Somebody Moved my Cheese today:

I entered the Princeton Public Library, intending to find my next audio book. The shelving had been heavily rearranged, and I had a few moments' trouble figuring out where the majority of the audio books were.

I'm so used to entering those audio shelves, and recently I've been listening to books by one author, S. J. Rozan. Seeing my usual target completely obscured, I had a true "somebody moved my cheese" moment.

Fortunately, if I may mix metaphors, I made lemonade from the missing cheese. I recalled that, at my advanced age and with my glasses-enabled eyesight, I tend to select only those audio books that are one shelf below my neckline. The moment I saw the audio books in their new, far different layout, I rejoiced that I would see different books and have a rich choice of new authors.

And next time, I'll know where to find my cheese.

Pointless? (Bucket List):

I do not have a bucket list. Organizing my life to include many specific, planned experiences does not appeal to me. Life is far too short to try to fill it with everything that matters. If I occupied my time fulfilling a list of things to do, who knows what amazing, spontaneous events I might miss? 


 I’ll give you an example.

Someone I know had a medical appointment, and I was happy to chauffeur. And of course, that meant spending time in a waiting room.

I have never experienced anything like this waiting room, not even in department stores. While I sat, relaxed and unhurried, I let my eyes run over an extraordinary tasteful panoply of brassieres and female undergarments in every shape, size, color and pattern. They were a pleasure to view, a spur to the imagination.

I had never heard of such a place. I doubt that this waiting room is on anyone’s bucket list. It's just an out-of-the-way place that's waiting to give assistance, help and pleasure to those lucky enough to find it.

A Vested Interest in Weather Reports:

I try not to rely on weather reports. They are a vague approximation from the viewpoint of any one individual, even when they are fairly accurate for a town or a specific area. I try to be ready for what I see in the skies, and I don't mind when the predictions are wrong.

With one exception. I'm required to read weather reports on my radio program. I don't "predict" more than twenty-four hours in advance. This morning I told my listeners that there would be hardly any breeze tonight. But right now, a steady twenty miles-per-hour wind is rippling through my back yard.

I misinformed my listeners! I feel bad.

An Unpleasant Truth:

The Batman Massacre in Colorado reminds liberals like me how nice it would be if access to guns was better controlled in the United States. It would probably take fifty years to get some control over the enormous quantity of firearms in circulation, but hey, if we had started exercising control in 1950, by now we would have made some progress.

If you are hoping that massacres like this will change the way Americans view gun ownership, forget it. Even liberals have to measure the damage guns do against our country's gold standard: automobile deaths.

We love automobiles in the USA. We drive them everywhere, at a cost of 30,000 deaths per year. (It used to be worse, over 50,000 in 1978.) Gun deaths are harder to record and count, but they seem to be in the same ballpark, with some estimates as low as 30,000 per year.

The bottom line is very simple. Let us Americans do what we want. Collateral damage on the order of 0.01% of our innocent men, women, children and babies is a decent price to pay. Multi-car accidents, where a few dozen cars smash into each other, don't make the national news headlines. Why should a demented shooter?

Cooking tip: stir-frying with Strawberries:

When you stir-fry, whatever the recipe, add a few quartered strawberries, late in the pan-frying. They will add subtlety and depth to the taste.

The "Daily Planet": World's most financially secure newspaper.

Once in a while, The Onion hits one out of the ballpark. Here's their headline: Economically Healthy 'Daily Planet' now most unrealistic part of Superman Universe. And here's a direct quote: "I can play along with Superman using a steel girder to swat someone into outer space, but I just can't get past the idea that The Daily Planet still occupies one of the largest skyscrapers in all of Metropolis and is totally impervious to newsroom layoffs or dwindling home subscriptions," said comics blogger Marc Daigle, ...


Clark Kent: Have you tried Blogging?

Toilet Paper: Feed from the top or the bottom?

People feel very strongly about whether to feed a toilet paper roll from the top or the bottom. Since there's a lot to be said for both ways, one must view the decision as subjective. But:

One of our friends made an objective decision about how to feed his TP. There's an Air Conditioning vent very near the paper roll. If he puts the roll in the "wrong" way, the paper unspools by itself and sails across the room.

Fleeting fame ...

Everybody talks about the weather; hardly anybody talks about the weatherman (or woman).

But check out this one.

Every single web page should be dated!

Every web page should have information on it about when it was created, and when it was last modified. Pages that are generated from databases should indicate how old the data is. To some extent, browsers could enforce this rule. Why don't they?

How often do you check out a review on a web page, or instructions on how to do something, without knowing whether it was posted a month or six years ago? There ought to be a law.

Do you think that food is Organic?

The New York Times has a good article on the "oversizing" of the Organic food business. Big Food companies have discovered that you can price organic food products much higher than their conventional competitors, and they have moved deeply into organic foods. The big companies need to produce "organic" food on a bigger scale, and so compromise is a big temptation.

Now there's a board that tries to control the notion of what Organic Food is, and it maintains a list of acceptable substances, as part of the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. The board is gradually being co-opted by the Big Food companies, but their control is not yet overwhelming. For example, the board voted recently on whether to allow an actual herbicide in growing some organic foods, but the herbicide was voted down.

I wanted to see the list of acceptable organic ingredients, and I found the list on this webpage. But don't rush to click the link yet; please, read on.

The remarkable thing about the list is that it is buried in verbiage on this page. It's preceded by many, many definitions and procedural matters. It's obvious that all that legalese wouldn't be needed if the organic food business was mostly the work of sincerely committed farmers and the like. But with companies trying to "push the envelope" it becomes necessary to define absolutely everything.

To see the actual list, go to that page and search for "Alginic" or "Bentonite". Both of these words are near the top of the list. The list allows: in organic food, or in the preparation or packaging thereof:
Carnauba wax
Chlorine materials (with exceptions)
Diethylaminoethanol (one specific use only)
Octadecylamine
Tetrasodium pyrophosphate (for use only in meat analog products)
Fructooligosaccharides
Orange shellac-unbleached (not as horrible as it sounds, perhaps)
And many of your other favorite flavors.

The Times article interviews, Michael J. Potter, the founder of Eden Foods, and suggests that Edenmight be the last pretty large organic food company that is not pushing the ingredients envelope.


In any case, remember to wash your sugar cubes before you eat them! Cheers.

Making you eat Broccoli?

Now that the new health bill has been blessed, more or less, by the Supreme Court, are you afraid that the federal government will make you eat some specific food? Well, I have news for you. The government has already been making you eat something: corn, and/or all the many other foods and food products manufactured from corn.

Corn production is favorably blessed by the federal government, which also keeps the price of imported sugar high. You can avoid corn, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, corn etc., and corn etc., if you read labels very carefully and prepare some of your own food. Frankly, if the government tried to shove broccoli down our throats instead, it might be better for us.

Wave her off:

After my morning radio show on WPRB, the first third of my mile-walk home is uphill. There's a bus that runs up campus every few minutes, and I'm always happy to catch it.

When I drive to the station, I take a long walk through the parking garage and then a short walk to the station. That same bus picks people up at the garage, and sometimes I can see the driver waiting for stragglers.

Two weeks ago I saw the driver, a hundred feet away, waiting for me. I thought that was a shame. She would wait for me to come out of the parking garage and turn away toward the radio station, and then realize she had waited in vain. I needed to give some sort of hand signal that would convince her not to wait.

After a moment's thought, I cocked my arm, palm out, fingers spread, and swung my arm down. I had gotten it right. She drove away.

How I learned to Swim (the Boff):

I have always been a careless fellow, noticing little of what goes on around me. When I was nine I could not swim, so I always wore plastic waterwings in the water. They enabled me to paddle out beyond my depth, certain that I would not sink and drown.

One day at the Spillway pond I was splashing happily in the deepest place when I noticed that I had forgotten to put on my waterwings. I scrambled out of the pond, ran to my parents, and crowed, “I CAN SWIM!”

How I learned to Swim (Intro):

I want to tell you how I learned to swim, but first I shall invoke some memories of where I learned. The date was 1950 or 1951, and around this time – there were polio scares every summer – we did not go to public pools. We spent some time at the bay beach near Jones Beach Stadium (Long Island), where I generally played in the sand. But when we visited Grandma Paula, we swam almost every day.

Her farm was in the lower Catskills near the Ashokan reservoir. We usually went to the “Cold Spot” or to the “Spillway pond”. The Spillway pond was the preferred place, but its water consisted of runoff from the Ashokan, and in dry years there was no pond at all. In wet years, the pond was deep and its current too fierce.

The Cold Spot was always the same, wonderfully swampy with water spiders, wasps, and reeds in many different clusters and shapes. After we swam there, our parents carefully plucked the leeches from our bodies.

Rarely, we swam at “The Weir”, a great expanse of shallow water. I'm not sure why we generally avoided the Weir, but perhaps the reason was a retaining wall of the Ashokan that loomed fifty feet above, shutting out the sunlight on even the brightest afternoons.

I learned to swim at the Spillway, rather suddenly, and tomorrow I plan to tell you about it.

One, Two, Three, Many (on the radio):

I usually organize and broadcast a 2.5 hour radio show of classical music, every Tuesday morning. This week I subbed for the DJ with the 8:30 slot, so I had a five hour program. (I shall do the same on the 26th. You can hear me at wprb.com, 6:00 a.m., EDT, Tuesdays.)

For 6/19/12, I had an unusual idea for a show. I called it “One, Two, Three, Many.” And here's what I did: I played a solo piece, then a duo, a trio, a quartet and so on, right up to a nonet. And then I completed the show with Mozart's Gran Partita for 13 instruments. (You can hear part of that piece near the beginning of the movie Amadeus.)

The incredible thing is that I had to do very little time management. The program fit exactly into a five hour period. Wow!

All the music was terrific. The composers were Bach, Mozart, Bartok, Haydn, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Berwald, Schubert and Martinu. You can check out the actual playlist here.

Email was not invented in the 1970's:

VA Shiva Ayyadurai claims to have invented Email in the early 1970's. Nonsense! In 1968, I joined a Princeton, NJ company called Applied Logic Corporation (ALC), which offered nationwide timesharing to its customers. In addition to using compilers and various applications, all customers could exchange Email, using a mail program with "To", "From" and "CC" capabilities. The mail program was in place when I arrived, in January of 1968; it had been written even sooner.


The mail program may have been developed by ALC, but it may also have been offered by the developer of the hardware and system software: DEC, in their PDP 6 operating system. We developers at ALC used email heavily to control our specs, share modules and cooperate on testing. We thought it was absolutely wonderful to have Email.

Garry Moore (2):

Garry Moore was exceedingly popular for about one year during the run of his TV show. It was produced in Manhattan, and during that year he learned never to stop moving on the sidewalks. If he stopped to chat with an admirer (he was often recognized), a crowd would form, making progress impossible. When greeted, he learned to say something brief, perhaps add a handshake, and move on.

One night he left the studio late and met a fellow on one of the empty side streets. The fellow spoke some sort of greeting. Garry brifely clasped the man's arm, said “You betcha,” and moved on.

At the end of the block he realized what the man had said:
“This is a stickup.”

He looked back. The man was standing in mid-block, staring. After a frozen moment, the man turned around and ran away.

Garry Moore:

Garry Moore was one of the first TV show hosts I truly enjoyed. He was much more low-key than modern talk-show hosts. The talk-show had not yet been invented, so his show was Variety, complete with a small orchestra and a regular singer, Peggy King. When it was time for her number, he might say, “Sing, Peggy King.” Occasionally he said, “Sinj, Pejjy Kinj.”
Although I remember many hours of gentle amusement, I remember very few specific gags, but here’s one to share with you. He held up what I hesitate to call a pair of glasses. There was only a single lens, centered in the frame. The live audience tittered.
“These seem to be lost,” he said. “But there’s a name: ’A Cyclops.’ Mr. Cyclops, you can pick your glasses up after the show. Please be sure to bring some identification.”

One Towel Only, Today:

The fitness center where I swim provides a towel service. The towels aren't large but they are good enough to save me, and many appreciative members, the trouble of managing our own towels. My fitness center is almost the only one in our area that provides towel service. They ask us to limit ourselves to two towels per visit, because the service is so expensive. They have to buy towels and pay people to wash them, dry them, fold them and move them from place to place.

Last Monday a sign said: Temporarily, please use only one towel. There will soon be more towels.

That was a challenge for me. I need a towel to keep me from freezing in the A/C when I return to the locker room; that same towel to sit on in the steam room; a towel to dry with, after I shower; and a towel to step on so that when I change into my socks, I need not stand barefoot on the locker room floor. (Fungus, anyone?)

I can make two towels suffice for all this. That one-towel limit was onerous, but I managed.

A short, Spanish-speaking attendant came into the locker room to remove the bin of used towels. I wondered if he knew what the problem was. My brain told me not to bother. He wouldn't understand my question; I wouldn't understand his answer; he wouldn't know the problem. But I have gotten so used to chatting with strangers lately (at my 50^th Reunion) that I plunged right in:

“What's the problem with the towels?”

He stared at me and said, “Dryer is broken.”

The General Trauma of Backwards Shirts:

When I was a kid, I utterly failed to master the art of putting shirts on frontwards. Undershirts, Tees, anything without buttons was hit-or-miss for me. I can't recall how my parents felt about it, but if they corrected me, they were kind and gentle.

If they hadn't been kind and gentle, I would remember, the way I remember being at summer camp when I was ten, mercilessly teased for wearing shirts backwards. A counselor took me aside and told me the sure-fire trick: Lay the shirt on my bed, front-side down. Then lift it up and put it on, and presto! It would go on the right way.

I carefully followed these instructions for three days; three horrible days of being told my shirt was backwards, and going back to the bunk until in desperation I got it right. On the fourth day, I tried to be analytical. That counselor had given me the solution! I must be doing something wrong.

Once again I laid the shirt on the bed, front side down. Then I watched myself like a hawk, as I reached out with my arms crossed and lifted the shirt. As I uncrossed my arms, the shirt twisted around backward. WHY HAD I DECIDED TO CROSS MY ARMS???

I got through the rest of camp with my shirts properly on.

Men's Undershirts:

I'm growing old, and I have not mastered the art of putting undershirts correctly on. Almost always, I make sure to turn them right side out. Then there is the issue of distinguishing between front and back. The collar at the back is usually higher and thicker. Why? If I put the shirt on backwards, I have to take it off and try again. Why can't the front and the back be the same? In fact, why can't the inside and the outside be the same? We're talking about a garment that is normally invisible.

My occasional ineptness isn't the only reason that undershirts bother me. I'll tell you about the traumatic side tomorrow.

"Preaching" to the Choir about double quote marks. Again:

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but, hey, Choir: maybe some of you can preach to the perpetrators. Double quotation marks have several uses: to show that someone is speaking; to show that a few words have been quoted verbatim; and to show that the words so-called are implied.

I shall give an example of the latter: I believe that these two sentences have almost the same meaning:

We sell so-called fresh shrimp.

We sell “fresh shrimp.”

Sadly my favorite supermarket thinks that the second sentence means:

We sell remarkably fresh shrimp.

Languages evolve. Even punctuation evolves. The trouble with this new use of quote marks is that it directly conflicts with an existing use, and for those of us aware of the contradiction, it fails to accomplish its intention. For example, I find it hard to believe that my supermarket's shrimp is really fresh; too bad I will never find out. I also think the realtor who brags like this on his billboard fails to convince me:

I “sell” homes.

I find it hard to stay off land when I'm asked to do so in double quotes:

“Stay off the grass.”

And I am not attracted to a restaurant whose billboard says:

“We serve vegan food!” (Who said that?)

This new use of double quotations could be welcome in English as soon as we expunge all of the directly conflicting usage. Which of course will never happen.

Bucolic Campus?

I left home at 5:30 a.m. today to walk across town and through the university campus to the radio station. (My classical music  show ran from 6 to 8:30. WPRB broadcasts at 103.3 FM and streams from WPRB.COM.)

Outside my door, the birdsong symphony was beautiful and intense. There was no traffic, and wow, there were a lot of birds. I bet it will sound even better on campus, I thought. There's only one road on campus, and the students would be asleep. I walked on, eager to find out what the birds would sound like among the tree-landscaped dorms and school buildings.

Campus was a surprising disappointment. A noisy bus plied up and down that one road. Students were asleep, but workmen drove their utility vehicles into place for their day's work. Giant A/C systems rumbled in the larger buildings. Against all this noise, birds sang their hearts out, but there weren't many of them.  For the first time, it occurred to me that our town has more tree cover than much of the open campus.

I'll listen to the birds at home.

I've invented an intelligent toilet.

Somehow I lack the energy to bring any of my inventions to fruition. This one has to be worth a lot, but I'm just giving it away, right here.

Consider a toilet equipped with a camera and some excellent video analysis software. When a person approaches the toilet and prepares to use it, the toilet controls the seat according to what is visible on the camera. If buttocks can be seen, the seat is lowered. If the user is facing the toilet, the seat is raised or lowered appropriately..

The hardware for the camera and its controlling software must be extremely simple and positioned so that anyone can easily verify that the device is not connected to the Internet.

Nimble NASDAQ:

NASDAQ's computer fumbles in handling the Facebook offering reminded me that fifteen to twenty years ago, when I was developing finance software, NASDAQ was the uptodate, nimble, highly computerized system, while NYSE seemed to be an old fogey. I will give you one example that sticks in my craw.

At that time, both exchanges issued new specifications for the formats of messages that reported trades. The changes made it possible to specify stock prices in much smaller increments, and to specify total trades in much, much higher totals. Since the company I worked at was doing business with NASDAQ and NYSE, we were entitled to get the new format specifications.

I had to modify some software to handle the new formats. For NASDAQ, I went to their website and downloaded the full new transaction message spec. It was a document that was easy to search, and I often cut-and-pasted from the document right into my comments.

For NYSE, I had to call a general phone number and ask around. I soon found a person who was willing to send me their spec. It arrived a week later, a bulky paper document. It was much less convenient than NASDAQ's online spec. It was obvious that this bulky paper document had been printed from a word-processing program. I inquired, and was assured that I was not permitted to have the computer-readable form.

And NYSE billed me $25 for the paper document. (Which I never paid.)

*Uck Zuck* :

Do you trust Facebook? Do you expect this humungous webworld to play straight with you, and with our data? Well, let’s look at Exhibit Number One. According to news reports, it appears that shortly before FB went public, Facebook learned they had a problem that might be material and signifigant to the price of the offering. Information about that problem was shared with some of the banks’ biggest customers, but not with the rest of us who may have wished to take a flyer on some FB stock. If some of those bankers acted illegally, or even immorally, I hope they get what they deserve. But please remember: FB is nearly a one-person company, because an awful lot of it is owned by one person: Zuck. If anyone was in a position to make sure that we, the public, were properly informed about the prospects of FB, it was Zuck. If anyone was in a position to instruct the bankers to handle this late-breaking problem in the most honest way, it was Zuck. If anyone is ever going to keep FB honest about how the company treats you, me, and our data, it is Zuck.  Well, when FB went public, in my opinion, he blew it. I’m through trusting him for anything. Here’s what I just can't help thinking: *Uck Zuck*.

Human Nature and Business:

I apologized to my Physical Therapist today, saying that I probably would never see him again if I could only keep doing the exercises he had given me.

“If my patients kept doing their exercises,” he said, “I guess I would be out of business.”

Raven's Daily Fortune Cookie:

I haven't been blogging enough lately, so I've started another blog. I'm trying to be succinct and useless, almost every day. You won't find advice like this elsewhere, and that's probably a good thing: Raven's Daily Fortune Cookie.

Tufted Titmouse:

We put up a bird feeder last winter. It had a cage designed to keep squirrels out and let only the smallest birds in. Weeks passed without a bird at our feeder. I complained to a neighbor. She said, “Don't worry, they'll find it.”

Gradually they did. I have an iPad app to identify the birds with, and learning this new skill has been difficult. We are feeding “finch food”, but I think we have yet to see a single finch. Black-Capped Chickadees came, sparrows and Downy Woodpeckers.

We are still feeding, and I added a “suet cage” that is another difficult challenge for squirrels. It appears that the presence of suet is a like a mighty billboard. A bluejay once poised above the feeder, looked around and flew away. Starlings have come by and chased the small birds off while they tried in vain to reach the finch food. And I think we are now getting visits from at least four kinds of sparrows.

The strangest visitor has a white cheek and looks positively ghostly. I may have misidentified it because of my life-long fascination with its name, but it seems to be ... yes … the Tufted Titmouse.

Buttermilk:

On rare occasions, my father drank a single glass of buttermilk. Watching him approach it as a special treat fascinated me, and I often asked for a taste. I couldn't stand the stuff.

But because my father liked it, I tried to do as he had done and drink it. I'm sure I tried it at least once every decade. Around age sixty I started to like it, and now I often buy a quart. I can't explain how my disgust at buttermilk's sour, fermented taste has turned into pleasure. I suspect that commercial buttermilk itself has changed, and I know that my taste buds aren't as sensitive as they used to be. But no matter; buttermilk is now a special treat for me, and a special remembrance of my father.

There's a weird aspect to this story. How did it happen that my father occasionally drank a single glass of buttermilk? We never bought it by the quart, and I really mean that he had the occasional glass. Here's how it happened: he would see buttermilk on the restaurant menu and decide to order it. Have you ever, ever seen buttermilk on a restaurant menu?

Times have changed.

Spam with passwords:

Sorry I've been away for so long. I'm back today with a paradox. I received an email from a website called Zeekler that gave me an account, an account name, a password, and some free resources. Zeekler seems to operate some sort of buying/selling web site. I have never contacted them or requested an account, as far as I know.

I was tempted to log in to Zeekler and close my account, but my instinct is that it would be better to have nothing at all to do with them. I deleted their email (permanently, because it contains a password). I had thought about reporting them as spam when I realized a rather special problem.

First, I hope you know that you should not save emails that contain passwords. In fact, no website should ever send you your password. If one does, you should delete the email with the password permanently at once. Your email account might be hacked some day, and if it is, the hacker will use any passwords in your saved emails to hack your other accounts.

If you successfully report some site as spam, how will you know whether they have sent you another email with a password in it? That's my problem. If Zeekler ever tries to contact me again, I want to know it.

I use Gmail. The way you avoid spam is to mark specific emails as spam. If I had marked Zeekler's email as spam, Google would have saved it in my spam folder, password and all.