The Most Beautiful Phone

Because of his huge hand size, the White House communications team had to install a special phone in the Oval Office. Fortunately, Donald Trump said, “These are the most beautiful phones I’ve ever used in my life,"

Proof of the Bowling Green Massacre

Not only did the lying media fail to report on the now-legendary Bowling Green Massacre, but as this photo shows, they even ignored the evidence that the few remaining hipsters were selling t-shirts within hours of the event.

Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Cartoonists?

Do you read the comic "Marmaduke"? Of course not. Neither do I. But perhaps we should.

Beat the Drum Slowly and Play the Fife Lowly

This has truly been an annus horribilis, It's little wonder that so many people have chosen 2016 as their year to depart this mortal coil. Here are the people whom I considered to be significant. Very obviously, your list will differ.

Heroes

• Stephanie Rader
• Edgar Mitchell
• Mitchell Higginbotham
• Fred Cherry
• Samuel Willenberg
• Delmer Berg
• Joe Medicine Crow
• Elizabeth Strohfus
• Gilbert Horn Sr.
• Erich Rudorffer
• Kaname Harada
• Jane Fawcett
• Elie Wiesel
• Dave Bald Eagle
• Shelby Westbrook
• Jeremiah Joseph O'Keefe
• John Glenn
• Larry Colburn

Musicians

• David Bowie
• Paul Bley
• Glenn Frey
• Keith Emerson
• Greg Lake
• Paul Kanter
• Frank Sinatra, Jr.
• Merle Haggard
• Jimmie Van Zant
• Prince
• Maurice White
• Scotty Moore
• Ralph Stanley
• Rob Wasserman
• Pete Fountain
• Stanley "Buckwheat Zydeco" Dural
• Sharon Jones
• Leonard Cohen
• Leon Russell

Sportsmen & Sportswomen

• Joe Garagiola
• Muhammad Ali
• Gordie Howe
• Pat Summitt
• Buddy Ryan
• Carl Haas
• Shugoro Nakazato
• Arnold Palmer
• Dave Mirra

Authors

• Umberto Eco
• Harper Lee
• Alvin Toffler
• Edward Albee
• Richard Adams

Actors

• Alan Rickman
• Dan Haggerty
• Abe Vigoda
• George Kennedy
• Frank Kelly
• Garry Shandling
• Burt Kwouk
• Bud Spencer
• Jerry Doyle
• Alan Young
• David Huddleston
• Kenny Baker
• Jack Riley
• Paul Comi
• Patty Duke
• Gene Wilder
• Robert Vaughn
• Andrew Sachs
• Florence Henderson
• Ron Glass
• Bernard Fox
• Alan Thicke
• Carrie Fisher
• Debbie Reynolds
• William Christopher

Statesmen, Stateswomen, & Politicians

• Dale Bumpers
• Antonin Scalia
• Jo Cox
• James R. Bennett
• Walter Scheel
• Phyllis Schafly
• Shimon Peres
• Janet Reno
• Fidel Castro
• King Bhumibol Adulyadej
• Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Scientists & Engineers

• Ed Yourdan
• Marvin Minsky
• Wesley A. Clark
• Ray Tomlinson
• Katharine Blodgett Gebbie
• James Cronin
• Joe Sutter
• Andrew Grove
• Eileen Younghusband
• Edward Lofgren
• Deborah S. Jin
• Charles H. Henry
• Erwin Hahn
• Jack Garman
• Denton Cooley
• Henry Heimlich
• Vera Rubin

Journalists

• Craig Windham
• Tom Mintier
• John McLaughlin
• Gwen Ifill
• Craig Sager
• Morley Safer
• Joe Garagiola
• Bud Collins

Others

• Bob Elliot — Comedian
• Jack Elrod — Cartoonist
• Henry Worsley — Adventurer
• Tom Hayden — Peace & Civil Rights Activist
• George Martin — Record Producer & Composer
• Daniel Barrigan — Priest & Social Advocate
• Raymond Selby — Friend & Character since 7th Grade
• Michael Cimino — Screenwriter & Director
• Garry Marshall — Television & Movie Producer
• Darren Seals — Social Activist
• Nancy Reagan — First Lady & Actress
• Greta Zimmer Friedman — A moment, frozen in time.
• Zsa Zsa Gabor — Celebrity
• Joseph Harmatz — Partisan Fighter & Revenge Plotter
• George Barris — Photographer
• Tyrus Wong — Artist

Early Exploits in User Experience

Years ago, I made a control panel for a laser system. The lab director, Dr. Ken ~~~~, had a habit of randomly changing settings on your perfectly calibrated equipment. To prevent this, the panel had a toggle switch that was labeled “TUNING” and switched between “MANUAL” and “AUTOMATIC”. There were three very fancy knobs that even had little Vernier dials:

They were labeled something like “OFFSET”, “DEAD BAND”, and “GAIN”, if I recall correctly. There was also an LED that could change from yellow to red.

Of course, the switch and knobs weren’t connected to anything and the light was connected to a little circuit that had a photocell. If someone stood in front of the panel for a couple of minutes, his or her shadow would cause a capacitor to drain until a transistor would reverse the polarity on the LED and it would change colors. Since there was no label about whether red or yellow was good, Ken would wander by on occasion and tweak the knobs until it changed to the other color.

The whole thing had been built as an April Fools’ prank and was quite satisfactory. Access to the real settings required you to unscrew and remove the aforementioned panel, whereupon you could change the actual controls, which were mounted on the electronics chassis itself. Since this was usually accompanied by considerable swearing and yelling across the football-field sized basement laboratory, it was never done except late at night, so Ken never caught on.

Because we were funded by the Department of Energy, which would send bureaucrats from Washington to ensure that we were spending the money properly, all of our gear was abundantly outfitted with dials and blinking lights, which twitched and flashed in dramatic fashion. This reassured the bean counters, who had absolutely no idea of what they meant. This was all the way back in 1979 and almost certainly represented my first explorations into the difference between user interface and user experience.

How Do You Say, "Sucks to be you!" in Spanish?

Ah, futbol. A game of inches. Chilean team Universidad de Concepcion beat O'Higgins, which is somehow another Chilean team. In stoppage time at the end of the game, down 2-1, O'Higgins' keeper clears the ball down the field, hoping for one shot at the tying score.

It did not work out as planned.

Precisely One Comment

My only comment regarding the election results is this: it is my profound hope that the President-Elect fulfills everyone of the innumerable campaign promises that he made, to the letter.

Aaarrrrggghhhh!

Vertikles critiqued this blog the other day and said that it looked like it had been created twenty years ago by an eccentric crank. I wasted no time in quickly whipping off a reply castigating him for his lack of taste and his indiscerning eye for the stylish. Having quickly dispatched of the unwarranted commentary, I returned to contemplating my next post. In the back of my mind, I was still stewing about his e-mail. He kept calling it a 19 point font. Hah! That shows what he knows. All of the text is actually sixteen pixels high. Still, he did come back to that point three times and in all of the years that I've known Vertikles (a number that makes nineteen look very small), he is nearly always correct about these details.

So, to appease my indignation, I quickly searched the text for '19px' and son of a gun, there was one spot in the code where body text was set to nineteen pixels. To understand how this could occur, you must realize that Blogger templates are a mashup of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Google voodoo. Furthermore, I was using a Blogger template that I had extensively modified (the attribution is in the source code, but I made so many changes that I didn't think it fair to either party to have the author's name on the page) and which had been written by someone with what must be delicately called poor code hygiene. Somewhere along the line, a 16 had been changed to a 19. So I changed it back.

And by Crom, now the page looked terrible.

I knew that all of the sizes were right, but the smaller text swam in white on the black background. Vertikles had also railed against my use of Raleway as the body font, but I rather liked it. Except that in the small size, it was all but unreadable. The nuances that make it interesting blurred together into a gummy mass. To make bad matters worse, the little things that annoyed me that I hadn't gotten around to fixing, like the spacing on the cast and inventory lists in the movie reviews, were even more obvious with the smaller font size.

Aaaaarrrggghhh!

So, some twenty hours of my life later, it's much nicer, at least in my opinion (and Vertikles would be wise to keep his thoughts to himself for a few weeks). I've rolled back to an earlier color scheme, made some tweaks to links when you hover over them, fixed the Crom-damned list spacing, and even changed the text font. Vertikles will still be displeased, but I don't care. I can't stand text fonts where you can't tell a lowercase 'L' from an uppercase 'I' or the number '1'. I also like editorial typefaces to have a bit of character (sorry), with a few distinctive characters. I had almost gone to something really trendy, but my predilection for pompous verbosity meant that the resulting deluge of sesquipedalian prose would be even more unreadable unless I chose carefully. In the end, looking through the Google fonts, as well as those that I have a web license for, I chose Museo Sans, which is quirky enough for my taste, while still being readable in a paragraph of text.

In the next day or so, I'll get around to another Amazon posting. The little gnomes who make the suggestions have been working overtime there and I have bumper crop of artificial stupidity to spring upon you. Until then, Tschüß.

Hey, Look at That!

The 2016 Wildlife Photography Comedy Awards have been given out. Check out the gallery to see all of the animals that didn't make the cover of National Geographic.

You Need a Large Dose

Jef Mallett's Frazz is the best thing in comics. Yesterday's was dead-on.

So what are are you waiting for? Crank it loud!

I Saw Beautiful Things Today

I served as a Poll Watcher today. This is a small and insignificant part of American politics, where each party can send observers to voting locations to watch that the election laws are being scrupulously followed to neither deny anyone their rightful vote nor to permit anyone to vote illegally. I spent roughly half the day in each of two locations, both of which had two precincts voting. One was on the edge of a prestigious private university and the other was in the most ethnically diverse region of the city.

And I saw beautiful things today.

I stood in the dark of a November morning and looked up at mighty Orion standing in the crystal clear sky.

I saw two college women waiting twenty minutes before the polls opened, so that one could attest to the other's residency in the precinct.

I saw a couple who had come from Somalia as refugees and who had been naturalized in July proudly wave their ballots over their heads as they walked across the room while everyone in the polling place, including the officials, stood and applauded.

I saw text messages from a friend monitoring another precinct telling me about a ninety-year-old woman and a 107 year-old man casting their votes.

I saw college students take their first step toward running this country by voting for the first time.

I saw couples of every gender combination hug and kiss after voting together.

I saw election officials white and black, liberal and conservative, do everything within the law to make it possible for people to register.

I saw people who couldn't produce the proper documentation come back, after having gone home to dig for what was needed.

I saw a middle-aged Hmong man smiling as though he would explode with joy after casting the first ballot of his life.

I saw people of all colors, national origins, and religions standing patiently together as they waited in line.

I saw two gay men proudly say that they now had the same last name as the poll worker looked them up on the roll of voters.

I saw two observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) watching American democracy, so that they can make recommendations and comments.

I saw two dozen people put aside their lives to calmly and patiently scan, sort, examine, and explain more than a thousand times all of the details needed to register and check in voters and to give them their ballots.

And when I walked across the street to an Arabic grocery to stretch my legs and grab a bottle of mango juice and some baklavas, the owner called me brother as we chatted about the beautiful weather.

Today, I saw the things that make me proud to be an American.

A Super Cool Good Guy

The Washington Post reports that a Cubs fan wasn't able to get a World Series ticket for game six, in Cleveland. While looking for a scalper, she saw Bill Murray and decided to get close to him, probably hoping for a selfie.

Suddenly, he turned around and handed her a ticket. Next to him. Five rows behind home plate.

The woman wasn't a supermodel. She wasn't famous. She didn't even ask him for the ticket. He just did a random act of kindness. And that's super cool.

As are the bunny ears she's giving him in this picture.

White Comanche

Cast

• Joseph Cotten
• William Shatner
• Rosanna Yanni
• Perla Cristal
• Mariano Vidal Molina
• Luis Prendes
• Barta Barri
• Víctor Israel

Inventory

• A deer being butchered
• Two attempted lynchings
• A bar fight
• An inept bounty hunter
• A wagon load of haybales, to be used as instant foxholes
• A cute little boy
• A bandage on the outside of a coat sleeve

Summary

Again, we have a Paella Western. It's a bit surprising that there aren't more of them, since the Spanish film industry was at least as productive as the Italians, you have an endless supply of actors to play Mexican roles, the terrain is favorable, and the Spanish army seemed to be for rent at very reasonable rates when you had a scene that required a number of military extras running around.

We begin with Johnny Moon, one of two characters played by Shatner, being ambushed by a band of men bent on hanging him. Fortunately for him, they prove to be incompetent at that, as well as at shooting. This is good, because Moon is on his way to a Comanche village to meet Notah, the warrior chief and his twin brother

Moon is kept waiting by his brother, who is out leading an attack on a wagon. Moon's come to kill Notah, whose raiding is what inspiring the locals to attempt to stretch Moon's neck. After the two share a little fraternal love, they are about to duel when a Comanche woman leaps in front and grabs Notah's arm. After Notah says that a woman saved him, Moon mentions that if Notah cut back on the peyote, he'd be faster, thus making this a mushroom paella. Moons tells Notah that he'll spend four days in Rio Hondo and Notah agrees to meet him to settle things once and for all.

On the way to Rio Hondo, Moon stops the lynching of one land baron's minion by the minions of another. This provides an opportunity to see Moon's speed with the gun and to provide some appropriate enemies. When he gets to town, the baron, named Grimes, whose minion he saved offers to hire him. Moon says he'll tell him in four days. Later that night, the other baron, named Garcia, shows up, conveniently setting up a lovely bar fight between his brother, who was one of lynchers, and Moon.

After dealing with the brother dramatically, but non-lethally, Moon discovers that his own brother raped the sole female passenger on the stage coach when she attempts to perforate Moon with a Navy .44. The Sheriff clears Moon by saying that he traced the tracks of the riders and that none of them could have been Moon's. When the woman, Kelly, confronts Moon in his room, we learn that the brothers are half-breeds born to a white father and Comanche mother. Turned away by both whites and Indians, Notah starts using peyote which gives him visions of a new Comanche empire with him as the emperor. Since this is the sixties, following a delusional druggie seems like a good idea, so he is able to build a cult.

The next day, we learn that Kelly has a curious habit of bathing in the middle of the desert. After conveniently dropping in on her during this excercise, Moon explains that he and Notah are going to finish things. Kelly returns the favor by pointing out Garcia's brother is about to ambush Moon. This time Moon removes the need for me to keep specifying whose brother I'm talking about by drilling him through the forehead. For inexplicable reasons, Garcia is not pleased by this turn of events and makes unpleasant comments about Moon, Kelly, and the Sheriff.

The Sheriff, smelling a range war, tries to recruit Moon, who blows him off. The next morning, both bands are in town, with Grimes' men in his saloon and Garcia's men riding into town. The sheriff tries to stop Garcia by talking to him, but Garcia simply shoots him and rides on by, so that the two sides can start blasting at each other from across the street. Moon saves the day by raising a dust storm. As the two sides thin each other out, he cleans up until only Garcia is standing. The Sheriff gets the drop on him, completely eliminating both bands and providing a convenient subsidy for the local gravediggers' union. As is the way with these things, Moon and the Sheriff bond over a slug of whiskey. Later, when he returns to his room, Kirk gets the girl. I mean, Moon gets the girl.

Meanwhile, Notah leads his band to slaughter a mining camp and then informs them that they will be going to Rio Hondo to slaughter the white folks. When someone points out that Rio Hondo is about Notah and his brother, Notah replies, in essence, that my problems are your problems. When the conscientious objector sneaks off in the night to warn the town, he is confronted by Notah's woman who, despite being pregnant, manages to out-ride him and ambush him. The two kill each other, but not before the Comanche warns Moon of the oncoming assault.

All of the townspeople leave town for the cemetery, conveniently leaving a free-fire zone for the upcoming events. Moon takes the two dead Comanche and sets them on a traditional pyre. Seeing this, the other Comanches stop to burn the bodies and free the spirits. Notah is nonplussed by this turn of events, but his band say that they will conduct the ceremony and wait for Notah to return. Or not.

The two settle things in the old way, which requires both men to ride shirtless, like Vladimir Putin, past each other, taking a shot on each pass. One wonders how long this has been the old way and precisely whose old way it is. Perhaps there was some sort of guidebook for how half-breed twin brothers settled disputes.

Joseph Cotton was a distinguished actor who had a long career, including his own television show, which appears to have been a courtroom anthology series. He appeared on both The Love Boat and Fantasy Island (twice!), thus marking him as a B-grade celebrity up until about 1980. His most famous role is as the lead character, Holly Martins, of The Third Man. It makes you wonder why he would do a movie like this, particularly since he was in the middle of the busiest stretch of his career.

Ironically, this came out right in the middle of Star Trek's run. It doesn't seem to have had any effect upon Shatner's career. It's rarely mentioned when discussing him, though.

Dialogue

"Miss Kelly, leave the sheriff out of what's between me and myself."

Story

The bits and pieces that aren't clichés wouldn't fill a half-hour. It's not completely terrible, since they didn't mess up anything and the parts are more or less in the right order, but no one will ever watch it twice.

Music

The opening theme is a jazzy big band piece that has nothing to do with a western, but which is catchy, nonetheless. The rest of the music is perfectly fine, if completely unmemorable.

Acting

Cotton does an excellent job as the Sheriff. The women do a decent job as the women in a western. Shatner is actually excellent as Johnny Moon. His Notah as a surfer messiah leaves a lot to be desired. It's like watching the episode Mirror, Mirror. He's trying too hard to distinguish between the two men.

Watching this made me wonder why Shatner didn't do more westerns. He rides a horse beautifully, he has the good looks and his speech mannerisms don't seem out of place for a loner cowboy. The fact that he's about the size of the typical stuntman couldn't hurt and I'm sure that with some practice, he could have learned how to throw a punch and fake taking one, so that all of the fights didn't need to be shot from odd angles.

[Update] Another Bad Guy

And it's an airline employee. Is anyone surprised when an airline employee turns out to be racist, sexist, homophobic, or amazingly ill-informed on matters of religion or culture?

This time, it was a flight attendant (the story doesn't say what sex the attendant was) who, when a passenger went comatose, told a doctor offering to help, "“Oh no, sweetie, put [your] hand down. We are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don’t have time to talk to you.”

The doctor's problem? She was black and female and we all know that unless you are a white male, you can't be an actual physician or nurse‽^†

The airline in question was Delta, but it hardly matters anymore. All of the American airlines are dreadful, as are most of the European. I met a multi-million miler while waiting for a delayed flight once who told me that he consistently got better service on African airlines, where at least the crews were pleasant and the atmosphere congenial.

The radius for driving rather than flying increases every year. I'm up to twelve to fourteen hours, depending upon how long I'll be at the destination. Most of my colleagues are up in the six to eight hours, although some have reached ten.

If this country had a decent high-speed rail system, there wouldn't be a domestic airline flying.

Update

The Washington Post has a follow-up article. It helpfully includes a photograph of the doctor in question. In the future, all flight attendants will be required to carry a copy of this photograph, so that in case of an emergency, they can see what a doctor looks like. I was going to add "in 2016", but the first black doctor in the United States, James McCune Smith, earned his degree in 1837, graduating at the top of his class. The first woman doctor in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell, earned her degree in 1849, although the medical establishment was so appalled that she was forced to practice in Europe for several years. Perhaps that could be Delta's new motto: "The Airline Most Recommended by Antebellum Doctors".

^†The character at the end of the sentence is the beloved interrobang. It expresses those cases where excitement and puzzlement mix. In this case, why would the flight attendant not assume that the woman was at least a nurse? Has she never seen a person of color as a medical professional before? Where does this flight attendant live? Mars? I live in a state that has a black minority of only 2.1% and I have had both black doctors and nurses. Routinely. This flight attendant is a racist idiot! See how handy an interrobang is? It summed up a whole paragraph in one character. In fact, it summed up a whole character in one character.

Product Marketing 101

I do a little graphic design work for fun, which of course means that I get boatloads of spam from companies selling stock photography, fonts, and various odds and ends. I've managed to eliminate most of the really awful stuff, so most of what I get is high quality, if generally not of much use. For example, the last week consisted of a rather remarkable run on coffee mug mockups. These are Photoshop files that let you take your graphics and project them onto a mug, as viewed from any of a number of locations, including full or empty, on the desk or in the hand, or even in an attractive gift box. It's how you market designs without the expense of having to actually make the mugs. Last week, for some reason, I got about ten of these, including various sizes, materials, shapes, and other characteristics. As I said, they're all very well done, but I'm not really interested in selling mugs this week.

There are also vast numbers of templates for dance clubs, bars, sporting events, etc. You basically fill in the appropriate names and dates and print off a few hundred to get hung on bulletin boards around college campuses and bus stops. The quality of these range from mediocre to unspeakable, but they probably accomplish the desired result and at almost no cost. I've got these packing off to my spam filter.

In between lies the stock photography. About a decade ago, there was a stock photography model who ended up in every computer ad for every company on Earth. She became known as "everywhere girl" and was eventually located in real life, where it turned out that she was a college student who made a couple of hundred dollars one day having about a thousand photos taken of her using various computers, carrying them across campus, sitting in classrooms, etc. Ironically, she was completely unaware that she had become an internet sensation.

If you have a need for a one-off photo, there are many services that can sell you one, with the appropriate rights for reproduction (please don't just grab them off the web—that's a good way to get sued). If you are going to do a series of ads or if you are doing a presentation, you might want to get a number of related photos, either of the same style or the same people. These come about a dozen at a time with titles like, "Excited Interracial Business People", which is a group of young, mixed race and sex professionals demonstrating more enthusiasm in a business meeting than would normally be expected. There are also healthy numbers of "Attractive dark-haired woman with perfect skin and makeup". Sets such as these are available in every imaginable combination of ethnicity, hair and eye color, makeup or natural, and range from prudish to mildly titillating. Women outnumber men about ten to one in these sets, which is indicative of something.

Today, in the utterly non-titillating line, I received an offer for fourteen photos of a "Happy girl in a pink dress with balloons is standing on the background of the waterfront". Indeed, there is a blonde woman, whom I would consider to beyond the age of "girl", being in her late twenties, wearing a long pink dress and standing on large rocks that look like a breakwater jutting out into the ocean. She has long hair, is wearing what appears to be a tiara, although I suspect that it is a hairband of some kind, and she has a bundle of about a dozen balloons of the same color as her dress. The balloons are not inflated with helium, so in a couple of the pictures, she is holding them above her head. In all but one of the pictures, she has a rather vacuous smile, with the exception being one in which she is blowing a kiss. There is no conceivable erotic value and with the possible exception of anti-psychotic drugs, there is no possible product that you could imagine using these to sell. Although well-exposed, they have no artistic merit and it's really not possible to think of any potential use for them.

This is a perfect example of a product without an audience. I am almost tempted to buy the set to use in a presentation on building a product without doing customer research. I believe that it falls within 'fair use' to show you a tiny version of one of the photos, just to provide context.

Should you think of a use for this set, I'd love to hear it. Also, suggestions as to how she got out onto those rocks in that dress would also be appreciated.

Great Moments in Product Design

So, on Wednesday, Aphrodite and I were invited to the elementary school where our kids had gone to speak to the students about our careers as engineers. These were pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students, fairly evenly divided.

Aphrodite, being who she is, gave an excellent talk on Test Engineering, with photos and videos. Me, being me, did a design exercise on how to build a bug catcher. The kids were good and had lots of good ideas (way too many, but that's typical of adult design exercises, too).

One boy, probably in kindergarten, proceeded to give me the single best design that I'll ever hear. He politely raised his hand and waited until he was called upon. When it was his turn to speak, he very precisely described how, if you wish to catch spiders, you need a bowl with steep sides about this high (using his fingers to indicate about an inch). You set this on the floor and then you place a dead hand in the middle and all the spiders will come and be trapped in the bowl.

A dead hand?

Yes. Spiders are really attracted to dead hands.

Several other students solemnly agreed that dead hands worked especially well for spiders, His teacher was frantically trying not to laugh out loud. I looked at him as he stood seriously looking back at me, waiting for feedback, and said, "I'll be sure to get the test engineers working on that, but I think that we may have trouble getting it past Product Compliance and the Branding departments."

He nodded knowingly and we continued the exercise.

I've Wondered About That, Myself

When in Doubt, Order a Pizza

Courtesy of the Washington Post, we have another Good Guy™

After Hurricane Matthew scraped the Florida coast, a Nebraska man worried about his 87-year-old grandmother. Her phone was out and the emergency services were overwhelmed, so there was no one to check on her. Until he had a stroke of genius.

He called her local Papa John's Pizza and had them deliver a pepperoni pizza. On the part of the order where special instructions go, (like, don't try to pet the dog) he asked that the delivery person call him when he dropped off the pizza. The delivery guy did so and grandma was found to be safe and sound, although living in the dark and without communications.

So, here's a Good Guy award for Palm Coast Papa John's Pizza and another for a thoughtful (and clear-thinking) grandson.

It's Going to Be One of Those Days

A gnat just flew into my coffee cup and drowned.

I'm sure that there are both an emoji and a German word for this, but I don't know either.

Back to the Amazon

When I began to revive this blog, I never expected that the most popular entries would be Amazon's butchery of my interests. Still, these are the most viewed, according to Google, so I'll keep doing them. In the near future, I'll throw in Netflix, which makes Amazon look positively brilliant. The latest couple of checks of Amazon recommendations have actually produced far too many bloopers for a single blog entry, so this will be spread out over the next week or so. Since it's the gift that keeps on giving, I can't help but hope that there may be even more goodies waiting.

We'll start out with some self-help books. I'm always trying to lose weight and get into better shape. Having met remote members of my family tree, I know that I resemble the Lithuanian side of my heritage, but I'm about to give it up on blaming genes and simply call it a result of incompetent Intelligent Design:

Just to be sure that I wasn't missing anything, I expanded the list. Nope, this time Amazon has completely wandered off the feedlot and is now meandering at random. I do recommend the Don Norman book as an excellent introduction into product design. It's a fun read.

Sticking with our polka dot theme, it might be interesting to see what young adults are reading these days. I can remember a summer of Herman Hesse when I was thirteen, so almost anything is possible. Having said that, Norwegian branding design was still unexpected.

I better expand this list, too. Just to see what's back there:

A J.K. Rowling short story collection—understandable and certainly more appropriate. One Hundred Years of Solitude and a supporting trivia book? I can dig it. A little sophisticated (says the kid who was reading Hesse at thirteen), but magical realism is a great literary style and after this, the quality of the reader's school essays is bound to improve (although her or his grades may not).

But what's that lurking on the very edge? Virginia Woolf? To the Lighthouse?

I confess to never having read Woolf. Mark it down as one of my many character faults. The problem is that I never felt the need for a primer on how to be an angst-ridden adolescent. I had to read the reviews and the Wikipedia summary to get an idea of what it might be about. At this point, I think that I'll spare any teenagers for whom I might feel the need to buy a book from both Woolf and Hesse. Gabriel García Márquez seems to be a much better choice, or maybe a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. I'll pass on the Rowling, too. Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes would both be better reads.

Wow. Totally heavy. Let's close this with a couple of my favorite insights on the part of Amazon. First, what I can only presume is an ethical guide to cloning:

Then, when I went back a week later, I found that it had been replaced by an eighteenth century dialogue on the existence of God:

I can only imagine the conversation in the operating room.

"Sarah, do you think that this is a metastasized region or a separate tumor?"

"John, a very small part of this great system, during a very short time, is very imperfectly discovered to us; and do we thence pronounce decisively concerning the origin of the whole?"

"I see your point, but the question is whether we should excise the whole bowel or just this region."

"You alone, or almost alone, disturb this general harmony. You start abstruse doubts, cavils, and objections: You ask me, what is the cause of this cause? I know not; I care not; that concerns not me."

"You know, Sarah, you're right. This guy's a walking corpse anyway. Let's cut the whole thing out, sew him up, and we can still catch half-price appetizers down at TGIFridays."

"But for my part, whenever I find myself disposed to mirth and amusement, I shall certainly choose my entertainment of a less perplexing and abstruse nature. A comedy, a novel, or at most a history, seems a more natural recreation than such metaphysical subtleties and abstractions. Or, barring that, an order of fried green beans and a Long Island iced tea would go down right fine."