Day one of Phony Retirement, as I’m calling it. Not technically separated from the office, but I am burning off PTO because they pay me 100% of it, and unused hours are doled out at 75%. They were willing to let me go another week, which was awfully swell of them. The underlying message from HR was, I sense “but you are leaving.” Yes. I are. I do. I will. I have.
Wife made a rare appearance at her office today, and since the dog needs company, I stayed home. . I’m sure Birch is grateful. He’s never alone too long. But he would probably just sleep, with occasional moments of sudden alarm because someone was walking on the sidewalk at the bottom of the hill. It wouldn’t be a full-on Mailman Alert. Birch has a perfect record when it comes to keeping the mailman from coming inside and stealing his kibble, but you wonder if he ever considers the nature of his adversary. Every day he appears, undaunted. Well, almost every day. Does the dog know it’s Sunday? Does he stay alert on Sunday, and when there’s no interloper, thinks: he got the message.
BUT THE BASTARD’S BACK ON MONDAY
So I’m outside in the gazebo enjoying a nice day, looking at the lawn. It’s doing okay. All this rain has been a tonic, and for once it doesn’t look parched and spotty. I had tremendous success, finally, with the difficult section that had defied all attempts to fill out. As usual, I added seed and dirt and fertilizer, watered it, then wondered if I’d overwatered, then put down more dirt, raked it over, then thought “why not some more seed, can’t hurt,” but now I’m thinking the seeds will compete and there won’t be enough resources and they’ll fail to thrive. The home equivalent of boiling water, and I’m bad at it. But now I'm looking at it, and thinking hey, success.
I think I’ll go rake the grass left by the lawn guy. Yes, I do believe I will go rake. Is this what retirement feels like? It’s not bad. Well, let’s act like an old man and start comparing insurance plans!
UPDATE: New word: Biberty (v) To hound someone with text messages after they've looked for online insurance quotes. Usage: "I did a search on two sites and I was bibbertied for two hours after."
LATER. Got the mail, which arrived as late as usual. It had an AARP Medicare supplement booklet. That’s the other thing I have to do, and it, too, seems as if it should make me feel old, but it doesn’t, and I don’t. Just released. I boxed up half of my shirts with collars yesterday, figuring I would no longer need the office uniform. In recent years I’d stopped wearing shirts and ties. Well, ties. Bare-chested with a thrift-store cravat, that was my look.
Might as well have been; there was no one there to see.
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So. what of this free for now stuff?
The "Volume 28 No. 121" isn't entirely accurate. Just a rough estimate. But What's this "Free ( For Now)" business anyway?
Well, I'm going to be making less money. That is one of the ordinary consequences of leaving your job. So I have to make some elsewhere.
* I considered moving all the below-the-fold entertainment to the Substack, but that would mean releasing content twice a day, and that seems a bit much.
* I considered moving everything to the Substack and revamping it after the first-year anniversary.
* I considered ending everything on the 30th anniversary of the Bleat and doing something else with the time, but I know the way I work and fill my idle hours, and I don't think that would lead to substantial remumerative rewards.
I settled on something small that doesn't require subscriptions, and can be used for books in the future. I've seen it around: a nice little micropayment site called Buymeacoffee. That will pop up soon. Annnnd there's something else in the works, which may have no impact on your daily Bleatage experience at all if you're not inclined to care. But it's something.
Tinkering and changing and fixing. Breaking out of habits and routines. Who knows what this site will be like next week.
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This popped up in my Apple News feed the other day:
The easy, trouble-avoiding reaction to this is to nod and look at your watch and say “look at the time,” and say you’ve a dentist appointment in 30 minutes and had best commence to flossing. The proper reaction, though, the one you should say before the sentence has been fully uttered, is no.
No, we do not.
But I suppose it depends on who “we” might be. If “we” is the author and her like-minded friends, sure, go ahead. But if “we” is the author and the rest of society, then no, we’re not going to sit down and talk, because we know that the talk will not be a conversation at all, but a lecture.
Despite its diverse optics, Brad Pitt’s racing flick fumbles the ball on female representation. A high-profile actress was cut, and the women we do see are sidelined
F1 is a movie about racing cars
The plot centres on Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes, a washed-up former F1 driver who returns to the sport after three decades for one final shot at glory. He’s recruited by an old friend who owns the flailing APX GP team.
Leading the team is technical director Kate, played by Oscar-nominated Kerry Condon.
Who’s a gal. Dear Google: how many female technical directors in F1 racing
"There are no female technical directors in Formula 1."
So that’s erring on the side of representation, no? No:
She’s the first woman in F1 history to hold such a senior technical role. She’s brilliant, spunky, and apparently, bad at her job: the car she designed is described as a “s**tbox,” and the team hasn’t scored a single point in nearly three seasons.
Enter Pitt’s Hayes, a “gambling junkie who lives in his van.” She has googly eyes from the get-go, and during an early exchange, he tells her that she should re-design the car for “combat” (the technical details are another conversation altogether).
And then they win because he’s the hero of the story. But let’s reverse it: Brad Pitt is the senior technical whatever, and a spunky female driver tells him his design is a bleep box, and he should redesign it, and he does, and they win. Is the movie now misandristic?
Also:
During a press conference last week, the filmmakers reminded us - the F1 media - that we’re not the target demographic. It’s clear that the movie will be best enjoyed by those with little to no Formula 1 knowledge, but even that group includes women.
When Bruckheimer joked that plenty of men will be “dragging their girlfriends to the cinema,” it felt like the quiet part said out loud. There’s a lot to like about this movie. But strong, layered, competent female characters? Don’t hold your breath.
News stories say women now account for 40% of all F1 fans, which might be so. My daughter likes it, inasmuch as she's watched it a few times and enjoyed it; don't know if she goes out of her way to find it and watch races. This article from a young woman notes:
Yes, the fact that a majority of F1 drivers are attractive, young European men doesn’t hurt its appeal to young women, but we really do enjoy the sport itself.
And that's fine! If this changing viewership demographic encourages the makers and the shapers of the sport to adjust things to accomodate the new fans, that's perfectly normal and organic. Insisting that 40% of the drivers and pit crews be female . . . is not. No, that's not what anyone is saying, yet. But you suspect that some will. And if there's not 40% representation in the pit? We will need to talk about that.
Alvo Iowa is but a blip, a blot on the map today, but it wasn’t always so. This is volume 26 of the Advance, indicating a long rub for a small-town paper. A one-man job? Possibly, but that’s a lot of teeny type to set.
Let’s wander over to Turkey and see how things are - OH MY GOD IT SMELLS
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This seems to be an unwise means of conducting business. |
The article's author was "was one of the most influential U.S. Army officers of the early 20th century.”
Lieutenant General James Guthrie Harbord (March 21, 1866 – August 20, 1947) was a senior officer of the United States Army and president and chairman of the board of RCA. During World War I, he served from mid-1917 to mid-1918 as chief of staff of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), commanded by General John J. Pershing, before commanding a brigade and briefly a division and then the Services of Supply of the AEF.
He was sent on a fact-finding mission to the Middle East to investigate the Armenian genocide. Upon returning to the United States, Harbord wrote Conditions in the Near East: Report of the American Military Mission to Armenia, which was a summary of the expedition that provided various details of the mission.
That’s probably where this comes from.
Important news from the wires:
About that brand:
Robert W. Furnas (1848-1916) founded an Indianapolis dairy in 1877 and began manufacturing frozen treats a year later after being asked to make ice cream for a church social. He lived to see his brand become a national phenomenon with plants in Columbus, Huntington, W.Va., St. Louis, Fort Wayne, Ind., Birmingham, Ala., and Des Moines, Iowa.
There so many local ice cream makers who had a moment on the national stage before they were absorbed into the Bordenborg or the Sealtest Collective or whoever was buying up the little guys.
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Did anyone really believe this? | |
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Well if you’d kept your sloppy mouth shut, no one would know what a slob you were.
Really, unless he’d named the previous tenant and pointed at her across the table, she shouldn’t have been insulted. She should have taken it to heart.
The humor columnist.
Great name. Bio of someone who didn't make The Shelf:
Strickland W. Gillilan (1869–1954) was an American journalist, author, poet, humorist and speaker. He is most famous for the poem The Reading Mother, which remains a popular poem on Mother's Day. He is also recognized as the author of Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes, said to be the shortest poem ever written. Much of his work is public domain and is often reproduced in greeting cards.
"Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes", also known simply as "Fleas", is a couplet commonly cited as the shortest poem ever written, composed by American poet Strickland Gillilan in the early 20th century.[
The poem reads in full:
Adam
Had ‘em.
Depending on how you define "poem," it's possible to be half as long.
Stop building monuments and statues, already! Give it a rest!
Alas, we know how the Elm situation went, but no one’s going to blame local hero Loring. His memory is still held in sweet esteem. Still, the loss of the canopies of elms is one of those things that defines a generation: those who grew up with those great sheltering green vaults, and saw them all fall. There would be a few years when they all had a band of sticky material around the trunk to keep the bugs from climbing, but in the end the bugs won.
That will do! Thanks for your visit. Some ice cream awaits in the Fifties update.
