A Jaunty Little Blog – Page 12 – No-wax, easy maintenance, bacteriostatic, and anti-slip.

January 17, 2013

It’s Time To Talk About Coughing

A lovely centered picture of an advertisement.

Friends,

I’ve been pretty ill over the last few days with a weedy, grating cough that has left my voice a squeaky mess. It’s going around, of course. We’re in the middle of AN EPIDEMIC!!! after all. Some who passed on the flu vaccine (which has proven to be wildly effective, actually) are getting hit with a fairly brutal strain of the virus. Folks are missing work. There’s sniffling and wheezing everywhere. My fake cold is a pale imitation of this. It’s annoying, my throat hurts, but I haven’t joined the growing group of people planning bathroom remodels because they’ve recently had the opportunity to spend significant amounts of time analyzing the wallpaper patterns.

Clearly I’ve been so irresponsible that I’ve felt compelled to go to work every day during this illness. The volunteers aren’t going to deploy those computers themselves! Amirite? (they’ve been doing a fine job deploying computers themselves. you’re like a mother hen hovering over them. please. -ed)

Your best pal in the whole world,

– bob

January 10, 2013

It’s Time To Think About People

A lovely centered picture of a conference room.

Friends,

I attended the American Advertising Federation (Desert Cities, don’t you know) luncheon this afternoon and it was a head-scratching affair. After meeting the advertising bigwigs in the desert, who were all very kind and welcoming, we sat down for lunch and listened to a panel of experts in marketing to the LBGT community. Granted that community isn’t a protected class in the Coachella Valley by the most fanciful stretch of the imagination, but I still have questions. Two big questions…

The lesser of the two, which is the most immediately important to me in my position as the spokesmodel (don’t judge) for the Far Eastern Outpost of San Diego’s Omnipresent Charitable Organization seems unanswerable. Presuming that the LBGT community is as highly political and willing to punish companies that aren’t as LBGT-friendly as the panel claimed this afternoon, how do I as the message crafter for a charity that is only loosely connected to the Catholic church and its dictums against homosexuality appeal to the LBGT community in a meaningful way? (whew! what an annoyingly long, run-on sentence! tighten it up, won’t you? – ed) This question leads to the next question, but stay with me for a second.

The wrinkle here is that if I wanted to try to appeal to the LBGT folks, which I do in a way that I’ll explain in a bit, would that offend the powers that might not appreciate that discussion? Is there a contingent at my workplace that might consider an appeal to people they might consider to be evil (or sinful or damned or the latest epithet) in itself evil?

The statistics trotted out at the luncheon were compelling: more disposable income, more cocktails and less beer (file that away for later), more technologically savvy, more brand loyalty. Some of these statistics are easy to explain while others like the cocktail thing are more difficult, but it’s easy to see why the room was packed with ad guys hoping to glean some insight. They want to sell stuff and need to know that the shirtless plumber ad is too transparent and that the community absolutely doesn’t appreciate pandering.

This is all fine, but it leads me neatly to my second question: When might we not have to tiptoe around everyone all the time? Like every group of people on the planet, there are nice gay people and terrible gay people. Friendly gay people and hateful gay people. Black, white, brown, beige, and pink. There are the same pockets of this and that in every discernible segment of the population, so I really actually don’t get why the “LBGT market” needs any special treatment. “Don’t pander,” the panelists warned. I couldn’t agree more.

Will I get resistance for advertising in Gannett’s Desert Outlook magazine or any of the other on- or off-line LBGT publications from the far-right donors? I imagine so but I’m not sure that I care. I think a lot of people are interested in the story of the Far Eastern Outpost, not just those whose ethical outlook is proscribed by a smaller world view (that I happen to find infuriating, but that’s another post). It’s just people, everybody. Some people will choose to be donors and some won’t. Some will find the things happening at the charity are worth supporting with their time or with their cash and some won’t. I don’t think it has too much to do with who someone chooses to sleep with, do you?

I didn’t think so.

Your pal,

– bob

POSTSCRIPT: Since I’m my own editor (i don’t have the time. i’m working on payroll and we need to have a talk about your lunch penalties. -ed) I’ve been reading this over and making edits for clarity. After pouring over each word, I’m annoyed by the labels. The panelists at the luncheon referred to those of us straight people who advocate and demand basic human rights like equal treatment for everyone no matter who they choose to love as “allies.” Like we’re a special class too. Protecting and supporting our fellows should be the baseline, not special. I’m not sure what’s more annoying; the label or the perceived need for one.

January 1, 2013

Say Goodnight, Time

A lovely centered picture of a time meddler.

Friends,

Thanks for an incredibly odd and frustrating year. I hope that you and the ones you love have a much better 2013.

Much, much better.

Your best friend in the whole wide world,

– bob

December 30, 2012

The Time Stealer

A lovely centered picture of a silly costumed man.

Friends,

It’s the interstitial between THE CHRISTMASTIME and THE NEWYEARTIME and I had many grand plans for this weekend. So I wake up late, as you do on the weekend, and realize that my rat fink traitorous lower back betrays me and thwarts any plans to walk, install brilliant gifts on my slab-sided pickup, or even carry laundry to the washer. Dammit.

You’re surely thinking, “Well then, why are you sitting in a chair writing this instead of laying down?” Because this is the only comfortable place and position to be in at the moment. Even then, it’s not great, but I really do love Ikea’s jesus chair (that they don’t sell anymore, but is kinda like this one) at the moment since it’s very nearly the right height.

Is it the cold, snowy weather? A dog huddling up into my lower back overnight? The fates? Broken osteothings? Maybe something else entirely?

Surely yes.

More tomorrow on the thrilling consequences of these circumstances!

Your best pal in the world,

– bob

December 28, 2012

Terror of The Ice People

A lovely centered picture of ice warriors.

Friends,

The winter storms have passed through and while roads are slippery there isn’t enough snow on the ground in this alpine wonderland to assuage fears about drought. All of the danger, without enough benefit.

It’s impossible to remove all danger from life, of course. Sometimes, you and your buddy waiting at the gas station, might be attacked or your store might be broken into. My hope is that I’ll receive a call from a local institution very soon asking me to write for them. Can this remove all the danger of driving to work? Removing 95 miles from the round trip is a great start.

Please take a moment to employ whatever arcane rituals you think will help. Thanks!

Your best pal ever,

– bob

December 22, 2012

Happy Christmastime!

A lovely centered picture of a Christmas pudding.

Friends,

I say Happy Christmas. This doesn’t ring right to American ears, which is the intended result. When I’m extending a cheerful greeting during this season, I would like people to notice, stop for a second and think. The dissonance makes people notice.

I don’t hear a whole lot about Americans being merry. It’s not a description that’s used very often and I really can’t tell you why. It’s not that we’re moping around, far from it. Visitors from other countries will usually remark that Americans are an amiable people. Affable, friendly, warm, but not merry. Jolly? Save that for our vision of a certain heavyset and hirsute gentleman in a crimson suit. Happy sits there on the upbeat spectrum somewhere between giddy and satisfied for me. A spot where a warm hearth, the golden winter sunset streaming through the windows, and little kids full of too much sugar giggling with delight resides. Happy.

While in the Apple store down near the Festival of Dirt purchasing shiny things for a cute girl I know, the young guy taking my money wasn’t sure what to make of me. I asked an overworked and over-asked woman in the back of the store if she would process my payment and was referred to the table up front with the young guy. “They’re faster,” she suggested. I shared that praise with the young guy, rolling him back a bit. After the gizmos were bagged and my receipt bleep-blorped into my phone, he thanked me with some tenuous corporate approved “Happy holidays!” “Thank you, and Happy Christmas!” I replied. He stopped for a beat and asked, “Hey, that’s English!” “I suppose it is, isn’t it?” as I headed out the door.

I wish you and the people you love a very happy Christmas.

You’ve been through a lot this year and you deserve it.

Your best pal in the world,

– bob

P.S. In other Christmas news, is Mercedes-Benz’s commercial guy…

…supposed to remind us of this guy?

I think the demographics point to yes.

November 26, 2012

Seven Seconds of Fame

Friends,

I was challenged at a meeting a couple weeks ago by the idea that I didn’t have a lot of experience with the media. Still don’t, but I took on the spokesman duties for a little event put on by the Far Eastern outpost of San Diego’s Omnipresent Charitable Organization. Didn’t get a mention in the lower third in the video package above, but neither did the county supervisor who wrote a big check, so I’m not too disturbed by the snub.

With this appearance, I’ve been in a few minutes of teevee interviews and seven seconds or so of airtime. Total. Ever. Okay, there was that time sitting in the audience at Bozo’s Circus in the old KMIR studios…

Your pal,

– bob

November 16, 2012

The Early Bird Special

A lovely centered picture of a sextagenarian at his job.

Friends,

This is the time of year when our monied elders come out from their summer hiding places in Idaho and Canada and migrate to the Coachella Valley. Actually, the annual migration may serve to empower some who never left the desert. People in the service sector aren’t happy, like the checkers at the upscale supermarket I stopped at yesterday…

A woman who looked like Iggy Pop if he’d stopped working out decided that she’d let everybody in the checkout line wait while she took off to pick out flowers. Her food purchase was pending in the register, so everyone in the queue surely wouldn’t mind waiting out her pokey and painfully deliberative decision-making process. Once she picked her poinsettia, Princess Jerky Treat shoved me aside to figure out how to work the payment terminal.

The checkout clerks looked at me and offered a wan smile and a little shrug that told me all I needed to know—”Sorry about that, but we’ve got to deal with these fragile monsters for the next four months.”

Rich, entitled, poor spacial awareness. I feel for the service industry. They’re gonna hear “be a dear” and will have to comp a lot of soup and breadsticks through March.

Keep a kind thought in your hearts for the poor kids down there who can’t get a job writing reverse mortgages, won’t you?

Your pal,

– bob

November 5, 2012

The Jeep Election

Friends,

This may be the second election in United States history decided by Jeeps. Let that sink in for a second.

If America’s foremost mink hubcap salesman hadn’t flubbed a news story about Jeep expanding back into China rather than saying at a rally in OHIO that Jeep was moving production to China, the state of the race would be very different. Partisans can talk about all of the other ways external forces have sabotaged his campaign, but this was an unforced error. In fact, it was the result of a lack of basic reading comprehension.

Shouldn’t that disqualify you from the presidency all by itself?

I’ll be up all night tomorrow hoping to find out…

Your best pal in the whole wide world,

– bob

October 19, 2012

Smile.

Friends,

The way the day started was perfectly fine, save the alarm going off at 4:00. Cozy flannel sheets, breakfast with Mme. Puppy Dog, getting on the road a little late but making up the deficit and getting to work on time. I wasn’t even too concerned when my first press release went out with bizarre characters mucking up the formatting. At least I was ticking off boxes on my bloated end of the year task list.

It’s a poorly kept secret that I applied for the newly relaunched automobile columnist position at the Orange County Register a few months ago. This is my dream job, the sort of gig you’d drop everything to do. I dreamed about it. I wrote stories in my head about taking an Aventador to Albertson’s. Stories about canyon carving in a Corolla. And stories like the distributor post from a few days ago to explain why these may be the best times so far for reliability and economy in our cars and trucks.

I found out today that I didn’t get the job over the internet.

Then the phones at work went down.

Then the live Verizon tech support lady told me in a chat window over the internet that I’d need to file a report over the internet.

Then my colleagues forgot how to work stuff. A global, universal tech stroke, if you will.

So what do you do with a plate of late-afternoon picnic potato salad like that? Do you smile in the host’s direction while choking it down? How much worse could the stomach ache get?

I took a different tack and wrote jokes about moon monsters instead.

It’s therapeutic.

– bob

October 10, 2012

An Ideal

A lovely centered picture that made me think about the state of things.

Friends,

This is a shot of the sign on the new Idyllwild Public Library. Built with donations and government money, the new facility is a massive reimagining of the old Coronet dime store and even the facade contains a message: it’s modern, it’s weathered and rustic, and is sited in our little alpine village without being overwhelming. There has been some controversy about staffing, but we love our skirmishes in the letters section of the local paper.

There are no other buildings in this town willing to take such an architectural stand, so it’s doubly important that it’s a library. We’ll have to wait and see if the rustic modernism motif takes off up here, especially since we’ve recently created a historical district designation for most of the core of the town to preserve and protect cabins and tiny shops constructed in the 1940s. Not a lot of chrome to be found except in the hairdryers at the beauty salon.

I’ll snap more pictures when the library officially opens. Aren’t you excited?

Of course you are.

– bob

October 3, 2012

A Hot Rodder’s Lament: Rebel Without An API Edition

A lovely centered picture of a coffee mug.

Friends,

I’ll cede the argument that modern cars are cleaner and more efficient than they’ve ever been. Sure, there have been many marques through our history that have been stingy with a gallon of gas, and some that have produced fewer emissions, but the entire fleet currently on sale beats those outliers by every measure. Why? We asked the robots to help out and they’ve agreed.

Is this a problem? Of course it is. And it isn’t, or at least wouldn’t be, if lawyers weren’t involved. Here’s a short example:

Back in the olden times of a decade or so ago, when you wanted electricity to light a spark plug to cause an explosion in an engine’s cylinder, you’d rely on a spinning top called a distributor.

Through a gear meshed with the camshaft, a shaft spins a piece of metal that makes contact with a post that sends electricity to a wire leading to a spark plug. It’s simple until you start thinking about how an engine in a car is used. As engines speed up and slow down, you want the spark to occur earlier or later, so maybe you add weights to the spinning top that move a plate forward a bit when the engine spins faster. This is lovely and elegant, you think. But you don’t want that advancement to go too far or else the spark comes too soon—even before the cylinder is full of the fuel mixture. Detonation, knocking and other badness ensues. How do you control the advance?

Specially tuned tiny springs.

Hold on, there’s more alchemy. When you mash the gas pedal to the floor (How quaint! More on that in a sec.) in your Curved Dash Oldsmobile, engine vacuum drops and if you send that signal to a vacuum motor attached to that plate, you can further advance the spark timing to catch up.

With me so far? Sucking and springs and centrifugal forces are changing when the spark is happening. Archaic with a capital arc. (I crack myself up sometimes.)

So what’s changed? Sure, computers, but what’s really changed has been the quality and number of sensors in a modern engine. An engine management computer cannot only know vacuum, and engine speed, but also atmospheric temperature and pressure, overall system voltage, throttle position at the throttle pedal, fuel quality, and a lot more.

What this means, simply, is that you can throw away distributors and let the computer tell individual plugs exactly (well, sort of exactly, hold on) when to fire. You put high-tension ignition coils directly on top of the plugs and the computer just turns them on and off. Easy, right? The computer can look at all the inputs, decide what’s going on and how much power is needed, and let ‘er burn.

But it’s not that easy.

For instance, you could theoretically make more power with more spark advance over a longer period of time, but the implications are many. For instance, if your, ahem, 285 horsepower engine could make 305 horsepower or more with a simple software change from the manufacturer, will your insurance rates go up? Is that too hot for the engine block over time, increasing warranty repair costs? When the home mechanic could change a couple springs and gain power, the manufacturers aren’t on the hook.

Here’s where this gets weird.

Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs, if you will) don’t release the code that drives engine management computers. Some don’t even release service manuals to the public. What this means is that backyard mechanics, hot rodders, and aftermarket equipment manufacturers are left to make educated guesses about how the engines in the vehicles they’ve purchased actually work. What signals come from where to make which thing work the way it does? After all, your gas pedal isn’t connected to the engine anymore. It’s just another sensor, but this one measures the angle of your ankle to represent how fast you think you want to go. If I want to make a widget that adjusts the power my engine produces and make an incorrect guess at how this affects all of the other systems, I guess this makes me that much more liable for my error, but wouldn’t it be much better if I got it right the first time? More later…

Your pal,

– bob

September 24, 2012

I’ve Got A Headache

A lovely centered picture of a rollercoaster.

Friends,

I really will get back to the science and the future and whatnot, but please allow a moment for this public service announcement:

When you go to Knott’s Berry Farm to have a lot of fun with people whose company you enjoy and you’d like to not be a wet blanket, I strongly recommend that you not ride the Boomerang. It will beat your brains out. First, I’m too tall and didn’t fit in the seat. Second, because I didn’t fit, I had to sit up too high which moved my head above the cushions on the restraint hoop. Third, riders pull 5.2 g^* going forward AND in reverse. Fourth, I have an ungainly and too large head with not enough strength in my neck to keep this melon from bouncing around at 5.2 g. Fifth, this really isn’t anybody’s fault but my own.

Also, I had something to write here, but I can remember what it might’ve been.

Your pal,

– bob

^* The unit of measure for g-force is styled with a lowercase g. Uppercase G is for the gravitational constant. You’re welcome!