Asparagus pee, Gooblek & Other Neat stuff

Something very strange is going on with the prices of things… can anyone explain to me why I can buy a microwave or a 4-head VCR for $39 out at Target, but I just paid about $4 for a bag of cat litter? Somethin’ ain’t right.

OK, all right, I understand supply and demand, and cheap sweatshop labor, and economies of scale achievable through mass-production, and all of that. But what I don’t understand is how you can put together something like a calculator with 20 moving parts and electronic components that have to be screwed and soldered together, that even includes a battery, package it in a blister pack with a 4-color print job that has to be diecut, pack those in a box, send it across the Pacific on a boat, ship it to Auburn, and sell it at The Dollar Tree for one freakin’ dollar!

I mean, at some point, it has to be like the old story: we buy these widgets for $1.20 and we can only sell them for $1.00, but we make it up in volume.

Phew! After working at least a few hours 27 of the preceding 28 days, I declared a holiday and stayed home alone yesterday while Janet went to work.

Of course, there wasn’t much to it. Papa John came and got Emily a little after 9:00, and the guy from the cabinet shop showed up at 9:30 to hang the new cabinet doors over the bathtub. Then I took a bath (the tub was declared seaworthy as of Friday, and I’ve had 5 baths already) and drove down to Kaiser Roseville Medical Center to find out that ‘fasting’ also meant ‘no coffee.’ After that, a quick lunch, a couple of beers, and a nap, and then by 5:15 or so, up to get Emily at John’s house.

Someday, I would like to try spending a substantial, uninterrupted period of time by myself. I’m pretty sure the longest I’ve ever been alone is only like 4 or 5 days, if that, and I can’t really think when that would have been, except maybe a thanksgiving break during college when my roomate went home and I hung out in our room. I like being alone, but I seldom get the chance, and then, since I know it’s limited to a few hours, I try to do too much instead of just enjoying some quiet time to myself.

Mathematically and philosophically, a spiral is just a circle or a self-similar repeating process that is moving along a perpendicular axis in time or space, but that apparent simplicity obscures some complex symbolism.

A lot of things in life work like spirals. Some are on an upward spiral, like the way money is supposed to grow in an investment account when you reinvest the dividends, and some are on a downward spiral, like an engine that begins to overheat, then the heat causes the oil to break down, which increases the friction, which increases the heat, etc. A lot of these processes have been given spiffy names – my two examples are called ‘the magic of compound interest,’ and ‘thermal runaway,’ respectively.

People often allow themselves to get caught up in spirals, good or bad. A typical downward spiral is when you’re having a bad day and you start keeping a laundry list of all the things that are going wrong and each thing just makes you go, ‘well, there’s another thing.’ It also happens when systems fail catastrophically, like a stock that drops to half its value in one trading session because as soon as the value starts to plummet, everybody and his brother yell ‘SELL!’ to try to cut their losses. I refer to this as the lemming effect, and my personal investment strategy is to buy them up as soon as they hit a low, expecting other bargain-hunters to drive the price up sooner or later.

Upward spirals sound good, and often they are, like a couple who are truly in love, or a pair of friendly competitors who push each other to new heights of experience and acheivement, but they can also go sour, and turn from growing enthusiasm to mass hysteria or crowd mentality, especially as the number of participating individuals reaches a critical mass.

One of my personal heroes, Mr. Rogers, died today. He was cool. News from Excite

I do not like feeling powerless. A couple of quick examples?

The stock market has been going down pretty much ever since I made my first investment back in the early ’90s, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It looks like Dubya’s going to war whether we want to or not, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

I would like to be omnipotent. Is there something like Viagra for that?

“Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.” –Dave Barry

So my brother read the post below and wrote back, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be. It’s easy. All you need is love.” and I’m finding that really helpful. It also helps that I’m kind of in limbo this weekend, writing this from a hotel room in Carson City, Nevada.

I’m at a Dataflex Developer’s conference for three days, and there’s really no reason to even think about how my back deck’s all torn up, or the leak in the hot tub, or the catalog merchandising list that was due last week. Ah, sweet freedom. All I have to do tonight is eat, drink a couple of beers, and sleep like a baby.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about intellectual property rights and copyright infringement.

On the one hand, I feel strongly that people who have enough talent to try to make a viable living by creating things like songs and stories really should be able to claim ownership of the things that they produce, and be able to sell said product on an open market at a price that will support a decent lifestyle.

On the other hand, it seems odd that anybody could make millions or even hundreds of millions by selling a pattern of sounds in the air or marks on paper, and fairly absurd that copyright protection extends so far now, thanks to lobbying by corporations like Disney, that it’s hard not to outlive your creations’ eventual free use in the public domain. On a similar note, does anyone really deserve to make millions playing ball, or doing anything else, for that matter? Obviously, it all just comes down to business – and the music business is big business. So is the movie industry, so is television, so is publishing, and so is sports. If you can get enough hype going to get a million people to tune in to your show, line up at the box office, click over to Amazon, or pay for an ad slot, then I guess you ought to be able to collect whatever that market will bear for as long as you can. If P.T. Barnum’s suckers are still being born every minute, then let’s wean them on whatever pablum’s comin’ down the pipe and keep working at them until we bleed them dry.

At the other extreme, though, you’ve got someone like Seth Godin giving away Unleashing the Idea Virus as an e-book and generating enough of an idea virus about what he was up to that he had to go print some real books so he could sell them on Amazon. I saw him speak at the Audio Publishers Association convention at Book Expo America in New York last summer about how clever he was and what a great idea he had, but I can guarantee you that it was only a great idea because it was so unique – if everyone starts giving everything away, or if everyone just starts taking stuff that isn’t theirs, then ain’t nobody gonna be makin’ any money, folks.

I guess when you’re faced with what seems like an ethical dilemma, you have to go back to the basics, like the golden rule. If I was trying to make a living and support a family by publishing books or music, I’d expect to get what’s coming to me, so I try to make sure that if I’m enjoying someone else’s efforts, I pay for my ticket.

I’ve thought of another personality category to add to the mix: morning people vs. night-owls.

I myself sit squarely in the latter camp, dear reader.

To extend my blatant and perhaps unfair stereotyping of the showering dog people, I think they mostly tend to be morning people as well. It just seems to me that the people who run the world are dog people who like to get up bright and early and take a shower. And by run the world, I mean simply that they set up these ridiculous situations where you need to get up at 4:00 a.m. to get to the airport, or you’re actually expected to do something constructive before noon on a day to day basis. Oh yeah, and the one that really bugs me – they get to say it’s an hour earlier when it’s already getting dark before six, just so it’s lighter earlier in the morning, but then it’s already dark when you get off work – what’s that all about?

 
               I know Jack.

I just ate my usual at Jack in the Box, and though I’ve never even pretended to be ‘on a diet’ or ‘eating healthy,’ I got to wondering just how bad I was treating myself. It ain’t pretty folks – in two tacos and a Jumbo Jack, I just took in 960 calories, 460 of them from the 51 grams of fat.

Darn tasty though – I mean, let’s face it, it’s hard to say anything bad about a deep-fried taco!