NO PURSE, NO POCKETS

     One of the first days of our trip to the then USSR we were taken to a church, converted to an art gallery with its displays of French Impression painters. We were required to check our purses at the door. I was very uncomfortable being ordered to surrender my purse, and all its contents. Hastily I tried to stuff everything into one of my coat pockets.

    The next day, not to be caught unprepared again, I arranged everything I wanted to keep safe on my body in my coat pockets. Left my almost-empty purse in the hotel room. Another church converted to an art gallery with -- you guessed -- French Impression painters. (I hadn't known there were so many of them.)

    But at this gallery we were asked to check our coats at the door, not our purses. So I emptied my pockets into my hands, trying to keep everything clutched together in my fingers. Spent the afternoon picking my belongings up off the floor.

    It was at a later stage of my life that I learned about a furoshiki. Now I seldom go anywhere without a handy furoshiki.

THIS CONVERSATION WILL BE RECORDED . . . .

    That's the warning, but does anyone ever listen?

    We had an hour-long power outage last week. Afterwards I got a text message that Xfinity had restored everyone's internet. Not mine.

    There was a link I could go to. Several screen changes later I was having a "chat" with what I suspect was a series of algorithms. Why the conversation went on as long as it did I have no clue, because I never was able to provide the answer my conversation partner wanted. The conversation was ended abruptly. Still with no internet, I tried again. I think this "chat" was with a real person, but again, I was not able to supply the right answers and the conversation came to an unexpected end. Next morning I was at the Xfinity office. I was offered an appointment with a tech to come to the house on that day, but other commitments required me to take an appointment for the next day.

    The tech ended up installing a new router, so we had the internet again. I do have to wonder -- does a real, live human being ever listen to those recorded, failed conversations?

    I hate to destroy anyone's illusions, but human behavior will never fit into a bunch of algorithms.

FOGGY PUDDING

     How many Christmases have I been singing the song We Wish You A Merry Christmas, second verse, Oh, bring us some figgy pudding, third verse, We won't go until we get some? Without ever having been brought some figgy pudding I got to wondering what figgy pudding might actually taste like.

    So I set about wandering the internet looking for recipes for figgy pudding. I venture there are at least twenty dozen recipes for figgy pudding. Some give directions for steaming -- you know, using the heat from the steam of boiling water to do the cooking -- a process that seemed cumbersome and time-consuming. Other recipes called for baking in a bundt pan. I chose the latter.

     Recipe called for buttermilk, and, strangely, baking powder. My mother cooked a lot with buttermilk, in those days cheaper than fresh milk, and buttermilk usually requires baking soda, not baking powder. The dough was extremely stiff and I wished I had thinned it with a bit more liquid, i., e., more buttermilk.

    The result was a dense fruit bread, which I took to church for fellowship time. I wanted to make a sign to let everyone know they were eating figgy pudding. Alas, the word 'figgy' does not appear to be in the spelchek dictionary -- it always came out 'foggy'.

    Rather than argue with spelchek I think we should change the lyrics . . . oh, bring me some foggy pudding . . . 

YOU CALLED?

     Is it a friend request?

    You get a notice on social media suggesting that someone wants to be your friend.

    Can you trust it? Does that person really want to be your friend, or has a social media algorithm merely found that the two of you have in common your passion for kumquats?

    You don't want to offend someone by rejecting a genuine friend request, but is it a true request or only a social media suggestion?

    Reminds me of the brief time I worked as a telephone operator. On rare occasions I would be taken off the local connections board and assigned to a long distance board, you know, with those long cords which had a plug at the unattached end.

    In the early evening supervision would be light, and the lack of activity boring. Well, I had a way to amuse myself, which was never discovered and for which I was never fired. I could cause the telephones to ring, in two houses at the same time. Both parties would pick up the phone, thinking that the other party had called. There would follow some quite amusing conversations, many of them concluding with "why did you call me if you have nothing to say?" and a slamming of the phone back in the cradle.

    Are some of these friend requests from real people, or just algorithms with too much time on their hands?

I STOP HERE

     Computers rule.

    Late last evening my son called my attention to the incoming administration's choice of Janette  Nesheiwat as surgeon general.

    Dr. Nesheiwat's resume includes a reference to the Joplin tornado. Both my son and I being survivors of the Joplin tornado, we were interested in Dr. Nesheiwat's connection. I went to the Olathe Library website, tried to suggest a purchase.

    Received a 404 Not Found message. Went then to Ask a Librarian. Suggested the book.

    The reply: Thanks for reaching out to the library. To clarify, are you wanting to put in a purchase suggestion for this item?

    From me: Yes, purchase suggestion, but when I clicked on that link, I got 404 NOT FOUND message. The author is Trump's choice for Surgeon General.

    From the library: Here's another link to the purchase suggestion form. I hope that works for you! Please let me know if you need any further help. (Note: you may have to copy and paste this link into your browser.)

    From me: Thank you, but this is as far as I am going. Either take the suggestion from here or not. The author, Janette Nesheiwat, of Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine, is the incoming administration's choice for US surgeon general. I thought it a book the library should have.

    From the library: You're welcome to do whatever you choose, but please note that the only way we accept suggestions is through the suggestion form on our website. If you would like to see the book on the shelf, you'll have to fill that out. Thanks and have a great day.

    From me: Janette Nesheiwat's previous experience seems to have a connection to the Joplin tornado. My son and I, being survivors of that tornado, were mildly curious. In addition, Dr. Nesheiwat has written a book about medicine, Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine. You are sending me instructions for going back and using a "suggested purchase" link.

May I suggest an alternative reply from the library:

Thank you for calling this book to our attention. As it was written by a doctor who will probably be serving as the next U.S. Surgeon General, it is an important book to have available on our shelves. We apologize for the inconvenience you experienced when trying to access our "suggested purchase" form and will do our best to have it functioning the next time you wish to suggest a purchase.

    From the library: I submitted a suggestion for purchase on your behalf. You should receive an email copy of the submission.

Have a nice day,

    Computers rule.

PRINT IS COMING BACK

     Looks like we may be seeing the return of printing. Maybe not in the form of newspapers -- yet. Can cursive handwriting be far behind?

    Retailers of luxury goods are returning to their marketing strategies of sending out print catalogs. Lora Kelly writes: But completely ignoring a catalog that appears on your stoop or in your mailbox is tougher. Simply put, you have to pick it up, even if you are planning to throw it in the recycling bin—and brands hope that you might flip through some glossy photos along the way.

    Admittedly the above quote is from Atlantic magazine, which just announced they are returning from ten copies per year to twelve issues-- in print -- every year.

    Cursive handwriting -- actually putting your fingers to paper -- is a deliberative action quite unlike keyboarding. You may make mistakes in spelling, or in grammar, but you will not mistakenly write tomatoes when you mean tomorrow.

UNSUBSCRIBING?

    Unsubscribing? I am doing just that.

    From most of the emailers I have been receiving emails from, some nearly a dozen a day. I will keep Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon and Cory Booker from New Jersey because they sometimes send me tidbits about the temperature of Congress for the day.

    The others, I do have a reason for unsubscribing. I am pulling myself back into my cave. I'll come out when the new administration lowers the costs on food, gas and housing, and sends Putin home.

A TURNING POINT?

    A watershed?

    I am a new subscriber to the magazine, the Atlantic. I was informed, more than once, that subscribers will receive only ten magazines during the year. My first two issues have hardly arrived in my mailbox, both on the same day, when the editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, announced that because of an increase to over a million subscribers, and a substantial increase in advertising revenue, Atlantic will return to 12 issues per year.

“The greatness of print and especially a print magazine is that it sits still for you,” Goldberg said. “It doesn’t beep and flash and demand that you do things. It’s there to be read and enjoyed. People still derive intellectual and aesthetic pleasure from print.”

    Is this a foretelling that the seekers of news may be running away from the ephemeral internet or television and returning to something that stays put? Words in print cannot be altered -- what you read is there to stay.

    Does this signify a rebound of newspapers and news magazines? The Kansas City Star/Times still throws the morning newspaper in my driveway.

FALLING, FALLING

     Why do I keep falling for clickbait?

    The first screen will show a guy in a white coat, so you assume he is a prominent doctor (when in truth he has no patients and is eager to earn a few $$$, maybe he isn't a doctor anyway, we don't see his credentials hanging on a nearby wall). The words on the screen read that you should never eat avocados again. READ MORE. Click. And here is an advertisement for cruise trips. (You did do a little search on cruise lines yesterday.)

    A slight scroll and there appears a description of an avocado (as if you have never seen an avocado before). Another scroll to reveal an advertisement for the best in vacuum tools. If you want to learn more about avocados, stay on course, don't get detoured into exploring vacuum tools.

    More scrolls, more advertisements and occasionally another sparse paragraph warning you about eating avocados, but not yet the reason. Advertisements to the right and the left, sometimes covering portions of the text about avocados. You should be able to remove the advertisements by clicking on an X, which is sometimes hard to find, if it exists at all.

    Why do I keep falling for clickbait? 

ARMISTICE

Armistice. Latin. armistitution, a short truce.

This Kansas plain has been blessed

by the blood of those who left.

Some brought home in boxes. Others never.

Island Mound, San Juan Hill, Chateau Thierry,

Normandy, Coral Sea, Heartbreak Ridge,

Saigon, Baghdad , , , Kabul , , , Kandahar . . .

So many places. So many heroes.

We honor their memory with our lives.

We see their faces in the stars.

(First published in To The Stars Through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga in 150 Voices.)

SUMMER BLOOMS

    My Aunt Genevieve never had much time for gardening, but every where she lived, every spring, she managed to plant a couple of rows of colorful zinnias in an area where they would be visible to a passerby. Throughout the summer the abundant blooms provided welcome color.

    A bonus would be their availability for bouquets or flower arrangements to adorn the fireplace mantel or the center of the dining room table. Sometimes a bloom or two, along with a bit of greenery -- matured asparagus stalks if any growing nearby -- went with her to pay someone a visit. Like my Aunt Genevieve, zinnias were tough and hardy.

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.

Sitting on the Fence

 My sister and I were emailing about the movie "Gone with the Wind". We're both Missouri-born, a "Southern" state with Union sympathizers. Her last comment to me: "Well you might have problems deciding which side you supported. You had great grand fathers on each side and they both got to Arkansas and their kids married each other."

Peer Knitters

      Don't ask me to explain, but a cherished memory was the time I stood with a group at the National Hotel in Havana, Cuba. Jane was having trouble fitting her knitting into her luggage because she had finished the scarf, but it was still on the needles because she had forgotten how to bind off. While we waited for a bus to the airport I watched a woman named Selkirk from Winnipeg, Canada, take Jane's knitting in her hands and finish the bind off. You never know where you will find a peer knitter.