Category Archives: Generic Rant

Alternative White Flags

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Everyone knows the white flag is the universal sign of surrender. It means to give up, to admit to having no chance of overcoming the opposition and resigning to a fate of defeat. But did you know there are other signs that have been used over the ages? When I was a kid, we often relied on one of the following banalities when faced with a verbal assault:

I know you are but what am I?

I’m like a mirror, you’re like glue. It bounces off me and sticks to you.

No one would pull one of those chestnuts out today, right? We’ve come a long way. Or have we?

This topic came to mind this week when two people passed me on a bike path doing about 25 MPH on an e-bike without even signalling their approach, a serious breach of bike path safety etiquette. If you’re unfamiliar with e-bikes… where the heck have you been?? They are bikes with electric assist motors to augment pedaling, capable of speeds up to nearly 30 MPH. They’re typically used by one of two classes of people: older folks who want to keep riding but need a little extra boost from time to time (God bless’em; that could very well be me some day) or sociopathic Peter Fonda wannabes who think they’re filming a reboot of “Easy Rider”. My passing duo were clearly of the latter variety.

The guy I was riding with was as perturbed as I was by these clowns. He called to them as they passed, “Slow down!”, a reasonable request, given that they passed within inches of us at the speed of well-tuned Yugo. One of the pair retorted over his rapidly receding shoulder, “Shut Up!”

A flagrant white flag.

We were actually lucky in this case. The usual comeback muttered by such mental midgets is the clever (and ubiquitous) rejoinder, “f*** you” accompanied by a brazen display of the middle finger. These are people who probably didn’t fare too well on their high school debate teams. Although in today’s world of uncivil discourse, they’d rock in a Republican presidential debate.

When I was protesting the Vietnam war (yes, I’m that old) I was regularly attacked with a white flag that still unfurls at regular intervals today: “Commie!” Tell someone we should even consider Medicare for all, some way of reducing the wealth gap, or trying to limit the number of mass shootings in this country to something less than, oh, over one every day, and you’re bound to hear that white flag still flapping in the breeze, a breeze driven by the hot air coming from people who are happy with the completely unworkable and unsustainable status quo.

Basically, name calling of any kind is the white flag of choice for anyone with no intellectual resources or valid arguments at his disposal. Without even knowing it, they’re saying, “I give up. You win. You’re right. But I’m not leaving this fight without letting loose one last volley of invectives (although he’s unlikely to know what “invective” means) worthy of a poorly educated middle-schooler.”

There are lots more white flags out there. It’s good to be aware of them so we don’t waste our efforts trying to communicate logically with those who go into a battle of wits unarmed.

Long may the white flag fly!

I’m Being Followed By a MoonShadow

Posted on by under blog snax, Generic Rant

A BlogSnax© post

Yusuf Islam, a.k.a. Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Steven Demetre Georgiou—obviously a man with serious identity issues—created some of the most memorable music from the soundtrack of my life. His masterpiece, IMHO, is the sensational “Teaser and the Firecat”. So enamored was I of this collection that the LP cover once adorned the entire wall of my bedroom in my younger days, reproduced there in precise detail by myself and some friends. Here’s a photo of the actual wall:*

The song came to me today as I rode my bike along a puddled post-rainstorm bike path. Lines from the song shook me like never before:

If I ever lose my hands...
If I ever lose my eyes...
If I ever lose my legs...
If I ever lose my mouth...

Then the song’s name echoed in my brain, slipping into and filling my heart.

MoonShadow

The initials of the two components of this fabricated portmanteau are MS, which can also stand for, among many other lesser things, multiple sclerosis, an often crippling disease of the central nervous system that can cause a victim to, in essence:

Lose her hands.

Lose her eyes.

Lose her legs.

Lose her mouth.

I’ve always adored the song. It’s even more meaningful to me now. It turns out that the artist who at the time went by the name “Cat Stevens” was inspired to write it when he literally saw his shadow cast by the moon. When we listen to music, it becomes our own as much as to its original creator. I’ve decided this will always be mine as an MS encouragement.

I really am being followed by a MoonShadow.

* It took weeks to get the expression on Teaser’s face just right, eventually requiring the assistance of a Genuine Artist. Compare it to the original. It’s a very good knockoff.

We did this without the permission of Cat/Yusuf, who painted the original cover. He never chased us down for residuals. I wish he had. I would have thanked him for what all his wonderful music meant (and still means) to me. Sadly, this treasure has long since been painted over. 😦

Missed OCD connection

Posted on by under blog snax, Generic Rant

A BlogSnax© post

I’m a consolidator. When I see two or more things that can be combined into one, or at least that match well enough to belong with each other, I have to put them together. It’s a symptom of my low-level, high-functioning OCD.

A mess waiting to be consolidated

A while back, I was in the parking lot of my local supermarket. My shopping was complete and my car was loaded so I proceeded to perform one of my favorite pastimes: consolidating the shopping carts in the cart corral. Usually, thoughtless shoppers have shoved them in there any which way but loose, all randomly askew, taunting me, challenging me. They’re begging to be organized, i.e. consolidated. The juices start to flow and I get to work.

As I’m blissfully carrying out the task, a guy comes up to me and says, “Isn’t that the best part of going to the grocery store?”

He gets it!! He’s a kindred spirit, as Anne Shirley would call him. I was too stunned to say anything. How I wish I’d had the presence of mind to invite him back to the house to have some snacks and share exciting tales of consolidation past!

If that was you, drop me a line and let me know what you’ve been consolidating lately.

What’s Poor?

Posted on by under blog snax, Books, Generic Rant, Movies

A BlogSnax© post

I had an interesting experience recently. I use the term “interesting” against my better judgment because, as Ben points out in “Captain Fantastic”, it’s a non-word. I’m simply at a loss regarding how else to describe it. I’ll tell you and you can come up with your own assessment.

I was reading a picture book I’d written to a class of kindergartners. The book, “The Little Red Boat Came Back”, is about a little girl living in Haiti. Her mother leaves to seek out a new home for them. Introducing the book and its topic, I gave a short spiel about Haiti, a topic about which I’m passionate. I told the kids that the inhabitants of Haiti, which is on an island not far from the US, are very poor.

At that point, one child hesitantly raised his hand. Delighted that this child was sufficiently engaged to ask a question, I stopped my presentation to hear his query. To my amazement, he asked,

“What’s poor?”

I was dumbfounded. Maybe my expectations were too high but I assumed, even at that tender age, the concept of poverty would be understood. I gave as good an answer to his sincere and reasonable question as I could muster at the time but, in retrospect, I think I could have done better.

I’m not sure what the child’s puzzlement says about him, his upbringing, his community (an affluent one), his school, or our society but I was troubled at the time and I remain so.

I can’t even tell you why.

Life by Subscription

Posted on by under Generic Rant

It started with TV. It used to be free. Before we knew what hit us, we were paying a monthly subscription for cable. We got all those channels and, as the old joke went, nothing was on worth watching. Then along came streaming. Now we’re paying for TV… one channel at a time… one month at a time. Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, YouTube, … The list goes on and on. And on and on, etc.

There’s subscription radio (Sirius), subscription software (Quicken, Adobe, and about a million others), even subscription cars. Yup, subscription cars.

And all this is in addition to your monthly (or weekly or annual) fees for luxuries like water, sewer, heat, electricity, internet, phones, AAA, rent, mortgage, insurance (all sorts of insurance), taxes (all sorts of taxes), loans, newspapers and magazines (online or old school hard copy), gyms, clubs… They just keep adding up, don’t they? And we forget we even signed up for half of them in the first place. The folks we’re paying count on it. It’s their business model.

Now add one more subscription to the list:

Your life.

Look at the pharmaceutical ads on TV. Nearly every single one of them is for a maintenance drug, one you’ll have to take every day and pay for every month for the rest of your life for the privilege of healthy living.* Don’t hold your breath waiting for any of those conditions to be cured. There’s no money in that.** Not when they have you on their subscription plan.

Don’t forget to renew those subscriptions.

* That is, if you survive the 750 side effects listed in the ads, most of which are more serious than the condition they’re treating.

** No, sir. As one Wall Street analyst warned, curing patients is not a sustainable business model. Read it for yourself here.

Shameless Promotion Department: Cycling to Crush MS

Posted on by under blog snax, Generic Rant

This is my annual plea for support of my bike ride to raise funds for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. The ride is on Martha’s Vineyard on April 29.

Read about the ride here.

Read about our team here.

Read my page and support me here.

That’s all for today. You may now return to your regularly scheduled life.

Some of the Vineyard Square Wheelers ready for action.

Inertia kills

Posted on by under blog snax, Generic Rant

A BlogSnax© post

The sentence that constitutes the title of this post casually left my mouth a couple of weeks ago. When I made this statement, I and the person I was speaking with paused for a moment. Although I hadn’t given the idea much thought beforehand, we both gave it a lot of thought and discussion after the fact. We decided there’s more to it than meets the eye… or ear. I believe with all my heart that it’s true in most, if not all, areas.

In business.

In the arts.

In government.

In faith.

In multiple sclerosis.

In life.

Inertia kills.

We must keep moving and learning and growing.

Obsolete stuff, obsolete language

Posted on by under blog snax, Generic Rant

A BlogSnax© post

In this era of increasingly rapid acceleration of technological innovation, stuff becomes obsolete all the time. I expound on the phenomenon in this post. However, it’s important to note that these changes have a ripple effect on our language. I’ve been thinking about all the expressions I use that are as out-of-date and meaningless as the items they reference.

Here are a few. Let me know if you think of others.

  • Bankers hours – Banks used to be open from 9-3. Now they’re online 24×7. I sure hope you don’t keep them hours!
  • Carter’s pills – This is a real oldie-moldie, before my time, even. The saying went, “I’ve got more of <whatever> than Carter has pills.”
  • Bigger than a breadbox – The breadbox is a useless object today and perhaps always was. Is something “bigger than a breadbox”? It’s hard to say, given that they come in different sizes. When playing 10 questions, what question should we ask now? “Is it bigger than an iPhone?”
  • Through the wringer – Again, this predates me. People haven’t used clothes dryers with wringers for many decades. Yet, you can still buy them.
  • Hang up – We don’t “hang up” anymore but the phrase persists because the cell phone has no corresponding function that also gets the message across. “Click the little red button” doesn’t have the same finality.
  • Ring off the hook – Much to our loss, phones don’t ring, nor do they have hooks.
  • Clockwise – I claim this phrase is in its death throes. It will be meaningless to future generations as analog clocks go the way of all flesh… and technology.

The list goes on and on. They won’t completely die until we do. I’ll still be “taping” shows just as my father never stopped exhorting us to “turn off the gas” long after my family switched to an electric stove.

William Goldman was an optimist

Posted on by under Generic Rant, Movies

One of my favorite quotes is from one of my favorite screenwriters. William Goldman, who wrote such brilliant scripts as “The Princess Bride”, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, and “All the President’s Men”, among others, once summed up his opinion about the state of affairs in the film business by saying:

Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

He was talking about Hollywood’s ability (or inability) to predict which movies would be hits and which bombs. His wisdom has proven accurate over the years.* Supposedly sure things with well known commodities as subject matter and bankable stars have soiled the proverbial bed. (Think “Jungle Cruise”, for just one instance.) There are several every year, just as there are several surprise hits. All this in spite of the focus groups, market research, and billions spent on advertising.

Let me suggest that Mr. Goldman, as much as I respect him and his acerbic opinions, was an optimist by limiting his comments to the film industry. Here are a few more fields where his insight applies just as well:

  • Medicine
  • Sports
  • Politics
  • Economics
  • Publishing
  • Weather forecasting
  • Religion
  • The list goes on and on…

Go ahead. Check “predictions” about what college quarterback will be a star. (Tom Brady? No way! That’s why he was drafted in the sixth round.) Ask ten economists how to solve some financial crisis and you’ll get a dozen plans. You can’t even get doctors to agree on whether a patient has multiple sclerosis, never mind how it will progress. (They don’t even know what it is.)

Even a field such as technology where there a lot of smart people (although I spent my professional career in high-tech, I wasn’t one of them) has had its share of gaffes. Check out this curiously entertaining list. The folks making those predictions were no slouches but they still got it wrong.

This is why as a child of the 60’s (okay, Boomer) I still abide by the motto, “Question Authority”. Especially in medicine. Especially in neurology. Especially in multiple sclerosis.

Your mileage may vary.

But probably not.

*With the possible exception of the pre-Disney Pixar, which produced hit after hit after hit… etc.

[Goldman photo by Bernard Gotfryd, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

Ultimate Christmas time-saver!

Posted on by under Generic Rant, Movies

Like many of you out there, I’m addicted to Hallmark-style Christmas romance movies. They’re awfully acted, wretchedly written, dreadfully directed Christmas-cookie-cutter calamities. Yet, for reasons I can’t identify, I watch them anyway. (Admit it, you watch them, too.) I already wrote about my addiction in a post from a few years ago.

Other than “A Christmas Kiss”, the “Citizen Kane” of Christmas romance movies (from a non-Hallmark source, more recently and inexplicably renamed “A Kiss for Christmas”) they are a complete and total waste of time during a season when time is at a premium. We’re fortunate they’re all almost exactly only 90 minutes long or some people might never leave the house for the whole month of December.

This year, however, I’ve come up with the perfect time saver for addicts like me. As a public service, I’m passing along my findings to you, no charge. (I know, that kind of selfless anti-capitalist behavior isn’t in the modern Christmas spirit.) First, I found the following video at my local library: a collection of nine of these dogs on three DVDs in a single package.

Now here’s the tricky part. Hook up your DVD player(s) so they can read and play all nine movies at the same time! (How? You’ll have to work it out. Hey, I gave you the idea; I can’t do everything for you!) Once that’s all set, sit down and watch all nine movies in parallel. You just watched 810 minutes of miserable movies in 90 minutes, a time savings of 12 hours!

When I did this, other than a few scenes where characters seemed to have multiple shadows and the colors were a little funky, you can’t tell you’re watching multiple movies. That’s because, in reality, you aren’t! They really are all the same movie!*

There. My Christmas gift to you. You’re welcome.

*Seriously, two of the movies had the same actor as the male protagonist with the same irritating personality in the same job: a workaholic advertising executive. I’ll admit to giving up after that revelation. That’s another approach to the problem: go cold (Christmas) turkey.