Month: February 2013

These were e-mailed by a reader who wishes to remain anonymous:

Was your high school safe? Drug or gang problems? Did it have any anti-bullying programs? Do you worry about your daughter’s schools? What about the opposite: what were the strengths of your school?

As far as I know, yes, it was pretty safe. There weren’t any anti-bullying programs to speak of, as in the mid-to-late 1980s, bullying was mainly seen as a ‘rite of passage’ kind of thing. You just had to get through it, back then. A shame, but that’s just the way it was — especially in my town, which is a small conservative town on the edges of Northern Appalachia. I took more ribbing than I’m sure I would be subjected to today in a more bullying-conscious era, but even so, I don’t think I got it all that badly. Mainly it was directed at my weight. And in all honesty, as I recall it, any bullying I suffered pretty much dried up by tenth grade. I think those kids just eventually lost interest, and my sense of it all was that they bullied because it was expected of them, not because they were bullies. If that makes sense.

Gangs and drugs? If they existed at Allegany Central, I had no idea. I’m sure that there was somebody in my class — in all classes, really — who was a source for drugs, if I wanted to go that route. But to this day, I couldn’t begin to tell you who that person even was. It probably says something that I was able to get through high school with that degree of blissful unawareness of whatever local criminal element there was. I didn’t even learn of some of the stuff that went on until Facebook came along, twenty years later, and I saw lots of photos from back then — photos of parties attended by lots of my classmates, parties with lots of beer at hand. I never knew about any of that stuff. I just wasn’t in that crowd…and yet, I wasn’t really ostracized at school or made to feel like I was a lesser person for not being part of that crowd.

Do I worry about The Daughter’s school? Yes, but at a low level. Our particular district has a number of good programs in place to minimize that kind of thing — particulary bullying — and to address it if it happens. She does seem to be trending, socially, in similar ways to myself and what I know of The Wife’s high school experiences, in that she has a cluster of close friends but she’s not wildly social or anything.

One thing I do like about her school right now — the middle school — is that each grade level changes classes at different times. Any bullying that happened when I was in school mainly happened in the halls when everybody was in the hall at once, so seventh graders had to run the gauntlet of eleventh graders. That doesn’t happen at her school now: eighth graders don’t change classes at the same time as anyone else. I don’t know if the high school does that too, but we’ll find out.

Do you volunteer or donate to any charities? How did you pick it/them?

I should probably volunteer more time than I do. I give to the United Way through work (The Store has a long-standing relationship with The United Way), and I donate to a number of different charities and charitable efforts through my church. Mainly I pick-and-choose the ones that sound like they’re doing good things, although I do try to keep my donations ‘local’ as much as possible. I donate to the local library (although not enough).

Hmmmm. I really should do more charitable work…and in terms of volunteering, I am a decent writer….

We’ve been watching BBC’s “Top Gear” on DVDs. Ever watch it? If you did, what did you think? What were your first vehicles, how did you get them (from family? from friends? bought used? new?), and did you love or hate them?

Without getting into too many details, I must in all honesty note that my parents have been of unusually enormous help to my family and I, in the vehicular department. They’ve come to our automotive rescue more times than anybody has any reasonable hope of anticipating. The number of times we would have been well and truly screwed if not for their staggering generosity and help is…well, it’s more than zero. It’s more than five, even.

Anyhow: the first car that I owned outright, mine, myself, was a Plymouth Colt. I loved that car. We drove it on our honeymoon. The only downside of that car was that it didn’t have A/C. After five wonderful years, it threw a rod while I was driving home on I-90 in Buffalo. This was less than a month after an oil change at one of those ‘Kwik-Lube’ joints (and that particular business is long-since closed down). I’ve always wondered if they screwed up the oil change, either by not putting enough in, or not putting the drain plug back on, or just not putting the oil in at all. That car should not have thrown a #*$&%*!! rod. (You know, it’s amazing what you remember: I know what I was on my way home from doing. I’d gone to Barnes&Noble to buy a copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Very strange. This was before I had a cell phone, so I had to wait for a patrolling cop to come along and call a tow for me.)

The Wife’s first car that I knew of was a silver Subaru Justy. Tiny little vehicle that she later wrecked when someone making a left in the opposite direction neglected to, you know, actually see her there. Next was a Geo Metro that got amazing mileage, but which she hated. Interesting….

As for Top Gear, I’ve never seen it. Should I? What say you, readers? I know nothing about that show, in all honesty!

More answers to come!

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The Herkmeister (hey, if you don’t mind my asking, what’s with that name? There’s gotta be a story there!) offers a couple of Star Wars questions.

So, Disney recently announced it would be making a bunch of stand-alone Star Wars films in addition to a new trilogy. The buzz is that first up will be a movie about Yoda (which is awesome because Yoda), but if it were up to you, which Star Wars character would you like to see get his or her own spin-off film?

This is tough. I’m genuinely not sure of what direction they’re looking to take here. How many movies are they thinking of doing? Another trilogy plus a ‘spin-off’ film, with the possibility of more depending on box office? The plans mentioned thus far are really nebulous.

Frankly, I’d like to see the story of how the Jedi began…who was the first person to figure out the existence of The Force, what that looked like, and so on. I think that might be interesting. I have no idea if that tale has been told in any of the hundreds of “Expanded Universe” stories created over the last twenty years. I also wouldn’t mind seeing a film made that tells a story inside the existing films — maybe track the travails of the Rebel alliance after they get beaten at Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. There was a wonderful episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called ‘Lower Decks’, which focused on a group of lower-ranked crewmembers of the Enterprise, people for whom Picard and Riker and the rest were all intimidating folk to look up to. That sort of thing might be cool.

And frankly, I think it would be cool if George Lucas made a Jar Jar Binks movie just to say “F*** you!” to the haters. Ha!

Also, any chance of more “Fixing the Prequels” posts?

Yeah, I really need to finish those up. I’m hanging my head in shame. If ever I should get that done (I was about a third of the way through Revenge of the Sith, if I remember rightly), it should be now, as Star Wars fandom seems to be revving up again. I do continue to sulk at the calcification of pop cultural opinion that the Prequels were one unremitting slog of suck, but those last windmills do still beckon, and I suppose I should tilt at them once and for all.

OK, more answers to come!

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I’ll start by putting Andy out of his misery, who always finds something off-beat to ask. In this case:

When you eat anything with Alfredo sauce do you get a nasty smell that lingers on your lips after you are done?

I am honestly not sure…but this is likely because I consume Alfredo sauce very rarely. I never keep it at home, and the only time I ever have it is if we’re at Olive Garden and I get the seafood pasta. And we haven’t been to Olive Garden in at least five years.

I do know that according to an episode of The Frugal Gourmet, sometimes Italians will, after a garlicky meal, eat an entire coffee bean or two in order to mask and absorb the garlic odor. Might be worth trying. Or just drink more so you don’t care!

So in my annual pilgrimage up north, I see a lot of the old telephone/ electric COPPER wire that the R.Rs ran along the tracks on poles. My question to you is, with the price of copper these days why aren’t the RR companies taking advantage of all of it and arranging to have a crew whose sole purpose is to take it down and arrange to take it to a scrap yard?

Huh. I’m actually unaware of so much copper wire still strung in such a way. I find it hard to believe that they would leave so expensive a commodity just hanging there, so maybe those wires are actually still in use in some way? I also have to think that if they were able to come up with that much copper to recycle or repurpose, those companies wouldn’t rely on simple scrapyards. The recycling procedures would undoubtedly be a lot more rigorous than that!

Andy also mentioned the glass insulators on the cable poles. These are, in fact, highly collectible by railroad enthusiasts. My father once worked with a gent who was a bigtime railroad enthusiast (he had an amazing HO layout in his basement), who kept a couple of those insulators on a shelf in his office, along with some other railroad-related bric-a-brac.

For being ex elite military guys, was it just me or did the ‘A-Team’ shoot A LOT but never hit anybody!!

I tend to think they were missing on purpose, because they were actually extremely good marksmen, and were just trying to get the job done without causing injury or loss of life. That inspires more confidence than assuming that they really couldn’t hit a damned thing.

And you also have to factor in that, at the end of each episode, when they unleashed their home-made weapon upon the bad guys (you know, the ones who said “We’re gonna kill you in two hours, but for now, we’ll just lock you in this warehouse with four vehicles and an entire Home Depot’s worth of tools, complete with welding equipment!”), the A-Team fellows were able to hit anything they wanted with their potato-guns.

Here are three from a reader who prefers to remain anonymous:

The sun is starting to have some heat to it (and days are not so brief), but all this warming is exposing more and more dirt. Is your heart lifted by hints of spring or crushed by all the wetness and extra dirtiness?

Here’s the thing about spring: In Buffalo, spring sucks.

Our summers are great, for those who like that sort of thing. We’re never hyper-hot (although I suspect that global warming will be seeing to that in the next bunch of years), nor are we as humid as the east coast. Autumn here is spectacular. Seriously! Vermont and New Hampshire may get all the autumn press, but our autumns are just wonderful: cool, comfy, and beautiful. And then there are our winters, which are…just fine. I’m not kidding here. I’ll take quite a bit of snow over the endless months of bonechilling winds that dominate the winters of the Plains.

Spring?

Ugh.

Spring here is wet and gray and damp and muddy and dirty and…well, it’s two months of unpleasantness. And then it takes most of May for the trees to get green again.

Ultimately, I don’t start getting into a better mood, at least about the weather, until mid-May around here.

Ugh!

Do you have a cell phone? Would you ever give up your landline?

Yup, I have a cell. It’s a LG…well, I have no idea what the model number is. It’s a pretty basic phone, though, and not a smartphone. I suspect that our next phones will be smartphones, as it appears that the market is going to be smartphones only (except for maybe a couple of super-basic phones for old folks). No touchscreen, no Internet. I’m rockin’ it, 2005-style!

I do use it as an mp3 player, and it takes pretty nice photos, for being only 3 megapixels. I would use it as a calendar, but that particular function is just cumbersome enough to use that I don’t; I use my tablet and an actual paper calendar instead. I do look forward to joining the smartphone universe, but it’s nowhere near a high priority. We’ll get there when attrition forces us to do so.

But the landline? That’s gone! Who the heck needs that anymore? Bye bye, landline! The only calls we were getting there were telemarketers, so what was the point? It’s history, and we’ve not looked back.

Ever been to any ballet? Did you enjoy it? How about opera? Gilbert and Sullivan?

Ballet: Yes, but only twice. A few more times for opera.

I saw a ballet troupe when I was in high school (our town had a visiting artists series of some sort), and it was really quite wonderful. I saw another in college. I don’t recall the specific ballets performed, unfortunately, but I enjoyed each. I keep thinking that we need to see The Nutcracker one of these years, but somehow I never realize it’s being performed until a day or two before, by which time it’s too late to plan the outing.

Opera: I haven’t been to one since college, which makes me sad, but The Wife just does not care for it, at all, so I’d have to go by myself. I am highly intrigued by the live broadcasts of operas from the Met at IMAX movie theaters, so I may do that, someday. My first opera was in high school, when my sister took me to see The Magic Flute. I saw a couple more in college, most memorably, Madame Butterfly. I never saw a Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta, though, which is a shame, because I love the music; “Behold the Lord High Executioner!” is one of my standard hum-to-myself tunes, and one of my favorite clever bits of film music comes during the chase scene at the end of Foul Play, when the action music is interspersed with quotes from The Mikado.

On both scores, I’d love to see more!

That’s where we’ll stop for now. Got some good questions going this time, and remember, feel free to ask some more!

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