What Would Jimmy Do?

We’ve owned Lexus vehicles since the 1990s… We’ve been pleased with them, but that’s not the point of this blog. I saw something on the Internet a few days ago that reminded me of an old Lexus commercial. The guy on the Internet was stacking champaign glasses and dishes for some reason. But it reminded me of the first time I remember seeing a Lexus commercial. The TV spot showed a man stacking champaign glasses in a pyramid shape on the hood of a car. The camera then paned around to show that the car was running — with the rear wheels on a treadmill. Apparently the car was running at full speed, near 150 miles per hour. Needless to say, the glasses didn’t fall, or even appear to rattle. I remember thinking it was a pretty cool commercial. I did a little extensive research and found out that the glass commercial was Lexus’s first TV ad. It was promoting the LS 400 — Lexus’s first vehicle. The LS 400 was introduced at the Detroit Auto Show in 1989 — not sure when the vehicles actually went on sale, so Lexus seems to be about 25 years old, more or less….
Happy Birthday.
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I just read an article that Radio Shack stores are closing. The company has been in financial trouble for a long time, but it looks like this is the end…
This announcement shouldn’t surprise anyone that’s been in a Radio Shack store in the past few years, but for people my age that used to buy resistors, capacitors, wire, solder, printed circuit material — and — vacuum tubes from the nearby Radio Shack this is a sad development — almost like losing an old friend.

Radio Shack opened their first store in Boston in 1921 and basically catered to the nerds of the time — ham radio operators, and other electronics “hobbyists.” They sold individual parts, electronic kits, batteries, hi-fi stuff, etc. After a number of years, they were bought by, or merged with, a Texas company — Tandy, and the company became known as Tandy Radio Shack. Tandy was a company that produced leather products and lots of leather kits, like purses and belts. I never got the connection with the leather and never saw any leather products in any of their stores. Radio Shack had their own in-house brands and if you’re old enough, you probably remember Archer, Realistic, Optimus and a few others that I can’t think of right now. Their “brands” always had a reputation for being cheap and a bit cheesy, but most worked pretty much as advertised.

One Radio Shack Product that became popular at the time and was particularly memorable for me (and I think my daughter, Kelly) was something known as a TRS-80. If that doesn’t ring a bell, it was one of the first home computers and was put on the market about the same time as the Commodore PET — remember that one?
The TRS-80 first hit the market in 1977 and was priced at $599.95. The only other “computers” available were build it yourself machines that only appealed to super technical hobbyists. By today’s standards, it wasn’t much of a computer, but it was revolutionary in that it was an all-in-one package and the price was reasonable for the time. The TRS-80 was a big hit — backordered for months.
One could make an argument that the TRS-80 was the most important personal computer of the 1970s and early 1980s.

I bought a TRS-80 in, I think, 1979. The whole concept of personal computers fascinated me and Kelly, who was a little over three years old at the time, seemed just as fascinated as I was. The TRS stood for “Tandy Radio Shack” and the 80 referred to the machine’s microprocessor, the Z-80. I indicated earlier that the price was $599.95. Actually, you could buy a TRS-80 for $399.95, but then you had to supply your own monitor — I don’t think many of those were sold. The $599.95 got you a complete system with Radio Shack’s 12-inch black and white display (made by RCA) 4KB of memory and a cassette tape deck that let you save and load programs — very slowly and somewhat unreliably, but it did work. Even early on, there were a lot of games available for the TRS-80, but probably the most significant pice of software was the Electric Pencil — the first microcomputer word processor.

Kelly picked up computer skills almost immediately — she used the TRS-80 in a lot of ways I never even thought of back then and If I remember correctly she used the machine for at least one science fair project. Before long, she inherited the machine and was the only person her age that I knew that had her own computer in her room.

The TRS-80 was very popular — it was fun and even useful and played a major role in consumer-izing computers that had mostly been utilized by propeller-heads.  But for some reason, it just never took off after it’s initial success. Apple and IBM and even Commodore came along and just left the Radio Shack machine behind. Not sure why, but the machine came to be known as the Trash-80. It wasn’t perfect, but it was probably one of the better PCs of its time. Why it became the Rodney Dangerfield of computers isn’t clear — maybe it was its looks — it looked more like a TV, with a keyboard — which it was. But I don’t regret buying the TRS-80. We never owned another Radio Shack computer, but since the TRS-80 came in our door, we’ve never been without a computer.
And as for Radio Shack, even though I haven’t been in one of their stores for a long, long time, I still have fond memories of the place(s) — a lot of what I learned about electronics came from experiments made with parts from “The Shack.”

Radio Shack, like a lot of us, just got old and left in the dust of the technology revolution. Seems we just don’t need a place anymore where you can still buy vacuum tubes.
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After we moved to West Virginia, we realized a lot of people, our families included, had a somewhat distorted idea of the state. The first visitors we had after we moved were mostly amazed that we didn’t live in a trailer park, or at the very least a “double-wide” somewhere out in the sticks. Most of them, at first, didn’t believe us when we told them we were almost a suburb of Washington, D.C. and lived closer to New York City than our own state capital.

One thing that most were aware of was moonshine — moonshine is almost synonymous with West Virginia. Tennessee is known for their whiskey and Kentucky is known for Bourbon, but when a lot of people think of moonshine, they think West Virginia.
Usually when people think of moonshine, they think about rednecks tramping through the Appalachian backwoods, making white lightning in illegal stills. During the years of prohibition, millions of gallons of moonshine were sold — often the supply couldn’t keep up with the demand. After prohibition ended in 1933, the moonshine trade plummeted. Recently, the beverage seems to be making a comeback. Almost all liquor stores today sell some sort of moonshine, a lot of it “packaged” in mason jars.

After the Revolutionary War, the nation found itself fairly deep in debt. To help pay off the country’s obligations, a federal tax on liquor was established. Now since one of the main reasons the war was fought in the first place was to escape taxes instituted by the British, American citizens were furious over the tax and most people continued to distill their own whiskey without giving the government its cut. Of course the government sent tax collectors out and that didn’t go over big either and eventually led to the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. The militia supposedly stamped out the rebel movement, but in actuality only served to drive whiskey distillers further underground. The liquor tax was repealed by Thomas Jefferson, but 60 years or so later, the expenses incurred by the Civil War brought back the liquor taxes.

Today “XXX” usually means an adult movie. In some of the western movies I saw growing up, the saloons often had big jug sitting around with “XXX” on it. Turns out that “XXX” stood for moonshine, and more specifically, moonshine that had been triple-distilled. In the days portrayed in the western movies, the equipment for producing moonshine was rather crude, but after the third run, the jug contained some serious stuff — so it was labeled with three X’s.
Today we read about all the schemes used by narcotics traders to smuggle their product. People that smuggle alcohol have been using most of those schemes for years. A lot of the earliest NASCAR drivers were former (or current) moonshiners. Possibly due to driving skills acquired while outrunning the revenuers. The term “bootlegging,” sometimes used in conjunction with the moonshine business is derived from smuggling — transporting alcohol in a boot.

Bootlegging was a term I heard often growing up in Oklahoma. Oklahoma was one of the last holdouts in terms of allowing (legal) sales of alcoholic beverages. What is now the state of Oklahoma was Indian Territory and it was against federal law to sell or give alcohol to American Indians. In 1889 Indian Territory became Oklahoma Territory and was opened to non-Indian settlement. Saloons began operating adjacent to Indian lands. The liquor traffic was so heavy over the next twenty years, that when Oklahoma became a state in 1907, framers of the state constitution included the prohibition of all alcoholic beverages. Of course that didn’t stop the distilling, selling, and consuming of moonshine. After national prohibition was repealed in 1933, the state legislature, influenced by religious conservatism, passed a law declaring that nothing stronger than 3.2 beer, in alcohol percentage level, could be sold in Oklahoma. That law was not repealed until 1959.

Because of Oklahoma laws moonshine and, especially, the bootlegger who sold illegal whiskey to his customers have played a unique part in the history of the state. Because the law prohibited the selling of 3.2 beer where dancing was allowed, the bootlegger became a major fixture at dance halls. A lot of Oklahoma folk legends are of bootleggers (like many West Virginia folk legends are moonshiners.)
Bootleggers in Oklahoma, since 1933, usually didn’t peddle moonshine though — most sold liquor that had been legally distilled and bottled and “imported” from other states.

So it turns out that both my native and adopted states have a deep-rooted history in the illegal alcohol business.
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Back on January 26 (I think) a small recreational drone crashed on the White House grounds. It was an accident — an employee of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency had been drinking at a nearby apartment and was “demonstrating” the drone to friend(s).

According to the President, this crash on the White House grounds shows that the U.S. must take steps to ensure commercial and consumer drones are used safely. Obama indicated that the drone that crashed was one much like those that could be bought at Radio Shack, that sell for $50 to $500. So, it’s a toy.
Congress wants rules in place to regulate these drones. If past experience is any indication, even after such rules are proposed, it’ll probably take years before the regulations become final — and worse yet, knowing our government, we’ll probably wind up with a Federal Drone Assessment Agency that will probably fall under Homeland Security or one of the Intelligence Agencies that will argue over interpretation and enforcement of the rules/regulations. I think I said this before — some of the things to be regulated are toys.
Rules already exist for Radio Controlled (RC) model aircraft and that essentially is what these devices are. Leave it to Congress to come up with an entirely new set of rules. I agree that the current rules might need to be modified to address the use of cameras and microphones, but a whole new set? If that happens, the odds are they’ll be messed up and we’ll spend millions rewriting, correcting, revising and updating to make them useable. Of course if Congress does make new rules to protect us, criminals and terrorists will be out of luck not being able to use these things.

When I was younger, junior high into high school, one of my hobbies was building model airplanes. I knew enough about electronics to build a radio system to control the model. It didn’t do much, but I could control the altitude and direction and bring it back to land without wires. Who would have thought that I had stumbled on one of the hottest technical and controversial areas today — drones. One definition of a drone is any unmanned aircraft or ship that is guided remotely. So I was building drones — who knew?
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Well, here it is Groundhog Day again (yep, that’s one of the holidays I celebrate.) Most years, I write something here about the celebration — the problem is that every year it gets harder to come up with something new. Groundhog Day is really a pretty boring holiday — same thing happens over and over. Sort of like the movie, I guess. But anyhow….

Every February 2nd, at a number of places across the United States (the most famous being Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the home of Punxsutawney Phil) people get together to wait for a groundhog’s predictions of our upcoming weather — of course there’s only two choices: six more weeks of winter or an “early” spring. So how come we celebrate this routine?
The first U.S. celebration of Groundhog Day was in 1887 (in Punxsutawney, Pa.) but Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day. You faithful readers will remember that Candlemas Day is also on my list of holidays and was explained in this blog a few years back.
On Candlemas Day, the clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. The Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal, the hedgehog, as a means of predicting weather. When the Germans came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition, but because of the lack of hedgehogs, they switched to groundhogs — they had plenty of those in Pennsylvania. Even though Groundhog Day has been celebrated since 1887, the movie “Groundhog Day” seems to have increased the day’s popularity.
As I mentioned earlier, February 2nd is also Candlemas Day. While considered a religious holiday, it has always had some ties to the weather — an old Scottish song contains the words, “If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year.”

But it appears that even sacred days like Groundhog Day can’t be left alone with their traditions. Punxsutawney Phil will now text you his weather prediction. If you’re really into texting, just text “Groundhog” to 247365 on February 2nd. And of course some states don’t want to follow Pennsylvania’s lead in using the groundhog for their weather predictor. Texas uses an armadillo and celebrates Armadillo Day. Who knows, armadillos may be better weather prognosticators than groundhogs.

The dean of all the groundhogs, Punxsutawney Phil has been at it for over 125 years and has achieved a 39 percent accuracy over that time. If you’re wondering about how long groundhogs live, the answer is typically six to eight years. So what’s Phil’s secret? It seems that every summer, Phil drinks a unique “elixir of life” concoction that keeps him alive for seven more years. Now I’m thinking if we could get that recipe, we’d really be on to something…..
Update: Big surprise — Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning and predicted six more weeks of winter. We’re not that far from Phil’s place and looking out the window, it’s hard to believe he saw his shadow. I’m thinking it has to do with that “elixir of life” juice he drinks — maybe it affects his judgement. I think we should hide that stuff. Maybe we need a new Phil….
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February 1, 2015. Super Bowl Sunday. Today is the start of my least favorite month. There’s tons of reasons I don’t like February, but one of them is that it brings an end to football season — the Super Bowl is played on the first Sunday of February.

We all know that February is the shortest month and because of the fewer days, some things happen, or don’t, that sets it apart. Some years the entire month of February can pass without a single full moon. The next time that will happen is in 2018. February ends on the same day of the week that October ends on — every year. And it’s the only time a month begins and ends on the same day of the week (on a leap year.)
February gets is name from the Latin februa, that is a means of cleansing. It referred to the pre-spring purification rituals.
Even though February is short, there’s lots of events and festivals during the month, and of course like other months, almost every day has a festival of some sort, even if they’re “made-up.”

Everyone knows that February has been designated Black History Month, but did you know that it is also Canned Food Month? But it doesn’t stop there, how about Great American Pies Month, National Fiber Focus Month, National Fondue Month, Sweet Potato Month, National Hot Breakfast Month and National Heart Healthy Month. I didn’t make these up.

The month is also chock full of daily “festivals” — we know about Valentines Day and Martin Luther King Day and Presidents Day, but you can celebrate all month long. Here’s a list, far from complete. If you’d like to celebrate one of them, you can google it to find the day….
National Baked Alaska Day, Homemade Soup Day, National Chocolate Fondue Day, National Chopsticks Day, Pizza Pie Day, National Gumdrop Day, National Cherry Pie Day, National Pistachio Day, National Strawberry Day, National Chili Day and Surf and Turf Day. No wonder people tend to gain weight during the winter.

So like it or not, February has been kicked off — Super Bowl today, Groundhog Day tomorrow and National Carrot Cake Day on the 3rd. We’re off to a fast start here on this shortest, and my least favorite, month.
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We got to spend the most time with Locke this week since he’s been born. The first time we saw him he was sleeping, at Christmas, he was awake some, but mostly just hungry. This time he had become a little person — took a few cat-naps, but was mostly awake and just checking things out. You could see amazement and wonder in his eyes sometimes and there was no questioning what he thought was funny — just amazing to see how much he’s developed and how active he’s become in such a short time.

I wonder what it is that make grandchildren tug at your heart and makes them so special? Maybe it’s because they’re all play and no work. I really don’t have the responsibility of raising them and because my mind isn’t concerned about mundane things like work, it’s easy to tune in to them, and then of course there’s the old saying, “send em’ home when they get cranky.” But I suspect there’s more to it than that.

I think because we’re not in contact with our grandkids every day and we’re not totally expected to discipline them, it creates a special kind of relationship. To be honest, my goal, and I work hard at it, is to be the world’s greatest grandkid spoiler and I’ve pretty much already forgotten the meaning of the word “no.” What a great job — this being a granddad.

I’m looking forward to more time with Locke — I’ve already decided grandsons can be just as much fun as granddaughters. Someone said, “never have children, only grandchildren.” I don’t totally disagree….
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Well, the news today is still brimming with ‘Deflategate’ articles. I got to thinking about why the suffix ‘gate’ has become so popular to describe just about any sort of a scandal. This all started with a 1972 political scandal that eventually forced Richard Nixon to resign the Presidency. Burglars, tied to the Nixon administration, were caught attempting to break in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The incident took place in a complex of buildings known as Watergate — all the events surrounding the incident took on the name “Watergate.”

So here it is more than 40 years later and the the New England Patriots and the NFL find themselves mired in something everyone is calling Deflategate. When did the use of ‘gate’ become an accepted suffix? Shortly after the scandal and resulting resignation, the news media started using words like “Watergatery” and “watergater” to describe sketchy behavior or unscrupulous people.
I don’t know if the news media is just unimaginative or not very creative, but it seems that the system they use is to take the last four letters of a previous (famous) scandal and add it on to all future scandals. Doesn’t seem like a good system, but ti appears to work. In 1973 the scandal-based definition of ‘-gate’ was added to the Merriam Webster dictionary.

I remember hearing a French scandal termed Winegage, that involved using chemicals to turn vinegar wine into table quality. President Clinton had his share of gates — probably the most famous was Monicagate. I also remember his pardoning of about 140 people on his last day in office, including Patty Hearst — that generated Pardongate. Jimmy Carter lived through Billygate when it was determined that his brother, Billy, legally represented the Libyan government as a foreign agent. A year or so ago when New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s administration shut down toll lanes on the George Washington Bridge it didn’t make front page news until it was dubbed “Bridgegate.” I suppose that in today’s world there’s tons of headlines every day competing for our attention — use of the ‘gate’ moniker is intended to grab out attention.

We used to think of gates in terms of livestock gates, baby gates, garden gates, or even logic gates — but not anymore — when we hear ‘gate’ we almost immediately think of scandal. I’m pretty sure the original word or term ‘gate’ is in no way related to scandal. Most suffixes have some grounding, like a Greek or Latin origin — as far as I can tell, not so with ‘gate.’

Actually, if you think about it, since the Watergate scandal was about what occurred in the Watergate Hotel/Complex, and not about the “water” it would seem to make more sense to refer to the whole thing as “Watergategate.” It’s funny how we mess around with our language…..
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Since this topic seems to have topped the news for the past week and everybody else has weighed in on it, I guess I might as well mention it here. Of course I’m talking about that very serious, potentially catastrophic practice of deflation. In case you’ve been under a rock or something for the past few days, you probably know that the New England Patriots are accused of under inflating some footballs. The articles I’ve read seem to indicate that this matter will have to go before a grand jury and a special prosecutor will be named any day now. This “gate” may turn out to be bigger than Watergate — this is football you know, and more importantly it’s Super Bowl.

Before I go on, let me make it clear that I’m not a fan of the New England Patriots, or the Seattle Seahawks — the participants in this year’s Super Bowl. I remain loyal to the Redskins and the Browns, neither of which have ever cheated. (If they did cheat, they’re not any better at that than picking quarterbacks, or anything else — their records speak for themselves.)

But back to Deflate-gate — the news coverage is being handled just like a big-time political scandal. I suspect that this incident is receiving more publicity because it involves the Patriots. I’m guessing that most of the media don’t care much for Bill Belichick, the Patriots coach — probably because he doesn’t spend a lot of time answering the news media’s stupid questions. Every good scandal needs a villain, and Belichick is perfect for the role.

Now I’m not in favor of a team cheating to get into the Super Bowl, but is seems that these improperly inflated balls have received more press than Ray Rice’s elevator punch, or the rampant misuse of steroids in the NFL.

So the media isn’t going to give up on this controversy until it’s been beaten to death, or, something better comes along. I guess it’s worth pointing out that the Patriots squeaked by the Colts by 45-7. The Colts might have pulled the game out if those balls had been pumped up just a bit more…..
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I read an article today that listed the most popular passwords for 2014. In case you didn’t see it, here’s the list:

123456           password          12345           12345678          qwerty          123456789
1234                baseball            football        1234567             monkey        letmein
abc123            111111                 mustang      access                 shadow        master
michael           superman         696969        123123               batman        trustno1

I have to admit that these are pretty lame, but this whole password thing is getting out of hand. Most Internet sites that insist on a password ( and more and more and more of them do) require that the password contain seven or eight characters, with numbers, special symbols and/or capitalization — and — you’re supposed to have a different password for each site.
(One thing I’ve noticed is that even though these sites all require you to rack your brain to come up with unique passwords, that you usually forget and have to click on that little “forget your password?” box, all the sites ask you the same recovery questions, like where did you go to school, what’s your mother’s maiden name, what was your first car…. seems like they want you to be creative, but don’t impose that restriction on themselves. Just sayin…)

But back to passwords. I understand the Internet is a dangerous place and people want my stuff, and these are bad people that want it and all that. I do get it. That’s the reason I don’t put anything on my computer that I wouldn’t share with anyone — even the bad guys.
I realize that in today’s world, we’re pretty much forced to do some things online — we have to get our bank statements online, for instance. We do take the proper precautions with those passwords, but Facebook (for example) pretty much has the same password restrictions. I rarely use Facebook and have less personal information on it than in the local telephone book (yea, we still get one.) So I really don’t care who sees my page.
I’m much more concerned with someone hacking into our bank’s database than I am of them stealing my password. My opinion is that the whole password system is flawed and messy — you’d think there ought to be a better way if all these web sites are going to force us to protect ourselves.

As far as picking passwords, everyone has their own method — I always thought •••••••• would be a good password, since that’s what I always see when the password is entered. There’s an old blonde joke that during a password audit, the blonde was using the password: “MickeyMineyPlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofyColumbus” — when she was asked why such a long password, she said she was told that it has to be at least 8 characters long and include at least one capital.

I’m kind of the opinion that i should be able to choose/use whatever password I want — I’d be willing to sign some sort of a waiver of liability, but that’s not the way the system operates. It’s pretty incredible that with all the advances in technology, digital security still relies on my mother’s maiden name or the street I grew up on….
Aren’t you glad you don’t need a password to read this blog?
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