The Online Photographer

Open Mike: New Habits

Happy to report that my lifestyle changes are going swimmingly*. My problems are worse than some others have, and not as bad as some others deal with. But they're mine so they're all I can share.

I'm either supposed to do, or trying to do on my own, five things:

• Go back to my plant-food diet, and stop eating sugar;
• Wear compression socks;
• Lose weight;
• Resume using CPAP; and
• Exercise.

The Five Doctors (I seem to keep seeing different people) are more or less agreed that I was having heart problems caused by sleep apnea—my heartbeat had become uncoordinated and irregular and my heart wasn't pumping enough blood, so I wasn't getting enough oxygen. This was causing all sorts of symptoms. I've been back on the CPAP for 31 days and the difference is...astonishing. I've gone from extreme fatigue (four naps in one day being the signal that got me to the doctor) to no naps; from oxygen hunger and shortness of breath to breathing normally; from lethargy to energy; from badly fractured sleep (with an avalanche of nightmares) to almost normal sleep; from confusion to normal mental sharpness (such as it is, yuk-yuk).

I've been off sugar and back on my plant-food diet for a mere eight days, and have been working out for only six days, and I've already lost 9.3 lbs. (.66 stone). (I weigh myself first thing in the morning on an excellent scale.) Who knows if the weight loss is attributable to the return of normal heart function, or the diet and exercise, or the resumption of normal sleep, or all those things?

The exercise is interesting. I rather enjoy it. I just take my tablet and read, and that makes the time fly by. I use some combination of a total of five different cardio machines, alternating sitting with being on my feet. I get my heart rate to between 90 and 100 BPM and keep it there. It isn't hard. I'm going to add workouts with dumbbells sooner or later.

Books, books!
I'm really enjoying Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. I love love love his guided tours of subjects far from my usual field of interest; I lapped up his lovely book on physics, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Body is equally entertaining, and bits and pieces of fascinating information fly by. For instance, babies who grow up in houses with cats present almost never get asthma. (I'm on the chapter about the lungs now.) His vivid account of how long it took before we accepted that smoking was linked to lung cancer is very telling. There's certainly a parallel to the obesity epidemic: as Dr. John McDougall says, "People love to hear good news about their bad habits."  

Speaking of which, that's what I'm working on now, habits. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll report back in a month or two. I hope I can do this. (I initially mistyped "can't" for "can"...Freudian slip?)

And speaking of habits—to briefly get back on topic—I'm carrying the camera again. Too many pictures were going by in my daily life. From now on, where I go, the camera goes.

Mike

*Except that I'm having trouble with time management.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Keith Mitchell: "I also enjoy Bryson's writing. Despite being a recently retired registered nurse, The Body left me with a sad sense of my lack of knowledge but simultaneously a sense that more work and research will still facilitate big improvements to our health.

"Glad to hear you are on the right side of your health concerns and hope that your new habits become embedded quickly."

Steven ralser: "If you want to read further about one of the reasons why it took so long to recognize the link between smoking (and second hand smoke)and lung cancer, read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes [and Erik M. Conway —Ed.]. See also https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org."

JoeB: "Good to hear the phoenix is rising from the ashes. I have found going to the gym an excellent way to organize my day—I enjoy the routine. I also enjoy the results of my workout. The social aspects of seeing the same folks at the same time of day cannot be discounted. Diet cannot be ignored. What and how much is eaten make all the difference in our life. I should have turned green if the saying 'you are what you eat' is true!"

MikeR: "Yay for you! And aren't those sleep apnea nightmares horrifying?"

Mike replies: They certainly are. I didn't think I was going crazy, but I did think the cause was fundamentally psychological. I didn't realize it was a symptom of sleep apnea.

Open Mike: First Cutting (OT)

["Open Mike" is the opportunistic Editorial Page of TOP, which gets done adventitiously as the occasion arises.]

There comes that time in early spring when we have a string of nice warm sunny days and I look at the grass and think, "nah, it's too early, it's not long enough to bother with yet." It is so nice out you wonder if it will never get cloudy.

Then the skies cloud up and the rain starts, and it rains for twenty days. The rain makes the grass leap up out of the ground and head skyward. At the same time, the rain soaks everything, making it impossible to run the lawnmower to cut any of that grass back down again. You have to watch helplessly while the grass grows out of control, unable to do anything about it. This happens seemingly overnight. Presently the grass is nearly as high as the rooftops, in spots.

Finally there comes a break in the weather. The clouds roil about, the sun is seen fleetingly at times, the asphalt road actually dries off even at the edges where it's broken up, and you seize the moment and run out and hop on the old John Deere, hoping it will fire up after slumbering all winter. But I'm outrunning my tale: before I begin mowing I have to pick up sticks. That's what the trees, especially the sycamores, do all winter—shed sticks—and I collected enough of them yesterday to make a house for the middle of the Three Little Piggies, all the while mourning my misfortune for being so tall and having to stoop so far to reach the ground. Last fall I had all manner of trouble with the John Deere. It had to go back and forth to the repair shop twice, and I was pessimistic of its prospects this spring. After having been hit with a succession of unexpected expenses this year so far, I thought perhaps having to buy a new used lawn tractor was going to add to my list of woes. I tried to counteract this possibility by idly shopping online for a new John Deere that I can in no wise afford. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the old one started up and ran smoothly; maybe that repair shop knows what it is doing.

If you read novels, and have ever encountered the phrase "the forsythia are in bloom," this is what that looks like. For those of you who live amongst skyscraper canyons in big cities, I can tell you that having a lot of forsythia is one of the good things about living in the country. The more forsythia, the better.

I believe my John Deere has about as many horsepower as the first Volkswagen Rabbit, the original hot hatch—about 90—making it very powerful, for a lawnmower. So if I creep very slowly across the great heaps of leaves that I absolutely meant to rake up a long time ago, the great engine with its new mulching blades will roar and churn and shake and spit out a torrent of moist leaf mulch, which I arrange very un-aesthetically in senseless patterns across the lawn. The yard is complicated, and has a great many impediments to the mower, including all the low-hanging branches that I continue to intend to cut back, and all the tenacious mystery plants that were once cut down but that persist in continuing to grow. (The rule is that if I want a plant to grow, it does not, and if I try to kill a plant, it will cling to life and continue to pester me for years without ever having the chance to sprout leaves or do any of the other things that plants are believed to have to do to sustain life. I had a wisteria bush cut down to the ground five years ago, for instance, and it is still angrily trying to come back out again.) The yard has also become filled with spontaneous potholes or sinkholes over the winter for no known reason. The smallest of these are no problem; I merely aim the lawn tractor to straddle and pass over them. The largest are also no problem, as I simply drive the mower down one slope, traverse the bottom, and drive up the other side. It is the mid-sized ones, the ones the size of a bathtub or a La-Z-Boy recliner, that are the problem; you can get hung up in those, and you may then require the services of a Mennonite neighbor with a team of draft horses to extricate the tractor. This happened only a few times yesterday, as I went along.

The first cutting of the season is merely emergency triage, meant to cut the grass back before it exceeds the height of oaks. I don't bother doing a neat job of it; I cut where I can and leave the niceties for later. All thoughts of making the lawn look good are set aside and left for the clement months, when the sun shines and the gnats shimmer in the hot air and the snakes that live underneath the rocks sun themselves on top of the rocks. For now it's just a grim battle of man against grass. Of course, I have another limitation that vectors in upon the job, namely, that my back can only take so much jouncing around perched atop the tractor. If I don't desist as soon as my spine begins to feel tender, I will be faced with days in traction, days on crutches, followed by a further flourish of days hobbling around with the aid of a cane. It's best not to overdo.

But yesterday I needn't have worried, as presently the rain returned, and I had to quit on account of that. That's "rain" in the colloquial usage. Did you know that not all rain is actually rain? "Rain" is technically steady precipitation that exceeds twenty minutes in duration. Any less than that, and it's a "shower." So now you know why the weatherman insists on saying "scattered showers"—he's being technical. The problem with these definitions, of course, is that in these parts, twenty minutes is long enough for about an inch and a half of rain to fall (that's a cm and half to you foreigners, I b'lieve), and that will soak things almost as good as rain will.

Anyway I got about half the yard done yesterday, which I am pleased about; and it looks like hell. I had to skip the places where the leaves were heaviest, lest I risk the mower blades clogging to a stop, and I got no trimming done despite trimming being urgently called for. But this is one of those incremental tasks. It keeps needing doing, again and again, and each time I bravely forge out to do yardwork I will improve one area a little better than I did the last time. And in that fashion, bit by bit, the premises will gradually get whipped into shape. I am confident that in this manner I will have the whole yard looking nice and neat by the time the leaves turn and start to litter the ground again, next fall.

Mike

[CORRECTION: I'm surprised that so many of TOP's otherwise intelligent readers got this wrong, but we just hired a new fact-checker—one who attended the University of Science, no less—and he checked again. He assures me that one deutsche mark does indeed equal one inch. So the correspondence is 1:1, and, therefore, 1.5 inches = 1.5 dm, as I reported in the post. If you don't understand this, it is doubtless because you are not European.

However there is one very bad mistake in the post, which management regrets. Take a look at this photo of the instruments from the cockpit:

So the lawnmower engine is NOT 90 horsepower, as I stated...it is 180 horsepower, as you can see for yourself. And note that mine has only 4,645 miles on the odometer. That doesn't seem like much, but none of them are highway miles.

Glad we got that all cleared up!  —Ed.]

[There might have been some satire in this post, and not just the measurement conversion.]

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Bryan Hansel: "I approach lawn mowing differently. I go as short as possible in an attempt to kill the grass so I don't have to mow. It might be different here in northern Minnesota though. We currently have about a foot of snow in the yard. After that melts, everything turns to mud. Just as the mud starts to dry, and the grass starts to grow, and the spring flowers start to bloom, the black flies emerge. That happens in June. There's a saying, "Don't go outside in June." You'll die from black fly bites. But the grass is getting high in June, so the mowing must be done. That's when the bug shirt comes out. It's armor against the bugs with a full mesh hood, bug-proof fabric, and elastic cuffs at the wrists and waist. By the time I work the courage up to push mow the lawn, the mosquitoes have emerged. Then it's an all out fight for the lawn. It's humans vs. the bugs. The bugs usually win. Thus my goal to kill the grass so I don't have to suffer the pain of 10,000 Minnesota black flies and mosquitoes. And this is all before the No-See-Ums hatch."

Mike replies: I'm like you. I grew up in Wisconsin, and I continue to be amazed, when I'm in other parts of the country, how few insects there are. When we played outdoors as kids we thought it was normal to be covered with red polka-dots (mosquito bites). In Berkeley when I was there my girlfriend's mother kept her french doors wide open to the evening air! No screens at all. I was astonished. As you well know, she would never get away with that in Wisconsin or Minnesota.

Stelios: "What? No picture of the John Deere?!"

Mike replies:

Note Green Bay Packer colors.

Geoffrey Wittig: "There are many philosophical elements to yard and lawn care. Some folk regard it as a great crusade, wherein your friends and neighbors, and perhaps St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, will judge you severely for the state of your yard. Such folks tend to mow at the first sign of green grass, keep the lawn severely trimmed, and neaten up the edges on hands and knees using scissors. A single dandelion is cause for chemical warfare. Every twig must be removed. I'm on the other end. As an adolescent I tried to persuade my father that if we merely waited, the wind would blow all the downed leaves out of our yard and off to somewhere else. He was not amenable to my argument, directing me to man the push-mower. I now live on about 99 acres of hilltop land. Thankfully most of it is forested or far too steep to consider mowing, so we only mow perhaps a quarter acre. Even more fortunate for me, my wife actually enjoys mowing. The first time I mowed the lawn 35 years ago, I came into the house sneezing uncontrollably with my eyes swelling shut and my nose running like a faucet. My wife sighed and said, 'I'll mow the lawn if you get me a riding mower.' 'Done!' Best money I ever spent."

Parachute (The Writing Life)

Since I posted the previous post, and got so many interesting replies from readers, I've done more thinking about what I would do if I had resources. And as for what I would want for myself, I come down to two things.

[Warning: Bloviation alert. This post is long and possibly not interesting! Proceed according to your level of boredom. :-) ]

Open Mike: Wildlife in the Half-Light

We've had the better part of a week here of what is normally thought of as midsummer weather. Hotter than 80°F (~27°C) day after day. I hate to be so picky, but it's actually kind of hard on me—it takes me a while to adjust to warm weather every spring.

But that's nothing like the effect the warm weather has had on the deer. We had a very mild winter—I only had to have my driveway plowed once—and I've seen more deer this spring than ever. The other day I drove with my neighbor Ilene up to a dogsitter's house on a remote hillside, with large meadows all around, and we saw several huge herds of deer. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say we saw 50 deer on that short drive, in three groups. The largest herd probably had 30 individuals in it. And if that weren't enough, in another meadow we encountered a vast flock (called a "rafter") of wild turkeys—no fewer than 30 and probably more. I've never seen that many wild turkeys at one time before.

Wonder what kind of hawk that is
Driving, I started a red-tailed hawk (wingspan 3.4 to 4.8 feet) who flew right in front of the car and then turned away from me to settle in some trees, giving me a brief but full-on view of his red tail. I thought, "I wonder what kind of bird that is—I could probably look it up because of that red tail." And then I thought, "oh. Red tail." I did confirm it from online pictures, later, and a red-tailed hawk seems to be what she/he was.

One more...the other night at dusk, I was returning from a walk with Butters (Canis lupus familiaris) and, ahead of us, a large fox ambled nonchalantly out of the woods at the edge of the road, looked up, saw us, froze, then turned around and slunk back into the brush. I peered into the woods on the bank for a long time, because I knew he was there somewhere watching us. But I didn't catch a glimpse of him. My eyes are not as good as a hawk's, and it was getting dark. That's actually not the reason I couldn't see him. The real reason is that he didn't want to be seen. They're good at hiding.

Look
A little tip—at any time near dusk, with woods and trees nearby, don't drive casually. Concentrate hard on keeping your eyes on the road at every moment. Don't look at sights and don't avert your eyes to anything inside the car. Stay on the lookout. Sunrise and sunset, especially in spring and fall, is when you'll most likely encounter a deer. And if you do see one, slow way down immediately—deer aren't solitary animals, and if you see one there are most likely a few more nearby. That was my problem the one time I actually made contact with a deer (neither deer nor car was affected, but it was a close call). It was my own fault.

We're in the habit of driving extremely casually, with our eyes on the road ahead of us a surprisingly small percentage of the time*. If you become aware of it, you'll realize that you're not watching the road all that much. I'm probably worse than average because I'm always looking around for pictures.

The top five States for animals involved in car crashes are:

1. West Virginia
2. Montana
3. South Dakota
4. Michigan
5. Wisconsin

There are an estimated 1.5 to 2.1 million car-animal crashes every year in the United States, with 60,000 human injuries and 440 deaths, about three times as many people as are killed by falling trees, ten times as many as are killed bitten by sharks, and sixteen times as many as are killed by lightning. It's believed that at least 1 million deer are killed annually by vehicles. With all that carnage going on, it pays to watch carefully during peak times.

Eventually the problem will take care of itself—in another ten or twenty thousand years, the deer will evolve to learn how to evade cars. Most of us can't afford to wait that long, however.

Mike

*I learned this from a nonfiction book called Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt, a fascinating book I thoroughly enjoyed. Amazon says the book is a bestseller, but that is not possible—I've personally recommended it about eighty times, and, so far, not one single person has ever reported back to me that they bought or read it. I don't know why I'm even mentioning it right now.  :-)

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Steve Rosenblum: "Oh yeah, the deer are a huge driving risk here in Michigan. My brother-in-law once rolled his car down an embankment in Montana trying to avoid hitting an elk. He ended up upside down hanging from his seat belt, but had only minor injuries. The general recommendation is to not swerve to avoid hitting an animal, that is what mainly causes the human deaths. If you can't stop in time to avoid it you should hit the animal, which is hard for many people to contemplate. Honestly, I would be at least as worried about the flock of wild turkeys you saw. Wild turkeys are extremely aggressive. They are thugs!"

Bruce Hedge: "Here in Central Victoria, Australia, an Eastern Grey kangaroo can weigh up to 200 pounds and make a large mess of your vehicle. They're also very unpredictable, changing direction and jumping high. Then there are wombats, otherwise known as 'hairy rocks,' 'cos if you're unfortunate enough to hit one, your wheel alignment (and vehicle) is history. As is the wombat. Deer and feral pigs are on the increase, too, but we don't have moose, which I imagine would be awful! The simplest solution is to slow down to 60–70 km per hour at dusk on quiet country roads and keep very alert. I haven't hit any of the above for ten years now. Touch wood."

Tom Passin: "Re 'A little tip—at any time near dusk, with woods and trees nearby, don't drive casually.' Here's a really valuable tip for driving near and after dusk. Turn your windshield visor down as low as you can to cut out as much light from the sky as possible. The sky may look fairly dark, but the total amount of light from the whole sky around dusk is enough to keep your pupils from expanding enough and your night vision from kicking in. Keep the visor down until the sky is really inky black."

Chris Kern: "Re 'in another ten or twenty thousand years, the deer will evolve to learn how to evade cars.' The urban deer in the small Maryland city where I live apparently are way ahead of the curve. My wife and I repeatedly have observed deer looking in both directions before crossing a busy through street on our corner lot, then waiting for any oncoming cars to pass before making their way across the street. On several occasions we have watched as a doe walked out in the middle of the street in order to block traffic until her fawns had crossed behind her. And, no, I am not making this up. Deer are much smarter than they are reputed to be and the urban deer around these parts have become surprisingly skillful at adapting to their only remaining predator: the automobile."

ASW: "When it comes to animal collisions, the advice not to swerve is generally good for animals up to deer size. If you, like myself and our esteemed TOP CEO, are one of the few Americans who still drives a reasonably sized automobile (I believe they're called...cars), you really don't want to hit an elk or moose. If you've never seen one, imagine 500+ lbs. (elk) or 1000+ lbs. (moose) of densely muscled flesh perched high atop four spindly legs. Hit that at even moderate speed and your car chops off the legs and the body comes through the windshield into all of your personal space. No thanks. I slow down in wildlife danger conditions (e.g., dawn/dusk), just like I slow down for adverse weather conditions.

"Of course, if you drive a more typical American SUV/truck, lifted halfway to heaven and with more horsepower than a WWII battleship, then keep on truckin' and show those pesky varmints that you're built Ford Tough, Like a Rock, or whatever else the commercials tell you."

Mike Plews: "Four years ago my commuter car was an '07 Honda CRV. I was going to see just how many miles I could get out of it and was up to 350,000 when I got T-boned by a buck on my way to work. He hit me square in the drivers side door, no warning, just a deafening bang, antlers in the front seat and a deer rolling over the hood. The deer ran into a corn field, presumably to expire. The Honda which I loved was totaled. I got pretty badly cut up but it could have been much worse. Used insurance to put a down payment on a Kia Sorento which appears to be as well built as the Honda and holds all my grandkids.

"Current wildlife interaction is a cardinal who stands on our kitchens window sill and keeps me company while I make morning coffee. Possum in the garage, raccoons on the deck, coyotes down the hill, even a mountain lion across the road; life in the country."

Ronny Nilsen: "I bought Traffic based on your recommendation! Bought it years ago. Great book!"

Mike replies: Ah, that's music to my ears. Now I can't say that everyone ignored me.

Open Mike: More On Money (OT)

In Friday's post, "How Is TOP Doing?", I talked, in the Featured Comments, a little about the relative nature of money. Money is a subject I know little about. Still, I was surprised by Dave Millier's comment. It doesn't jibe with what I know of housing prices in the UK; I remember that when I bought my house, my British friends were flabbergasted by how much house I was able to buy in Wisconsin for $260k. One sent me some links to properties available for the same price in her area (Brighton), and the comparisons were risible. Let's just say the equivalent in pounds didn't buy much. So if British people are earning so little, how are they buying houses to live in?

Furthermore, the "standard" I chose for a good salary (my last corporate salary, $55k in 2000), was in no way high-end for the U.S. It was approximately the median family income for the Chicago suburb where I lived (Forest Park, Illinois), and that suburb was not as prosperous as several of the others around it (Oak Park, River Forest).

I do recall that I was proud when I first earned $60k for a year, because that's what my father earned at his high- but not top-level corporate job when I first learned what he earned. (At the time, he worked for Congoleum Corp. and was charged with returning the Bath Iron Works, a shipyard in Maine, to profitability.) Little problem with that: he was earning that salary in about 1970, as near as I can place it. Adjusted for inflation, that was about $240,000 when I earned the same nominal dollar amount. Today it's a whopping $477,500! So I never matched him, not by a long shot. I guess I knew that at the time.

My father dropped out of Harvard Business School after his first year because he couldn't pay for the second year. He then joined his two brothers in founding a company. When they sold the company—the closest estimate I can come up with for that would be about 1961, when Dad was 32—his stock was worth more than $1 million. Adjusted, that's about $10 million today. So when he went back to finish Harvard Business School in 1963 he was a minor celebrity among his classmates—someone who had already done what they aspired to do. Yet we were far from the richest family at the prep school I attended. We considered ourselves "upper middle class," and lived well but not ostentatiously.

He did like to travel, and I'm sure we spent a lot of money on trips. I got to travel a whole lot as a kid. By the time I was 20 I had been to Ireland, England, Scotland, Italy, the Bahamas on a cabin cruiser with a crew, a dude ranch in Wyoming, the Florida Keys, Switzerland, Austria, and Monaco—and France, my father's favorite destination, many times. On one of those trips we crossed the Atlantic on a then-new ocean liner, the S.S. France. My brothers have ventured farther afield, to places like Istanbul and Singapore, but I've only been to North America and Europe. That early travel sort of scratched that itch for me—I haven't done much traveling as an adult. I would love to take a guided tour of Europe again before I shuffle off to Buffalo, but I'm not organized enough to plan such an undertaking on my own, even if I could afford it, and I guess it wouldn't be much fun to do by myself.

The S.S. France, the longest and fastest ocean liner ever built when she was launched in 1956, pictured in 1962, the year before my family sailed on her to France when I was six. The prow is now preserved at the Paris Yacht Marina at Port de Grenelle in Paris.

The old ship, much modified, awaiting scrapping at the Alang ship-breaking yard in India in 2007. The prow is ceremoniously cut off to mark the commencement of of the dismantling.

Going back further, my grandfather once told me that in 1950, he was earning $350,000 a year in stock dividends alone. That's nearly $4.5 million today. And they were unabashedly rich, with two large houses and a number of servants, and a beautiful 29-foot sloop my great-grandfather bought from General Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-Hur. (I sometimes characterize their lifestyle as "Downton Abbey at 1/8th scale.") I have lots of relatives who are in a different social class than I am.

I'm unclear about the difference between "mean" and "median," but, "according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median weekly income (including overtime, commission and tips) for full-time workers (excluding those who are self-employed) in America was $1,041 as of the second quarter of 2022. If that rate persists for the entire year, that would equal $54,132 a year. The mean American income in 2020, according to Statista, was $71,456" (quote from firstrepublic.com). That's below my benchmark of 2000, of course, but it does indicate that my benchmark isn't crazy high. In any case, I'm not earning as much as my benchmark any more.

However, I'm still good to go to keep TOP hoppin' for "the foreseeable," thanks to all of you. Next up, my final thoughts about "process vs. project." And I'm going to get back on topic for a while! I have my strength and balance class on Monday and Friday mornings now, and didn't have time to write a real post this morning. I set the alarm early, but still don't have time to get my work done and get out of the house by 10.

As ever, more anon.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Lee R: "'Mean' and 'average' are the same.

"Median is as follows: if you line up everything low-to-high, the median is the exact middle. This is especially helpful to know when talking about average/median incomes. Let's say we have 11 households. The first earns $1 per year, the second $2, so on until the 10th person makes $10 per year. The 11th person makes $1 million per year. The median income of that group is the household in the exact middle: the household earning $6. There are 5 earning less, 5 earning more. The mean (average), however, is the sum of all the households ($1,000,055) divided by the number of households (11). The mean income for this group is $90,914 and some change. But if you ask 10 out of 11 of the group, that number isn't representative of their income. These are ridiculous numbers, but they illustrate why mean household income and median household income differ: a small number of extremely high-earning households (say the top 1% of earners) will increase the average disproportionately. My takeaway is when you're looking at incomes it helps to know both averages and medians, but the median is probably more representative of what the 'middle' looks like."

Mike replies: A great explanation. Thanks.

Richard Parkin: "How do people in UK afford houses? They can’t currently. I’m no expert on this but it happens I know the three-bedroom flat I bought new in 1970 cost £6,250 to build (land, profit, everything by a large very company). According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, that would be about £80k today; but I’ve just checked and see a neighbouring identical flat sold for £300k a year ago. This is in a not very fashionable area of south London."

Steve Rosenblum (partial comment): " In the medical field, these sorts of numbers [mean and median —Ed.] have caused a lot of pain. People who have a cancer, or other serious diagnosis are frequently quoted a 'median five year survival' and that's the number they hear and hold on to in terms of how long they will live. However, what it really means is that of 100 people with that diagnosis at that stage, 50 people won't live that long, but 50 people will live longer—sometimes way longer. It's usually a bell-shaped curve and there are people who define the far edges of that curve on both sides. When patients used to tell me that they had read online that they only had two years to live, I would review all this with them and tell them there was no reason to assume that they wouldn't be in the group that defined the better end of the curve and that we would hope for that. I had patients that I thought wouldn't live three months still coming to see me 20 years later, and other patients I thought were doing well drop dead the following week. After that I gave up on the illusion that I could accurately prognosticate. Every person is, after all, an 'n of 1.'"

Steve C (partial comment): "I'm in Australia and also remember being shocked at how cheap housing is (was?) in the 'States. Prices here are particularly inflated because home ownership is as much about wealth generation as it is about housing, maybe more so, which drives money into homes, which in turn drives the price (and around it goes). Obviously, there's a lot more to the economy and to general well-being than property prices, though. In relative terms we pay little for health care and education, fresh food is cheap, cities are accessible, the average worker gets four to five weeks of paid leave a year, and permanent employees have a degree of job security (no-fault dismissal of permanent employees is illegal up to around the $160k wage mark)."

Dan Khong: "You have left us with many questions and one of them would be, 'What happened to the family wealth acquired by your grandfather?'"

Mike replies: You'll have to wait for my memoir to come out, if it ever does.

John Camp: "I can give you one example of median and mean that really startled me—I think I saw it in the Wall Street Journal. The numbers I give are not exact, because I can't find the article, but they're close. The average (mean) American has a net worth of $750,000. The median American has a net worth of $170,000. If you lined up up all Americans from richest to poorest, the middle guy, the median, would be worth ~$170,000 (that's including his or her house.) If you counted all Americans and added up their wealth, then divided by the number of Americans, you'd get the $750,000 number (the average.) That's because the richest Americans have so much money that it wildly skews the average (the mean.)

"The third commonly used statistical descriptor, the mode, would be the most frequent amount that Americans are worth, but that wasn't mentioned in the article. But the discrepancy between the mean and the median sort of skizzes me out."

Mike Plews: "Now into my third year of retirement I can say I have at least one life lesson worth passing on to your younger readers. It is this. Managing money is a lot like sex. Most of us think we are a lot better at it than we really are."

David Dyer-Bennet: "I have fond memories of my two crossings on the S.S. France, 1966 and '67. Even in tourist class it was fancy, butter from a different part of France every meal and things like that. The food was excellent. Huh; there ought to be pictures somewhere. I have pictures from a lot of other places on that year-long trip (my father, a math professor, took a sabbatical year and spent it in Zurich). Glad I didn't rush to explain mean vs. median! That's been quite well covered."

Open Mike: The Last of the Old Americans

Here's an exercise to try: don't complain at all for a whole week. I learned this from a man who never complained, Loyle Egger. He was a WWII veteran whose father, Fred, served in the armed forces for every minute of both WWI and WWII—not just of the US involvement, but the entire time hostilities were going on, anywhere.

If you complained, Loyle would let you go on for a while and then say, "aw, too bad!" As if to say, stop whining. I always figured it was probably something he heard a lot from Fred.

It's not that Loyle was perfect. He was cheerful, but with an edge—he'd argue with you, and he could be critical, and sometimes he would needle you until you wanted to strangle him. But he almost never complained.

One time he showed up for pool with a big bandage on his forearm. When we asked what happened, he said he was taking a drink to one of his guests, and while he was stepping over the sleeping dog, the dog decided to get up. "And I had to take the fall on my left arm because I was holding the drink in my right. So I hurt my arm. But I didn't spill a drop!"

I said, "Loyle, you're 89. At what age does it start to be prudent to walk around the dog?" He just shrugged and made a dismissive noise. Later, our friend Jerry said to me, "He's never going to walk around the dog. He just thinks he can do everything like he always did. That's the attitude that got him to 89 in the first place."

Sleeping in the garage
Here's my favorite Loyle story. Before he moved to his daughter's house in his dotage, he had some ten acres, give or take, parts of which were grassland, wetland, or woods. A key point to the story is that he had very few near neighbors—and they weren't very near. A large chunk of the land was lawn, and until fairly recently he still mowed his own grass himself with his John Deere. Anyway, one day, after finishing, he backed the John Deere into the garage as usual, but, as he was getting off, he fell backwards. He ended up lying awkwardly on his back on the concrete, jammed between the wall and the mower, with his legs awkwardly tangled up in the tractor. He tried to extricate himself but couldn't. So he lay there for a while. "I thought, well, I can't get up. So, what can I do?" he told me.

He decided the answer was...to scream. So he started screaming for help at the top of his lungs. Within just a few minutes he realized he wasn't going to be able to keep that up for very long, so he revised the plan. He would scream for help every fifteen minutes, in two stages. Scream for a minute or two, pause, then repeat. The idea was that people would hear him the first time, and then, while they were listening more intently, they'd zero in on the second round.

So he kept this up for three or four cycles. At that point there happened to be some workers across the road retrieving a load of yard waste for pretty much the only neighboring house within earshot. They weren't regular workers, weren't normally there, and were only there that day for a short time. But the plan worked: they heard Loyle screaming for help, went in the direction of the noise to investigate, heard the second set of screams, and eventually located Loyle and helped him out of his predicament.

"So everything worked out fine!" Loyle said cheerfully.

"Well, not really!" I retorted.

"What do you mean?"

"What would you have done if those people hadn't just happened to be there at that moment?"

"I guess I would have spent the night in the garage," he admitted. "But I would have been all right. My daughter Marsha calls me in the middle of every morning to check if I'm all right. If she didn't get an answer, she would have come over. Marsha would have found me. I wasn't in any danger."

"But Loyle, you would have had to spend the whole night on your back on the garage floor! It's Fall. It gets cold at night. What about dinner? What if you had to pee?"

"Oh, I would have been all right," he said, then added, in a quiet, rather annoyed tone, "I hope would have slept at least part of the night." You're 89, and you occasionally sleep on your back in the garage trapped behind the lawnmower. No big deal.

A good ending
I have a snapshot of Loyle in extreme old age that I might show you someday. But here's the picture I have of Loyle in my mind. A group of us used to play pool at the Moose Club. One day several years ago, before COVID, it was raining when we were leaving the Moose. I had parked on the far side of the parking lot, and for some reason was just sitting there in the car—maybe I was looking at my phone, or just thinking, I don't know. Anyway, I watched Loyle and his good friend Norm Wilson come out of the Moose. They were both lean but frail—Norm is a retired Xerox executive, as far as I know, a few years Loyle's senior (he's 98 now, despite the fact that he gets pneumonia every winter), and they're both widowers. Both could still get around pretty well at that point, although they might not have beaten the tortoise to the finish line. Well, Loyle was walking Norm to his car, shielding him with his umbrella. Loyle had his hand protectively on Norm's shoulder, and they were walking side by side, two old friends. I don't think they knew I was there. They walked into and out of the perfect composition—the right angle, the right distance, wonderful expressions, the protective gesture, the umbrella, the gray day, one guy protecting the other from the rain. I didn't have my camera with me. But I can see the picture in my mind's eye still. I could reconstruct it pretty precisely with stand-ins. I figure the two of them will be the last of the WWII generation that I know, anyway.

Loyle died last October, and he had a good death. The two of us and our friend Dan played pool just ten days before he died, at the bowling alley, with him ratcheting around the table using his walker, and at lunch he re-told a few of his favorite WWII stories that we had heard many times before. He died after an illness of just a few days, during which he was able to call some old friends, including Norm, to tell them he would never be seeing them again.

In my observation—I saw him every week for the last five years of his life, more or less—Loyle had about a three-year decline, soldiered through his extreme dotage stoically (with much help from Marsha and his granddaughter Becky and other family members, I'm sure), and expired at the end of a very short hospital stay. We should all be so lucky.

And here's the coda to the above: when I told the story of the fall behind the John Deere to his daughter Marsha, on a phone call just this past week, she had never heard it before! He never even told her. It would have been too much like complaining, I suppose. That was Loyle.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Tom Duffy: "The story reminds me of my sainted mother, God rest her soul. At 87 we insisted she use a medical alert pendant. She'd been resistant because of the monthly fee, despite money not being a concern.

"A week later I got a call, in the middle of the night, from the servicing company, saying the pendant had been activated. I drove to her apartment and opened the door for the police who had also been notified. We found my mother lying in the bathtub unable to extricate herself. After we got her back to bed I told her I was glad she had got the pendant. She insisted she didn't need it. 'Mom, you were stuck in the bathtub and couldn't get out.' 'I was perfectly prepared to spend the night in the tub!'

"I guess living through the Depression and World War II gives you some perspective."

darlene: "Your words weave worlds of wonderment, Mike. I feel like I got to know Loyle through your memories and storytelling."

Moose: "'Never explain, never complain!' I explain all too often, I suspect. I very seldom complain. I can't claim the apparent perfection of your late friend, but I'm pretty darn good. One benefit is that, when one eschews complaining, it seems that the number of things worth complaint diminish, rather dramatically."

Richard Nugent: "I am reminded of a story about my mother-in-law, Mary, who immigrated to the US from Ireland as a teenager. A widow in her mid-eighties living alone, she was very self sufficient, if a bit frail. During a visit I suggested that she might want to put a smoke detector in her home. She demurred, objecting that if it went off in the middle of the night it would “scare the b’jesus out of me.” Will our generation ever be as endearing?"

No New Post Today

There won't be a post today. I know things have been torn up around here lately—unsteady—but I'm going to take the day to work on my book.

Very inconveniently, it's not a book about photography. This probably means it will die in a drawer, as they say. Photography is all anyone ever wanted from me; nobody has ever been interested in anything else I have to say. But I can't help it—I have other stories to tell before I shuffle off to Buffalo. (That's an old euphemism for kicking the bucket, itself a colloquialism. It's ironically symbolic that the actual Buffalo is close by.)

I always wanted to be a writer, and I am, so I can't complain. I made the decision when I was a freshman in high school, and I still remember where I was when it came to me—I was running an errand for a teacher in the middle of the hour, so the hallways of the school were deserted, and as I walked I was mulling over what I was going to do in life. It came down to painter or writer. Everybody knew me as an art geek, but I knew a lot about modern art by that time, how idea-laden it had to be, how obfuscatory the intellectual scaffolding had to be, and I had my doubts I could negotiate it. Halfway down the staircase, by the courtyard at the old South Campus of the University School of Milwaukee, I stopped cold and stood stock still for a while in the silence, thinking. I realized that writing was all I was good at, so I had better aim at that.

The idea was put in my head by an eighth-grade teacher, Worden L. "Sandy" McCallum. We called him Mr. McCallum, of course. He wanted to see me after school one day. I thought I was in trouble again and was going to get yelled at—I was very often in trouble. But usually, I knew what for. So I was mildly curious to find out what I had done wrong this time.

I was enamored of Mr. McCallum. English was my favorite class even with teachers I didn't like, and I liked him. He was different from the other teachers—for one thing, he wasn't a professional educator and I don't think he had been trained. He was a "gentleman teacher" of the sort who used to "pitch in" at old-time independent prep schools like USM—a volunteer, essentially. He only taught one or two courses. He seemed to be independently wealthy as far as I knew, and he had at least a few fine antique cars. I liked cars, so I would always go to the window of our fourth-floor classroom early and look down at the parking lot to see what car he would arrive in. My favorite was an MG, although at this remove I can't remember what model. Mr. McCallum was good-looking in a sort of preppie way and had the imperious air of old "quiet" money and the invisible upper class. I wanted to be like him.

When I got to the classroom—I could find it in that building today, and I can picture it in my mind—he had one of my papers in front of him, and he proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions about it. But he kept complimenting it. He read one sentence and said something like, "how do you do that? How do you know which words to use and how to put them together?" To which I thought, what? I decided he thought I had copied the paper and it wasn't my work.

I remember he had me read aloud a sentence with a semicolon in it. "That's right," he said, after I spoke it. "How do you know what a semicolon sounds like?"

"...Dickens?" I answered. I didn't know.

It might have been Mrs. Memmel, my fifth-grade teacher at the Bayside Elementary School. I didn't like her at all—she had teacher's pets who could do no wrong, and then another category of "bad kids" she persecuted, and I was one of the latter. But she did me a huge favor. For an hour after lunch, every day, she would read a book aloud and we had to follow along in our own copies of the book. Every now and then she would pause and call out a kid's name, and the kid would have to give the next word—that's how she tested whether you were following along like you were supposed to. She never called on me because she learned early that I was always right there with her. I learned how written words sound from Mrs. Memmel. Not only the proper pronunciations of lots of words, but the music of writing—the cadences, the flow, the starts and stops, the emphases, the silences in the right places. I still read aloud to myself occasionally, just to remind myself that the symbols on the page are actually sounds.

I later learned that Mr. McCallum was fascinated by a certain question, namely, how he could love writing so much and not be good at it. He didn't think I had copied that paper: he was merely interested in why it was so good and how I did it. Anyway, as I was getting ready to leave, he was still looking at the paper, and he asked me a question: "Have you ever considered being a writer?" I honestly didn't know what to say to that. So I just said "no," because that was the truth, and left. But obviously it stuck with me. 

He lived in fine big modernistic house in the woods across the ravine from my house, and when I was in high school he invited me to continue to write for him. So I would write stories and cross the ravine and walk through the woods and take them to his house. It was what would now be called an "inappropriate" relationship, because he and I would sit in his study and drink beer and smoke cigarettes and discuss our work and the work of other writers, like two friends, and I was only fifteen or sixteen. But other than the beer and tobacco he never acted the least bit inappropriate, ever, in any way. He had some number of sons, I think, who were all grown and gone, and a much younger daughter who was still at home. Maybe he just missed his sons. But he was one of the only adults in my life who treated me like an adult, or who ever bothered to "see" me as a person. I was grateful for that then, and I still am. My relationship with my own father was fraught and dangerous, and my father had remarkably little interest in what kind of person I was. I was always casting about for substitute fathers.

If you are looking for a post to read, try "Like a Sack of Bricks," from March about ten years ago.

I fear my book is a fool's errand, in fact the most foolish of fool's errands. If I were a book-writer kind of writer, I would have written a book by now. After trying two articles for The New Yorker and closely reading about fifty more with my tinfoil analyzing hat on, I've come down to the conclusion that I'm naturally a columnist. But I am trying, with the book, I mean, because I only have this one life—and, you know, there's Buffalo, down the road just a couple of hours from here. Time and tide wait for no man.

Sorry for the lack of a post today, but, like I say, there are other stories to tell.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

DaveB: "I drop into TOP…occasionally. I don’t really do it for the 'photography.' I like what else you write…kinda 'Off Topic.' Today’s post was EXACTLY the type of writing that you do that I like best. You hit the sweet spot for me with this one. My one suggestion…do more of it! There have been few writers in my 73 years who paint the picture in my mind with the way you use words.

"P.S., I’d like to read your book before you get to Buffalo!"

Anthony: "From the above post: 'Sorry for the lack of a post today....' Moving into koans?"

Mark P Morris: "Morning—it almost seems that you are downplaying what you write here. I enjoyed this essay very much. It was revealing but in a very good way. So, thanks for writing it and letting us in on how you feel and how you developed as a person."

Robert: "Re 'I fear my book is a fool's errand, in fact the most foolish of fool's errands.' Exactly why you should lean in and keep on doing it. Don't let fear stop you."

Mike replies: One of my favorite books for artists is Art and Fear by Orland and Bayles. And one of my favorite recent cartoons is two arty-student kids looking at a droopy computer, and one is saying "The AI art generator became self-aware, and now it just procrastinates and questions itself." (Looks like the author is "Coverly" of speedbump.com.)

Mike Chisholm: "Hey, don't think we didn't see what you didn't do there...."

Stephanie Luke: "Just discovered this today, and how delightful it is. I couldn't help hearing it with an upper-class English accent. Your work is done. By all means, write!"

Luci: "Hello, I am not sure what the definition of 'post' is nowadays for you, but let me tell you I enjoyed reading what you wrote today. Yes, photography's fine, but pieces like this are at least as enjoyable. To me, at least. So, thank you!"

Mike replies: You are welcome.

Kenneth Voight: "Very well written. This is why I read you. Have you ever considered being a writer?"

Mike replies: I'm gonna think about it.

Chris Kern: "Mike: 'There won’t be a new post today.' Mark Twain: 'It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.'"

Peter Barnes: "I do like it when you don't post."

Sunday Open Mike: Romance at the Movies (OT)

May I just say how much I miss Roger Ebert? He was for a time the nation's foremost movie critic. He was also a foursquare writer with a plainspoken style who never showed off, the kind of businesslike wordsmith I approve of. I only had contact with him one time, when I tried to commission him to write an article about movies that include photography in their plots. I had arranged to pay him what was, for the company I worked for, a lot, but which was probably too little for him. Even so, he was interested—he came up with a pretty serviceable list right off the top of his head. But in the end had to back away because he was overcommitted. I didn't get the sense that that was an excuse. He just didn't have time. A pity.

Last night I looked up an old rom-com about a May–September romance—As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt was a fine actress who seemed to vanish from public view at some point. For a while she was everywhere, then she wasn't. In her heyday she was one of my relatively few screen crushes. I endured many episodes of "Mad About You" because she was in it. I loved her. (Using that expression is a little embarrassing. As I write it, I hear my psychologist kid brother Scott correcting me: "You don't love her. You love her character.") When James L. Brooks made As Good As It Gets in 1997, Jack Nicholson was 60 and Helen Hunt was 34. That alone makes the romance unlikely. I looked it up the other day: less than 1% of intact couples have 28 or more years in age between them. The common cliché when there's an age disparity is that the man is always older (and usually rich), but it's not that uncommon for it to be the other way around. Mary Tyler Moore's husband of 33 years, for instance, was 15 years her junior.

Mary Tyler Moore, by the way, as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show, was my first screen crush—when I was eight years old! Looking back on it I think she (or rather her character, as Scott would be quick to point out) somehow ruined me for women forever. I'm not being serious. But I did think she was as beautiful as humans could get.

Of course, screen crushes aren't real, and "types" aren't determinants. Physical appearance alone is never enough to make a relationship. What really attracts me is another mysterious quality: soul. That's a vague and opaque word, one that doesn't communicate much. But I know what I mean. And I know it when I come across it.Women who truly attract me are rare, and only come along once in a great while. "Soul" as I perceive it is treasurable and uncommon. Strange that it often appears in women who don't know they have it—and who sometimes don't even think all that much of themselves.

Mary Tyler Moore, who stole my tender heart in childhood, was also the only screen crush I got to meet in person. Well, meet might be overstating it. I was visiting Hanover, where Dartmouth College is, and my old friend Jim and I went to the Top of the Hop, a big open lounge and event space on the second floor of the college arts center, to talk. We picked a pair of armchairs in an out-of-the-way corner, and talked all afternoon. As the hours rolled by, the room filled up. There was a buzz in the air. It turned out that Mary Tyler Moore was going to speak. So we decided to stay. We had inadvertently claimed the best seats in the house: after arriving late, she made her way over to where we were, to give her talk. I can tell you one thing: although she was famous as a girl-next-door type, in real life she was uncommonly beautiful. So there I was, right next to Laura Petrie, thinking of myself at age eight sitting in front of our black-and-white television in my pajamas watching her cook for Dick Van Dyke after he tripped over that same ottoman week after week.

Life is strange.

By the time she arrived, the room was packed. Downstairs, another crowd of people had gathered who were being shut out by the fire marshalls. Intermittently we heard rumbles and cries of complaint from the disappointed crowd below, and halfway through Mary's talk she was interrupted by a loud yell from downstairs: "F--- YOU, Mary!" After just a beat, in her best brave-but-querulous Laura Petrie / Mary Richards voice, Mary yelled back, with just the right inflection, "You too-ooo!"

But back to As Good As It Gets. Many of Roger Ebert's reviews spend a good deal of their allotment of space simply laying out the film. This happened, that happened. Yet he manages to hit the nail on the head time after time. If you happen to remember that now 25-year-old movie, read his review of it. He hits it on the nose. "If the movie had been either more or less ambitious," writes Roger, "it might have been more successful. Less ambitious, and it would have been a sitcom crowd-pleaser, in which a grumpy Scrooge allows his heart to melt. More ambitious, and it would have touched on the underlying irony of this lonely man's bitter life. But 'As Good as It Gets' is a compromise, a film that forces a smile onto material that doesn't wear one easily." A narrow miss, but a miss all the same. I'm going to watch it again tonight anyway, I guess.

Mike

UPDATE in the cold light of the next morning: I actually remembered very little of the movie, so it was entertaining a quarter of a century later. But it's also a weirder movie than I remember. Roger Ebert says, "[Nicholson's character] hurls racist, sexist, homophobic and physical insults at everyone he meets, and because it's Nicholson, we let him; we know there has to be a payback somehow." But in today's atmosphere, some of those "hurled" comments seem startlingly vile. The movie as a whole shoehorns what is a grim and sorry story—a desperate, lonely, beleaguered woman allowing herself to be manipulated by a much older, psychologically ill misanthrope, for purposes neither of them quite understands—into the gauzy, feelgood arc of the standard rom-com. That in itself is a little shocking. But there is very fine acting (I think Helen Hunt out-acts Jack Nicholson, frankly, although all the performances are good, even the dog's) and plenty of fine writing, and more than a few moments of genuine laugh-out-loud humor. I was less impressed with the romance aspect of it—even at the end when the big kiss happens, you still feel they're both making a terrible mistake and that there can't be anything but pain and strain in their shared future.

But hey, it's a movie. What are movies for if not for telling us unreal and entertaining concocted stories? So, okay.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Open Mike: OK Is Not Spelled 'Okay,' and Other Strange Facts

—>Strawberries aren't berries, but watermelons are.

—>John Knox, an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia, led a study in 2011 to see how far photographs can travel aloft in tornadoes. "They’re like little wings when they go up into the air," he said. The study found a photograph that was returned to its owner after being found 219 miles away from where it started out.

—>John Lennon (or "John Lennon"?) earned $14 million last year. Yet he's now been dead for longer than he was alive. In the arts, you don't need to be yourself anymore to do well.

—>Tyre Nichols, who was in the news following his murder—sorry, death—at the hands of Memphis police, was one of us: a photography enthusiast.

Photo by the late Tyre Nichols, R.I.P.

His website opens with a quotation by Joel Strasser: "A good photographer must love life more than photography itself." Tyre, we hardly knew ye.

—>Sign on all the televisions at my new gym:

"NO NEWS"

—>In 1830s America there was a brief fad among young people of initializing incorrectly spelled phrases. There were many of them, but the one that stuck around was short for "oll korrect," meaning all correct. OK, which today is believed to be the single most recognized English-language word the world over, is thus correctly spelled with two capital letters, because it's an acronym. But "okay" is OK too. 

—>The world's largest camera collection is thought to be that of an Indian photojournalist from Mumbai named Dilish Parekh. He has at least 4,425 cameras.

—>Beethoven never saw the ocean.

—>"Signs of the apocalypse" were popularly considered to be omens and warnings that the world had turned topsy-turvy: birds flying backward, purple sky, and so forth. In case you haven't kept up with such things: the Most Valuable Player in the NBA for two years in a row has been a big awkward-looking white guy from Serbia. And arguably his biggest competition for the award this year is a white guy from Slovenia. Hmm.

—>For the first few decades after 1839, photographs remained relatively rare. Now, so many photographs are taken every day, week, month, and year that the numbers can't even be meaningfully estimated.

—>While you might think every photograph is on the web, this one isn't:

At least, not till now*.

—>Windsor Castle isn't named after the House of Windsor; it's the other way around. The British Royal family descends from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. George V changed it to Windsor during WWI to distance his family from the understandably unpopular Germans, and to make the family sound more English. King Charles III's father, Prince Philip, is largely of German heritage, and spoke German fluently. (Whether King George I, who was German, spoke English in addition to his native German is still disputed.) By blood, Charles III might be more German than English**. Incidentally, Prince Albert of haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, the German Prince who married Queen Victoria, introduced a German custom to England that the British took to heart: the Christmas tree.

—>Of the 25 most expensive photographs ever sold, seven are by Richard Prince, who makes straight (though usually enlarged) copies of photographs by other people.

—>The camera that is probably the most valuable in the world has never been sold. It's the first Ur-Leica, Oskar Barnack's camera of 1913 that was the earliest prototype of what was eventually, in 1925, dubbed the "Leica." It's on display at the Ernst Leitz Museum in Wetzlar, Germany. It made a negative 24x36mm in size and had a 40mm lens. It's been said that it might sell for 400 million euros, but no one knows.

—>Wasabi isn't, mostly. It's horseradish; real wasabi is too expensive for sushi restaurants outside of Japan to use. Real wasabi is so rare in America that the signature distinguishing characteristic of a sushi restaurant in Wisconsin, called Wasabi, is that they actually use wasabi.

Mike

*A lot of the photographs I publish have never been on the web, but this one pulled up nothing on TinEye and Google Image Search, which hardly ever happens to me.

**I'm sure our British friends will correct this entry if need be!

P.S. Got any more? I concocted this post after I ran into that fact about Beethoven, which really struck me for some reason.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Antonis R: "True, packaged wasabi is mostly horseradish. Wasabi is mentioned as the ninth ingredient in an S&B box—probably to justify the name of the product. Also true, an approximately 10"+ wasabi rhizome can cost $25–40 in a Japanese market in the US (if available at all). But another reason for substituting horseradish in the less expensive establishments is the work it takes to grind it to order. The spiciness and aroma of the root are only released in the moment the cells are broken when ground against shark skin or similarly shaped metal hand grinders. It only lasts moments. Even fancy restaurants can't prepare it ahead of dinner service. In Japan some restaurants serving soba (buckwheat noodles) include the root and the grinder with your order at the table and let you do the work. Unfortunately, there is no substitute for the real thing!"

Dan: "Unless someone has a better example, the world's largest camera collection was owned by a man (whom I should not name) in Ina city, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. When I visited his home in 2016 he had over 8,000 cameras. Most had been sent to him in inoperative condition over a period of 45+ years. He is a well known professor of entomology and many items were sent by his students and their families. In addition to his career in entomology, he was an avid photographer and gadget tinkerer. He was able to repair nearly all the cameras he was sent. When I toured his home it was cameras from ceiling to floor. You had to wind your way through halls made of hanging cameras and accessories. Additionally, his garage was stuffed with items that didn’t fit in the house. I visited him this summer only to find that nearly all the cameras had been sold off...to pay for an electron microscope! He’s in his late 80s, but he spent hours showing me images of some kind of mite he has studied for years. 'I’m the only person I know of with an electron microscope in my home.' I could only nod and agree."

Sergio: "Weird facts are always fun, the more arcane the better. But the one about Beethoven really impressed me. I revisited in one split second all of his music I've actually listened to trying to re-digest it in the light that he had never seen the sea. That in itself is a pretty weird fact."

Mike replies: That one came from the upcoming Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces by Norman Lebrecht.

Albert Smith: "'Strange but true, carpet is neither a car or a pet, but is actually some kind of floor covering.' —David Letterman"

John Wilson: "The 'pineapple,' one of my favourite fruits, is in no way related to a pine or an apple. It's actually a type of bromeliad that produces a cluster of 200+ berries fused together in a double helix that follows a Fibonacci Series."

John Krumm: "Boy did I tear up when I clicked on the link to Tyre Nichols' website, and then read his 'About' section."

Dave Richardson: "The Corvette being pulled from the water was pretty easy to find in posts earlier than yours."

Mike replies: Very curious. My own Google Image Search yielded zero results, ditto for TinEye. I still can't find the story anywhere.

Mani Sitaraman: "Dilish Parekh passed away ten days ago, on February 2nd, alas. R.I.P. He inherited a collection of about 600 cameras from his father, and then collected more on his own. He was a freelance photographer. I hope the following isn't an indecent speculation. Being somewhat acquainted with the photography business in India, I wonder how he could afford to build such a large collection. For instance, a luxury wedding photography assignment pays about $1,000. Most pay less than half that, for instance. and it's not an easy living over there, in U.S. dollar terms. On the other hand, I assume cameras in people's estates in various corners of India probably aren't that expensive either. He refused all offers for the collection. Here is one of several news stories about him."

Open Mike: Sleep Apnea

UPDATE: Today I joined a gym that has six different kinds of cardio machines. My insurance covered the entire cost. My son has been very encouraging—he's very athletic and likes to exercise. I'll publish updates every couple of months. Thanks so much for all the good and informative comments—I learned a lot. —Mike 

Just wanted to report for those who might be interested that I'm doing much better after resuming treatment for sleep apnea.

Open Mike: One More Wee Piece of Advice (OT)

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, which used to appear on Sundays and sometimes still does.]

-

Before we leave behind the subject of the advancing years, one wee bit of advice to younger people: never stop exercising. I've come to believe that the important thing about exercise is doing it without stopping. Consistently, over the years, from when you're young to when you're old.

Mostly I say this because it's the opposite of what I've done, and I've had troubles because of it.

My observation has been that people typically exercise in two "shifts" in life: in one period when they're young adults and emphasizing secondary sex characteristics for the purpose of advertising abundant health to attract partners; and in another period when they're "young old people" and it finally hits them that they'd better take care of themselves. Personified by the late-fiftysomething out walking while doing that thing with their arms where they hold their forearms and hands up and swing them back and forth to signify that they're not just walking, they're exercising. In the years in between, life gets in the way and many of us don't exercise much. Except briefly in the wake of resolutions and spells of determination, or on vacations maybe.

...Or maybe that was just me. When I was 57, I reconnected with a woman I had carried a torch for "in another life," twenty years earlier, and we began a relationship. She was a marathoner, and went to the YMCA at a truly ungodly hour (4:30 a.m.) three times a week to exercise. I went with her. She suspiciously dubbed this "courting behavior," to which my reaction was, of course it was courting behavior—I was courting her, wasn't I? I also made the bed every morning after she went to work and did the breakfast dishes, and that was courting behavior too. (The campaign failed despite my exertions, alas.) Long story short, I made repeated attempts, even after she left me, to get back into running, which I had enjoyed throughout my youth in various ways. It began one morning—one very early morning—while she was "spinning" for an hour. ("Spinning" means furiously pedaling a stationary bike going absolutely nowhere.) Left to my own devices, I decided to run around the 1/8th-mile track. I ran hard for one lap, and then walked a lap to recover. It felt marvelous. It reminded me of youth, reconnected me with my long-ago love of running, and powerfully inspired me. So I repeated the process—eleven times. 

The next day, my knees were in such ferocious pain that I could barely make it down the stairs for breakfast. And my knees hurt for so long—like, six weeks—that after three weeks I was convinced I had damaged myself permanently. That's my tendency, I will admit—go overboard with a new idea and overdo it. 

Eventually my knees fully recovered, thank God. Over the next four or five years, I made repeated attempts to get back to running. Again and again, the same pattern repeated: I would start slowly, gain strength and stamina, gradually increase my workout, and then something would go sproing and I'd injure myself somehow. Sprained ankle, aching or "trick" knee, something called "pes anserine pain syndrome," back trouble, inflamed toe, whatever. Then I'd have to take two to five weeks off to recover, and lose whatever progress I had made. It happened again and again. My only success in that period was walking two miles a day interspersed with very short stretches of mild jogging. I made a conscious effort to jog like an old guy, in a sort of shuffle, to minimize impact, and I'd only go one or two hundred feet before resuming a walking pace. That worked, or seemed to.

But it stands to reason that people can run in the their late fifties, sixties, seventies, and even older—you see it and hear about it all the time. Why couldn't I? I finally concluded that it was probably because I had just taken too long a time off in the middle of my life. When I was in my late teens and twenties my habit was to jog three miles a day in the three months of the spring and the three months of the fall. My idea, even at the time, was that it would be good to get into the habit of running regularly and then carry the habit into older ages. But I probably only sustained that for five or six years. Then I didn't run for three decades. By the time I got back to it, it was too late. That was just my experience—"your mileage may vary."

I did the same thing with a car once. Neglected normal upkeep for 40,000 miles in the middle of its first 100k, and then got slammed with everything going wrong at once.

It just seems to me that the people who successfully exercise into their older years are the ones who never stopped. I acknowledge that it's better to exercise than not to, and now is always a good time to start, for any value of "now," regardless of how long you've been a butt in a chair. But if you are young and planning your life, somebody ought to tell you that a little exercise consistently over your lifetime is probably better than a whole lot of exercise for a short period every now and then. Start early and keep at it. Make it a habit. And do it continuously.

Push-ups
A while back I talked to Nick, the kindly young man who used to help me load dog food purchases into the trunk before the True Value went belly-up. On doctor's orders, I'm not supposed to lift more than 50 pounds because I have shoulder impingement in both shoulders—what they would call "rotator cuff injuries" if you happen to be a baseball pitcher. I asked Nick if he did pushups, and he told me a typical story. He said he he had very into doing pushups for a while in high school, and improved for a while, but then he hit a wall at 95(!) pushups, got discouraged, and quit.

That seems typical. Young people get all into something, do it to excess, and then never do it again. It would really be a lot better if you started doing three pushups every day when you're fifteen, and just add one more every year on your birthday. By the time you're forty you'd be doing 28 pushups a day and not thinking a thing of it. It would really be much better for you in the long run.

None of this is science. It's just my belief. "An observation amplified," as Thom put it recently. As to whether it's really true, "more studies are needed," I guess.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Aaron: "I hate running, but there's a history in my family of heart troubles. I'm 46 and so far my heart is fine. I decided that I should start exercising while I can. But, I know myself. I won't stick to a running plan that requires very much of me. So, I decided that I could run for 10 minutes a day. I'll hate every minute of it. But, I can make myself do it for 10 minutes a day. I'm doing it on a treadmill, so I've raised the incline so it's at least hard work. I've started out very slowly—I don't even get to a mile in my 10 minutes. But, so far I've stuck with it because I can make myself do something hard for 10 minutes. Then I'm out. And, while it's still well short of recommended exercise time in a week, it's more than I was doing before! Well, that's not quite true. I love going for walks and do that pretty regularly."

Franz Amador: "I hear you, brother, though I suspect you're going to get a lot of responses from people who have always been active and still are suffering from increasing injuries as they get older. It sounds like you could really use a good physical therapist. Also, something cheaper and more convenient that I really like is Coach Eric's videos from Precision Movement. There are paid options, but he has lots of free content on YouTube. Highly recommended, in some ways even more than a PT."

mark: "Your thesis about old age and exercise is spot-on. My father, who died at age 93, fought diabetes to a standstill for the last thirty years of his life with daily trips to the gym. He was, by decades, the oldest regular there, and garnered support and admiration from youngsters in their 50s. His weights and treadmill regimen was successful, with diabetes and related problems catching up only after a fall prevented him from going to the gym. My own plan involves cycling until I can no longer do it, and then some combination of walking and weights. Maybe yoga, too. I don't think my knees would tolerate much running. As to you own plan, just remember that pool isn't exercise."

DavidB: " I started running in high school. I quit for a few years while in college but have been running...or walking when injured...ever since. Now in my late 60s and so...so...slow that it bothers me if I think about it. So I don't think about it. I just run."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Could I please add to your observation. I attend exercise classes run by a woman of similar age to me (mid-40s). She has people in 30s–60s attending. Her view is that in general, you need both exercise and stretching / flexibility. As a sweeping generalisation, men tend to focus on strength and ignore the flexibility, while and women tend to focus on flexibility and ignore the strength. The thirties and forties are the years to establish good habits. It gets increasingly harder to pick them up after that; the body takes longer to get fit, and longer to recover from injuries, with increasing age. I’m still working through some functional issues that result in sore back/shoulder. Having a young child isn’t helping. Trying to establish a routine is an exercise in futility (sorry, pun not intended). I really miss the jogging too."

Kirk: "Walk. Bike. Swim or do something else to get your heart rate up for an hour straight. Start now. Do it every day. Or don't. But the evidence and studies are abundant and clear. Exercising is vital for maintaining health and mobility. No excuses apply. Never stop. Never stop. Never stop. And don't neglect things like yoga to enhance flexibility. Also vital for healthy existence."

Damien: "I'm only 37, but I've had my version of all your injury stories! There is something in there that is not strictly about age. Muscles grow fast and recover in the blink of an eye; tendons and ligaments need way, way more time to adapt and to recover—months or years instead of days. I remember a certain story about patience in the darkroom; well, this also applies to the gym.  ;-) 

"My new rule is, any novel inflammatory joint pain means: ease off until it's gone. That's the only way I've been able to break the cycle of one step forward, two steps back."

Stray Thought (OT)

All of you know this already (all of you that it pertains to, anyway—not you young-uns, in your forties, or younger than that), but I thought I'd try expressing it anyway. It just strikes me that as we get older, we have to be harsh with ourselves and just do whatever's needed. You have to adapt.

I know a guy in his 50s who is not adapting at all. He acts just like a twentysomething free spirit. Girlfriends all over, needs to get laid every night, drinks to celebrate every occasion and, when there's no occasion, drinks. Carelessly blows his paychecks. Lives in a group house where they're sometimes late with the rent and sometimes get the electricity cut off. Every drug anyone can get, he's up for it and into it. He strikes me as the sort of guy who might die of drinking because he prefers that to becoming a grownup.

Because you can't live to be too old acting like a young person. At some point the body just can't take the wear and tear. (Not to mention that your brain shrinks. Did you know your brain shrinks as you get older? Terrifies me—my brain was barely large enough to begin with. Bah-dum-pah.) Anyway, what I'm saying is, you have to make changes as you need to. In 2018, I had to give up coffee on account of a-fib. I was unsentimental about it, despite having been so far into the bean that I even roasted my own private-stock Kona* for a while. All in all, I drank coffee for forty-five years, starting when I was sixteen and had to go to work one Sunday morning on zero hours sleep. But at the end it became obvious it was bad for my heart, so I walked away. All I did was tell myself that I had enjoyed coffee, but the time for it in my life was over. Don't cry.

We have to do that as we age. Stop drinking alcohol, change our diets, start exercising. Or dial back our exercising, whichever's called for. Or start to consider mere walking to be exercising! Take pills, get hearing aids, wear a hat so a bald spot doesn't get too much sun. Whatever it is. Acquaint ourselves with strange new kinds of healthcare providers. There must be a thousand ways it can manifest itself. We each have specific deficits or infirmities, but everybody probably has something. Nobody gets out of here alive.

You have to be hard about it. Unsentimental and matter-of-fact. It requires a quality prized by long-gone generations and not much in favor now: self-discipline. You can hold aging back, stave it off, refuse to give in, but then one day you have to accommodate it, and at that point you just...do it. Whatever it is.

So now I have to adjust to the CPAP machine again. A crazy Rube Goldberg contraption that makes you feel like an invalid and is about as dignified as clown shoes. As David Vestal used to say, "So, okay." It's time for that, I need to do it, so just do it. No complaints, no self-pity. Other people deal with worse things. And it's better than the alternatives.

Here's an exercise that was suggested to me by the example of my late friend and pool-playing compadre Loyle Egger, who died a few months ago after a long life and a short illness: try to go a week without complaining. About anything. It's an instructive experiment! Loyle seldom complained. Hell, I walk around the house complaining aloud to myself. I'll just warn you: not complaining about anything for a week is as tough as living for a year without buying anything made in China. It almost can't be done. Sure makes you think, though.

Remember the words on Yeats's tombstone: Cast a cold Eye. That's the spirit!

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

*Provided by a photographer / reader / coffee grower on the Big Island, Phil Rosenberg—thanks again, Phil. It was a lovely experience.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Albert Smith: "For me, my real wake up call to get serious about preemptively doing good things for my body after acting 'bulletproof' for decades was being my Mother's care giver in her final two years. The things she never did for herself, not out of selfishness but to make sure everyone else in the house was taken care of, caught up with her. To see a strong, never too tired woman unable to get herself across the room with her walker was heartbreaking. I accompanied her to multiple stays in rehab facilities and was surrounded by people just as physically incapable as her, many dozens of years younger. No one escapes; it's just a matter of when and how severe.

"The positive things that you don't do today (or years ago) will come back to haunt you some day just as surely as all the negative things will lead to problems. I saw that and made my changes accordingly. Never smoked, but gave up drinking. I exercise religiously; this will stave off many ailments that cause older people problems. Watching someone who can't get off a toilet will motivate you to do your squats now.

"Can't say it's never too late. It just might be. But control the things you can control while you can."

Stan B.: "IF (big if) you keep yourself in shape, you can front till you're sixty. But no one comes outta that decade unscathed. Yeah, accommodations, sacrifices, out-and-out pain—they will become your new partners in crime, and your body the crime scene. Not an easy concept to contemplate, not an easy reality to live with. You deal with it best you can…."

dan: "You have to do what it takes, which is 'more.' More exercise. More discipline about eating and sleeping. More learning about truly new things. Age is the most destructive of excuses because once you accept the idea of 'dialing back' you go into a death spiral."

John Maxim: "I never did, and still do not, understand what the lines on the tombstone mean. Perhaps you can elucidate?"

Mike replies: There are a great many interpretations out there, and mine is no more special than anyone else's. First, the lines come from the poem "Under Ben Bulben," published shortly after his death, Ben Bulben being a beautiful mountain in County Sligo near the churchyard. So the first step is to read the poem a few times until it starts to seep into you. He had written a number of elegies for others; in this poem he sings his own elegy. He first wrote the epitaph, however, as a marginal note in a volume of essays by Rilke, whose ideas about death "annoyed" him (that's Yeats's own word). The marginal note, in verse, was:

Draw rein; draw breath.
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman pass by.

That first line, in other words, being, hold on there dude! You need to take a deep breath!

So I take a rather forthright impression from the epitaph, approximately this: "Look, we're animals, we're born, we live some allotment of years, make of them what we make of them, and we die. It's not a tragedy, it's just nature. So if you're in front of my grave, don't weep, don't mourn or be sentimental. Just move along."

This shortchanges the transcendental nature of the poem and its mystical allusions, though. For Yeats the "indomitable Irishry" casts back to before Christianity and the ancient pagan times when mountains were the remote homes of gods. Yeats said in his Autobiography, discussing mountains, "Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology, that marries them to rock and hill?" To look into it further than my simple take on it, I'd probably counsel reading some interpretations of "Under Ben Bulben," starting perhaps with the Wikipedia article, then moving to a closer reading of the poem like this one at Litbug, and from there to more serious essays of literary criticism, which I don't know well enough to recommend. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Bear.: "Ah—mortality—don't want it but can't live without it!"

Jnny [Wednesday morning]: "I weaned myself off CPAP by sleeping upright in a recliner. My (world class) snoring and apneas disappeared, and my back feels so much better."

Mike replies: I've been attracted to that idea for a while—I looked into getting a "hospital" bed a few years ago with the idea of sleeping halfway sitting up. I'd love to try it. I worry, though, that it would just be another of my expensive enthusiasms. I have too many of those!

Tom Duffy: "I've been a volunteer EMT for 18 years. Probably about 60% of our calls are 'old people' calls. The lesson that gets driven home to me over and over is that Mobility Equals Life. Stay active and exercise!"

Tom Burke: "Re coffee drinking: I can't comment on whether stopping drinking coffee was the right thing for you to do or not. However, I will say that the cup you gave me when I visited TOP World HQ in April 2016 was the best I have ever drunk. It was a great coffee and I still remember it. Thank you!"

Grinchy Christmas Thought

Complete the sentence: "I wish I could have back all the money I spent on _________ over the years."

For me it's stereo equipment. And CDs. I have CDs in boxes in the attic of the barn that I've never listened to straight through. And don't get me started on hi-fi...for every piece I got good value out of, and there were a number, there were three or four (I hope not five, but maybe) that were nothing but highly efficient ways to eliminate hard-earned money from my bank account. I honestly would have been better off giving the money away to someone who really needed it, rather than handing it over to grubby millionaire hi-fi hawkers and hucksters. Yeesh. Very ironically, the speakers I've been listening to for ten years now were free. (Review pair I was allowed to keep.) But, I bought the next model up with my own money, and those promptly broke. It's hard to buy speakers that break, but I'm talented: I can waste money on stereo stuff in innovative and unusual ways. Comma, fer cryin' out loud.

When reader Kristine H. wrote, "The truth of the matter is that most photographers could have purchased at least one (likely two) Leicas for what we’ve spent over the years 'upgrading' from this camera/lens or that to the newest model," well, truer words were never typed. But I can't fault cameras. At least I used them all, and I got back in enjoyment and interest what I wasted in $$$. Even when I didn't enjoy the camera, or use it much, I enjoyed the search, the trying-out, the demystifying, the shopping research, the anticipation, the purchase, the ownership, the addition to my store of comparative knowledge—the whole experience. I can't claim I would have done all that much differently had I been trying to be more sensible.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

Original contents copyright 2022 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

William Cook: "Boy, that _____ hits the nail on the head! How I wish I had all the money back I’ve spent on Harley-Davidsons. Some people think Leicas are pricey—visit a Harley showroom sometime. This is the kicker; I don’t even like riding them very much. After many years and more than several of them, I realized what I liked about motorcycles was tinkering and modifying them, not the riding of them. For pleasurable riding, a small motorcycle or scooter was always more fun for me. I guess it might relate photographically to endlessly researching and buying the latest wizbang cameras and never actually going out to shoot with them. My much used and fun ride today is a Segway electric kick scooter. Now that's a fun ride! It doesn’t even bother me when people say, 'look at that old man on a kid’s scooter!'"

Mike replies: Made me laugh. Hey, at least you can be honest about it. That puts you ahead of a lot of people.

darlene: "FILTERS. I am sure I have amassed a small fortune in filters and gels. My photo career began at a time when the mix of the light’s temperature and the film’s temperature mattered. Shooting 4x5 and medium format transparency film were the norms for commercial work, so you had to correct for the color and white balance during the shoot. Also, have to add in the cost of test Polaroids and sheets of polarizing and color gels for the lights, depending upon the product (I shot more catalogs of oil paintings than I'd like to remember). Glass filters, plastic filters, gels, and different sizes and strengths; Polaroid backs for the different setups and gel holders for the lights. I do not miss that; I know I put more money into filters than I’d like to remember. Now with digital equipment and post-processing software, we have much more control over the whole process. I still shoot with a few filters, but not for color and white balance any longer."

Open Mike: The Video / Text Divide (OT)

Take a look at this:

It's the first page of one of those online quizzes meant to induce you to look at page after page of ads. The opening gambit was, "Your Memory Is Excellent If You Can Name Just 12 of These Iconic People." Among the other big mysteries: Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Frank Sinatra, and Muhammed Ali.

I didn't take the bait, but I think my "personality result" (personal result, I think they mean) would have been pretty good.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, a teacher recounted the time one of his Gen Z students told him that some illustrations of Civil War manuscripts had been useless to him, because "of course" he couldn't read cursive.

Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives...in my ignorance, I became...a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world.

I had my Rip van Winkle moment with my son and his Gen Y friends when they were teenagers, in our kitchen. This would have been 2009 or so. One of them asked what time it was, and another answered that she didn't know. This astonished me, because our kitchen was small and there was a giant clock about a foot in diameter hanging on the wall just a few feet from their noses.

You're ahead of me: they had never learned how to tell time on an analog clock. Or rather, one of the five had: he stared at the clock, took his time like it was a math problem, then gave the correct answer. Of course I immediately sprang to action, taking the clock down off the wall and proposing to give them all a very short course in that simple subject. But my son took me by the arm and, in a voice like he was talking to a simpleton, said, "Dad. We're late. We've gotta go. Some other time."

Mickey who?
I actually remember exactly how Gen Z people must feel about Elvis and Madonna. When I was their age, there were all these people I was supposed to know about but didn't, and I remember how that felt. Johnny Carson (who most people born after 2000 probably don't know) would make references to Jack Benny, and I had no idea who Jack Benny was. Benny Goodman, Mae West, Doris Day, Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Cagney, Buster Keaton, and on and on—sorry. Mickey Mouse I knew, Mickey Spillane or Mickey Rooney not so much. Only gradually did the identities of many of the famous names from before my time fill in. 

Of course, Gen Z people know a lot of things I don't. I opted not to take "typing" in school, reasoning that I would never be...a secretary. (I did my own writing in longhand at the time.) I remember right where I was when I made the decision. Here's my comment about that choice now: !!! Or "WTF," as the kids would type it, with their thumbs. It's called keyboarding now, and keyboarding, they know. In deciding whether to include keyboarding or cursive in school curricula, who would choose cursive? Good thing, too—having typed more than ten million words in my life, I still can't type. Serves me right.

Hieroglyphics from another era. Illiterates used to call
writing like this "chicken scratchings."

My great-aunt Frances "Dickie" Schirmer, who lived to within two months of her 102nd birthday and was an exceptionally intelligent and disciplined person, used to read People magazine cover to cover in her late nineties so she could follow conversations among young people. But do I know who Zendaya and Rowan Blanchard are? Not before writing this post I didn't.

Here's my theory
So anyway, I think this might make a good sociological study: survey people as to whether they find it more efficient and comfortable to ingest information as video or text, and find out what you can find out about that. Are there dividing lines? Where are they? I call myself a "creature of the written word," but that's because I'm unusually literate compared to the general population: I read 50 books a year, have a vocabulary in the 95th percentile (almost too high to be a writer), and write every day. I value good videos like everyone else does, but the medium as a whole is decidedly second-rate to me unless the subject is suited to it. It tends to go at its own slow pace, you can't skip ahead or back easily, you can't skim to get the gist, and it's awkward to extract quotations. (Gen Z doesn't know that quotation is a noun and quote a verb—but then, neither do many people of my generation, and I have trouble keeping it straight myself.) My point is just that I'm comfortable with text and I find it convenient. It's efficient for me. I'm sure there are people who find it tough slogging, slow going, full of distractions and fluff or waste, and who feel the information they want is buried too deep. A talking head in a video talks faster than they can read. And why toil away reading a whole book when you can watch the movie in two hours?

I suspect at some point in the march of the generations there's a Video / Text Divide. But I don't know. (Maybe there's a video about it out there somewhere.) Either way, which side you fall on isn't a matter of virtue or intelligence or your worth or value. More likely, it's just a sign of the times in which you grew up.

Mike
My flickr page / My New Yorker author page

P.S. Did the typo in the headline of the "Iconic People Quiz" jump out at you, or pass you by?

Original contents copyright 2022 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Stephen Cowdery: "Text is usually more efficient, especially at conveying information. Video is usually better at portraying a scene. One of the blessings of YouTube is the ability to close-caption and playback at a higher speed; a lot of video producers think they are film-makers, two different disciplines. Going beyond the mundane, great writing can do things that great film-making can't do and vice versa."

John Camp: "I knew celebrities who were far old than I—a couple of generations back—because I was a kid at the beginnings of commercial TV in the early '50s, and the afternoons were filled with early movies because there really wasn't anything else to broadcast. My memory may be faulty, but I believe that on occasion, we'd get a silent movie with organ music. As television developed, the old stuff went away. I missed the typo even though I read and write for a living, because I don't read from left to right. I read a block at a time, so I knew what the headline said. This is a big disadvantage when copy editing and proof reading, because when you know what something says you miss the small stuff. This also gives me a chance to mention my favorite headline of the past few years, buried at the very bottom of the New York Post's front page a few weeks back: 'Florida Man Makes Announcement.' The Post was also the originator of the famous 'Headless Body in Topless Bar,' about a bloody NYC murder."

Mike replies: My art teacher used to collect absurdist tabloid headlines. His favorite was: "Man Decapitates Self with Chainsaw—AND LIVES!" The thing that tickled him about it was, as he said, "somebody looked at 'man decapitates self with chainsaw' and decided it wasn't quite enough."

Benjamin Marks: "Most '-tion' words are nouns.

Pollution
Subtitution
Tuition
Fluctuation
Predation
"Stay-cation"
Faction
Ration

...etc. In fact, if you look up '-tion' in Wiki-whatever, you will find: '-tion: (non-productive) Used to form nouns meaning "the action of (a verb)" or "the result of (a verb)." Words ending in this suffix are almost always derived from a similar Latin word; a few (e.g. gumption) are not derived from Latin and are unrelated to any verb. More often, -ation is used.' (Wiktionary)"

David Brown (partial comment): "I’m on the text side of the text/video divide. It comes down to practicality. Text has three things going for it that video lacks. The first is random access. It is very easy to find the information I need in a book, as opposed to a video (aren’t indexes wonderful things?). The second and probably most important is information density. I can read must faster than I can watch a video, given identical subject matter. And third, there is retention. It’s a personal thing, but I retain information much better if I’ve read something than if I’ve watched a video."

Bill Tyler: "The linguist John McWhorter recently wrote a piece about cursive and its obsolescence. He argues that it's not an important skill in today's world, and becoming less so all the time, comparing it to Roman numerals. I think he has a point, though as a certified (certifiable?) old guy, I will miss it.

"About information—whether a well-done video or the written word is preferable depends very much on the material itself. Unless there's a visual component to the underlying subject, I prefer written information. Note that I used the phrase 'well-done' in describing video. Most videos these days seem to have a lot of fluff surrounding a very tiny kernel of useful material.

"Oh—you mentioned vocabulary, so I thought I'd take an online vocabulary test. I quit when I found 'imminent' misspelled as 'immenent.' Previously, the test had given a set of proposed antonyms for 'lonely' that did not include anything remotely resembling a correct answer."

Keith Cartmell (partial comment): "Books usually have a table of contents, and the useful ones usually have an index. Videos are only just beginning to have something that crudely resembles a table of contents. I can read far quicker than people talk in a video, and most of them take forever to get to the point, with pointless diversions along the way. It's infuriating. And the book is almost always better than the movie, especially if it's a good book. Some content only exists on video. Sigh."

Mike replies: I think semi-pro video makers are learning to get along with it. Two of the channels I frequent are RealLifeLore, which teaches geography (a subject tragically neglected in schools, like civics), and Blacktail Studio, which shows an enterprising fellow (really, as he gradually reveals all his activities you realize he has too much energy for any one person) doing woodworking projects. Take a look at the beginning of one of the Blacktail videos—you'll see within the first few seconds how he speeds up the action to get through naturally sluggish sequences quickly. As for RealLifeLore, watch the first few seconds of "Why No One Has Measured the Coastline of Britain," about the Coastline Paradox. As you'll see, or rather hear, he doesn't waste any time getting the words out!

RubyT: "I definitely prefer print. I process information visually much better than aurally. I will say that I have found videos to be less irritating since my youngest showed me how to speed them up. Depending on the natural speed of the speaker, I listen to most videos at between 1.5 and 2X. I do type (the single most useful class I took in high school, in 1983), I do read and write cursive, and I only wish my own penmanship were the equal of the 'chicken scratch' in the example you posted."

Kent Wiley: "Neil Postman's amusing and prescient 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death deals with this divide between the literacy of text and its demise due to the ascendancy of video images. The modern filmed equivalent would be Idiocracy."

Dave Karp: "Most of my college students (freshmen and sophomores) don't know how to write in cursive. Similarity, most of them can't touch type either! I realized this when I saw some of their notes, all in printing. They can't keep up and they can't type. Our college will make sure that the students who can't afford a computer have loaner Chromebooks, but it doesn't help with the note taking because they cannot type."

psu: "I like both text (books, PDFs, web pages) and video when done well. Video is most effective when dealing with subjects that benefit from being able to visualize what's going on. There are some amazing math and physics videos on YouTube that do this. Video is also great for explaining things that require audio like music. I like this guy, Adam Neely. I don't think there should really be a divide in media. The divide is in production quality and how well people use their medium choice to get the message across."

Ilkka: "One big difference between text and video as ways to transmit information is the ease of editing. It is common to make typing errors or accidentally use the wrong word. Easy to fix when writing. A lot harder to do on video. To the extent that most people don’t even bother to fix it. This is one thing I didn’t like in the (old) Luminous Landscape videos when Michael was reviewing equipment. They were great when showing and discussing locations. But in the equipment reviews they were weak at actually transmitting detailed information and the occasional errors really struck my ear. I watched them all because I had paid for them, but still today I hardly ever watch any equipment reviews on video."

Open Mike: Going Gentle (OT)

I saw a headline the other day that said something like, "the hardest thing about growing old for most people is accepting that they're growing old." Made me laugh. True for me. The strange fact about getting old is that I honestly can't quite wrap my head around it. It doesn't seem...right, somehow.

I don't feel all that different from in here. But I also don't hang out with young people, and forty-year-olds look like twenty-somethings to me (and twenty-somethings look like teenagers!), and I've become surprisingly prudish, and the other day my feet felt so cold so persistently that I took the bull by the horns and soaked the ol' dogs for five minutes in a Rubbermaid tub of hot water like a sick guy in an old Norman Rockwell painting. (Big surprise:  it worked. My tootsies felt warm the whole rest of the afternoon.) That certainly isn't something young people do!

If you make a comment about your age, most people will reply with some homily like, you're only as old as you feel. Something that, deep down, means, "fight it." You know, the old Dylan Thomas lines: "Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

I don't know about that. I think the harder fight might simply be accepting reality. "When I stopped living in the problem and began living in the answer, the problem went away...acceptance is the answer to all my problems today." Does "you're as young as you feel" mean I'm...two? Because sometimes I feel like I need a nap. LOL.

My consolation is that I might have a good life as an old guy ahead of me! I'm in good health. And the DSM defines middle age as being from 45 to 64. And I'm 65. So that means I'm a young old guy, right? Hello? You still there? Wake up!

I'll take it. As my bro' Dr. Charlie says, consider the alternative.

Mike

P.S. Our Print Sale starts at 10:00 a.m. today, but remember, that's PACIFIC TIME. So: noon in Chicago and Dallas and 1:00 p.m. in New England and Florida...and here at TOP World HQ in the heart of the old Burned-Over District. I'm excited!

Featured Comments from:

SteveW: "Thank you Mike, that was a the OT I needed today."

Herman Krieger: "For my 96th birthday, I changed my two-wheel recumbent for a three-wheel one."

Mike replies: Our friend Herman is TOP's honorary official oldest reader, and has been for years! Long may you prosper, Herman.

And thanks to all of you older guys who inspire me to not worry and keep enjoying life. I really liked the comments—I think there were two—about the seventies being the best decade so far. I'm going to aim for that and work toward it. I've had some not-so-good decades in my life, for sure, so it's a good time to aim to set that right.

Open Mike: Woodwork, Etc.

A.
It only snowed here Saturday overnight, and just a little, but they got 77 inches (that's not a typo) in Orchard Park, where the Bills play, in the Southtowns of "Nickel City." That's 86 miles from me as the crow flies. They say the only plane that left Buffalo Niagara International Airport on Friday was the one carrying the Bills to Detroit, where their game this weekend got relocated to. Ironically, climate change was implicated in the snowfall; conditions are ripe for lake effect snow because Lake Erie is unusually warm after our uncommonly warm October. I went out photographing on yesterday, my day off, but it's a funny thing—when it's 23°F (–5°C) and windy, suddenly there aren't any good photographs more than 30 paces from the car. I don't know where they all go, but there aren't any. 'S true.

B.

Just as a matter of aesthetic preference, do you like woodwork in houses? Just out of curiosity.

C.
Do you do this? I like to keep the same card in the camera across two, three, or even four stints or spells of photographing. That way, not only am I less attached in my mind to my hopes for any one day's shooting, but I have more to look at, and hence, more chances to find a few good ones. When I go out once, come back, can't resist downloading the card, and find I got nothing, it's discouraging. In those situations, I'll sometimes work on pictures I know in the back of my mind aren't really that good. Clinging to my false hopes. Wanting to have gotten something. When you review your work, it's better to be in a realistic frame of mind; and that's easier when you actually got a few.

Mike

The best card ($45 each)

Featured Comments:

Adam Isler: "I generally keep the card in my camera all week and shoot at least something almost every day, but have an extended shoot only once or twice a week. Then at the weekend I download the images from the chip to Lightroom, automatically organized into date folders, and work on Lightroom's 'most recent import.'"

Dogman: "I wanna see it now! I download immediately and give everything a look in Lightroom. If I like anything I immediately do whatever fiddling around I deem necessary, and delete the losers. The card goes back in the camera, is formatted again and is ready to go next time. SanDisks are the cards I use. I've yet to lose a photo due to card failure. My losses are due to photographer failure."

Grant: "The Buffalo storm is nothing new. The Queen city is pounded by big storms every few years. I recall storms in 2000, 2001 and 2006, that had the border with Canada closed numerous times. Toronto has sent snow clearing vehicles to Buffalo more than once. The nice folks in Buffalo have helped out Toronto a few times too.

"I lived for many years in a 1920s house with a staircase very similar to the one in the photo. There was a stained glass window at the stair landing. I liked it, except that it had a dark stain, which I guess was the style at the time. I would have refinished it to something lighter, but for the fact that all the woodwork in the house was in the same dark stain. Far more effort was required than what I wanted to do.

"A number of years ago I started using 64 GB cards. I have multiple cameras and I still shoot like I only have 36 exposures on the card. This allows me to go a long time without a care in the world. My blasé attitude has only caught up with me once. I recently got to a really nice location, carefully composed my shot, squeezed the shutter and got a message 'No memory card.' That's when I remembered that it was still in the card reader at home. Being a photographer with many years experience, I had a backup plan, a long walk back to the van to get the other camera.

"How ironic that when I got home and sat down to that day's installment of TOP, the lead story was about a photographer in the Finger Lakes who had had the same experience. Great minds think alike?"

Mike replies: I've now got one of these (it's light), with two spare cards in it, in the side pocket of the camera bag.  :-)  The pocket on the other side contains a spare battery.

Kent Wiley: "It's been nearly 20 years since the most recent of these photos was taken, but you might say I appreciate woodwork in homes, since I did most of the wood trim in these views. I had some help certainly, and wonder what these dwellings look like now. At the time, my carpentry skills were certainly better developed than my photography skills."

Mike replies: Wow, that's impressive! You are a master.

Kristine Hinrichs: "I shoot every day and download the files (11+ year 'Project 365'). Even after eleven years, I feel like it’s Christmas morning waiting to see what the images look like. I am so often surprised by the gift of an image that found me. Often enough I’m disappointed as well but I know there’s always tomorrow."

Mike replies: You packed a great deal of wisdom and truth about what it's like to be a photographer into very few words in that comment. Thanks for that.

scott kirkpatrick: "It has been attributed to Brett Weston and was apparently a family observation that the weight of a large field camera had the same effect on pictures that you see with sub-zero temperatures: They either come close to the car out of curiosity or run away."

Open Mike: Are Ye Confused?

A little discursion onto the subject of "ye" this morn:

To begin with, ye as it exists in English is two words, not one. In one, the Y replaces thorn, which was a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, and Old Swedish alphabets and still exists in modern Icelandic. Thorn has been completely replaced by "th" in English now. Early printers replaced thorn with a Y, which they considered close enough, and used "y^e" for the, "y^t" for that, and "y^s" for this. So one meaning of "ye" is simply "the," and is properly pronounced "the." So when you see "Ye Olde Shoppe" or some such affectation, it's actually pronounced "the old shop." Which isn't very exciting, but there ye are.

...Which brings us to the second meaning of ye, which means the same thing as "you," plural. It's an archaism that carried over—for a while, anyway—from Old English, which used separate words for "you" when applied to one person, two people, or many people...or, in some cases, to someone of high rank, as in the so-called "royal we" (in Latin, the pluralis majestatis). "Ye" generally meant the same thing as "y'all" or "you guys" in modern English-American speech, and was pronounced "you" (or minimized to something like "yuh." Say "...so now you know" casually, quickly, with "you" de-emphasized, and you'll probably be within harrumphing distance to how "ye" was spoken).

When we say it as "yee," we're engaging in what's called a spelling pronunciation, by which the pronunciation of a word gradually shifts to the way it looks like it should be pronounced; for example when Versailles Road in Lexington, Kentucky, is pronounced "ver-SALES," startling French people and Québécois, or when people pronounce the silent "n" in kiln (real potters are mysteriously divided between "kiln" and the older pronunciation "kil"). Thus, the King James Bible's "judge not, that ye be not judged" should be read out loud simply as "judge not, that you be not judged." Modern translations all use you, as for instance the New International Version's "do not judge, or you too will be judged." As Popeye used to say, faskinatin'.

Finally, Ye is the name of the person who used to be named Kanye West. It's not what he "goes by"; it's not what he's calling himself now; it's his new legal name, as decreed in Los Angeles Superior Court by...er, Judge Court. Really, that's her name. He pronounced Kanye "CON-yay," so Ye is pronounced like the last syllable of that, thus: yay. It was his nickname for years among his friends and peers in the rap community. Interestingly, "Ye" as a name looks like it might fall victim to spelling pronunciation, meaning that some people whose only exposure to him is reading disturbing things in the news might start saying it "yee."

So there you have it: "ye" is two different words and is pronounced either "the" or "you," and "Ye" in the former K. West's case is a whole real legal name and is pronounced "yay."

So now ye know.

Mike

Featured Comments:

David Mackenzie: "Y’all is actually singular. The plural is 'all y’all.' FWIW."

Marcus Peddle: "I use 'ye' (yee) for second person plural because I'm from the Island of Newfoundland where the language got stuck in time in some ways. 'Youse' is an alternative to 'ye' in some parts of the island. I sometimes slipped when speaking to groups of students in my English as a Foreign Language classroom and asked things like, 'Are ye finished the activity?' Interestingly, they always understood what I mean, probably because I looked at all of them while saying it."

Richard Parkin: "On reflection, I wonder why ye would necessary to distinguish the plural of you. Thou (tha’) is still widely in use at least in this neck of the woods (Yorkshire, UK)."

Open Mike: COVID and Water (OT)

Tomorrow will mark two weeks I've had symptoms. I'm feeling generally better now, except for a few things: mainly fatigue and a cough. The cough isn't bad; it's what I'd describe as "nagging." I don't cough much, and it doesn't hurt much. I also have a dry congestion and some sinus pain. I've stopped losing weight.

The fatigue is what has power. I had difficulty staying awake all day yesterday—my mentation kept slipping into the "wakeful but confused" state that I recognize as stage 1 sleep. That's when you think you're awake but your thoughts are beginning to wander off in bizarre directions that aren't logical. Many people aren't consciously aware of this state—it's the normal first stage of falling asleep. At those times I'll have my eyes closed without realizing it, or catch myself beginning to doze. Happened all day long. I took naps twice yet still slept all night. Small chores are enough to make me tired, and I'll do things like sleep for 10 hours and then need a nap five hours after waking up. And I had a strange sensation two days ago—I was sitting at my desk, perfectly idle and relaxed, but at the same time was feeling a strong urge to go lie down. That was odd.

As a bonus, I'm sleeping soundly, which is a pleasure. I've had trouble with sleep literally all my life. I have vivid memories of learning how to get out of my crib for the first time when I was a toddler—one of the first skills I remember mastering. My parents would have to put me back to bed multiple times.

Danger, Will Robinson
I quarantined for five days as required (really six days, because the first day you notice symptoms is counted as day zero) and my doctor's office assures me that I'm no longer contagious, but I'm still keeping to myself and informing people that I've had COVID recently. I figure I'll let them make their own decisions as to whether they want to be around me. I'm doing most of my food shopping at open-air farmer's markets. I've been to grocery stores a few times, but I go at off hours and wear a KN95 mask.

Nationwide, we're still losing 517 people a day to COVID. That's the current five-day average. That's less than heart disease, cancer, and accidents, but more than stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. Older people and those with severe underlying conditions are most at risk. You're five times more likely to get the disease if you haven't been vaccinated, and several times more likely to have severe consequences. I could kick myself—I probably have the Omicron variant, and I didn't get the latest booster that covered that. I meant to...I just didn't get around to it. I don't get around to a lot of things. That's not age-related—I've been that way all my life.

I'm doing my best to take it easy. My life doesn't scale down well—there are just things that I have to keep up with. A downside of living alone. No one else is going to cut the grass. I can be sick, just not very sick.

Water
In the middle of all this, the water failed! That was a significant worry while it lasted, mainly because of ignorance: I didn't know what was going on or what was going to fix it. Did you read about those people in Jackson, Mississippi, who were without water for weeks? I don't know how they did it. I was only partially without water for two days and even that was a significant hassle. You can go two days pretty easily without washing clothes or taking a shower or running the dishwasher. That gets a lot more difficult if you're talking about two weeks. Never mind two months. I found it easy to consciously ignore the plight of the Jacksonians when I was just hearing about it tangentially on the news (you know, that's them, doesn't affect me)—but I have a lot more empathy for them now.

I couldn't find a plumber at first—didn't even manage to speak to one—but I'm fortunate to "know a guy." He's a contractor, and hires lots of tradesmen. So if he asks for a favor, people step up for him, because he's the guy who gives them work. He had a plumber here within hours.

We went on a scavenger hunt in the woods. I vaguely knew where the well head was, but not exactly. It seemed to have disappeared. But of course it was just all overgrown. It's on the neighbors' property, which used to be part of this property.

Here's my shiny new possession that I paid a lot of money for! I treasure it so much I had it buried 150 feet in the ground. As you can probably guess even if you don't recognize it, it's a well pump. The date of manufacture on the old one was 1993, so it lasted 29 years, seven of which benefited me. Lucky me...I'm the guy who gets to pay for the next 29 years. If and when I sell this house, the next owner will get a lot of the benefit. You know what they say: Oh well. (Get it? That must be one of my best puns ever.)

A lot of expenses in life are a sort of lottery. When did you buy your house? What was the market like and what were the interest rates? Is your car a lemon or a peach? Did you ever have to buy a new roof for a house you only lived in for a few years? How expensive are your vices? It's a lot cheaper to collect cameras than cars.

I need to clear out around the well head so it doesn't get buried, and so it drains. That's going to have to wait until I feel better, though. 

So I'm back above the wash line, to use Hans Rosling's term. (If you've never watched that video, you should: you'll probably never again wash clothes without being grateful.) I have just what I had four days ago, except I'm poorer, and yet I'm all the more grateful for what I have. In fact, I think I'll go experience some first world luxury...by doing a load of laundry. Ahhhhh.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

PaulW: "Nine years ago I had a new roof, and many upgrades, installed. Two weeks later my home was destroyed in a flood. I caculated that it cost me a bit over $1,000 a day to own that roof. I should have bought some Leica gear and saved money."

Kevin: "Re 'The fatigue is what has power.' You said it !! Saturday evening, the 17th, marked three weeks since I first had COVID symptoms. My case was mild, in the grand scheme of COVID. But it was quite enough for me. Leaving work on Friday, September 16th, I thought; 'I feel like myself again.' The first time I'd had that feeling since before I was COVIDed on August 27. You'll get there, Mike. Just gotta wait it out."

Kye Wood: "Ooh! I reckon on winning this one. Since March this year, I have...

• Had a professional house clean $2,600
• Had the four water tanks cleaned $1,800
• Had the roof cleaned $1,000
• Replaced the hot water system $2,200
• Replaced the toilet $1,700
• Installed a water purifier with ultraviolet and dual filters $2,200
• Installed a 6.6KW rooftop solar system $8,000
• Replaced a retaining wall that stops the mountain swallowing the house $11,000
• Replaced the electric meter box and circuits $2,200
• Replaced IT cabling in roof and connection to street optic fibre $2,500
• Had dangerous trees felled and mulched $3,800
• Installed a concrete driveway entrance $5,800

"But...my two water pumps are working perfectly. So there's that."

Mike replies: Whew. You're right, you definitely win. If that's the right word....  :-)

Dan Khong: "Thanks for pointing me to the video clip on the washing machine. Enjoyed that. I still remember the days when we had a washer lady come by every few days to wash the laundry. Because of her, my mother had more time to spend with me. Now we have washing machines—and laundromats—so people have more time to write for blogs, read books and take pictures."

Mike replies: A reader pointed out that video to me originally, so I can't take credit for finding it.

SA: "I had the post-COVID cough too this summer and it didn't go away for over a month and was even getting worse. Doctor gave me cough suppressants and steroid, which didn't help much. An acupuncture specialist in my town cured me with a single treatment. She said that she has helped a lot of patients like this.

"She said that COVID can leave the immune system in an activated state for months, which leads to such symptoms. (Note that inflammation is a sign that your body thinks it is still fighting infection.) She pointed out some some sore spots on my body—various lymph type areas, the adrenal gland, etc. She stuck needles in various places for half an hour and when I got up the cough was almost all gone. She did another followup treatment a few days later, and I have not had any trouble since then.

"(She has a master's degree in Aerospace engineering by the way! Very nice person.)"

Open Mike: Aguantar (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP.]

-

If you haven't been aware, a Spanish kid has become an absolute sensation in the tennis world. After winning the U.S. Open Championship, Carlos Alcaraz became the youngest No. 1 ranked player ever, at age 19.

Situations conspired to help with that ranking: Novak Djokovic's refusal to be vaccinated has kept him out of tournaments, and, in a completely separate matter, Djokovic was also denied the ranking points from his Wimbledon victory; Wimbledon had its ranking points withdrawn this year because of the tournament's refusal to let Russian and Belarusian players contend. And Rafael Nadal has had his late-career renaissance interrupted by recurring injuries.

In his maiden year on the tour last year, Alcaraz made a name for himself at the '21 Open with a run deep into the tournament before being forced to concede in the quarterfinals with leg cramps. At the end of last year he was ranked 32nd in the world. Then the deluge: so far in in 2022 he has won the Rio Open, the Miami Open, and the Barcelona Open. At the Madrid Open he became the first teenager ever to beat Rafael Nadal on clay (the adoring Spanish fans and press dubbed him "Carlitos," or "little man"), beating Djokovic as well on the way to winning that tournament, too.

Then the U.S. Open in New York. Several of his matches at the Open were epic, including his duel with the rising young American star Frances Tiafoe, 24, and especially the grueling marathon against the young Italian Jannik Sinner, who at 21 is barely older than Alcaraz. Sinner, who clearly played well enough to win against almost anyone, was dejected after the match. It didn't end until 2:50 a.m., a record that will hopefully never be broken. (Who was in charge of that? Fire that guy.) For his part, Alcaraz accomplished another rare feat: he became only the third man in open-era history to win a major after enduring three consecutive five-set matches. The New York Times says his team used the Spanish word aguantar, which means roughly "to bear up" or endure.

Carlos Alcaraz (photo by Yannick Jamot, slightly cropped)

With Roger Federer announcing his retirement just the other day, and the women's GOAT Serena Williams bringing her fabled career to an end at this Open, it's a huge pleasure to watch the new generation beginning to blossom. Here are the short highlights of the Open Final—23-year-old Casper Ruud of Norway is the other finalist—and the USTA has also posted extended highlights, which is like watching the whole match cut down to the action. And for an added treat, here are the extended highlights of Alcaraz-Sinner. A brightly-lit shop window showing off the excellence of the modern game. Great fun, and impressive as can be.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Migrant Mother, by Sarah Meister. "Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of MoMA." Forty-two pages with many illustrations. An engaging guided tour of the history and lore of "American photography's Mona Lisa."

This book link is a portal to Amazon. You're very kind use our links, as they help support the site.

B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Gary Merken: "Casper Ruud's comments in the post-final interview were heartwarming. The final was held in New York City on September 11. He first paid extended tribute to the memory of those killed in the attacks 21 years ago. He was only two years old at the time of the attacks, making his comments, which showed a sensitive awareness and maturity beyond his years, even more remarkable. I hope to see more from this young man."

Open Mike: The Perfect Day (OT)

["Open Mike" is the anything goes, off-topic Sunday Editorial page of TOP.]

Here's all I have to do each day and how much time I should spend doing it:

Sleeping: 9 hours

Personal hygiene, showering, shaving, etc.: 30 minutes

Prepping and cooking three meals and morning tea: 1 hour 20 minutes

Eating three meals: 30 minutes

Writing (TOP, New Yorker, book projects) and moderating comments: 6 hours

Research for writing: 1 hour

Reading: 1 hour

Housework, averaged: 30 minutes

Yardwork, averaged: 30 minutes

Feeding, playing with, and walking dog: 1 hour

Laundry (including bedding and folding, over one week, averaged out): 10 minutes

Shooting pool: 30 minutes

Shooting photographs: 30 minutes

Processing photographs and DAM: 1 hour

Exercise: 90 minutes*

TV: 0

Video games: 0

Diddling around on the computer with no good purpose: 2 hours

Shopping and errands: 30 minutes

Driving for shopping and errands: 40 minutes

Phone calls to friends or family, averaged: 40 minutes

Wasting time on the phone on hold or trying to get through to some necessary entity, averaged: 20 minutes

Dealing with mail, bills, shipping things, banking, home maintenance issues, doctors, or something I forgot to do and am now being threatened about: 30 minutes

AA meeting: 1 hour

Everything around an AA meeting, including driving, averaged: another hour

TOTAL: 29 hours 40 minutes

Nothing to it.

Next day: Do it all over again!

Mike

*This is Dr. Greger's recommendation. I haven't exercised for 90 minutes in one day since I was in my 50s. But this might not be an area to skimp on. He says "mild cognitive impairment" is marked by "those starting to forget things or regularly repeating themselves." I haven't exercised for 90 minutes in one day since I was in my 50s—did I already mention that? I forget.

Book o' the Week

Chromes is an edit of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes taken from 10 chronologically ordered binders found in a safe in the Eggleston Artistic Trust. This archive was once used by John Szarkowski, who selected the 48 images printed in Eggleston’s seminal book William Eggleston’s Guide, while the rest of the archive has remained almost entirely unpublished. Three volumes, slipcased.

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Open Mike: Can't Eat Enough

Hmm, two 'Open Mikes' in three days is not good. But I want to pass along another link.

The article is "Challenge to the Insurance Industry: A Solution to Significantly Reduce Health Care Costs," by Ken Beckman, July 2016. (It was featured recently on nutritionfacts.org.)

A brief review of U.S. health care costs, from the paper: "Total expenditures exceed $2.5 trillion and have grown from 5% of GDP in 1960 to about 18% of GDP today. Heart disease remains the most common and costly condition, with over 1,000,000 bypass surgeries or angioplasties annually. Nearly half of individuals 65 and over are taking prescription drugs for high cholesterol and the total direct cost of treatments for cardiovascular disease (including high-blood pressure) is approximately $200 billion. About 45% of the U.S. population was overweight in the early 1960s compared to 75% today, with the proportion of obese individuals up nearly 200% over the same time period. This has contributed to an increase in the incidence of diagnosed diabetes from less than 1% in 1960 to nearly 7% in 2010 resulting in annual direct costs of over $175 billion. In total, about 85% of health care spending is for individuals having one or more chronic conditions."

Yikes.

What are "chronic conditions"? The "diseases of affluence" are roughly:

• hypertension (high blood pressure)
• obesity
• asthma
• cardiovascular disease
• dementia
• diabetes
• cancer
• depression

All of these are at least moderately affected by diet and least four of them (hypertension, obesity, heart disease, and diabetes) are highly affected by diet—basically, eating mainly plants and avoiding meat, dairy, eggs, refined carbs, and oil. Heart disease, named as "the most common and costly condition," is not only curable, it is reversible with diet alone. But we do what we do, (most restaurants in my area feature cuisine I've dubbed "meaty cheesey greasy") and eating plants, by contrast, is culturally considered "extreme" and "radical."

Caldwell Esselstyn responded to that:

...The truth is, the nutrition that is extreme or radical is the one that results in 1.2 million coronary stents being done per year in this country; 500,000 bypass operations where your entire chest is divided in half, [and] veins are taken off your leg and put in your heart. And they may last several years and at the end of that, you will have to have another procedure. Or, maybe it’s a little bit more extreme or radical when you spend $25 billion in statin drugs, $5 billion on stents, an epidemic of obesity, an epidemic of diabetes, an epidemic of heart disease. This is the diet that's radical and extreme.

I followed a plant diet pretty strictly for 18 months, ending in June 2021, so I could write about it here. The result was, well, radical and extreme: I lost 43 pounds (down a whopping 76 pounds from my peak, which I believe occurred in about 2014) and all my health markers improved markedly: my blood pressure went down to 110/60, my cholesterol went way down, and my sleep apnea, energy, and mood all improved very noticeably. Alas, I got depressed after my brother died and I couldn't—well, didn't—keep it up.

Head case
There were two main reasons for my failure: I'm addicted to sugar, and I can't cook. But another reason is one I still find quite odd: I couldn't eat enough. There are more or less a hundred foods you can eat without restriction on a plant diet, and, strangely, the more you eat the better. You're not supposed to eat small portions. You're not supposed to skip meals. For some reason I just couldn't get my head around that. I had "dieted" so much over the years that I just seem to associate "healthy eating" with restricted eating. Smaller portions and fewer meals. That's just not what you're supposed to do on a healthy plant-based diet. You're supposed to eat all you want, as often as you want, and the more the better, because it keeps you satiated and it displaces whatever bad foods you might be tempted to eat.

Mennonite whole wheat bread. Rosemary sets it out
at noon and it was still warm when I bought it
just now. Not WFPB, but hard to resist.

A big task in healthy eating is to come up with basic go-to meals: I need 1–2 breakfasts (one is okay), 2–4 different lunches (three is fine), and about 12–16 dinner meals (the optimum seems to be about 14*). After that the game is just to get your number up. You eat 21 meals a week; the more of those that are plant-based the better. Right now I'm eating about 13 healthy meals a week, out of my 21. That's not enough; I need to get to about 18 or 19.

Oh well. The initial challenge when transitioning to healthy eating is to stop gaining weight—the first thing to do is get a good scale, weigh yourself twice a day (before bed and just after getting up), and hold the line. Most people who are overweight or obese are continually gaining weight, and Job One is to put a stop to that. It's the old "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." So far I've gained nothing in the past two months, so that's a step in the right direction. (If the analogy is getting back on the horse that threw you, I have a foot in the stirrup.) But I'm still eating out too much, backsliding on @#$&! sugar, putting butter on vegetables, failing to resist the siren call of Mennonite bread, etc.

More updates eventually.

Mike

*Research indicates that even people who can cook and who cook whatever they want tend to settle down to a basic rotation of about 14 or 15 meals that they enjoy a lot and can whip up without too much bother, with an experiment thrown in every now and then for the sake of adventure or novelty, and perhaps a restaurant meal every week or two for variety.

Book o' the Week

Home Fires Volume II: The Present. There is of course a Volume I: The Past.  TOP reader Bruce Haley has produced documentary work relating to conflict, humanitarian crises and environmental/industrial/land use issues for 30 years. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the ethnic civil war in Burma.

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Today at B&H Photo

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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Featured Comments from:

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "I consider myself an anti-extremist. I'm 51 and been active/athlete my entire life. I too am probably addicted to sugar. I have never been on a diet, but I certainly do pay attention to all of my food. I am genetically lucky in that I could probably eat uncontrolled and max out at 210 pounds (6'1")? I am currently 177 pounds and while not nearly as fit as I would want to be, I can attribute my relative leanness to two things: first, I can honestly say that I refrain in some way at every meal to reduce the low hanging fruit. I would love a Coke, but drink water or unsweetened tea. I would love pizza or the chicken parm or the burger, but will opt for the swordfish, chicken and vegetables, etc. Would LOVE the full dessert, but literally carry around my own 70–80% dark chocolate so I can get my 'sugar-fix' in a more controlled manner.

"Second, drinking alcohol really is no longer part of my life. I will probably consume 2–3 drinks per month. I've been asking 'regular' people lately how many alcoholic drinks they consume each week and am shocked to hear that most seem to fall in the 17–25 per week range which I found shocking! Aside from the negatives of alcohol, I've found that a couple of drinks often comes with bad food choices and skipped exercise. When I say 'regular' people, I mean 45–55 year old active/involved parents who are also mostly high-earning career people."

ASW (partial comment): "My extended family on both sides was full of uneducated manual laborers: farming, logging, construction, etc. People who worked hard, all day, every day. No one ever worried about their diet, which was stereotypical Midwestern meat and potatoes with a side of meat and pie for dessert. A bigger worry was having enough food for all the kids (Catholics!). Yet, if we set aside the long-term smokers and the (many) alcoholics, they all lived into their 80s and 90s. Heck, a lot of the smokers and alcoholics made it nearly that long too. When I look back at old family photos I see thin, wiry women and sunburned, muscular men with nary a bulging belly in sight.

"My generation moved up in the world: college, sedentary jobs, sedentary lifestyles, expanding waistlines, health issues. I doubt that many will make it into their 90s.

"I'm in the middle. I got the education but don't like sitting still. I'm in my early 40s but I'm the same weight I was in high school when I played sports and worked on the farm.

"My wife and I eat primarily vegetarian (meat is an infrequent treat), mostly for environmental and ethical rather than health reasons. We try to avoid processed food, and luckily my wife loves to cook (I do not). We do not count calories or worry about portion sizes. I eat a shocking amount of food. I have been (kindly) asked to leave a Chinese buffet. I have been (less kindly) asked to leave a pizza buffet. What?

"I have run every day this year (minimum two miles; maximum twenty miles). I do pushups every day which is a habit I learned from my dad. I'm over 40,000 for the year. Although I sit in front of a computer for a job, I incorporate 'work' into the rest of my day whenever possible. I mow my one-acre yard with a battery-powered push mower. In the fall I rake the leaves by hand and carry them to the compost mountain in a wheelbarrow. I pretend that elevators and escalators don't exist. If I have to drive to a store I park at the farthest corner of the lot (also saves on damage to my car). More often than not I ride my bike into town when I'm going to the public library or to grab a few groceries. It's only two miles, which doesn't even get the car warmed up but is easy aerobic exercise for me. We go for walks and hikes with our dog for fun. Yes, it takes sweat and effort to increase your output, but that's the point.

"I always encourage anyone trying to make themselves more healthy, but I think too many people overthink it. Michael Pollan offered simple advice for the input side: 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants' (from The Omnivore's Dilemma [quality hardcover and paperback; Kindle edition and trade versions; Young Readers Edition. One of the most enjoyable books of any genre I've ever read, by the way. —Ed.]). Note that when he says food he means real food: meat, grains, nuts, and veggies, not processed junk.

"On the output side, make an effort to do some sort of 'work' every day. You don't have to be a runner or a competitive body builder, but almost everyone can go for a walk and do some sort of body weight exercise. If you're stuck at a computer, use a standing desk for part of the day. Go for a walk while eating your lunch. When you head down the hall for a bathroom break, do a lap up and down the stairs afterwards. If you love watching TV at night, get an exercise bike and pedal slowly while watching. Push things, pull things, lift things, carry things (including yourself). Then do it again the next day."

Daniel: "How about the list or a reference to the list of the 100 veggies/fruits we can eat without limit?"

Mike replies: I looked around for that too and was frustrated. It's a claim from the linked article.

I can take a run at it, though. "Healthy food" is relative. Olive oil is bad for you (oils are the sugar of the fat world), but it's better than vegetable oils loaded with saturated fats. Beef tenderloin is bad for you (here's the lowdown on protein) but it's a lot better than processed meats like hot dogs, baloney, sausage, and Slim Jims. Milk is bad for you but it's better than soda pop. And so forth. Improving your food will help you even if you're still eating questionable foods.

The seven healthiEST foods are: 1. greens; 2. vegetables; 3. fruits; 4. legumes (beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lentils); 5. whole grains; 6. nuts and seeds; and 7. spices. A fair amount of these real foods are necessary for human health no matter what else people eat and no matter how cockamamie and compromised their food beliefs are. These seven things are the most nutritious foods. They supply the thousands of phytochemicals your body needs to thrive.

It's very difficult to eat a diet of ONLY the healthiest foods—I've tried—but the good news is that small amounts of "bad" foods won't hurt you in the long run. So whatever you're emotionally attached to doesn't have to be banished completely and forever. You can still eat meat once in a while as long as your gut microbiome isn't adapted to make poisons out of it; you can still eat small desserts after a meal unless it triggers cravings for more sugar; you can have pizza a few times a year; and you can even have a sugared soda pop, if you must, although a handful of times a year seems like a prudent limit. (I ate ice cream five times in 2020.) Exceptions like these are repugnant to vegan true believers and purists, and also to those who eschew animal food for ethical and humanitarian reasons, but, scientifically, where health alone is concerned, it seems reasonably clear that they don't appreciably affect health outcomes. You're an omnivore and you can survive on the world's worst foods for shortish periods—it's a tribute to our extraordinary adaptability that it's even possible for humans to survive on McDonalds meals and highly processed foodlike substances from gas stations or convenience stores. You won't thrive, but still, we're amazing.

Peter Croft: "Keep writing about food and healthy eating Mike. I really enjoy your articles and opinions."