WINNING CHRISTMAS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (01-05-23)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

 

     For all of you who made it through Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Emperor's Birthday (Japan), Yap Constitution Day (Micronesia), Sambisa Memorial Day (Nigeria) and Synaxis of the Mother of God (Greece) and didn't have to buy anybody presents, then congratulations to you. For the rest of us, it's murder trying to think of the perfect gift to give on Christmas, let alone Yap Constitution Day. At this point in my life, it's less important that I get anything I need, or anything useful, or even anything I had no idea how much I needed. I just need to not make a perfect idiot of myself totally misjudging what others need.

     One thing that usually works is to find something for the household that we can really use. Something that my wife will open and say, "WOW! We really needed one of these because the one you bought two years ago turns out to have been a total piece of crap!" She has never ever said that, but I can read between the lines when she says, "WOW! This is PERFECT!" If I hear those words I slump with dejection.

     I knew I was onto something when a commercial came on the television for an "air fryer," and she said, "I know someone who has one of those and she swears by it." And I thought to myself, YES! A gift idea. "Honey when you say, 'swears by it,' that's good right? Because we have a toaster that has an undemanding definition of 'toast,' and every time I'm near it I am swearing." Then I pictured myself smiling the Christmas smile that one can only smile who has evenly fried air. So I went on Amazon to find the perfect one, and much to my dismay, there were approximately 3,000 to choose from. 

     I knew I didn't want a "smart" air fryer, that hooks up to your smart phone, and communicates with all the other appliances, and runs the entire household without you even being present, and before you know it, you haven't lived there for years and nobody noticed it. So I looked around at the different features, and none of them had all the good features at once. 

     I read about 100 of user the comments and reviews, and it was immediately apparent that no one can agree on any facet of an air fryer. Some said you could fry an eight-pound chicken on the rotisserie, and others said, yes, but only if the chicken was short for its height. Another said you should use the rotisserie outside becase it smokes, and apparently has made no effort to quit. There wasn't even a clear consensus on the spelling of "rotisserie." 

     Another buyer wrote a long review, but spent a lot of time evaluating how the unit performed when dehydrating persimmons. I'm not sure I could trust a review of anyone who ate enough dehydrated persimmons to make a studied comparison.

     We needed a new coffee maker too, because our old one doesn't work very well. Come to think of it, our old coffee maker was ME. I need to compare more features. Does it get the coffee hot enough? When I order coffee after dinner at a restaurant I ask the waiter to make it so hot that if I spill it on myself I will sue the place and see that he's fired, and I'm not sure that that is a motivating comment.

     What is the difference between an urn and a carafe? I guess it matters less if you're making coffee than if you're running a crematorium. Also, do I need a frother? The answer is, of course, but I'm not sure for what. Frothing sounds like something they do all the time in Europe, where they wear socks with sandals and nobody says a word about it. Or perhaps in a Disney movie, and then we burst into a beatiful song. It behooves me to find out, because the frother is an extra $40 bucks, plus the new sandals are another $28. 

     Now the holidays have come and gone, and I'm declaring myself the winner of Christmas. I've bought the perfect air fryer, and now I'm inundated with internet ads for air fryers that are even MORE perfect, on the off-chance that I might buy three or four more of them. The coffee maker works pretty well too. It made a funny noise every time I walked over to it, but that turned out to be my knee. What I've learned so far is that once you start frothing things it's tough to stop. Come on over and see for yourself. We're the house with the dog bowl outside that has frothed water in it.

LONG AND WINDING ROAD

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-29-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     Sometimes an interviewer will ask a musician what his or her influences are, and they will say, of course, The Beatles. Which makes Paul McCartney the most famous YouTube influencer there ever was. During the height of Beatlemania the fans were so loud that four musicians couldn't hear a note they were playing onstage. Everybody was screaming at the top of their lungs. If I had been there at the time I would have been screaming too: "CAN'T YOU PEOPLE PLEASE SHUT UP FOR TWO MINUTES? I CAN'T HEAR THE MUSIC OVER MY CONSTANT YELLING AT YOU!" Playing inside a DC-10 engine might have been a peaceful respite. To escape the madness they would lock themselves into the friendly womb of EMI Recording Studios, adjacent to and affectionately known as, Abbey Road. 

     We saw a documentary at the Jacob Burns Film Center called, "If These Walls Could Sing," about the hallowed soundstage which included a Q & A with the filmmaker, Mary McCartney. McCartney, who is a photographer, was seduced into directing her first movie when she came across a photo of her Mother leading a Shetland pony into the studio. The '70s were like that. Paul McCartney doesn't remember exactly what it was doing there but does recall that it was fairly well-behaved. I guess it could come in handy if your voice was a little horse.

     The Beatles had unlimited recording time there, it was written into their contract. It grew to be a place where what was commonly referred to as magic was exposed to be hard work, intense collaboration, trial and error, and innovation. There's a lore about the place that started the day Edward Elgar directed an orchestra performing his Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1 over 90 years ago, and was recorded directly onto wax disc. 

     And the mystique has only grown over time. No one can walk to the other side of the street at "Zebra Crossing" without snapping a photo commemorating the event, and it's one of the few photo ops in the world where a selfie will not do. The stories are as legendary as the music. Like the time a young Jimmy Page was hired into the session for Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger recording. She had to sing the song as the credits were rolling, and she got to the last note before the credits did, resulting in high D-sharp held so long that she almost had to finish it from an oxygen tent.

     But it was the people who made Abbey Road a place. The creative inspirations of The Beatles, Pink Floyd and others were matched by the technical wizardry of Ken Townsend, Geoff Emerick and other "balance engineers." The doubling of vocal performances, done digitally now, was pioneered at EMI, by feeding a slightly slower output of Paul or John's voice back into the tape machine and letting the physical distance between the record and the playback do the job. Ideas like slowing down the tape, or running it backwards into the mix made smoke come out of the ears of the studio executives, who only prayed that these techniques were not damaging their equipment. The Beatles were, however, The Beatles, and they were left to their playground.

     Paul affectionately called the technicians and engineers "boffins," and he knew he could come to them with an outlandish brainchild that was possibly an orphan, and they would find it a home. Behind every cool thing in history is a slightly socially awkward person with thick glasses who made it technically possible. And that's why the geek shall inherit the Earth.

     The '70s seemed like the studio's heyday, but hey, those days don't last forever. The music business changed, the recording industry changed, and the cavernous Studio One lay fallow. Until a lucky circumstance that led John Williams there, twirling his baton and leading an orchestra that embarked on a Solo career. The Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises begat a new era for Abbey Road, and it had come full circle back to the philharmonic recordings that it had started with. Producer Giles Martin, son of the late George Martin who presided over all those Beatles sessions, referring to all those ghosts of music past that inhabit Abbey Road likened the atmosphere to a teapot that "wasn't meant to be cleaned." 

     Mary's movie hit all the right notes, and it's a good thing because it must have been hard to shine growing up in all that reflected light. "Daddy, do you like the song I made up??" "Of course, honey, and have you considered strings for the second bridge?" 

FIR EXAMPLE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-22-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     We attended our town's tree-lighting ceremony a couple weeks ago, and it definitely helped me get a little more holiday spirit going, which was a good thing because I'm running a little behind. I didn't get my act together in time for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, Where Did I Leave My Wallet Wednesday, There's Nothing Left in the Store Thursday or Forget About it Friday. I guess I can get better bang for my holiday shopping buck if I wait until after Christmas. Even better, if I can just hold my gift recipients off another year, the electronic doo-dad I was going to get this year will soon be obsolete, and I can the new one that hasn't been invented yet the year after.

     When I was a kid we used to get more into Christmas once my Mom started putting decorations up around the house, like pine boughs and a ceramic Nativity Scene we had, which included Mary, Joseph, the Wise Men, some farm animals and the baby Jesus in a manger. My Mom set the scene according to standard practice, and then we made some revisions to the layout that were not necessarily based on the Bible. We were just little kids and didn't have the whole story down pat, but suffice it to say that our version of things could have resulted in a visit from the Bethlehem ASPCA, PETA, the Department of Agriculture and Child Protective Services.

     I didn't even get a chance to put my outdoor Christmas tree lights up yet since I'm existing on one foot these days. The job requires me crawling around underneath the shrubs to find the plug in the wet leaves, trying to determine if its a fire hazard (probably yes, but settling on no) and then locating an outdoor extension cord that is UL approved. I don't know who the UL is, but if you've been waiting around for their approval all this time I think you should see a therapist.

     I always find it astonishing that we can send so much money sending a probe to Mars, where I spend hardly any time, and almost no money on whatever research it would take to find a way to manufacture Christmas lights that don't stop working when one of the bulbs burns out. I went to High School in the 1970s, and we had a lot of burnouts, and it didn't stop the rest of the school from functioning just fine.

     At our tree lighting, The Girl Scouts were serving hot chocolate, and I drank about 85% of the minimum daily adult requirement. I don't need my hot chocolate as hot as I like my coffee, which I prefer so scalding that after I have one sip the tip of my tongue burns off, which is the only part that you can taste coffee with. After that I can only identify foods that are bitter, salty, or taste like 205/17-inch all-season radial tires, and don't ask me how I know that.

     The tree ceremony is a great place to join in a few Christmas carols. And I like the fact that since I can never remember lyrics, I can just sing "Fa la la la la," and I have a better than average chance of getting it right. But if I hear the songs in every television ad starting since before Halloween, I'm going to peak too early and become severely Grinched by Thanksgiving. And I don't want to find myself singing "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen" along to the TV, and discover much too late that it's an ad for "manscaping" products or something. I suppose manscaping products might make a great Christmas gift for the guy who has everything and needs to shave some of it off, but I don't need to be involved. Just do the pruning, mow the lawn, blow the leaves and leave me out of it.

     You might not believe it but I have a cynical side to me, and even as a kid I wasn't really buying the Santa Claus story. And yet parents used to insist the whole thing was true, and it made me very wary of blindly accepting everything adults said. 

     To this day I have a hard time believing the story of Santa Claus. How could he get all those deliveries done in one night? Who names a reindeer "Blixen?" And if Claus gets caught in  the chimney flue on the way down, isn't it going to put a damper on things? But then whom to my wondering eyes should appear, but Santa Claus himself, right next to that Douglas fir in front of the Town House. And after a countdown, the place lit up like, well, a Christmas tree, and I thought maybe it wouldn't hurt to update my Christmas list, just in case I've been nicer than I thought.

'TIS THE SEASON TO BE WARY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-15-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     I feel that part of my job as a journalist (and I use that term so loosely that it slipped out of my hand and rolled under the couch) is to keep readers informed and aware. And the holiday season should be a time of heightened vigilance of scams, shams, spams and flim-flams that can mean very special gifts for e-criminals around the world.

     I'm ordinarily a fairly trusting person. I injured my back once trusting someone as far as I could throw them. I want to believe what people tell me. I want to believe conspiracy theories so that I can fit in with all those smart folks who don't have particularly high standards of proof.

     In fact just the other day I got a message from a Mr. Philip, not sure if that's his first name or his last name. He identified himself as a barrister and asked me to contact him by a different email address, which he included a link for, so that he could give me a more detailed explanation. He didn't mention what the explanation was for, so I assume he's going to explain all that in his explanation. It's the sort of thing barristers do, so I'm pretty sure it's legit.

     I also received an email from Ms. Yuen Cheng, in which she said, "Hi." I'm planning to respond, and I already know what my reply will be. There's no link or attachment or anything, so I think she may simply have something inside her head that doesn't plan on coming out. I'll let you know in a few months when we reach the end of a sentence.

     I also heard from Aisha Muammar Gaddafi, "the only daughter of the embattled president of Libya." She's now a refugee in Burkina Faso, and I don't have time to give you the whole story, but suffice it to say that there's $27.5 MILLION DOLLARS in an account that could be mine if I play my cards right. I don't know how or why she chose me, but I have mentioned to several people in the past that I would LOVE to have $27.5 million dollars, and I guess word got around.

     There are ways to protect yourself from online grifters. Try not to share too much information about yourself on social media, or recount every detail about your life in a public weekly newspaper column. Look for subtle differences of one or two missing letters in email return addresses that can signal a bogus correspondence. If you get an email saying your Prime account has been hacked and it's from "scAmazon," it may be fraudulent. Some have reported phone calls from the IRS, but it's important to know that if the IRS was prone to calling people by phone, I would have had to change my number 20 times by now.

     You can easily identify scammers because after the year 2016, no one uses courtesy or politeness in any form anymore except if they want you to click on a malware link. Miss Kissi Becker Sirleaf writes, for instance, "Dearest one, How are you and every members of your family? I hope fine? Good to write you." I have to admit, she had me at "Hello." And since her father in West Africa is a "highly reputable business magnet," I feel somewhat attracted to her situation.

     They already know your buying habits, and may try to appeal to you using products or subjects that they know you like, so answer emails and correspondence that refer only to things you hate.  Remember that cybercriminals are a relentless bunch, where only the most successful survive, and the ones who fall by the wayside are the ones who can't hack it. They see you when you're sleeping, they know when you're awake. They know when your password is bad or good, so beware for goodness sake. Sometimes a little popup appears asking me if I would like to accept cookies, and what my cookie preferences are, but there's no menu to tell them that I am not a big fan of raisins.

     They also know that your pet's name is probably your password, with the current year added on. That's why your pet's name should always be more than eight characters and include a number, a capital letter, a lower case letter and a symbol. And you should change your pet's name every two months. I hope this will make you think twice about clicking a link from an email address that you don't recognize. If you liked this article, let me know, and please include your Social Security number so that I know it's really you.