Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

How's your line?

Is it trim and sleek? Or are you like me.

I got to thinking about this the other day when I was swapping out the contents of the pockets of my blue jeans to a clean pair of trousers. I was inspecting the reverse side of the pocket where I dump coins and recalled the horror from olden days when I might notice that the cloth was wearing thin or even developing a hole due to the weight and shifting of those coins. After all, once that pocket went, those pants were finished as well.

Of course this would be a non-issue if I were of the set that never puts anything into pants pockets.

Alas, I've always believed that pockets were made for stuffin'. For example, my right-rear pocket is for my wallet. (I used to put a card-carrier in the left-rear one, but with great effort abandoned that practice and thinned down my plastic so that they fit in the wallet.) The left front pocket is for car keys and ChapStick, the right front for coins, and both might hold a Kleenex or two.

This post isn't about shirts, but I might as well add that my shirt pocket holds a dazzling array comprised of a calendar, Starbucks cards, scraps of notepaper and a few Tums for emergency aid for my poor, battered esophagus. Plus a ballpoint pen. And yes, it was a sad day indeed when shirtmakers economized by dropping the right-hand pocket.

I can get away with this because men tend to be sloppy, practical sorts and I can blend in with the crowd -- or hope I do, anyway.

On the other hand, my wife's trousers have pockets that are almost never used. This is surely because objects of any size would do strange things to her feminine figure. Conclusion: pockets on womens' pants are primarily decorative elements.

Then there are men who walk around with empty pants pockets. I can understand this where the guy's appearance is an important career maintenance factor: think executives, movie stars and such.

But otherwise...?

Let us know your take on pockets in Comments. I'm especially curious where guys put their wallets, car keys, change and so forth if they avoid putting those items in pants pockets.

Later,

Donald

at February 8, 2010 | perma-link | (1) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Rather than loading up on beer and snacks for the Super Bowl football game this past weekend and watching all those pre-game shows filled with video clips and conjecture, Your Faithful Blogger was occupied with the project of acquiring and setting up a new computer.

My wife had an ancient (10 years-old? 12?) Sony Vaio computer whose key software had long since been abandoned by Microsoft's support staff. It was more than time to upgrade, and so she finally decided it was time to do so. Therefore, Saturday was Best Buy day.

I was pumping for a entry-level box. This was because all she does is check email, surf the Web a tiny bit and write up minutes for her college sorority alumni group.

To no avail. She spied a Gateway all-in-one machine with a fancy touch-screen she probably (wisely) won't track up with sticky/oily/greasy or whatever fingers. More expensive than that basic box, yet about half the price of a comparable Mac. So she bought it.

Sunday afternoon it fell to me to disconnect the old computer and set up the new one (and the new printer). Three or four hours later, I finished the deed. Now I'm puzzling over some Windows 7 (the newest Microsoft operating system / user interface) features, but haven't yet read more than a snippet of documentation. Reader help will be greatly appreciated.

I missed out on Windows Vista, so my point of reference is Windows XP, which I find easy to deal with. One feature of 7 that I immediately noticed is that I can't seem to find those clearly laid-out presentations of directories (or "folders" as Microsoft so rudely renamed them) that used to appear when I got into Windows Explorer. Now all I find under the C disk drive is two or three folder icons. What happened to all the rest? Must I go to My Documents or some other sissy location and start populating these on my own? I dearly miss Program Files, Windows and all those other really handy directories.

Windows 7 seems not to have an email program; the folks at Best Buy told us to download something from the Microsoft site that would do the job. So I did, but the software doesn't seem to have an address book. Question: Is there a decent (and easy to use -- for Nancy's sake) email program with all the expected features that I can download?

Also, I'll probably download the Firefox browser unless someone can convince me that Internet Explorer has now risen to Cat's Meow status.

Any other tips?

Later,

Donald

at February 8, 2010 | perma-link | (7) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

For many of us, Barack Obama remains an International Man of Mystery even though he has been President for more than a year.

Blame for our ignorance can largely be dumped on the news media Establishment (The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.) who sent platoons of reporters chasing after every detail of Sarah Palin's existence while accepting Obama's autobiographies and press releases as gospel.

This Cone of Spin has been in place since before the start of 2008 presidential campaigning. As a result, the average citizen probably knows less about Obama and how he ticks than any president in recent times.

Another result is that political writers -- mostly on the Right -- have been on a What's Obama Really Like kick for some time. This is nice for the writers because it's a topic that shows no sign of going away. But it might not be in Obama's best interest because, if pundits are uncertain, then so must be broad swaths of the voting public.

At any rate, as the title to this post hints, a number of commentators have been putting Obama on the proverbial psychiatrist's couch and using his words and deeds in an attempt to discern what might lie deeper. To illustrate my point, here are some recent items in that vein from the Internet. I make no claim for their accuracy or profundity; I chose them simply because they were recent and easy to spot.

Harvey Mansfield, for example, delves into political philosophy. Matthew Continetti looks at the "man behind the 'postpartisan' curtain." Peter Wehner doubts Obama's claim that he (Obama) is non-ideological. Finally, two Washington Post reporters point out that Obama has been to church only four times in the past year, yet go on the claim he is actually privately a religious or spiritual man.

I think Obama and his public relations crew consider it politically wise to keep an invisibility cloak wrapped around the inner Obama. As to why, well that ought to be grist for yet another analytical column by one of those pundits.

Later,

Donald

at February 4, 2010 | perma-link | (7) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Politics seems to be everywhere. And maybe it always was, though I don't recall such pervasiveness before, say, the mid-1960s.

Admittedly, I grew up in the shadow of the New Deal and World War 2, an era when disagreements regarding the state of the nation and its place in the world were comparatively small in scale and tended to emerge at election season, leaving the rest of the time fairly quiet.

One place that seemed politics-free in those happy years was the field of science-fiction. Noticeable (to me) politics emerged sometime around 1970 when Harlan Ellison's writing struck me as being a bit Left. Well, whatever his slant, it wasn't the space opera libertarianism common up until then (think, among others, Robert Heinlein). In contrast, at about the same time, Poul Anderson's stories began to include explicit anti-Left elements.

It's worth noting that early sci-fi -- space opera, mostly -- featured conflict between humans and varieties of bug-eyed monsters wherein a Mensa-class scientist might almost instantly invent and build a weapon that would save the humans' day. Science fiction eventually evolved to the point where authors were inventing societies and conflict could be between humans. This opens the field to politics: are the bad guys businessmen, the military, big government -- or what?

Even so, classical science-fiction writers with a strong personal political bent could still keep the political dimension of their stories disguised well enough that it didn't interfere with the main action.

I've mentioned a number of times that I seldom read fiction, and that includes science-fiction. So I'm out of touch.

Can readers bring us up to date regarding the intrusion of politics into sci-fi?

And which currently active writers fall into various political camps based on the content of their work?

Later,

Donald

at February 3, 2010 | perma-link | (12) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Back home at last after six weeks in the not always sunny-in-winter southern Pacific Coast.

While traveling, I made use of road maps. And this brought to mind the national systems of highway numbering. The basic scheme is clear, but the details are sometimes anomalous.

An account of the origin of the U.S. highway or route system is here. Unlike the Interstate system begun in the 1950s, the U.S. numbering system emerged in the mid-1920s from lower-level initiatives.

The general scheme is that north-south routes are odd-numbered and east-west routes are even. The lowest numbers are in the northeast, the highest in the southwest.

From my Rand McNally road atlas collection I dug out atlases from 1941 and 1952, my oldest, and did some checking. Even numbers ranged from 2 in the north to 94 crossing lower Florida in the south. The odds were from 1 in the east to 101 along the west coast. The linked article goes into detail regarding split highways (for instance, U.S. 99E and 99W -- east and west versions of highway 99) and three-digit numbers indicating variants (195 and 395 running parallel to 95 in Oregon and Washington).

The Federally-implemented Interstate highway system retained the odd-even scheme but flipped the numbering order: the lowest in the southwest corner of the country, the highest numbers in the northeast.

What I find interesting are the oddities. For example, a little number-adjusting back in the late 60s (if I remember right) resulted in Interstate 76, which just happened to pass through Philadelphia. (Nudge: Philadelphia. Declaration of Independence. 1776. Get it?)

Then there is Interstate 84 (Portland, Oregon - near Salt Lake City). For many years it was 80-N -- mainline 80 connecting San Francisco and New York City's George Washington Bridge. Eventually 80-N was renamed Interstate 84. A while later, a stretch of Interstate connecting I-90 and I-84 via Yakima, Washington became I-82. Huh? Why not an intermediate number such as 86 or 88? (I-88 is fragmented already, one segment is between Binghamton and Schenectady, New York and another between the Chicago area and Moline, Illinois.)

The old U.S. highway system had a few cases where a route would seriously wander from its proper sequential place. A famous example is Route 66 which went between Chicago and Santa Monica, California. Then there was U.S. 6 which, in the 1940s ran between Long Beach, California and Provincetown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. By all rights, U.S. 6 should have been placed north of U.S. 10, which stretched from Seattle to Detroit.

One problem with highway numbers is that, while there are plenty of reasonable-size cities in the east that can serve as anchors, the west only has a few potential termini: Puget Sound, Portland, Oregon, the San Francisco Bay area, the Los Angeles region and San Diego.

Regardless, I find studying the supposedly orderly but actually slightly messy number systems an interesting way to occupy my mind when it has nothing better to think about.

Later,

Donald

at February 2, 2010 | perma-link | (4) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Whether it's a general male trait or simply my normal sloth, it seems that most of the guys I meet and socialize with nowadays are husbands of friends of my wife. And of those husbands of my wife's friends, the ones I tend to get along with best and for the longest visits are guys who Know Stuff.

Now, everybody of sound mind knows a lot of things by the time teen years are nicely underway. So my Know Stuff criterion is really something to the effect of knowing stuff about subjects I too am familiar with. That is, a guy deep into bricklaying, hot-rodding and pre-1970 baseball statistics clearly knows a lot of stuff, but I would have trouble carrying on a long conversation with him about those subjects because my knowledge about them is pretty scanty.

On the other hand there are a few people who know things, but at a superficial level across nearly all the board. And there are those who know things, but aren't able to organize or present them in an interesting way.

Do you get the idea that the subject of this post is highly subjective?

Even so, I think there are people whose knowledge and ability to communicate it are above average. Further, I suggest that these traits make for blogging success as well as conversational compatibility.

A prime example is Dave Burge who blogs as Iowahawk. Burge is widely recognized in the righty side of the blogosphere as an especially keen satirist. I believe that the strength of his satires is largely due to knowing a lot of stuff -- the way people of different backgrounds phrase things, details of society now and even 70 or 80 years ago, details about other countries, and so on. If the details are wrong, the satire fails.

Burge's blog persona is that of a Iowa hayseed hot rod freak who (for a while on the blog) purportedly lived in a trailer park. Yet not long ago Burge dropped his mask and wrote this post in which he created a downloadable spreadsheet model that mimicked the well-known global warming "hockey stick" graph. (It seems Burge works with statistical modeling on his day job). The punch line of the piece is that that hockey stick appears only if data are manipulated just so.

So, while the criteria for the honor of Knowing Stuff are subjective, in certain circumstances there can be a payoff for one who Knows Stuff.

Later,

Donald

at January 30, 2010 | perma-link | (1) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

As many readers know by now, author J.D. Salinger died yesterday.

And many readers have read Salinger. Even not-so-lit me read "The Catcher in the Rye" when I was too young to really understand all the East Coast stuff it inhabited.

Speaking of reading preferences, what were Salinger's?

Roger L. Simon comes to the rescue with this anecdote. Key passage:

My encounters with Salinger happened when I was a Dartmouth student (1964). The already reclusive Salinger would appear on the campus occasionally, usually to make a stop at the Dartmouth Bookstore to stock up on books. (He lived some twenty miles off in the town of Cornish, N. H.)

When he was around, word would go out to the artier types at the college and we would slip over to the bookstore and, well, stalk the famous writer, I guess you could say. By then he had published Franny and Zooey, among other works, which we greatly admired. But many of us were puzzled that the majority of his purchases were mere mystery paperbacks – Dorothy Sayers was one of his favorites. Undergraduate snobs, we had expected Dostoevsky or Camus.

This deserves further comment, but I'm not equipped to deliver. Are you there, Michael Blowhard? Anyone?

Later,

Donald

at January 28, 2010 | perma-link | (3) comments

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

We'll probably drive to Reno tomorrow so that Nancy can take a break from skiing. While there, I'll probably stop by the National Automobile Museum, site of what's left of the once-massive Bill Harrah collection. If I do, I'll probably do a walk-through of the books/gift shop.

Donald Pittenger writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Our get-out-of-Seattle-in-winter effort is into its final phases. That is, we're in the Lake Tahoe area for Nancy's annual ski week. I never skiied much and quit before I bailed out of Albany, NY to return to the Seattle area. So she skis and I try to keep busy doing other things.

Today those "other things" involved driving down to South Lake Tahoe/Stateline to buy a few needed groceries. While there, I checked out the commercial scene.

Two or three years ago, the place was doing well, if appearance was any guide. Now, that same casual yardstick suggests that times are hard. In the "village" by the big Marriott on the main drag, something like half the retail spaces are vacant. Nearby, things don't look so bad, but vacancies seem greater than last year which was worse than pre-recession.

I then drove over to Harrah's and did a walk-through of the four big casinos on the Nevada side of the state line. Two of them -- the Montbleu and the Horizon -- didn't look healthy. Some restaurants were closed "for the season" or otherwise simply shuttered. The slot machine zone of one casino struck me as sparsely populated -- by machines as well as gamblers.

Harrah's and its sister (brother?) casino Harvey's seemed in better shape. Perhaps that might be due to the comparatively deep pockets of the Harrah organization. Even so, a small Harrah casino for non-smokers called Bill's was closed (it never struck me as very busy in past years).

Skiing is an expensive hobby, so it stands to reason that it would be affected by the current recession which is lengthy as well as deep. Had the recession been shorter, perhaps more tourist-related businesses would have survived.

For what it's worth, what I've been seeing here is the strongest evidence of the recession that I've experienced thus far. On the other hand, I haven't visited Detroit and similar places since before the 2008 crash.

Later,

Donald

at January 26, 2010 | perma-link | (1) comments