What Would Jimmy Do?

Friday the 13th. Lots of people believe the unluckiest day is Friday the 13th — some people have an actual fear of the day and won’t travel, make decisions or even get out of bed on that day. The fear of Friday the 13th is known as friggatriskaidekaphobia and supposedly more than 20 million Americans suffer from it. If someone is only afraid of the number 13, they suffer from triskaidekaphobia.

Friday the 13th comes around every year — at least once. It’s possible to come around as often as three times in a single year. In 1984, Friday the 13th occurred three times, and each one occurred exactly 13 week apart. The unlucky days that year were January 13, April 13 and July 13. It’s interesting that in order for a month to have a Friday the 13, it must begin on a Sunday.

No one knows exactly were the superstition of bad luck comes from — supposedly the reason the number 13 gets a bad rap is because it comes after 12, which is considered a number of “completeness.” There is 12 hours on a clock, 12 months in a year, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 days of Christmas, 12 Zodiac signs, 12 Apostles of Jesus, 12 eggs in a dozen, etc.

Friday the 13th has been associated with bad luck from biblical times. Many believe the it stems from the idea that the 12th guest at the Last Supper was the one who betrayed Jesus prior to his death, which occurred on a Friday.

But the number 13 just can’t catch a break — there are 13 twists of the rope in a traditional hangman’s noose and 13 steps to the gallows. In Formula 1 racing, there is no car allowed with the number 13 — the number has been removed after two drivers were killed in crashes, both driving cars numbered 13. Bad guys like, Charles Manson, Saddam Hussein, Jeffery Dammer, Theodore Bundy and Jack The Ripper each have 13 letters in their names. Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13 (1889) so on Friday, August 13, 1999 would have been his 100th birthday….
I don’t know if any of this is significant, but I might add that there are 13 witches in a coven.

Probably just as many good things as bad happen on Friday the 13th, but then again, why take a chance — a friend of mine believes it is bad luck to fall out of a thirteenth story window on a Friday. Luckily, a lot of buildings don’t have a 13th floor (check the elevators.) Just remember that superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational — but — how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
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Probably not many people have noticed, but I haven’t updated this blog in quite a while. Lots of things have happened in the world and in our household in the past couple of months — some of which I’ll probably mention in this forum, some I won’t.

Anyhow, today is Mother’s Day — a holiday founded by Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. It was made a national holiday in 1914 by President Wilson. Interestingly, Anna Jarvis filed a lawsuit in an effort to stop the over-commercialization of Mother’s Day. As you can probably surmise — she lost. Anna had hoped the day would be a day of reflection and quiet prayer by families, thanking God for all that mothers had done.

You’ve probably heard that Mother’s Day is the busiest phone day of the year with people making in excess of 122.5 million phone calls. It’s also a big card giving day — estimated number of Mother’s Day cards this year is 152 million.

Claire is a mother, a Godmother, a grandmother, and a mother-in-law, so she’s pretty well got the bases covered.
Happy Mother’s day to Claire — and all the other mothers….
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The Presidential campaign is heating up and it seems like politics and politicians have reached a new low. I’m not sure how much being “politically correct” means anymore — at least not with politicians. But I was thinking about how things I used to say and hear all my life have recently become politically incorrect and now everyone (except the politicians) has to be very careful not to offend anyone.

Blind people are now visually challenged, deaf people are aurally challenged, ugly people are aesthetically challenged, fat or heavy-set people are now people of mass. Psychopaths are socially misaligned, crooks are ethically challenged, short people are statured differently.
Minority groups are numerically challenged groups, females are persons of gender and I’m pretty sure a drooling drunk idiot would be referred to as a person on the floor. Janitors go by sanitation engineers, dish washers are utensil sanitizers, farming is exploiting mother earth and a paper bag is a processed tree carcass.

And of course even the politically correct are only politically correct for a period of time….
Deaf became hearing impaired before becoming aurally challenged and blind was sight impaired prior to being visually challenged. Retarded is not acceptable at all, while mentally handicapped has been replaced with mentally challenged. Fat isn’t acceptable — big boned was ok for a while, but the correct terminology is now alternative body image.

So — has our politically correct culture gone too far? It is never proper to use any language when talking to, or about, another human being that would purposely hurt or offend them. However, if these changes in terminology are meant to censor the person’s right to free speech, that censorship undermines American values. I’m not saying it’s happened, but political correctness has gone too far when people become afraid to speak the truth or their own minds for fear of becoming labeled a racist or sexist or upsetting some individual or group. Like any “movement,” political correctness needs to be exercised with a bit of common sense….
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Since the weather has warmed up, our golf group played a couple of times this week. During one of the discussions, the origin of the use of the word “fore” to alert other golfers of a ball coming their way came up. Of course none of us knew any more about the origin of the term than we do about playing golf. I decided as a service to our group as well as both the readers of this blog, to do some extensive research.

Turns out that, as often is the case, no one really knows how the term came to be used as a ‘heads up.’ The Oxford English Dictionary indicates it was first used as a warning cry to people in front of a golf stroke in 1878 and believes it is an abbreviation of the word ‘before.’
I found several explanations, or “stories” that were interesting….
Because golf balls were expensive, early golfers employed “Forecaddies” to stand where the ball might land and reduce the number of lost balls. (This is still done today in professional golf tournaments.) Golfers probably shouted to their forecaddie, who would always be some distance ahead, to draw attention to the fact the ball was coming. In time, this was shortened to “Fore.”
One explanation given by the USGA, is that the term comes from the military battle craft of musket days, when rank after rank would fire fusillades — some over the heads of those in front. Speculation has it that the term Fore! might have been used to warn those in front to keep their head down.
The first explanation makes more sense to me — I’m not sure why golf would choose to use military terms….

Going with the “forecaddie” theory, looking up caddie reveals it comes from the French word ‘le cadet’ meaning ‘the boy’ or the youngest of the family. Adopting French terms wasn’t unusual for the Scots and leads to the theory that French military ‘cadets’ carried the clubs for the golfing royalty in France and the practice came to Scotland. The term came to be used for a general purpose porter or errand boy in Scottish towns in the 18th century. By the mid-1800s, caddie began to be used mainly for those who carried golf clubs. In the early days there were no bags and the clubs were carried in a bundle.

So I’m going with the forecaddie explanation — I imagine if golf balls were very expensive, it was a lot cheaper to hire a forecaddie. I think if anyone in our golf group could hit a golf ball far enough to lose it, we might think about using forecaddies….
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Be Nasty Day is celebrated every year on March 8. As both my faithful readers know, I’m usually into holidays, but I’ve never celebrated this one. I think I know some nasty people, but to be sure I checked the dictionary — nasty is defined as”
• Physically filthy; disgustingly unclean
• Offensive to taste or smell; nauseating
• Offensive; objectionable
• Vicious, spiteful or ugly
• Bad or hard to deal with, encounter, undergo, etc.

So, based on that definition, I think I do know some nasty people. But I still don’t know how to go about celebrating Be Nasty Day. Should you attempt to reform nasty people by turning the other cheek and being extra nice, or should you show everyone your nasty side? Maybe we should all just think of nasty things to say to people, like…. I’m not anti-social — I just don’t like you, or something similar.

Actually, I’ve decided, we don’t need a day to be nasty – there’s enough nastiness to go around every day. So on this Be Nasty Day, I’m choosing to celebrate it by being nicer to nasty people rather than being nasty for the day. I think Buddha said to be kind to unkind people; they need it the most!!
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Today is Al’s Birthday. Al was my brother-in-law, but more importantly, he was my best friend. He is remembered as a true warrior, who fought until the end. He never gave up. He was a man of many talents and many friends. He never told anyone how to live — he just lived, and we’re all better off having watched him do it.

Losing a friend is one of the biggest challenges we face — as the years pass, it becomes less about “what we have lost” and more about who they were, what they thought us, and how we can share that with others. That’s one of the best ways we can honor our loved ones who have passed on — to share with others what we learned from them.

So Happy Birthday, Al! I’m sure you’re having a big party up there today. Have fun, but remember to keep your halo on….
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You’ve probably noticed that a disagreement between Apple and the FBI has been getting a lot of press lately. The issue is way too complicated for me to solve here, but it is important for all of us and the issues involved are going to get more muddled as time goes on.

The simplified version of the issue is that an iPhone recovered by the FBI during a terrorist incident is “locked” and the FBI (or anyone else) can’t access the data on the phone without the proper code to unlock it. The “code” in question here is a four digit number — doesn’t sound too difficult. Just try all possible combinations until you hit it. Well, it turns out that for security reasons, the phone is designed to only allow ten (10) tries to enter the correct code. If a wrong code is entered 10 times, the phone erases all its data.
So… the FBI is asking Apple to write software to disable this “feature.” Apple, of course, is claiming that to do so would (potentially) compromise the data on everyone’s iPhones.

If Apple does create such a tool that enables government or law enforcement agencies to bypass a product’s security features, the potential for it falling into the hands of cybercriminals and hostile governments is probably pretty high. If such a tool existed, foreign intelligence agencies and criminal organizations would pay enormous sums of money for access to such a “master key.” The “thing” the FBI is asking Apple to create isn’t a “thing” at all — it’s digital data. It’s not something that can be locked in a box and put away.

One thing that makes the problem here so murky, is that it involves legal, policy and technical issues.
The FBI is choosing to use something called the All Writs Act of 1789 (rather than legislative action via Congress) to justify the expansion of its authority over Apple.
Until this FBI/Apple argument started making the news I had never heard of the All Writs Act. Turns out the All Writs Act (AWA) is a United States federal statute which authorizes the United States federal courts to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” The act in its original form was part of the Judiciary Act of 1789.
The application of the All Writs Act requires the fulfillment of four conditions:
• The absence of alternative remedies (there is no other statute or rule that applies)
• An independent basis for jurisdiction — the act authorizes writs in aid of jurisdiction, but does not in itself create any federal subject-matter jurisdiction (it applies to a third party with some connection to the case)
• Necessary or appropriate in aid of jurisdiction — the writ must be necessary or appropriate to the particular case (it is justifiable by extraordinary circumstances)
• Usages and principles of law — the statue requires courts to issue writs “agreeable to the usages and principles of law” (compliance doesn’t create an “unreasonable burden”)

Part of Apple’s argument seems to be that if the FBI wants new powers to break security of our digital technologies, let it demand a law from Congress. If such a law is passed, it can be submitted to the courts to ensure it’s constitutional.

As I said earlier, this is way too complicated for me to solve and I continue to follow the news in an attempt to understand both sides… as of right now, I’m probably more on Apple’s side. From what I know about the situation, I think it would be very difficult to keep the information (necessarily) in a digital form bottled up. My opinion may change as both sides reveal more information.

As more and more of our lives are lived online, the Internet, computer power, social networks, etc. have pretty much laid our actions, beliefs and relationships permanently open to inspection by way of their digital traces. Personal anonymity is dead or dying. What little privacy Apple’s security provides is possibly being taken away. When Earl Warren was on the Supreme Court, he said, “The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.” He probably didn’t realize how right he was at the time.
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Last evening I was watching the Super Tuesday election results. I noticed that a few times I found myself saying, “Wow.” I got to thinking about that word — you don’t necessarily hear it a lot, but when you do, you know that whatever caused the expression to be spoken had gotten the undivided attention of whoever uttered it. I’ve heard that if you make something or say something that elicits the “wow” response, you’ve done or said something special.
From what I can tell, wow is a 16th century Scottish interjection — a natural expression of amazement.

Funny how a little word can express so much. Sometimes we use the word wow when we see something of beauty, or when we see something terrible, or when we see something we don’t understand, or miraculous — we use it for differently all the time… But when we use it, one thing’s for sure — whatever made us say it, has captured our undivided attention.
Next time you say wow, stop and think about why you said it — whether it was mundane or miraculous, I’ll bet it was amazing….
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It takes the Earth about 365.242189 days (365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds) to go around the sun one time. The calendar we use has only 365 days, so if we didn’t add an extra day about every 4 years, we would “lose” almost six hours every year. So someone (Julius Caesar was the first about 46 B.C.) introduced the leap year – adding an extra day to the year. Of course Julius Caesar used the Julian calendar and he decided that any year evenly divisible by four would be a leap year. His concept wasn’t all that bad, but his math was a little off. Today, using the Gregorian calendar, there’s a leap year every year that is divisible by four, except for years that are both divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400. That rule was added to make up for the fact that an extra day every four years was too much of a correction…. but we don’t skip leap days too often — the last time a leap day was skipped was February of 1900. The next time will be February of 2100. I’m not sure of the significance of this, but leap years are the only years when January 1st and December 31st fall on different days of the week — every other year they’ve on the same day.

Anyhow, approximately every four years we get an extra day. It’s added at the end of February — I suppose because February got short changed with the current calendar, having normally only 28 days.
Anthony, Texas and Anthony, New Mexico have proclaimed themselves the Leap Year Capitals of the World. They hold a leap year festival every leap year that includes a huge birthday party for everyone born on February 29th — they require an ID as proof of birth….

So we wind up with an extra day — if you’re on a fixed salary, you work for free. And if you’re inclined to break the law, try not to be sentenced to a year in jail this year — in the eyes of the law, a year has 12 months, not 365 days. So… unlucky criminals serving time in a leap year spend an extra night in the slammer. I guess it’s good news that you have an extra day to do your taxes in 2016.

But I’m still of the opinion that the 29th should be a free day. Why should you have to work an extra day in February? Leap day should just be a day that doesn’t count. This should be a phantom day — anything you say or do doesn’t count. I figure we all deserve at least one day every four years or so just for ourselves. And of course if you’re one of those that are always complaining that you need more time — here it is, a whole extra day!
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A couple of days ago I wrote about how Legos had changed over the years and how I sort of missed the old ones. I realize that life and all the things around us are pretty much in a constant state of change, but some of the changes —in my mind — just aren’t necessarily for the better.

Some of the things I miss besides Lego sets with no special pieces…
Real volume knobs on devices — they gave you really fine control, not like the digital buttons on most things today.
Drive-in movies — I thought it was pretty cool on a summer night to go to the movies and not have to get out of your car, except for maybe popcorn. And if you thought ahead, you brought the popcorn with you….
Blue jeans becoming worn or tattered from wear — not off the rack and “pre-worn” for you at an exorbitant price.
Wooden crates that used to hold soda bottles — they looked cool and kept the bottles from rattling and you could use them to stand on and all sorts of things…
Another thing I miss is records. I know they were big, easily scratched , you had to take care of them, and they did wear out over time but I enjoyed the jacket covers and the little blurbs written on them about the musicians or music on the album. I realize getting music online is more convenient and faster, maybe even cheaper — but I do miss records…
I also miss the test patterns on the TV early in the morning and late at night, A&W root beer stands, swings made out of old tires, playing outdoor games in the summer until 10 pm, gas stations where they actually pumped the gas for you, cartoons at the movies before the main attraction started and drug stores that had soda fountains…

Something I really miss is living in a corruption free society — I realize there never was such a thing, but compared to today, it seemed corruption free. But as they say, today is a gift of God, and that’s why we call it the present. And the past is never where you think you left it anyhow….
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