Archive for the 'Personal Narrative' Category

I just picked up a $15 rice cooker at the same store where I once bought a very fine $8 toaster. Do I know value or what. But here is the thing. A rice cooker is passive — you put in the rice and water and turn it on and it does the rest. Do you even have to turn it off? I don’t think so. It just sits there, stewing. Sort of female-like. The cooked rice stimulates one’s appetite. It also takes a long time to get ready in the evening. Tradeoffs.

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When I started out with computers it was all Apple. We had Apple II machines and I remember the “green screens” (and then an “ochre” screen). It was quite exciting to have 2 disk drives, back in the day when you stored your programs on disk rather than on a hard drive in the machine. My father had a background in computing from the earliest days and was happy to invest in computers when hardly anyone else I knew had one and this helped me to get exposure which has been a big help in my career. The most exciting games were Choplifter which was great with the joystick (thanks to Wikipedia for helping me with all these memories), Castle Wolfenstein which startled me when the guards shouted at you, and of course the epic Wizardry game for which I have the cover sheet of the rules manual right here.

In college I had an IBM PC XT. This machine was also state of the art for the day and its casing was some sort of nearly industrial metal that you could run over with a truck. By then we had started to move on to 3.5″ disks which seemed very futuristic when compared to a 5.2″ floppy. I remember actually moving this computer around which was not simple because it was the opposite of portable.

At work we had “luggable” machines which were compacs. I am not sure which version we had it may have looked like this I do remember that it was 1) very heavy 2) if I lost it I’d probably be fired 3) it had an eerie screen color that was described as amber.

Over the years I ended up in the Windows world because this was the tool for business and in various jobs you had to program on and work with Windows laptops and desktops.  Given that, it made sense to just stay in the Windows world for my home PC’s of which I’ve had many but are quite boring so I will spare you that update.
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(With apologies to the Obama perpetual re-election campaign. Other people have had a go at this concept – I think The Life of Brian is one of the funniest, but I wanted to have a go at this myself. )

3 Years Old – Under President Eisenhower, Celia stays home with her younger brother, as her full-time work-at-home Mom helps her get ready for school by reading aloud to her, supervising her playtime and providing a secure home environment. She will join thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.

17 Years Old – Under President Nixon, Celia takes the SAT and is on track to begin applying for college … which college program includes two years at a local junior college capped by two years at a state university – a public university system that the taxes paid by Celia’s parents over the years have subsidized. The public high school which Celia attends is in a working-class suburb, but offers academically enriched courses for those students who qualify for them.
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A few blocks up the road from where I live there was an estate sale last weekend.

The deal with these for those who don’t know, is that you hire a company to advertise and create interest in the sale, come into a house, tag everything up with prices and try to liquidate the stuff. In exchange, the company gets a cut, of course. This particular estate sale was very well attended.

The road that I live on had cars parked all along it for the majority of the time that the sale was open. I think that more people have taken up this type of thing as a hobby. I can certainly see the appeal of getting something for cheap and re-selling it on Ebay or Craigslist or wherever. And most (all?) of these transactions, I would assume, go under the radar of the tax man.

This particular house was of some interest to me since it was the Frau Becker’s house. I had a passing acquaintance with Frau Becker – she always had a little dog of some sort and she walked it in the neighborhood. When I was outside doing yard work or whatever, we always had a little light conversation. A nice lady. I asked my wife about the sale and assumed she had moved away. My wife told me that Frau Becker died a few years ago from ovarian cancer. Sad news, that. I suppose the husband finally died too, and that was the reason for the sale.

While I wasn’t close to Frau Becker, I knew her. So yesterday when I sauntered down to the sale to see what was left, it was sort of like seeing part of her that I didn’t know about.

So many chemicals and lubricants. There was a nice, barely used lathe in the basement that they were selling “dutch auction” style.

Lots of airline glassware. The Frau flew first class back and forth from the homeland, it appears. And kept the glassware. Or do you get that for free up in the front of the plane?

She kept sewing kits from all over the place. You know, the little free ones that you get in hotels? I imagine the Frau came from a depression time where you kept pretty much everything you could.

Matchbooks.

Maps from every country of Europe.

A mass of costume jewelry here, a pile of magazines there. I imagine the good jewelry was sold elsewhere by the family.

Lots of old books – in German. Those don’t do me any good.

Unwritten post cards.

An old HP laptop battery.

The dresser where Frau Becker used to keep her clothes. The dressers were quite nice but I didn’t dare bring home a piece of furniture without the express written consent of my secretary of interior decorating (i.e. the wife).

It was an interesting half hour that I spent in Frau Becker’s home. I had never attended a sale like this and it was a neat feeling to be able (yea, encouraged) to rifle through someone’s personal effects. Since I knew the Frau, I was a bit creeped out, but not too much.

I may attend a sale like this in the future. I wonder if I will think about the deceased the next time. I am sure I will – that is the historian in me.

I was reminded of a great lesson. In the end, it is all crap that you can’t take with you. It was good for me to get that reminder.

Cross Posted at LITGM.

I thought that, since I described my daughter as beautiful, I should provide some evidence.

Here she is with her mother.

That’s Arizona behind them.

Lest I slight my other daughter, here is Claire with the Rosetta stone a few years ago.

I have one more but no recent photo. She’s the FBI agent and doesn’t like photos. She has been trying to recruit Claire, who speaks Arabic, for years.

It would seem that once there is a TV reality show about something than you can assume that it’s gone mainstream enough that the denizens of the mainstream media world are interested. So it seems to have happened with ‘prepping’ – that is, being prepared for the zombie apocalypse with a garage or a bunker full of shelf-stable and dried foods, a water purification system and a couple of cases of munitions. Meh … a lot of people went nutso over this just before New Years’ Day 2000, and there always has been a lunatic fringe … but then ensuring that you have a plentiful supply of food, drink and supplies on hand used to be pretty mainstream, actually. It was called ‘getting ready for winter’ in the 19th century, especially if you lived on a homestead half a day’s journey from the nearest general store. It certainly has been a requirement for LDS church members, as I discovered when I lived in Utah. It seemed pretty sensible for me, actually – having an emergency stash of food.

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About ninety minutes ago. Two guys are talking. I walk up and join them.

First Guy: …all politicians are liars. All of them. Mitt Romney is the worst liar. Everything he says is a lie.

Me: You voted for Obama, didn’t you?

First Guy: Yes, I did.

Me: He’s the biggest liar of them all.

First Guy: No he isn’t. George W. Bush is.

Me: Excuse me, I need to get to my parking meter before it expires…

Popular joke in the halls

Q: What do you call Call of Duty in Pakistan?

A: Sims.

I think this generation hasn’t quite internalized multi-culti.

A long time ago I decided to make an effort to look my best. Conventional wisdom said guys get better haircuts at female hair shops because the standards are higher. (Actually the prices are higher because getting your man-hair cut at a chick place is like taking your Camry to the Rolls Royce dealer for an oil change. Also some female barbers hairdressers give high-maintenance haircuts that look good when you are all teased and pouffed up as you leave the shop but require gels and blow-dryers to maintain the look. But I digress.) Anyway I started getting my haircuts at places that called themselves salons.

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Americans in the nineteenth century mapped the wilderness without – from 1803’s Louisiana Purchase to 1848, the continental United States was filled in. But they were as interested in the voice within, defining the self. The most requested lecture by Frederick Douglass was “Self Made Men”. In his Making the American Self, David Walker Howe contends that “Frederick Douglass was arguably the most thoroughly self-constructed person in the whole nineteenth century. He not only made his own identity, he made his own legend. . . Self-definition was a life-long process” (149). That process is the subject of his Narrative (Monadnock version) (Narrative), which is structured both in style and content by his early reading.

I’ve long wondered how welcome his vision would be in some school rooms – a sturdy self-reliance that has more echoes of Victoria than of Emerson. I love teaching its round sentences, noting its tight arguments, its specific details of slave life. Most of all, though, I teach it as an explicit and powerful “coming to consciousness.” He traces a path many autobiographers take but few as introspectively. And I find his values attractive – consciousness reached through reading, culture as aid. His growth is classic – a youth finds himself (and his relation to certain traditional values) in the city; he has much more in common with Franklin than Rousseau.

Well, Kevin Williamson describes what happened in one school: Jada Williams, an eighth grader at a public school in Rochester, New York read Douglass. He apparently had some of the same effect on her that Sheridan’s speeches had well over a century before on the young Douglass:

Coming across the famous passage in which Douglass quotes the slavemaster Auld, Miss Williams was startled by the words: “If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there will be no keeping him. It will forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” The situation seemed to her familiar, and[she then wrote] her essay . . . a blistering indictment of the failures of the largely white faculty of her school: ‘When I find myself sitting in a crowded classroom where no real instruction is taking place I can say history does repeat itself.’

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Many people canoe and kayak in the Florida Everglades’ extensive inland waterways, which are beautiful, full of interesting plants and animals and easily accessible. I couldn’t refuse an invitation to join friends for a day trip down the Turner River in the Big Cypress area. My friends arranged for me to borrow a kayak but its owner backed out of the trip at the last minute. Fortunately, the guy who organized the trip offered me the use of a kayak that he owns.

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Brief Note: So, I’m grading intro to lit papers. I don’t mind so much because the class is unusually good this semester and the books they chose are ones that interest me – as well as interest them. One of my students has been, in my opinion, led astray by the famous Achebe essay that simplifies Conrad. He is eating it up – in fact, his conclusion is that the Bible’s message (and I guess Achebe’s and what Conrad’s should have been) is that we should never judge anyone else. But in the midst of the paper is this interesting observation: “As most people would agree, he who has the gold makes the rules, and so wealthier nations are looking at having the correct ideas of culture because they are thriving more than other cultures. I think the line is drawn between people that are in pursuit of money, power, and sex versus people in pursuit of survival.”

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The 2012 Chicago Zine Fest is fast approaching. March 9-10 is the weekend for small press, self-published, and independent publishers to show us their stuff. Quimby’s Bookstore, Silver Tongue, 826CHI, Renegade Handmade, and DIYCHI are sponsoring this year’s festival of readings, exhibitions, and workshops.
 
Small press and self-publishing have become increasingly popular amongst authors of all kinds. Let’s face it: getting published by a large company isn’t exactly the easiest feat to achieve. Perhaps it’s rightfully so that writers and artists take matters into their own hands without the scary middle man. While large chains like Border’s and Barnes & Noble have been disappearing rapidly, the independent publishers and their creative authors have done a great service to our local bookstores who are very proud to carry their unique items on their shelves.

– Chicagoist

I always have plans to do “arty” things around the city and then flake out at the last minute. Maybe I’ll make this one. Or maybe not. Or maybe I will. I swear, sometimes I’m like Polly in Along Came Polly. Truth be told, I am one-half Reuben Feffer, one-half Polly Prince.

I haven’t been blogging much lately because it’s been a strange few weeks. Last week really took the cake. I had a credit card number lifted, a minor fender bender, and then got called in for a follow-up mammogram which turned out, thankfully, to be nothing. Awaiting the results while rain blurred the great glass panes of one wall of the waiting room, I thought, “maybe I should do more arty things around the city.” Enough with Reuben, it’s time to be a little Polly.

As I was working over a hot computer this afternoon, with the local classical music station on, I heard a reader for this little excursion. Oh, my – I wondered if Texas Public Radio just wants us to get a good look at what happens when a prosperous state undergoes a revolution of the proletariat, and have received a full ration of social justice, as well as management by the modern version of the philosopher kings … yep, get a good long hard look at the itinerary. It includes a stop at the Bay of Pigs Museum. Lots of lovely pre-revolution buildings – at least, that is what the TPR website page about the tour displays.
Gee, I guess they couldn’t wrangle a tour to Syria – I gather that it’s lovely, this time of year. Or maybe to another civil-rights hellhole like Burma, or Iran; so many lovely historic buildings and pleasing vistas, for the delectation of the culturally-sensitive and well-heeled visitors. I am just gob-smacked by this – and the timing for this particular tour offering, as well as the community that it has been offered to. San Antonio is a fairly conservative town, full of former military – and many of whom are sponsors and contributors to public radio – or at least, we were, back in the day.
I used to work at this place, as a part-time announcer; until they decided to let all the local part-timers go, and manage the station with a combination of full-time professionals and automation. I used to think that TPR was one of those intersections where a lot of different circles in San Antonio intersected. Now, my daughter is wondering – Did Sean Penn and Michael Moore go halfsies on corporate-sponsoring Texas Public Radio?

We lived in Athens for nearly three years, my daughter and I. She was only three years and a few months old, when we arrived there, and just short of kindergarten when we left. This is the place that she remembers clearly as a child. I was assigned to the base at Hellenikon, which was merely an acre-wide strip between Vouligmeni Boulevard, and the airport flight line, wedged in between a similar strip which was a Greek Air Force facility, and a couple of blocks of warehouse and semi-industrial facilities of the sort which cluster in the vicinity of busy urban airports. Once – at the end of WWII, or so I was told by people who remembered that far back – the airfield had been away out in hell and gone in the wild and rolling scrub-brush country, south of the city. One very elderly American retiree recalled that the airfield was so far from the city that he was advised to carry a pistol for self-defense purposes, when he had reason to venture out that far from the American Embassy.
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Most of the time, the farther Left I look on the continuum of political opinions, the more I see people who do not reason well or are ignorant about history. Maybe I am overgeneralizing from my own experience. Most of the conservatives and libertarians I meet seem to have coherent worldviews even if I don’t always agree with them. A much larger fraction of the leftists I meet seem to have incoherent worldviews in which issues that I see as related exist as unconnected islands, or in which events that I see as consistent with spontaneous order and feedback mechanisms are seen as manifestations of conspiracy.

Perhaps the “Screwed Generation” would have benefited from better education. Perhaps they will learn from experience.

The topic of DSLR camera lenses will be esoteric for most readers here. However, it won’t go out of date and will remain on this blog for future reference by Chicagoboyz readers and parachutists from Google.

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[Bumped. I need 12 more likes. Many thanks to everyone who already clicked my button, if you will.]

Having cooled off after my last attempt to set up a FB page I have reactivated my account (because nothing is ever forgotten at Facebook) and am ready to give it another go. If you have a FB account I’d be grateful if you could click my Like button. I need 25 likes so that I can change my URL.

Thanks again.

UPDATE: If the like box doesn’t appear here, please click here to visit my page.

UPDATE 2: Mission accomplished. Thanks to all who clicked.

The Canon PowerShot S95 is a higher-end small point-and-shoot type camera. Its electronics are supposed to be similar to those in the Canon PowerShot G12. I haven’t used the G12 but my sense is that the main tradeoff between the two cameras is that the G12 is larger and easier to use with better controls and an optical viewfinder, while the S95 is very small. Indeed you can easily carry the S95 in a shirt pocket or trouser pocket (in the latter case I keep my camera in a Ziploc bag to minimize dust intrusion). For me the camera’s small size and reputedly high image quality were the reasons to get it. And it has turned out to be OK for my purposes despite some flaws. (The S95 is currently being supplanted by the similar S100. Most of my comments should apply to both cameras.)

Details follow.

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Ever since I finished the Adelsverein Trilogy, I’ve wanted to have a German language version out there.
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