Salty Dogs

That's what we were, today, in another installment of the retirement chronicles.

Some explanation.  We have never, believe it or not, used Groupon for a deal.  Now those of you who know my lovely wife know she is the Mistress of Deals, so why it has taken us so long to take advantage of this wonderful device to save while splurging, I don't really know.  Anyway, we were curious about the incredibly high glass tower of the new Revel casino/resort in Atlantic City, and were inspired to try it out by the availability of a great Groupon offer.  It involved a Sunday night stay, so the excitement level was bound to be low, but that's all right, especially since it would be less crowded there and we really don't start the evening at 11:30 p.m. anyway.

Ignoring the problems Revel has suffered from construction delays and rumors of another possible sale, we took off in a nasty rain storm (sometimes -- usually -- fun is found at the end of a trying trip, we've found) and checked our unsophisticated selves into this most modern -- very Euro -- high-rise and resolved to ignore the lousy weather by just staying inside and exploring.

We found two things that those of you who can stand the idea of Atlantic City, and/or live on the East Coast, should definitely try.  Trust us.

First: Iron Chef Jose Garces' tapas restaurant, Amada, is not to be missed.  Huge sea views, walls of candles and old world/modern design are only the introduction to a gustatory binge worth any pain, although there was only pleasure.  Their signature cocktail, the Matador, will leave you feeling that the $14 it runs was well spent.  I only had one, being an amateur bourbon drinker, and that was just fine until next time.  We arrived for the Sunday night special featuring all tapas for $5 each, and wolfed (no other more polite term would describe it) down six plates.  The staff, despite a nasty negative review we found online, were exceptional in their attention, knowledge, and timing.  Jose and staff, you know what you're doing.

Today we couldn't wait to visit the Himalayan salt room at the spa (part of the Groupon deal, of course), and had it pretty much to ourselves since most singles or couples who came in went right back out.  Strange.  It was visually beautiful, with the walls made of salt bricks lighted from behind, a perfect temperature, cool music, and the color palate of the salt walls:  ranging from clear, through pink and amber, to red-brown.  This salt comes from the Khewra mines in Pakistan, the largest in the world.  Although it can be used also like table salt, it seems to be superior stuff, containing anywhere from 10 to 84 minerals in addition to the usual sodium chloride.  Other than the aesthetic experience, it's supposed to be beneficial in treating respiratory and skin conditions.  I know, I know, there are a million claims for a similar million substances that are supposed to stave off inevitable decay and death.  But it probably can't hurt, and a doctor in the early 19th century observed that the salt miners in Poland never suffered from respiratory ailments or caught colds (and that wasn't the beautiful Himalayan stuff).  In any case, it was a very nice experience, and no aging humans were harmed.

We were thinking that this will be the next big thing in luxury mansions, after home theaters and wine cellars.  It will be on "House Hunters" soon enough, I'm sure.






 

Local Hero?

If only finding out the truth were this easy

"What kind of society devotes a huge amount of its resources just to lying to itself?"
                          (Theme of a recent post on the blog Hipcrime Vocab)


Right-wing populism enjoyed a strange and thrilling victory recently in Pennsylvania's York County.  Due to a legislator resigning, a special election was held to fill the post for the next few months.  A wealthy businessman who owns Penn Waste and a trucking company did not like the formal Republican nominee (maybe even more than the Democratic one, who of course didn't have a chance anyway), and not only ran a write-in campaign, but won, with a resounding 47.7% of the vote (in a 14% turnout of registered voters).  This appears to be the first time a legislator has been elected in the Commonwealth in that way.

The new state employee is a libertarian tea-partier who hates government (so why not keep your day job?) and promises to try to reduce the size of the legislature (requires constitutional change, but not a bad goal as ours is huge and the second most expensive in the nation), forgo a pension and free health insurance (pretty easy for a millionaire), and work immediately on the elimination of property tax.  There have been letters in the newspaper every week since the Reagan era expressing a devout wish that this be done, so Mr. Scott Wagner has ready-made support and will campaign for re-election touting this crusade, as un-doable though it will probably be.

Property taxes support public education in the main, and both of these institutions raise the ire of the landed, wealthy elite, both here and now and throughout the long history of aristocracies and oligarchies.  I understand that in France, the resident of any property pays the taxes, which is mighty nice for old-wealth families living off rental income; their law must sound good to self-made American style barons who hold much land and several buildings.  To cover the loss of income from a repealed property tax, Mr. Wagner wants to expand the sales tax to cover now-exempt purchases such as food, prescription medicine and clothing.  Never mind that employees, owners and real-estate investors in outlet malls placed close to the state's borders will lose all those customers who are escaping their states' sales taxes on necessities, but the heck with those losers who live paycheck to paycheck, or on a fixed income, who would be hurt immediately and almost daily by such a broad regressive tax increase.

There is a very serious problem with property taxes poised to rise dramatically in Pennsylvania, one that did not need to happen and which was only partially ameliorated nine years after some of those "smartest guys in the room" pushed the passing of Act 9 in 2001 which increased school (and other public) employees pensions hugely both in the future and retroactively.  In some school districts, so much of the property tax revenue is going to pay for these insane increases, school funding is evaporating while taxes climb each year.  Because there were such good investment returns in the 1990s, it was decided to burn up the surplus by handing it out to current and future public employees.  A few months after the Act's passage, signed by Republican governor Ridge -- yes, that party of fiscal responsibility -- 9/11 happened and everything went south in terms of investment income.  As if all those in charge did not know that stock market bubbles and crashes always happen and upward growth forever is not possible.*    

Mr. Wagner and all the op-ed page letter-writers cite the probably baseless narrative of retirees who live on fixed incomes being forced out of their homes by property taxes.  I think he and his elite class have as much trouble with arithmetic as their honored Rand Paul, the master of Budgets Made of Smoke.  The York County township, Spring Garden, where our new legislator lives is quite posh with lots of homes going for a half-million or more.  The property tax on these is about $13,000 a year, which is indeed high. An average modest retiree-type home in York County would incur an annual bill of around $2380, about what the same home in other mid-Atlantic states would be taxed at (I looked up some in Ohio).  I don't think that larger amount will harm the millionaires any; it's just the idea that a little of their hoard goes to educate the common people's offspring that has them fuming.  Not only could they really care less about the retirees while they cynically stir them up; $2380 a year is not a deal-breaker for anybody unless they're in such bad financial shape already that owning a home is probably too much to handle anymore.  And I guess the spinners of this narrative have forgotten that the state has long had homestead and senior-citizen reductions on property tax easily available for those who qualify.  My grandfather had a pension quite adequate to live on, yet did qualify and used both programs quite happily.

 

And in Cumberland County, this retiree bungalow would only be taxed at around $1900/year

Mr. Wagner, who chafes mightily at paying his property tax, turned over $90,000 to a local conservative political action group (Citizens Alliance of PA) in 2012 alone.  That, I guess, is a more productive use.  And his Penn Waste company contracts with local governments which handle the administrative work and the billing while awarding a monopoly of all the township customers.  That's much more profitable than finding, serving and billing scattered customers, if he had to compete with other companies in the ideal "free market."

The Wonderful Wizard did no harm with his deception and was relieved to be done with hiding behind the curtain.  Our new local hero's deception reminds me more of Mr. Burns:

*The same fiscally responsible governor who sent out an order during his term mandating free dry cleaning and laundry for all high-level state government officials, which I saw while working on the new Keystone State Office Building.  

You're So Fine

I've been thinking of Parade Magazine, found buried in your Sunday paper, lately.  Of all the fish-wrappers...a step above tabloids, I guess, but something that should likewise ignored, shoved aside to the trashcan pile with the other filler in the Sunday paper like all those color ads.  It used to be like a little Life magazine, way back, and that's why I still look at it with faint hope. But its decline seems to be an indicator of sorts, like the ills suffered by amphibians which show, early on, what damage is occurring in wetlands.

Note the format size and volume of content:  it has drastically shrunk in recent years, and they have cut Marilyn's brain teaser column down to one item.  For a while now, the first and main articles are usually about what celebs are up to TODAY and RIGHT NOW.  Like their antics aren't always the same, over and over again.  It has turned into daytime TV or a women's 'zine, with a feel-good article and of course a recipe thrown in to balance the sleazy and self-promoting celeb goings-on.

And whether the subject is famous this month for being in something or an unknown young athlete who is an inspiration to us all, the theme throughout is: admire this person.  Puff pieces placed by publicists are nothing new, but why do we fall for it?  Photoshop is ubiquitous, and there is no correlation between what is true and what you read in print or hear from TV talking heads in suits.
The hyper morning TV show hosts are well-paid celebrities themselves, but I can find no reason why:  recently I watched in horror, then anger, as all four talked on top of each other and then drowned out their guest at the Olympics, who just gave up.  Ted Cruz, you have a career after politics just waiting for you.

When you dig a little and find out about the whole person, whether political figure, leader, icon, or star, the result is usually the evaporation of superficial admiration.  You must realize, with a sigh, that "out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight and true thing was ever made."  That's hard to live with; it's so much easier to just believe.  The king (or ex-President) is divine, the Pope infallible, the general experienced and wise, the media star perfection itself, the author or scholar always brilliant throughout a long career.  George Harrison, who certainly met everybody and didn't suffer fools at all, said the only person he admired was Ravi Shankar.  Without my ever meeting him, I'd add Pete Seeger.  But my list is really short, like George's.

The problem lies in our confusing physical attractiveness or talent with the whole person, while consistently failing to recognize psychopathic personality traits.  The icons themselves, living in a bubble of praise and admiration, come to believe that, like George W. Bush, being born on third base (with huge advantages in social status or physical/mental talents) means that they've hit a home run.
The media, local or national, is saturated with sports heroes.  I can admire the immense amount of work, that most of us would not ever be capable of, that goes into such achievements, but I can't admire someone for being born with the genes that mean an exceptionally fast, coordinated or strong body, or intense focus or even eidetic memory.  I can't admire the extremely rich and ruthless people, like the ones on "Shark Tank" or in Fortune magazine, we're supposed to be in awe of; they've got the qualities of a salt-water crocodile, not a human being with a spirit or soul.

My favorite financial blogger (speaking of another bunch of mostly scoundrels) suggests a "low-information diet."  Don't trouble your mind or body by accepting the endless junk -- manipulated media or food -- that is thrown at you 24/7.  Even the Buddha had that figured out, 2500  years ago!






 





 
 

Last Flight

Lt Eugene Rice, USAAF, 1943

I have had a half-dozen ideas for posts in the past few weeks, but they seem too trivial to think about, given the events of the past week.

Our father was found unresponsive a week ago in his nursing home near us in Mechanicsburg and was quickly sent by ambulance, not for the first time, to Holy Spirit Hospital.  He had been overwhelmed once again by pneumonia and internal infection.  He never really regained consciousness except to acknowledge my brothers Ron and Jeff when they called; his last words to Nancy and I when we visited him the day before were: "More than you know, I appreciate your visits."  The three doctors involved over the next three days concluded Dad could not get any better; the anitbiotics he had then and many times before just wouldn't work anymore.  We were warned that when the respirator was removed, he may not last long, but he did indeed keep going for 24 hours until 4 p.m., March 1.  Without the medical interventions, poking with needles and the painful-looking respirator, he became more and more peaceful and we saw him breathe his last quietly, with no struggle.

We had never spent so much time together as the last nine months, while Dad was first in the hospital and then a nursing home in Florida, and after August when he was moved here.  Brother Steve gathered up many old pictures and as they stimulated his memory, we heard stories of very long ago, the people and places in the pictures not remembered by hardly anyone still living.  Memories of family visits to his grandparents way up in the country of Perry County were the fondest.  He also asked about old co-workers and schoolmates, and we found a good deal of information that he appreciated hearing.  A way of saying goodbye to everyone, it seemed.

There were about a dozen boxes of pictures, records (even a set of report cards from the early 1930s), souvenirs, letters and  greeting cards at their home, so we have a lot to remember our parents by.  High school graduation announcements, dance cards, awards, newspaper articles -- especially his moment of fame when the hometown paper published a handsome picture and account of his B-24 sinking two Japanese vessels and wrecking a half-dozen more.  They were all recommended for the Distinguished Flying Cross, but got Air Medals instead.  Dad was the bombardier and well deserved it. 

He never told us much about his WWII service from 1941 to 1946, except for two stories about how miserable life was in the Southwest Pacific:  that they learned to wear helmets all the time, since the monkeys loved to drop coconuts on their heads, and a grim one about a tentmate being fatally bitten by a giant spider.  Oh, and how much they enjoyed their banana moonshine.

We will all be speaking at the funeral tomorrow and if I go on like this then, I will take up all the time.  There is so much more to remember about a 95-year life, but I know we can all say,

                                                    "Well done."







 

Shadow Lands



"There is no there there," Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, beginning a long history of that city usually getting no more respect than the late Mr. Dangerfield.  I wonder if she knew anything of the long and ongoing history of places that were worse off than Oakland, in that they didn't, upon closer inspection, ever really exist.

There seem to be two main reasons for the perpetuation such geographical frauds, the first being the great dislike that cartographers have for blank spaces (when not making up mountain ranges and rivers, they usually filled those voids with fantastic animals and legendary oddly-formed people).  The second reason is explorers who found that writing up stirring tales of distant lands sold well and possibly influenced those back home with authority and wealth, and often made more money than seal hunting, so...they made stuff up.  Like Fox News does today.

For over a hundred years, beginning with a 1798 map, a huge mountain range was shown on maps of west Africa, stretching west to east from Sierra Leone to Nigeria.  They were given a name worthy of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel:  The Mountains of Kong.  The man who invented such a stretch of rock was believed because he was indeed credible:  he was a co-founder of the Royal Geographical Society, a fine surveyor and a pioneer in oceanography.  The idea that mountain chain was there is possibly due to coming across a 15th century geographer's vague account, but why would someone of such scientific bent take that as proof?  Ah, well, our local CBS TV weatherman is a big climate change denier, so I guess science can keep some people on a rational path only some of the time.  A Frenchman went to the Kong region in the late 19th century, and finding just a lot of flatness, reported the same to the folks back home.  Off the maps the fabled mountains went!

There have been a, uh, boatload of imaginary islands placed in the Pacific on maps; in 1875, Captain Sir Frederick Evans got a little steamed about this and removed 123 such islands from the Admiralty charts (including three that actually were there).  But an American sea captain kept his inventions on the charts and maps until 1922, escaping Cpt. Evans' keen eye.  Benjamin Morrell claimed to have discovered Morrell Island near Hawaii and New South Greenland near Antarctica in an 1820s published account of his otherwise unproductive travels over that great ocean.  People should have been a little more skeptical, though, since he reported birds of paradise (inhabitants of steamy tropical regions) on the ice of the South Pole continent.  Others got the fictitious islands of Isla Grande, Royal Company Island, Swain's Island, The Chimneys, Macey's Island and Burdwood Island on maps of the South Pacific, either to get their names in print or to make all that emptiness a little more interesting.

Whole countries have appeared with great detail in print, like those composing "Schlaraffenland," depicted on maps made in Nuremburg (1716).  Part of the long-lived "Land of Cockaigne" legend, the native people (and their scandalous behavior) were even visualized  in a 1566 painting by Breughel.  So if it was painted, written about and mapped, it sure looked to many like it was, if far away, definitely somewhere! 

 

The countries supposedly in Schlaraffenland
 

How about an imaginary land that was found (as we'll see, more or less) to actually exist?  California was imagined, long before it was found, to be a large mythical island at the edge of the world inhabited by warrior women.  It appeared on a French map of 1656 after a popular book of legend, a little history and fiction inflamed dreamers in the early 1500s.  Rumors of its existence and plenty of gold, pearls and griffins therein were heard and believed by Mexico's conqueror, Hernan Cortes; after the first exploration of Baja California the mariners still thought it was an island, and the popular imagination (and the cartographers) kept it that way long after subsequent explorers found the west coast pretty solid, with no watery strait between the Pacific and the north end of the Sea of Cortes.  And the griffins?  Just condors.  No wild women, either.

The Island of Warrior Women today.  Still no griffins.
 

So, with satellites, Google and science boldly advancing our knowledge, this sort of thing is now part of history, right?  Alas, the geographical con game goes on: as recently as 2012, Sandy Island (near New Caledonia), seen on charts, a worldwide database and yes, Google Earth, for 12 years, was found not to be there by some amused Australian scientists, as they sailed over 1300-meter-deep water where it was supposed to be.  And a custom globe maker in England discovered, to his chagrin, that a reputable 2008 world map he was using as a basis for his impressive 50" diameter "Churchill" model had the capitals of Israel and Tanzania wrong, along with 148 other errors.

I think old Gertrude Stein had the best answer to:
 "Are we there yet?"



****

Most of the above is from Simon Garfield's fascinating 2013 book On the Map.   


























 

Bad Company

We got our newspaper this morning, thanks to the especially intrepid carrier who braved the already quite deep snow, and it was most welcome since we're not going anywhere for a while.

Ever since I once came across the obituary of a former co-worker who died in his early fifties, I scan those grim pages for anyone else I might have known.  I remembered he had been in the paper a few years previously for a big domestic blow-up at his trailer home.  Not out of character; probably just the first such incident to make the news.

I've given up wasting time reading the endless who-robbed-or-shot-whom stories about random misguided locals, but today couldn't help noticing one involving another former co-worker -- again, not at all out of character (people don't change, do they?).  It seems yesterday afternoon at a truck stop, one trucker got into a fight with another and he ended up getting stabbed.  The stabee, whose name I recognized immediately (and the age was right, too), said they traded punches after an argument.  Now, this guy was big, aggressive, loud and always right about everything, so I can see how a minor problem escalated.  The knife wielder was soon caught down the highway, but without knowing the exact circumstances I think he should have sensed this guy was volatile by his manner, walked off and avoided becoming the one sent to trial.  The first story my former co-worker ever told me was of the time he punched out a guy at a tony downtown gym and got away with it, of which he was quite proud.  He also stole from our company (which handled lots of cash) because he was trying to support a non-working wife and three children at the age of 28 at the time.  Not adept at good choices.

The owner of another company I worked for (quite happily; it was a good group) was sent to jail a while ago for bribing a school district official to participate in a computer-sales scam.  Now, this guy had everything and, as Bob D. said, he threw it all away.  He lived in a wonderful tree-ringed home in the excellent Forest Hills (Harrisburg, not Richmond) neighborhood, had a red-haired model girlfriend, a cool ride and he was as personable and well-liked as they come.  And our company was doing well.  So greed for even more lost everyone their jobs, and he lost his freedom for a couple of years and his reputation permanently.  Probably the redhead, too.

Once I gave a hard-luck co-worker a ride home after a very long day, finding out too late we were going to the 13th Street projects at 10:00 at night.  Two skinny white boys in a Toyota at that hour -- oh, yeah, we were about to become the subject of a "First 48 Hours" television episode, all right.  He was trying hard to move up and out, though, but also had a non-working wife and two small children, and was closer to desperation than even was apparent.  I forget why he lost his job there -- probably non-attendance due to transportation problems -- but within the year I saw him in the evening news, being carried out of a suburban home in a body bag.  He was surprised during a burglary and quickly shot dead by the homeowner.  It seems he went back to the same area time after time and both the residents and police were on alert.  I still feel bad for him and his family, despite his brief crime spree; he was enjoyable to  talk to and seemed brighter than most.  Sometimes people carelessly make bad choices and sometimes they seem to have no choices left.

Yes, there are more.  Another co-worker, who was at first a pretty entertaining character, acted like John Belushi, much to our amusement.  It slowly stopped being funny, as we observed him doing things like hooking up with a waitress during an out-of-town job (despite having a long-suffering wife #2), disappearing during the workday to have long conversations with anyone he could find, and shoplifting.  Once we picked him up at his apartment for a group trip for this same distant job, and he refused to get in until the football game was over and he had loaded up on drugs sufficiently.  He once explained to a visiting company higher-up that "I gots to be productive!," sending us reeling in laughter, because of all the things he was, that was never one of them.  A few years later, another former co-worker couldn't wait to tell me that guy was busted for crack near Pittsburgh but had escaped from jail.

Bad boys.  Whatcha gonna do?












 
 

Technical Difficulties

I once tried to build a personal reference library, but became disappointed and stopped.  It seemed no matter what I wanted to find out, I didn't have the right resource.  Encyclopedias and dictionaries were incomplete or out of date, and even the NY Public Library's Desk Reference series only very occasionally had what I needed.  Probably because of the odd nature of what I was usually looking for.

After the advent of the Internet, I was a pretty happy clam.  Then came YouTube, and eventually one could find even the very oddest music-related stuff, which I especially like (Indonesian rockabilly comes to mind).  So imagine my distress when our Verizon equipment shuddered and died the other day, just as I was trying to find out about another obscure discovery.   Scene:  while Nancy was using the computer, I had been looking at a few magazines lying in a stack, spending a happy afternoon with last summer's issue of Shindig!, a dense magazine from the UK filled with things very old and very new, almost all of which you will never hear about.  They're deeply devoted to psychedelia there (just the subject of commercialized nostalgia here, and little practiced outside of major cities).

I was intrigued by a review of a new album by Ed Askew of Connecticut and New York, as he was described as "the quintessential acid-folk obscurity." Game on.  Even better, according to the reviewer, he hadn't issued anything since 1968 (I love that out-of-the-darkness return stuff).  As further digging revealed, however, he's been very active since 2000 (the reviewers are enthusiastic and creative with language, but a little lacking in the accuracy and grammar/syntax departments), but his multi-instrumentality also caught my attention. In particular, that he played along with guitar, keyboards, harmonica and ukelele, a Martin Tiple.

Whaaat?

That's when the TV and internet connection made gurgling noises and died.  Nuts.

A traveling Verizon technician got our workorder and decided that since she was nearby and sensed our distress, stopped by several days before our scheduled appointment and promptly replaced the optical box inside (having already replaced four that day, she knew what the problem was immediately).  After some resets, we were back in business.  If it weren't 20 degrees and crusty with snow outside, we might have found other amusements, but in the dead of winter that fiber-optic connection with the world is worth a lot.

I found out that the Martin people made the Tiple (pronounced "tipple" here, but it is a Spanish word pronounced "tee-play," meaning "treble") from 1919 until sometime in the 1970s.  There were nine or more models, most with ten steel strings and some with eight.  You can spend years on Martin model and serial numbers and other production aracana, but you'll always finish more confused than when you started, so we'll leave it at that.  Except -- there was only a single T-45 model made, in 1922, and it improbably survived the car crash which killed its owner and player (today it's worth over $15,000!). 

So what is it?  Manufacturers Martin and Gibson responded to the ukelele and banjo craze after World War I with many models so well made they usually sound great today.  The Tiple was copied after a South American instrument that was solidly in the long Spanish and Portugese tradition; you can see the lute and those small gitarras in its look, but in Iberia, the Americas and Hawaii it evolved with a variety of shapes, sizes, sounds and tunings.  The strings are in four courses:  2, 3, 3, 2, and usually in a D tuning (a, D, F#, B).  Or so one site says.  I found a lot of misinformation (like the word "tiple" meaning "little guitar") and typos at various sources, but you have to love a mystery that stays a little bit of a mystery.

                                   (No, it's going to take a lot longer than five minutes to learn.)


Instrument maker Ohana is taking the place of Martin in the current resurgence of the ukelele family, and makes a model (TK-35G-10) out of mahogany for around $400.  Take a listen to some performances on YouTube; it's got the bright jangle of a 12-string guitar and harmonics that will keep you more involved than a standard ukelele.