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I recently ordered a laptop power adapter from NewEgg.  I got a shipping notice, with a USPS tracking number (much appreciated!), but then this:

Shipped from 34 35th Street

Hello?  35th street where?  Is there a city involved here?  NewEgg lists their office address; in Los Angeles.  Shipped from LA?

No.  After looking up the tracking number, turns out it’s being shipped from Brooklyn, New York–the other side of the country.  Well, I’m on the east coast, so that’s great for me—but why not tell me that in your notice?

It’s even more inconvenient at Amazon, who NEVER give the shipping source–which is really painful when there’s no tracking number, either.

The Question:  What does this series of numbers indicate?

six  two  five   five  four  five  six  three seven

Hint:  It has nothing to do with the 13th Century Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci.

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The Answer:   on a ditigal clock, each numeral is formed from a matrix of seven illuminating bars.  The series of numbers is the number of bars needed for each numberal.

The Moral:  Lying in bed awake at night, can’t you find something better to do with your mind?

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I was in a department store a while ago (Macys?  Kohls?)  in the mens wear department, and another man in there was asking a salesman to find him some black cargo-pants.  Made the poor guy run down to the stockroom, only to come back and report that there just weren’t any.  Honestly, cargo pants?  in 2014?  Cargo pants haven’t been au courant for at least two years; you haven’t been able to buy them for even longer.  Even here in the provinces.

And good riddance, I say, to cargo pants.  They were never any good for carrying cargo–that is, for sticking anything in those pockets adhered to the legs of the pants.  But they were baggy; yes, they were baggy, and I think that was the whole appeal of cargo pants: they were so baggy, that they could hide the shape of the pudgy pear who was wearing them. Same with all the “loose-fit” pants.  What does that mean, “loose-fit”?  Same with “full-cut”.  It means, “Cut for the big fat ass of Americans.”

I was recently in Rome for a while.  Roman men do not wear “full-cut” or “loose-fit jeans.  No, they wear regular jeans, which are cut to fit the body of a regular man-type person.  And they look good, like regular men. Men’s clothing should men fit It’s not right to make a man look like a slob.

Slacks should descend only to the level of the shoes; they should not be bunched up at the bottom of the leg, as if one were wearing a size too long.  And the new “skinny” look?  Ridiculous, stick-figure grotesquery turning the legs into twigs.

The behind should not be like a deflated balloon.  Slacks should fit the curves of the buttocks.  The brand Bonobos has it about right, as far as the back of the pants has it about right; but they get the front all wrong. It’s what’s up front that counts, as the old cigarette commercial said.

Why hide our natural shape?  Birds don’t try to hide their plumage, and what we have there is our own natural plumage.  Why do we stand upright?  One reason is to be able to carry things in our hands.  Another is to help us run faster.  Another, to appear larger and intimidating to our enemies.  Forgotten is another main reason: genital display.  It’s a  mating advantage:  Look what I got!   We should be proud of that. Further, comfort would indicate that the loose, baggy look is not only obnoxious, but uncomfortable.  It simply does not feel good to have your genitals swinging freely, ready to be squished the moment you sit down or cross your legs.

Bring back the codpiece!  The codpiece will cozy your genitals, while providing a display unit worthy of a real man.  It’s comfy, and practical: protective, yet proud.  The codpiece is a family-jewel-box display case, and a sign that we will not be intimidated into hiding ourselves behind swaths of useless baggy fabric.

I have a generally sunny view of life.  Today gives me pause.

This morning I was sitting outside on our back porch drinking my coffee.  It was a lovely, sunny morning, a few fair-weather clouds in the sky, the birds chirping happily in the background, some of them quarelleling at the birdfeeder; a perfectly normal summer morning.

Suddenly, there was a “screek, screek, screek” call in the air, and all the birds seemed to hide in the bushes, huddling down under the nearest overhanging branch.  I looked up into the sky, and there was a hawk, circling, circling above.

That afternoon, I was watching the hummingbirds.  We think of hummers as gentle creature, but they are viscious with each other; each bird has to have complete control of the feeder; although several could feed at a time, only one must have control, and will abandon any ability to feed itself, in order to chase the others away.

A while later, the mallard duck appeared.  It is a female mallard.  A few years ago, a mating couple appeared, to pluck the new sprouts from the earth beneath our feeder.  Then they had four little chicks, cute little yellow fluff balls.  After a week, there were only two little fluff balls.  Then there were no more fluff balls  .

Always, the drake, the male, had come with the hen, the female.  And as she ate, he stood guard, watching for danger.  Ireally anthropomorphic.

Then last year, the drake didn’t appear.  Now it’s just the female.  So, I wonder what happened to the female.  I wonder what happened to the chicks.

In a large planting pot near our porch, a Carolina Wren had built a nest…both the male and female had made trip after trip, dragging twigs and grass to create a veritable cave.  Then t..he wren laid an egg.  The egg lies there still, but the wren disappeared long ago, probably scared off by the sounds of our human activity.

This evening, I was agakn sitting on my porch (I do a lot of sitting, where I do my writing), and the flock of mourning doves, who like to forage beneath and in my feeders, suddenly took off in a loud flapping of wings, and the next moment, WHAM a brown shape shot down from the sky, grabbed something in the corner of the yard, and in an instant flew off.

This is a really quiet corner of South Carolina.  And violent.

One thing is that we are from a generation that was lied to so often, so thouroughly, that it is nearly impossible to blithely accept what scientists are saying.  Scientists are presented as authorities, and the authorities have led us astray so often that we are “fact-shy,” like horses, brushing facts from our eyes.

It was scientists and doctors who were telling us that sure, go ahead and smoke tobacco, it’s good for you, even help dry out overly-moist lungs.  It was scientists telling us of the wonders of leaded gasoline.  Science that told us that nuclear power plants were clean and perfectly safe, don’t worry your little heads.  Experts it was who told us we had to stop communism’s domino-like domination of the world.

Experts told us of the quick in-and-out victory in Iraq, and experts who let Afghanistan’s battle stagnate.  Experts who told us the economy could only expand, and the market would have no limit and could now never collapse.

So when now, “experts” scientists or not tell us that GMO foods cannot possibly harm us, are surely perfectly safe—any wonder there is scepticism?

I’m taking this opportunity, to announce: I’m coming out of the closet. This may come as a shock to a lot of you; I’m not all that obvious, I think, and I try not to let it show all the time, but here it is: I am an old person.

Oh, I’ve been gay all my life. I came out as a gay man at the age of nineteen, about when I admitted to myself that I was gay. But now, let’s face it: I’m an OLD gay man. A whole different barrel of fish. Or no, not fish…think of something else. Anything else.

At any rate, here’s how old I am: I was at Stonewall! Wow–I bet you don’t know anyone else who was at Stonewall. Here’s a kicker: I was 27 years old at the time–getting close to the age above which one is not to be trusted. You can trust me on this, though. I was there. At Stonewall. June 29, 1969. Very early morning.

Read more…

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053811/white-on-white-murder

Back in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, a staggering 83 percent of white murder victims were killed by fellow Caucasians.

This is not to say that white people are inherently prone to violence. Most whites, obviously, manage to get through life without murdering anyone. And there are many countries full of white people — Norway, Iceland, France, Denmark, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — where white people murder each other at a much lower rate than you see here in the United States. On the other hand, although people often see criminal behavior as a symptom of poverty, the quantity of murder committed by white people specifically in the United States casts some doubt on this. Per capita GDP is considerably higher here than in France — and the white population in America is considerably richer than the national average — and yet we have more white murderers.

NYTimes, Aug 11,2014:

Better Than First Class, an Entire Suite in the Air
By Joe Sharkey

LOS ANGELES — AIR travel in coach being more uncomfortable than ever, I was receptive when a woman with Etihad Airways flagged me down on the trade show floor at the Global Business Travel Association convention here recently and led me to a display of the newest example of luxury in commercial flying.

That was “The Residence,” a three-room suite that Etihad will install in first-class sections of its A380 superjumbo airplanes, the first one scheduled for service on Dec. 27. The 125-square-foot suite has a living room with two couches, a 32-inch television set and a refrigerator, a bathroom with a shower, a bedroom with a double bed, and a private butler.

Harper’s Magazine, Aug. 13, 21014

Phony Capitalism

By Joseph Stiglitz

Americans are finally beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the inequalities in income and wealth that mark our society. Lately, this realization has been helped along by an unexpected source: the French economist Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the surprise bestseller of the year. Piketty has collected the most extensive evidence available of the increases in economic inequality and inherited wealth over the past forty years, which are creating a new plutocracy.

Many people (okay, a few) have asked me how I make my wine blend,  Castello d’Avis.  Since reading the column in The Atlantic about the quality of box wines (reviewer liked the Franzia cabernet sauvignon), I thought I should post my own blend.

The idea behind this blend came from our liking of a Californa blend, Menage a Trois; a tasty wine, but getting more and more expensive: last I looked, it was $11 at CostCo.  That’s getting a bit rich for my blood.  It’s a blend of cabernet, merlot and zinfandel.  I haven’t found a cheap zinfandel in a box, so I am using the shiraz.

7 Parts  (350 ml) Almaden Cabernet Sauvignon
5 Parts (250 ml) Carlo Rossi Merlot
3 Parts (150 ml) Black Box Shiraz

Almaden Cabernet Sauvignon: it has a fresh, hearty flavor, with a pleasant bouquet (some overtones of chocolate): unusual in a box wine.  I’ve tried all (that are carried by Total Wine), and this is the best.  $14 for 5 liters.

Carlo Rossi Merlot:  Gives a fruity body to the blend.  Best of the big boxes: $15 for 5 liters.

Black Box Shiraz:  The spiciest of the boxes.  $15 for 3 liters.

That comes to $41 for a total of 13 liters, which is 17.33 bottles at 750 ml each, or $2.37 per bottle.  Pretty good price, and a pretty good wine.

The Carolina Wren is in her nest, and I’m feeling fuzzy-warm about it.

The pair started building their nest about three weeks ago.  They decided to spot it in the planter, just beyond where I usually sit on our lanai, about two feet from my face.  The nest, nestled in the wilds of our coleus,  looks rather like an igloo.

There is now one egg in that bower.  She is sitting on the egg today.  I am sitting elsewhere.  If I sit in my usual seat, I have to remain very, very still, or she will freak out.  She hops out her door onto the side of the planter, and sort of plops to the ground, onto the brickwork, and scurries away to a hiding place beneath the patio table.

So I sit elsewhere.  These wrens usually lay three to five eggs; there appears to be only one in this nest.  I’m rooting for a safe hatching, and a successful fledging.  Whatever it takes:  I do my part.

Carolina Wren