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:
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" is the (partly) off-topic Editorial Page of TOP that appears on Sundays. This one's an update about all the off-topic "gear" enthusiasms I've bashed you over the head with in the 2020s. This is sort of a "what I did during COVID" list, camera at the bottom. Speaking of updates, did I clean the kitchen yesterday, as I said I was going to? I did not. Did I update all the comments? I did not. I'm such a jerk. First rule of blogging, for me: never make promises. Tomorrow, I will wade into the debate and disputation over the new OM-3, guns blazing...promise.]
Pool: I got a pool table late in 2020, the worst year of the pandemic. For many years it was my biggest material desire. It's a cosmetically not-so-perfect nine-foot 1965 Brunswick Gold Crown I (one) that I got for a good price. I had a large shed built to accommodate it. Radical solution, but there was no other choice. It was one of the best things I ever did. I use it to get up and stretch from sessions at the computer, and hardly a day goes by that I don't at least clear a few breaks. I enjoy it enormously. I knew I liked pool from the first time I was exposed to it as a boy, and I've liked it all along, and I still like it.
Watches: I'm not going to be a watch collector! To "demystify" the subect (the term is Oren's), I ended up buying nine watches, all quartz, none of them very expensive and a few of them quite cheap (<$100). I only like and wear two of them: a Seiko 120th anniversary quartz and a Casio Oceanus T200. (These aren't affiliate links, just pictures of what I have. You're a photographer, you probably like to see.) I like the Casio a lot even though Casio changed its support of it for the worse a year or two after I bought it. That's the one I wear every day, and I'm fine with it. I could get along without the Seiko. The rest of the watches I bought I'll be getting rid of somehow. Want a watch, cheap? Get in touch.
Keyboards: An abject failure. I'm afraid the truth is that I cannot learn to touch-type—there is something off in my brain and fingers. I gave it a strong try this last time, practicing for long periods of time every day for many months. I never got much above 20 WPM, and never got to the point where I didn't have to think about it. It just doesn't kick in for me*. And I have poor manual dexterity, something I've known about myself all my life; I'm forever hitting the wrong keys, or just catching a bit of the key next to the one I'm aiming at.
At least I got one thing out of the attempt: I finally forgave myself for not sticking with touch-typing when I got my first typewriter at age 14. I had always regretted that, but now I think maybe I just sensed at the time that it wasn't meant to be. And I did identify the perfect ergonomic board which solved my own hand pain completely, the only one that did: it's this one. (Which reminds me—I have to send the one I have here back. Yikes. Forgot about that.)
There will be no more talk of keyboards on TOP.
I can only imagine your disappointment.
Coffee: You might recall I used to get green Kona coffee beans—100% Kona, not 10% like in Hawaiian restaurants—from a reader on the Big Island in Hawaii (thanks, Phil R.), and roast it myself. Best coffee I ever experienced. Unfortunately, I had a bout of a-fib in 2018, and an A-B-A test (quit coffee for three weeks, then went back to it) confirmed that coffee was making it worse. Haven't had a drop of coffee since. I switched to white tea, which still has a little caffeine, but, compared to coffee, only a little. I drink it with lemon juice and a little crushed saffron. Entirely unexpectedly, I like my morning mug of white tea every bit as much as I ever liked coffee. I get my tea from TeaVivre, in Fujian Province, China. They have a warehouse here, so orders come quickly.
Shaving: A complete success. I wanted to investigate "wet shaving," the accepted term for using double-bladed, single bladed, and straight razors to shave with. I had always hated shaving and it irritated my face, and I rebelled at the ridiculous cost of the multi-blade cartridges they foist on people now. It was part of a general effort to try to enjoy the things I have to do anyway. I had to try a bunch of alternatives, and I bought a number of double-edged razors and tried a bunch of blades and shaving creams. I settled on a radically simple and cheap solution. I have a fat-handled Gillette Tech razor made in the late 1930s, and I use Kai blades made in Japan because they last a long time, and for lubrication I use shaving oil—I use Shave Secret (it's cheaper at Wal-Mart, or you could even make your own). I can't say I love shaving now, but it's now perfectly gentle on my face, I get a nice close shave, I almost never nick myself, and my rather oddball method is very cheap.
Computer: Since I got my M4 Mac Mini, the computer has utterly disappeared as an issue/worry/impediment in my life. The M4 Mac Mini is about the size of a half-squashed softball, very easy to site on the desk. And it just sits there, silent, as cool as if it were off, and works exactly like it should. I haven't given it five minutes of thought or worry since I got it all set up and sorted. The thing I like best? Near-instantaneous start-up. Long story short, best computer of the ~17 Macs I've owned, or worked on for employers, since 1984. If you're thinking it might suit you, you won't be disappointed. If you're coming from an Intel Mac to Apple Silicon, man, just do it. You're in for a surprise and a treat.
B&W camera: An out-of-the-park home run. I continue to be grateful I discovered my oddball but totally customized-to-me Sigma rig. It's a Sigma FP with 45mm lens and an LVF-11 viewfinder (it's just a magnifier for the viewing screen) and this handgrip (the grip is not an affiliate link, it's just so you can see what I chose). I had the camera converted to monochrome-only by having the CFA (color filter array) stripped off the sensor, so it "sees" only B&W. While I don't recommend this solution to others, I love it for myself. It has liberated and energized my photography. It's tricked out with a perfectly sized bag, extra battery, carefully selected straps, yellow filter, and well-researched cards (you might remember that bout of gear obsession. The linked post is accurate except I sold the Wise card reader when I got the CalDigit TS4 for the computer, which I'm also very pleased with). I think of it like a 4x5 view camera that's portable, needs a tripod less often (although I use a tripod much more often than I ever have before in my life—hey, it's a 4x5, plus, Bryan says I should), and doesn't require film development. I always struggled with 4x5 film processing. Speaking of processing, I use FastRawViewer Monochrome2DNG for ingestion, raw conversion, and demosaicking. A simple, easy-to-use, effective app. Again, this isn't a solid mainstream do-everything option in its modified monochrome form, but for me it continues to be close to perfect. Just look at the gorgeous, subtle highlights at the top of my latest upload. That's filmlike, I think. I hope (you can't really plan!) to use this "FP-m" for the remainder of my days.
I also have a Fuji X-T4 (here's the current version) along with a variety of lenses, and my iPhone, and I use both of those quite often.
———
Is that everything? Most of these, er, enthusiasms, I'm pretty convinced, were part and parcel of COVID isolation. I'm an introvert and I like alone time, but COVID isolation was too much of a good thing. My social life is continuing to recover.
Mike
*I'm the opposite of our friend Carl Weese, who taught himself to touch-type in one day as a boy using the rudimentary instruction book that came with his budget typewriter. He can still adapt to new keyboards in five minutes.
Original contents copyright 2025 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:
["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP, in which we sometimes touch upon classic art. It appears on Sundays, usually. Sometimes. Every now and then. It aspires to appear on Sundays, let's just say.]
I wanted to alert any jazz fans out there (hi, Steve R. and you 28 other people!) to my latest find—a record by Stan Getz (tenor sax) and Bob Brookmeyer (valve trombone) on Verve entitled simply "Recorded Fall 1961."
First of all, compare the sound quality from two different sources. Here's "Minuet Circa '61" from an uploader called 60otaku4, with sound quality that's vivid and upfront; the whole album is available in gentler, smoother, more distant sound quality from Jazz Everyday! [sic]—here's "Minuet Circa '61" from that source. Very different experiences, no? Yet both are okay in their own way. I prefer the former.
(Portrait of Stan Getz by PoPsie Randolph
[I can't show it here])
Stan Getz was a prolific cool jazz saxophone soloist in the West Coast style, initially known for playing bebop, but he later became a central figure in the jazz / bossa nova craze. Brazilian bossa nova, an offshoot of samba, was only briefly popular in the U.S. (the Beatles were a-comin'), but intensely so while it lasted. You've heard him on the famous "Girl from Ipanema," and the album Getz/Gilberto is one of the all-time evergreen bestsellers in jazz, up there with Time Out and Saxophone Colossus.
He was similar in a way to Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, or Benny Goodman—facile, perfect and effortless in their musicianship, but men who had rather sketchy reputations as people. Getz lived a chaotic, destructive life, leaving ruined families and broken relationships in his wake. He can't have been easy on his children. At one point his second wife, Monica Silfverskiöld, while separated from Stan, was taking care of her children with Getz and his children by his first wife. It was Monica who suggested the collaboration with João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos ("Tom") Jobim. Reportedly Getz was reluctant at first because he had heard that the Brazilian artists had a reputation for being difficult. To which Monica replied, "Well, don't you have a reputation for being difficult?" Getz was a drug addict pretty much his whole life, and never escaped it, even after he started attending AA in '83. He held up a drugstore in Seattle once to get narcotics! Getz inspired one of the most wonderful little paragraphs of any jazz bio on Wikipedia—in its entirety, it reads:
Zoot Sims, who had known Getz since their time with [big band leader Woody] Herman, once described him as 'a nice bunch of guys,' an allusion to his unpredictable personality. Bob Brookmeyer, another performing colleague, responded to speculation Getz had a heart operation with the rhetorical question 'Did they put one in?'
I recalled that from years ago when I re-read it yesterday and it made me laugh again.
If you like or are fascinated by "The Girl from Ipanema," by the way, you owe it to yourself to at least sample Adam Neely's explanation of why it's so weird*. Adam Neely makes me feel like I understand things I definitely don't understand.
As a coda, here's Stan Getz doing a pop turn with Huey Lewis and the News on a minor hit from 1988, "Small World." Three-quarters of the way through the soft-rock tune, up steps 60+-year-old Getz, incongruously inserting a limpid, vaguely truculent cool jazz solo. It reminds me of a line from a Nate Bargatze joke: "You having fun? Because I'd like to put a stop to that." One of the very few times I've ever experienced Stan not quite coming up to his customary very high standard. Lewis is obviously delighted to have him there, however. (He did seem to like horns, as I recall.)
Anyway, give "Recorded Fall 1961" a try if you're partial to classic jazz. Ira Gitler gave it five stars (their max) in Downbeat, writing, "Getz and Brookmeyer are mature players, and everything they do on this record is in perfect balance...the most important factor in the success of this set is the ease with which these men communicate their thoughts and feelings to the audience. It seems to flow out and by the same token, right in," and here's the blip from The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings:
Four stars is Penguin's maximum, and they're stingy with it. I didn't even mention that Roy Haynes is the drummer. I've found him a reliable indicator of quality jazz, whether he's the leader or a sideman. Roy passed just last November at the age of 99. I once actually wrote Roy a fan letter, a thing I've almost never done my whole life long.
That was my Saturday morning yesterday.
I love art.
Mike
*Speaking of weird, after Friday's post I had to re-watch David Lean's 1946 version of Great Expectations for the first time since high school. That is just one of the weirdest, most bizarre stories I know—it's as strange as a Wes Anderson movie. It's a purely symbolic movie somehow, like some awkward half-formed myth, but it resists any kind of sense at every turn. No naturalism to it at all. The villain gets run over by a paddle steamer, the deus ex machina Magwitch dies on cue, boy gets girl in the end apparently forgetting that all her life she's literally been trained to be cold and heartless. The whole everlovin' shebang is such a melodrama that it's a parody of melodrama. I would love to hear a psychoanalytical interpretation of the sequence of events and the motivations of the characters.
I used to rather strenuously hate it—the book, the movie, even the Classics Illustrated comic book of it that I read as a boy. Now I simply wish I'd just never been exposed to it. That infernal plot, arising from some swampy place in Dickens' perfervid mind, half ruined fiction for me, by making it seem too obviously like implausible preposterous stuff people just made up. With the notable exception of A Christmas Carol, it soured me on Dickens, too. The plot of GE, which he no doubt made up as he went along (the novel was originally published in installments) ended up a coiled and tangled thing, like a big wad of fishing line. The moment in the movie that made me want to spit-take is when Miss Havisham—Miss Havisham!—says, "What have I done?" What, that's the moment Dickens picks for her to get a little flash of self-awareness?!? In the life she's been living all those years? With the wedding cake and the wedding gown and the fake cobwebs and the thirst for revenge and the vitamin D deficiency?
Maybe Dickens was following some social programmatic intent: the wealth of young snobs coming from the labor of the rough and persecuted, yet secretly devoted, working class, and the aristocratic rich (Miss Havisham) living useless neurotic lives shut away from the sun? I don't know. I certainly don't know why they made prep school students in my day read that ill-begotten lump—it's as strange as forcing Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter on a bunch of high school virgins of both sexes. (We had to read that also, as sophomores.)
/rant. Sorry; I get going sometimes. But hey, do other photography websites give you capsule reviews of Dickens novels in a footnote? They do not. :-)
Original contents copyright 2025 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:
Terry Letton: "Now you’ve done it, you made me think I’ve missed something. Off to Barnes and Nobel to see if they have a copy of Great Expectations!"
Mike replies: If you think you must! They will have more than one edition. I will take a stab in the dark and guess you will find five different editions at a B&N, and if you look around you might find their own edition in a soft leather-like binding looking very ersatz-posh. It will probably be on a table with more like it. I would however recommend the Folio Society edition, from the UK; it has a nice brown leather spine (if memory serves), and all the original illustrations by Marcus Stone, and a slipcase. You can find one on eBay or AbeBooks.
Peter Wright: "As is not infrequently the case, you have managed to hit on more than one of my non-photographic interests in a single post. I quite like Stan Getz, although he's not one of my major jazz favourites (that would include Dave Brubeck, and Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and many others before Getz), and I can probably go the rest of my life without hearing 'Girl from Ipanema' ever again.
"When I was in high school, I read (I think) everything by Dickens, simply because I liked his writing so much. Loved him! A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and more! All classics! The only one where he is clearly writing for installments, and it does get tiring, is Pickwick Papers—a sort of 19th century soap, so I don't recommend that, but all the rest? Dive right in! Including Great Expectations!"
Bryan Geyer: "Perhaps it's of no matter, but do be aware that the formerly independent bookseller AbeBooks is now (since 2008) wholly owned by Amazon. And congratulations on remembering anything from Great Expectations! I recall reading it as a teenager, along with the Bronte sisters' books, but it was C. S. Forester's series on Captain Horatio Hornblower that provided more lasting impact."
Mike replies: True dat, but AbeBooks (ABE originally meant Advanced Book Exchange) is still where most independent used and antiquarian booksellers ply their wares online.
And man, I loved those Hornblower books too! I read the whole series probably three times over by the time I was fifteen. I'm not sure I've ever found any reading that's more gripping or satisfying. But do you have to be a young boy to feel that way? I suspect maybe so....
Steve Rosenblum: "Thanks for the tip, Mike! I've been looking for new jazz (new to me that is) to listen to lately so this is racked up for a listen tomorrow. Also, sadly, Huey Lewis has lost most of his hearing due to Merniere's Disease so he no longer performs. When they were at their peak, Huey Lewis and the News were fabulous to hear live."
Tex Andrews: "What a wonderful column! So, last things first, I love Lean's Great Expectations. He's an underrated director in my opinion. That film is visually stunning and creepy in so many ways.
"On Stan Getz: the Getz/Gilberto album is a must-have for any jazz head. Bossa Nova was so huge in the early '60s, it's hard for me to believe how it's fallen so far off most folks' radar. Getz played at my college (tiny place). I had suggested to the guy who ran the spring concert program that we get out of our rut and get some jazz. For some dang reason he picked Getz. They played in the basketball gym, first mistake. His female pianist insisted they move our one grand piano from the theater to the gym—what a prima donna. Then Getz...was drunk. Basically I agree with Peter Wright above on where I'd put Getz. Important, to be sure. I heard a radio interview with Larry Coryell in the late '70s—also drunk."
robert e: "This post itself read like a nice bit of jazz, footnote and all. Thanks for that, and for all the recommendations! For what it's worth, 'Minuet' on Spotify is more like 600taku4's post, which is good, because I feel like I'm missing things when I listen to the other YouTube post. This recording wasn't on my radar at all, so I appreciate the note. Two other jazz classics you mentioned were old favorites, but weren't in my Spotify library, because I really don't have one place that reflects all the music I own, or all the music I like, or all the music I want, or the music I'm intrigued by, etc., and sometimes that seems like a real problem. What do people do these days to keep track of their music across multiple media?"
Mike replies: Beats me. Mine's all over the place. It's very unsatisfactory.
["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often but not always off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. skids wildly on the ice and crashes into whatever is in front of him. It appears on Sunday so infrequently that it's useless to say that it appears on Sundays.]
SA*
A newspaper article is classically written "top down," in the so-called inverted pyramid format.
The headline gives the basic information in pithy and hopefully catchy form. For example, "Viral Texas Chain Collision Actually Happened in 2021."
The byline and dateline tell the reader who is responsible for the reporting, the umbrella organization which you will hopefully recognize as trustworthy, and when it was first published, for instance, "By Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer, 5 January 2025."
The lede (pronounced" leed") is a paragraph giving all the essential information contained in the article. For example:
"A video showing cars and trucks smashing into each other on an icy Texas highway has gone viral in the New Year in 2025, accompanied by the false information that it just happened. It was a real accident, but it happened almost four years ago, in 2021, during a Winter freeze that hit Texas particularly hard."
Then comes the body, in which the lede is fleshed out, usually in several paragraphs, if possible answering the traditional "five W's + how" of "who, what, where, when, why, and how." Telling, for instance, why the old news story is being recycled as if it just happened (a craven gambit to pull in social media views, which worked), what weather event caused it (a severe cold snap which led to President Biden declaring an state of emergency in Texas), when it actually happened (February 11th, 2021, the first day of the storm), and where (I-35 in Fort Worth), how many cars and trucks were involved and how many people were hurt or killed (133 vehicles, causing six deaths and 65 injuries), the wider situation it was a part of (power outages were widespread and 246 people died statewide as a result of the storm), what the source of the misinformation was (a wrongly titled video stating that it happened on January 1, 2025), and so on. The body might go one for several paragraphs.
After the body, minor details might be added, for instance, that a dog was among those rescued from the crash scene, that it took firefighters and emergency crews until the next day to clear the highway, perhaps a quotation from one of the survivors or one of the rescue personnel, etc.
What a traditional newspaper article does not have is distractions inline with the text block, especially unrelated diversions that can take the reader away from the article permanently with one click of the mouse!
A newspaper article also doesn't have a concluding or summarizing paragraph, for two reasons. First, all the salient information has already been given at the top; and second, so that compositors can trim the end of the article to fit whatever column space is available without omitting any necessary information—all they'll cut is, perhaps, the part about the dog.
As opposed to
the reason this format evolved this way is based on the way people read newspapers. Few people read newspaper articles all the way to the end. You scan the article headlines and read on if the subject grabs you. If you're only moderately interested you might stop after the lede; if you're engaged by the story you might get into the body, and only if you want the complete picture for some reason will you persist through the minor details at the end.
Efficient. And, one might say, courteous.
Now, of course, if you look at a typical news article online, you might notice that a different paradigm is evolving.
First, the headline is cut off, on the pretext that it's longer than the space available, viz.: "Photographers Missing Out on Free In...", such that you have to click on it just to see the whole dang headline and find out what the freaking article is even about. There's no byline, no name of any umbrella organization as the source of the article so you can get a clue of whether it's trustworthy or not (or a completely anodyne name you don't recognize at all), and the article is undated—which is especially unhelpful if you're looking for up-to-date information. Then, the headline turns out to be a deliberate tease: "Photographers Missing Out on Free Insurance That Could Save Them THOUSANDS!!!" Scrolling down, you come to a brief paragraph with seven typos, wrong words, and illiterate sentence structure, on account of the article has been written by a combination of ChatGTP and a non-native ESL speaker who resides in a distant land—no hate implied; he's making his $7 a day and he both needs it and earns it—bracketed by three large advertisements, including one right below the snippet of text. Your skills at discriminating meat from crud online are constantly improving, of course. Because they must. The text is just some blather about how times are tough and everyone needs to save money and you could too if you only knew to do THIS. You scroll down, blood pressure rising, and get to the second paltry text block, at which point the ads refresh and cause the text block to reset two inches down from where it just was, causing you to lose your place. Doesn't matter, because the second text block contains nothing but renewed teasing promises to get you to keep scrolling.
This goes on until you have seen 19 ads you have absolutely zero interest in and two which you were kinda tempted to click on except you know better because you're smarter than Pavlov's dogs. At which point, the article tells you that you might want to think about putting your cameras on your homeowner's insurance using a rider, which you already knew.
And then to add insult to injury you have to figure out how to get back to the page you were reading before you took the stupid bait and got a sharp fishhook painfully stuck in your lip. Which you do, only to find that the main page itself has refreshed in the meantime and the other articles you kinda wanted to read have disappeared and been replaced by something else.
Ah, progress.
Mike
*Satire alert.
P.S. Culture and society will figure out the internet eventually. Right now it might resemble the picture above, but newspapers themselves had a "wild west" phase in which there were limitations but few rules. Standards of book publishing had to evolve over centuries. The ethics of good journalism and accepted best practices, such as simple matters of format, had to evolve slowly as practical effects were observed and lessons were learned. The same thing will happen to media online...someday.
Original contents copyright 2025 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:
Ed Otten: "Brilliant expose of the time-wasting machinations of the web. Particularly troubling are the algorithms which dog one between devices. Showing even a modicum of interest in a product results in a lingering cascade of related click baits...sooo annoying and, in a sense, quite frightening!"
Charles Rozier: "The really crazy thing is that these clickbait headlines you describe appear even within paid sites like the New York Times, which supposedly is not competing with itself for clicks. It seems to have become one of those cultural decline things…."
Craig: "I hate the teaser headlines that are becoming common even in mainstream news outlets. The San Francisco Chronicle has an annoying habit of writing headlines like, 'This Bay Area City Now Has Highest Property Values in Northern California,' making you click on it just to find out what city they're talking about, even though the actual name of the city would have taken up less space than 'This Bay Area City.'"
Mike replies: You make a good point: that the bad habits of online writing are spilling over into old-time print media now too.
Aimi Kobayashi in 2021
So, to start with, did you know there are a lot of great movies on YouTube for free right now? I'm in the middle of Licorice Pizza, which I watched half of last night. I'm perilously close to being bogged down and giving up—I don't care for Paul Thomas Anderson. He's what I call a puppetmaster director—one who toys with the lives of his characters as if they were props. Although not nearly as bad as that other Anderson. But I digress. And I know many people love them both, so I'll shut up about that.
Annie Hall, True Grit (the Coen brothers' one, not the sunnier, simpler, earlier John Wayne vehicle), The Truman Show, Heathers, Train to Busan, The Best Years of Our Lives (I loved that and have written about it), The Great Escape, No Country for Old Men, The Insider, Jiro Dreams of Suchi, Irma La Douce, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Fences, Airport, etc. All free.
With one caveat—I don't know if you have to see ads if you don't pay for ad-free YouTube. I don't know.
Anyway the one I watched was Downfall, for the second time. That was the movie with the Bruno Ganz "Hitler rants" scene that spawned a thousand memes back in the 2000s. In the one I first encountered, he's ranting about the price of the then-new Nikon D3x.
But that eventually led to me to see the movie, and it's outstanding, really good, if something so, well, bad can be said to be good. That's available for free on YouTube too. That in turn led me to a site called Five Books, where historian Keith Lowe recommends five books on the aftermath of Hitler's war. I found just the descriptions of the books fascinating. I tend to like reading books in pairs, or in sets; it lets me vector in on a subject from several perspectives at once. So I dove in, and have gotten engrossed in Tony Judt's Postwar, a history of Europe from 1945 to Y2k more or less. The print book is 955 pages, so it might take me a while—I don't spend as much time reading as I used to—but so far there's a revelation on every page. His description of the many "civil wars" spawned by WWII, like a hurricane throwing off tornadoes, is news to me. And did you know that four out of ten of the living prisoners liberated from the concentration camps perished in their etremity after being rescued? They were too far gone, and the medical care that could be brought to bear just wasn't enough to save them. R.I.P. Tony Judt also offers opinions throughout, which I like. I half think it's the only really honest way to write.
Here's another little factoid: of the 28,000 German pilots who served in the war, only 1,200 survived—and the survivors were vilified and persecuted in postwar Germany by the population, who blamed them for not protecting them from the bombing. That comes from another title on my on-deck pile, A Higher Call, about the Stigler-Brown incident.
Gratitude
From this little dip of the toe into the Judt, I got one more thing for which I can be eternally grateful: that I haven't had to live through disruption and suffering on that scale. The stories are beyond dreadful. I've always maintained that heaven and hell are simply ideas extracted from the best and worst that humans can experience right here on the crust of our little blue pearl. I have known little snippets of heaven, but thankfully, no hell.
One more recommendation for streaming content: Aimi Kobayashi performing the lesser of the two Chopin piano concertos at the 18th Chopin Competition in Warsaw in October of 2021. (She didn't win, usually a good sign.) It's absolutely exquisite, the best I've ever heard the piece played, not that I'm any big expert. Check it out, if you're of a mind to, and, as they say, enjoy.
Mike
P.S. I have the 13 Baker's Dozen pictures chosen and processed and ready for upload—that's the next task, for after breakfast and some attention for Butters—and will be working on sequencing next. I hope you like the choices; I didn't go for beautiful, mostly. There would have been all kinds of ways to go with this one. Thanks again to all who participated. The next Baker's Dozen will be "Realistic Minimalism," of course. We have to. Probably this Spring.
Original contents copyright 2024 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:
Simon: "Thank you for the link to the Kobayashi performance. I’ve not heard Chopin’s orchestral work previously (which is a pity, it seems) and I love listening to musicians who prioritise communicating depth and emotion over technical prowess. Also kicking myself for not seeing Lee in the cinema when I had the opportunity. Oh well."
Richard Tugwell: "Don’t know about others, but I use Brave browser which seems to suppress YouTube ads in its default configuration. I'm sure other options are available."
John Shriver: "See Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Money, Oil, and Power for why the German pilots could not defend Germany. The Allies systematically took away all places where the Germans could drill for oil, and constantly bombed all the plants that they had to convert coal to aviation fuel. The Germans had nothing to power their planes with.
"Really, much of World War II, from a military point of view, was about starving the Axis of fuel. Much of the territory Japan seized had oil wells. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because we would not sell them oil.
"There's also a PBS series, 'The Prize,' based on the book, six one-hour episodes that can be found online."
Mike replies: America was the Saudi Arabia of the era. Kevin Phillips says that the US supplied four out of every five (?) barrels of oil used to fight WWII. Part I of his book American Theocracy, entitled "Oil and American Supremacy," is the best 96 page primer I ever read about the issue. I'll look into the Yergin book; the sample is enticing.
Gary Merken: "Hang in there with Licorice Pizza. It's loosely based on Anderson's early life. Yes, some of the set pieces go on too long. But the performances by Hoffman and Haim are good—I knew nothing about Alana Haim and her family, who also appear in the film—and Tom Waits has a nice cameo. When my kids were learning to drive and would park too far from the curb with me in the passenger seat, I'd quote Woody Allen's line in Annie Hall: 'It's okay. I can walk to the curb from here.' Best Years of Our Lives was the very first DVD I ever watched, back in the late 1990s when my then-new Dell desktop had a DVD slot. Borrowed it from the library. Teresa Wright is luminous. The storyline, especially about the double-amputee Navy veteran, is sensitively told. A treat to see Hoagy Carmichael on screen.
"As I'm sure you know, Mike, Chopin was a much better composer for solo piano. The Nocturnes (introduced to me by a college girlfriend). Ballades. Scherzos. Mazurkas. Preludes. Etc. Now I'm gonna put on the record with Artur Rubenstein playing the Nocturnes she gave me all those decades ago."
Mike replies: That's one of the very best, especially if you have sentiment attached to it. I have Claudio Arrau, which is also wonderful.
Trevor Johnson: "About Gary Merken's comment about Rubenstein playing Chopin Nocturnes. I knew Rubenstein as he was a great friend of my piano teacher: Rubenstein was a most entertaining person. I also met Vladimir Horowitz, when he was in the UK, as they both shared the same UK manager. The Chopin Concertos are interesting and I have a vinyl recording that Rubenstein signed. As for me, I still play piano every day, although I'm principally a classical pipe organist, but I went into healthcare, on my father's advice, to earn some money and now work at a few universities and the NHS, etc., part-time."
Mike replies: What a great opportunity, and lucky for you. Nice to have you here.
It just occurred to me, amusingly, that my "white whale" is...Moby-Dick. I've been trying to read Moby-Dick for most of my life, or at least I've been holding the idea in my mind that I will one day read it. And yet I never seem to be able to get through it. I own at least four editions of it. And have set out on that voyage at least that many times.
White whale, n.:
"An objective that is relentlessly or obsessively pursued but difficult to achieve" (Oxford Languages).
"A goal that you are determined to achieve, or something that you are determined to get, especially if this is very difficult" (Cambridge Dictionary).
"Something you obsess over to the point that it nearly or completely destroys you. An obsession that becomes your ultimate goal in life; one that your life now completely encircles and defines you" (Urban Dictionary).
"The potentially mythical object of an endless, life-long quest" (English Language Learners).
"The White Whale in Moby-Dick is possibly one of the greatest symbols in literature. When we talk about a character being used as a symbol, we mean that the character, in addition to performing a role within the plot, also represents an abstract idea or concept" (Study.com).
As a reader of non-fiction mostly, every year I try to read one great classic novel, for...balance, I guess. Trying to decide on this year's book. But this year I think one of my decisions should be to not read Moby-Dick, and indeed to never read Moby-Dick! I'm never going to read it anyway, so why continue to carry around the notion that I will? Out, damned spot.
Sometimes it's better to give up your dreams, am I right? I mean, Captain Ahab would have been better off if he had simply decided to give up on ever finding the great white whale. He could have spent the remainder of his days sitting by the fire in a little cottage in a quaint New England seaside town, with his bad leg comfortably resting on a stool, reading...a good book. Sometimes it's better to let things go.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2024 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:
MARILYN NANCE: "In college, I read most of Moby-Dick in one long night only to find that the last 10 pages were missing from my used copy. Fortunately, I had been going to class and knew what happened. Try the audio book, Frank Muller is a wonderful reader (unfortunately passed)."
Geoff Wittig: "I also have too many editions of Moby-Dick. My favorite is a full-size facsimile of Andrew Hoyem's fabulous hand-printed Arion Press edition. The real thing recently sold at auction for $16,500 and it's widely regarded as the best fine printing done in America in the last 50 years. The Barry Moser engraved illustrations are fabulous. It's probably just me, but I find such a beautifully printed edition easier to get through, because I can enjoy the typopraphy and design in addition to the text itself. And, once you make your peace with Melville's period prose, he's a remarkably sly, droll writer. Bartleby the Scrivener is an astonishingly modern little gem of meta-fiction."
David Drake: "I was an English lit major in University and read Moby-Dick in an American Lit course. I very much enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I could get through it now. It's those exceptionally long sentences broken up with a crazy amount of commas. Our modern minds are used to sounds bites; we need to slow ourselves down to enter that 19th century mind-space. You get to the end of the sentence, and you've forgotten the beginning! It does give you a sense of the 19th century mind, as compared to the frantic pace of modern day. Now Ulysses by Joyce—there's one I didn't get through."
Dave Levingston: "I’m reading Ulysses. And by reading I mean it’s on my Kindle and every few months I read a couple pages. None of it makes any sense at all, so it really doesn’t matter. If you want something good to read in fiction there’s this guy named John Sandford whose books are so good I’ve read them all and wait impatiently for every new one he writes to be published. But maybe you shouldn’t take my recommendations. I loved Moby-Dick."
MikeR: "For me, it's The Federalist Papers. About 60 years, so far. I think the first two definitions appropriately describe my quest to convert an Epson printer from color to totally black-and-white, using carbon inks. I succeeded without having to use a harpoon, but that success was never assured."
Moose: "When I was 12–13, somewhere in there, I caught the mumps. Not a good plan, at that age: a.) Risk of sterility. Indications to date are that my middle-aged boys are my progeny. b.) PAINFUL! I killed time reading Moby-Dick. When the pain left, I left the book; don't expect to ever finish it. Coincidentally, I'm now on page 384 (of 857) of the recent novel Ahab's Wife."
Michel Hardy-Vallée: "It eluded me for a whale (ahem, I mean for a while...) until I bought the facsimile of the Arion edition by the UC Press. It's nothing about the size or complexity (I'm a card-carrying Joyce bro), but it's a question of maintaining attention. I can't commit to an ugly book. It's truly a masterpiece of typography and text-image integration. As a result, you feel like you're entering a well-ordered palace, and everything is in its place so that you can concentrate on the story. The design never competes with the text, and really enhances it."
One problem with standing desks. They break.
However, they are truly a luxury if, like me, you spend a lot of time at your desk. Half because of the intended purpose, which is to allow you to stand up and keep working and then, after a little while, sit down again; that's nice. The other half because you can make small changes to the height of your desk—to vary your arm position while typing, make it easier to get to things underneath the desk, make it easier to get in and out if you have a regular chair, or just to get the desk at the exact right height for you in the first place. They're very nice.
And the good news is, adjustable standing (AKA stand-up, AKA sit-stand) desks have gotten cheap.
Rock of Gibraltar
The first one I ever saw was at an office furniture store in Wisconsin. The top of the line SPFE sit-stand desk on display was a thing of beauty. It had a gorgeous thick real wood top and was as solid and steady as the rock of Gibraltar. It moved up and down smoothly and quietly with the touch of a button. Standing desks had never entered my consciousness before that. I wanted one immediately.
It also cost something like $2,100 in fifteen-years-ago money ($3,037 today). I mulled it over for months or maybe a year or two and eventually bought the "budget" model from the same manufacturer for around $1,100. It had lighter legs and a thinner (1-inch, 2.54 cm) laminate top (depth and width 31x65 inches, 79x165 cm). Still plenty nice enough.
Mine has had it rough. It survived incompetent installers who mucked everything up and departed with the new desk still inoperable (the store had to find the guy who knew what he was doing and send him along later); several bits and pieces coming loose over the years; and Lulu chewing up one of the connector plugs! The plug still worked post-mastication, which was a blessing. The desk also survived the 740 mile trip to New York in a jam-packed moving van driven by bandits. Not to mention ten years of service. Worth $110/yr.? I'd say yes.
But it finally broke. This morning the right side of the desk is eight inches higher than the left. It's not moving, but it's still making me a little seasick. Web search turns up several people with the same problem pleading for a source of parts. But the company that made it is long since out of business.
Cheaper by China
These days, though, standing desks are much less expensive. (The Chinese got to them.) I don't need a new top, but you can buy the leg sets alone for reasonable prices. I bought this heavy-duty leg set from Amazon for $346 with free shipping:
Capacity 275 lbs., the highest I could find. Made by a company called Mount-It! [sic], which sounds both very Chinese as well as a little dirty. That's actually on the expensive side; you can get leg sets for almost half that now—this is Amazon's "Overall Pick"—and whole desks like this one for $240.
I think my new leg set (arriving on Wednesday) is an outgoing model; the new top-of-the-line desks from Mount-It! have a load capacity of 220 lbs., which is, obviously, still reasonable unless you're overweight and plan to lie down on it. I'm not necessarily recommending any particular brand. It looks like some of the leg sets and desks that Amazon sells are generic, without even a brand name tacked on for show. And some of the brand names that do come up aren't exactly venerated well-known names. Topsky? Fezibo? Radlove? Sweetcrispy?!? However, you'll also notice that most of them also get high ratings from customer reviewers, so it looks like problems aren't...well, a problem.
My outgoing one just has two buttons, up and down. The new control modules have presets, exact height readouts in inches or centimeters, several presets, and time reminders—all of which would be useful, in my opinion.
Heirloom desktop
I'll tell you what I'd do if I were starting over, though. I'd get a stout leg set, then find a Mennonite or Amish cabinetmaker to make me a stunning real-wood desktop out of some sort of pretty wood. I fancy American black walnut, though you might have a different preference. As a bonus, that would let me specify the exact size I wanted. If you're an amateur woodworker, you could make one yourself.
Then, if the lifting mechanism ever broke again, I'd just get another leg set. And end up bequeathing my beautiful custom top to my son or grandson.
My desk might have broken, and I'm going to be listing to the side for the next couple of days, but it's all good. I'm a big fan of standing desks all the same. They're well worth the trouble in my book.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2024 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:
Mike S: "I worked in a 911 center and we had dual-level powered sit-stand desks. The desk top was split into two parts. The rear section held the six monitors and the front section was for keyboards, pointing devices, coffee, oh so much coffee. Both levels could be raised in tandem, but the genius design allowed the monitor level to be lowered below the keyboard level. Alternating between standing and sitting is the best way to survive, but being able to also alternate between looking straight (or up) at monitors versus standing and looking at a downward angle is pure luxury during a 12-hour shift. Very high quality, used 24 hours a day, 356 days a year and probably cost as much as my non-existent Leica."
Steve L.: "Mine is from Standdesk. I bought it many years ago (like 10 maybe) after reading about the concept right here on your blog, I think. It's worked flawlessly, though for most of it's life I've used it mainly standing up. Now that I'm in my mid sixties I seem to be splitting my day more, half standing and half sitting. I just checked their website and they have a lifetime warranty, which might interest you if you ever need another one. Cheap, too. I paid way more when I got mine years ago."
When I was recovering from my heart procedure, which was supposed to take six weeks, I had to put my shirts and coats on backwards, because I wasn't allowed to raise my left arm during that time. I had not thought about how I put on a shirt or coat since I was, I don't know, five or six? When do kids learn to put on their coats? If I was five, that means John F. Kennedy was President the last time I consciously thought about how to don a coat. It wasn't a real problem, just an annoyance. But I had a ludicrous amount of trouble with it. I swear it took me the whole six weeks to re-learn how to do it. I didn't get the knack of doing the motion backwards till the last day. Honestly, it was that hard.
That's part of the reason I got all agitated when I learned my old keyboard had been discontinued. The replacement (which I called the No Natural because it had the same name minus the word "Natural") was different enough that I couldn't type on it at first. I was convinced it would take me forever to get used to it. Because, you know, the putting-on-the-coat thing, not to mention lots of other things like that.
But when I finally actually tried to learn the new one, I adapted to it in...about eight minutes. I exaggerate. But it's fine.
Do I still need to learn to touch-type? Not really. I took a typing test using the No Natural at Monkeytype, typing my old way with three fingers and one thumb, and within three tries my score was 50 WPM with 98% accuracy. Which (again) is fine.
So all this keyboard business was just me being Chicken Little. I was honestly panicked when I found out my keyboard had been discontinued. I mean, I had been been using it for 30 years (a new one every three or four years). Meanwhile, readers were all like, dude, just learn to type. As I was freaking the F out.
Lost souls
Speaking of odd nicknames for weird things, like No Natural, I went to Wal-Mart yesterday. I decided that store should be called "Wander and Hope," because that is what you have to do there. I get an attack of existential pessimism whenever I go into a Wander and Hope. It makes me question the culture of now, the meaning of life, and whether I belong on this planet. I never feel lonelier or more defeated. Manfully, however, I found three blue-vested employees in a little klatch talking with each other animatedly about their men, their kids, and their lives. I interrupted them and asked them for what I needed, and one of them turned away from the others and sucked it up and put on her concerned/motherly/helpful employee-face. She waved and pointed and said, "It's down there, way down there, just look for a section called 'More Meaningless Crap.' You'll see it. You'll find it. You'll be all right," and I repeated, "More Meaningless Crap?" to help me remember it, and she said 'More Meaningless Crap." Then she went back to her discussion with her friends. Within 40 steps I had forgotten what section she told me to look for (it wasn't actually the More Meaningless Crap section), but I was too far into it to go back and ask again. I thought perhaps I would find another employee in the interior of the store to ask, but encountering a Wander and Hope employee in the interior is as common as someone offering you a Prosciutto e Melone sample on a tray in the middle of the Australian outback. I had about a football field to walk. In my meandering I encountered several more old men wandering aimlessly, doddering into view for a little while and then disappearing. At any given time in any Wander and Hope there must be at least eight old men shuffling around lost, having forgotten or given up on their mission of finding whatever it was they came for. They wander around for part of the afternoon and then eventually manage to trickle out the front doors. They probably lose their cars in the parking lot, like I did, but here's a hint: if you just keep walking around purposefully out there like you know where you're going, nobody can tell you're lost. If you ask any of those old men later that evening what they did that day, they will look at you with a bewildered expression, which is not all that different from their usual expression, and say, "I went to Walmart."
I eventually found a round plastic can of wipes for car interiors, and I was pretty amazed that I found it. It occupied about 12 inches of linear shelf-frontage in a vast wall of other stuff, on an aisle adjacent to twelve other very similar aisles, and the employee had pointed to it from a football field away, and I found it anyway. I was a little proud of myself. Next, you wander until you detect daylight, and head toward that. Sometimes you merely sense it. Eventually you will get to a long stretch of cash registers, all of which say "CLOSED" except two, which both have long lines. At that point you are within an automated self-checkout payment of freedom, so keep going.
Ignore that orange warning light
My car came home yesterday, by the way. It was at the dealership because no one could figure out a persistent problem with the TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system).
This popped up about two years ago. At that time I took it to the Honda dealer in Canandaigua and asked if they could have a go at it, to save me the drive all the way to Rochester to the Acura dealer. (My car is an Acura, but Acura is a division of Honda, and my car is based on the Honda Civic.) I waited patiently, and presently the Service manager came out to talk to me. He kind of hemmed and hawed, saying that he didn't know if Acura used the same machine as his, and that Acura might have different codes than their machine used, and that I would probably be better off just taking it to Acura. I thanked him and left. In the interim I had several other places try to fix it, a couple of tire stores and a couple of independent mechanics. The light kept coming back on. It didn't really bother me much. It was merely an annoyance, no big deal. I learned to check the tires the old-fashioned way, and ignore the big orange warning panel that says "CHECK TPMS."
My car had to go to the Acura dealer for a different issue, so I asked them to take a look at the TPMS problem while they were at it. I, er, expressed my skepticism that it could be fixed. The Service manager said, "Oh, we'll fix it." When I picked the car up a week ago he told me the TPMS was fixed. I said, I dunno, that's been a pretty persistent issue. The light came back on before I even got home, same as usual.
But Acura is super-serious about standing behind their work. When I called and told them the light had come back on, that's when they sent a driver in a loaner car to pick up my car, so I wouldn't have to make the drive to Rochester again. They delivered an expensive, gleaming, brand new SUV, an RDX, for me to drive. They kept my car a whole week. No extra charge for any of this.
That's service.
Having not seen my own car for a week, it came to me in a flash of obviousness that it was dirty, hence the stop at the Wander and Hope. I had softened a good deal toward that Acura RDX that I ended up driving for one solid week. When they picked it up yesterday I still didn't know how to turn the radio on and off, but I had learned what a lot of the other features did and had started to relax into its weird mid-2020s vibe. I learned many things about it. If you can believe this, that damn car will drive itself on a more or less straight road, for miles, no hands on the wheel. It weaves gently from the fogline to the centerline and back again...until it reaches a curve, when it will go right across the centerline and into oncoming traffic. That seems a.) amazing, yet also b.) not a desirable functionality in any way, shape, form or fashion. We didn't hit anything.
So the reason they kept my car for so long was because the dealership was hosting a visiting Acura engineer for a day, for a completely separate matter, and they wanted him to take a look at my car while he was there. Well, guess what? The engineer discovered that the piece of testing equipment the dealership was using had gone bad.
He tested this hypothesis by driving my car to a nearby Honda dealership and getting them to fix the problem!
So everyone's happy. The Acura dealership discovered their equipment was faulty—they've ordered a new one, of whatever it is—the Acura engineer solved my issue, and my issue got solved, which is what I wanted.
I just think it's a little ironic, is all. If the first Honda dealer had just taken a shot at fixing the problem, it probably wouldn't have been a problem for the last two years. You know what they say: Oh well.
I can't complain. That's life. Life on life's terms.
This post typed the old-fashioned way
Meanwhile, I'm using the chip-away method on my dirty car. Whenever I have a big task to do, I tackle it by doing just a little at a time. To "detail" the interior of my beloved 2014 Acura ILX 2.4 with manual transmission (that's it in the top illustration, taken in the dark with the iPhone), I get a container of those car interior wipes, keep it in the car, and just clean a little bit every day. The inside of a door one day, the body sill the next; the center console the next day; the top of the dash the day after that; and so on. Before you know it the whole inside of my car will gleam like new.
Now I'm off to chip away a little bit more on my taxes.
Happy Easter to those of you celebrating!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2024 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:
David L.: "I work in a big box retail store. One of the most common searches is 'I’m looking for my wife/husband.'"
Steve Rosenblum: "As you know, Mike, here in Michigan we have these gigantic Meijer superstores (formerly called 'Meijer Thrifty Acres' before they decided to jettison the reference to their West Michigan Dutch Reformed roots). I believe they were pioneers of the 'superstore' concept because they had the combination grocery store/huge discount store thing going before I started college in 1970, long before Walmart and Target got on that bandwagon. I was amused by your post because even in my college days, long before I became an old man, I found myself in a kind of mild dissociative state after wandering around in there for quite a while trying to find the item I came there to buy without a helpful employee in sight. There didn't seem to be any logic to where things were located, or at least I was unable to perceive it. These days they are somewhat better organized; plus, many of the big box store apps will actually indicate on which section and shelf the item can be found."
Ken James: "Mike, that was the funniest thing I have read in like forever. It was made even more special for me because just on this past Thursday I went to Walmart for the first time ever! I was one of those old men shuffling about aimlessly in total amazement. I went there because they apparently carry a dog food I am feeding my rapidly declining old dog, and yep! I finally found the dog food department and, like you, after wandering that quarter-mile-long aisle for 10 minutes I spotted it on the vast wall in front of me on the very highest shelf, one case left occupying the same 12 inches of shelf space. The whole experience was truly surreal. I could also identify with wandering until I spotted daylight. What an experience. My wife had a similar experience with the tire pressure thing on her car too."
Speed: "Both Home Depot and Lowe's will tell your phone exactly where a product is if you tell them which of their stores you're standing in and exactly what product you are looking for. Their computer knows where their stuff is, why shouldn't you? Some Walmart stores do as well—maybe all but I've not yet shopped in all of their stores. And all three of the above will 'pick' all the products on your list, package them up, charge your credit card and have them waiting for you near the door. Target too."
Question: Do you think it's weird that there's a whole category of keyboards marketed to gamers, as well as many aimed at software developers, coders, and other adepts and computer ninjas, but no category of keyboards marketed to writers? Serious question.
Sign o' the times, as Prince once sang.
I'm having a lot of anxiety about this keyboard situation. I've had a number of situations or experiences in my life when my settled habits and hard-won competencies got blown up for some reason, and I went off the rails and never got back on. The idea that I might never get comfortable typing again is probably irrational and untrue. But irrational fears make you fearful just like rational ones do.
Supine with a shotgun
Here's a brief rundown the main problems with typing posture on flat rectangular keyboards, of which the Apple Keyboard or any laptop keyboard are leading examples.
Starting position: stand or sit with your arms down and your elbows by your side. Raise your forearms till they're parallel with the floor and put your hands straight out, palms down.
Wrist extension: First, from that starting position, move your hands at the wrist till your fingers point upwards. Then flatten just your fingers. That's wrist extension. Wrist extension happens when your flat keyboard is above the level of where you're resting the heels of your hands. It also happens when you're angling your forearms up to reach your desktop. This is a perfectly comfortable movement for healthy hands, but if you work your fingers for hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades with your wrists fixed in an extended position, it becomes a recipe for RSI. It's one reason why your hands are supposed to "float" above the keyboard, with the heels of your hands not touching the desk. Of course few people do that. What many keyboards do instead is to provide little fold-out legs on the underside of the keyboard in the back, to angle the keyboard the wrong way! Because it makes the face of the keyboard and the legends on the keys easier to see.
Hand pronation: In starting position again, with your elbows by your sides and your forearm extended parallel to the floor again, rotate your thumbs upward until your palms are again flat, but facing the ceiling. That's called supination, related to supine, which means lying on your back. T.S. Eliot wrote, In "The Fire Sermon":
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.
The poetic image is of a body lying on its back. Palms up, hand supination; palms down, hand pronation (relates the prone, the position of a soldier firing a rifle lying down; but not in the case of Edwin Throckmorton ("Ebby") Thatcher, who was so drunk when he was trying to shoot pigeons off the roof of his family's empty mansion that when he slipped on the thick wet grass and fell down, he found he could not get up again, so he commenced to firing shotgun blasts at the pigeons while lying supine on the grass. The neighbors called the police). Anyway. If you sit at a cleared table and place your elbows on the table and bring you hands together or nearly together on the table in front of you in the most natural and comfortable position, you'll find that your palms are not dead flat but angled upwards somewhat. When you have to keep them flat with your palms down, as you do when typing on a laptop keyboard, the ulnar bone and the radius bone of the forearm twist and pinch, and the problem is called pronation.
Ulnar angling: This is my term; typing folk rather lazily call it "ulnar deviation," which, strictly speaking, is a medical condition, a semi-permanent deformity caused, usually, by rheumatoid arthritis, not just a way of holding your hand or hands. (The more poetic description for the deformity is windblown hand.) From the starting position, still with your palms down and fingers straight, rotate your flat hands outward towards your pinkies until your fingers of each hand are pointing away from the other hand. Then bring them together in the middle. That angling of the wrist is what causes trouble. (If I had another person here a few photos could illustrate these positions in a jiffy, but the only other nearby being is Butters.)
Hunching: When you bring your wrists together in front of you, then look down, it tends to bring your shoulders forward and inward, curve your back forward, and crane your neck downwards. Sit in this posture persistently and it begins to transfer a significant amount of tension to your shoulders, back, and neck. Ever feel like you need a good shoulder and neck rub after you've been typing for a long time?
Fingertip impact: The last of the major RSI problems is fingertip impact. High-speed typists really pound away at the keyboard. Barbara Blackburn, born 1920, was listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world's fastest typist, with an unofficial speed of 212 WPM on the Dvorak layout. (Keystroking records were removed from the Guinness Book from 1986 onwards.) Evidently it's not feasible to type with a light, delicate, diaphanous touch and still be a speed demon.
Solutions
And here are the ways "ergonomic" keyboards usually try to correct the above problems. The common way to ease ulnar angling is to split the keyboard, almost always along the T-G-B / Y-H-N line. This can either be done by placement on a single, fixed board, like the keyboard I've been using for 30 years, angling each bank of keys inward at the top and outward at the bottom. A custom becoming more common recently is to physically split the keyboard into two independent halves, making it possible to place and angle the keys in relation to your hands in whatever way feels most comfortable. Fascinatingly, I've noticed that some YouTubers, when trying split keyboards for the first time, will angle the halves the wrong way in order to reproduce the undesirable ulnar angling of their wrists that they've long been used to!
Wrist extension can be solved by devising a "wrist rest" for the heels of the hands to rest on that's level with the keys, or by manipulating the relationship of chair, desk, and keyboard until the fingers can rest on the keys with the hands in a relaxed position.
Pronation is solved either by moving the two halves of a physically split keyboard far apart, or by what's called tenting, which means propping up the halves with the inside edge higher than the outside edge, or some combination of these two things. Just keeping the keyboard in one piece prevents adequate tenting, and all the Microsoft-style "ergo" one-piece keyboards offer only a mild bump in the middle for a very low degree of tenting.
A keyboard that is split, has integral wrist-rests, and is tented
Hunching is solved by moving the split halves of a keyboard back toward the body so that the shoulders open up and straighten, the spine can be held straight, and the arms can relax. It takes some getting used to, but it's extraordinary how comfortable it is.
As for fingertip impact, consider what TOP reader John Camp, AKA John Sandford, who has not one but many No. 1 New York Times bestsellers to his credit, said here the other day:
I estimate that I type roughly 400,000 words a year. But the thing is, I'm not trying to type 80 or 60 or 40 words per minute, or any other number, because I frequently pause to think, and reconfigure what I'm about to type, or to rework something I already typed, and I don't know how that would fit into an efficiency calculation. I think I'm efficient enough, and wouldn't get any better with any of the other keyboard styles, but what I really need is something that would keep my fingers and wrists from being damaged by the work.
Human beings love superlatives, and social media reveals a constant striving for extremes. Fastest biggest richest strongest best; idiotic GOAT arguments and "winners"and "losers" separated by hundredths of a second. But in writing (and perhaps even in typing in general) there's no real need to take things to extremes. Nothing much is wanted in most cases past the point of relaxed and accurate competency. Maybe this was not the case when a "draft" of a novel involved retyping the whole thing from start to finish; but now we make corrections, revisions, and emendations inline, thanks to the computer. And words look the same on the page regardless of whether you typed them quickly or slowly. The overall average speed of all typists is believed to be ~40 WPM. Many of the world's greatest authors wrote their works in longhand—some with a sharpened goose feather dipped in ink, and that can't be fast. And one can be a writer typing no faster than Archy the cockroach hopping around on the keys of Don Marquis' mechanical typewriter, the only kind they had in those days. That's probably why there are no keyboards made specifically for writers. (Although wouldn't it be a good marketing strategy?)
However, safety is something else. Apple could be leading the way here, but it chooses instead to contribute to the problem, leaving innovations in RSI prevention to small independent (and typically undercapitalized) companies like the pioneer Kinesis or the next-gen innovator ZSA. As many as 60% of people who type all day for their jobs will suffer RSI at some point in their lives (my right hand hurts right now). It is the number one cause of lost productivity in the white collar workplace, keeping workers out of commission for an average of 23 days per injury. Its more insidious forms, such as the dreaded carpal tunnel syndrome, are frustratingly persistent and slow to heal.
So while moderate typing speed is usually enough, it's still of crucial importance to "keep [your] fingers and wrists from being damaged by the work," in John's words. It's a field in which not much progress has yet been made.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2024 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:
Joshua Rothman: "As a writer myself, I know exactly what you mean. I use the Keychron Q11 split keyboard. I think it has brown switches. I'm nowhere near as far down the rabbit hole as you, but I did have my own little keyboard adventure, and since landing on the Q11 my wrist pain has gone away—even my tennis elbow seems better!"
ASW: "When I was a kid my mom put me in piano lessons. I remember that after 10–15 minutes of playing (very poorly) my wrists and forearms would start to hurt. The hand placement never felt natural to me. I've never had a similar issue with typing (on a basic desktop or laptop keyboard). I think that my perfectionism might play a role. I rarely type more than a few sentences at a time before pausing to reconsider, and usually change or even delete the majority of what I just typed. It makes for horribly inefficient writing progress, but gives me plenty of rest, and so far has prevented any RSI issues despite spending lots of time at the computer most days.
"As far as the key pounding goes, my wife's typing (even through walls and doors) sounds like a high-speed jackhammer in action. I'm a pretty light typer, again because I spend far more time pondering than typing."
Ken James: "Hi Mike, Have not typed you in a long time.
"How high is your desktop? Standard desk height? I over the years have made several desks. I make the top surface be 24 inches give a take a bit. My current desk is 25. In the past I used plywood for the whole thing but for this last one I bought legs on Etsy and put 2x12's on top. I did a bunch of stuff to the timber to make it pretty but you don't have to. This might well solve all or most of the wrist problems. Might. I also find a trackpad to be much better than a mouse. I designed home office systems for 12 years or so, so have thought about this a bit."
Mike replies: I have a sit-stand (adjustable height) desk that's 25" off the floor in its lowest position, and that is indeed what I use with the keyboard in the illustration above—I'm happy to have an expert encourage it! The adjustable height from a standing position is great for experimenting.
In 2021 (probably as a COVID distraction) I decided to start wearing a watch again. But I needed a watch. Just one. I bought, um, eight.
Last year, I decided I could make myself happier if I learned to enjoy all the everyday things I dislike doing. High on the list was to learn how to enjoy shaving. (I had always disliked shaving.) I looked into all kinds of shaving methods and decided to try "wet" shaving, the term of art for shaving with single old-fashioned double- and single-edged razor blades. Once I settled on that, I needed a razor. Again, just one. Instead, I bought a drawer full of supplies and...well, seven razors, eventually.
Sensing a trend?
Well, now I've bought three new computer keyboards. Please don't throw popcorn at me. I feel bad enough.
But it's not a new hobby, and, although I am currently mimicking an obsessed person, I'm not obsessed. I've been obs...preoccupied with keyboards of late only because I have to be. Because—speaking of late—my Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard also lately became late, as in late of this world. I've owned 12–15 of them over the past 30 years, meaning I've worn out 11–14. I'm on my last one. My old warhorse got discontinued in 2019, Amazon tells me I bought this one in 2021 for $59, and the replacement is much cheaper in every way except price. New old stock old ones go for $400 and will run out soon. I was never all that attached to the 4000, but I like the replacement less. So I decided to jump ship. A weighty decision when you consider that tapping on a keyboard all day is pretty much what I do.
Here are the stages I go through when I get on one of these jags:
Unfortunately, when you acquire something that's going to be part of your life going forward, you usually have to spend some money. The reason is that it costs money to demystify the topic. And the best way to demystify the topic is to try different things firsthand as you learn about the subject. You read stuff, research, you ask your friends for advice, diddle about at stores, and try things out, doing your best to get a handle on things. They begin to sort out in your mind. Along the way, mysterious preferences emerge that seem to make sense but are actually based on some mysterious combination of sunshine, endorphins, and how much sleep you got. (That's another way of saying, sometimes the brain just gloms on to things for no good reason except that something appeals to us. Or we think it's going to.)
To really decide, you need experience. Hands-on. Sometimes you need to own the dang thing a while.
Here's a rundown of those stages:
Investigate: I write, so I've gotten very good at quickly getting the gist of things. When I get interested in something, I don't just dive in, I dive in like an Ama pearl diver off the coast of Japan. Deep, and fast, and unburdened. I can get the general lay of the land in a new hobby or pursuit remarkably quickly. It was only a couple of weeks before I knew all I needed to about watches; a few weeks before I could write a detailed primer article about the wet shaving world (I wrote it, but I spared you, you're welcome); and I'm getting there with the mechanical keyboard hobby. I already know what POM, ABS, PBT, WoB, 40–60–75–80–100, red–green-brown–white, MX, layers, superkeys, VIA, Gateron, Kailh, Topre, Das Alpha Zulu, Gamakay, Filco, WASD, Colemak-DH, Workman, Carpalx, Capewell, buckling switch, KAM, XDA, DSA, group buy, shine-through, double-shot, and barebones all mean, among much else. (It's a complicated little hobby, I'll just say that. My own Wiki is on little scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes all over my desk.)
I once asked my friend O.G. the OG* why he has 45 view cameras in his house. He said he felt like he wanted to demystify view cameras; he wanted to know the whole territory for himself, see them, use them, know them. It's become an important concept for me. When we're choosing an implement/accessory of any sort (camera, DE razor, keyboard, bicycle, telescope, pool table, you name yours) it's no use being a virgin. You can't shop and choose just from reading reviews and hearing advice. You don't really know how you're going to feel about something until you try it.
Choose: You can get lost in the investigation stage. Some people never come back from it; they decide to become ongoing experts in their little corner of the Universe of Schtuff, and before you know it you know everything there is to know about Dwarf Fortress or vacuum tubes for amplifiers or carbon-fiber bicycle frames, or whatever. However, if your concentration is on the doing rather than the equipment, then the investigation stage needs to come to an end (or at least enter long pauses) and a choice must needs be made. For example, after trying five DE razors I alighted on a revamped 1940s razor called a Tech that Gillette used to sell to the working class for a few pennies, the better to sell blades. I didn't really "decide"; I just kept coming back to it over and over again. I liked it.
Challenge: Next, you decide if there is anything else out there that vies with your choice, something that is along the same lines but might be better, and you get one of those and compare it to your choice and see if it is better. So once I realized that I liked the Tech, I put it up against a few other mild nonadjustable razors, a modern Tech-type copy, and also investigated the history of the Tech and tried different vintages of them. I also had to put an expensive razor up against it to see if I was missing something by choosing something so inherently cheap. In some cases a challenger will replace the early choice, in other cases the choice will withstand the challenges. We're still being rational at this stage, by the way.
Settle: This step is important. Nothing's perfect. If you chase perfection in every parameter you'll get lost in La-La Land and put yourself in a perpetual state of wistful wanting. Like, in keyboards, people who leave QWERTY behind for an alternative layout (Colemak-DH appeals to me, see above about sunshine endorphins and sleep) but then can't quit futzing with further key position changes and modifiers, alert for every bigram that has a hint of awkwardness to it. (A downside of on-the-fly re-mappable keyboards.) I've used so many cameras over the years that there is always something that I can say "but I wish it had..." about. Remember a principle I talked about long ago: the closer two alternatives are to each other, the more fanatically humans will argue about which is best and the more minutely they will compare them, but the less it matters which choice you actually make. I once wrote the following on the now-ancient CompuServe Photography Forum:
OP: "Should I use a Nikon or a Canon?"
Me: "Yes."
There comes a point when you "let the tail go with the hide" as the old buffalo hunters used to say, and just deal with your choice as it exists.
Optimize: Once you've chosen and settled, optimize. Makes sure you got a good sample, that everything's set up as you want it, all the little accessories it needs are with it, that it's been customized and decorated or kitted out. In this phase you're putting the finishing touches on. Not too important, except it makes it feel like it's yours.
Put it in the rearview mirror: I once opined that the most important thing about choosing a camera is "stopping shopping." I had a long discussion with friends the other night about obsessions, and we decided that an "obsession" in the non-pathological sense is something self-destructive that you can't help doing. With photography, the situation is particularly dire, because I have witnessed many people over the years become permanently lost to the process of shopping; they never stop, and the shopping itself becomes their hobby. As long as you are also out using the equipment on a regular basis, I see nothing wrong with that, but shopping for cameras and lenses and related gear, if you never stop, is not photography—it's a parallel hobby related to photography. For years, I had a parallel hobby investigating lenses. It's only when it becomes excessively unbalanced that it segues into obsession: the audiophile with the $4,000 (or $40,000) turntable who only owns a few test records, the collector who has 40 (or 400) film Leicas but has never really gotten to grips with learning how to handle one.
I'm not obsessed with keyboards. I don't intended to get into it as a hobby. I just need one, is all. For the record, I bought eight watches, but I have two favorites and those are the only ones I wear. Or need. I doubt I'll ever buy any more watches. I like those two, and I alternate between them, and I'm good with that. And I bought seven DE razors and tried many of the various aspects of that hobby (because that's what it is), but I've settled on my razor, my blade, my way of lubricating my face—everything I personally need from beginning to end. It took me only a matter of two or three months to go through the six stages of acquisition, from (admittedly intense) investigation to putting behind me everything except what I personally needed. Heck, I had to buy four(!) pool tables before I got that business over and done with. I'm a Gold Crown I guy for life, now.
My new/used Dygma Raise, tented
And I'll do the same thing with keyboards. A keyboard called the Dygma Raise arrived yesterday, and oh, my God—it is the most comfortable keystroking device of any kind I have ever laid my hands on. Over the top ergonomic. In my mind I have already jumped to the Optimization stage, although I still have one more challenger, the Kinesis Edge RGB, to compare it to. The Keychron Q11, seductive as it was, is all packed up and ready to go back to Amazon.
I would love to write reviews of a few of these keyboards. Just the ergonomics, though. I forgot to mention that my six stages of acquisition are based on what a reviewer naturally does: you have to come up to speed quickly, learn enough so that you can write a report, and then resign yourself to moving on to the next thing. But I'll spare you the keyboard reviews, too.
There's a handicap that keeps me from expertise in this case: I can't type. A guy who can't ski can't review skis. Which brings up the other wrinkle in the keyboard journey: it involves a long training stage. What do they call it? Oh yeah, "long learning curve." Even people who are already fast touch-typists on standard keyboards can need at least a short acclimation period to split keyboards, new layouts, and keyboards with minimal keysets that work with layers and superkeys. (A layer is just what it sounds like: when you hold a regular key down, the functions of all the other keys automatically remap to different characters. A superkey is a key that types different characters according to the code you use when tapping the key: hold the hyphen key down and it types an m-dash, which is usually option+shift+hyphen. When you rapidly type two spaces on your phone when texting and a period appears, that's basically a superkey.) This, for instance, is a complete keyboard:
This Corne LP is a complete keyboard, on which you type any character available on a 101-key keyboard and more. But it takes a little getting used to.
For example, those nine keys at the right could remap to numbers for a numpad, with the right-most thumb key as the zero/zed.
So it could be that the journey is just beginning. I have some training to go through. If I fail, my fallback will be to simply go find another Microsoft-style "ergo" keyboard similar to my old 4000. Since the 4000 was the OG, there are lots and lots of clones out there, from the Mac-centric Macally (can you see the flaw in that one? I see it right away) to the Logitech K860. That won't get me any further along than I am now, but the transition period will be short.
I dig this Dygma, though. The Leica of keyboards.
Hope you enjoy this day, the first football-free Sunday of the Winter!
Mike
*"original gangster," if you don't know the term. Example of an OG: in the masterful TV series "The Wire" (which I have argued elsewhere is the Great American Novel come 'round at last), Melvin Williams, the guy who played the community activist "The Deacon," was himself a reformed drug dealer on whose earlier life the character of Avon Barksdale, the boss of the drug dealers early in the series, played by Wood Harris, was partly based. Literally the OG.
Original contents copyright 2024 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:
Richard G.: "Mike, now that you've gone down the rabbit hole and settled on a shaving razor, have you settled on a blade? I looked at one website and there appear to be several dozen for sale. This could keep you occupied for the rest of your life. LOL"
Mike replies: You laugh, but...there are guys who review blades, and guys who compile charts on blades, and lists of where blades are manufactured, and guys who have stockpiled thousands of blades—easy to do since they're sold by the hundred.
I use Kai blades from Japan. The reason is that there was a fascinating study with an electron microscope at the Engineering School at MIT which showed that the way that blades "dull" is that little tiny pieces break off at the edges of striations caused by the grinding tool. If you imagine the cross-section, the edges of most blades are very pointed; the edge of a Kai blade has a more blunted profile. So they're not quite as sharp at first, but they last longer and are more consistent presumably because they don't chip. Also, the Kai blades are just a tiny bit wider than standard (give me time and I could get you the numbers), which makes them a little more aggressive in the Tech, which is a mild razor, and gives it a little more blade feel. A good match, to my taste. "YMMV," an initialism very widely used on the shaving fora.
Albert Smith: "Re '...and we decided that an obsession is something self-destructive that you can't help doing.' Yep. The COVID lockdown caused me to break my frugal way of life and click 'add to cart' repeatedly and redundantly in the world of watches, partially inspired by the thread on this forum that discussed why watches were still valid in this day and age. I just ordered a new field watch this morning after receiving two Fleiger pilot watches last week that I haven't worn for more than a hour. Life was simpler when I was broke."
Speed: "My rule for cameras is to always have one that is better than I—so that any defects in my photographs are the result of my ignorance and/or incompetence. As I approach competence and my favorite camera manufacturer releases a new model, I buy a new camera. Usually untouched and unseen. A little adventure is good. And cars...I can't remember ever driving a new model before buying one. Sometimes I'm surprised but so far, never disappointed."
John Krumm: "I have a mild case of what you have, the sniffles, perhaps, not the chills and cough and fever dreams. I settle quickly. My incentive to do so comes from really hating to sell stuff, and feeling guilty wasting family money on too many watches or razors to try out. So I have an expensive (for me) iWatch I only use for a bedside alarm now, the wonderful Casio Oceanus you wrote about (my wife reads your site for gift ideas and surprised me with it) and a less expensive solar Citizen that sits ignored now. I dislike the process of selling individual camera items so much that I happily lose about 50% of their value by boxing everything up I don't want and sending it to KEH."
Mike replies: I wish I could do that with my whole house. Actually that is the part of the whole process that I am by far the worst at. The extra six watches and six razors are of course still hanging around. I need to sell them but....
Melanie: "Your post is freakishly relatable, right down to shaving devices—at least, until the reality of cut legs quickly set me straight. (However, I'm happy to have never fallen down the rabbit hole to keyboard Wonderland.) The information collection Investigate stage is really the funnest part, and presumably replaces earlier hunter/gatherer functions for humans living in the 21st century.
"In any given week, if I don't have something to obsessively research, then I'm not as well armed with tools to hold off a mental health crisis. Hitting on a new obsession is (I expect) like winning at pokies. Sometimes I even walk away from it without losing any money!"
Mike replies: :-) Made me smile.
However sometimes I wonder whether having something to obsessively research is the mental health crisis in my case. I get like a dachshund chasing a badger. I have to keep telling myself, no, if it's something you need and you stop shopping once you settle, you're still okay, if tenuously so. So as soon as I start obsessively researching guitars (I can't play a lick) and climbing equipment (I'm scared of heights) and private jets (I'm lower middle class in a good year) then you can lock me up in Ward No.6. (Chekhov reference, in return for your Alice reference.)
I have a tiny little first-world problem, but one that I still have yet to solve. And one that I have to solve.
I had better solve it. I feel like a veteran photographer whose favorite material has just been discontinued. I could tell you stories about that. (I was going to, but this post got too long.)
Very brief background: I made the decision to hunt-and-peck on my then-brand-new typewriter, a gift from my grandmother, when I was 14. I remember it clearly. Bad decision. Very bad. I told myself back then that I was never going to need to know how to type. Nobody told me computers were a-comin'.
Apple Extended II keyboard, 1987–1994
When computers did arrive, I didn't think they had too much to do with me. But big honky mechanical keyboards like the IBM Model M seemed fine. They typed more or less like my father's IBM Selectric electric typewriter. Didn't confront me either way. Then I started using the Macintosh in 1984, the year it came out. It came with a keyboard, so, once more, I never thought about keyboards. Although I never even saw one that I'm aware of, Apple's last big mechanical keyboard, the Extended / Extended II, came out in 1987 and was discontinued in 1994. Was that about when the tiny, flat, "chiclet key" keyboards for the Macs, a smart and stylish design accessory as well as a petite but pestilent pox upon persons, began to show up? Whenever they arrived, I never got along with them even a little bit. Even my early Powerbook 190 (picture), one of my top-three all-time favorite Macs, had better keys. By the time chiclet keyboards proceeded upon their plaguey proliferation, I was already having problems with RSI (repetitive strain injury). They made it kick in even worse. My hands, wrists and arms seemed to always hurt somewhere. The more I typed the more it hurt.
I still have this taped to my monitor. Thirty years is not long
enough to ease my Windows vs. Mac confusions.
One of the first "ergonomic" keyboards, Microsoft's then-radical Natural Ergonomic keyboard, came out in 1994. Microsoft's very first keyboard. I got one; my hands felt better. It was made for PC's, and half the features didn't work on my Macs, but I got used to it. It eventually morphed into the physically identical Natural Ergonomic 4000, which I'll abbreviate NE4k. I've now been using them for 30 years.
Malicious obsolescence
I've gone through more than a dozen. Usually the first point of failure is that the legends wear off the keys, which is ridiculous—simply poor manufacturing, never corrected. They fail in a variety of different ways. Annoying little problems crop up; on my current one, the Shift key is slow to release, so capitalized words not infrequently look like THis. Eventually they get dirty; I even tried cleaning one in the dishwasher, following instructions I found online! It worked, but it was a project. It was easier to just buy a new one when the old one got grody, or lost its feel, or started sticking, or wore out.
When you use something every day for 30 years, you get used to it. I can now "hunt and peck" on a NE4k without much, well, hunting. (I do have to look down from time to time for specific keys, or to re-orient myself.) I basically type with three fingers, plus one thumb for the spacebar—sometimes a fourth and fifth finger for specific reaches—but I can do it while barely looking at the keyboard. Unfortunately, I can do that only on my keyboard. My exact keyboard, the NE4k. With other keyboards—even (perhaps especially) with those that look similar to the NE4k but are just that little skosh different—my effed-up muscle memory is just wrong enough that I can barely type at all.
Confession: Actually, if I'm honest, my typing is so idiosyncratic and wrong that I have good typing days and bad. This sounds absurd, but it's true—sometimes I make so many mistakes that I give up for the day. Other days my fingers fly. My typing speed goes from about 25 WPM + frustration on bad days to as high as 55–60 WPM on the best days. I don't know what makes the difference. Brain farts? The phase of the moon? Leprechauns in charge?
Here's the rub, alas: the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 went the way of all things in 2019. Discontinued. I wasn't aware, or I would have bought a dozen and salted them away*. I'm on my last one now, and the usual signs of decay and failure are starting to appear.
I have to do something about this. And the sooner I start the better, I'm guessing. Unless it's already too late for that.
You might think that the replacement for the NE4k would be the natural choice, but not so. The NE4k is far from well-built—a creaky plasticky slab—inexplicably with dog hairs under the keys!—but the confusingly named 2019 Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard (MEK), which Microsoft just handed off to a company called Incase to make and sell, is much worse. I have two. Cheap and flimsy. The NE4k itself was hardly known for having great feel, but the MEK doesn't rise to the NE4k's modest standard. Made to sell, not to use. Bleh, and yech. It's also not an exact duplicate of the NE4k, so it almost fits my muscle memory but not quite. I type on it like I've suffered a TBI, no offense. I dislike it.
Voyage to the unknown
When I first tried to deal with this problem a few years back, it seemed to me that the solution would be to learn something entirely new and completely different. My old habits are just going to frustrate me if I tried to duplicate the keyboard I'm used to, I figured. The NE4k is not coming back.
I feel like I'm a good candidate to learn touch typing at this point, although maybe this old dog can't learn new tricks. A few years ago I did some research and got a regular straight, flat mechanical tenkeyless keyboard, but within mere days it became clear that that's never going to work for me—my hands started hurting almost immediately. I then splurged on what seemed to be the most ergonomic of all ergonomic keyboards, the Kinesis Advantage 2. Since I intended to learn an all-new keyboard anyway, I also tried to learn the Dvorak layout and touch-typing all at the same time. Three radically new things all at once was probably, ah, overly ambitious (my most realistic friend, Ken Tanaka, probably could have predicted that!), but at the time I felt like I was mostly doing it as a mental exercise. I ended up getting up to 20 WPM with that setup. I worked on it every day for months. But only 15 to 30 minutes a day. Muscle memory never kicked in. Eventually I stopped tilting at that particular windmill.
Back to the drawing board, down to brass tacks
A few days ago I hauled the Kinesis Advantage 2 out of the closet again, wiped the dust off, switched the keyset back to a QWERTY layout from Dvorak, and started in again at keybr.com. Sigh.
(As an aside, here's a great explanation of why keybr. might be the best "learn how to type" site. As Popeye would say, faskinatin'.)
I'm not sure the Advantage 2 is for me. I've used it a lot, and although it's easy on my hands, I can't seem to get the hang of it. So I've started poking about the wilds of the unknown 'Net for other alternatives. All I know is that I'm going to have to learn something new. And that I'd better get to it.
Keychron Alice V10, with a Keychron Pro K Blue switch
I don't think there's any answer to this problem other than to pick a keyboard, set goals, and get down to work.
Looking at the Keychron Alice right now. Looks nice. No idea if I'd like it better or worse. How would I know? I've been with one keyboard for three decades, and that's longer than all but 26.2% of marriages last.
This is just a very old bad decision circling back around to bite me. Ever made a casual decision you came to regret later? We all have, so no use complaining. I am just a bit peeved at 14-year-old me right now, though! Jeez, young Mike, just take a typing class** and do it right. Why did you always have to be different?!
Mike
*Actually I just discovered this morning that there are still a few available new on Amazon, but for $399. They used to be $59. I could buy one of those, I guess, but it would only delay the inevitable.
**Available for free at my high school just for signing up, and, as a bonus, full of girls. Dumb, Mike. I probably thought I'd be the most awkward and slowest typist in the class, and I didn't want to look bad in front of all those girls. That's important when you're 14.
Original contents copyright 2024 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" is the often off-topic Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Sundays, allegedly and theoretically.]
Photo by Douwe C. van der Zee
—>The first thing made by humans that was taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza was the spire of Lincoln Cathedral in Lincoln, England, completed in 1311. That meant that the Great Pyramid held the record as the tallest structure built by humans for some 3,800 years. Lincoln Cathedral held the title until 1548, when the spire collapsed and was not rebuilt.
—>Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon.
—>The Slovenian basketball player Luka Dončić, 24, who plays for the Dallas Mavericks and has been in the NBA for six years, currently holds the third-highest lifetime scoring average of all time in the NBA, 28.3 points per game (PPG). The only two players ahead of him are Wilt Chamberlain and Michael Jordan. In playoffs, Dončić has a career PPG of 32.5, second only to Michael Jordan. A week ago last Friday, he scored 73 points in a game, a tie for fourth-highest in League history. The two players who have scored more than 73 points in one game are Wilt Chamberlain, who did it twice, and Kobe Bryant.
—>Humans are the only animals that cry tears in response to emotions, and the only animals that have chins.
—>The worst business move in history might not have been such a bad move. You probably know that there was a third founder of Apple Computer, Ronald G. Wayne, who immediately sold his 10% interest in the company back to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for $800. A year later he was paid an additional $1,500 to forfeit any future claims to the then newly-incorporated business. Today, his share would be worth approximately $95 billion. Wayne has stated on numerous occasions that he does not regret his decision. The reason is that he was intended to be the tiebreaker in disagreements between the two intense and headstrong Steves, the stress of which, he believes, would have made him "the richest man in the cemetery."
—>Human beings have been recognizably human for somewhere between 90,000 and 300,000 years, depending on how you look at it. Even if we survive as a species for that many more years, no human being will ever again experience the climate that existed in 1970.
—>Australia is wider than the moon.
—>The economy of the State of California is larger than that of all but four countries on Earth: China, Germany, Japan, and the United States itself (although India is close and the U.K. not too far behind India). Vermont's economy, the smallest in the U.S., is higher than that of 108 countries.
—>In 2018, there were more immigrants to the U.S. from both China and India than from Mexico. In addition, Mexico in recent years has seen an undetermined but large flow of former immigrants returning to Mexico. The same was true of Irish immigrants in the 1800s, many of whom eventually returned to Ireland.
—>The number of bacteria in our bodies outnumbers our human cells; we are about 56% bacteria. However, bacteria are very light, so we are still approximately 99.7% human by weight.
—>In photography's first seventy years or so, it was considered childish to smile while having one's picture taken, and adults said "prunes" before the picture was taken to remind them to remain appropriately serious*. Eastman Kodak eventually changed this with its ad campaigns by encouraging people to smile and say "cheese." Now, the custom among Americans of grinning all the time is considered an oddity by some Europeans.
Mike
*I've requested a copy of the scholarly paper that purports to document this, but haven't received it yet. If I am sent a copy I'll let you know.
Original contents copyright 2024 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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This time of this year marks ten years for me without a TV. It wasn't a momentous decision; I moved in 2014 and just never hooked up the TV in the new house. I got resentful of the fake culture of advertisements—the insincere bonhomie on the surface and the cutthroat competitive greed behind it. Marketing is mostly lying. I got tired of the lying. Plus, the older I get, the less interested I am in any of the things they're advertising.
Lamar Jackson, Baltimore Ravens quarterback, interacts with service members after practice at Ravens Training Camp Facility in Owings Mills, Md., July 30, 2018. More than 1,000 service members from throughout the National Capital Region filled the stands to watch as players and coaches ran a variety of drills and scrimmages. Photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Delano Scott.
However, sports is the thing I miss the most about TV, and today is the day I find it most difficult to not have a TV. It's not that I'm a huge American football fan, but, because of the game highlights and all the analysis and commentary available on YouTube, I've followed it pretty closely this year for the first time in many years. I would have loved to watch the Chiefs take on the Ravens in the early game today and (even more) see the Lions vs. the 49ers in the late game. Out of the four teams, I'm rooting for the Lions, but my money would be on the Ravens to beat the 49ers in the Super Bowl. They've been the two strongest teams all year. Lamar Jackson is the League's best quarterback. Which is saying something because it's a strong group.
Also, the Australian Open tennis final was sensational this year, with the 22-year-old Italian Jannik Sinner coming back from two sets down against the master tactician, 27-year-old Daniil Medvedev of Russia. It was Sinner's first major title and only the second time an Italian man has won a major tournament in the open era, the first being Adriano Panatta in the French Open way back in 1976. That would have had me jumping out of my seat.
I also like watching the baseball World Series, despite not being a big baseball fan either. I like basketball too, and follow it more than I follow the other major American team sport aside from football, but I've never been one to watch whole basketball games from start to finish. And I've never rooted for any particular team. I'm more interested in the culture of it, and in individual players and their accomplishments. Basketball is the most physical of the major sports and requires the most physical and mental genius. I find it fascinating how different great basketball players can be. It's almost bizarre that the best basketball player in the NBA right now is a phlegmatic Serbian white guy with an unfashionable haircut and no discernible muscle tone who can't jump over a dollar bill.
The sport I feel closest to is tennis, because I played it for many years when I was young. I should never have stopped: it's said to be the best exercise of all for seniors. The sport I love the most, however, is one that I've never played a single game of and have never once seen played in person: snooker. What a great game, beautifully designed, with distinct phases in each frame, and a multitude of different skills required. In that sport, Ronnie O'Sullivan just became the oldest as well as the youngest man ever to win the Masters, hoisting his eighth trophy, a record, just two weeks ago. It would take more than a whole post to recount his accomplishments and records. Snooker fans believe, quite sincerely, that O'Sullivan is more dominant, decorated, and flat-out brilliant than any active player in any other sport, worldwide.
One could at least make the case. But snooker is an oddly localized game; deeply entrenched in UK, it's played almost entirely in the UK and China, with a smattering of players hailing from India, Australia, and elsewhere. As far as the US is concerned, well, there's only one snooker table in the United States, and it's in storage. That's just a joke I heard once. But it's virtually unknown here. And so of course snooker is never on television here—yet another reason to not care that I don't have a TV.
Enjoy the football today, if you're a fan. Today I wish I lived at your house!
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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Dennis Mook: "When younger I used to love to play sports. When older, I transitioned to enjoy watching the competitions on television, that is until the commerical breaks became unbearable. There are so many advertisements today, sometimes 4-5 minutes in length, that it completely interrupts the rhythm of a game. That spoils it for me. I’ll just watch the highlights now. But I really miss the enjoyment of the continuity of the games."
Kenneth G Voigt: "I have Dish TV. I never watch anything live. Dish automatically records the programs I have selected (on a recurring basis) and I watch at my leisure. I NEVER WATCH A COMMERCIAL. I use 'Fast Forward' or the '30 sec jump' button to skip all commercials."
Keith Cartmell: "Each to their own. My opinion of sports on TV, especially football (not soccer) is that it is the modern manifestation of Roman policy, 'give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.'"
Stephen Cowdery: "I've lost my interest in most sports as well, however I've become enamored of women's curling, maybe as close to ballet as any sport is."
