Dear Mom,
An older video: Canadian humorist Rick Mercer, talking to Americans:
Love,
Dave
Feb 062012
Feb 042012
Dear Mom,
Yesterday, when I went out to get the paper, I found a plastic bag on the sidewalk. Inside–well, I could tell what was inside, so I didn’t really inspect carefully, because I knew it was the phone book.
Specifically, I knew it was the new version of the Yellow Pages. I wasn’t curious enough to look inside to see if we’d gotten new white pages as well. In fact, not only do I never use the phone book, I wasn’t sure at first where we keep the phone book–in the closet in my office, with the rest of the office supplies? At the desk in the kitchen? Or somewhere else?
Two years ago, I took a side-by-side picture of the yellow pages when the new edition arrived:
Guess which one is the new one?
So I did the same thing this year as well:
You guessed it -- the OLD one's on the left.
It really struck me this year how old-fashioned the phone book seems. I can remember looking up businesses in the Yellow Pages–in fact, that’s how I found the garage (Senger Motors) that used to work on my old VW Beetle.
Of course, I found them more than 40 years ago.
So the phone book continues to shrink each year, because people aren’t using it, so there isn’t much sense for a business to advertise. Look at this:
Down for the count?
The book on the bottom is two years old, I think, but it doesn’t matter. You can see that the number of pages has dropped from more than 1,400 to 951–just about one-third.
And probably because so many people have cell phones now, even the white pages are shrinking:
"Let it ring twice, then hang up, okay?"
The Montgomery County white pages are down by nearly 100 pages. And it’s not because we’re losing population.
By way of contrast, here’s what may be the first telephone directory ever–from the phone system set up in New Haven by Alexander Graham Bell:
There aren’t any phone numbers, probably because the phones didn’t have dials. You talked to the exchange–which was pretty much the way things worked in Inverness till about 1965 or so, wasn’t it?
Love,
Dave
Feb 022012
Dear Mom,
A cute video I found online today.
Love,
Dave
Dear Mom,
I came across a fascinating web page today, thanks to someone I follow on Twitter.
An example
Someone has created a map of the London Underground (the subway system). The thing about the map is, it shows where the trains actually are in real time.
In other words: if you watch the map, you can see the trains moving.
Obviously it doesn’t matter much for you or for me, since we’re not in London. But imagine someone heading out, checking his smartphone to see how long till the next train shows up. An amazing idea.
Click this link to see for yourself (or click the sample image I posted on the right).
You may need to give the image a little time to work, or else use the zoom controls to zoom in a little closer, which will make the trains seem to move faster.)
Love,
Dave
Jan 262012
Dear Mom,
I’m a semi-bachelor again. Jeanean is taking part in board meetings, so she stayed in Baltimore yesterday and will do so again tonight. Then she’s off on a trip to Phoenix, which will include a little shoot out from Phoenix to Yuma to visit A.J. and Carol. (You will remember them as the people with Rosie the chihuahua.)
Pizza at the Pungs House, Feb. 28, 2008
You can click this link to see a post from our trip two years ago, when we were in Phoenix and drove to Yuma for a visit.
Found online: mixed greens near Yuma
It’s about 185 miles, and it’s almost all out in the middle of nowhere. Hot, dry territory, but with lots of farms. They use various irrigation systems to grow acres and acres (it could be square miles, actually) of vegetables.
I found this photo of mixed greens in a lettuce field near Yuma (not our photo, just one I found online). I like the composition: you can see the different varieties in the foreground, and they just stretch for yards and yards into the distance.
We passed miles of this kind of thing. Sometimes the rows would all be the same color (so we figured, the same type of crop), and sometimes they’re mixed like this. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they harvest the mixed stuff together to put into those bagged salads.
(You can click that picture to see a larger version.)
Anyway, Jeanean asked me if I’d return her library books, since they’re due before she returns. That was a good excuse to get out of the house, so yesterday afternoon I combined book-returning with a little grocery shopping.
I knew I was low on gas as well, because I’d driven Jeanean to work, so filling up was one more chore to fit into the trip.
There was a milestone, so to speak, that I hit with my car. I had wanted to take a picture at the right moment, but I didn’t stop long enough at a light to get out my phone and snap the picture.
So this one is from the library parking lot, with the engine off.
Taking the long view
Yeah, yeah, I know, who cares about Dave’s dashboard? But what’s significant is the odometer reading:
Only 48,000 thousand miles to go to reach the moon
I’ve just rolled past 193,000 miles. My car has a number of complaints–the clear-coat is peeling off, the speakers have gotten kind of rattly, and the front seat isn’t the most comfortable. On the other hand, when I did fill the car up shortly after taking this picture, my mileage worked out to about 35 miles per gallon–which is pretty respectable for a car that I drove home on October 30, 1995.
Speaking of time passing, as I was looking for that photo of A.J. and Carol, I cam across one from January of 2009 (three years ago:
The calm before the storm
This is our old kitchen, looking into the dining room, just before the demolition was to begin. I can place this in time in part because (though it’s hard to see) through the doorway you can see a couch covered by a tarp in the living room. Also the bottle of Mountain Dew in the bottom left corner is clue–I don’t drink Mountain Dew. And if you look at the edge of the picture, next to the bottle, you’ll see just a tiny bit of a blue-green t-shirt. Randy’s wearing it.
(Looking back at the original post, I see I didn’t need to do the detective work; I said in the post that this picture is from January 5, 2009.)
Our trip to Arizona was a good excuse for us to be out of the house when the serious demolition took place, and when the bazillion boxes arrived with the new kitchen cabinets. This shot is from January 27, so I imagine I took it the day before, which would be exactly three years ago:
"You're sure you want to do this?"
This is also a view from the kitchen into the dining room, just from a different angle. If you look carefully, you can see Jeanean and Randy looking over plans.
What’s funny about this is what I wrote at the time (full post here):
And there’s been progress… eight or nine new recessed lights in the ceiling.
Love,
Dave
Dear Mom,
I saw an item in today’s paper I thought you’d find entertaining.
It seems that two employees of Metro (the DC-area bus and subway system) have been arrested for stealing coins and bills from the fare vending machines.
Using this things is fare-ly complicated
You can pay with credit cards (which is what I do), or with bills and change. The machines issue change as well, so they apparently have a good stock of money in them at the start of a shift.
Periodically Metro employees come to remove some of the money and (I suppose) top up the parts of the machine that issue change. You occasionally see them in the station, as in this photo I found online:
Stocking up
This emplyee has a metal cart with locking compartments. Notice on top of the cart there’s a kind of wheel; I think those are the blank farecards–credit-card size pieces of stiff paper that people use to travel on the subway.
Anyway, you can read the entire story here in the Washington Post. What was interesting to me is how the Metro police tracked these guys down: “Between October and December, [one of them] used more than $28,000 in coins and cash to purchase tickets.”
Tickets, as in Virginia lottery tickets.
…the FBI was tipped off to the alleged scheme in September, when it learned about a man dressed in a police uniform who routinely bought several hundred dollars’ worth of scratch-off lottery tickets from a Woodbridge store. A source later told agents that the officer had been going into the store for about three years, at first carrying “what he could hold in his hands” — about 50 to 100 coins — and later bringing in bags containing about $500 in change, the affidavit says. The source reported that Haile spent $13,050 in October, $7,780 in November and $7,350 in December.
It seems to me if you’re stealing cash–including change–from your employer, it’s not a good idea to be spending that change, especially in the same place all the time.
Love,
Dave
Dear Mom,
I found out only today — through Facebook — that my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Strunk, passed away in December. He meant so much to me that I wrote about him on my blog, and I thought you might want to see what I said.
Love,
Dave
My grade school was St. Brigid’s, in northwest Detroit. The parish has been closed for 22 years, and I suppose the school closed before that. I remember getting half a day off school for Father Brennan’s feast day. I remember teachers like Sister Patrick Elizabeth and Sister Mary Eamon (Eamon, as in de Valera–the school had lots of green on St. Patrick’s Day).
More than anything, I remember my sixth-grade English teacher, Mr. Strunk. He was only the second teacher I’d had at St. Brigid’s who wasn’t a nun, and the only one who was male.
In hindsight, I suppose I didn’t have a mental model for what a male teacher would be like. I was disconcerted at first by how different he seemed. I need to say that I had some very good teachers: I don’t recall any of that whacking-with-rulers stuff that people seem to assume was mandatory in pre-Vatican II Catholic schools.
But Mr. Strunk was really different. He said things that were funny, wry, unexpected. He read to us from Mad Magazine–and may have been planting a crop of critical thinking with the seed-starter of parody. He went far beyond the stuffy borders of our textbook.
Early in the school year, when he’d said something funny, I responded with with a sarcastic laugh. (I suppose it was my ten-year-old’s critique: teachers weren’t supposed to be cracking wise.) He said, not harshly, “If you don’t think it’s funny, don’t laugh.”
That was a door he opened just for me, but he spent a lot of time opening doors like it: “Think for yourself. You can do it.”
He’d open them by assigning sixth graders a 1,500 word composition. Topic: The Dime. That was it; a two-word topic and a length. What can you do with that?
Another assignment: a 48-line poem. This time, he assigned the title: “The Last Voyage of The Albatross.”
I don’t recall anything I wrote–but I have a vivid sense of enjoying the writing. I have an even more vivid sense of what he wrote on my paper, because it leapt into my memory and has never left:
Your poetry improves, my friend,
with each brand new endeavor.
I wish that I had words to lend
to serve you as a level.But while such things as kings and men
on your mind’s sea do toss,
don’t let this be the last voyage
of your young Albatross.
School was never the same, and a few teachers after him suffered by comparison. I lost contact with him after going out of state for most of high school. In pre-Facebook days, it was hard to track down someone out of state; in post-Facebook days, it can still hard to connect with someone who was over 25 when John Kennedy was assassinated.
Through a friend of my younger brother’s, I learned last year that Mr. Strunk was still in the Detroit area; he spent 40 years teaching and coaching. The friend sent me an address, but warned me that his health was poor. I wrote a letter that week; I’d sealed it and stamped it, then realized he might not be up to a written reply. I reprinted the letter and included a phone number, on the outside chance that he might remember me and might be up to calling.
No such luck, but that was all right. The important thing for me was to say to him directly, more personally, the kinds of things I’ve talked about here.
I have not seen Mr. Strunk since, I suppose, 1963. Many of my classmates will remember one of his weekend gigs at the parish’s activities building: hosting a hootenanny (and that’s a word well on its way to joining “floppy disk” and “antimacassar” ) . One of his standards was The MTA Song – about a hapless Boston commuter who lacked the “exit fare” and so couldn’t pay to get off the train.
And did he ever return?
No, he never returned
And his fate is still unlearned.
He may ride forever
‘Neath the streets of Boston:
He’s the man who never returned.
For me, Mr. Strunk was the man who always returned. I decided to become a teacher in part because of his example. Even after leaving the education field, I would recall his intelligent encouragement, his genuine interest in his students, his respect for their intelligence that included challenging them.
I learned only today that Mr. Strunk died last month. One woman wrote in the funeral home’s online guestbook, “My all time favorite teacher and I will never forget how honored I felt when he told me to call him Frank.”
It’d be hard to top that. I am grateful to be able to say “Mr. Strunk” and still feel his presence. I’ve read comments from people who were students in his final years of teaching, and from classmates of mine–we who were the first class he taught, more than 50 years ago. There are teachers I will always cherish–Brother Leo and Brother André, Father McKendrick and Dr. MacDonald, Professor Bauder — but there was only one Frank Strunk.
Jan 132012
Dear Mom,
Here’s a little linguistic training in the Newfie language:
“What’s your favorite Newfoundland beer?”
“A free one.”
Love,
Dave
Dear Mom,
A very-well done video (psst — it’s an ad, but not an annoying one). Make sure you have your sound on.
Taking the form of a letter, it begins “Dear Mark.” They mean Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook.
Love,
Dave
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