Keep Away

No, not Keep Away the game we played in the street with a gang of kids and a beat up rubber ball, which you may know as Monkey in the Middle.

Rather, it's Keep Away as in "Get it out of here." The Keep in question is Keep.com, self-described (and the punctuation is all theirs) as:

                      Shopping made simple. Oh and beautiful, too.
                      Keep is your new shopping obsession. Join for free.

I would describe it as Pinterest with price tags, a socially networked time-suck with instant buying opportunities, devoted to insecurity and the impulse purchase.  I mean, would you be caught dead buying boots that didn't have more than single-digit likes? Didn't think so.

So far, the website looks like it is the shopping ground of very young women who all have the same taste in short skirts, tiny jewelry, high-heeled boots, and items imprinted with silly sayings about sex.  Not judging.  If it were populated by my demographic it would be filled with elastic-waist black trousers, I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up medallions, bunion-friendly ground grippers, and items with silly sayings about senility.  (And who says that we oldsters don't know how to spend money?)

For each item you can hit Like, Keep or Share.  If you click through on an item, you can Like, Keep, or Buy.  Alas, Keep.com is a shopper's happy place and there is no Trash option. You can also follow the person who "discovered" the item, in case you actually have to work for a living and don't have all day and night to pursue discoveries on your own. Oh, wait a minute, those intrepid discoverers are "tastemakers," and when they aren't curating, they are beautifully presenting.

Keep: Curated by tastemakers. Beautifully presented. Immediately shoppable. Totally addictive.

It's probably harmless enough, unless you have a limited budget and are prone to addiction, and I'm sure those who enjoy advertisements divorced from all that pesky content will find it worthwhile.  But it's just one more website with app that is doubtless employing dozens of bright young things in building yet more handbaskets for the Hell Express.

Like? Keep? Share? Next Stop Hell.

So join for free. Credit card melt down made simple. Oh and beautiful, too.

Oh, My Exploding Head!

A sure sign of aging:  the increasing frequency with which my head threatens to explode when I read the news.  (Another sign that I am really old is that I still read the news, sometimes in an actual paper printed on crinkly actual newsprint with smudgy actual ink.)

This morning the bearded ghost of Allen Ginsberg * stands on the breakfast table and HOWLS:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

     starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking 

     for an angry fix,

But that last bit sounded more like:

Uber-ing themselves through the Wi-Fi 

streets at dawn looking 

   for an awesome app

I was reading about a company which has 30 employees in 4 cities and what they do is provide app-based reservation services for a whopping 90 restaurants so far.  Who pays for the reservation?  Why, you do.  $5 bucks a pop.  You might even be able to make a reservation for a special meal only available to the cool kids who make their reservations through the app.  Sucker burgers with sap sauce?

You can include a picture in your in-app profile and the restaurant staff will greet you by name. Wow! Instant celebrity when the tattooed host at the Dude Food Blood and Bones Brewpub and Grill high-fives you at the entrance. That's probably worth the $5 right there.

I am sure these clever youngsters over at Reservatronics (or whatever they call themselves) have visions of buy-out sugarplums dancing in their heads as they apply their energy, technological savvy, and desire to solving the immense problem of getting a reservation in a restaurant.

I really like my red-clad pocket pal of a phone, and I probably use as many silly apps as anyone my age, (that is, someone who remembers dial-up on-line access), but it is really appalling that so many folks are spending so much energy to solve minuscule non-problems.

I guess the enormous problems are just too enormous to be solved by a nifty little app.  The hard and messy solutions are never going to be acquired for mega-bucks either. And the beat goes on.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
                                                Allen Ginsberg: Howl, Part 2

*Actually, it was my bearded husband, Rick Teller, who stood beside the breakfast table laughing his head off reciting the Ginsberg lines. Thanks for the inspiration.

The Saucy Bits

More hoo-hah every day as celebrity after celebrity, both major and minor, trashes the hackers who got into their phones, pulled out nude photos, and, gasp!, put them out on the internet.  More viral than ebola! More evil than Satan! Oh, the rhetoric!

Yes, these women have a right to feel violated.  Yes, these hackers are certainly "bad actors," which seems to be the  trendy term for miscreants, and are worthy of a bitch-slap or two.

But, here I am going to launch into full oldster crank mode:  Take all the nude photos you want, selfies or otherwise, but remember that if it's on your phone and you are famous,  it's just hacker-bait. If you're sending it along, it's hacker-bait on someone else's phone. Haven't you figured that out yet?  Even old wrinklies have heard about hackers and identity thieves, and since we were brought up in the olden days we learned the difference between public and private, a distinction that has gone the way of the daguerrotype.

Meanwhile, spare us the self-righteous anger and go back to your acting:  good, bad or otherwise.

You Can't Always Get What You Wah-ahnt!

Let's all sing a chorus with Mick and the boys in (dis)honor of America's biggest geriatric criminal crybaby.

According to an article in the Boston Globe this morning, (and you can take it for what it's worth because I certainly didn't fact-check it),  Whitey Bulger's main goal in life, once he stopped racking up body count, was to remain at large forever.  "At large" is such an odd term when it refers to a moral midget like the Bulge,  especially since he was living anything but large holed up in California, where he was playing tightwad by stretching cheap tube socks over soda bottles to stretch them out. (Either that or developing some kind of Molotov cocktail for his own personal Ragnarok.)

D'ya see what this Bulger fella is whinin' about now?

At any rate, his desired endgame, when he felt that death was near, was to head to Arizona and crawl into an abandoned mine where he would curl up, die, and remain hidden forever.  Cue up the 1930's gangster voice:  You'll never take me alive, copper.

Well, tough luck, boyo! You'll just have to settle for life in the can--that would be the "But if you try sometimes well you just might find/You get what you need" portion of your program-- and the rest of us can head into the holidays thinking about some other kinds of turkeys.

Foc.us? Foc.me!

No Forks in the Sockets
No Beans in your Ear
No Pistachio Nuts in your Nose
ETC.

Don't we all need a jumpstart for our brains now and again? I do, especially when faced with a task like balancing the checkbook or finding the jack-o-lantern candleholder that I tucked away last Halloween.

But, don't we all remember our mothers telling us not to stick a fork in an electric socket?

If Ma were around today she'd be telling us not to stick electrodes into our brains.  Ma's no longer here so Trouserville will pick up the megaphone:  don't go sticking electrodes into your brains.

 In other words: no self-administered transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

BEFORE tDCS

AFTER DIY tDCS

Yes, we are living in the future where scientific information  (much of it half-baked or in this case, half-fried) is freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

There has been real research by real scientists in real universities to determine whether tDCS can help re-carve neural pathways for those with Parkinson's disease, for example. There are some indications that this may work, though some of the researchers  have fessed up to forehead burns. 

Enter the FDAWW (Future Darwin Award Winners of the World) who have taken this preliminary research and run straight to the hardware store with it. You can see them on You Tube hooking up 9-volt batteries to wires and sticking the wires into their brains.  Not as a Mr. Wizard science project they hope will get them an A, or because they are dressing up like Frankenstein for Halloween. No, they are trying to enhance their video gaming ability.  Duh! Double Duh! and a hearty WTF.

If you aren't the DIY type there's a company in the UK who will sell you a device  with the classy moniker Foc.us, for about $250.  I haven't checked it out, but it sounds like a gussied up version of the classic tin-foil head wrapper beloved of cranks everywhere. You might have to get on a waiting list, though,  since the first production run of 3,000 sold out faster than you can say scalp burns.

I guess there are a lot of people out there who listen neither to their mothers, nor to the inner voice that is shrieking "Sucker!"










If you want to read more about it check out Jump-Starter Kits for the Mind which appeared in the New York Times Science Section on October 28, 2013.  I know you have enough brain power to just click right through the advertisement that pops up first.

Spies, Lies, & Cries

Mea Culpa

Trouserville's Department of Corrections, Amplifications, and Moderately Sincere Apologies would like to issue follow-ups to some previous posts.

1.  Spies (Happy To Be American) 

Well, I was so pleased to see that the secret court issued a now sort of public wrist-slap to the secret spies of NSA. Guess the judges weren't too impressed with the defense.  "Yes, indeed, we did indulge in a little bit of domestic overspying, but golly gee willikers, Mr. Judge, it was technical difficulties and we fixed them and plus we set up a compliance department and we now have 300 people making sure we don't over sneak." 

I think I'd feel more secure if they could bring back the spies of yesteryear! 

Not very secret spies Boris and Natasha

Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy

2.  Lies (Go DIrectly to Jail)

We don't need no stinkin' fact checkers; Trouserville's family and friends keep this blog on the straight and narrow.

I passed on what I thought was reliable dope from the Wall Street Journal regarding New Improved Monopoly Empire Now Without Go To Jail Cards.  Turns out it was just plain dopey unverified dope. I did drill down to the Hasbro website, but I missed the public outcry and the subsequent revelation that all is well:  you can still go to jail.  My sister informed me of this because she is a professional who pays attention to details, not a lazy oldster who only skims the silly news, and not even every day. You can read her accurate reporting in the Monopoly Empire post on her blog, Pink Slip.



3.  Cries (Compare and Despair No More)

I have been hewing to my resolve to compare and despair no more on the fitness front.  But that resolve was sorely tried by an article about James Kales, at age 98 a Senior Olympics medalist.  Here's the trying part:  although he did some field and track sports in his youth, he didn't take up tennis until he was 85,  and at the same time took up serious dancing. These activities (tennis six days a week, dancing three to five nights a week), plus a little bowling and sensible eating allowed him to bring home two gold, three silver, and one bronze medal in decathlon activities like shot put, discus, javelin. 

Sigh! I'm more than three decades younger and the only shot put I can handle is the shot I put in the gin & tonic.  Discus? Does flinging an old CD down as a coaster under the gin & tonic count?

Of course, this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, so take it for what it is worth. And just to avoid any future corrections Mr. Kales, much to his annoyance, did not actually win a medal in discus.

Happy To Be An American?

Yes!  Proud to be an American? Hm-m-m-m, let me think about that one.

I am grateful as can be to my not-so-distant ancestors who emigrated from the bogs of Ireland and the beet fields of Mittel-Europa when they did, arriving in the US where they made good, enabling me to live a life of privilege and prosperity.  Mostly, I love America. I can do without the Kardashians, but they are undeniably an All-American success story. 

I won't go on and on about all there is to love about the United States, from the Constitution and the BIll of Rights  to ice cream, apple pie and hotdogs for all, from sea to shining sea, although the rockets' red glare gives me a headache.

I especially like the First Amendment even though it means hearing some mighty stupid political remarks from time to time.



But back to the question of  whether or not I am proud to be an American. Today, the answer is "not so much." Bad enough that our phone calls and emails are being spied upon continually by the paranoid and sneaky gnomes of the NSA.  Bad enough that the weasels of Washington try to convince us that all this prying is a for our own good, as though we are a bunch of pre-schoolers who don't know enough to run out and play in the traffic. But the vomit icing on the garbage cake has got to be the monitoring of the mail.  

Under the Mail Isolation and Control Tracking program the exterior of every piece of mail processed, all 160 million pieces of it, is photographed.  In addition, the Mail Covers program allows any law enforcement official to request that postal workers record all information from the outside of envelopes and parcels before it is delivered. 

All this surveillance might explain why it takes so long for a birthday card to get from Boston to Philly, and perhaps why a Priority Mail parcel sent to me on June 14 has yet to arrive, but there is something offensive about monitoring that doesn't require any oversight whatsoever.  Yes, practically speaking, I could give a rat's ass if the government records the fact that I subscribe to the New Yorker or receive too many catalogs for old-age products, but why should there be a record of what banks I patronize, what charities I contribute to, or who sends me a Christmas card?

I knew that privacy is a thing of the past, a quaint little something that we could once take for granted, but there is a difference between being generally characterized by the zip code where you live and being specifically identified by drones whose job it is to spy on its own citizens for the United States government. 

That doesn't make me proud at all, it just makes me sick.

A My Name is . . .

Abercrombie? Absinthe? Aflatoxin? Aqueduct? Amoeba?

Well, it could be worse. The product, uh, offspring, of celebrities Kanye West and Kim Kardashian has been given the reality-TV-ready name of "North."  That would be "North West." Duh! She will be called "Nori," which as a type of seaweed is nicer than "Noro," a type of intestinal virus. As her parents have announced, she is their very own little "North Star," and they pose the question, "What is higher than North?" Hmm-mm--mm, I think we can all fill in that blank. At least they didn't succumb to a "K" name. Kaopectate West doesn't have quite the same cutesy ring as "North (Nori-don't-call-me-sushi) West."

N my name is Nori and I need nothing.

I won't be the first or the last to scratch my head over the names that folks, celebrity and non, give to their children. Look, call yourself whatever you want, but have some pity on your kids.

Back in the day, if you were born Catholic as I was, you couldn't be baptized unless you were given the name of a saint.  "Kathleen" was a form of "Katherine," and there are a couple of saints with some form of that name, so that was fine. Fortunately, there was no way I could have been named "Kapok" or "Kwashiokor," even if my parents were the kind of narcissistic louts who would do something like that.  My only complaint was that "Kathleen" was one of the most popular names (#11 in the top 20) the year I was born, not quite the Sophia-Emma-Isabella-Olivia-Ava of its day, but in an Irish-Catholic enclave it probably edged up to second or third. How else explain the fact that of the 21 girls in my grade school class, seven were named some form of Katherine or Kathleen? 

So, I have a ho-hum first name, but at least it wasn't a weird old Catholic saint name that sounds like a disease, such as Namadia (widow and nun), or has a wacky qualifier, like Isadora the Simple.

So, good luck to little Nori. I'm sure she will have many more K-word obstacles to overcome in her life than the somewhat silly name she's been saddled with.

Java Jive

Hi.  My name is Trouserville and I'm a coffee addict.

It started when I was fourteen with a daily thermos of black coffee smuggled into the Notre Dame Academy lunchroom.  In college, my roommate and I were the only ones in the entire dorm with our very own percolator. I am powerless in front of my need for caffeine. (Sob! Sniff! Whimper!)



Oh, give me a (coffee) break!

Just the other day I thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket made of cronuts.  Now I find out that according to the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)--the bible of the anything-for-a-billable-hour psycho-babbling professional--that I may be suffering from a psychiatric disorder.

Oh, wait, actual caffeine addiction didn't make it on to the official list, but, according to a Wall Street Journal article two other caffeine "disorders"--intoxication and withdrawal--got the nod.

This ain't the caffeine talking when I ask: is this the most moronic example yet of the attempts by the psycho establishment to pathologize, and thus monetize for themselves, the ups and downs of ordinary life.  As a side effect of this nincompoopery, actual disorders become trivialized. 

Is there anyone on the planet who ingests caffeeine who doesn't know that if you drink coffee every day and then stop drinking it you may well get a headache, or feel drowsy?  That it's not  a migraine, a brain tumor, encephalitis, Lyme disease, MS or anything else that should cause you to seek medical attention? That you are not headed for the dingbat roundup?

Guess not.  Guess there are some folk too stupid to know that if you want that particular headache to go away all you need is a cup of joe, a cola, or a chocolate covered espresso bean.  

It's nice to know that those poor schlubs can now go to an emergency room and be given a medical and psychiatric evaluation, perhaps including a blood test and an MRI, and then issued  a prescription which will presumably be paid for by their insurance or our tax dollars.  Maybe they can even get a free trip to caffeine rehab.  Instead of spending a buck at the Dunk or a fiver at Starbucks they can be given a prescription for what?  Hundred dollar caffeine pills? Fifty buck espressos?

Wake up and smell the coffee already.  And if you think coffee lovers are a bunch of raving lunatics, you have never heard The Ink Spots singing Java Jive:

I love coffee, I love tea

I love the java jive and it loves me

Coffee and tea and the jiving and me

A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!

And if listening to those cool dudes doesn't help your headache, Dr. Trousers says "Take a chocolate-covered espresso bean, and don't call me in the morning--at least not until I've had my coffee."