I think I began to see the point at which western society was beginning to reach peak decadence when the patio fan was invented and began selling.
In the first place, a patio itself – basically an outdoor living room – is a bit of a luxury our ancestors wouldn’t have dreamed of, but attempting to do the wind’s job for those seated on the patio by harnessing a breeze-producing machine is maybe a bit excessive. Some of these fans can be hooked to garden hoses and blow a “cooling mist” over the happy family.
But nothing spells “over the top” like patio heaters which can run a buyer a cool $3,000. So, you want to sit outside but it’s a little chilly out there so you buy a machine which can do the sun’s job for it. Previous generations, if it was cold outside, would have stayed inside but modern humans see no need for that.
So, a patio heater it is then.
But not a heater with just an on/off switch. Not on your life. Here is the product descriptions for a $3,000 jobbie.
This patio heater comes with: a variable input temperature control panel, a modulating gas burner, a low-noise combustion air blower, a visual burner inspection sightglass, a combustion and air-proving safety switch, a three-try spark ignition control, a 100 per cent safety shut-off, a low-voltage control connection, a four-inch heat-treated aluminized combustion tube, an aluminum standard reflector, tube couplers, a heat economizer baffle, stainless steel hangers, a decorative grille, an indicator light, and stainless steel burner head construction.
Or you could just go in the house and put on a sweater before coming back outside. Special features: Wool, sleeves, five big buttons. Also available at extra cost: a hoodie.
My best friend and I were well familiar with the ditches along the almost two miles or so from our farms to the little crossroads of Bornholm northwest of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, when we were growing up. On a warm summer’s day, he would walk on one side of the road, I on the other, and we’d scour the ditches for bottles that we could cash in at the store or the nearby gas station for pop and potato chips. A regular-sized eight-ounce or 10-ounce pop bottle would net us two cents while a large 28-ounce bottle would put five cents in our pockets.
Yahoo!
Because motorists in those days would throw everything but the kitchen sink in the ditches as they drove along, we hardly ever ran out of a supply of refillable glass bottles to turn in. It didn’t take many to pay for our glorious booty from the store. I remember small bags of potato chips that cost a nickel, and pop that you could buy for seven or eight cents for a small bottle to 10 cents for a bigger one.
Our treasure trove took a little bit of a hit one summer, however, when a man in the village started walking the ditches too. We weren’t too happy with this trespasser but we couldn’t do much about him. Our hauls began to dwindle and eventually, so did our interest in fishing the ditches for funds to pay for our habits.
I believe it was a short time after our ditch-digging days ended that we discovered the miracle of girls. We soon found that they were the only worthwhile subject of discussion and would be that for many years to follow.
We hardly ever talked about pop and chips anymore.
But we did learn fairly quickly, as I recall, that it was much easier to find bottles in the roadside ditches than it was to acquire the friendship of girls, as intriguing as they were to us, in reality if not only in our dreams.
There was a little thing going around on Facebook asking users what we would say if we had a chance to talk to our younger selves. What advice would we offer that young whippersnapper who grew into the old guy we are today?
I can think of many things I might say but the most important piece of wisdom I would offer young Jim would be career-related. I would tell my younger self to legally change his name to Gordon. Why my parents never had the good sense to do that in the first place, I don’t know, but for someone destined for a working life putting himself before the public through artistic and entertainment endeavours, Gordon is the only and best name for any Canadian boy.
All the greats in this big country are named Gordon. Gordon Howe, greatest hockey player ever, Gordon Lightfoot, greatest folk musician the country has ever produced, and Gordon Pinsent, one of the finest actors anywhere. Also Gordon Downie, lead singer of The Tragically Hip rock band.
And I grew up watching a crabby old TV journalist/broadcaster named Gordon Sinclair, a character if there ever was one, and a guy I almost ran over one day as I nervously chartered the insane Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. As I managed to screech to a halt just in time, he turned, inches from the hood of my car, and gave me a look I imagine only an upset Gordon could give. After all, I once saw Gordon Lightfoot quit playing one of his hits on stage because the audience wouldn’t stop clapping along to it.
“This is not a clap-along song,” he yelled at us, before refusing to return to it.
Seems to me, the given name Gordon is almost a ticket to success in Canada.
Instead, Jim. What am I supposed to do with that? Even the proper form for it, James, hasn’t got the same Gordian touch.
There has never been a Gordon in my family going back hundreds of years. I think this explains the mediocrity of our contributions to the world of sports and entertainment. There is no Stanley Cup, Grammy or Oscar on my mantle or the mantles of any of my relatives.
People get all bent out of shape over the smallest things. A woman going through a fast-food drivethrough in Michigan ordered bacon on her burger. It came with no bacon. So, she complained.
The servers at the window apologized and gave her a free meal. The second burger had no bacon.
Now some would say that for a place to screw up like this twice in a row is no big deal but to those people I say, “Bacon! They forgot the BACON!” It isn’t as though they failed to toss in some extra relish, mustard or ketchup. They forgot the bacon. TWICE.
Now, what would you do? So would I. And so would our heroine who was so grievously denied her bacon. She pulled out her gun and fired a bullet into the restaurant.
Please, if you are a bleeding heart, please stop reading. Because this is the proper use of a firearm. When a restaurant fails to come across with the bacon, it’s time to go all Yosemite Sam on it. I am woman, hear me roar! Guns are made to straighten out situations just such as these.
Unfortunately, for our modern-day Annie Oakley, a pinko, commie, woke, liberal judge in Michigan thought differently. Hopefully, all the burgers in the prison for the next few years will be served up with lots of bacon.
I am just about finished building a wooden wagon on wheels that can be used to haul speakers and monitors around for jam sessions my musician friends and I hold on Friday nights. I have never built anything like this and didn’t know that I could. But a fellow musician showed up at my house with four wheels that he had bought and he asked me to build it because I told him I had some space and a few tools.
I took on the job, pretty sure I’d make a total mess of it because I enjoy rough carpentry but I am far from a fine craftsman. But my buddy had such confidence in me, that somehow, I found the know-how to smack the thing together.
He also kept a bit of pressure on, calling to find out how it was coming along. So, the friendly timeline combined with his total confidence in me, has produced this little vehicle which I will paint today.
Being a perfectionist, I put more lumber into it than an old sailing ship the pirates travelled in and it’s so heavy, we will need another wagon to carry it to the place we want it to be.
I am pretty proud of my creation, however, and know that it only came about because of my friend’s belief that I could do it.
Sometimes, it seems, trying to live up to someone else’s expectations is not such a bad thing.
I have no plans to hang around with Dylan McWilliams. Three years ago, the Colorado resident was out hiking in Utah when he was bit by a rattlesnake. A year later, he was attacked by a 300-pound black bear when he was camping in his home state. The bear grabbed his head and started pulling him away from his friends but they raised a fuss and Dylan was freed.
And last week, the poor man was bit in the leg by a shark while he was boogie-boarding (whatever that is) near Hawaii. He kicked the seven-foot-long tiger shark as hard as he could then swam to shore.
If all this happened to me, I would be downright negative. I would lock myself in my bedroom and never come out again. I would nail boards over the windows. And wear an impenetrable metal suit.
But that’s not how old Dylan rolls.
“I don’t blame the shark, I don’t blame the bear, and I don’t blame the rattlesnake,” he said. “I’m just mad that I can’t get back in the water for a couple days.”
Dylan is welcome to think what he wants. As for me, I blame the shark, the bear and the rattlesnake. They are a bunch of nasty critters and I have lost all respect for them.
The technology apparently exists which will allow dead recording artists to go back into their studios. The long-gone Elvis Presleys, Janis Joplins, Roy Orbisons and Frank Sinatras of the entertainment world could, theoretically, release new recordings of songs they never sang while they were alive nor even ever heard. The Beatles, it seems, could be getting back together after all one of these days.
“Imagine” an album by John Lennon of new songs written by his sons. Or by Paul McCartney.
This follows on the prospects of dead actors appearing in new movies. James Dean, dead for 70 years, was to appear in a fresh movie a couple of years ago, though that seemed to be a sort of flash-in-the-pan news story that went away fairly quickly. But there have been at least a couple of movies made featuring older actors appearing alongside their younger selves, hardly confusing at all.
And then there are live performances by dead music stars via holographic imagery who appear on stage backed up by very alive, live orchestras. A few years ago, one of the biggest rock stars in Japan was a hologram of a totally made-up female singer who has never existed in real life.
This is not even to get into robots who will likely make all of the above seem like mere child’s play. As far as I am aware, which isn’t very far, China is already experimenting with robot TV news presenters.
If any of this seems strange to us in 2021, it is probably no more mysterious than our ancestors when they first saw “horseless” carriages driving down the street on their own power. Or when they turned the buttons on a little box and heard voices and music coming out of a speaker. Not to mention advances such as movies, airplanes, and TVs, let alone space exploration.
It’s a fast-moving world now and the timeline for the development of new technologies is shrinking every day. Now, instead of it taking years to move from one mode to another – wax records to compact discs, for example – it is taking mere months in some cases for one “new” device to replaced by a more advanced one. Or for something entirely new to be created.
But the concept of keeping dead artists’ careers going is not a totally new one. How many Agatha Christies have there been since the original mystery novelist died?
Having done a little recording myself a few decades ago, I wonder how good my news songs, written by talented robots, will sound when I lay them down a hundred years from now. And then sing them as a hologram down at the local pub.
Think tanks are all the rage these days. Politicians, business leaders and professionals are always hiking off to these multi-day events, where everyone of like mind gets together to help them learn from each other and from experts what it is they should know about their endeavours.
I think these projects are great and I love think tanks. In fact, I spend every single day at a think tank, sometimes the one upstairs and sometimes the one downstairs. In fact, I just spent some quality time at a think tank where I did a lot of cogitating (look it up, it isn’t anything inappropriate.)
I think about a lot of things while attending my think tanks. And, as usual I came away from my most recent session having thought a lot and feeling much lighter.
In fact, I find my daily attendance at my think tanks are really great pauses that refresh without filling. I maybe don’t learn a lot, but I don’t believe I leave my think tanks any dumber than when I arrived.
My favourite think tank is almond coloured and about three feet high. It has a wooden seat which is nice because it doesn’t get cold, an important attribute on frosty mornings, which, in Canada, there are a lot of.
If you have a chance to attend a think tank or two sometime, I highly recommend the experience. It is where I have come up with some of my best ideas over the years and those who have encountered the results of some of my best ideas fully agree that they could only have come from my own personal think tank.
I gave a ride to some young people to another town to visit their friends, except for one young guy in that town who was working and couldn’t meet them.
I don’t go to this town very often and rarely eat there. I have probably darkened the doors of a few of the 20 or 30 restaurants there less than half a dozen times in my life.
This day, supper time rolled around and I still had a few hours to kill so I looked around for somewhere to eat. I drove by a pizza place, a chain restaurant that I don’t normally like to go to, but I didn’t see any other pizza places in my travels so I decided to stop in. The young man who came to the counter to serve me looked familiar. He was the friend that couldn’t be with the young people I had brought to town because he was working.
That’s funny, I thought. I could have picked any restaurant yet chose this one. And even if I had picked the young man’s restaurant, he could have been working in the back and not on the front counter and we would have missed each other completely.
Strange.
What impressed me about it was how unimpressed he seemed to be at the chance meeting and how unimpressed the young folk were later when I gave them a ride home and told them about it.
The impression I got from it all is that I am easily impressed.
I have been thinking lately that I would like to live a long life. At 73, I can’t really complain about the length of my life so far but I would like to live longer because I still have things I want to do. I am still hoping for a multi-million-dollar recording contract, also a long sought after date with either Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts, or both, given that I have to wait for the restraining orders to expire, and my ultimate goal, is to win a hot-dog eating contest.
So, funny the timing of things. Just as I was doing all this wishing, along comes an article on the Internet today entitled The Best Foods To Eat For A Long Life, According To Longevity Experts. If anybody would know about this, it would be longevity experts and, in fact, I would like to live long enough to someday become a longevity expert. Or, failing that, an expert in anything. Anything at all.
So, of course, I dove right into the article on my laptop. But my excitement and my smile both vanished in record time when I read the details of what I will have to eat to live longer. I can only say, it’s not looking good for me, as, with the exception of one or two of the listed items, I don’t want to eat anything the longevity experts recommend.
Get a load of this. The experts want me to eat foods in their natural state, like whole grains, vegetables, fruits, fish, eggs and nuts.
“All vegetables are packed with nutrition, but cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts and cabbage are powerhouses at helping you live longer.” I don’t know what cruciferous even means but the word starts off with the same three letters as “cruel” and that puts me off, I have to say.
“There’s really no upper limit on how many cruciferous vegetables you can eat, but a good rule is to cover about three-quarters of your plate with them,” one of the experts suggested. Especially good in this category are dark, leafy greens. Strike two for me as the only green stuff I like are green jelly beans. At least I think they are beans, so that should count for something.
I am also expected to snarf down a lot of fatty fish like wild salmon, sardines, anchovies, herring and mackerel. I prefer skinny fish, myself, and will only choke down a salmon sandwich if the salmon is spread on the bread so thin it is almost invisible.
Another expert is all hot and bothered about eating whole grains and I realize now that this War on White Bread and Buns will never end.
Instead of dousing the food I do eat with sugar, the many extra years I desire would have to be spent putting “extra virgin olive oil” on everything. Reading further, I see only a half a teaspoon of the stuff a day will do the trick but I am gagging at the thought of even that much.
The experts start to lighten up as the article progresses, and recommend berries. I will admit, I can handle a few berries now and then, especially doused in cream and sugar. But then they drop the ball entirely advising me to start eating “fermented foods,” leading me to wonder if these rascals are “demented fools.” They recommend I eat kimchi, kombucha, tempeh, miso, and sauerkraut that are laced with “beneficial bugs that help you maintain a healthy gut.” I ate a few bugs while singing on the tractor as a kid when the odd one would fly right into my wide open mouth in the middle of a Beatles song. No thanks.
Tree nuts and seeds. Maybe. Almonds, brazil nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, cashews and walnuts.
Plain yogurt. I will get right on that.
It is recommended I eat lots of legumes such as lentils, peas, chickpeas and peanuts. Peanuts I can handle especially if they are whipped into a butter and sold in a plastic jar.
Tomatoes, yes, though no mention of potatoes, and even a larger oversight, in my opinion, potato chips.
But finally, and almost too late, the experts recommend I eat dark chocolate. As it happens, I eat chocolate, both dark and whatever the opposite is, several times a day, and have eaten large quantities of it since before I could talk. When I read that, I started to cheer up a bit. Especially at the news that dark chocolate is good for brain health. I could probably make use of a healthier brain.
Come to think of it, I think all this advice is paying off, as I have already lived longer than the time it took me to read this article.
But I am cautious and I worry. I just hope I live long enough to finish writing this story. If it ends in mid-sentence, do me a favour, please, and call an ambulance.
