks are playing in it. And although they were pretty good this year, they were nudged out of the NFC Championship by Carolina. So I am glad the Broncos beat them. Because the Seahawks beat the Broncos in the Super Bowl a couple of years ago. So we know who the real champions are.

I probably would have watched the Super Bowl except both of our televisions were being used by my kids to watch separate movies that we'd made them stop watching the night before with the promise that they could finish watching them the next day. I just didn't think they would wait until the Super Bowl was on to finish watching there programs. God knows Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dog Days and Neverland are more important than the Super Bowl.

I tried following the game on social media while I grilled dinner. But all I could seem to get on Twitter were play by plays on the commercials being shown. So I ended up asking Siri on my iPhone what the score was every five minutes. I think she was starting to get irritated at me.

Every dog his poo

Quite some time ago I Tweeted about watching a person out my train window on the way work waiting patiently while their dog pooped and then diligently picking it up with a poop bag. My Tweet was something to the effect of, "So which one is the dumb animal."

This was of course before we got a dog. And I was blocking out the fact that we had cats and everyday I was scooping cat poop out of a cat box and regularly cleaning up cat puke. But at least I wasn't having to pick up warm poop with my hand encased in a plastic bag.

That has all changed. Just over a year ago we decided to get a dog. We'd had to put down two of our three geriatric cats due to kidney failure and cancer. This opened the option of another pet that my children had been lobbying for for some time.

Afraid of shadows

"Me and my shadow
Strolling down the avenue
Me and my shadow
Not a soul to tell our troubles to" 

 --Songwriters: Dave Dreyer, Al Jolson and Billy Rose

The sun is out here so I suppose if the groundhog (aka wood chuck) lived in Seattle he would scurry back to his den and sleep another six weeks. I wonder, though, if the groundhog is really afraid of his shadow, or just afraid of the light. He is a creature that lives in the dark.

I've never been afraid of my shadow. I've been afraid of other people's or other things shadows. But maybe that is more being afraid of the unknown than anything else.

I used to be afraid of the dark. More accurately I was afraid of what I couldn't see in the dark. I imagine that is a primal memory in the animal part of my brain remembering when predators hunted in the dark.

Groundhog's Day Eve

I can hardly wait until Groundhog's Day! I almost forgot it since the stores went right from Christmas merchandise into Valentine's Day crap and skipped Groundhog's Day altogether. Doesn't seem quite fair.

In honor of it being Groundhog's Day Eve, I've taken the liberty of reusing the photo above that I've now used four times in posts also in honor of Groundhog's Day. Most of them are just rehashing the history of the holiday and gibberish about the movie Groundhog's Day starring Bill Murray. The movie is about a man who ends up repeating the same day over and over again until he gets it right.

This is basically what I do in my blog, only I simply repeat the same stories over and over and repost the same photos of things I've Photoshopped my face on.  I do the former because my memory sucks and I do the latter because I'm getting too lazy to Photoshop my face on new stuff.

Senior Varsity Quiz

I have always been good with trivia. I know a lot about a little and a little about a lot.

In Junior High (we didn't have middle schools in Idaho), I was a member of the Junior Varsity Quiz Team. We competed against other Junior High Schools on a local television station program appropriately called Junior Varsity Quiz. We lasted two rounds before being defeated by North Junior High School. I'm pleased to say I answered the most correct questions in the program (a minor accomplishment considering we still lost).

Being able to answer questions quickly about a broad range of topics hasn't really been of much use to me later in life. Oh, it comes in handy if you are playing Trivial Pursuits or find yourself in a bar where a trivia contest is going on. But on a practical level, being able to rattle off random trivia just makes you sound like Cliff from the old Cheers program.

The blogger rarely posts twice

As a rule, I rarely post twice in a day, but for some reason I feel compelled to write something else other than praises for my new iPhone (which is really awesome). I'll note that didn't promote my last post on social media and it has only been viewed four times. If I tweet or post on Facebook about a new post, I generally get about 25 or so hits. So as pitiful as my readership is, social media does boost it a bit.

I've actually been a bit more prolific this January than I have been for awhile. This is my seventh post. Though back in 2006 I post 31 times. Of course that was back in my blogging prime. It was all still relatively new to me and held promise. Now I write about getting a new iPhone.

The i's have it

Years ago, I had a Mac at work in addition to a PC. All of the designers I have ever known swear by Macs. I liked it, but practicality and price eventually drove me to PCs.

When I first ventured into the world of cell phones I had a standard flip phone for home and a Blackberry for work. Eventually my work and home phone merged into an Android Smartphone. I was ok with the Android, but frustrated at times by how slow it seemed and sporadically random glitches in the software and apps.

So I broke down and ordered an iPhone. Now granted it is an iPhone 5s, not the latest iPhone 6S or whatever the newest models are. But I have to admit I feel as though I have entered a whole new world of smartphonedom.

Layers

Back in 2013, I posted a photo from Googlemaps taken of my boyhood home that had captured an image of my late mother working in the yard. It was taken a few months before her death.

We sold the house to a developer, understanding that it would eventually be torn down and new homes built on the property. I returned to Boise a few times since and drove by but the house still remained. My brother in Boise informed me a few months ago that the house had been torn down. I put it out of my mind. But today I looked it up on Google Earth and found they'd done a new street level photo of how the property looks now.

Now Google also allows you to look at a timeline for the property since they started taking the photos so there was also a photo of the house from 2008.

The one constant thing from all three photos is the maple tree in the foreground. My brothers and I rescued a sapling from a drainage ditch probably 50 years ago, brought it home and planted it there in our front yard. And it is the only thing that remains of my childhood home.

Stephan Hawkins predicts the end of the world

Actually, the MSN article headline read "Most threats to humans come from science and technology, warns Hawking," but I thought my headline was a bit more attention grabbing. In actuality, the article said Hawkins just pointed out in a speech about black holes, that "The chances of disaster on planet Earth will rise to a near certainty in the next one to ten thousand years, the eminent cosmologist said, but it will take more than a century to set up colonies in space where human beings could live on among the stars."

Then he goes on to theorize about black holes and lost everyone.

Sure Hawking is a genius, but isn't saying the world will shoot it's eye out with a technology charged BB gun in the next 10,000 years just stating the obvious? Big whoop. If the world ends in the next one to ten thousand years, I'll be long gone. And even my kids won't be around in the next 100 years or so to worry about living in a space colony. So I for one don't take this revelation from Hawking anymore seriously than Harold Campings ravings about the rapture.