WHAT NOW?

     We have an antiquated telephone. No, it's not as antique as a rotary dial, but it's one of those that when you hold it to your ear, you can't see the buttons. Well, including mobile phones, I guess all modern phones are like that nowadays.

    The recorded voice gives you an option . . . press one . . . so you hold the phone away from your ear so you can see the buttons. You press one and by the time you get the phone back to your ear you have missed the first few words of the next bit of recorded voice.

    Last Friday my doctor (well, not an M.D. , but a P.A.) changed one of my prescriptions. A recorded Walgreens voice called me this afternoon. The voice said the prescription was ready to be picked up, but it needed to ask me a few questions. Would I please enter my birthdate?

    What? Take the phone away from my ear and painstakingly enter my birthdate? In what exact format did the voice want my birthdate? I remember the pleasure of slamming a rotary phone down on a boyfriend who jilted me. Can you derive any satisfaction out of slamming the phone down on a recorded voice?

I LIKE WHAT CARVILLLE SAID

     James Carville has just risen mightily in my opinion.

    Said Carville, "They came after women," made insulting remarks about women, "but I said nothing because I'm not a woman".

    They came after Puerto Ricans, "but I said nothing because I'm not a Puerto Rican".

    They targeted Black people, "but I said nothing because I'm not Black".

    "But they came after watermelon", and they got Carville's attention.

    Carville was also defensive about gumbo.

    I would join Carville in defending watermelon, but he can have his gumbo. Just let me know when they come after runzas.

I VOTED FOR THE NUTCASE

     Yes, I did.

    It was a vote AGAINST the incumbent. I was so angry with the incumbent because of his lack of communication. He never responded to letters (this was before email). To really clinch my feelings I had recently attended a Republican event. We were all seated at tables for eight. He was seated at the next table, and as we swung ourselves on our swivel chairs away from the table he and I were elbow-to-elbow. Never once during the evening did he say anything to me or acknowledge my presence in any way.

    So without taking time to research I voted for his opponent. Fortunately, the incumbent was re-elected.

    I say fortunately because a few weeks later I actually met the opponent when he attended a meeting of District Two of the Kansas Authors Club. He carried a briefcase on which was stated the office he had sought. He seemed to think that he had won and was waiting to be summoned to Washington DC.

    He also seemed to think he could be a best-selling writer. (Well, a lot of us suffer from that delusion, so I guess a lot of us are nutcases.)

BETTER, OR WORSE . . .

     In the beginning, it looked like a dull book about arithmetic. or algebra, or geometry. or calculus, or whatever - MORE NUMBERS EVERY DAY, written by.Micael Dahlen and Helge Thorbj/ornsen, and translated into English from Swedish or Norwegian by Paul Norlen.  But as I kept reading, it got better, or worse . . . depends.

    With the internet we are surrounded by more and more numbers, including some things that shouldn't be counted. There are a few sly remarks about quantifying their sex lives, which made me wonder what their wives thought about this.

    The internet's obsession about counting, and thus rating, even extends to surveys about satisfaction before the customer even receives the product. Most of the examples the authors used came from Instagram posts, but they could just as well have been about facebook. Well, I'm tired of facebook counting my steps, every time I turn around, whether I turned clockwise or counterclockwise, etc., etc., etc.

    Social media, I'm outta here.

THE TOLLING BELL

     A bell was tolling mournfully as I came out of my daughter's Pullman town house in South Chicago in the mid-1980s.

    When George Mortimer Pullman, inventor of the Pullman Palace Car, built the village to house his railroad car employees he included one church, intended to serve all the Protestant denominations. He calculated without the Catholic Church. No sooner was the Greenstone Church ready to receive congregants when the Catholics, feeling snubbed, immediately constructed a church just beyond the village limits. The slow, measured peals came from a few blocks distant.

    I left the Pullman neighborhood, ran my errand and returned. And the bell was still tolling, a low, somber, reverberating tone. I stopped with my hand on the stair railing to the porch. A non-Catholic, I dug from my memory the phrase, "one for every year  of life".

    Another item dredged from my recent memory: a newspaper feature article about a 106-year-old Pullman resident who could still remember, through the eyes of a child, the federal troops moving about on the lawn of the Florence Hotel during the Pullman Strike. Looking across Arcade Park, I could see the Florence Hotel south lawn from my third-floor bedroom window.

    Also called the Great Chicago Strike of 1894, the first labor conflict that eventually spread across the entire country, the Pullman Strike had forced the painful birth of a national Labor Day, as proclaimed by President Grover Cleveland.

    I had never met the older woman, but I knew which house she lived in and had seen her from afar. I marveled that my life had almost crossed paths with someone who had witnessed such historically significant events. From 1894 back to 1776 was not much more than 100 years.

    We really are, I thought, a still young experiment in the concept of a self-governing people.

THEY DIDN'T CALL ME

    On August 11, 2023 the police chief of the City of Marion, in Marion County, Kansas, asked a magistrate judge to sign off on a warrant which would allow him to search and seize equipment at the offices of the weekly newspaper, the Marion Record, the home of the publisher (and the co-owner, his mother), and the home of a city council member.

    Recently a survey asked the question:  “Can you share with us how you feel about the police raid on the Marion County Record and how by not prosecuting law enforcement for the raids might affect a local newspaper’s ability to independently and freely report on local community news and events in the future?”

    I wish the survey had called me. The police chief is not the only guilty party here. I would ask the magistrate judge to explain the legal precedent that justified signing the warrant.

    The Marion County Attorney, Joel Ensey, who withdrew the warrant two days later, also has some questions to answer. 

     A First Amendment lawyer has said the raids are the "grossest violation of the right of free speech" he has ever seen. I myself was in a state of disbelief when I learned about the raids. If the decisions made by the police chief, the judge, the county attorney, and others involved weren't so ludicrous, they would be laughable.

CHOCOLATE WON'T MAKE YOU THIN?

How bad will it make you feel when I tell you the internet got it wrong when it claimed chocolate will make you thinner? (Read Sarah Kaplan, "How, and Why, a Journalist Tricked News Outlets into Thinking Chocolate Makes You Thin," Washington Post, online, May 28, 2015.) To complicate things even further, how many fattening calories are in chocolate depends (to paraphrase Bill Clinton), on how you define chocolate. Cocoa, the basis of chocolate products, is relatively low in calories. It's the additional sugar and butterfat and other goodies that are added to the cocoa that will swell up the calories. But cocoa by itself has an extremely bitter taste; nonetheless. chocolate does have a few health benefits. When I find out what they are, I'll let you know.