New Jersey

There have been many jokes aimed at NJ from NYC and Hollywood. Actually, some are well-deserved. Not because we citizens aren't hard-working sorts (don't forget, we made like 100 Destroyers for WW II in record time, have most of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the country here and such).

But we also have our politicians. All deserving every NJ joke you can invent.  Democrats mostly, and idiots mostly. They have been stealing from our wallets since before I was born. Pretty good track record. Somehow, all the dying cities around here which lost their manufacturing skills to lower cost, equally competent workers elsewhere (sort of the definition of competition), looked up to their Democrat congressman to save them, rather than save themselves.

And save them they did. For no conscionable reason, just because they had the power to steal money from the rest of us they did it with extraordinary enthusiasm. Not only for the dead cities despite being deservedly dead and too stupid to reinvent themselves, but because the efforts to revive them could help the politicians personally pocket a huge hunk of the proceeds.

Ever heard of retirement "double dipping?" This is where a New Jersey politician finished with one career in public office moves on to another, which has its own medical and retirement package. So he gets to pocket two entire retirement plans at public expense.

You wonder why we are in financial difficulties?

Driving When You're NOT Driving

You've probably, more than once in your life, driven with one of these people. In a normal setting, they are like you or me - pleasant company, normal conversationalists, good humor and such.

But put them behind the wheel of a car and a change comes over them. There is suddenly tension in the air. You are instantly less relaxed than you were just moments ago.  Rather than being a mere passenger, you are thrust into the "assistant driver" role - every slowpoke, errant driver or knucklehead maneuverer is called to YOUR attention.  

You can't simply relax and be a passenger since you are being involved in all the driving decisions this person is making. You might as well do the driving yourself since if you do, at least you have a modicum of control.

As the passenger, you are simply a hapless victim. That's why we curmudgeons do our own driving.

Pooper-Scooper Laws

There was quite a divide amongst the ranks of the Curmudgeon Societé Generale when these laws first appeared. As you can imagine, dog-owning curmudgeons were outraged while we cat owners smiled contentedly. For this curmudgeon, I was all for it, given the dangers of stepping off the curb when visiting big brother Buzz in NYC and soiling a perfectly good pair of Florsheims was still fresh in my mind.

Yet all is not well. Since we live on a quiet street, dog walkers from everywhere walk along our street. Being responsible, civilized sorts, they do pick up, but one apparently spies our trash bins curbside on trash days and promptly tosses their little baggy in it. The garbage guys come, reach in, grab our big bag, inadvertantly leaving the little dog-poop-filled one behind for me. Just great.

I'm setting up my webcam.  I'll get the miscreant.

Femme Fatales

In Hollwood, when some femme fatale sees a spider - or worse a mouse - she screams and jumps up on a handy chair or the toilet.

Let's review here:

Thing 1:  I'll give her the scream - even manly curmudgeons have been known to express surprise with a loud cry.

Thing 2:  Did anyone actually SEE Dr. No?  If it is indeed a spider, three whacks with her shoe and the spider is as flat as a pancake.

And Thing 3: Most women these days carry those 20,000 volt stun guns.  One well-aimed blast and any mouse would be a chunk of carbon.

I think these femmes need better technical advisors - perhaps one from the Curmudgeon Societé Generale...

Watches

Did you know watches had complications?  Sometimes many. I saw an ad for a watch that had a bunch, PLUS:

Tourbillon movement

Glycydur balance wheel with two arms

Skeletonized titanium baseplate

Anticorodal Pb109 aluminum

Fast rotating barrel

Barrel pawl with progressive recoil

A translucent composite case injected with carbon nanotubes

Torque limiting crown

Wire-drawn and microblasted surfaces

Free sprung balance with variable inertia

And it can be yours for a mere $700,000!

The Timex my father gave me for High School graduation didn't have complications - it just kept going and going, as the ads of the day promised.

But if you want to spend $700,000 instead of $12.95 on your watch, expect complications.

Tarts

What is it with women? Invite one of them over for lunch and they bring something completely unbelievable, like a tart. What is a tart anyway?  As a ranking curmudgeon, I can assure my dear readers that the Societé membership has absolutely NO idea. 

Lunch? You bring some beer. Dinner? You bring a wine - pretty much the first one you see when you venture off the beer aisle. Simple. Straightforward. 

When tarts enter the conversation, all bets are off. We fear berries will be involved, but which are the correct berries? Why would such a question ever come to our attention? Like we might know. "Oh, the razzenberry pies are good this year. Lets go with that." Riiight, as Dr. Evil would say. 

Beer. Close your eyes and drag the nearest six-pack out of the fridge. 

Done. 

Googling Yourself

Have you ever done this for yourself?

I just Googled myself. I got my answer within .15 seconds (Google likes to brag), but 600,000 entries leading to topics such as "irritable old fart," "self-important whiner," "idiots who have access to the Internet," "gasbags," "where is this guy and can I find him and shoot him," although handsomely descriptive, didn't capture the art of curmudgeonry.

I think I must have spelled my name wrong.

Breaking News At Eleven!

It is really, really hard not to make fun of "news" programs these days. The line between entertainment and news has been so fuzzed that you have no idea what's going on. The 24-hour cable news stations confuse things even further with their incessant drivel from pundits.

What really cracks me up are these late night - oh, let's say between 9:30 and 10:30 - brief ads for 11 pm scheduled news shows. Why networks think they need 11 pm news shows in addition to the 5-7 pm coverage ad nauseum remains beyond me, but my point is that these shows are on their schedule, so the networks feel a need to tease you into staying up to watch them, rather than far more entertaining things like Conan O'Brian, or finishing that Castle you had recorded on your DVD yesterday.

Hence the "Breaking News at Eleven" ads. Their message is clear: better watch us at eleven to see what important thing has happened since 7. A curmudgeon's interpretation: we have nothing important going on, otherwise we would interrupt your programming right now, but wait a while and see what we've made SOUND important at eleven!

Right, bozos, you can count this curmudgeon out.

Paint

I am thinking I opened a very odd magazine when the inside cover ad was somebody crowing about how THEIR gallon of paint - at $190 - was WAY cheaper than their competition ($250 per).

I know paint has gotten expensive (I think we have thousands of dollars of it in our "paint can repository" downstairs in the basement that stands as a mute attestation to my Sainted wife's enthusiasm for changing room colors).

So I took a closer look at the offending ad. Ah! It wasn't merely paint, it was "dual-biocide ablative antifouling" paint. THAT explained everything...I guess.

Yachting magazines - where dreams meet up with the ugly truth: boats are holes in the water you throw money into.

The Government To Our Rescue

You, dear readers, have put some faith in my humble recordings here. And you have trusted me to avoid whining about easy targets like politicians and organized religion. 

But even curmudgeons have their limits of patience. This was tested recently while I was calmly and happily watching a Lois and Clark rerun. (Mostly because, on Seinfeld, Lois told us that "they ARE real, and they ARE spectacular.") Anyway, the station ran one of those government-required Emergency Broadcasting drills in the middle of the show.

Born in the days when the Ruskies were the evil villains and we actually watched a live TV signal, this concept is as dead as the USSR. 

Ahh, but not the department of paid bureaucrats who perpetuate this dinosaur. Of course not - there are pensions to be had - and taxpayers to be had. Worst of all, they pissed off a curmudgeon by needlessly interrupting the show he was watching.

You really, really don't want to do that. Our tempers are foul enough. 

135

Number 135.  That was my draft number. I didn't ask for it, I didn't want it.  No matter. The Vietnam "war" was on, idiots were in charge, and you were their chosen victims, one number at a time.

In WW II you couldn't stop kids from enlisting.  Heck, my wife's father lied about his age to enlist.  My own father raced through a 3-year college program to enlist.

The Vietnam war - started by Kennedy's stunning combination of incompetence and arrogance and tossed over the wall to Johnson - needed to forcibly recruit kids who had absolutely no desire to go fight some war in a weird country that was absolutely no threat to us. I've read Johnson's biography, and this whole thing plagued him for the rest of his life.

It was American military idiocy at it's finest.  We each had a draft number, based on our birthday.  "Oh, rats, all the 31s just got killed - bring in the 32s," etc., etc.

The guy running the war - Westmoreland - personally killed some 50,000 US kids. The "enemy" may have fired the shots, but this remarkable idiot set the kids up. The war was dumb, he was dumb, but the military had it's pride to keep up.

Well done.

Oblasts

Man has invented enough names for the spaces he lives in to turn even the most structured brain to mush. You've got your villages, towns, states, counties, territories, principalities, sovereign whatnots, kingdoms, emirates, atolls, and on and on.

I just learned a new one at the august age of 60...plus: Oblast. An alert reader, being inspired by my musings about the Repor's hot up-and-coming market of Latvia, pointed out the next-door state permits an entirely different nation to exist within its borders. 

Wikipedia is quite specific on this stuff and this thing is NOT an enclave, nor even an exclave. It is an Oblast. 

The two simple sentences above introduced 2 new concepts to me in a mere 22 words: Oblast and exclave. To sum up, Slavs are weird. There are enough somethingstans to choke a horse. Small wonder why the good old USA stuck with simpler words, like "state" and "county." Even mother England stuck with words that the average 2-year old could understand: hamlets, shires and the like. 

Oblasts? Must be a one-of-a-kind thing, no?  Hah. NOT no. Every country whose name ends in "stan" appears to have these things. And, to repeat, also have a country name that ends in "stan."

I'm giving up.  

When Men Were Men and Jacks Were Jacks

As a crusty old curmudgeon, I can remember when cars came equipped with jacks to lift the car so you could change a flat tire.  You are no doubt thinking, as a crusty old curmudgeon, you probably remember winding a lever near the front bumper to start cars, as well.

Laugh if you will, but jacks and spares were the easy guy things in the trunk of a car. The engine compartment things: oil, belts, spark plugs and other crap were the purview of the guy you called to fix your car (after you looked at it and made up stuff like "oh that damn engine rotator split" to impress your date).

But flat tires? A way to show off to your date. Just be sure to set the parking brake - things could get ugly.

BMWs always had full-sized spares. With their obscenely expensive wheels in them, too. Then came those donut things.  Good thing I had started to lease my cars - I had no idea what to do with "donuts" - eat them? You certainly couldn't be seen in a BMW driving with one.

My new car has...NO spare.  No jack.  What sort of trickery is this? Turns out, you just push a button on the dash and a very pleasant person comes on and promptly arranges to save you. Pretty cool.

Pretty annoying. I recently had the need for a good jack to push a heavy piece of garage furniture. Car jacks can lift 4000 pounds; they could easily move a 600 pound cabinet. Me? Not so much. 

I pushed the button on my dash.  The nice lady wasn't very helpful.

Fog

I was always told that one of the treats of being on the coast of Maine is the occasional foggy day. The foghorns are sounding and life slows (even more, if that is possible). As a kid, a fog day actually presented new adventures. Hide-and-seek became an entirely new game.

But there never was a fog "day." Heck, August was justifiably called the fog MONTH. So our games in the fog were expanded. For example, we would row our little boat furiously until we hit something (what fun!). The "something" was inevitably another boat (that we prayed didn't contain people waiting out the fog before continuing on their Down East cruise).

Our best fog story? We sailed out in a light fog and exhilarating breeze; as soon as we got outside the harbor, the fog got thick; as we came about THE TILLER BROKE. We could hear waves crashing upon the rocks nearby, suggesting we would soon be there. We pawed through the bilges looking for a piece of wood that could be used to replace the tiller. The sails were flapping like crazy, the surf surged.

Needless to say, we crashed onto the rocks and all aboard perished. Boy, do I hate fog.

I Fart In Their General Direction

My sainted wife turns on the kitchen TV first thing in the morning while her coffee boils in her antique 1950s-era glass percolator.  Not for anything pleasant, like a favorite episode of the Rockford Files or Murder, She Wrote, but for the "news."

And New York news comes on.  Who can possibly give a crap about another shooting in the Bronx or a mugging in Queens?  Well, for one, not me. I turn on MY TV and watch a soothing episode of Poirot.  I sip my boiled-free Mr. Coffee coffee.  My day awakens pleasantly, free of horrible goings-ons that have no bearing on my life in places where I do not live.

I spit on New York.  And their daily depressing - and mostly invented - "news." Call me callous, call me a curmudgeon, but you can't call me depressed first thing in the morning.

The Tooth Fairy

I cannot let his one go without comment. I understand that in a free democracy, such as ours, there are always going to be protest groups of all sorts. There are the well-known ones, like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and PETA as well as a boatload of wingnuts (I'm sure we each have our favorite).

My father actually gets that liberal rag, the New York Times. But he kindly clips their technical articles for me - they are actually a decent way to learn about technical news and new gadgets.

There are always a variety of other articles in the section as well, but a recent one caught my eye: "Tooth Fairy Site angers Anti-Commercialism Group." Yes, you read that right. A site that offers losing teeth-themed comfort items and fun games to young girls angered the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood protest group, who apparently spend most of their time going after evildoers like Disney and McDonald's.

Protesting a tooth fairy site. I'll go with wingnuts on this one.

Through and Through

About a month ago, I mentioned something about using my crack Mr. Fixit skills to repair a puncture in our pool piping. I will not repeat exactly HOW the puncture occurred. However, every guy looks forward to the moment when they have to race to the hardware store to get critical items in an emergency, and this one was no different. 

I got a couple clamps, and totally confused - and inexplicitly amused - the young clerk by asking for "wadding." With the delight every hardware shopper knows, he found me some miracle product that would be perfect for the wadding bit. This miracle product - as seen on TV, no less - was that clay like stuff you mold with your fingers that then turns into hard-as-rock epoxy. Now THAT'S wadding.

So fix the hole I did. What I missed was that the puncture turned put to be what we in the pipe puncture trade call a "through and through." I sort of missed the bottom hole bit. My fix really looked good from the top, though. 

I recently mentioned the pool guys were still chuckling when they got here. They were chuckling all the way back as well.

Dishwashers

I know what you're thinking - this curmudgeon has really gone off the rails. He's been domesticated - there is no hope for his curmudgeonly inspiration any longer.

Despair not dear readers.  I have recently written a treatise on the proper method of loading a dishwasher so that things don't bang into each other, chip and stuff. This "method" is entirely lost on women.

Their approach?  Cram everything in anywhere you can. If the door closes, fire the thing up and then complain to your husband the next morning because the china is chipped. 

"You were in the next room watching a Bruce Willis movie - you should have been able to hear things banging around."  Yes, I was watching Bruce Willis make mincemeat of miscreants, and breaking china simply sounded like part of the movie.

No matter. She has used the setback as an opportunity to go off to some store or other to assuage things by buying more things to chip. I, on the other hand, have tossed all the damaged china out in the woods. I can't wait to see if anything is noticed to be missing.

You don't mess with curmudgeons.

Hat Dweeb

I ran across this photo of a fine example of our young recently. I guess to look cool (to whom escapes me since he looks like an idiot) he has his hat on backwards. I guess to look stupid, he doesn't realize that the bill is there for the very purpose of shielding his eyes from the sun.

There is exactly one reason to wear a hat like that backwards: when you are the commander of a submarine and have to look through the periscope. Obviously, the bill would get in the way. We've all seen this in countless WW II movies - reverse your cap, do your marking, order "down periscope," and put the hat back on correctly.

Today's youth? Clearly brains aren't their strong suit. 

AB Switches

These things are extremely important in life, as any astute person recognizes (I include all my dear readers in that sweeping statement).

In early computer-controlled telephone offices, the computer was literally duplicated. While Fred was busily attending to people dialing numbers, running the office and all, Barney was looking over his shoulder waiting for him to make the smallest mistake and then seize control. Both guys thought they were pretty clever. Neither realized that I could walk up to their control panel and flip the AB switch that told them which one I wanted to run the show. 

When I go stereo shopping for that perfect subwoofer that will vibrate the floorboards but not actually lift them, I listen to some music at, well, floorboard floating levels. Which to buy? Switch back and forth between the two top contenders...using an AB switch. 

To every curmudgeon's endless disappointment, these things don't work on wives.

The Riviera

Contrary to popular belief, curmudgeons are not dirty old men. Yes, we are old and some could use a good shower, but we are not dirty old men in the depraved sense.

Just because we all wanted to go to the Riviera in our younger days because nubile young women went without bathing suit tops simply made us normal, healthy, horny young men. The US being a pile of prudes, one had to travel afar to get our juvenile jollies.

It is with great regret that I never made the journey. Worse, I recently read that modern french lasses are eschewing the topless look. 

This really puts a dent in any remaining interest in the Riviera.

Phuket

I had never heard of Phuket. Turns out, it is a very popular island resort off the west coast of Thailand that was used extensively for R&R during the Vietnam war.  

My wife had a business conference there some years ago, and being no fool, I tagged along. As it was before the tidal wave devastation, it was a delight. We snorkeled around an underwater park, and even toured the island nearby used in the James Bond flick "The Man With the Golden Gun."

You would barely recognize it. It is now a tourist trap of the first order, with shanties, tents and all manner of junky stuff for sale. On the positive side, swimming in those waters puts "princess temperature" (87⁰) to shame.

Oh yeah, we also attended the conference.

Labor Day

Well, here it is "labor day" - the unofficial last day of summer. Ever wonder why it is called labor day? No labor gets done - it's a holiday. Every kid in America sees it as "the last day before the hated school year starts." For them, it is the START of labor.

So why is it called labor day?  A day celebrating laborers could be anytime in the year. The day celebrating (or, more precisely mourning) the end of a fun summer for all kids does have to occur around now, unfortunately for them.

Yet our dear government came up with "labor day." This could not be less descriptive of what the day stands for, but according to Wikipedia, we were copying the Canadians.

Now THERE'S something to blow your mind.

Stress

There is something called stress. Even my close friend, Merriam-Webster calls it a constraining force.

When I was working, there was a lot of stress in every one of my assignments: engineering, sales, Product Management (the top one), future-looking reseach, even Public Relations. But I got paid handsomely for putting up with it. Fine.

So when I retired, I assumed stress would disappear from my life.

Hah! Still married to a stress manufacturer. Recently, I was asked "What is this $89 Amazon charge for?"  I've like ordered a zillion things from Amazon, so the likelihood of me remembering any particular one is quite low. So I made something up - "Oh, a pair of topsiders." Since we both know I get my shoes from Zappos, that wasn't my finest quick thinking.

Lucky for me, Amazon keeps a list of my recent purchases, so I was able to solve the mystery (a really good pair of new headphones).  Good thing there's a soothing Matlock on. I'm not getting paid for this stress.

Dreams

I believe I have mentioned that I have quite vivid dreams. Full color, 3D, the whole bit. And so convincing, I often wake up thinking they were real life.

I race - or more precisely stumble - around, making sure that what my mind just saw was not actual reality, so that I can sort of reground myself.

Of course, Scruffy head-butting me awake at precisely 6 am for her breakfast has a similar regrounding effect. And when an 18 pound cat stands on you in bed, you're pretty sure you're back to reality.

College Resident Advisors

At Brown, in the freshman dorm, each floor had a senior class "resident advisor." The concept was apparently to have an experienced student help us newbies adjust to being away from home for the first time. 

Our "advisor" was the definitive model of this concept. The first thing he showed us was the library card he took from the campus Rockefeller Library and modified it to look like a Canadian Air Force ID so he could get us booze. Even HE was underage.

He then proceeded to help organize panty raids on Pembroke, Brown's "sister" school up the street and such. I've got to hand it to him - we got over being away from the comforts of home pretty quick.

"Bad Move, Grandpa"

We curmudgeons like our "I can't believe he's a hero" type movies (they remind us of ourselves), so Bruce Willis movies are tops on our list. A recent one, Red, simply proved our point. Full of actors with chops that can't be topped and entendres that can't be doubled, this thing here is a winner.

This post turns out to be a movie review - Red finally came to cable, so in my infinite cheapness, I finally got to see it.   Normal people would simply go to IMDb for a collection of idiots giving their opinions, but you, dear readers, get to read mine right here!

The actors seem to be having a field day, and if it seems like they are, you are pretty much guaranteed you will, too. Add Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and Morgan Freeman as retired spies and Richard Dreyfuss as a nefarious arms dealer and you've got a can't miss.

And just a piece of advice: never, ever say "Bad move, Grandpa" to Bruce Willis.

Red 2 can't come out fast enough.

Light Timers

I have shared in the past that we use timers to turn lights on and off around the house.  Not so much for security (in a town with a median income like that of our town, crime is largely confined to bad parking).

No, we have them for convenience - a lamp lit when we come home late is comforting.  We have 3 annoying little MR8s that burn out on virtually a daily basis to light the garage apron at night (I vented on these as long ago as January 2012).  I even had those little light strings wrapped around a couple trees because certain Sainted wives like them. (Don't let on, but so do I). Those little suckers burn out with what seems like glee.

Fine. Dandy. Pretty. A maintenance nightmare, however, of Megasaurus dimensions. I've been fruitlessly trying to get one those little light string fault detectors to work for 2 years. And this from an electronics engineer. And I order MR8s by the dozen. (Of course, you can't just buy them at the local hardware store).

I smell a rat. My wife smells an incompetent idiot.  And I really hate this time of year because I have to change all the timers weekly to keep up with the change of season. As you can readily discern, this thing has a no win clause.