MY Land Line World

As an old fossil who disdains most technology because, well, it's too new for me and will change my old habits (that I like) too much, I am here today to report on one of my favorite old technologies. It's the land line telephone. Remember that? Since I have never had, nor will I ever have a cell phone, the land line is still as useful to me today as it was in the past. That is, I use a phone when I have to, nothing more or less. it is not an amusement, not an addition and  the fewer rings form it I here each day the better.

My nightmare is what will happen to me if I don't die before the land line phone does? Oh well, no need to worry too much about that. I will probably die from shock if the land line passes away before I do. That's because I refuse to enter the insipid, idiotic world of cell phones.

Here's the state of the land line phone in my own small world. I have the two land line phones in my three story house. If I don't reach one before the ring tone stops, I rejoice with the admonition that, "If it was important the person will call again". If not, then I escaped being a Pavlov dog responding to a ring tone. I smile and picture the cell phone addicts who race to their phones with every ring or ping and feel superior in some small way.

Attached to one of my land line phones is an antique you may have heard of. Yep! I have an answering machine on the phone that filters the nuts from the non nuts, the annoying from the essential. I estimate that I do not return at least 60% of the messaged calls. Most of those are advertisements or request to donate money to some organization. As to the donation harassment, the answer machine and the caller ID is a joy to me. When I see "unknown number" displayed or a number that I do not recognize I never pick up my receiver to answer.

The odds are it is either a donation plea (usually from the same organization I donated to recently, because once you give you are on the donation call list forever) or one of the many phone scams those people in Russia, India or some off shore island robot call direct to fool the person on the other end into forking over money.

Some scammers are even so emboldened to leave a message threat. One very common is the Microsoft support scam. In that one, an Indian accented voice with dozens of other Indian voices toning the same spiel in the backgrounds says if you don't let them take over your computer an unknown virus on it will destroy it. The ruse is the phone microsoft people plant a virus on your computer when you allow them access remotely and continue taking money away from you until you finally realize it's fake. I wonder how anyone can be so gullible to succumb to that obvious fraud. But it must work on some people because it's been on going now for many years.

I am  ridiculed by cell addicts every day as to "How can you survive" without a "cell". Very well, thank you. The few times that I am inconvenienced by not having access to a phone in a situation when it would be helpful to have one, I remind myself of how pathetic a cell addict is, how out of touch with life those "in touch" with cell phone people really are. And I say a little prayer that soon, the Microsoft scam crew will connect them and disable their phone...

Coffee Bagel

Ever eat a bagel for breakfast? Well, in this country a lot of people do. I like them once in a while with jam or plain butter or just cream cheese spread on top. A good bagel should be boiled and then baked for that chewy texture that distinguishes bagels from an ordinary bread. Some people are snobby about bagels. They refuse grocery store bagels, any bagel really that is not from a delicatessen or a bagel shop that makes their own bagels. I have some shocking news for them.

I just learned that there is a coffee bagel. It's the Expresso Buzz Bagel made by bagel king, Einstein Bagels. It contains 32 milligrams of caffeine, about a third of what you’ll find in the average cup of coffee. The Expresso Buzz is made with espresso, coffee-cherry flour, and protein derived from cocoa. That sounds like it may taste a bit too much coffee for me. I like coffee with my morning bagel, but not necessarily in the bagel. 

I should wait to try it before judging, but the problem for me is that the best bagels for my taste are the plain ones. That would be the bread product originating in the Jewish communities of Poland, traditionally shaped by hand into the form of a ring from yeasted wheat dough, roughly hand-sized, that is first boiled for a short time in water and then baked. The originators of the bagel didn't flavor them like bakers do today.

Real bagels stay fresher longer than ordinary breads because the boiling gives it an outer sheen and a crunchy, protective crust. Even when it gets a little stale, you can dunk it in coffee or whatever you are drinking to bring it back to life. But bagel snobs don't ant any of that. They won't have any of the endless flavors of bagels either. I tend to agree with the latter. I will never understand, for example, why someone would want a jalapeno bagel. I suspect no Jewish deli today would let that in their store. When I buy bagels from a grocery store I look at the containers with so many flavors- blueberry, cheese, cinnamon raisin and on and on. But I always buy a plain white flour bagel. The trendy food police bagels made with quinoa, spelt or any of the other "healthy" grains never get eaten by me.

Well, that decides it for me. I will skip coffee bagels and all the grains and flavored ones. I'll have a plain bagel with butter for breakfast tomorrow morning. shalom!

Public Rest Room Confusion

I have a new anxiety, thanks to the crazy left wing Obamites who redefined what using a public rest room is supposed to be. My anxiety is in using a public rest room. It's because it is hard to know what the P.C. police define as proper poop and pee etiquette in choosing and using the "right" public bathroom. Forget the days of "Male" and "Female" sign age, pictures of each sex included. Today the public bathroom labels are as hard to decipher as is the Rubic cube. Now those doors have terms like "Non Binary" and "Transgender" for those people from places where kids are bring without a real sex. I think their mom or dad must have given them an imaginary sex to replace the lost real one.

So I am always a little anxious that I am in the right rest room for my sex. But there is reason fro the anxiety, like the time the 50 year old bearded man entered the same rest room as I was in, the one I thought was labeled as "Male". Hmmmm, I thought. I must have read the label wrong and had entered into the bearded, dress wearing rest room instead.  No, I didn't need therapy after that incident, and I even managed a normal pee stream before escaping that mystery rest room. But it added to the common bathroom anxiety syndrome many of us in the U.S are experiencing.  I am developing it thanks to the left wing bathroom Democrats.

After one makes the problematic bathroom selection, the anxiety doesn't end there. Strange things are happening in rest rooms these days. There are the people with cell phones chatting to invisible people while pooping installs. They speak so loudly that escaping their chatter is difficult, and for some reason the normally odd cell phone conversations we are forced to hear in public become even weirder when they are made while the cell nut is sitting on the pot taking a dump (the poo dump, not the dump of their cell abuse on us). Then there are people taking baths in the rest rooms. Maybe they are homeless, but it is unsanitary for everyone to allow it. In the old days there were "rest room attendants' to police such things The attendants would summon police and the bath houses would be closed. But in the age of P. C. everyone is allowed to do whatever they want. Otherwise, we are sexist or racist for saying the now forbidden word- NO.

The there are the "lookers", creatures who stare at the pee-er's love muscle.  It's enough to make most people escape with urine unloaded. There are also the "messy" ones. They throw paper on the floor. They urinate on it for fun. They never flush. They leave water running. Perhaps they never had a mom to teach them common courtesy and cleanliness. maybe they never had moms. They could be space aliens, f given their non human behavior. I think that if they are caught defiling a public rest room, a suitable punishment from a clever judge would be 6 months of bathroom clean-up duty. I am not sure the "messy" would be rehabilitated, but I know the rest of us would have nice rest rooms to use.

My rest room rant is getting smelly. I better do my business, flush and depart.....

Is That The Truth?

Are you as suspicious of what you hear from people today as you were 20 years ago? I am. Truth has been replaced with agenda and lies. I wonder why the change has come so fast. In our world, the idea of absolute truth, something that is true at all times in all places and has relevance for our lives, is about as extinct as the dinosaur. In fact, most people everywhere in the world say there is no such thing as ultimate, or absolute, truth. The media lies, politicians lie, friends lie to friends and strangers, religions lie. It's so rare what Mark Twain once said when he uttered, "When in doubt, tell the truth," may be the truth.

Perhaps the way we communicate today makes lying easier for us. It's surely easier to lie on a social media web site or when talking on a cell phone. Maybe that makes it easier to lie still more when we speak face to face. And the death of religion removes sanctions against lying.  Those who believe in religion may or may not lie more or less. But they surely will hesitate more often to lie and feel guilty more often when they do lie.  Our cold, electronic society is one in which  truth is treated like a fairy tale, an outdated idea or even an insult to human intelligence. We have all become politicians! (I hope I am not Hillary Clinton, the world's greatest liar)

It's hard to know if what we are told is the truth. Trying to figure out if we have been lied to or not is complicated because we may have been told some part of the truth but not all of it. Part truth may be worse than a lie because it is more difficult to recognize and much harder to correct.  And "the truth is" that if we were only told the truth in life we would be more miserable than hearing truth only some of the time. I suspect not many of us could survive or live comfortably in a world of only truth.

We are suspicious of those who claim to tell the truth. And those of us who have been lied to more often, more often distrust that there is truth. That's my conclusion, but I am not sure it is the truth...

The Art Of The Goof-Off

I have always preferred goofing off to obligations. You know what goofing off is, because we all do it from time to time. It's the art (good goof offs are true artists) of engaging in recreation or an idle pastime while obligations of work or society are neglected. That's a fancy way of what your mom and dad you so say about you when they subtly declared, "sometimes I think you are a bum." But then when wasting time and getting away with it we feel we are winning the game of life. Under those circumstances being called a bum by mom is a badge of honor.

I think we goof off many different ways because our personality guides us to choose which way. There are many traits that also make us goof off in certain ways. When we are old we goof off differently than when we we did when we were young.  An old person might goof off by taking a number of naps during the day while a young person may goof off in a bar at 3 am. There is no way they will reverse roles at their age because the body, mind and soul won't allow it.

I always thought an employer could better choose from applicants for jobs by asking about how the applicants goof off. Forget those phony resumes' and recommendations.  If you were an employer, for instance, would you hire the brilliant Harvard grad with pristine job skills and experience instead of the average slob, of the Harvard goof off played with his cell phone all day (probably at work too)? Not I. Give me the average goof off who wastes his time more productively than showing an addiction to a cell phone device.

Our environment largely determines how we goof off. If we are busy with real obligations we will goof off much less and do it productively. The educated goof off reading too much. The product of an environment in which education was not stressed goof off too much watching TV or playing video games. People who have responsibilities to children or others who need help goof off the least. 

Hollywood air heads goof off the most, but they are good at pretending self-importance and involvement.  One would think the wealthy goof off more, but they probably don't because to become wealthy often requires hard work and little distraction. But then people who are wealthy through the lottery or inheritance seem to especially goof off prone.

The gig question is whether we can be happy if we don't goof off at least a moderate amount of time. Probably not. People who are driven and have all of their day committed to obligations are often too stressed to be happy. That type never retires from work because all they want to do is work themselves to death. I think that I have written enough about this because t's taking away too much of my goof off time!

Men, The Most Hated Humans

Just a brief observation today about something I see growing and growing. It's the negative characterization of males, mostly by the media, but  in all aspects of society. Today's male, minorities excluded since minorities are one of the protected groups the politically correct see as perfect humans,  is portrayed as a pretty awful human. I think that white males may be the most hated human affiliation since the German Nazi party of Hitler's day (ironic that those people were mostly white males too). To often the lie is told that if one is male he must be a “skirt chaser,” or “metro-sexuals” or a “macho men”, or  a hater and abuser of women. It's just not true that men are made in the image of Harvey Weinstein.

To make those kinds of charges against women today would be  an invitation for disaster. Yet, society seems to like to have a villain, and in the west white males are the chosen ones. It is probably because in former times white males dominated this society and excluded others legally or culturally. They discriminated against women, but now most discrimination against women is by other women or imagined discrimination. The crazy idea that there is a war on women in the United States, but that the nuts claiming that we westerners are fighting women also they love Muslims and their women hating men is bizarre until one realizes nothing makes sense in the politically correct world. The real war on women is in the Mid East, not in modern western society.

How many times in the media, for example, do you see men portrayed as good-hearted, hard-working and self sacrificing men who are just trying to take care of their friends and families? Not often, and if so the character pegged that way is an outlier, a freak.  Feminists often  paint men as evil and anti women. We are seen as "oppressors" I can understand that false images from feminists because they hate men and want to use them as a scape goat whenever it is convenient. But normal sensible women should not create false images of men. Perhaps the average women today has been brainwashed by the "I hate men" agenda.

Men have been perceived as the head of the household and women were mainly housewives. Nowadays the differences between male and female roles are smaller, however the mass mediums still perpetuates traditional gender stereotypes. The fact that they can get away with that shows that men may have a farther way to go to reaching equality than do women.

Corrupt Information Mediums

It's time for another rant!!! I think I am ready to make a pronouncement. A few years ago as I noticed the media was becoming an organ for the left, part of the Democratic part, I thought to myself, "At what point will the newspapers and other mediums become opinion pieces rather than impartial vehicles of news to the ignorant masses" (that's you and me)? I decided if reading the front page of a random newspaper and finding that more than 50% of the articles are opinion that the newspaper is a partisan opinion sheet. Bad news...we are at that point.

Here's a few examples  from U.S.A. Today of how a newspaper gives its opinion in the form of an alleged impartial news story; "President Trump's a liar; Now what?", "Why you shouldn't expect much from Social Security", "James Comey testimony a disaster for Trump",  "Trump supporters concoct their own Comey story". And those a few headlines. If you read the content of those and other more harmlessly entitled articles you'll read opinion after opinion, often in the form of an assumed truth. There often is a false premise on which the story is based, but that premise is assumed to be true by the author of the article.

If you look at the headlines I mentioned in the paragraph above they all are the trendy "I hate Trump and I'll lie about him to convince you to be mindlessly trendy too" category.  Any issue the liberals embrace and define (often falsely) will be so defined by the media in a shameless attempt to win favor. The public be damned! That seems to be the motto of much of the public mediums today. They basically have decided what truth is and will not allow the real truth to surface in their publications in an objective way. The biases the media has are much bigger than even to promote liberalism. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover and keeping us in a confused or false state.

The media can be accessed from almost anywhere. In several ways it's lodged itself in American culture and replaced what once were common outlets of information. Television and printed words were at one time the only ways of receiving news.  Now a lunatic in pajamas can spew falsehood and hate on a social media site and be seen by more people in a day than the total number of people who read a daily newspaper in a year's time. The development of the endless Internet mixed sources of information and the expanding accessibility of unchecked information raises a  question; What is the quality of the information we are getting?  The answer is that most of it is damaging to truth and or it is an attempt to control the minds of the masses.

With cell phones committing a virtual lobotomy on many humans today it's unlikely many people will notice or understand how they are being manipulated by the communication they love so much.That is the ultimate irony.