TubaOrNotTuba

Anyone who has lived with a dog realizes quickly the dogs are smart. Do not be fooled. Under that furry face there is a whole lot more going on. We had one that could open doors. Another, or maybe the same one could open the side door to our van. From inside not outside but why quibble. So, today on a news broadcast I watched a dog that was mastering speech. There was a gimmick involved. This dog would push a button and a gadget would say a word. I found it a little unfair because the dog was able to use human speech to talk to a human. Why not up the game to a point with a human has to interpret barking sounds. You know it can happen. Those of us of a certain age remember Lassie. Mainly because her people ask her questions and she would answer. And they would understand. Tough questions like Lassie where is Timmy? Is he down the well? I guess you had to be there. No, I am making a broad assumption. The dogs have something useful too communicate. The last thing we need is to give the dog another way to ask for cheese. Or a walk. If we’re going to set up a system of communications let’s go for something useful to both species. I have not yet decided what that might be but I still have time. It takes more than an hour to train a dog. Believe me. And that fault might lie with the human.

There is an ongoing battle in the working world between industry professionals and people who want to repair their own goods. You bought something and you believe bunks to you. By extension, if it breaks, you should have the right to repair it. Companies have been fighting back in the courts. They want to be able to refuse to sell specifications and parts diagrams and parts. Now having spent my working life fixing stuff I have found this whole argument curious. But I think I have it figured out. It hinges in part unplausible deniability. Stay with me on this one. If people cannot fix their own stuff then the manufacturer can more easily figure out who broke something after the fact. But there is a hitch. I ask you to look at the recent press dealing with aircraft manufacture. Or more precisely aircraft manufacturing shortfalls. The kind that can turn an airplane into a long fall. It turns out in the case of one of the larger companies that many, many pieces are not attached according to specifications. In some cases the bolts and the nuts have nothing between them except air. My own thought is that they probably know exactly who the culprit is. When all the missing bolts come from one area of an aircraft I’m sure that they know exactly who was tasked with tightening the bolts. So far no one has been outed. Doxed. But it is just a matter of time. For those who want to fix their own airplane before takeoff, hang in there. Eventually the manufacturers will have to admit that they have fallen short. And you may get handed a small wrench as you board. Just in case product. Something along the lines of if you see a bolt give it an extra twist. It might not be the best solution but it beats what’s going on right now.

Part of improving my education includes learning new words. Or at least, the origins of words that I know. Today’s random fact is the word hobo. As in the people who traveled around the continent a lifetime ago looking for work. Generally by rail. Without tickets. Now you remember. Anyhow I did not know the origin of the term and apparently it goes back to the end of the American Civil War when people were first starting to travel looking for work. This was an agrarian economy and if you had your own tools you had a step up on the competition people on farms make great use of the hoe. With an “e”. And the people that traveled were known on the farms as a “hoe boys” certainly shortened. There, now you know. I’ve also watched a number of documentaries on the buying and selling of antiques. Objects that are one of and unique. Including leaf from a famous Bible. Remember this is all about the words and a leaf refers to a page with printing on both sides. You may ask why would someone buy a single page from the Bible. Even a famous one. And it turns out that a certain entrepreneur had come across a very old Bible pulled all the pages out and then sold them one at a time because that worked for him. It also made him more money. And those pages still come up at auctions. Each one has a value of a small car. Pretty good profit if you can be in the right place at the right time. I am sure that those involved have no interest owning a complete book. Or, if they came across a copy they would also break it down into components and sell them off. Anything to make a buck. Next to my list is to find out the origin of the term buck. So. I might have to go and look in a book.

In life, we sometimes come across things that we were not meant to see. Things from behind the scenes if you will. In high school we had a large student body. Larger than my eventual university to give us some scale. And, at one point, circulation of an underground newspaper began. Silly stuff. Some gossip some jokes but completely anonymous. The masthead proclaimed it, anonymous. End of one particular weekend morning I showed up at the school to go to basketball practice. No, I was not a star. But, during a break, I got across to the other side of the building to go to my locker. Where I store all of my treasure if you will. And, in the hallway by the lockers, I met some of my classmates. On a Saturday. Not there for basketball or band. I had to know why and they refused to give me any kind of clue. And so, like any child detective, I put the clues together. The next issue of the newspaper came out two days later. Properly mimeographed. This was not a basement production obviously. Can I put the dots to the lines and realize that I had walked into an editorial meeting for that newspaper. I never revealed what I knew to anyone else. I have however kept track of the people who were in that hallway. And of the five involved two have had careers as lawyers one has been a top official for a government office and the other two moved away. If you ask me who was on the staff of that newspaper I have no reason to give their names. You will never read that newspaper. But I know that being in the right place at the right time is how most secrets are revealed. Sadly, I have not kept any of the back issues but I wonder if those staff members have them hidden away in their personal archives. A question to ponder.

You learn at an early age that you cannot learn everything. Unless, of course, you are delusional in the clinical sense. I take great pleasure in learning new things and I have realized that others have bodies of knowledge that I can sample. A question of asking pointed questions or listening at the right time. This afternoon I sampled an interview with a top level guitarist. Someone who presents songs during the Grammy Awards. Able to do a lot in a number of fields. I have a working vocabulary and his speech pushed me to my limits. He was discussing tools and methods that I barely recognize. But there was a pleasure because it proved to me that I am still capable of learning. Not to do what he does but to appreciate it in a deeper sense. Actually, I have been using this method for a number of years. I now have little bits of knowledge in a number of fields. The way education used to be and should still be. I really wish that I could use a time machine and go back to talk to some of my ancestors. To learn how they did things like taking care of horses or going fishing at sea or felling trees. I have little bits of knowledge but not enough to throw myself into the fields. I wonder how people handle these things a lifetime ago. Did they simply accept that they could not know about a given subject or did they try to get enough working knowledge to be able to stand by and recognize what was going on. Removing the magic from the equation. And back to the guitar player. I get the feeling that he can do just about anything he wants with his instrument but he is also smart enough to recognize that he does not know it all.

There I was. Out in front of the house with a shovel trying to clear a tiny amount of snow. What I realized was that I could not see what I was doing. A combination of poor eyesight and too much sunshine. I know how to point a shovel. Something I have been doing since I was a child. And I know the format of my steps and sidewalk. Right now, after 20 minutes or so, I have decided that they are as cleared as they need to be. This is winter. There will be more snow. But if you stop by and you decide that my job is mediocre, so be it. I work cheap. Perhaps a better question to ask is why do I bother clearing the steps. We have, on average, a visitor a week. No particular schedule. If they find that there is too much snow on my walkway they can simply go to another entrance. There. My confession for today. I did the best job I could and I am satisfied. As for the lane, that is someone elses responsibility. The man with the Big Blue tractor. And this winter, to date, he is only needed to visit one time. In other words winter is not what it used to be. Yes, I know, there are many months to go but I somehow suspect that when people ask how was the winter of 24 I will answer that it was easy. I may even take a couple of pictures just to prove that to someone else but I suspect that no one will ask. Those who are offended by our climate have already headed South. And you will notice that I have not opted to join them.

In this neighbourhood there are few large man-made works. When you do not see large works you forget just how many there are in the world and for how long mankind has been altering his own environment. Today my lessons in civil engineering taught me about a large canal in France called le Canal du Midi. Used to join the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean. I admit, I had never considered this need. I was aware of the Strait of Gibraltar and I figured that met all the possible conditions of getting a boat from here to there. But in the good old days when they were kings they would control who passed through their territory. Control freaks one and all. Anyhow someone decided to construct a canal for shipping over a distance of a couple of 100 kilometres and through the mountains. A lot of work with a shovel? Certainly and an even larger amount of work to make sure that there was water in his new canal all year long. Invention of systems that had never been built before. I found the lecture very intriguing. I admit. I had never, not once, considered how you make a river cross the canal. Or vice versa. But here where engineers, in the middle of the 16th century, not only thinking about how to do it but actually getting out there with hundreds of people and picks and shovels. Even better their workmanship is still in use today. Hundreds of years later. In sharp contrast we barely make our local roads passable from one year to the next. Will they go to visit the site? That could be fun but not likely to happen and so I will file away my knowledge in case the question ever comes up at supper. Funny how that goes. Just a note. We have no canals locally. And the ocean always has water. Where you live effects what you build.

Those who can, do. I guess when you have a talent you figure out how to let others see what you are capable of. One field crossover that is always been interesting for me are those who can act and make music. I know, they are a multitude. I do remember the first movie star that gave me enough name recognition that I spotted her on a jukebox list. One of those machines found in a local restaurant where you flip through the pages chose your song dropped money into the slot and listen to what came out. I am unsure what movie I had seen her appear in but they can vividly remember sing the name Hayley Mills come up in the list of artists that were going to sing for me. And for everyone else in the restaurant, I guess. One of those moments that you can no longer duplicate because the old idea of buying your songs a coin at a time is from the distant past. I wonder where all those machines have gone. Later on during one of my first summer jobs I had the chance to fill a jukebox. With my records. Not songs I have performed you understand. Songs I had purchased. And so we went at it my friend and I with a fever. We filled all the record slots and wrote out the song titles by hand and turn the jukebox into something of value. And then the job came to a sudden end. Did I ever get my records back? Probably although I do not remember the mechanism. But I can tell you step by step how to turn a jukebox into something of value and that is a life skill. Did my records garner attention? I am unsure. This was in a roadside diner and I think that people coming in from filling their saddle tanks on the truck did not care about the jukebox.

Sometime in mid morning, I woke from a dream. Very vivid pin in it I was eating peanut butter with a tiny spoon from a jar. Micro dosing I guess. To be fair I’m not given to eating peanut butter. No no analogy. Just no reason to do so. We had a dog that would not eat the stuff either so it does cross great leaps in biology. The rest of the family does enjoy the product. I know this because full jars come into the house and then go out empty. Since peanut butter doesn’t evaporate somebody is getting it into the system. It is a strange product. So much work involved. Go ahead, take a bag of peanuts and try turning them interfaced. Labour intensive. There was a time, back before allergies, when kids ate peanut butter in sandwiches. In school. After school. While watching cartoons on TV. A very popular product. I have no idea why I was dreaming about this but as I said it was all very vivid. The spoon was small with an elaborately carved handle top. A perfect thing for a child to hold on to. I checked in the kitchen and we do not own such a thing but I will not try to say it never happened. Not the spoon. Not the dream. There is probably a jar of peanut butter somewhere in the house. Crunchy or smooth? No idea. Give my next dream I will keep an eye out for glasses. Milk glasses. Like in the good old days when that’s how we got cool looking milk glasses by buying peanut butter. And someone just passed me a note saying that other people in the house eat peanut butter with bananas. As a reminder that we have bananas that must be eaten before they turn into bread.

I remember when the answer to many questions could be found in a comic book. The ones that come in at 12 cents and ended up in stacks and boxes under all of my friends beds. If you were willing to spend some time rooting around you could learn a lot. One series that should have received more attention were the classics where we learned about real things and real places in real people. This afternoon I have been trying to wrap my head around something known as the Spanish Civil War which seems to have caused a lot of stir in Europe back before the Second World War. Same players in many cases. Now, we depend a lot on the team names to figure out what is going on and so that was the approach I used while learning about this conflict. I am actually more confused than ever because the good guys the bad guys did not use the same names we would have today. What I took away from it was that this war was a way of resolving many older conflicts while wrapped in flags. And that the eventual winner hung on to his flag for another 4 decades also makes it hard to figure out what they were actually doing. I had grown up believing that a war would last for three or four years, not 30 or 40. My bad. The lessons were there in history books or those comics. I have not seen a classic comic in decades. They must still exist because people did not throw such things away. Somewhere under a bed there are still boxes filled with the jewels of history. Not at my house. My children never got into that little rabbit hole. At least, as far as I know. I must ask them where they learned their versions of world history. Maybe, like me they simply moved on and went straight to the Internet rather than making micro payments of $0.12 a week or month. In passing that was a reasonable price for people who got their salary by collecting empty pop bottles. A dollar went a long way.