TubaOrNotTuba

I tend to think of it as death by 1000 tiny cuts. Or if you will the zombies. Forget what you’ve seen in the movies. We now have a world where companies collect money for services that they might someday give you. In fact they are so sure you will love their product that they will bill you and collect their money in advance. Yes I am referring to those services that are done by subscription. Ones that require no effort on the part of the company other than to be there to take your money at regular intervals. Once a year in many cases. In going back through my e-mail box I notice that I have received confirmation of payment for a number of services that I had not thought about in years. Tiny services like the ability to collect data from my TV set if you will. The charges are not large taken one service at a time but the amounts add up. I now better understand what it would take to become rich. Subscriptions. I am not going to list all the offenders because they do not care. In fact if you go through the steps of trying to cancel some of these services you will receive yet another e-mail. One that says they cannot find any trace of your account. Note that they already have collected your money for the next year. And if I was willing to put more time into it and effort I could probably resolve each case to my satisfaction. At least, I hope so. It is hard to remember what a particular electronics service offered me in the beginning that convinced me to sign up in perpetuity. I doubt that the word perpetuity was ever used in the original offer of service. I will be working through this one company at a time. I just want to warn the rest to you that zombies are not a mess. Rather they’re little collections of money done electronically for things that you had not thought about in a decade. And yes all the fault lies with me big is at the other end there is no human. Just a carefully programmed computer that has my name and number and I need to provide revenue to their company. One small payment at a time.

Please excuse me if I sound like I have a bit of a cold. That’s a nice way of saying that may have caught a virus the last time I went out into a public place. I have no colds in my house. Bit of a miserable time but it’s the price we pay to be human. I never heard my dog cough. I do not go out into public places very much and so the choice of going to a huge concert hall with hundreds of other listeners may have been what it took for me to be suddenly infected. Of course it could also have been that I had to use the handrail to go up and down flights of stairs. We no longer have the safety rules in place that we had only a few years ago no compulsive hand wiping or spray chemicals everywhere. We just get a cold and go along with it. Spring has arrived. Is this part of the deal of changing seasons? All I can do now is wait things out. Despite all the advances in medical science through the centuries we still have not found a way to avoid feeling like someone had tried to stavas in the throat. Agreed. I have never been stabbed in the throat but I’m guessing. And in a few days or weeks this too shall pass. Already there promising warmer weather which will bring other problems. It turns out we also have some trash can bandits in the area. You may call them raccoons. And there is no reason for them to want to get into my piles of old tin cans. Hardly a balanced diet for a wild creature. In other World News one of my sons has told me that there was a fire in his old apartment a couple days ago. He has not lived there in years so this is only an anecdote. He managed to pass through the risks of people breaking in and trying to steal stuff and now he is trying to remember all the details that have been erased by a sudden fire. I guess he feels glad that he moved away from that location.

I have had a lifetime of being basically less than social. I have people living on the road near here that have never met me in over a decade. I’ve had cities where I’ve lived for three decades and never visited the people next door. That’s me. I may know who you are but I feel no reason to go in and knock on your door and come and sit down the table. Our nation is headed into the same Pattern of life. Ask around and see how many of your friends are planning to go South for their next holiday you will only need a few fingers. We have decided that crazy is enough to keep us away. From what I’ve heard on various podcasts this is not me this is everyone. I mean there are places that I have no expectation of visiting. Looking at you King of England. I know where you live but I will be not dropping by for tea I call it being a good neighbor. A sense of mutual respect. The king has no reason for me to drop by for social hour. That same thing holds true for pretty much anywhere I have ever visited. When I lived in our capital city I had the chance to go into a lot of different houses but only because I was the census taker. That opens a lot of doors. And they knew who I was because of my ID. No expectation of regular visits. And so as the number of cross-border visits dwindles and fades away it will soon be historical memory of going South for the holidays. Most of us are finding other places to visit. Can’t go South? Trying north east and west. There I have solved the problem. By the time I have to renew my passport I will be an older and wiser citizen. And for what it is worth they can still call me. I do answer the phone when it rings. I have a whole series of new acquaintances who work for Amazon. What about you? Are you going South for your holidays? Why? Do you still buy products from across the border? Why? Are you too lazy to seek out alternatives produces closer to home. Apparently they have an app for that.

We can all agree that competitions can be fun. Not all competitions but we do tend to make it into something larger than life. No matter the sport no matter the place someone will be trying to be better than the person beside them. But if you want to try something interesting go look at a book of world records. Move beyond the obvious ones like who ran fastest or who climbed highest. Go for the silly things. Look for the person that ate the most pudding in the session. And it works for more than people I have a fond memory of going camping with a big crate or cardboard box if you will of marshmallows. I had no intention of eating them but I found a couple of dogs on the beach and they were keen. Who could eat the most. Until they could not. Dogs are perhaps wiser than humans and they know when to move away and look for something better to do with their time. I made it through high school with only a minimum amount of competition. When we climbed those large ropes in the gymnasium we were playing with a watch but the real game was to keep from falling off and getting hurt. How do you spot for an event like that. And so we move back to the classroom ended things are much less dangerous. Who could complete the largest number of quadratic equation solutions in a day. Just for the record it was not me. I turned from competition to music if only for my sanity. We do not give awards for the person who gets through the piece of music before all the rest. Oh I’m sure there’s a competition summers but not one that I have come across. Similarly if you told someone that you had watched a large number of movies they knew the secret. It takes a lot of time. Looking for a speed reader? Don’t waste your time. And so I am now left to check the weather records. Was this the coldest day in the last month? I think you know that it does not matter. There will always be something else coming along that will take the record away. And so when you watch sports or check the financial pages know that someone is looking for a record at the end of the day. It turns us all into people armed with a keen eye and a stop watch. Not much else.

I am pretty sure then I have fallen off the radar for one industry. The fast food industry. Or as others know it the fat food industry. Put it down to demographics or geography or change in income but I no longer receive those bundles of coupons that invite me to come in for yet one more burger. I still have a postal box but no sign of any interest in them giving me something for free. That is probably a good thing. Since I no longer go to their restaurants I tend to eat in a more healthy fashion. Smaller portions that are prepared here at home. If I have a hamburger it is by design not hunger pangs. I watched some footage that talks about the changing industry. About how some of the bigger names are going to disappear. The clientele is still out there but there does not seem to be the uptake or uptick in client numbers. When I hear about someone that took the time to eat a fast food burger every day I am left with a sense of curiosity. Was it the sauce? Or the convenience? Going home from work and preparing meals is labour intensive. The fast food industry depended upon that. With multiple restaurants on every corner in a larger city there was always someone willing to sell you a burger and fries for cheap. Remove the clientele and the business model makes much less sense. Or dollars. I am hard pressed to remember the last time I went out and bought something like a bucket of chicken. Measure that in years. Or a foot long sandwich. Something I might do while traveling a long distance in the car but otherwise much easier to go home bread and some cold cuts. As for soda from the fountain? I do not miss it. We purchased one of those machines that allows you to carbonate your own liquid’s and even there I use much less fizzy water than before. Still have it in refrigerator but not on the table. I think I may have broken clear of the fast food industry. I will let them attract clients as they see fit but I do not think that they miss me nor I them. Funny how that changes. When I bought my first burger for $0.10 I thought that the world had changed. I agree, that was a long time ago. And there are no restaurants in my immediate area offering products that make me want to go to them. Not even a pizza because I have a refrigerator and a freezer at home.

I believe in weather forecasts. I have for most of my life. Once we stop turning to the farmers Almanac which would assure us that we were going to have snowy weather for three months the year we wanted something more precise. The government believed in our needs and provided regular weather forecasting. Hence my sense of disbelief that our neighbours to the South are getting set to dismantle their part of the weather forecasting service. I guess that if you do not deliver bad news then there is no bad news. Science for the rest of the world. Yes we have people that watch the weather all over the continent and they take the time to provide what they see to a network. This works for the main part because we have weather observation stations that are kept in good states of repair. Not pointing fingers at our local wind observation station which seems to be offline for months at a time. That is just a flaw. And my own weather observation station does a good job even if I do not manage to keep the contact with the world network online all the time. I am lazy. The equipment works just fine but the flaw is me. So back to weather observations. This is a true science based on observation and collection of data. With enough data points you can get a supercomputer to predict what the weather will be over the next couple of days. And then you can tell the world about it. When I listen to the weather forecast on local TV I rely upon the scientific foundations of that exercise. And the supercomputer summers in upper Canada. I can only wonder what they’re going to do down South when the forecasting of significant weather is no longer there. I’m sorry but looking out the window will not let you know that there is a tornado inbound. Which reminds me that I really should try and get my own weather station back online if only to provide data points to a much larger network.

Take a moment and remember one thing that happened yesterday that was important. Keep it brief. Limit yourself to a couple of seconds. Now how well did you do? One of the premises often used in TV drama is to ask someone to recall something they saw as a witness. We all know that this rarely turns out well. I’m going to flip the coin in this one and point out that this is actually a feature. You can do the math. How many seconds per day of intense input does your brain receive. Sound and video if you will. Now. Try to imagine if you were unable to filter any of that out. I hate to think about the volume of content we all receive in a given day. Expand that out through your life and you will start to guess what I’m getting at. Our brains are not designed to process the quantity of data we now all receive. It probably was always like that. Prehistoric mankind was as overcome by a beautiful sunrise as we are today. They may have had more time to watch the weather or build piles of stones into something to help them recall a moment but mankind has that issue we are unable to remember everything. As you get older people will warn you that you will start to forget things. The image of walking into a room and asking yourself why you came in. It is real. It is a good thing. If everything caught your attention nothing would catch your attention. This is our brain doing what is designed to do. So do not despair when you find that you have forgotten some particular fact. As long as it does not involve your own identity you’re probably good to carry on. Besides how would you tell if a letter was meant for you if you did not have that filter of knowing your own name. And for your own sanity do not get caught up in the endless amount of details that we all have to deal with. Our brains were designed to filter. Let it do that. So what if you watch a movie for a second time or listen to a piece of music on repeat. That is life.

Last night in that. Before dawn things got strange outside. We had been in the light of a full moon and then it faded to red. Now I have been alive long enough to know that this is a regular event. Not a scheduled event but one that you can predict. Hence all the time they spent during the evening weather forecast talking about how it will get dark outside. No rain needed to fall. There were no clouds. Just a bright night that went to dim for longer than I want to calculate. I actually did not bother getting up although someone else in the house had a camera focused on that red orb. I used to care about such things but I have learned that they are of little significance in the day-to-day existence of people in this part of the world. No need to sacrifice a goat or burn funny herbs. And now that the event has come and gone with no other evidence outside I have to assume that maybe it was just a dream. There will be others. Remember I did say that these were events that you could mathematically calculate so we know exactly when the next one will be and it’s duration. And unlike the solar eclipses which tend to move mountains figuratively when the moon goes red we just put a note on the calendar that this is going to happen. As it did. I listened to see if any of our local wildlife had any reaction and there was none. No changing of their habits. Clouds coming go all the time and so if the moon is under a veil it’s just business as usual although I imagine that if we had more owls they might take note. The eclipse also had no effect on the remaining snow that is melting away under its own schedule. Or maybe that is related to the temperature. So many details. And since I no longer watch the sky I have to assume that this passes virtually unnoticed by all around me. You know. They saw some stars and then they didn’t and then they did exactly the same as when the clouds are overhead.

The best story I heard yesterday involved a product announcement. This was on our national network and I learned that a brewery in eastern Canada has released a party pack. Not exactly the name they gave it but close enough. In the pack more than 1400 cans of beer. The selling point was that the buyer would get the truckload of cans of beer delivered to the place of choice and then they would sit back and drink one can of beer each day until the end of the current political regime in the South. I thought about this for a moment. Beer has a limited shelf life even in a can. And some temperature control is recommended. I tried to imagine just for a moment what a four year old can of beer might taste like. Probably not what the brewer had planned. Also the upfront cost would give pause too many. And the whole idea of spreading your beer out over four calendar years means that the average college freshman would still have some left by graduation day. Not likely to happen. I am certain that this product will not be offered next year or the year after. This seems to be a media event. Thank you to our national news outlet giving the company the coverage they want. Why not offer something a little more traditional? I think that I have some old sweatshirts they have been around for a decade. You can still read the logo and in the case of advertising that’s the part that counts. I have sent the story on to one of my sons who has a good take on how the brewing business works. Still waiting for his take on the subject. Funny how advertising works. Most companies want to be known to the world without depending upon their product having a limited shelf life.

The premise was to talk about the best job I ever had. I’m gonna take a right turn on that one and go for the best job I never had. When you were young you apply for jobs without fully understanding what is involved. I was in high school and someone mentioned that the local pop company was looking for people to ride on their trucks. This was in the time when soda pop was delivered in glass bottles in wooden crates. Two dozen bottles to the crate as I remember. And the job for the guy on the delivery truck was to get those boxes off and back on again full and empty. I can only guess how much a full creative pop actually weighed. My own impression was that the people who did this for a summer ended up going out for the football team because they were suddenly much stronger than anyone else around them. Also I had this illusion that you got to drink all the pop you wanted. I never got the job so it still remains as an illusion. No big muscles and no lasting effects of drinking too much warm soda as the truck bounced up and down the city streets. I am guessing that you remained capable of burping better than anyone else around you. Jobs like that did not pay much. Minimum wage was still a dream so you were likely to get whatever the company imagined it could pay to the stupid child looking for a job. I did notice later in life that there are very few people who stay in that occupation for very long. I made it out without the lasting effects. I found other things to do. But I realized looking back that sometimes not getting a job is the best thing that can happen to a young person. Did I have other jobs when I was in high school? Not really. I did a lot of babysitting because I came from a large family. And I learned that your pennies needed to be counted if only to make sure you had enough to buy a single bottle of pop when you made it to the store. I could probably do the calculation knowing that the average pop bottle contained about 350 grams of liquid and the glass made that much again and then you multiply. But the truth is that on a hot summer day those crates weighed far more than you would want to lift by choice. And remembering the format used by delivery trucks you spend a lot of time lifting the crate over your head. That could leave you crippled for life.