Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: August 2019

• All Others Pay Cash

  Posted at 1:45 am by kayewer, on August 25, 2019

  It happened in WalMart just now: I had to wait at self-checkout because I was paying with cash. It seems the machines were either not processing bills or dispensing change, so they could only take credit cards. This was happening in five or six kiosks out of the eight in use.

  The strange thing about the event was that even the shoppers with an item valued at less than ten dollars used a credit card. We’re nickel and diming on debt.

  It reminds me of my favorite go-to guilty pleasure show with a message: Garfield and Friends. An episode in Season Four called “Cash and Carry” (https://www.thetvdb.com/series/garfield-and-friends/episodes/226340) featured the world’s favorite lasagna chomping feline wrecking a wastebasket, which his hapless human Jon Arbuckle must replace at the wastebasket store in the mall. Of course, this was back in 1991 when malls and specialty shops (which carry only wastebaskets?) were still relevant. Since Jon was disturbed by his credit card debt and had cut up all his charge cards, he tried to buy the new wastebasket with cash. This leads to the clerk wondering what the green paper stuff is, and Jon is taken downtown by the cops and subjected to the typical interrogation scene, complete with overhead hot light and Dragnet inspired dialogue. He got the purchase, but had to promise not to try to pull such a stunt again (at least until the next time Garfield did his Ricky Ricardo impression on the wastebasket bongos).

  Sweden is apparently going all plastic now, with cash hardly anywhere to be seen. How this is an improvement I can’t begin to figure. When you have cash, once your wallet is empty, it’s gone and your spending is over; with plastic you don’t see how much you’ve spent until the bill comes. That is how millions of people wind up declaring bankruptcy for money spent on food they ate and then flushed down the toilet 18 months ago.

  I didn’t mind breaking out the ten dollar bill so much, but the dime really broke the bank. Change is a bothersome thing, unless you collect it and go to the coin counter for something in return.  Still I believe cash matters. It’s keeps spending honest, it’s tangible, and when new it smells kind of nice blending with your leather wallet.

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• Point and Wait Don’t Shoot!

  Posted at 1:31 am by kayewer, on August 18, 2019

  I’ve been having camera trouble, and as I’ve struggled through trying to fix what is happening, I realized that having a camera is sort of like having a gun, except for (obviously) the bullets and killing part.

  DSLR (meaning Digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras are not quite an easy alternative to film cameras because of all the buttons and programming involved. Somehow I managed to get my camera out of simple mode and into nothing works mode, and my instruction manual got lost. It probably ran screaming because it knew, from the look of me, that I was a newbie and likely to never get through the booklet, let alone program the darned thing. It might have been right.

  Two things I did realize are that the camera is stuck on timer mode, and it has no flash. No flash means I have a hot shoe. Not a Prado heel, but a gizmo on which one can mount a separate flash. Until I get a flash, if I’m indoors with my camera, I am in the dark. And I need a new instruction manual.

  Wait, you say, you have the Internet, so go online and read the manual. Did you ever try to look like a photographer while toting an instruction manual around on a laptop? And what if the action I need to photograph happens while I’m trying to read the manual to figure out how to set up my camera to take the darned shot?

  This is part of where a camera is like a gun. You need to get it out, load it, pull back the hammer and then aim and pull the trigger. The bad guy usually comes with all that done already. Fortunately you may have an advantage if you are in the dark and the bad guy doesn’t know where he’s going.

  Just don’t fire off your separate flash which you’ve mounted on your hot shoe. In such a case, have the bad guy take your Prado heels and call your insurance company in the morning.

  Camera, you’re fired, because you can’t fire.

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• Even More Random Thoughts

  Posted at 1:43 am by kayewer, on August 11, 2019

  After enduring a double issue for over two months, the new Reader’s Digest arrived in my mailbox this week. It arrived too early, and now I will have plowed through its articles well in advance of the next issue. I don’t like double issues; although the staff at the magazine may get some much-deserved time off, the extra content that is supposed to get you through double the time between issues is rarely good enough for me. As a subscriber to Entertainment Weekly, I’ve seen my share of double issues, and I think they should be limited to two per year. Unless something happens that is really too big to not expand the coverage, and then just add some darned pages, and don’t make us wait double the time for the next update.

  While I was trying not to bury my nose in the magazines, I took out a weekend subscription to the New York Times for their magazine, book review and such. I think I’m the only person on my block who gets newspaper delivery these days. It scares me to think that part of the reason our world is going to heck in a handcart is that nobody is actually paying attention to the news.

  And sandwiched between all the paper that I’m not supposed to be reading because it’s all online, I was volundrafted to help with a project at the office. I wouldn’t mind so much, except that all our extra projects tend to have staffing problems, because we work in a place where our customers can’t wait for us to do anything extra. It would be like keeping the doors to WalMart shut while the staff had a webinar in the common area, keeping potential paying customers out.

  As I was sweating through my good office clothes hauling things up and down three stories with the help of the mailroom (and she worked dollies wearing a dress, no less), I saw that our dress code had deteriorated to beach sandals. I feel okay complaining about this only because I wear stockings with my sandals, as I hate street crud between my toes.

  When I headed home in traffic (and there were four lanes filled with vehicles stretching across I-95 seemingly into Bucks County), I wondered what it would be like to designate just one lane for people who were not going on vacation and merely headed home.

  In my head all week was an annoying mindworm from the Santander Bank ads, “Break My Stride” by (originally) Matthew Wilder. Of course, the ad features a cute piggy bank which came to life in a previous and rather touching commercial, but darned if that song doesn’t get stuck like a scratched record in my brain, even if it is a cover version.

  The only other thing that stood out in my mind was the problem of a “dead zone” while driving with my Sirius XM radio. Just a short one, running a few tenths of a mile, but it’s noticeable.  And don’t you know: the song goes dead right at the good part. Sure, it is a satellite transmission, so tunnels and bridges and overpasses may interfere, but what I’m dealing with are some well placed trees along the road. Guess they don’t like Sinatra.

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• The Pizza Question, Part Whatever

  Posted at 1:46 am by kayewer, on August 4, 2019

  We like puzzles, and to be puzzled. Or if we are easily ticked off and/or prone to self-induced blood pressure spikes, we like to argue until our faces turn plum about answering puzzles. A math question is the latest conversation spiker, following on the heels of the “what color is the dress” debate and the “laurel or yanny” sound bite.

  The puzzle reads as follows:  8 ÷ 2(2+ 2) = ?

  Depending on when you learned math, you might come up with two different answers. I had new math, so I would take the entire series of numbers apart and then give up. When I had new math and tried to tough it out, I spent my Christmas break catching up with 20 pages of homework I couldn’t complete because I was stuck. My mother, a math whiz in her day, approached the teacher, who admitted she had to consult her guidebook to help explain the solutions. So much for enriching young minds.

  Anyway, one school (pardon the pun) of thought is that one performs the function within the parentheses first, so we would be multiplying 4 by the solution to 8 divided by 2. Since the solution to the division is 4, the final answer is 16.

  But wait! If you learned to do multiplication first, you would multiply the 2 outside the parentheses by the solution 4 within the parentheses, making the final formula 8 divided by 8, which equals 1.

  It’s the great pizza topping debate all over again, only if the wrong solution is reached in a math problem, it could spell disaster if you’re building or creating something in which accuracy is key.

  I even learned about some new acronyms (or at least new to me), called PEMDAS and BODMAS. PEMDAS stands for Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. BODMAS stands for Brackets and Exponents, with the next two functions from PEMDAS reversed. These are guidelines for determining in what order to do a math function, and even they don’t agree.

  We already have two of everything else that isn’t a Noah’s Ark animal, so why not two ways to mess up math? And worse, we have two more things to argue about.

  We should be taking measures to stop polarizing ourselves instead. And we shouldn’t fight over differences which don’t directly affect the balance of our lives. If a math problem has two solutions, it is actually two problems, from what I can see.

  But don’t count on that.

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