Digital Life, Real Disaster

FAA grounds all United flights

NYSE suspends trading.  Unprecedented move.

These occurrences due, of course to computer glitches or malfunctions.  Accept that at face value. Nothing to see here, move along now.
 
End sarcasm.

Then back to the lunchtime conversation with BBBH.  (Actually, it was less "conversation" than soliloquy.)

vanilla:  I think T. S. Eliot had it right when he said the world would end not with a bang but a whimper.  Whether it proceeds from intention or accident is beside the point.  The world will come to a grinding halt when all our activities are computer-driven, and we are nearly there now, and the great "glitch" or "hack" or irreparable breakdown occurs.  And it will occur.

BBBH: You could be right.

Gordie #T

Gordie, our pet cucurbit, is doing its thing once again.

Fifteen years ago we were traveling along the road near Bent's Fort, Colorado when BBBH asked, "What is the green stuff growing along the road and into the road?"

"That," I answered, "is a wild gourd that grows in this sere country.  It produces little gourds about the size of a baseball that look like little watermelons."

"No!"

So when I spotted another patch ahead, I slowed, stopped the car, crawled into the vines (aren't there rattlesnakes in this country?) and soon filled the floorboard near her feet with the little globes.

She was amazed.

Back home again in Indiana (wouldn't that make a great song title?) we stored several of the gourds in a box and promptly forgot them.  A year later we discovered them again, dried out and hard. Brilliant me. I broke one open, removed some seeds and dropped a couple of them in the ground near the west side of the house.  And thus Gordie was hatched.

The plant's roots are rhizomes and it spreads by "fingering" throughout any real estate it can capture.  It is a constant battle to keep the rascal confined to its corner.  And it won't die.  I think this is its thirteenth summer with us now.

Gordie is a cucurbita foetidissima, or as it is commonly called, a Missouri gourd, or buffalo gourd.  As the Latin name implies, it is a stinking gourd.  It is a very useful plant, though, and you may learn about its many applications if you do a web search.

(I should explain, too, that it is not the habit  of c.f. to climb.  We installed sticks and strings for its use.)

Son Carl, aka Neil, has a birthday today, not yet raising the number to stratospheric levels. Happy birthday, Carl.

Word of the day:  cucurbit

The Preacher and Silly Matt

My father was a preacher who practiced his calling for seventy years.  It goes without saying that he prepared hundreds of sermons.  I have written about this a bit in the past but where I want to go here has to do with the papers he left behind.

I have file cabinets filled with notebooks in which he had stored his sermon outlines, clippings, anything germane to his interests, and that encompasses much of life's quirks, oddities, and yes, triumphs.

Several years ago I started to transcribe Dad's sermon outlines.  After a good number had been done I realized at some point that I was never going to complete the task.  I drifted on to other things and now I am hard pressed to recall even where the digital copies are stored.  Do I even still have the drive on which I stored them?  I am not as well-organized as some people are.

A few days ago I opened the bottom drawer of a four-drawer file cabinet and pulled out one of the notebooks it contained, one I had not gone through before. Yes, it contains sermon outlines, but also some odds and ends of this and that, including this little verse entitled "Silly Matt" which I remember having heard my father recite:

I feel so exceedingly silly,

I say what I shouldn't to ought.

My mind is as frail as a lily

'Twould break with the weight of a thought.

I am so exceedingly lazy

I neglect what I oughtn't to should.

My notion of work is so hazy

That I couldn't to toil if I would.

Fizzle*

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

“And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head –

Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

(Lewis Carroll)

"When I was young," replied the Sage

"And hadn't the wisdom that comes with age

I thought indeed that I stood on my head

But now I know the world's inverted instead."

(vanilla)

This is a snapshot of the house where I was born.  I took the picture about thirteen years ago. (West side and south side, or back of house.)

I recently found this much earlier picture of the house.  This was taken closer to the time I was born.  (North side or front of the house.)  This was the home of my Grandparents Morrell until they moved to California about 1939.

I thought it interesting that I remember Chinese elms on the property when I was a child and I found there were still Chinese elms there in 2002.

*Through absolutely no fault of my own, but rather via a fluke of unbidden circumstances, this moniker was applied to me.  Fortunately, it did not stick as a permanent nickname though I was reminded about once a year, usually on July 5.

And then
BBBH did this

 And this which I suspect suggests that I am a prickly old thing.

Long live the USA!

Happy Birthday to our Nation!

She seems to be getting a bit old and somewhat arthritic, somewhat forgetful of her roots; and "what she is here for;" a bit dyspeptic, cranky and cantankerous; and generally heir to the ailments of old age.

I can relate to that.  Still, long may she live; and so may I!

Homogeneity

Homogeneity.  Sociologists abound and their studies are legion.  This is no scientific analysis of human behavior.  It is simply some observations regarding humankind's proclivity to flock with like birds.

What portion of homogeneous divisions among us are natural and what percentage of them are artificial would be an interesting study.  Also, who believes what regarding these divisions would be of interest.

I recall an incident that occurred during my tenure as a public school administrator in which we were proposing a cross-graded continuous progress segment, a school-within-a-school, so to speak, in which students from ages six through eleven would be grouped together.  Ignoring the obvious fact that this is a homogeneous group in some broader definition, we found that when we opened the proposal for public discussion  some on either end of the liberal/conservative spectrum wanted to ignite a firebomb and throw it into the mix;

The ultra-conservative members of the community were armed and ready with charts and arguments all the way back to Adam and Eve to demonstrate that the "natural order" of things required that children should be grouped in  much narrower homogeneity, namely traditional graded age groups, else society would ultimately topple.

On the other hand there were those who adamantly pursued their own agenda, that is pipe-dream, that no order should be imposed at all, that the natural developmental processes of the human social and intellectual growth would take care of themselves, should we simply let children "decide" in their own time when they are ready for any given stage.

Our proposal was ultimately approved and a large number of students over a period of years functioned quite well in the broader "family" setting, but that is not the point of my rambling.

Last evening I attended a meeting of a group of people of "a certain age."  These people could correctly be identified as older people, but we are given to euphemisms, e.g., "Seasoned Citizens," "Keen Agers," "the Golden Years," and so forth.  Our group is called "Best Years Fellowship."

I have lived long enough now that I have been lumped in with the very students I taught when they were children in the public schools, for a number of the members of the group did indeed sit in my elementary classroom, lo those many years ago.

Where is the homogeneity?  Well, the groups would ultimately get pretty small.  There were but two people in the room besides me who were my age or older.  And the ninety-six-year-old guy could comprise a group all by himself.  I mean within our social reach, he has no peers.

The whole "age" thing is pretty dumb, anyway.  We are born, we live, some longer than others, and we die.  What our group has in common more than "age" is like-mindedness with regard to the way the world works and the ways in which we should work within it.  Instead of developing insular social groups in which people of like age "relate" to one another, why not a broad spectrum which includes everyone relating to each other?

I do not need interaction with other old poops so much as I need the stimulation of new ideas, new ways of viewing things.  And where will I find that?  Younger people, of course.  And trust me, the younger people would be well -advised to get close enough to their elders to allow some of the wisdom to rub off onto them.

Doing Laundry

We have a little washer,
Load the clothes at top
Then swishy, swishy, swashy,
Makes the colors pop!

But this washer is an inside-outer
Now hear my tale, don't be a doubter
We load the T-shirts, wash and spin
Open the door and reach within.

The shirts are outside in!

Simple solution you might think
Turn shirts inside out and drop in drink
Voila! the shirts will be turned
Not a chance, your theory's burned.

This appliance is an outside-inner
Won't turn shirts inside in
So nevermind, your chore is set
On this certainty you can bet.

Before you fold that shirt to fit in drawer
You'll turn that sucker
Sleeve, sleeve, bottom through the neck
Or you could wear the seams outside, look like heck

Thursday is washday.  BZZZZZ!  Dryer's done; gotta go fold clothes.

Another laundry story here.

Better Buy a Buick

I am amused at advertising that casts one's own product in a negative light. This goes on all the time with the "new and improved" approach, but the current one that tickles my gizzard is the old lady uttering the line "That's what I told him!" in response to the statement "That's not a Buick!"

Of course, I have the line down pat and can mimic quite well the inflection that the lady uses in her delivery of the line.  But that is not the point.  The point in point of fact is that Buick is attempting to sell you a car by denigrating the product they sold to your parents, or to your grandparents, or even to you two, three, or five years ago.



Such a response from an elderly lady who for the past several decades was too busy to much notice automotive styling would be natural.  Consider that when her daddy finally agreed to allow Leroy to pick her up Saturday afternoon and take her to the county fair, Leroy, having wheedled the loan of the family car from his parent, showed up in this:

To which today's whippersnapper might well say, "That's not a Buick!"

1937 Buick Special