Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: April 2019

• Over Excited

  Posted at 1:52 am by kayewer, on April 28, 2019

  Hype is a soul killer.  April and May seem to be full of hype: spring comes, winter ends (they’re separate joyous times), and the entertainment industry starts to release the big events. May is a sweeps month, so all the television shows save their best for last. Movies start coming out in anticipation of a big summer.

  Two of the biggest events this year are Game of Thrones, a cable TV series which features what may be the biggest but penultimate battle* this Sunday, and Avengers: Endgame which just appeared in movie theatres. GoT is halfway through its final season and prepared to meet viewer expectations in a nearly 90-minute episode depicting the Battle of Winterfell, in which humanity takes a stand against the invading undead White Walkers intent upon wiping out all living things, while the heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe try to restore the galaxy after a supervillain wiped out half of all living things.

  Somehow I think the two should have traded places. But maybe that’s just me.

  Anyway, the Avengers and company have run for over 20 films and featured more fantastic actors than the Academy Awards could hold in one auditorium, while GoT has run eight seasons and worked effectively to exceed even the author George R. R. Martin’s novel output (who knows how he will catch up to them). It’s all coming (or come) to an end at last. I haven’t even brought up the last Star Wars movie (The Rise of Skywalker) coming in December, nor have I mentioned the last episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which I’m told is just as big as the rest of the series out there. I’ll get back to them.

  All this hype and anticipation and the dates and episodes coming and going all at once can be hard on the spirit. I just saw the Avengers movie last night, clocking in at over three hours and feeling like a thrilling roller coaster ride which ran in slow motion in my mind to protect me from exploding. It probably didn’t help that our seats were three rows from the 3D screen. I will offer no spoilers here, but the intensity was so overwhelming that I could not process it all. With hours to go before the GoT episode, I know I will be mentally exhausted when it’s all over. Just in time for the workweek to start again. Is this what in war is considered fair? We are talking four and a half hours of my life which I am voluntarily giving over to creative minds who seem to want to, to put it politely, mess me up, so that my non-entertaining life might suffer.

  There doesn’t seem to be a study of such things, but grouping so many big events together cannot be good for anybody. Studies have concluded that too much horror film exposure is bad, so excessive drama is probably equally as injurious. The only reason I’m doing it is that I am still young enough to enjoy the indulgence and old enough to appreciate what goes behind making such overly fantastical visual events. Also, anybody following a storyline craves closure. Any good tale needs a good beginning, strong middle and satisfying end.

  I know without watching a single episode of Big Bang Theory that their fans will be split into love/hate camps and analyse it forever after the last hurrah. Same with Star Wars fans, of which I am one. That release date is before Christmas, and fans deal with it. We used to look forward to May releases, but not anymore. As if the holidays are not stressful enough, we have to sit in a theatre and worry about what happens to fictional characters.

  I may be burning brain cells more than calories this year. Has anybody done a study on that?

  *(Fans anticipate the ultimate GoT battle to come before or during the final episode, when the quest for who will sit on the Iron Throne is completed.)

   

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• On Order

  Posted at 3:11 am by kayewer, on April 21, 2019

  The nine words no consumer wants to hear are, “We don’t have it, but we can order it.” I have heard that so many times lately, I’m wondering if anything in the world that I like is actually in stock.

  I went to the shoe store, and the styles I wanted were out of stock, but could be ordered and arrive within a week. Since I was shopping during a coupon event, and time was growing short, I bought two other pairs instead, and I figure I’ll return when I can use my store credit to order the others. Naturally credits or shopper rewards cannot be combined with coupons. Besides, I have shoes, so it’s not as if I’ll be barefoot in the meantime, but I suppose shoes are hard to keep in stock in every size. If they come in wide and narrow widths, it’s an even bigger problem. Imagine a shoe in three or four colors and narrow and wide widths, and you have a stockroom just for one style of shoe.

  Welcome to the shoe store. We sell one shoe, but it comes in all sizes.

  The cell phone store, however, doesn’t carry batteries for the phones they sell. I found this out when my phone was expiring and wouldn’t hold a charge, and I went to the store for help. No can do. They didn’t have it and could not order it. A sales rep did show me a battery online I could order from “the big online retailer.” I ordered it, and what came was not even close to what fits in my phone. Not only don’t they have it and can’t order it, but they know nothing about it.

  I got a recommendation from a friend and went looking inside a store that sells–believe it or not–just light bulbs and batteries. What a concept: a specialty store! I was almost giddy, thinking I would walk out of the store with a new cell phone battery.

  They didn’t have it, but they could order it.

  Since I already ordered a replacement from “the big online retailer,” I passed, but maybe I should call them back later. They did provide me with helpful information on when their stock order would come in. Everybody is happy to provide that information, because what they don’t have might come in, and then they can ship it.

  It seems the only people making out on merchandise these days are the ones who ship it.

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• Missed the Target

  Posted at 1:54 am by kayewer, on April 14, 2019

  Violence in the workplace affects everybody; if you’re in a supermarket, it’s somebody’s workplace. Workers these days may be asked to review emergency procedures to protect themselves and others, and that was what I experienced this week. I saw a short presentation about active shooter safety entitled “Run, Hide, Fight: Surviving an Active Shooter Event” from the Department of Homeland Security and  the city of Houston, TX.

  I found it mildly disturbing, and not because of what you might think. In the first minute of the video, a clean-cut black clad man calmly walks into an office lobby, pulls a highly lethal weapon from a backpack and opens fire with precision, cutting down two people–one a security guard–on camera and a fleeing employee out of sight. The overall sense of dread as employees act out the prescribed scenarios modeling the choice to run, hide or fight when confronted with an active shooter then play out.

  “Run, hide, fight” is the DHS prescribed way to deal with a shooter in your office. In short, if you can escape, leave your things and get out, and try to take other people out with you; if you can’t escape, hide as best you can; if those will not work, grab anything you can use as a weapon and aggressively fight the shooter for your life.

  Three workers run from the building and stop a man parking his bicycle from going in, as a woman in the group dials 911. A group of employees in a break area push furniture in front of a door, while two women hide in different spaces: a cubicle and in a dimmed office with a copier blocking the door. When the break area employees realize the shooter will come in for them, the men grab chairs and other objects, a panicked woman moves to a corner out of the way, and when the shooter enters the action freezes and then cuts to the responding rescuers looking for their suspect.

  That was what disturbed me. What happened after that?

  The old saying attributed to Anton Chekhov (and never really accurately quoted) is that a gun revealed in act one needs to be fired by the end of the play. An apt saying for this kind of situation, because we know the confrontation is coming, but then we are cheated out of it. There is no resolution to the incident, and any writer would likely pick that up immediately and question it, including me. The rest of the video plays out, showing workers racing to safety behind emergency vehicles and such, but the story wraps up without going back to the break area. The video runs slightly less than six minutes, but they could have wrapped up the story with four seconds more.

  I wanted to see the gunman on the floor of the break area, knocked out cold by the man wielding the chair. I wanted to see the leader of the group holding the gun pointed at the gunman, or better yet, the gunman, sans widow maker, running down the hall for dear life and into the hands of law enforcement. Anything but what we got: nothing.

  If we’re going to be proactive enough to deactivate an active shooter, we could benefit from seeing that it can be done. We don’t even need to know the how, just that it can happen. If we can’t deter them, beat them.

  (Because I don’t want to disturb or offend readers, I am not providing a link to the video, but you can choose to view it or not on your own and see what you think.)

   

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• Guys Keeping A Breast

  Posted at 1:54 am by kayewer, on April 7, 2019

  I recently saw an advertisement for a device which allows men to breastfeed babies. It was attached to an article about a husband who complained on social media (Reddit) that his wife, in his opinion, should pay for infant formula out of her own pocket since she chose to give up breastfeeding after six months. The post has since been taken down, because he got an earful from both genders about his lack of common sense.

  After perusing the article (https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/man-demands-wife-pay-for-formula-after-she-stops-breastfeeding/ar-BBVuJH4?li=AA2dnLi),  I spotted the video for the Father’s Nursing Assistant:

  (https://designyoutrust.com/2019/03/the-fathers-nursing-assistant-japanese-device-allows-fathers-to-breastfeed-their-babies/).

  This is a vessel resembling a pair of breasts which a man can fill with milk and wear like a vest to provide the nursing experience for himself and the baby. Designed by a Japanese firm, its purpose is to enhance the bonding experience between father and child and aid with sleep (which appears to be a big problem lately for Japanese parents and their children). The right breast is where the milk is poured and stored, and the left breast seems to be fitted with an artificial nipple for the baby to latch onto. It’s a smooth robotic looking two-tone whitish tank with straps. It also appears to come with an app to gauge feeding and sleeping time (the babies’ rather than the parents).

  It was introduced in Texas at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, and looks to be popular. I wonder how society will deal with this in public restrooms, and could whipping out this gadget in a park be considered lewd behavior?

  There is a good side to this: it brings men into the picture more than before, because they’re not so detached from feeding baby as they would be by just popping a bottle in the kid’s face. It’s contact and comfort. Not a bad idea.

  But does it come with a carrying case, or a bra?

   

   

   

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