To thee, dear goal, so long deferred
Like old Aeneas -- in a word
                    To Africa we came.

We beached upon a rising tide
At Sasstown on the western side;
                    And as we touched the strand
I thought -- (I may have been mistook) --
I thought the earth in terror shook
                    To feel its Conquerors land.

In getting up our Caravan
We met a most obliging man,
The Lord Chief Justice of Liberia,
And Minister of the Interior;
Cain Abolition Beecher Boz,
Worked like a Nigger -- which he was --
                    And in a single day

Procured us Porters, Guides, and kit,
And would not take a sou for it
                    Until we went away.*
We wondered how this fellow made
Himself so readily obeyed,
And why the natives were so meek;
Until by chance we heard him speak,
And then we clearly understood
How great a Power for Social Good
                    The African can be.
He said with a determined air:
"You are not what your fathers were;
Liberians, you are Free!
Of course, if you refuse to go --"
And here he made a gesture ... so.

             * But when we went away we found
                    A deficit of several pound.

He also gave us good advice
Concerning Labour and its Price.
"In dealing wid de Native Scum,
Yo' cannot pick an' choose;
Yo' hab to promise um a sum
Ob wages, paid in Cloth and Rum.
But, Lordy!  that's a ruse!
Yo' get yo' well on de Adventure,
And change de wages to Indenture."

We did the thing that he projected,
The Caravan grew disaffected,
                    And Sin and I consulted;
Blood understood the Native mind.
He said: "We must be firm but kind."
                    A Mutiny resulted.
I never shall forget the way
That Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:

"Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not."

He marked them in their rude advance,
He hushed their rebel cheers;
With one extremely vulgar glance
He broke the Mutineers.
(I have a picture in my book
Of how he quelled them with a look.)
We shot and hanged a few, and then
The rest became devoted men.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Nobody could skewer the colonial mindset like Hilaire Belloc, and I have found a copy of The Modern Traveller.  It is going to be a good evening.

I get to telephone my boss in the morning and tell him that I've busted my tail for the past year and a half for nothing because a decision made halfway around the globe has just rendered everything I've done useless.

Maybe I'll be sober by then.

I've had a LiveJournal now for almost six years (really?  Has it been that long?).  When I signed up for LJ, I created a quick little biography for myself, because that was the thing to do.  I haven't changed it since ... and I just went back and read it.

About half of it isn't true any more.

I'm 40 years old.  If my 20-year-old self could see me now, he would be flabbergasted at how different I am now than I was then.  My 60-year-old self will probably someday look back on me now and feel the same way.

This is not meant to suggest that I'm somehow especially flabbergasting at the moment (errrr, I don't think so anyway), but ... there is no point in trying to step into the same river twice, is there?

One of these days I should update that bio.  :)

I've been quiet in these online parts for the past week or so because of business travel.  As George Carlin once observed, travel is the time when you take all of your Stuff and cull it down to just the Stuff You Really Really Need, so that you're not one of those sorts who takes fifteen minutes to get through airport security.  This means that anything you do choose to bring with you had better bring you satisfaction.

And this has made me realise that I don't get no satisfaction from my cell phone any more.  Considering that it's three years old, and that mobile computing follows the Weird Al All-About-The-Pentiums rule ("it was obsolete // before I opened the box"), this shouldn't be surprising.  And considering the deal that I got on it through the Microsoft Developer Network (i.e. practically free WiMo smartphone with no contract and a discounted data plan), I certainly ain't complainin'.

On top of that, the touch screen on my venerable old Palm organiser is also starting to have a few issues ... which means that my entire Life Management Solution is going to hell in a handbasket.  And Lord knows, I need a life management solution lest I forget what my name is.

Here's what I'm thinking:

iPhone:  The obvious choice.  When other manufacturers and software developers bring out new devices and systems, the question that people always ask is, "Is this an iPhone killer?".  Definitely the dominant platform in the smartphone / mobile computing industry at the moment, locked into the same virtuous cycle of software-and-accessory development networking effects that Windows enjoys in larger computers ... and the hardware is pretty.  But they do seem to have more than their fair share of reliability issues and require more frequent OS reinstalls than I like ... and the big negative: they are locked into AT&T, which is not my favourite carrier and whose network is getting slammed because everyone wants an iPhone.

Android:  The up-and-coming #2 platform in the consumer smartphone space.  Has the virtue of not being tied to a single device or carrier.  Generally not considered quite as polished as the iPhone, and some of the hardware that's been released with it has been a bit chunky; but each new iteration of the software has been getting better and better reviews.  Has a smaller "app count" than the iPhone, but more developers are starting to release iPhone and Android versions of their software at the same time.  Since I'm with T-Mobile, would not require a carrier change.

Blackberry:  Still the 500-pound canary in the business sphere, but really struggling to move into the consumer market.  Their attempts to make "hip" hardware have mostly sucked: I'm trying hard to think of anyone I know who has bought a Blackberry and not moved on to something else (who thought it was a good idea to make a touchscreen that you had to press down hard on to make it click, reducing your typing speed to near zero?).  Not totally irrelevant in the marketplace for consumer-oriented applications, but definitely a distant player behind the iPhone and Android.  On the other hand, there are tons of available devices from pretty much every carrier.

Palm Pre:  The built-in software is really really sweet, but it's going to be an uphill climb to get developers to show much interest in creating a new Palm ecosystem that could rival the big players.  I find the tiny keyboard frustratingly useless.  And it's available only from Sprint, which is a carrier that screwed my mate over and with which I will not do business.  So much for that.

Windows Mobile:  Increasingly irrelevant as Microsoft sat on its laurels instead of moving its platform along with the times.  BART did not release a new version of its Trip Planner software for WiMo because "we do not support obsolete platforms" - ouch.  And the application that I consider the true smartphone killer app, Shazam, is not available for WiMo because the developers sold the exclusive rights to it on that platform to AT&T, which will let you subscribe and then charge you by the song.  I can do better.

Are there any I'm forgetting?

A good rule of thumb that I've found, in any sphere, is this: go with the #1 or #2 option, or forget it.  Not only does this reduce the possibility of analysis paralysis (to which I am dreadfully prone), but especially in fields like smartphones where there are strong networking effects, anybody #3 or lower just isn't going to get the network.  We all auction our stuff on eBay and put our classifieds on Craigslist for a reason.  So, that means iPhone or Android.  And that conveniently brings me down to just three choices: the iPhone on AT&T, the myTouch 3G on T-Mobile, or the Droid on Verizon.

I want something that can replace both a Palm and an older smartphone, so I want good organiser functions (including easy note-taking, since I use my Palm for things like shopping lists and expenses), a good browser, and a good cellular network.  Anybody got any advice before I take the plunge and whip out the plastic?

A Halloween costume, like any other costume, has one primary requirement: it has to be something you wouldn't ordinarily wear.  It is difficult, if you're a doctor, to go to a Halloween party dressed as a doctor.  All your friends will laugh at you and say, "Couldn't you come up with anything better?"

It would be like me going to a party dressed as a mild-mannered accountant.

So if you're a fursuiter, do you go to a Halloween party in suit?  99.9% of humanity might say that a fursuit is "costume enough", or even more than enough ("Aren't you hot?").  But then again, 99% of humanity can go to a Halloween party dressed as a doctor.

So when I see fursuiter friends wondering what they're going to do for a Halloween costume, I chuckle but understand fully where they're coming from ... much though the urge at first is to go, "Ummmmmmmm, if you look in your Action Packer I think you'll find something ...".

Now let's see, where did I put that harness with the extra-large neck or those oversized T-shirts?  Cuz, you know, I can't go to a party without (more of) a costume, either!

My opponents are indistinct, as though a grey mist covers the room.  Even the table barely registers in my mind, although it must be there.  My attention is totally on the cards.  I am in the Zone.

I'm holding three jacks, a pair of sevens, and a four.  I know this is good.  I have a full house on the deal.  My pulse quickens ... I have a chance.  This hand is for all the marbles.  The stakes are high, so high that there aren't even any chips in front of me.  We're not playing for anything so meagre that it could be reduced to mere chips.

It's not good enough.  I can't see my opponents' faces, can't feel the serenity at least one of them feels now that he's looked at his cards, but ... I know it's not good enough.  The four is easy: pitch it.  My brain mentally greys it out.  But the sevens ... it's a boat.  I have a boat, so I hesitate.  If the draw turns this into mere trips, I'm dead.  Yet my gut knows: I need that fourth jack or it's all over.  Break the boat and I triple my chances, slim as they are.

With that sense of finality that comes from making important decisions where none of the options is easy, I grab the sevens and the four and throw them into the centre of the table.  I hold three jacks in my hand.  The cards that I'm about to get will determine everything.  Please be the jack.

The unseen dealer flips cards my way, their backs Bicycle blue.  I lean forward to reach for them.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

*mashes the "alarm off" button*

Dammit!

In my quest to make my new apartment more "me", I have begun putting things up on the walls.  Given my tastes and inclinations, one of those things is ... my Kama Citra poster.

No, before you ask, it is not going in the bathroom.

Now, I am no handyman, but I could play one on TV.  If I purchase a bunch of tools, I can pretend I know what I'm doing.  And really, how hard can it be to hang a 2' x 3' poster nice and level on a wall?  The poster frame that I have for it has these nice little eyelets on the back and everything.

Right, so it's two feet wide ... that means the centreline should be one foot from each side ... and I want the bottom to be even with the base of the nearby light switch, which will put it nicely at eye height when walking past it ... and the centreline should be centred on the wall itself ... and the little eyelets are three inches down from the top of the frame and three inches in from each side ... which means I need to use my measuring tape and measure from here to ... here to ... up there ... is it straight?  I don't know, and I don't own a level!  Well, OK, the measuring tape looks straight, so three feet up to here ... and then three inches over from there ... and up from there by the length of the hooks themselves ... and ... man, this is requiring more maths and more manual dexterity than I thought.

But still, with all due confidence, I made little pencil marks all over the wall, then pounded the picture hooks into the wall at the two points that were the result of all this calculation.  Then I carefully slid the poster over the hooks ...

And it fell right off the wall.  The hooks that I bought to put into the wall are too short to reach the eyelets on the frame.  Well, blast.  Perhaps I'll just let it hang from the top of the frame, and forget the eyelets ... it'll be a little bit low, but ...

No, it's crooked.  It's definitely crooked.  Granted, if any poster shouldn't be straight, it's this one, but ... this is going to bother me.  I need to go buy a level.

So just now I did, and I just got home and tested the poster.  It is, in fact, perfectly straight.  Therefore, either my whole apartment is crooked, or I am.  And I think we know the answer to that one.

OK, I still need to re-mount it on the wall about three inches higher, so that it's not disturbingly below eye level as people walk past and admire it on their way to the bedroom closet, but ... Kama Citra is on the wall in the bedroom.

Now it's home.  :)

It's no secret that there are a lot of parties out there who are seeking to "monetise" the Internet ... which is to say, figure out better ways to deliver content to people and actually make money from it without having to bow to the old broadcast-TV model of running advertisements.  Even though I rather prefer things that are free to things that I have to pay for, all else being equal, I also acknowledge that all else is not equal.  I mean, how many of us any more actually watch broadcast TV or listen to broadcast radio?  We have cable, or Netflix, or satellite radio, or streaming music to our favourite music players ... yet why would we bother with such things when there's free TV and radio?

This is also why I have had no objection to paying $99 a year for a subscription to the online Wall Street Journal.  Enough people at my office received the print edition, which would sit in the coffee room and let me glance at a teasing headline or two before the actual subscriber took it away.  If I wanted to read the rest of the article at my desk, I could either get my own paper subscription (which is messy old-fashioned paper, and reading it makes it obvious that, at that moment, I'm not particularly working), or I could get an online subscription (no messy fingers or recycling and it "looks like work"!).  I was sold on spending the money, even if one could argue that it was the Internet and "should be free".

(Hell, they should pay me for being subjected to the Journal's oft-petty neo-con editorial section, with which I have a merely modest rate of agreement)  :)

Then Uncle Rupert bought the paper.  Uncle Rupert has never made any secret that he wants to make more money out of his online properties ... that he wanted to test to see what the market would bear.  Hey, I've asked for a raise before, because I thought I wasn't getting what I was worth.  I can't inherently object to the concept.

Although finding my recent annual renewal on my credit card at $197, without even so much as an E-mail warning me about a price increase (nay, price doubling), was a bit much.  Especially when I went online to see if this was just a clerical error and found that the new subscription rates were $197 a year or $12.95 per month.  $12.95 per month times twelve is ... less than $197 a year.  That makes no sense: newspapers usually give a discount for renewing for a longer period of time, not a surcharge.  I was rather miffed, in much the same way that I'd be miffed if I went to my favourite local filling station and found that their $2.75 a gallon price had just been increased to $5.50.  It was time, officially, to Get Miffed.

*ring*

"Thank you for calling the Wall Street Journal.  All of our representatives blah blah blah you know the drill."

*hold music*

Interestingly, the hold music for the support department is experimental jazz.  How very un-conservative of them!

*hold music*  Hi, this is Randi, how may I help you?

"Hi Randi!  I'm ... a bit confused.  I just got charged $197 for a new annual subscription, which is double what I was paying before ... and I see that I can get a monthly subscription for just $156 a year.  What gives?"

"$197 is our new annual rate, yes ... we do offer service by the month, but paying for a year at a time locks you into that rate and protects you against any future price increases."

"That sounds kind of like a protection racket to me!  I'm guessing that means there are more price increases coming up?"

Randi laughs, because I've asked her a question that I know she can't answer, especially on a line where our conversation is being recorded for our protection.

"Well, look, I like the Journal, but doubling the price is a bit much ... and if I go month to month I can tell I'm pretty much guaranteed to have another price increase very soon.  It's not worth $197 a year to me, so let's just go ahead and cancel my subscription."

These are, of course, the magic words.  Now I have to be Retained.  As I have been trying to remove clutter from my life lately, and especially clutter that costs money, I am accustomed to talking with retention departments.  Retention departments are, I must say, pretty good at getting me to stick around if they just offer me a good enough deal ... like the airline miles credit card with the $50 annual fee where I realised I was earning less than $50 worth of miles on it every year.  Call to cancel, hey, annual fee waived.

So sorry, Uncle Rupert, you don't get a raise.  Retention just sold me another annual subscription for my good old fashioned rate.  Monetise this!  :)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I have been scarce in these parts lately, for which I apologise.  Unlike many, I cannot blame Twitter.  I blame work, which has had me working seven days a week for the last several weeks.  Even if this leaves me time for recreations like LiveJournal, it doesn't leave me any energy or willpower.  If my next post says "I quit", well ... it shouldn't, but sometimes it's getting tempting.  :)

When I was just starting out in the world, I had a very simple ambition.  I wanted to be rich.  And I didn't want to have to do much to get that way.

Hey, come on, I was 18.  It made sense at the time, and the world hadn't yet taught me that it just doesn't work that way.

But this meant that I was gullible fodder for every get-rich-quick scheme that came down the pike.  You know those piles of old books that I've been throwing out?  Do you want to know how many of them were things like, "Secrets of the Super Rich" and "Money-Making Opportunities in Multi-Level Marketing"?  No, you don't.  You don't want to know primarily because I don't want to think about it.  These books usually sold through mail order at the price of $15 or $20 or $25 plus shipping and handling and promised the moon and the stars ... and then arrived printed on cheap paper, full of typos and just plain bad advice.

Of course, I know now the advice was bad.  As they say, if you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, you don't need advice.

In 1987, in my quest for the holy grail of Riches Without Work, I received an advertisement in the mail for a series of publications by Hume and Associates of Atlanta, Georgia called "The Superinvestor Files".  This, I was sure, was it.  These weren't printed on cheap paper; they arrived, nicely bound, from a reputable commodities investment advisory group.  Each file described in great detail a commodities trade that had been extensively backtested ... and unlike most other such things that had very obviously had their ruleset drafted specifically to fit a certain small set of historical data, but that would work only on that set of data and never on any future set of circumstances (an odious but obvious practice called "curve fitting"), or that had rules so vaguely defined that you would already have to be an expert in order to determine what actually to do in the market (in which case, why would you need the advice?), these had detailed, specific instructions of what to do in every circumstance: when to buy, at what price, when to sell, at what price, detailed triggers, explanations of why each rule was there ... everything a neophyte trader would need.  And with around fifteen years of consistent, backtested results on each trade, you could trade with confidence.

I was sold, at $25 each plus $2.50 shipping and handling.  A new Superinvestor File would arrive every month like clockwork, with a new trade from which I could profit.

$27.50 back in 1987 dollars is more like fifty bucks today, so imagine me paying $50 a pop for these suckers ... out of my income when I was 18, which wasn't very much.  Did this leave me any money left over with which to open an account at a commodities brokerage house, much less trade?  No, but ... the time would come when I would be able to use these things, as assuredly as the sunrise; and then I'd be rich.

Hume wrote a total of 29 of these books, which arrived at a pace of one per month until the day in 1989 when I had them all.  With the gradual pace of their arrival, it was easy not to notice that I had spent, in modern money, $1,450 on the set.  Even with my income nowadays, that's a very large sum of money.  Now imagine how much money it was when I was 18.

I just found them in a box.

Naturally, I never made a single trade with any of them.  But I just did a little Googling, and discovered two things: first, that I really do have the complete set, which potentially makes them much more valuable; and second, that while Hume hadn't fallen prey to curve fitting, they had fallen prey to another common foible in backtesting, which is using data that weren't time consistent but assuming that they were.  Without going into a lot of detail (IM me if you really want it!), if you use a buy price from one time and a sell price from a different time but assume that you could actually have done both at the same time, you can get artificially inflated results that could not be achieved in practice.

Anyway, real-world testing of Hume's strategies on live data, as opposed to backtesting from historical data, have shown that they don't work.

Well, fudge.  But, that said, the Superinvestor Files are sort of classics in the field, and some people still swear by them (although it should be said also that most commodities speculators lose money).  I was going to throw them in the recycle bin, but ... well, maybe they're actually worth something!  Maybe I could recover a few hundred bucks of my original $1,450 investment in these suckers ... so I checked eBay.  How much does a complete set of the Superinvestor Files actually go for?

Ten bucks.

The good news, I suppose, is that had I actually made any trades using Hume's advice, I probably would have lost a lot more than $1,440.  The bad news?

I paid $1,450 for something that I just threw into the recycle bin downstairs after getting no value out of it whatsoever.  Easy go, easy go some more!

Back when I was a kid, I visited the site of a Civil War battle.  Honestly, I don't remember which one, and it doesn't really matter.  But all I remember of the entire battle site was this little ravine, with a path leading down into it that was just wide enough for one man ... and through which an entire Confederate army retreated, man by man, under fire, improbably surviving to fight another day.  It was so quiet ... such an insignificant little place, it seemed hard to believe that a hundred years earlier it could have been the scene of such chaos.

But the places where big things happened are always smaller than we imagine.

I have found myself in Dallas, Texas the past couple of days ... here for a business conference.  In the evenings there hasn't been much to do, and I pretty much totally failed beforehand to see if there were any evening social opportunities here that didn't involve going out with co-workers, so I've been spending my evenings mostly walking about and seeing what I stumbled across.

So it was that I found myself earlier tonight wandering around Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.  Dealey Plaza is a little park / statuary / fountain / reflecting pool area, put up in 1940 by the Works Progress Administration, which was little noted outside Dallas until 1963, when everything around there suddenly entered the world's consciousness.  Elm Street.  The Texas School Book Depository.  The "grassy knoll".  The triple underpass.  Shots fired.  Walter Cronkite trying not to lose it on camera.  The Warren Commission report.

I had never been there.  I sat on the grassy knoll for a while and just watched the cars go by on Elm Street, into the triple underpass, at the site where the president slumped.  It was so quiet ... such an insignificant little place, it seemed hard to believe that fifty years earlier ...

A few other people wandered around, for the same obvious reason.  I mean, of all the grass-covered lumps of dirt in the world, this was THE grassy knoll.  If you're going to sit on one and think for a while, this would be the one ... even if absent what had happened it would just be a forgotten patch of grass on the way to a railroad underpass.

I fly home tomorrow.  My life has sort of been on hold since the move, as I have made myself deal with the overwhelming crush of work and of my unwanted possessions in lieu of spending time on LiveJournal and other more pleasant things.  I have eleven boxes to go.

It was funny to sit on the grassy knoll and think about ... eleven boxes.  Talk about even more insignificant ... and it's all that stands between me and my life resuming its normal course.  "I can handle this," I thought, brushing the grass from my trousers as I stood to start the long walk back to my hotel, pausing briefly to look at the tiny historical marker in the grass, down by the street, that marks the spot.

Yeah, I can handle this.

From Amazon.com, under the listing for the Alcohawk personal breath alcohol tester ("meets DOT standards"!):

"Customers who bought this product also bought: The Complete A**hole's Guide to Picking Up Chicks"

Remember kids, don't try this at home.

Yesterday I was walking out of my apartment to head out to dinner with a friend, just minding my own business ... when on the street I saw something I certainly hadn't expected to see.

It was a blue Mercedes-Benz 240D sedan, parked next to the kerb in front of the building next door.  This would have been entirely unexceptional except for its number plate: WERWLF.

"Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm", I thought, "this could be a Fellow Traveller, as it were ... or it could just be a coincidence, one of those 'parallel groups of people who don't know the other group exists' sorts of things.  Whoever this is, he's presumably not here to visit me, so ... hmmmmmmmmmmmmm ..."

Then I headed on my way.

This afternoon I was walking out of my apartment to head out to the bank, just minding my own business ... when parked next to the kerb in front of the building next door I saw a grey Audi A6, number plate PAWPTRL.  Presumably "paw patrol".  Now I had to laugh.

Who are you people and what interesting character lives next door to me?  :)

The unboxing of the new apartment is taking ... a bit longer than I had expected, both because work has been busy and because the volume of stuff that I own has been ... well, a bit horrifying, honestly.  Therefore, it's a good thing that I am finally dealing with this, even if it means that I'll probably have an entire week here of being pretty much anti-social so that I'm not distracted.

Today's target: the plushie boxes.

Plushie boxes are a joy to move.  They are huge and look frightening, but then you pick them up and discover they're light as a feather and are filled with cute doggies.  This makes a pleasant contrast to book boxes, which are small and look harmless ...

Books do have one advantage over plushies, though: books are easier to dust.  When Kay and I were together and we had our dogs, plushies pretty much of necessity lived on high shelves, lest they turn into dog toys (as a few did anyway).  This meant that they gathered dust ... and plushie fur has lots of little staticky plastic fibres that act like perfect dust catchers.  You could probably dust your house with them far more efficiently than with an actual dusting product.

I had made a comment to a friend yesterday that I had all these plushies and no real place to put them all, since a lot of the bookcases that used to be their home had gone to the dump.  "Why not put them on the bed?", he asked as though that should have been perfectly obvious ... and indeed, at my new place the rule of "everything within a metre of the floor belongs to the dog" does not apply.  Not to mention I have a big fat king-sized bed all to myself that is just crying out for a few dozen plushie friends to share it.

But in that case, these suckers are going to get dusted.  How do you dust a plushie?  You hold it out the window and beat it.

I live six storeys up.  Someone down on the ground is going to see me, from that distance, dangling a dog out the window and pounding on his head, and he's going to call the SPCA.  I will be most amused.

And yes, as soon as I'm done with the unboxing and have time for online things again, there will be a picture.  :)

Since I just moved from a fairly large house into a much smaller apartment, I'm taking advantage of this golden opportunity (i.e. necessity) to get rid of a bunch of things.  Today, before I go to the Goodwill store, it's the turn of the unwanted clothing.  This includes my fairly extensive collection of old suits and jackets that I never ever wear.  There are good reasons to wear the jackets (at least) absent the context of a wedding, funeral, or job interview; but alas, I never get around to it.  You know that "fashionable" look where you wear something totally beyond casual, like a t-shirt and jeans, and then throw a jacket on over it to make it all trendy and fabulous?  It just makes me look silly.

Therefore, I should try it again sometime.

However, in the meantime, it's time for some most of these suckers to go.  The jacket that I got back in the mid 1980s that's light blue, a colour that was in fashion for exactly three months and that my mother then picked up for me on sale afterwards at Sears?  OUT!  Will never wear it.  How about this brown one that looks fairly decent aside from the fact that the best word for its particular shade of brown is "loam"?  OUT!  Good gravy, at what point was it ever a good idea to wear anything that is literally the colour of dirt?

Oh right, the 1980s.

Now, even in casual California, there is one very good reason to wear suits and jackets, and that's pockets.  T-shirts almost always have none.  A polo has one if you're lucky.  Jackets have pockets EVERYWHERE.  Two on the outside at the waist, the pen / handkerchief pocket on the outside on the breast, the wallet pocket on the inside ... a suit jacket is like cargo pants for the upper body.  You wear one to formal events, like the theatre, not because you want to look formal, but so that you have someplace to put the tickets and the programme and still be able to hold your drink.

In the 20-odd years that I've owned these jackets, I don't think I've ever emptied the pockets.  Tickets and programmes go in ... nothing comes out.  Now that I'm giving them away and I have to empty the pockets, it's a veritable treasure trove.  Look, here's the programme from my college graduation!  It ended up, amusingly and coincidentally, in the same pocket of the same jacket as the programme from Kay's graduation fifteen years later.  Here, in another pocket, are the invitations from three different weddings, spanning ten years.

Here's a little gilded prayer card with an image of the Virgin Mary from my grandmother's funeral in 1994.

Here's a name tag that I folded up and stuck in a pocket when I was done with it, presumably because I couldn't find a trash can at the time.  Hello, my name was ...

Here's a little silver chair, about two inches long.  A silver chair!  I haven't the slightest idea!  I think I'll keep it, though, just so that I can put it somewhere and laugh at the ludicrousness of a little silver chair that was probably a table favour at some event or other ... probably a wedding where providing such things to the guests was some sort of ancestral tradition that the bride had to do because her great-great-grandmother had done it.  Although the "made in Taiwan" sticker on the underside of the chair sort of gives away its lack of antiquity.

It shows how often I wore that jacket, too, because I would have noticed that weight in there after a while.  You'd think.

So much history in so little clothing that now, honestly, has so little practical value.  They're all either in unwearable condition, or are so far out of date that I couldn't be seen in them ... or they just don't fit any more.  There's one suit in there that I actually like.  The coat is in fine shape and is one of those "timeless" designs, unlike the light blue jacket.  The trousers look good and fit fine.  Even if I'd wear it only rarely, hey, everyone needs an "emergency suit".

I've put on enough muscle on my chest and shoulders that I can't even get the coat on over them and pull my arms forward more than a few inches.  Wow, I was really scrawny once!.  While this means that I do need to go purchase a new suit at some point instead of keeping the one I have, I do have to say this: growing out of your clothing that way feels really really darn good!  The suit goes into the Goodwill bag with a smile.

Now where's a good spot for that chair ...?

As I sit here in my new apartment, which is slowly coming together but which still contains far too many boxes, it occurs to me that "possessions" are a curse.  The joy of things comes not in the owning, but in the searching and acquiring.  That's when you appreciate them.  After that, no matter how wonderful they are, they all degenerate into stuff.

Perhaps the secret is to buy things, decide in advance how long you're going to keep them, and then give them all away.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

You know that delivery of music via physical media is a dead concept when you're sure you own a song on CD, but you purchase it again online because going and finding the bloody CD is just too much trouble.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The first rule of moving house is that things will get lost.  It doesn't seem possible.  You start out with one residence.  You take everything in that residence and put it into boxes.  You take those boxes to the new residence.  You unpack them all ... and a good portion of your things just aren't there any more.  It's like the socks that somehow don't make it out of the dryer but aren't in there afterward, either, leaving you with improbably mismatched pairs.

I am in the middle of moving house.  There are a few things that I knew in advance that I would need to access well before the end of the unboxing process, things that I did not want to risk losing (or finding three weeks from now, which would be the moral equivalent).  To forestall this, I separated them from the rest of my possessions and put them in logical, obvious places ... places so obvious that I knew I would be able to find them readily when I needed them.

Now I can't find any of them, and I have no clue what places would have seemed logical and obvious at the time.

Since the stuff we want to keep we end up losing, and the stuff we don't care much about is the stuff that manages to survive every instinct for disorganisation we can throw at it, the trick to having important things survive a move is obviously to throw them directly into the rubbish bin.  That way they will resurface at the destination in perfect order, neatly stacked on my desk.

I'm sure I'll find those things that I was supposed to take with me on last week's trip to Denver ... any day now ...

I confess to almighty God,

On the ceiling of the bedroom in my new apartment is a ceiling fan.  It's directly above the bed, a very nice position for comfortable sleeping.  On the wall is a switch.  If I push the switch up, the fan comes on.  If I push it down, the fan gradually slows to a stop.  I can lie on the bed and stare up at the ceiling fan and watch it slowly change from an object into a flickering blur.

and to you, my brothers and sisters,

I have been staring at it a lot the last few days.

that I have sinned through my own fault,

He tried so hard to make me happy.  When he was about to graduate from paramedic school, and we had numerous options on where to live, he gave me a list of places and asked me to rank them.  One of the places was the San Francisco Bay Area.  I ranked that one #1 ... and pretty much dismissed the rest, even though some of the others were actually better career options for him.  It was my way or the highway.  He acquiesced, and looked for jobs in the Bay Area.

in my thoughts and in my words,

When it came time to look for a place to live in the Bay Area, he wanted to be up in the mountains where it's pretty and green ... and I wanted to be in the city near more of my friends.  If he found a place that wasn't what I wanted, I would unhesitatingly shoot it down.  There were decent places up in the mountains, but I wasn't willing to give up easy access to the social life that I wanted.  I thought a little bit at the time, "Hey, he was willing to move to the Bay Area for you ... surely you could move to Boulder Creek for him", but the little bits never summed up to an intention, much less an action.  He acquiesced, and found us a house in San Jose.

in what I have done,

I wanted to spend time with my friends.  Some of the time, and with some of those friends, that meant spending time in bed.  We had long had a simple arrangement with regard to that sort of thing: be safe, don't keep any secrets, make sure each of us remained the other's top priority, be respectful about it ... and keep our hearts just for each other, no matter what we did with our bodies.  So why, then, one night when a particular "adventure" was running way behind schedule did I phone him up at 11:00pm and ask him if he could possibly not come home just yet ... you know, just hang out elsewhere and do something, even though he had nothing elsewhere to do ... just so I could get some from someone who wasn't him?  If he were really my top priority, would I have driven him out of his own house so that I could get what I wanted?  That was so disrespectful ... yet he acquiesced.

and in what I have failed to do;

He tried so hard to make me happy.  He gave me everything I wanted.  I never even said thank you.  Did I even honestly appreciate it, or feel any gratitude for the sacrifices to his own life, his own career, his own interests, that he made for me?  Or did I just pursue what I wanted, regardless of what he wanted, always on a quest for "I got mine" and reducing him to just one more thing that I "got"?  Did I love him?  Or was it more that I loved me and loved what he did for me?  Do I need to answer those questions if I find myself even asking them?

and I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin,

I was a selfish little shit.  I took him for granted.  And I gave him no reason to stay with me.  I said I valued him.  I said I loved him.  But did I, or had I let him degenerate in my heart into little more than my trophy husband, my handsome man with the great career and the generous willingness to let me go "be myself" ... oh, look everybody, isn't it wonderful that he and I have been together for thirteen years?  That makes me feel so good!

all the angels and saints,

Pain is a brilliant teacher.  Unfortunately, the lessons it teaches, it always teaches too late.  I drove him away.  I pushed and I pushed, I took and I took, I didn't give him anything in return when it wasn't convenient for me.  I put him in a position where the only way that he could get anything he wanted in life was to leave me ... and he left.  But in all fairness, hadn't I left him long before that where it counts, in my heart?  If I hadn't, I wouldn't have treated him the way I did.  I am getting what I deserve.

and you, my brothers and sisters,

Now I have what I obviously thought I wanted.  I have an independent life where I can do what I want, when I want.  So why do I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling fan, hour after hour?  Why do I look at my new rooms full of my possessions and find it all to be just so much unwanted rubbish?  Why do I lie here and beg him in a tearful whisper that he can't hear to come back to me, even though I know he has no cause, even though I know he has someone now who really does appreciate him and does love him?  Isn't it just one more act of selfishness to want him back because I am in pain, because my new life feels so empty without him?  Yet could it be, perhaps, that I see now that I had what I truly wanted all along ... and I threw it away for nothing?

to pray for me to the Lord, our God.

OK, here's a trick question for y'all, and no fair the Californians butting in and answering it.  Which is more common in the San Francisco Bay Area: earthquakes or thunderstorms?

Earthquakes, of course!  Now this is partially a trick question, because little nearly-imperceptible earthquakes happen all the time all around the Ring of Fire (and hey, it's California ... we have fires, too!).  But even if you count only "real" earthquakes, like the kind that cause your family in New Jersey to pick up the phone and call you and ask if you're OK because they just watched a story about the Big Quake on the morning television news ... earthquakes still predominate.  I've lived in California now for fifteen years.  In that time, I've experienced three quakes that were significant enough that people were getting under furniture.

And I've experienced exactly one thunderstorm that met my criteria for a Real Storm ... which is to say, "Man, this lightning that's striking the ground not very far from me is kinda pretty, but it's very loud and startling and if I stand in the wrong place I'll die."  One!  And let me tell you, you haven't lived until you've been standing under the overhang at a petrol station, filling up your vehicle whilst surrounded by volatile hydrocarbons, and had lightning strike the building next door.

But still, one storm!  Even the rumble of distant thunder is rare enough that I've found myself on more than one occasion waking up in the middle of the night, hearing it, and in my sleep-addled state wondering what blew up.  Thunder?  In California?  The thought didn't even enter my head.

This morning I awakened to find the local Twitterverse all a-twitter (haha!) over the Big Storm last night.  There were 140-character-or-less reports of brilliant lightning displays, window-rattling thunder, persistent inability to sleep, people standing out on their back patios marvelling at this once-in-a-decade performance by Mother Nature.  East Bay, South Bay, everywhere around the Bay ... it wasn't just one little storm cell, but apparently a big line of storms that covered the whole area.  Kay got home from work, and said that in San Leandro the thunder was so intense that it literally rocked the ambulance.

I ... slept ... through ... it.

It was a warm evening!  I had the door from the bedroom to the patio wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide open!  The curtains were doubtless flapping madly, the light show just past them awe-inspiring, the sound cacophonous, resonant with Nature's fury!

Do I just happen to live in the one little part of town that it managed to bypass, or did I really really really need sleep?

You know you're living in California when there's a thunderstorm ... and this is such an occasion that everybody tweets about it instead of just turning on the windscreen wipers.  And I slept through it.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Just sent an E-mail at work that contained this sentence:

"Because this will involve sending Company-confidential data to a third party, I'd like to make sure, before I do that, that that will not cause any issues."

With the exception of "Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas!", I don't recall ever writing a legitimate sentence before that has the same word three times in a row.

</languagegeek>

"Cash is king" ... or so the saying goes, especially in rough times when other assets have fallen in value and/or may be difficult to sell.  The person with cash can swoop in and purchase what he wants at a nice discount.

That's cash in an accounting sense, of course.  Cash in the sense of having a wallet full of paper and a pocket full of metal is also useful, although I would shudder at the thought of using it for any really large transaction ("May I pay for my new car in twenties?").  I do find cash very handy in restaurants, though, because it spares me the routine of throwing my card into a big pile of plastic with a note to put $26 on it ... and then hoping that the waiter actually gets credited for his tip that was incorporated into that number.

So I was surprised to read in the Journal this morning that a high-end New York restaurant has decided that it is not going to accept cash any more.  Cash is too gauche, too déclassé, too passé, for such a fine establishment ... a place where the appetisers alone cost more than the entire bill the last time I ate out.  Almost all of their customers already paid using plastic, and the restaurant is apparently tired of maintaining cash drawers, arranging a daily visit from an armoured car, etc., just for the handful of patrons who still use greenbacks.

It is a trend: the last time I flew to New York, when I wanted to order a drink on the plane, I swiped a card in a slot in the back of the seat in front of me, and the kind steward shortly arrived with my beverage.  No cash.  In fact, they told us up front that they didn't take cash for purchases on board.  The last time I went to McDonald's for a little Big-Mac-ly indulgence, there was a sticker on the cash register that said that they didn't take notes bigger than a twenty, because breaking C-notes tends to give them a crisis later in the day with making change.  But, had I wanted to, I could have paid with plastic, no questions asked.

Cash, in the sense of paper and coin, is increasingly not king.  BUT ... anyone want a free lunch at a very upscale New York restaurant?

Here's the catch: those lovely little words on every note that say, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private".  On board that Virgin America flight, they can tell me that they don't accept cash, because they require payment for purchases before I receive what I have purchased.  At the time of the monetary transaction, there is no debt - nothing has happened yet.  They can tell me that they don't accept paper dollars just as easily (and as legally) as saying that they don't take euros.  If they do take my method of payment, then they owe me a drink ... but at no time did anyone owe anyone else any money.

The McDonald's, similarly, can put a sticker on their cash register saying that they don't take $50 and $100 notes, even though those notes are legal tender, because you pay before you get your food.  Since the money comes first, there is no debt.  Nothing in the Coinage Act requires a business to take cash for services not yet rendered.

I cannot imagine that this nice upscale New York restaurant makes you pay at the counter before they bring your food to the table.  They can say that they don't accept cash.  They can even ask you up front if you intend to pay in cash; and if you say yes, they can show you the door without serving you.  But once they have brought that food to your table and you've stuck a fork in it, there is a debt: you owe them for that food.  They had prices on that menu in dollars, indicating that this was actually a monetary debt (i.e. there was no expectation that you were accepting the food in exchange for your overcoat, or for your labour in washing dishes afterward).  If they refuse to accept cash for a service that has already been rendered and for which there is a monetary debt ... you don't owe them anything.

Do I have the chutzpah actually to try this?  No.  Besides, given the court costs and the like from when they went after my furry little arse and made both of us waste tons of our valuable time for a judge to tell them all about legal tender, it would be cheaper, honestly, just to pay for lunch.

But as a Gedankenexperiment ...  :)