While we are on vacation Truman is in the very capable hands of the rest of the family. He’s probably telling them who’s boss and just hanging out watching the action in the rest of the household.
J.P.
Club.
Earl and I are sitting in the United Club at SkyHarbor International Airport in Phoenix. We arrived a little ahead of schedule, and boarding time is about 90 minutes away.
We are on our way to Denver.
This is the first leg of our 12 day/11 night vacation. It’s been a while since we’ve been gone this long. I’m looking forward to the adventure. I plan on taking a lot of video and photos. I’ll probably share something on my Youtube channel.
Tears.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, 1-900 numbers here in the United States were quite popular. Commercials were popping up all the time, urging the viewer to call 1-900-whatever to experience just about anything. Late night TV leaned hard on sexual escapades. I called one of those lines once and the guy sounded too hot and I hung on him. Too intimidating.
I remembering hearing ads on Kiss 108 in Boston. They went something like, “Are you gay? Does gay life intrigue you? Call 1-900-BE-THE-GAY (or whatever)…” and for only $2 a minute, after $4 for the first minute, you could talk to gay people.
Not once did I ever hear a word about “grooming” back then.
Most famously, Dionne Warwick (she had dropped her optional “e” by then), led the Psychic Friends Network. Dionne showed all her teeth and glory in rabid infomericals, urging viewers to call a 1-900 number to get a reading from a renowned psychic. I think her name was Linda Gregorian or something ordinary like that. You think she would have had a name like “Zesty Zelda” or something, but no, you could talk to Linda for $6 a minute on your Alltel bill.
I never called it.
For some reason I recently remembered an ad for a 1-900 line where people could call in so they could start crying. “Everyone needs a good cry once in a while”. I couldn’t bring myself to call into this line to see what was going on the other end of the wire, but I remember the relentless images of people crying on the phone in this ad to be quite upsetting.
Posting this screenshot from the ad is still quite upsetting to me.
I had a friend back in the day that called this number once and they said there was a calm voice telling a sad story about someone close to the narrator dying or something. This was back during Desert Storm; even in 1990 there was enough in the news to cry about, I didn’t need to rack up money on my New England Telephone bill to find a reason to cry. Not really fitting into the social scene of Boston was reason enough for me to cry, let alone all the stuff going on in the news back then.
Of course, 1-900 numbers gave way to the Internet. And with the Information Highway and the constant bombardment of other people’s business, we all have plenty of reasons to cry now.
Tweaks.
I’ve been making some tweaks to the self-hosted WordPress instance that’s running Ye Ol’ Ancient Blog. There’s a lot of drama going on with the company that owns WordPress, and while I’ve been following along a little bit with said drama, I haven’t really gotten into the weeds on the whole thing. I don’t like the idea of my blog running on software supported by a lot of drama, so I’m contemplating moving to a new platform by the end of the year. We’ll see if that happens.
In the meanwhile I’ve been tweaking settings and trying to make things run a little bit faster. I’ve felt inclined to blog a bit more this week, and that’s probably because of my ongoing social media fatigue. A few of the folks I follow on Mastodon have been striking a weird, self-righteous vibe, at least a stronger vibe than usual. I blame the impending U.S. Elections. Perhaps this is confined to my bubble but people seem a little more high strung and on edge than usual.
I find this fatiguing.
Confusion.
I’m not a fan of commercialism rushing or overtaking the holiday season. We went shopping at our local Kohl’s last night and I was very confused by their holiday display, which was a mix of Halloween and Christmas decorations. Personally, I feel like Christmas decorations shouldn’t be sold before the 1st of November and establishments should be decorated for Christmas until after Thanksgiving, but then again I don’t want those pesky kids on my lawn.
One of the reasons I’m less enthused about the Christmas holiday season in general is because of the commercialism of it all. Every time I see Charlie Brown mention it during the annual Peanuts TV special, which was produced in the 1960s, I want to yell back at the screen, “kid, you have no idea how bad it’s going to get”. Granted, Charlie Brown had to deal with aluminum trees but he also got to enjoy tinsel, which has turned into something we don’t do anymore.
And now I’m talking about Christmas decorations on the 1st of October. I need to end this blog entry. Now.
Snack.
When I was a young lad I would make my way over to Grandma and Grandpa Country’s house for my after school snack. This was easy to do, since they lived next door. I’d usually hang out with Grandma Country until Dad returned home from the family business. Grandma and I would watch “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie” together, I’d have a few of her most excellent cookies and a glass of milk, and while she was usually busy going through her afternoon routine, she always had time for her only red-headed grandchild.
All of this was 50 years ago, but I am fortunate to have a retired husband that’s usually home in the afternoon who makes a nice snack for me as I work my way through my workday in the home office. While I don’t have milk and cookies for snack these days, mostly because of my contant eye on my health and well being, he knows how to make snack time interesting and appealing for us middle aged guys that watch our gut and “Bewitched”.
Plus, he does such an outstanding job with the presentation.
New Week.
The week is off and running and I’m feeling pretty good today. The workday has been productive thus far, I’ve been feeling creative with photography and videography today, and since I had a good night’s sleep, I didn’t pass out on the couch during my lunch hour.
These are all good signs.
I’ve been shying away from social media for the past couple of days, outside of sharing the link to my latest video and a few witty remarks on the Fediverse. Too many people are in such a state about the upcoming U.S. Elections. I know I could easily get into a similar state if I started wallowing in the muck, so I’m trying to stay clear of that sort of thing. I’m fully comfortable with my voting decisions, which are based on my personal moral foundation. Love + Labor = Life. Do the right thing.
I’ve resurrected the MarsEdit application on my Mac, which encourages me to blog more and scream into the social media void less. At one point I thought about moving this nearly-quarter-of-a-century old blog to a new platform, but I don’t want to risk losing data, formatting, and the folks that still stop by. So I’m content with leaving things just as they are for now.
It’s easy to ignore the noise that is complaining about tech companies if you go out and create instead of consuming all the time.
Life shouldn’t be all consuming.
Night Cat.
I am amazed at the quality of night shots with my new iPhone 16 Pro. As I type this entry I can barely see Truman sitting on the garage roof about a yard away from me. I pointed my phone in his direction and hit the button, and this was the result.
