The Abnorm

The Abnorm

 

It doesn’t take a person much more than a day on the internet before he, OR SHE, finds

that this great big world of our owners’ is made up of all kinds.

It almost seems anything these days that doesn’t create a media swarm,

why, that’d be the ephemeral, fleeting evanescence we euphemistically call “the norm.”

“I want the same rights as a regular person!” the feminist shouted in a big hullabaloo.

As an old, white male there not looking to get laid, I was nearly lynched when I shouted, “Me too!”

I don’t have anything against alternative lifestyles and such, it’s just

my boyhood, Wheaties box, manly man hero becomes a lady and I MUST perform as if nonplussed.

It just gets a little too complicated when something that clearly ain’t the norm

comes up and to even register slight surprise, well that’s just bad form.

If you’re thinking I have no understanding of gay people, you’ve got my number.

Why, I get an odd, uncomfortable feeling just from washing a cucumber.

But, “I have plenty of gay friends,” says the phobia justifier.

He, OR SHE, knows that if one doth protest too much, one will be thought a liar.

What’s the big deal? Fake or real, as long as they ain’t hurtin’ nobody.

I’m old and maybe a bit conservative, but I’m no fuddy-duddy, buddy!

Don’t pretend to get God. He, OR SHE, mighta mixed some rainbow in with the straight

just for a little variety. And when God finished, He, OR SHE, said it was GREAT. (Or fabulous.)

This just in: my brothers daughter, Judy, is now identifying as a young boy named Justin, just in

time for Christmas. So I’ll need to return that “Girl Power” cross-stitch I got her/HIM. It’s all about adjustin’.

Or maybe I’ll just hang on to it, just in case he (or she?) changes his mind,

and finds she maybe wouldn’t mind all the hormonal boys at school chasin’ her behind.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in everybody doing what it is that makes us all happy.

The body’s just a body, not SOMEbody. If you got a lemon, trade it in, and make it snappy.

All of that being said, I want to say this as nicely as I can:

I don’t want to watch The World’s Strongest Woman, or The World’s Most Beautiful Man.

I’m a good-natured naturalist, I guess. I adore Nature in all Her forms.

It’s seems so simple, it’s gotta be wrong! So I guess I’m a member of the ABnorm.

Memory or Meme-ory?

Have you ever been talking to someone about current events and they say something like, "I remember reading recently that..." and what follows is complete bullshit? And you wonder where the hell they read that garbage. Well, it might not be memory, it might be meme-ory.

Here's a good example: In the wake of the recent mass shooting in Nova Scotia, Canada, the Trudeau government (capital L Liberal) has offered more than the requisite thoughts and prayers. They've banned assault weapons. And immediately, out come the tears and the violins and along with them nowadays, the insanely brainless memes. And, as I've wondered at before in these pages or posts, not necessarily put on social media like Facebook by insanely brainless people. Some SMART people are sharing them.

Things like this:

Now, I might be able to understand posting this without doing a thorough check on the AR 15 if the last word weren't there. But when you're questioning the intelligence of the PM by ironically calling him a genius, you'd better have your facts straight or you're gonna look like an idiot.

Here are the details on the AR 15. All I did was Google, "Has the AR 15 been illegal in Canada since 1977?" This article, in which it clarifies that in 1977 the AR 15 was restricted, not made illegal, makes that "genius" remark backfire on the posting party - to use firearm terminology. In trying to take a pot shot at the PM, their weapon blew up in their faces. I'm not a big fan of this PM, but he's taking a lot of flack, to use another - I'm just gonna use them all up here and now: he's under heavy fire, facing the firing squad, in the firing line, drawing enemy fire, under siege, in the piss, facing trial by fire, under a hail of enemy fire, taking a barrage of enemy fire, getting strafed by enemy fire, getting sniped at, being pelted, flamed, blasted, blazed, peppered, plugged, and picked off. And he doesn't deserve it. I believe that this was the right thing to do, and I believe that the majority of Canadians believe it was too. But try to say that to people who post stuff like this:

Posted by a good friend of mine who is exceptionally intelligent in my opinion. And he's not one to go defriending people who differ. So to this I commented, "Yeah, I miss my old Death Race 2000 car.

For the youngsters, that was a movie starring David Carradine from "Kung Fu," which is a TV show you're also unfamiliar with. In the movie, people compete in a race in which the winner is the driver, or team, that commits the most vehicular homicide.

I continued my comment on the post thusly: "I also miss my butterfly knife and my switchblade. I mean, where the hell have my rights gone? Why, do you know it's actually illegal for a guy to own a flamethrower nowadays?"

The humour may go unappreciated, but I had a good time.

Then there's this one:

and this one:

EDUCATE YOURSELF! (this means I'm right and I'm mad, so don't bother educating yourself, just trust me) These weapons can spray out up to 1200 bullets per minute folks. So yeah! Point made! Trudeau is just being unfair to people who want dangerous LOOKING guns, right? Weapons wearing scary outfits. Maybe they'll SCARE those dangerous deer to death while hunting with them. If not 1200 rpm. should oughta get you a kill shot in there somewhere, eh? If you don't mind crunching on bullets while you eat the meat.

Turns out, gasp, this meme is also bullshit. In fact, the Ruger Mini 14 was USED in an infamous mass shooting in Quebec back in '89, and it IS on the list of assault weapons to be banned.

Finally, and maybe the best of all, there's THIS beauty:

 Do I even need to? Probably not, but I will. Umm... we don't have the same rights and freedoms as our armed forces, though that seems to be the assertion here. I wouldn't mind getting behind the wheel of a tank. (I'm sure it's not even a wheel, but I don't know that and I like it that way.) It would sure be cool to get stuck in traffic and be able to just crush cars in my way and get to where I'm going. Yeah, that would be acers! But I hasten to point out that that would be homicide, another thing we can't get away with that our armed forces can. In fact, that is, as horrific as it sounds, one of the purposes of the assault weapons they carry. I feel like this point is not getting through to a lot of people. When you cry out against a government that bans assault weapons, weapons that are perfect for killing people, it doesn't sound that much like you are bemoaning any loss of legitimate rights and freedoms, it sounds like you might just want to kill some dudes.

So don't be mislead, people of Canada. Educate yourselves! We're lovers, not fighters. But we DO have a military, police forces, (and hockey players) who do a pretty good job of fighting for us. As I repeated way back in elementary school, if you want to fight, join the army. And from what I hear from my hunter friends, (I prefer fishing. Never tried hunting.) if you want to hunt like a REAL man, grab a bow, not an AR 15.

Post script: I just noticed that the meme I downloaded was not quite the one I got for the last one. The one I tried to download pointed out that the military weapons and the civilian ones are the same. Like the previous memes, they just look different.

PPS: For those who want to make an argument about protecting home and family, I think if we want to call ourselves a civilized society, we need to satisfy ourselves with putting one or two holes in an intruder rather than 120. This is real life not video games. But that's just like my opinion man.

Blinded by the Light

I woke up early today for no good reason. Just got up with the sun. It's on days like these I most appreciate being a Corona shut-in because I can take a nap. I LOVE naps! I've said it before, but just an hour long nap makes me feel so great! Like I'm getting away with something. I'll be taking one or even TWO today no doubt. And the sleep! It's probably double the value. It's one of those wonders of nature that can't be explained. Yeah. For sure. Around noon probably. In MY life, this is what passes for a nooner. There's no WAY I'll be pulling an all-dayer today!

So I slowly worked my way out of bed by updating my games, checking email, messages, Facebook, and some other sites. Then switched from phone to computer and had coffee and toast at my desk while verifying the lyrics of the soundtrack of my last dream before waking up. Manfred Mann no less. Blinded by the Light. Not racked up like a deuce, another roller in the night, but revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night. So with a boulder on my shoulder and feeling kind of older, I tripped the merry-go-round. Then some silicon sister with a manager mister told me I got what it takes. Meanwhile Go-cart Mozart was checking out the weather chart to see if it was safe outside, and little Early-Pearly came by in his curly-whirly and asked me if I needed a ride. Coincidentally, that was exactly what my dream had been about!

Well, almost. Actually, I write the above because as I opened up Facebook, I was reminded of a post that I had made two years ago. At the time I was feeling much like I did last night and posted the following: So I type, "How to disable autocomplete on my Kindle." Well actually I type " How, " which becomes "Haw," which is underlined in red squiggly. Now I have " Haw t, " because I typed the t before I realized "How" was changed to haw even though I hadn't even typed "hee" before it. I backspace and retype "How" but autocomplete inserts a space so now I have "H ow," which is also underlined in red squiggly because evidently autocomplete suggests words that don't exist. I say to the 14-year-old in the room, "I thought electronic devices were supposed to make life easier." He says, " They do! "

As I sit imagining back to a better time when I wasn't so boulder-on-my-shoulder older and that hit song came out, not the original by The Boss in '73, but the one released in '76 by Manfred Mann, the one I listened to in my dream as I was boot-skiing down a hill, taking a steep ramp and doing a lay-out back flip with a half twist, (I'm not kidding, that was part of my dream!) I'm struck by the massive advances in science and technology since I was nine or ten and first getting into music that wasn't my Mother's. All those lyrics, and the fact that Bruce Springsteen wrote that song, did I know all that at 5:30 when I got up today? Nope. For most of my life I thought that song was about a douche and someone getting wrapped up in it somehow. ??? And by the way, what's a douche? I didn't KNOW!

Not a lot of people KNEW the actual lyrics either. And how could we? We had to buy the record, (this was before we could tape the song off the radio on our ghetto blasters (a term I cringe to type - can you imagine THAT term catching on today?)) put our heads as close to the speakers as possible, crank up the volume and guess. Just guess. And we had to live with that. Yet somehow, even though every one of our friends had a different hearing of the lyrics, they didn't disparage all of society and its mass ignorance at not hearing what they had heard. We didn't engage in death threats to family and pets of people who differed in their hearing of the song. We waited to hear it from the experts. The only experts. Not even Dick Clark if he had Manfred Mann on American Bandstand could be trusted. We had to hear it from the band, or the Boss. Then we knew it was fact.

Today we can find out in a minute by Googling the lyrics.

So science and technology HAS made things easier in some ways. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't use it every day, in fact DEPEND on it every day. But last night when I was trying to post a new assignment for my online students, I wasn't thinking of the positive side to technology. It was a lesson I'd made long ago for a class of Koreans on present tense and adverbs of frequency. Sometimes, never, once in a while, usually, seldom, etc. Well, what do you know? This week's lessons for my kiddies included present tense and adverbs of frequency. So why not use the same lesson? Sounds easy but it turned into a technological nightmare.

The problem began during the video. I have to make a video at least 20 minutes long, each week. In it I review the past week, give pointers on common mistakes I saw made, give kudos for good things I saw, then introduce the topics for the week, the book assignments and I give them one assignment to be submitted online to me. I usually show them in the syllabus (Microsoft Word document) where we are. This week I had made a summary of my video in written form (Microsoft Word document). And I wanted to show them the old handout I had made years before. I had listed things at the bottom of the handout such as, brush your teeth, visit your grandparents, check your email, sleep in, etc. I had used it as a conversation class handout so I had just typed, "Talk with your partner or partners about how often you do the following..." I changed that to "Write 10 questions and answers about how often you do the following..." Then I tried to save it onto my desktop as a new file. What I got was, "Syllabus save." So I tried again. "Week 8 Lesson saved." I tried several more times but I just couldn't save the new, slightly modified handout to my desktop. But it showed up as saved to the desktop (about 6 times) IN Microsoft Word. And I was able to keep all three MSWord files open. So I made the video. That went okay. But when it came time to upload the handout, and the assignment, to the university LMS, I couldn't do it.

Microsoft Word gets confused when you have more than one of its programs open at the same time. I have a pirated copy of Word (I mean, who doesn't?) so it might be a glitch in the copy, or the actual program might be messed up. Either way, I was sure the second it happened, that I'd encountered this before. Maybe once, maybe 10 times. I sometimes take a long time to pick these patterns up. If you try to save something to your desktop, I guess it has to go through its flawed computer brain about 50 trillion times that you want to save THIS document, not the other two. And that can take up to SECONDS! Even MINUTES! Excruciating! But when you try to save the file 6 times... well then you're into some seriously frustrating time wasting. And if you don't know what's happening because the last time it happened, you said to yourself, "I won't need to remember this because it won't come up again. When will I ever open multiple files in Word again?" And the time before that. And the time before that...

What makes things worse is the brief glimmer of hope you get when the message comes up that the file you are trying to save will need to be converted into a more recent version of Microsoft Word. Is this okay? "Ah HA!" you exclaim. That must have been the problem. So you click "allow" and it changes to a more modern version of MS Word and disappears into the netherweb again.

That's when you start doing desperate things. You start throwing your mouse, gently so it doesn't break, but roughly enough to let the gods of technology know how furious you are. Then you bang on your desk and swear a bunch of times as you try to save again, only compounding the problem. Then, as a last resort, you seek help on the internet. "Why can't I save a Microsoft Word file to my desktop?" you type into Google. You get some other person's plea answered by computer people who shouldn't be answering average people's pleas. "Well it is not recommended that you save any programs to your desktop. Here's what you do: you open up a ghost file using your ACR configuration in some upper gump font. But first you're going to need to change the ftp protocol icon in your registry. It's super easy!"

You wade through all of THAT self aggrandizing crap until you come to, "Open up Windows explorer, go into view, then change desktop setting, then check "show hidden files" and uncheck "don't show hidden files." So you do all that and voila... your file STILL doesn't show up on your desktop. But you still try to save it a few MORE times further compounding your problem.

Then you search another thread and find, "Have you tried refreshing your desktop? Just right click on your desktop and then choose "refresh." "AAhhhhhh, I KNEW there had to be a simple solution!" you say. So you go ahead and do that and finally, your problem has not been solved. But you do a couple more test saves, just to be sure. Further compounding your problem.

So, like usual, if you want something done, you have to do it yourself. I started searching all over my computer to see if all those files had been saved in another place even though every one of them I had definitely chosen the desktop as their destination. They were all showing up in Microsoft Word itself marked as "saved to desktop," but I couldn't see them on the desktop and I couldn't drag them and drop them to the desktop from Microsoft Word itself. I tried copying, transferring, exporting as pdf, you name it, I tried it. Meanwhile a couple hours have been wasted.

Finally I looked in Windows Explorer under "recent" and there were about half a dozen word docs marked saved to desktop, and a few pdf's with the same designation even though exactly NONE of them actually appeared on my desktop. So, I minimized my screen, selected one of the pdf's and dragged and dropped to the desktop. IT WORKED! I now had one of those files on the desktop. I needed that because on the uni's LMS, Canvas, files can be uploaded from your desktop, but not from Microsoft Word or some other locations. In fact I just make pdf's because some or all MSW files don't even show up as files that can be uploaded. But pdf's work. And as you see your successfully saved to desktop pdf appear, there's an oddly faded Word file taking shape on your desktop. MS Word is nearing completion of the 50 trillion checks on the first of 15 files you unsuccessfully tried to save to your desktop. WHY I OUGHTA....

Something that should have taken an hour took FOUR! Can any among us think of all the great knowledge and entertainment technology and computers have brought us at times like these? Well if you can, I envy you. And I bet it won't be long before I open up a few MS Word files simultaneously again and say to myself, "What harm could it do?"

I depend on technology almost as much as I depend on essentials like water, air and... light. But sometimes I am blinded by the light. I thank you.