[This was a guest column in Editor & Publisher, the trade journal of the editing and publishing industries.]
My local newspaper recently ran the obituary of an obviously much-beloved woman who “spent her formidable years in Providence.” Like most large city dailies, my paper has long since jettisoned staff-written obituaries in favor of paid announcements written by the family of the deceased, charged at the not-inconsequential rate of $53 to $65 dollars per column inch. Although the paper’s web site maintains that letting families submit their own unedited text leaves them “in control”, I wonder if they are instead left in the lurch.
My on-line dictionary defines “formidable” as: “1: causing fear, dread, or apprehension 2: having qualities that discourage approach or attack 3: ending to inspire awe or wonder i.e. impressive.” One could engage in considerable speculation as to how any of these might have described this era of the deceased’s life, but one couldn’t help but have the niggling suspicion that this is not what they intended to say.
Few of us are skilled obituary writers (fortunately) yet we all mis-use words. Most obituaries are written on short notice, and certainly under emotional circumstances. But these kinds of slips are distractions from the purpose of an obituary.which is to announce the passing of, and pay tribute to, a much-adored and sorely missed loved one. I am fascinated by these reviews of people’s lives and at nearly 60, am, alas, finding more and more people that I know among the reviewees. Many of these accounts have made me cry (and not just from the errors). I read about a lot of people that I wish I had known but feel I know a little from their obituaries. How can one not feel warmly toward someone who “never did anything without thinking about how it would affect other people, and any animals that might be nearby”?
But given the cost and the emotional value of obituaries, I wonder if newspaper staffs might consider supplying a little editorial help under several headings:
Spelling Actually Matters: More than once I have thought back to the somber pronouncement in a local obit that grandma “has gone to live with the angles.”
Punctuation Perils: A judicious use of semi-colons might have prevented one writer from suggesting that the deceased’s husband and children were going to be cremated along with her.
Felony quotation abuse: as in: Mary graduated from “West Side High School” and the “City College of Nursing”. And its corollary, Baffling Capitalization Practices: “A graduate of NEBRASKA STATE UNIVERSITY, she belonged to THE HEART ASSOCIATION and the DAR.”
Hyper Hyperbole: Mom may have been a wonderful painter but were her talents really of “Renaissance proportions”? (And while we’re on this subject, what IS a Renaissance proportion?) As to the pronouncement that “All heaven is rejoicing at her arrival”, I’ll admit I’m just jealous because there’s not a snowball’s chance my loved ones will ever say this about me.
And I think it wouldn’t hurt newspapers to offer a few general guidelines as well. For example:
It’s probably better to mention the spouse before the cats.
Every family has its own lore, but sometimes that lore is best left in the family and out of the newspaper. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to mention that mom was aggressively wooed by a notorious mobster – and probably why the obit was run again the next day minus the reference.
Playing fast and loose with history: Grandma was undoubtedly a marvelous story teller, and the adoring grandkids (her chroniclers) a rapt audience - but maybe a tad vague on world events. Because if grandma were born in 1936, it was probably not likely she was a leader of the French Resistance.
Genealogy: One decedent’s obit claimed his ancestry could be traced back to the Vikings. (Honest mistake; I got suckered by that web site too.) Another claimed to be a descendant of George Washington - not good news to Martha, as she and George had no children.
I’m ambivalent about this request, frankly. The appeal of paid obits is that they aren’t professionally written, and without the filter of a staff obituary writer, express a palpable grief and heart-warming affection. I’d hate to tamper with what is often their guileless charm. But it just seems the price tag ought to come with a phone call asking if perhaps they meant to say “formative” (as in early developing) instead of “formidable” years? Which would still give them the option to say, “Hell no! We were scared to death of her!” But at least everyone is clear.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
*Airlines As Terrorists
[This piece was written in the Alaska Airlines terminal in Seattle and subsequently printed as an Op-Ed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.]
Somewhere in our fourth hour as hostages of a major airline at SeaTac, I couldn’t help but reflect that if our captors were terrorists, there would at least be someone negotiating for our release.
The terrorists, if they were the Old School type more interested in airplanes as a negotiating ploy than airborne missiles, would even demand food. And unlike passengers, they would get it. They might even let the elderly go free. We hope we would qualify.
My 59 year old husband and I are so old we remember back to the halcyon days when a flight delayed even a half hour was cause for mass apologies and free champagne, and airlines happily accepted their delayed competitor’s tickets, creating a powerful incentive to get one’s plane back in the air before passengers were flying someone else’s friendly skies. Even more fondly, we remember when airlines had a customer service model other than lying.
Lured into a false sense of security by an actual aircraft at the gate last week, we were dismayed when, forty-five minutes prior to flight time, the On Time status suddenly flashed Delayed. Yes, they announced soon after, the plane was here but the crew was temporarily stranded by a maintenance problem in Sacramento – two hours flying time away. It didn't take much in the way of math skills to realize that long before the official status changed, they knew.
My business traveler husband, the Airplane Whisperer, barely looked up from his 30 pound copy of Professional Asp.Net 2.0, a tome ideally suited for today’s not-going-anywhere-soon flier. “Won’t matter,” he said. “They’ll be out of flight time by then.” He has a 100% accuracy rate for predicting when flights aren’t going to go.
As the hours wore on and the departure time continued to be pushed back, the cheery blond gate agent updated our status with practiced perfidy: the crew is in the air and will land at 6:17. But as each new departure time approached, more bad news: We aren’t going to board quite yet as we’d hate for you sit on the ground. Then, oops! The crew is now in Portland. But they’re still on their way! And finally (my husband only smiled): alas, the crew is out of flight time for the day. We’ll have to find a new crew.
Just to be clear, we realize this isn’t the gate agents’ personal faults. Like prison guards everywhere, they’re just following orders. And they probably deserve combat pay since I can’t imagine what possesses anyone to take a job as the ground interface with the flying public. Travel benefits, presumably, but anymore that’s like working for a radiologist for the free barium enemas. No, they’re just the hapless front men for the management grinches who don’t have to look into the faces of vacationers whose $500 a night Caribbean hotel room is sitting empty, or the distraught daughter who is going to miss Dad’s funeral.
Sadly, we don’t think it’s going to be getting any better. In fact, my husband continues to be grateful that no terrorist has yet been caught trying to board a plane with booby trapped underwear, triggering the inevitable next level of personal degradation.
In the meantime, however, a free glass of champagne would be really nice.
Somewhere in our fourth hour as hostages of a major airline at SeaTac, I couldn’t help but reflect that if our captors were terrorists, there would at least be someone negotiating for our release.
The terrorists, if they were the Old School type more interested in airplanes as a negotiating ploy than airborne missiles, would even demand food. And unlike passengers, they would get it. They might even let the elderly go free. We hope we would qualify.
My 59 year old husband and I are so old we remember back to the halcyon days when a flight delayed even a half hour was cause for mass apologies and free champagne, and airlines happily accepted their delayed competitor’s tickets, creating a powerful incentive to get one’s plane back in the air before passengers were flying someone else’s friendly skies. Even more fondly, we remember when airlines had a customer service model other than lying.
Lured into a false sense of security by an actual aircraft at the gate last week, we were dismayed when, forty-five minutes prior to flight time, the On Time status suddenly flashed Delayed. Yes, they announced soon after, the plane was here but the crew was temporarily stranded by a maintenance problem in Sacramento – two hours flying time away. It didn't take much in the way of math skills to realize that long before the official status changed, they knew.
My business traveler husband, the Airplane Whisperer, barely looked up from his 30 pound copy of Professional Asp.Net 2.0, a tome ideally suited for today’s not-going-anywhere-soon flier. “Won’t matter,” he said. “They’ll be out of flight time by then.” He has a 100% accuracy rate for predicting when flights aren’t going to go.
As the hours wore on and the departure time continued to be pushed back, the cheery blond gate agent updated our status with practiced perfidy: the crew is in the air and will land at 6:17. But as each new departure time approached, more bad news: We aren’t going to board quite yet as we’d hate for you sit on the ground. Then, oops! The crew is now in Portland. But they’re still on their way! And finally (my husband only smiled): alas, the crew is out of flight time for the day. We’ll have to find a new crew.
Just to be clear, we realize this isn’t the gate agents’ personal faults. Like prison guards everywhere, they’re just following orders. And they probably deserve combat pay since I can’t imagine what possesses anyone to take a job as the ground interface with the flying public. Travel benefits, presumably, but anymore that’s like working for a radiologist for the free barium enemas. No, they’re just the hapless front men for the management grinches who don’t have to look into the faces of vacationers whose $500 a night Caribbean hotel room is sitting empty, or the distraught daughter who is going to miss Dad’s funeral.
Sadly, we don’t think it’s going to be getting any better. In fact, my husband continues to be grateful that no terrorist has yet been caught trying to board a plane with booby trapped underwear, triggering the inevitable next level of personal degradation.
In the meantime, however, a free glass of champagne would be really nice.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Going Down In The La Jolla Triangle
[This piece was published in San Diego Magazine.]
When I tell people I live in the La Jolla Triangle they usually think I’m referring to the Golden Triangle area encompassing the University Towne Center mall and surrounding business complex. No, the Triangle where I’ve lived for thirty-five years is more of the Bermuda variety where, as my friend Barbara says, “ships, planes and municipal services mysteriously disappear”.
We got our first inkling that there were some anomalies with our location soon after my former husband and I moved in and called 911 to report an accident in front of our house. The police dispatcher called back ten minutes later to clarify the information as, she said, “there is no such address”.
As it turned out, four of our neighbors’ homes were AWOL as well. Most of our street of 4-digit addresses meanders along on the west side of La Jolla Boulevard but inexplicably skips some 5100 numbers when it crosses, marooning five houses with 3-digit addresses on the east side.
It wasn’t only the fire department that was a little hazy on the whereabouts of these 1947-era homes. The regular mail carriers knew where we were but the substitutes would routinely return any three digit-numbered mail to sender as undeliverable, resulting in unpaid bills, DMV fines for expired registrations, shredded bank statements, and unanswered invitations. (Our mortgager expressed dismay when their communications to us were returned with the address stamped “nonexistent”.) Calls to the post office would only temporarily sort it out; in that era, the La Jolla Postmaster position seemed to have a higher turnover than the swing shift at Burger King.
Our own problems were further compounded by the fact that there was an unoccupied vacation home on the west side of La Jolla Boulevard which contained our three digits in the same sequence. Both the postal carriers and UPS (at the time, even less able to find our home than their public counterpart) were notorious for writing a fourth digit in front of our house number and abandoning our mail at the vacation home whose owners would kindly return it to us once a year. It was like Christmas in July.
When my husband and I divorced after ten years in the house, I had to ask myself: Did he just want his mail?
It didn’t help, of course, that the house across the street from us, built at the same time and whose front door and driveway faced ours, is deemed to be on a different street, as is the one kitty corner to us. How some houses on our street came to be assigned to one street and others seemingly randomly to another remains, in my view, one of the Great Unsolved Address Mysteries of all time.
Episodes of lost mail might still be occurring except for the fact after a two year spate with only substitute carriers on our route, my second husband received a Final Notice from the fund company handling his IRA that since their three previous communications had been returned as undeliverable, his retirement account was being turned over to the state as abandoned. The sheer force of ballistic energy from our house could have fueled a missile to Mars – or more likely, a direct hit into our postal substation. Less than a week later, the Regional Postmaster had changed our route to connect it with the west side, and promised us a regular mail carrier, a really terrific guy who we’ve now had for some years.
But would that it were just the mail. Neither SD G&E nor the city of San Diego will lay claim to the street light in front of our house. Eerily, both insist that there IS no street light in front of our house. (Cue Twilight Zone music here.) Fortunately, it only goes out every few years.
And just when I thought that after thirty-five years and the advent of GPS locators our sixty-one year old house could finally acquire its rightful place on a map, our trash pickup suddenly ceased this summer. Just ours, not any of the neighbors. Unlike most of the blocks in our neighborhood which come in nice rectangular shapes, the end of our block is rounded with our house on the tip and – count ‘em – five thoroughfares coming together at the end of location our driveway. Backing out on a foggy morning has always been a leap of faith, but that’s another article. After the fourth missed pickup, my new best friend, the La Jolla sanitation supervisor, revealed that routes in our area had been reconfigured and that somehow, given our quirky address and our at the hub of so many streets, we’d dropped off the grid. But even the truck he’d sent back out to pick up our trash several days later returned empty handed. “Where ARE you?” he queried into my voice mail.
So at this point, we’re very (very) clear why the previous owners moved. But what about us: if we ever sell, do we have to disclose that our mail service is iffy, trash pickup sporadic, the streetlight a phantom, and pizza delivery a mere wishful fantasy? Does real estate law have a “Black Hole Rule”? And since half our neighbors are deemed to be on a different street anyway, could the new folks choose?
In the meantime, we suggest that low flying aircraft steer clear.
When I tell people I live in the La Jolla Triangle they usually think I’m referring to the Golden Triangle area encompassing the University Towne Center mall and surrounding business complex. No, the Triangle where I’ve lived for thirty-five years is more of the Bermuda variety where, as my friend Barbara says, “ships, planes and municipal services mysteriously disappear”.
We got our first inkling that there were some anomalies with our location soon after my former husband and I moved in and called 911 to report an accident in front of our house. The police dispatcher called back ten minutes later to clarify the information as, she said, “there is no such address”.
As it turned out, four of our neighbors’ homes were AWOL as well. Most of our street of 4-digit addresses meanders along on the west side of La Jolla Boulevard but inexplicably skips some 5100 numbers when it crosses, marooning five houses with 3-digit addresses on the east side.
It wasn’t only the fire department that was a little hazy on the whereabouts of these 1947-era homes. The regular mail carriers knew where we were but the substitutes would routinely return any three digit-numbered mail to sender as undeliverable, resulting in unpaid bills, DMV fines for expired registrations, shredded bank statements, and unanswered invitations. (Our mortgager expressed dismay when their communications to us were returned with the address stamped “nonexistent”.) Calls to the post office would only temporarily sort it out; in that era, the La Jolla Postmaster position seemed to have a higher turnover than the swing shift at Burger King.
Our own problems were further compounded by the fact that there was an unoccupied vacation home on the west side of La Jolla Boulevard which contained our three digits in the same sequence. Both the postal carriers and UPS (at the time, even less able to find our home than their public counterpart) were notorious for writing a fourth digit in front of our house number and abandoning our mail at the vacation home whose owners would kindly return it to us once a year. It was like Christmas in July.
When my husband and I divorced after ten years in the house, I had to ask myself: Did he just want his mail?
It didn’t help, of course, that the house across the street from us, built at the same time and whose front door and driveway faced ours, is deemed to be on a different street, as is the one kitty corner to us. How some houses on our street came to be assigned to one street and others seemingly randomly to another remains, in my view, one of the Great Unsolved Address Mysteries of all time.
Episodes of lost mail might still be occurring except for the fact after a two year spate with only substitute carriers on our route, my second husband received a Final Notice from the fund company handling his IRA that since their three previous communications had been returned as undeliverable, his retirement account was being turned over to the state as abandoned. The sheer force of ballistic energy from our house could have fueled a missile to Mars – or more likely, a direct hit into our postal substation. Less than a week later, the Regional Postmaster had changed our route to connect it with the west side, and promised us a regular mail carrier, a really terrific guy who we’ve now had for some years.
But would that it were just the mail. Neither SD G&E nor the city of San Diego will lay claim to the street light in front of our house. Eerily, both insist that there IS no street light in front of our house. (Cue Twilight Zone music here.) Fortunately, it only goes out every few years.
And just when I thought that after thirty-five years and the advent of GPS locators our sixty-one year old house could finally acquire its rightful place on a map, our trash pickup suddenly ceased this summer. Just ours, not any of the neighbors. Unlike most of the blocks in our neighborhood which come in nice rectangular shapes, the end of our block is rounded with our house on the tip and – count ‘em – five thoroughfares coming together at the end of location our driveway. Backing out on a foggy morning has always been a leap of faith, but that’s another article. After the fourth missed pickup, my new best friend, the La Jolla sanitation supervisor, revealed that routes in our area had been reconfigured and that somehow, given our quirky address and our at the hub of so many streets, we’d dropped off the grid. But even the truck he’d sent back out to pick up our trash several days later returned empty handed. “Where ARE you?” he queried into my voice mail.
So at this point, we’re very (very) clear why the previous owners moved. But what about us: if we ever sell, do we have to disclose that our mail service is iffy, trash pickup sporadic, the streetlight a phantom, and pizza delivery a mere wishful fantasy? Does real estate law have a “Black Hole Rule”? And since half our neighbors are deemed to be on a different street anyway, could the new folks choose?
In the meantime, we suggest that low flying aircraft steer clear.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
A Terminal Case of Ambiguity Fatigue
[This was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune]
My sister and I were having our weekly lunch at Rock Bottom (she eating Atkins, and I the Syndrome X diet), and discussing all the flip-flops in medical wisdom that have occurred in our 50-something years. We concluded at the end that our biggest health problem may not be high cholesterol but “ambiguity fatigue”. It seems that everything we thought we “knew” is now wrong.
When our sons were infants, babies had to sleep on their stomachs to avoid crib death; now they have to be on their backs. Our friends with ulcers who spent 30 years avoiding spicy foods are now being treated for a bacterial infection. Brushing your hair 100 strokes a night was said to make it shiny and healthy (but now gives it split ends). People with diverticulosis were once relegated to soft diets; now they’re filling up on roughage. My sister and I have dutifully switched back and forth from butter to margarine several times in the last 30 years (but frankly preferred the butter years); now we can’t figure out whether the saturated fat or the trans fats are more likely to get us. Cholesterol may not matter; artery inflammation measured by C-Reactive Protein may be the better measure. At my health club the other day, a fellow treadmiller was overheard to say that her doctor says to stop drinking 8 glasses of water a day - too hard on the kidneys.
Is nothing sacred?
Of course, my sister and I agree that the two that have truly broken our spirits are the HRT (hormone replacement therapy) and carbs versus fat debates. I spent twenty years limiting myself to two eggs a week and now suddenly eggs are OK again? I demand a cholesterol refund! Our genuinely beloved Primary Care Physician, nobly adhering to prevailing medical wisdom, is trying to get her patients off the hormones and onto the statins that she hopes will add a few years to our otherwise decrepit middle-aged bodies. But we’ve become a hard sell. Ambiguity fatigue has taken its toll. In our heart of hearts, we’re beginning to think of medical researchers, albeit unfairly, as the Enron executives of health care. What happened to all those studies showing HRT was good? If those studies were all flawed, how do we know the new ones aren’t too? Before I completely change my life again, they’re going to have to convince me.
Then there’s the issue of all these statistics. By my calculations, I do at least 20 things that are purported to reduce my risk of heart disease by 50%. – like eating fish twice a week. At what point does my heart owe me? When do I get a hot fudge sundae risk free? (I am hoping that someone who paid more attention to college statistics will write in and tell me.)
As my sister looked longingly at the whole wheat bun on my turkey burger, and I salivated over her high-fat plain hamburger, we concluded there is only one real health care question:
Does anybody really know?
All you can really do, we decided, is weigh up the evidence and go with what feels right, knowing that whatever you’re doing is bound to come back into favor again at some point. It’s kind of like riding out a down market. In fact, I like to think of it in terms of medical research ``futures”: I personally plan to go short on Lipitor (my pick as the next pariah of health care) and go long – very long – on chocolate. A person, after all, has to live.
My sister and I were having our weekly lunch at Rock Bottom (she eating Atkins, and I the Syndrome X diet), and discussing all the flip-flops in medical wisdom that have occurred in our 50-something years. We concluded at the end that our biggest health problem may not be high cholesterol but “ambiguity fatigue”. It seems that everything we thought we “knew” is now wrong.
When our sons were infants, babies had to sleep on their stomachs to avoid crib death; now they have to be on their backs. Our friends with ulcers who spent 30 years avoiding spicy foods are now being treated for a bacterial infection. Brushing your hair 100 strokes a night was said to make it shiny and healthy (but now gives it split ends). People with diverticulosis were once relegated to soft diets; now they’re filling up on roughage. My sister and I have dutifully switched back and forth from butter to margarine several times in the last 30 years (but frankly preferred the butter years); now we can’t figure out whether the saturated fat or the trans fats are more likely to get us. Cholesterol may not matter; artery inflammation measured by C-Reactive Protein may be the better measure. At my health club the other day, a fellow treadmiller was overheard to say that her doctor says to stop drinking 8 glasses of water a day - too hard on the kidneys.
Is nothing sacred?
Of course, my sister and I agree that the two that have truly broken our spirits are the HRT (hormone replacement therapy) and carbs versus fat debates. I spent twenty years limiting myself to two eggs a week and now suddenly eggs are OK again? I demand a cholesterol refund! Our genuinely beloved Primary Care Physician, nobly adhering to prevailing medical wisdom, is trying to get her patients off the hormones and onto the statins that she hopes will add a few years to our otherwise decrepit middle-aged bodies. But we’ve become a hard sell. Ambiguity fatigue has taken its toll. In our heart of hearts, we’re beginning to think of medical researchers, albeit unfairly, as the Enron executives of health care. What happened to all those studies showing HRT was good? If those studies were all flawed, how do we know the new ones aren’t too? Before I completely change my life again, they’re going to have to convince me.
Then there’s the issue of all these statistics. By my calculations, I do at least 20 things that are purported to reduce my risk of heart disease by 50%. – like eating fish twice a week. At what point does my heart owe me? When do I get a hot fudge sundae risk free? (I am hoping that someone who paid more attention to college statistics will write in and tell me.)
As my sister looked longingly at the whole wheat bun on my turkey burger, and I salivated over her high-fat plain hamburger, we concluded there is only one real health care question:
Does anybody really know?
All you can really do, we decided, is weigh up the evidence and go with what feels right, knowing that whatever you’re doing is bound to come back into favor again at some point. It’s kind of like riding out a down market. In fact, I like to think of it in terms of medical research ``futures”: I personally plan to go short on Lipitor (my pick as the next pariah of health care) and go long – very long – on chocolate. A person, after all, has to live.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Cell-fishly Annoying The General Public
[This was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune]
Walking along the board walk at Pacific Beach last week, I was suddenly confronted with the sight of a 20-something guy with shoulder length hair striding toward me, gesticulating wildly with his arms and talking loudly to no one in particular. There was a time when this would have been a no-brainer; I would have given him a wide berth and hoped that he would get back on his medication some time soon.
But then I thought I saw the tell-tale signs of a little wire hanging down from his ear, and it occurred to me that what I was seeing was a new and troubling sociological dilemma: how to tell the dangerously deranged from the cell phone head set user. (A friend claims there is actually not much difference.)
Certainly the proliferation of cell phones have spawned no end of debate from legal issues (talking while driving) to those of simple courtesy. A sign in The Cheese Shop in La Jolla informs customers that their sandwich preferences will be happily noted once the orderer is off his cell phone. It is virtually impossible to go through a supermarket line without being treated to the inanities of someone's cell phone conversation. At Blockbuster Video, there is invariably the blockhead who is painstakingly moving along the racks reading every single title to (presumably) Mrs. Blockhead at home.
But the hands-free head sets are a different problem altogether. This is potentially a serious public safety issue. Before cell phone headsets, a person's behavior was a reasonable clue to their state of mind, and more specifically, to their threat to you. But no more.
As always, the perps will probably not see themselves. If in doubt, it might not hurt to take this little quiz. When you talk on your head set cell phone, do people:
(1) Pull out their own cell phones, dial 911 and point in your direction?
(2) Look at you with fear in their eyes as they edge nervously away?
(3) Pull their little children protectively toward them?
(4) Scream "I have a weapon and I'm not afraid to use it"?
If so, it is because YOU LOOK LIKE A LUNATIC.
Sometimes, of course, you think they're talking to you - not unreasonable since a quick survey indicates there isn't anyone else around - and, not wishing to be rude, you feel obligated to reply. "Um, no, I didn't actually think George had a hot body. But then, I don't know anyone named George" The cell phone user then turns her (or his) back on you, eyes rolling, and can be heard to mutter, "Just some old lady who thought I was talking to her. As if!!" Then she continues on her monologue looking like she's talking to little people who live in her hair.
Given the seriousness of this dilemma for the general public, I foresee legislation mandating signs in public places that read: "Visible cell phone required" with the implied "or we throw a net over you." In the meantime, when confronted with an individual displaying erratic symptoms who may or may not be talking on a cell phone head set, I think it would be reasonable to shoot them with a tranquilizer dart while you're sorting it out. Better safe than sorry.
Walking along the board walk at Pacific Beach last week, I was suddenly confronted with the sight of a 20-something guy with shoulder length hair striding toward me, gesticulating wildly with his arms and talking loudly to no one in particular. There was a time when this would have been a no-brainer; I would have given him a wide berth and hoped that he would get back on his medication some time soon.
But then I thought I saw the tell-tale signs of a little wire hanging down from his ear, and it occurred to me that what I was seeing was a new and troubling sociological dilemma: how to tell the dangerously deranged from the cell phone head set user. (A friend claims there is actually not much difference.)
Certainly the proliferation of cell phones have spawned no end of debate from legal issues (talking while driving) to those of simple courtesy. A sign in The Cheese Shop in La Jolla informs customers that their sandwich preferences will be happily noted once the orderer is off his cell phone. It is virtually impossible to go through a supermarket line without being treated to the inanities of someone's cell phone conversation. At Blockbuster Video, there is invariably the blockhead who is painstakingly moving along the racks reading every single title to (presumably) Mrs. Blockhead at home.
But the hands-free head sets are a different problem altogether. This is potentially a serious public safety issue. Before cell phone headsets, a person's behavior was a reasonable clue to their state of mind, and more specifically, to their threat to you. But no more.
As always, the perps will probably not see themselves. If in doubt, it might not hurt to take this little quiz. When you talk on your head set cell phone, do people:
(1) Pull out their own cell phones, dial 911 and point in your direction?
(2) Look at you with fear in their eyes as they edge nervously away?
(3) Pull their little children protectively toward them?
(4) Scream "I have a weapon and I'm not afraid to use it"?
If so, it is because YOU LOOK LIKE A LUNATIC.
Sometimes, of course, you think they're talking to you - not unreasonable since a quick survey indicates there isn't anyone else around - and, not wishing to be rude, you feel obligated to reply. "Um, no, I didn't actually think George had a hot body. But then, I don't know anyone named George" The cell phone user then turns her (or his) back on you, eyes rolling, and can be heard to mutter, "Just some old lady who thought I was talking to her. As if!!" Then she continues on her monologue looking like she's talking to little people who live in her hair.
Given the seriousness of this dilemma for the general public, I foresee legislation mandating signs in public places that read: "Visible cell phone required" with the implied "or we throw a net over you." In the meantime, when confronted with an individual displaying erratic symptoms who may or may not be talking on a cell phone head set, I think it would be reasonable to shoot them with a tranquilizer dart while you're sorting it out. Better safe than sorry.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Thinking Outside the Hose
[This was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune just before mandatory water rationing went into effect in the spring of 2009.]
With an 11,000 sq. ft. lawn-afflicted lot and only a 1600 sq. ft. home, my husband and I are plagued by nightmares of San Diego’s newly-created Water Police showing up in the dead of night. Our only question is: will they be coming for us or the azaleas?
For those of us who have already been conserving water for years, who have only turned on sprinklers as needed, and who dutifully empty even the ice from drinks into our brick planter, mandatory water use reduction along with staggering rate increases are scary thoughts indeed. We’re definitely going to have to think outside the hose.
For the record, succulents prefer Johnny Walker ice to Diet Pepsi ice. One of many solutions that have occurred to us is that to keep our border plants alive, we may have to drink more.
But no, this is serious. Barring a forty-day rain (we’d actually need several), San Diego is entering an era where water usage is going to be an issue as never before. Could the mortgage crisis pass only to be replaced by an epidemic of water bill foreclosures?
With the looming threat of rationing, my husband and I have spent many an hour surveying our property to make decisions about what we’d save and what, worst case, we might have to let die. The Sophie’s Choice of horticulture, as it were. Already we think we can hear our plants pleading with us: “Save me!” “No, save ME!” “Screw her – I bloom more!” “But I’m more drought resistant!” “Don’t believe him – he’s an annual!”
Of course, we’ve thought of all the usual solutions but with toddler grandchildren and a granddog, we’d really prefer not to have a total desert landscape. Not to mention that the estimate to convert our large corner lot to cactus and pebbles was a whopping ten grand; Astroturf would be even more. That could pay for a lot of water. Or, considering the specter of $1,000 monthly water bills, maybe not. I’ll confess that I’ve cruised the fake fern department at Michael’s. They’re looking more realistic than I remember.
We’ve also considered converting our front yard to one huge vegetable garden, or preferably, since we’re old, turning it over to sharecroppers for a cut of the produce. Of course, there’d have to be a Zucchini Clause. But it still wouldn’t reduce our water usage to the degree we’d require in the long term.
Letting the lawn be taken over by drought-friendly ivy would leave us with a becoming sea of green. Also a rat sanctuary.
Our younger son suggested the obvious solution was to reduce our waterable land with a modest remodel, cleverly subsidized by the prospective water bill reduction. He proposes a nice wide (very wide) covered veranda around the house. We could sit out on it in our rockers, he said. Watching our grass die.
Ironically, we have lots of perfectly good (if chlorinated) water in our now-rarely-used backyard pool. Empty the pool and it cracks. Stop filling the pool and you have created an 18,000 gallon spawning ground for West Nile Virus. I don’t want to ruin a potential patent, but my engineer husband is working on some ingenious laundry solutions that involve the pool, our small outdoor rinse-cycle fountain, and the nice warm concrete pool deck. Oops, I think I’ve already said too much.
But what we’ve really concluded is that Southern Californians, including ourselves, are simply going to have to embrace what we have dubbed Creative Moisture Multi-Tasking ©. Basically, all water use must perform at least four simultaneous functions. For example, we see ourselves showering au naturel in our front yard under the lawn sprinklers, while sudsing up with an organic fertilizer-based shampoo. Whoever finishes first rinses the breakfast dishes while the other scrubs vegetables for dinner. Et voilà! In one miserly ten minute watering slot, four water-requisite tasks were achieved (five if you count fertilizing.) The toilet app, we have to confess, is problematical. But frankly, if they’re really serious about conserving water, it’s only a matter of time before flush toilets are banned. Those low-flow things never worked anyway.
So that’s our plan. No question about it: water rationing is going to change life as we know it. But we’re also hoping that the prospect of naked seniors cavorting under the sprinklers in their front yards will be all the impetus the local Water Board needs to ramp up the Carlsbad desalinization project. ASAP.
With an 11,000 sq. ft. lawn-afflicted lot and only a 1600 sq. ft. home, my husband and I are plagued by nightmares of San Diego’s newly-created Water Police showing up in the dead of night. Our only question is: will they be coming for us or the azaleas?
For those of us who have already been conserving water for years, who have only turned on sprinklers as needed, and who dutifully empty even the ice from drinks into our brick planter, mandatory water use reduction along with staggering rate increases are scary thoughts indeed. We’re definitely going to have to think outside the hose.
For the record, succulents prefer Johnny Walker ice to Diet Pepsi ice. One of many solutions that have occurred to us is that to keep our border plants alive, we may have to drink more.
But no, this is serious. Barring a forty-day rain (we’d actually need several), San Diego is entering an era where water usage is going to be an issue as never before. Could the mortgage crisis pass only to be replaced by an epidemic of water bill foreclosures?
With the looming threat of rationing, my husband and I have spent many an hour surveying our property to make decisions about what we’d save and what, worst case, we might have to let die. The Sophie’s Choice of horticulture, as it were. Already we think we can hear our plants pleading with us: “Save me!” “No, save ME!” “Screw her – I bloom more!” “But I’m more drought resistant!” “Don’t believe him – he’s an annual!”
Of course, we’ve thought of all the usual solutions but with toddler grandchildren and a granddog, we’d really prefer not to have a total desert landscape. Not to mention that the estimate to convert our large corner lot to cactus and pebbles was a whopping ten grand; Astroturf would be even more. That could pay for a lot of water. Or, considering the specter of $1,000 monthly water bills, maybe not. I’ll confess that I’ve cruised the fake fern department at Michael’s. They’re looking more realistic than I remember.
We’ve also considered converting our front yard to one huge vegetable garden, or preferably, since we’re old, turning it over to sharecroppers for a cut of the produce. Of course, there’d have to be a Zucchini Clause. But it still wouldn’t reduce our water usage to the degree we’d require in the long term.
Letting the lawn be taken over by drought-friendly ivy would leave us with a becoming sea of green. Also a rat sanctuary.
Our younger son suggested the obvious solution was to reduce our waterable land with a modest remodel, cleverly subsidized by the prospective water bill reduction. He proposes a nice wide (very wide) covered veranda around the house. We could sit out on it in our rockers, he said. Watching our grass die.
Ironically, we have lots of perfectly good (if chlorinated) water in our now-rarely-used backyard pool. Empty the pool and it cracks. Stop filling the pool and you have created an 18,000 gallon spawning ground for West Nile Virus. I don’t want to ruin a potential patent, but my engineer husband is working on some ingenious laundry solutions that involve the pool, our small outdoor rinse-cycle fountain, and the nice warm concrete pool deck. Oops, I think I’ve already said too much.
But what we’ve really concluded is that Southern Californians, including ourselves, are simply going to have to embrace what we have dubbed Creative Moisture Multi-Tasking ©. Basically, all water use must perform at least four simultaneous functions. For example, we see ourselves showering au naturel in our front yard under the lawn sprinklers, while sudsing up with an organic fertilizer-based shampoo. Whoever finishes first rinses the breakfast dishes while the other scrubs vegetables for dinner. Et voilà! In one miserly ten minute watering slot, four water-requisite tasks were achieved (five if you count fertilizing.) The toilet app, we have to confess, is problematical. But frankly, if they’re really serious about conserving water, it’s only a matter of time before flush toilets are banned. Those low-flow things never worked anyway.
So that’s our plan. No question about it: water rationing is going to change life as we know it. But we’re also hoping that the prospect of naked seniors cavorting under the sprinklers in their front yards will be all the impetus the local Water Board needs to ramp up the Carlsbad desalinization project. ASAP.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Vons Parking Lot: Scariest Place In America
[This was published in the La Jolla Light as an opinion piece before I began writing my own column.]
I know that everyone has to die of something. I, for example, am more than willing to die from chocolate. What I’m not willing to have as the cause of my demise is Death By Vons Parking Lot. People roar down the aisles of that lot like Bobby Unser on the Indianapolis Speedway. Except, of course, that when Bobby took the curve in the final stretch, he wasn’t talking on his cell phone.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the downtown La Jolla store itself. Great selection, wonderful management, terrific specialty departments, friendly staff, efficient pharmacy.
And it’s not that the parking spaces aren’t roomy. But the back-out space is tight and for those of us in little cars trying to back out between two SUVs, it’s totally blind. The folks channeling their inner NASCAR driver are peril enough in that situation, but it’s the pedestrians that are just plain baffling. Short of a deep-seated death wish (and the knowledge that those Beemer and Lexus drivers are well insured and will amply compensate your loved ones), I can’t for the life of me imagine what sort of brain activity, if any, is being registered by the wing nuts who are obliviously texting as they walk right behind backing cars. One can only sigh wistfully and wish this lot were in the Serengeti, where natural selection could take its course.
There is no good will toward man in the Vons lot on Christmas Eve day. Or during any of the peak shopping hours. Or even Sunday mornings. I’d like to think that Love Thy Neighbor included not running him over.
Of course, the lot is not without its entertainments. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t witness two black SUVs (always black, always SUVs) backing out of their spaces at 30 miles per hour right into each other. I think I can say with some authority that people who own black SUVs know some really bad words.
Sorry, Vons. I’ve lost my nerve. I’ll come to visit from time to time for old time’s sake. But as much as I like your store, I’m too old for this many near-death experiences. I’ve opted for the chocolate.
I know that everyone has to die of something. I, for example, am more than willing to die from chocolate. What I’m not willing to have as the cause of my demise is Death By Vons Parking Lot. People roar down the aisles of that lot like Bobby Unser on the Indianapolis Speedway. Except, of course, that when Bobby took the curve in the final stretch, he wasn’t talking on his cell phone.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the downtown La Jolla store itself. Great selection, wonderful management, terrific specialty departments, friendly staff, efficient pharmacy.
And it’s not that the parking spaces aren’t roomy. But the back-out space is tight and for those of us in little cars trying to back out between two SUVs, it’s totally blind. The folks channeling their inner NASCAR driver are peril enough in that situation, but it’s the pedestrians that are just plain baffling. Short of a deep-seated death wish (and the knowledge that those Beemer and Lexus drivers are well insured and will amply compensate your loved ones), I can’t for the life of me imagine what sort of brain activity, if any, is being registered by the wing nuts who are obliviously texting as they walk right behind backing cars. One can only sigh wistfully and wish this lot were in the Serengeti, where natural selection could take its course.
There is no good will toward man in the Vons lot on Christmas Eve day. Or during any of the peak shopping hours. Or even Sunday mornings. I’d like to think that Love Thy Neighbor included not running him over.
Of course, the lot is not without its entertainments. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t witness two black SUVs (always black, always SUVs) backing out of their spaces at 30 miles per hour right into each other. I think I can say with some authority that people who own black SUVs know some really bad words.
Sorry, Vons. I’ve lost my nerve. I’ll come to visit from time to time for old time’s sake. But as much as I like your store, I’m too old for this many near-death experiences. I’ve opted for the chocolate.
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