Air Tags and Sleeping Muses

I don’t seem to sit down to write much anymore. It’s been months since I enjoyed banging away on my keyboard. No loss, I’m sure, but it used to be fun, well, for me at least. My writing group has outgrown me and my blogs are on the verge of being just repetitive old political or religious peeves. I really think my muse has simply wandered off somewhere and found other things to do.

I’m happy I wore a long-sleeve shirt and long pants because it is sixty-eight degrees here in my dentist’s office waiting room. I sit with my laptop deflecting the forced, cold air from overhead vent away from my legs, but it still hits me square on the shoulders and the top of my bald head. There is no respite from the constant, chilly blast from the ceiling. My wife is getting a crown on a molar and I am simply being the conscientious husband, who after sixty-two years, still thinks being here matters. She does it for me. She once slept overnight in a chair in my hospital room as I recovered from an emergency appendectomy. She didn’t have to, and I didn’t really want her to, but it was right thing for her. I have always felt the same way. In fact, the reason I’m writing now is she waited on me in this very same office just a couple of weeks ago when I recently had an epiphany about air-tags. Yes, air tags.

My wife waited for me while I underwent my semi-annual visit just a few weeks before. When I came out, she was standing at the counter talking with the receptionists. They were both laughing and my wife was quite flushed, as if she had been embarrassed. She told me why as I distractedly checked out.

A man walked into the dentist’s office and told the receptionist his cellphone had tracked his daughter’s car keys to their office and asked if she could help find them. My wife, sitting in the waiting room, glanced up, but went back to reading. As the man began pinging for the keys, a beeping response could be heard from somewhere near where she was sitting. In one of the nearby cushions, modern technology was doing exactly what it was designed to do: respond to an electronic stimulus both by sending an electronic SOS, and by meekly beeping. My wife stood up to help look through the cushions, and was absolutely stunned when she realized the beeping came from her purse. She opened her purse to find two sets of car keys, both with the same type of fob and colors. One was hers, the other set of keys belonged to the young woman, who the day before, had placed her keys on a counter top while my wife, standing on the other side of the counter, was finishing paper work while leaving the yoga class she had just taught. My wife simply picked up everything, including the keys, and shoved them in her purse. A day later, a dutiful dad tracked down his daughter’s keys, now in a different town, even a different county. He pushed an icon on the screen of his cell phone, and a little, innocuous piece of plastic said “Here I am!” in a dentist’s office nowhere near where his daughter lost her keys. The technology involved in this seemingly simple feat is astonishing.

When I casually tapped my credit card on a scanner and the two entities communicated with each other, I assumed this logic was similar to other popular wireless services such as Apple’s AirTag or any of the other tracking devices now common with people who have cellphones and worry about the whereabouts of their suitcases and dogs, or even sometimes their children. Husbands and wives are tracked as well, along with guitars and violins, anything else that might unexpectedly go bye-bye, and I naively thought it was done without batteries or because of cell phone towers. I was wrong on both counts. Welcome to my world of incessant curiosity. Needless, usually, but it does give me something to write about since my muse wont do it. Let me explain.

The locator tag he used is different from the medallions we wore on the Island Princess several years that told my wife where to find me whenever I wandered off exploring the ship. I really liked the pretty, small, round little device that I simply wore on a lanyard. I assumed since it was sealed and did not have any ports or plugs to recharge it, it was a dormant, inactive responder much like the little RFID chips on your credit card. You know, that strange little metallic looking thingy embedded on one side of your credit card. It is a really, really smart little computer chip. While they react to stimulus from a sensor that queries with a low power signal that only travels a few inches, they use that radiated energy to respond without having any of their own battery power. I was only partially right about the medallion, it does have RFID but it does also have a three volt, nickle-sized battery. It is sealed, not replaceable and is used to do the heavy work such as the Bluetooth tracker.

We were mailed the small, sealed medallions shortly before we embarked on our Panama canal cruise. Princess cruises waits until the last minute to ship the medallions to it’s passengers so not to needlessly deplete the battery. I found out later from passengers we befriended on the cruise who remained on the world cruise long after we left the ship after transiting the Panama Canal, the battery on the medallion ran out just before the end of the 60 day around-the-world cruise. The battery powers a long-range Bluetooth sensor used for doors and the basic ship tracking which is such a pleasure for passengers, but the NFC, the Near Field Communication feature of the RFID, just like a credit card, is not powered. The medallions reverted to the RFID capabilities that required the familiar tap or touch of credit cards to work. While the battery, a standard CR2025 was designed for up to 30 day usage to deliver the normal functions, such as unlocking your cabin door as you approached, the around-the-world trip was simply longer than the battery life. Once the battery expired, the little piece of technological wonder reverted to the other RFID function that works as a backup as it does not require a battery.

So, basically, the medallion worked like a basic GPS positioning systems using Bluetooth, but the Apple AirTag does not use GPS. Nope! So, you ask, where are you going here? Obviously my muse is giggling with delight as I head into the crux of another dilemma. The Bluetooth chip in an Apple AirTag can transmit no further than 100 feet or so. AirTags only “chat” with other Apple devices, such as iPhones, iMacs, or other iOS devices as it only has the same battery as the Princess medallion. It simply doesn’t have the power to connect to a cellphone tower.

If the apple AirTag doesn’t communicate with cell phone towers, what does it communicate with? Ever heard of Crowd Sharing? Apple calls it Find My Network and it is ingenious. The situation is unique because the unsuspecting cellphones or computers have no indication they are being used as information carriers, the owners and users of the iPhones are simply not involved with the process. The AirTag transmits an identification beacon signal out into the world almost constantly. When any other Apple device, it doesn’t matter where, when or who, receives this beacon, it encodes the identifier beacon and sends it upstream to the Find My Network system where is logged for any query to find it. It is done anonymously without alerting any user that the activity is happening. There are no indicators to any local user how many tags or who they are to anyone being sent upstream to the network. The intercepting Apple device has the power to transmit the information to the cellphone tower that the AirTag simply does not have itself.

The Android systems and apps used by cellphone companies other than Apple use similar technologies to make their trackers work as well, and there are trackers available that talk directly to cell phone towers or even receive GPS signals as well.

My muse is sound asleep. So are you, probably, but I feel better now, My fingers work, at least a couple of them, and my keyboard actually feels looser than when I started. My wife has come out of the dentist’s office with her new, computer printed 3D crown permanently mounted and all she has to do is not floss for a few hours. Modern technology has eliminated the old waiting days for the crown to be built and the fitting appointments that followed. Someday in the future they may even embed an RFID chip in the crown, but I have no idea where they would put the required cellphone.

George

Defeat at Hormuz

I would be thrilled if I could remember why I sat down to write. I’m sitting in a doctor’s office, no, not my doctor, I’m waiting on my wife, in downtown Athens, Georgia. I’m facing a wall of impressive credentials, looking at my keyboard like a puppy looks at a box of dog biscuits. I had a theme I wanted to capture, that’s why I brought my PC in the first place, but by the time I scrapped my bumper on the office parking lot, read my emails on messages on my cellphone, I forgot why I bothered to power it up in the first place.

My muse has slipped down the hallway somewhere, probably checking on my wife, while I struggle to recover my thoughts. Our current President has made a fool of himself yet again, and I wonder where the Republican party went. I’m sure I can write an intelligent comment, but it isn’t worth it because America really doesn’t care any more. The Republicans are more worried about their God taking over the country than they are of those of us who live here. You know, us Americans. They don’t care about anything but their own salvation, which is in direct conflict of the teachings of the God they want to install. It’s like Jon Stewart asked one his devout Republicans on television years ago, “Can I have your parking space after the Resurrection?”

But, enough religion and certainly enough politics. I’ll write about what we watched thirty minutes ago just a few miles from here. By we I mean myself, my wife, and my just-turned-17 year old granddaughter, Claire. We were sitting in our car in the parking lot in front of the stage door of the school where Claire is taking voice lessons, waiting for Claire’s teacher. We chatted and checked our phones as is the norm nowadays, and noticed a quiet, real life or death struggle unfolding right in front of us.

We were watching the confrontation of a chipmunk sitting on a rock, directly in front of us at eye level, staring a rather large King snake, which in typical reptilian fashion, was surreptitiously maneuvering ever so much closer. We were less than ten feet away. I quietly opened the car door and got out, cellphone camera poised and ready to capture my wildlife photo of the century when the chipmunk decided the snake was close enough. It practically disappeared right in front me. I really couldn’t tell you where the fuzzy brown blur went. At first, the snake, seemed as confused as I was, but, tongue sampling the air, slowly turned around, and began slivering into a nearby burrow covered by the pine straw. I quickly approached the rapidly disappearing snake and snapped as many snapshots as I could get. My photographs were terribly disappointing, the snake had neither a head nor a tail.

In retrospect, as I sit here pondering our current situation, I have come to the conclusion that is probably how our President feels after his Defeat at Hormuz. I do, however, believe the snake has a better understanding of what happened.

George

The ROMEOs

 

There’s a group of older men in Athens, Georgia, who meet every Wednesday for lunch. Mostly from the academic environment that permeates the social atmosphere of the area, they include a former concert master of the Athens Symphony Orchestra and a professor of occupational studies known for his development of whale watching off the coast of Massachusetts. There’s a highly respected retired judge, a retired public defender, the former President of the National Science Teachers Association, and by an odd quirk of circumstance, there’s me. Although my daughter is a UGA alumna - she got her PhD from Terry School of Business - I didn’t go to the University of Georgia, but it doesn’t matter. I try to keep my mouth shut, probably not enough, but they are polite enough to listen to me anyway. I suppose it’s kind of like listening to your Uber driver defile the SEC football  conference, that's the big, multi-million dollar Southeastern Conference for those of you from the real world, when he’s really upset Georgia didn’t make the playoffs. I don’t know anything about those rules either as my hometown team is in the Atlantic Coast Conference, a rather modest entity by comparison. Actally, I don’t really care about the conferences because I didn’t go to the University of Miami, either. I just grew up there.

The colleges I went to were night schools, extension schools that were made available to U.S. military service members around the world. It took me six years to get my first thirty credit hours, and I never attended any college after that. The company I interviewed with after my discharge hired me and raising my family pivoted to the forefront of my priorities. I can’t count the number of internal IBM company schools I attended in my time but I only took one other class toward my elusive goal of having a college degree.

It was that very first night school at the University of Maryland extension back in 1962 that really got me into the group. The school was at Bitburg Air Base, Germany, while I was serving as a flight controls technician with the 585th Tactical Missile Group. As fate would have it, one of our new neighbors in Athens after we moved here from Florida sixty years later, was Andy Horne. Andy was a professor in the same program at the same school several years after I attended there. We reminisced about Germany in general and the school and it’s intrinsic value toward a degree in particular. Andy, Dean Emeritus of the UGA College of Education, graciously invited me to lunch with the group, but fate tragically intervened and Andy died following heart by-pass surgery before I ever got to meet the group.

The invitation was again offered and I joined the group for lunch. I was thrilled when they cordially included me in the next lunch. They are a great group of like-minded people who love to discuss anything and everything under the sun. The reminiscing and stories are priceless. The ROMEOs are like that. That’s what one of the wives calls us. ROMEOS, Retired Old Men Eating Out.

Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

George Mindling

Sedentary

We moved to Athens, Georgia, a year ago and we are still ambivalent about the wisdom of ripping up our roots and moving out of state at our age. I was eighty when we made the decision to get out of Hurricane Alley and seek refuge in a safer haven, but the move has taken well over a year and our transition is far from complete. We are perturbed with our inability to feel at home in our newly adopted state.

My wife and I spent the last forty-five years or so participating in the annual Florida six-month long Hurricane watch party, the weather alerts that start at the beginning of the hurricane season, just about the time school ends and wraps up just after Thanksgiving. The intense peak is always around Labor Day Weekend when everyone sits in front of the television watching the Weather Channel worrying where the current storm is going to make landfall. Hurricane David planted the first serious fear in us during Labor Day weekend in 1979. After doing what meager preparations we could to our townhouse, we went to bed expecting to be hit directly sometime during the night. The dangerous storm capriciously spared us and we woke up to singing birds and gentle breezes. There were multiple scares before Hurricane Andrew hit Miami in 1992 and our two-car, hurricane reinforced garage door blew in and wrapped around the car parked inside. Our daughter fared far worse: her condominium only fifteen miles away was destroyed completely. Not just damaged, but red-tag destroyed. She relocated to Georgia, not too far from Atlanta, to finish her final year of college. Her move gave us an excuse to travel up north to visit every chance we got.

We thought we would be just spectators to the annual ritual after moving to Port Charlotte on Florida’s west coast after I retired, but we were wrong. We helplessly watched Hurricane Charley barrel toward us in 2003 before it too decided to follow a slightly different path at the last possible minute. While we missed a devastating direct hit by the storm’s eye-wall by about ten miles, we were clobbered directly by Ian in 2022. The big, heavy twenty five foot tall palmetto laying exactly twenty-eight inches from our bedroom in the aftermath was the very big straw that broke the camel’s back. Time to leave the watch party. So, where to go? Out of harm’s way, of course, but someplace where the weather is mild, if not warm in the winter. No snow or ice storms, no life threatening environmental issues. The best part of the move would be living closer to our daughter and her family. While Georgia seemed to check all the boxes, we had a foreboding about the massive disruption to our lives. We wondered why Florida friends Ingrid and Richard moved from Port Charlotte to Asheville, North Carolina, only to move back to Florida after only two years. Another friend, Clyde, a muscular, urbane friend who moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, a few years ago, only made it a year before he also moved back to Florida. Why didn’t they make it “up north”?

There are many active retirement communities being developed across the state of Georgia, and we visited many of them in the twenty years we’ve been looking for a desirable alternative to Florida. From Hochston to Gainesville, from Peachtree to Greensboro, from Hiawasee to Tifton, we have pretty much covered Georgia. Many of these purposely designed communities are from companies such as Del Webb, Cresswind, and Lennar, specializing in “55+ Active Adult Communities.” They aren’t the only ones of course, but they are some of the predominate or most prolific developers. We were interested in the possibilities offered by most of these communities, and for many people they are the perfect answer. But we found they are not for us.

The unimaginative sideboard houses, all uniformly painted in a bland color palette, aligned precisely to maximize the profit of the smallest footprint possible, resemble a dreary and unappealing Army base. They are jammed together as selling the precious, squeezed, footprint of land is of foremost importance. The only thing missing are the big, white building numbers painted on the street side corner of each one. We found few one story or “ranch” style homes that were small enough for us that had any quality. It was not uncommon to find rows of visible nails that completely missed their support beams and studs, living room rugs our young granddaughter could pull up with her fingers, and gaps in the finish I could put my thumbs into. Small, more often than not, translates to cheap rather than affordable, garish rather than tasteful, and worst of all, crowded and exploited.

We read plans and covenants, by-laws and home owner association rules at every community and found the inescapable and often inexplicable petty rules and regulations seemed to be at the whim of an insulated higher power. Appearance and community standards are not only expected, but desired as well, but so is common sense. While most developments tend to specialize in club house activities closer aligned to our old style of Florida living, once you drive out the gates – which I would do on a regular basis – you would be back in reality. Florida, especially around the coastal areas, tends to be modern and accessible. We find much of America is simply stuck in the past of reluctance and denial, or at best, the fanciful anticipation of a distant future that has eluded the complacent.

Even in the highly successful Villages, a huge – it encompasses six zip codes – preplanned adult community in Florida, appropriately not far from Disney World, diversity reigns. Not in the residents, they are all predominately white from up north, but in the overall concept of the community. From styles and colors, neighborhood layouts and building design and construction, landscaping that would make even Frederick Law Olmsted envious, to blending what prospective residents assume is native Florida with civilization, they have succeeded in presenting a retirement image that has simply escaped the developers up north. Unfortunately, here again, once you drive out of the Villages, you meet apparent destitution and the mishmash that contrasts sharply with the meticulous, carefully developed residential island the newcomers live in. Very few of the newcomers to the area live outside the boundaries of the Villages.

We were fortunate to find a relatively inexpensive home in a rather unique area near Athens, Georgia. Our new home is a one-story, twenty-five year old brick townhouse with a two car garage with the privacy of woods facing the back of our house. Each home, although they all follow the same architectural guidelines, is distinctly different. The streets all end in a cul-de-sac so there is no through traffic, and yet we are only minutes from shopping and restaurants. There are restrictions against political signs, or any kind of yard signs, and an inexpensive home owners association that even offers a pool. We were fortunate to find the house just as it came on the market. We know we will be hard pressed to find a more desirable area or location, and we would not be able to replace our home for anywhere near what we paid for it.

Our biggest single disappointment with our new home is something we have to learn to master on our own: Winter. The sporadic sessions of summer terror have been replaced with the numbing dullness of perpetual inactivity in the winter. We do not like being enclosed inside for five months of the year. We do not like being cold. We do not like brown, lifeless landscape that is made worse by the depressing overcast and dreariness of the weather. We do not like being uncomfortable as a way of life.

Therein lies our dilemma. Stay or move back? What do we want out of our lives? Can we seriously face the prospect of enduring, or even surviving another Hurricane? We know the cost of homeowners insurance in Florida is fast becoming unobtainable. To top it off, our lifestyle and our bodies are no longer as flexible as in our youth. We know should our daughter and her family relocate somewhere else due to work or school, our attachment here will diminish greatly. Florida? Who knows, being snow birds certainly has its appeal. While summer in Florida is nerve wracking and often terrifying, winter here is boring and sedentary. The answer might be a balance between the two, living six months here and six months there. The best of both worlds, but then again, can I handle moving every six months?

Maybe we just need to go on a world cruise for a year. If we’re going to be sedentary, then let’s do it in style!

Huatulco, Mexico

George

Bluebirds of Happiness

 

Little Jimmy Dickens never met our bluebirds or he would have changed the lyrics to his 1965 novelty hit song from “Bird of Paradise” to “Bluebird of Georgia.” Have you ever heard Johnny Carson’s comedic curse, uttered at his audience for laughing when his side-kick, Ed McMahon, announced the end of any Carnac episode? The insults ranged from elephants stepping on your feet to the famous “May the bird of paradise fly up your nose.” Little Jimmy Dickens took the resulting ditty, written by Neal Merrit, to 18 weeks on the Billboard pop chart. Personally, I think he could have used our pretty little bluebirds instead.

Understanding and protecting the pretty blue and orange songbirds that crash into our front window for hours on end, startling us every single time they hit the glass panes, has us in a predicament. It is always hard to assimilate the idealistic image of perfection and happiness with the aggravation and distaste of reality. The guilt one feels toward disliking the pretty birds is distressing, but the pretty, fluttery images of happiness and love are really hard to live with. Really, wipe off your shoes and come on in.

They arrive back in middle Georgia in late spring, just in time for the nesting season. Actually, it is their first of three nesting seasons they’ll have once they’re back in our neighborhood. Luckily for us, they tend to abandon their first nest and move on to deface someone else’s front porch once the first brood leaves the nest. Where do they love to nest? Under our roof of course, right over our front door. They love the tiny ledge where the soffit meets the fascia, preferably in a corner. If you don’t know where the soffit or the fascia is you are probably a renter.

The piles of mud that inexplicably appear on your front porch are the first indicator the universal symbols of peace and friendship have decided to honor your home with their presence. You instinctively look up only to find the underside of your soffit stained with streaks of mud as the little birds prove they are capable of carrying far more than they weigh. Quick! Get the hose and blast it off there! Don’t let them get a nest started. If you do, you’ll be like us when we first moved in to our house.

The nest wasn’t there when we did our final walk-through before closing on the house, but by the time we moved in they had not only built a nest, but filled it with three eggs as well. I had to use a stepladder and my cellphone as a camera to see inside the nest, but once I found it had eggs, it was off-limits, untouchable until the fledglings flew the nest. I decided, after cleaning the stoop for a month, the only way to prevent it from happening again was to build a decorative barrier or trim that left them no space to build their mud and straw refuge in the future. But life gets in the way, and once they left and I removed the empty nest, I completely forgot about the pretty little birds that pooped regularly in front of my door. Until two weeks ago, and I found I again needed the garden hose to clean my porch. They were back.

The battle has been in full swing. They are tenacious creatures. No sooner do I wash down the soffit than one of them flutters in and smears the pristine white paint trim with more dirty red clay. My homeowners association would definitely not approve red or any other mud on the front of the house and I don’t care much for it, either. I searched my garage for something I could fit on the ledge that would prevent them from getting any kind of foothold, but after spending an afternoon mounting diagonal pieces of Styrofoam to block the ledge, I found they weren’t deterred. The smearing and droppings continued, they just spread it further around the porch! I said they were persistent.

My neighbor suggested I paint the ceiling sky blue to fool them into thinking they were out in the open, but I don’t want a blue ceiling. That would almost be as distasteful as the dripping mud. Besides, I don’t think it would fool the messy transients for even a minute. Yesterday I mounted full size panels around the inside of the alcove ceiling so there is no flat space left for the little stinkers, er, symbols of peace and happiness, to form a foothold. They have flown in, hovered, and flown out several times now. I’ll check daily for the next several weeks, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a nest sticking out from the wall on stilts.

You think I’m being unfair? You think I’m not Eco-friendly? We, who had alligators in our backyard, opossums in our pump house, and bobcats under our mailbox, not co-existants with nature? [I just made up the word coexistant to describe a participant of coexistence as there is currently no word in English for that particular noun. I don’t want to use coexistent as that is a state or condition, not a member or participant. Really, Google “one who coexists” and let me know what you come up with. I’ll happily credit you with my edification.]

My 15 year old granddaughter suggested coexister, which is far more accurate than Google’s Co-pilot, their AI program, which came back with this jewel:

Copilot

Certainly! A person who coexists with others can be described in various ways, depending on the context. Here are some terms you might find relevant:

1. Conciliator: A conciliator is someone who helps different parties or groups find common ground and peacefully coexist by resolving conflicts or disputes.

2. Harmonizer: A harmonizer promotes unity and balance, allowing diverse elements to coexist in a harmonious way.

3. Peacemaker: A peacemaker actively works to maintain peace and understanding among individuals or groups, ensuring they can coexist without conflict.

4. Tolerant Individual: Someone who practices tolerance and acceptance, allowing others to live alongside them despite differences.

Remember that these terms emphasize different aspects of coexistence, but they all reflect the idea of living together harmoniously. 🌟🤝

If you need more synonyms or have any other questions, feel free to ask!😊

Well, may the bird of paradise fly up your nose! No, wait, wait, how about, may the bluebirds of Georgia fly up your nose! There. That’s perfect.

May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose – Written 1965 by Neal Merritt

Sung by Little Jimmy Dickens

George

Concept

 

My muse loves to tease me. Here I am, busy looking for nonsense I can contradict on Facebook and immediately I can tell it’s bored because I have the urge to type something even though I have no idea about what. My muse can be as dull and mechanical as it is romantic and spontaneous, so I won’t define my muse by gender, that simply wouldn’t be fair. It can be boring at times, but it is never to be ignored. Let’s see what pops out this time. Aaah! It has to do with concepts! What is the best possible definition of concept I can think of? According to Google’s dictionary, Oxford languages, a concept is “an abstract idea; a general notion.” Ask a religious person where heaven is, my muse whispers.

And my fingers start as if by remote control. My muse takes over!

First, understand that many religions believe in some sort of life after death. Whether it be reincarnation, resurrection, or rebirth of some kind, there must be a holding tank, so to speak, and in Christianity, that area is “heaven,” where all deceased Christian’s souls are held, waiting for the Resurrection upon which they will be returned to earth in physical bodies as their former selves. While there is no scientific evidence of an afterlife, the concept has been handed down generation to generation for well over over two thousand years – long before mankind had ever seen a penguin – creating a strange, surrealistic dogma that is in conflict with not just human logic, but proven facts as well.

The generally accepted concept of heaven is loosely based on angels flying around with harps and a set of big, pearly gates that everyone has to pass through to gain access to everlasting life. How pearly gates got into the act is beyond me or my muse, so, for guidance, I went to Wikipedia:

“In some Christian denominations, the Pearly Gates are an informal name for the gateway to Heaven. The name is inspired by Revelation 21:21, which describes the New Jerusalem as ‘twelve gates, each gate being made for each tribe of Israel.’ In popular culture, the gates are depicted as large gold, white, or wrought-iron gates in the clouds, guarded by Saint Peter, the keeper of the ‘keys to the kingdom.’"

I still don’t know how the gates became pearly, but that is the best explanation AI can currently come up with.

If someone points up at the sky and says, “heaven is in the sky above,” they are ignoring the fact the earth is round. Sky is relative only to where you may be at the moment. If everyone on earth all pointed up at the sky at the same time, they would be pointing to every point of the universe. Some would pointing toward the sun or the moon or Andromeda or wherever the earth happened to be in its daily rotation. Some would be in daylight, some in darkness. No one would be pointing in the same direction. This leads to two distinct possibilities: One, there is no heaven, or two, heaven is not where everybody thinks it is.

We know life, as we know it, anyway, does not exist outside of our atmosphere and that atmosphere does not extend very far up into the not-so-magical sky. Can heaven be located in a non-life supporting environment? Could it be on Mars? How about over in another galaxy? What is life, by the way. Simply put, life is a condition that naturally converts matter from one form to another using energy. Yep! That’s it! Any physical entity that uses matter to convert to energy that is used to create matter in a different form for its own sustenance is alive. Taking a leaf of lettuce and converting that form into bone cells or skin or feathers or driving an organ that rationalizes and compares is is a great example of life. The kicker we humans don’t understand is where in the chain did lettuce learn to convert dirt, light, and water into glycosylated flavonoids, phenolic acids, carotenoids, vitamin B groups, ascorbic acid, tocopherols, and sesquiterpene lactones that other life forms learned to consume in the first place?

But how about a dimension that mortal humans simply can not imagine? One where life as we know it is not sustained, but in a different form from our limited knowledge it might flourish. Is heaven perhaps a dimension, an undiscovered astral plane that spans time and distance and space that mortal humans can not conceive? How far does it extend? Is it limited to our own solar system? Does heaven span the gap between galaxies? If heaven is indeed an ethereal storage area for our un-powered souls, we know it can not be like the cloud where we store our photos on the Internet which requires physical computers and lots and lots of electrical energy. It has to be a reality that exists in a natural, universal state that we can not access. A natural state that, so far, eludes detection by our science.

But everyone knows where heaven is. Everyone points up. And that is a concept. My muse is really enjoying this. I think my muse knows there are penguins we haven’t discovered yet.

George

Complex

I’m embarrassed by the number of articles I haven’t written. I forget the inspiration I want to capture by the time I find a keyboard or scratch paper to scribble down quick notes. I find myself repeating phrases to myself until they just fade away, displaced by the wonder of marvelous items I discover while rummaging around looking for blank paper.

At first I made light of it, trying to fluff off my occasional distractions as normal aging amid a faster, more complex environment that doesn’t allow us time to absorb the constant, unavoidable changes in our daily lives. Changes none of us can escape. Like turning off my daughter's downstairs floor lamp.

In our rush toward an effortless existence, we have siphoned off technological breakthroughs such as sending disciplined energy through space in coherent methods to allow us to communicate with our fearless explorers as far away as the moon. We now use our vastly increasing knowledge to control a lamp I simply don’t want to walk down the stairs to turn off. From the comfort of an overstuffed sofa sitting in front of a colorful wide screen, sharply focused, showing me what happened today in Gaza that shouldn’t have, I ask Alexa to do it for me. I simply have to remember the name of the lamp. Easy. Peasy.

For you, maybe.

“Alexa, turn off the downstairs lamp!”

The light doesn’t flicker, Alexa has not relayed my command. Perhaps she hasn’t heard me.

“ALEXA, TURN OFF THE DOWNSTAIRS LAMP!” Nothing. Darkness is still banished from the downstairs staircase.

I slowly disentangle from the couch and go to the kitchen counter where my granddaughter thoughtfully left a list of Alexa and Echo controllers and their respective subordinates. Yes, they have so many voice activated appliances they have to break them up into families. There are two desk-top lights, but each is assigned to a different controller or else they both come on at the same time. I read the list twice, but the downstairs lamp isn’t on it. The hard part here is I used the lamp last year when we stayed downstairs in the guest room. I used the lamp, by name, for several days, but my memory is as silent as an alligator waiting for a raccoon to wash it’s food at the water’s edge. The raccoon senses danger and backs away, but not me.

“Alexa, turn off the floor lamp!” Nothing. As frustrated as I am, I am determined not to walk down the stairs.

“Alexa, name the lamps downstairs!” The silence is embarrassing.

“Alexa…”

“Here,” my wife says as she hands me a note. “Try this one.”

“Alexa, turn off Bunny Rabbit!” I said. The light emitting from the stair well faded away.

“Where did you find the name?” I asked.

"I texted them in Orlando, I needed to hear the television instead of you.”

I read the note again. I swear I’ve never heard the name Bunny Rabbit before. Well, maybe not since last year, anyway.

- George

The Second Greatest Scam

 

Everyone has their own idea of the greatest scam ever pulled on mankind, but only a few acknowledge the current popular myth that may be the most pervasive in modern history. Need a hint? Let’s start with the manufactured foundation the big lie is based on: the entertainment media’s obsession with obscure, unlikely mortals, who through inhuman sacrifice and orgasmic, hyper-devotion, become pedestal-mounted demigods who command the respect of world leaders and the social elite of every nation. I’m writing about the perpetuated image of the arduous hard work, personal sacrifice, superhuman skills, and the absolutely blind devotion that creates the incredibly talented, elite superheros known as Chefs de Cuisine.

According to the media, neurosurgeons, theoretical mathematicians, and space shuttle crews undergo far less stress and nowhere near the intensive training the average executive chef apparently receives. Obviously, poor misguided commoners reap far less fame and fortune than the culinary idols known world-wide for creating a world-class, single leaf salad. Why are the entertainment elitists, especially Hollywood, absolutely enamored with mythical, gastronomical decadence and the infrastructure that supports it?

Movie after movie depicts the trials and tribulations of becoming a world class chef, winning the hearts and wallets of all mere mortals while making food, that, personally, I just don’t like very much. Except desserts. I do like French desserts. And that revelation, I confess, was an epiphany triggered by my daughter when she said she liked French desserts, but not their food. She pried the lid off my subconscious grievance about the fanatical global fanfare of “creating” outlandish food only the absurdly rich actually eats. It has been simmering in the subconscious regions of my mind ever since a pretentious server at a local French restaurant scoffed when I inquired about sausage gravy over biscuits for breakfast. “We don’t serve ANY gravies for breakfast,” she sniffed. My bad. Being deep in the heart of Georgia had inadvertently set the “local” cuisine latch in my taste-buds. She didn't even mention biscuits.

According to Wikipedia, “A cuisine is a characteristic style of cooking practices and traditions, often associated with a specific region, country or culture.” Let me see if I can help demist the fog here. Americans will eat anything with sugar on it. If that doesn’t work, just add salt. It’s always one or the other. I have said for years if Americans were handed a plate of sugar, they would put syrup over it. We have friends we avoid eating with because they put so much sugar on their spaghetti sauce I’m afraid I’ll contract diabetes before morning. We produce American cuisine in factories and prepackage it so even my dog can be trained to hit the microwave start button. We fill bags with air and toss in a few ounces of chemically produced crunchy product, flavored to increase your ghrelin hormone levels while diminishing your leptin levels, add a good dose of sodium chloride and sell it by the truck load, especially during football season.

Wikipedia’s definition of Gastronomy doesn’t help much, either. “Gastronomy is the study of the relationship between food and culture, the art of preparing and serving rich or delicate and appetizing food, the cooking styles of particular regions, and the science of good eating.” As mere mortals who eat primarily for sustenance know, it’s what you do with what you got that determines a region’s choice of foods. It is not much of a choice for many countries on earth. You’ll notice words like “starvation” and “malnutrition” are not factored into the overall concept of international cuisine. Neither is the word, “profit.”

Not convinced yet? Count the French restaurants in your neighborhood, and then count the Italian and Mexican restaurants as well. Now, which one comes in third place?

I rest my case.

George

Beam Most of Me Up, Scotty!

 

While lying in bed, slipping aimlessly between thinking about tomorrow’s to do list and traipsing along with the sandman, somewhere between consciousness and dream world, I thought about being beamed up. I have no idea where to, just maybe to the Holodeck, but something occurred to me while I implausibly stood in my designated circle waiting for the command, “Energize!”

The famous science fiction tele-transportation method that disassembles your molecules and your life force in one portal and reassembles everything in another portal somewhere else may have many more possibilities than just simple transportation. The line “Beam me up, Scotty” was made famous by the TV series Star Trek, and was responsible for solving many problematic script exits from impending danger. Even though impending danger was part of my thought, my being beamed up was somewhat different: I dreamt, “What if I had cancer?”

I thought, if they can identify all the biological components needed to recompose me, why can’t they leave out the pieces that shouldn’t be there, like cancer cells. Why not simply leave the bad parts out of the rebuild? Maybe even leave out any viruses, or even stray bullets. Could they even possibly reconfigure my nose during the reassembly process? You know, a little architectural rearrangement of my skeletal cartilage that might help with my self-esteem. When the teleporter process disassembles you, in what ever format or process that may take, each component, each molecule, must be meticulously identified and ported, incubated, and then either transmitted to its reassembly point or perhaps just replicated at a predetermined location for reassembly and activation. Maybe once you’ve been teleported, they could save a copy or two of you in case you’re needed somewhere else. Perhaps your disassembled self could be put in a container and put on a shelf for inter-galactic travel.

The basic concept of somehow disassembling and reassembling our molecules along with their necessary life force has been around for a few years, from Thomas Reid’s letter about replication to Lord Kames in 1775, and more recently by Stanislaw Lem’s epic Fourteenth Voyage of the Star Diaries in 1957. The concept has migrated from science fiction to cautiously awaited anticipation, thanks to Captain Kirk, First Officer Spock and the famous Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott who solemnly pulled the activation lever.

According to an essay by National Science Foundation released on July 6, 2020, “While human teleportation currently exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible now in the subatomic world of quantum mechanics – albeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.”

They continue; “Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance" -- also known as quantum entanglement. In entanglement, one of the basic of concepts of quantum physics, the properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.”1

Aaah! I’ll sleep better tonight. Unless my muse is restless once again. Wonder where I’ll be next time?

1 https://new.nsf.gov/.../teleportation-possible-yes...

Laura, The Riveter

This Blog was originally published in the Sleeps Two Blog in 2011  

The blog is not really about camping, it is about my Grandmother

It should be here instead.

George  May, 2023

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After several months of car shopping and driving all sorts of SUVs that could comfortably haul our new KZ Sportsmen 202, we finally traded our trusty, venerable 1999 GMC Jimmy for a newer, 2005 Toyota Sequoia. We simply wanted more towing power to haul our new 21 foot travel trailer than our six cylinder Jimmy offered. We wanted a comfortable vehicle we could use whenever the travel trailer was sitting dormant, waiting to be once in again connected and hauled somewhere exotic.

We test drove GMC Yukons, Toyota V-8 4-runners, Chevy something or others, and Fords with hoods so high I couldn't see the road in front of me. We drove just about every combination of pick-up truck or SUV that could haul the new trailer and still give us a vehicle we could use “off-duty.” We finally decided on Toyota's big V-8 SUV and drove several Sequoias before finding the dark blue unit we really liked. It only had ninety-five thousand miles on it, and other than a couple of cosmetic issues, was in great mechanical shape. I was surprised to find there were very few used Sequoias with less than 100,000 miles on them.

My dad never kept a car beyond the 60,000 miles. He traded every car before the fenders might fall off or the floor board might rust out, but that was then, and this is now, since Detroit has been slapped up against the side of their corporate heads by foreign competitors. Our American-built, Japanese designed SUV looked like new, except for the floor mats, which we replaced. I added a new brake controller and was pleasantly surprised to find the necessary wiring was already in place, all I had to do was take off the existing plastic caps from the wiring coiled up under the dashboard and plug in the new controller. Nothing like planning ahead.

I had the Sequoia safety checked and all the inspections brought up to date, from spark plugs to brakes. When we test drove the SUV with the trailer attached, we knew we had a great combination. Only one thing needed to be resolved: The ride height difference between the two vehicles. The trailer hitch had to be lowered to keep the travel trailer level.

The two-inch box hitch receiver is fixed on each vehicle, but the shank on the trailer ball assembly for the load equalizer was adjustable. All I had to do was move the shank down and we once again had a level travel trailer. But I had a problem: I didn't have any regular wrenches that even came close to big enough to fit the nut on the hitch.

However, using the Ford wrench from my grandmother, yes, my grandmother, I made the switch effortlessly. You see, my grandmother used to build bombers. B-24 Liberators, to be exact.

B-24 Liberators being assembled at Ford's plant at Willow Run, Michigan
1943 Ford photo from Wikipedia Commons

Laura Corns Mindling, my grandmother, worked during the war for Ford Motor Company at the Willow Run Aircraft Plant, just outside Detroit, Michigan. She was originally hired as a stitcher, working on seats and strapping, but was soon promoted to the machine shop, or production floor as a press operator. She was so good Ford kept her after the war, moving her to the River Rouge plant, near Dearborn, where she worked as a press operator until 1956.

Assembly line at Willow Run, 1943
 Any of the women could have been my grandmother, Laura,
who worked as a drill press operator for Ford until 1956.
Wikipedia Photo

She slipped on an oily floor in 1956 and broke her wrist in the fall. When she was finished with her medical leave, she took medical retirement, and eventually moved to Miami. 

From Left: Daughter Ruth, Laura with Grandson, Dick; her Husband Louis, Son Glen, my father,
home from Italy, and me. Detroit May 1945

She and her husband, Lou, first with her son Glen and us for several years, then moving not far away in their own efficiency apartment. 

Laura lived alone for several years in Miami after Louis, my grandfather, died in 1966, then moved to live the rest of her life with my Aunt Ruth in Denver. After Laura's death, my brother and I received several artifacts and family mementos. I received a few items, including a heavy, wrapped bag.

Included were two wrenches used by my Grandmother at Ford, oh so many years ago. I like to think she used these tools to help win a war, or build a car that perhaps someone she knew may have driven. 

Today, those wrenches helped me change out a ball hitch and a trailer shank that had me absolutely stumped. Grandma would have been proud.

Laura Estelle Cornes Mindling - Circa 1917

https://wwiiwomenmemorial.org/stories2/2020/7/8/laura-estelle-cornes-mindling

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This Blog was originally published in the Sleeps Two Blog by the same author in 2011. It deserves to be here as well.