Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

Up with Christmas Cards!

 Posted by at 18:17  Up With
Jul 072014
 
The world's first commercially produced Christ...

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Back in college, I learned sophistication and nuance. The old fashioned stodgy lifestyle of my parents mid-western home was passe. I was becoming an educated, discriminating man of the world and it was time to put away childish things and one of those things was Christmas cards.

It was a struggle.

I was torn because this new sophistication wasn’t logical. Christmas (and religion of course) were merely an opiate for the masses and should be shunned. But it wasn’t so simple because sophisticated and nuanced people didn’t want to miss out on Christmas presents or the partying of the season. They sent out Holiday cards that communicated innocuous good wishes for the ‘season’ and exchanged gifts. Their secular lifestyle was unruffled without actually offending anybody..

 Then there were the Jews.

For the first time in my life, I discovered that not everybody celebrated Christmas. In my culturally deprived hometown, everybody was a nominal Christian. I knew about Jews. I’d even seen one or two in person but they weren’t part of my life. In college, they were everywhere. I discovered that they were pretty normal, except for the oddity of not celebrating Easter or Christmas although it struck me as convenient that they had a compensating holiday at the same time.  That alone is should be enough to make you believe in God.

 And, of course, the atheists.

For the first time in my life, I had to think about the impact of sending a Christmas card to a non-believer. It was my first lesson in applying  sophistication and nuance. If I know that someone is not a Christian, it it proper to send them a Christmas card? This was really a non-issue since college students don’t normally send Christmas cards and if they do, it is probably just to family and friends from home not to their sophisticated and nuanced college buds.  Still, I agonized.

Once that small doubt is inserted, it becomes harder and harder to act. Should I send a Christmas card to people I know to be non-Christian? Should I send them an innocuous holiday card? Or nothing at all? Once you start down that path, it is hard to stop. How do you know someone’s heart. Why should you assume that they celebrate Christmas? How can you be so arrogant and insensitive? The natural process finally tells you to send everybody a holiday card or just forget the whole damn thing. That way the only people you can possibly offend are real Christians and as I learned in college, they are all nut jobs anyway.

When you are sophisticated and nuanced you play it safe.

So I’ve played it pretty safe with holiday cards through my life. I pretty much tiptoed around the actual Christmas meaning and kept the whole message pretty secular. “Party-on, Dudes!”

Lately, though, my veneer of sophistication seems to be wearing thin. Each year sees a diminished role of religion in the celebration and it’s beginning to bother me. After all, religion is one of the things that separates man from animals. Despite all the effort on the part of the nuanced and sophisticated atheists and agnostics running our institutions these days, we remain  a Christian country. If being religious makes you a nut job then our founding fathers were nut jobs.

 So what’s your point?

Well, I’m getting off track here. The point I started out with is that I am finally comfortable with sending ‘real’ Christmas cards and not the safe and innocuous holiday cards. I have finally determined that what they mean is not that I want to push Christianity on anybody but at Christmas time, I want everybody, Christian or not to think about the meaning of Christmas. It is my message to them that I hope they will share in the joy of the message for believers and non-believers.  That is the spirit of the season.

Bottom line, I’m finally over my holiday confusion. It may not be nuanced and sophisticated but this year I’m sending Christmas cards.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Googlephobic

 Posted by at 18:17  rants, Reflections
Jul 072014
 

The Cantankerous Old Coots evolve.

Al Gore

Cover of Al Gore

Expose three ordinary guys to the internet and you don’t know what might happen.  They might just reject it outright as an irrelevant and irresponsible time waster.  Then again, they might just decide that it is a way out of a drab and mundane existence- a path from ordinary to extraordinary.  Well what I see looking back over our journey is chaos and confusion.  There is no path through the web, just a tangle of conflicting threads.  What seemed simple in the beginning has become a maze- a sideshow carnival with a multitude of barkers hawking miracle cures, not to mention fame and fortune if you take their ride.  We are as susceptible as the next guy and each of us has been down a few rabbit holes since embracing the internet.  We certainly haven’t reached the pot of gold yet and each time we attempt to retrace our steps from the last dead end we find ourselves in yet another strange new world full of promise and impending doom but we persist.  Today as I appraise the landscape and the state of the Cantankerous Old Coot, I find that Justin is Twitterpated, Bob is a Facebook Fool and I am in a Googlephobic funk.  How’s that for diversification?

Understanding my own mind is a serious enough challenge.  I don’t have a clue what, if anything, is going on upstairs for Justin and Bob.  For me the boundless opportunities of the web are beginning to look like a mirage.  The freedom of opportunity and access which seemed to mean that the best man would win is starting to look like a con job.  It’s like this.

It seemed so simple!

When we started Cantankerous Old Coots back in the dark ages of the internet, we were innocent babes.  The internet was a simple place- at least so we believed.  Somebody (I personally never believed Al Gore) created the place and out of the goodness of their hearts they let common folk like us publish whatever we wanted.  What could be better?   Some folks got the knack of it right away and became so popular that they were considered authorities, developed a big following and after a while started making money with their blogs.

Content is king

The secret, as the story went back then, was all in creating ‘killer’ content.  The details about how that ‘killer’ content actually found readers was even less clear than the definition of ‘killer’ content.  It was always my belief that ‘killer’ content was what I turned out.  I thought that ‘killer’ content meant good writing (like you used to learn in school), logical construction and original insights.  I thought that web publishing was like old fashioned publishing- quality ultimately wins.  I’m a pig headed cuss unimpressed by signals to the contrary.  The fact that my ‘killer’ content was not finding an audience sailed right over my head.  To my mind, I needed more time and more exposure.

As I said before we were naive in those days. We thought that Google was a search engine- something to help us find information on the web.  It never crossed our minds that a dumb search engine could possibly have anything to do with defining ‘killer’ content.   I remember wondering to myself how Google made any money because I never paid them anything.

It took several years before I began to understand.  First I noticed that there were ads on Google but I have to confess that for years I couldn’t tell an ad from a search result.  As a result, I must have clicked on the ads before moving down the page to the search results.  I no doubt bought some products, innocently unaware that Google received money for that placement.  Who knows how many second rate products I bought just because Google shoved them in my face by displacing the ‘killer’ content sites recovered in the search.

Ultimately I found out about the ads and became more sophisticated in using Google to find information.  I became more suspicious about the prominently placed ads and no longer assumed that they were high quality.  But I still had a long way to go because I didn’t yet understand the definition of ‘killer’ content.

That came later.

I should have caught on when I learned about SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  If you aren’t getting the attention you want, I was told, it’s because you aren’t writing for the Search Engines.    “Duh,” I thought, “Of course.”

I began checking for keywords.  Was I using the right keywords?  Was I using them enough times? Did I need ‘long-tail’ keywords or were regular ones good enough.  Did I have back links?  Was I ‘black hat’ or ‘white hat’?  It was so strange, complicated and magical that I never stopped to think about what this all meant.  It never occurred to me that search engines can’t comprehend grammar or syntax.  They have no way to evaluate good writing.  The truth is that ‘killer’ content on the web has nothing to do with literature, good writing or even communication.  ‘Killer’ content is simply whatever Google says it is and Google isn’t a person.  Google is a computer program.

So, it turns out that ‘killer’ content (and success on the web) is determined by a computer algorithm not by real human beings.  Google makes money the old fashioned way that the government has mastered- regulation.  You never see Google charge you for anything if you are a normal person.  You just enjoy all the free services and never see the real cost.

Google’s legacy.

The legacy of the Google dominated internet today is the death of literacy.  Nobody reads newspapers anymore.  Nobody has the patience or time to actually read a carefully crafted news story when they can get a titillating headline while they check Facebook or a snarky comment on Twitter.  Magazines used to publish creative writing.  Ordinary people used to read literature, savor beautifully constructed prose and emulate what they discovered in their speech.  These days ‘Killer’ content has nothing to do with beautiful writing.  ‘Killer’ content means nothing more than using enough keywords and in the proper number.

No wonder Justin worships Twitter and Bob sucks up to Facebook.  Why waste your time crafting deathless prose when Google- the overlord of the internet- deems it irrelevant.

This leaves me in a quandary. Now that I see the truth how to I proceed with my life?  Do I accept reality and embrace Google’s new order or take a stand on principle and tilt at windmills?  Maybe I should Google it.

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Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Down with Normal

 Posted by at 18:17  Down with
Jul 072014
 

There is an unwritten law in California.

In California we believe that if you don’t think it’s broken, your standards suck.

Following this law has given us a whole new election process.

A Dictionary of American Politics, Comprising ...

A Dictionary of American Politics, Comprising Accounts of Political Parties, Measures and Men, Etc. (Photo credit: Cornell University Library)this law, Californians have gone from being the best state in the union when I moved here in 1970 for such things as roads and schools to being last today. Having ruined the state infrastructure, the focus these days is undermining governance.

Yesterday was the primary election. Californians never expect to have an impact on the candidate for President. Still we get to express our preference and vote to determine who should be on the ballot in November. But California has decided that regular primary elections are just too ordinary for the Golden State. This is a primary election with a twist. This year everybody gets to vote for everybody; parties don’t count.

What I mean is that no matter what your political party preference, you get to see the entire list of candidates and vote your favorite. No more of those arbitrary distinctions between candidates and voters. Everybody is as good as everybody else. The idea that you should limit yourself to one party when you vote in the primary is like believeing that the Earth is flat. No flat Eathers alowed in Califronia. California is challenging the tired old routine of elections. They shook everything up by putting all the candidates on one ballot. No matter your political party you can vote for any candidate and only the top two vote getters will appear on the November ballot.

Why? you ask.  In California you learn not to bother asking.

Nobody I know has offered a rational explanation for this change or any evidence that it is an improvement over what we used to do. I can’t even remember how this new process got established. It was probably one of the plethora of ballot initiatives that confuse California voters each election. Nobody can understand what the language means and both supporters and opponents lie like rugs.

Whatever, the result is that instead of all the miscellaneous political parties having a candidate on the Primary ballot in November, there will be only two candidates and there is no requirement about what party they represent. The voters will choose.. It might be two Democrats. It might be two Republicans. It might even be two Greens or a mix with one Democrat and one Republican or even a Libertarian and a Peace and Freedom. There are no petty rules about party representation.

 Tradition never looked better as California improves itself to death.

As I watch California deteriorate these days I’m appreciating tradition more and more. Change isn’t always good. I don’t much like this change but it is something you have to accept when you live in California. It’s what they like to do in California, shake things up. Like they did a few years back with the ‘new’ math back when my kids were in elementary school. I have no idea what ‘ new’ math is, or was. I couldn’t make heads not tails of it. I always assumed that the teachers understood but there is no clear evidence that they did either. All I know is that my kids never understood math, new or old and hate math to this day, in spite of tutors hired to remedy the failings of the California education tyranny.

They never admit failure. 

Eventually, (after my kids were past saving) California abandoned ‘new’ math and without fanfare or explanation returned to ‘old’ math. It’s a tradition in California to do new things, just because they are new. They rejected phonics as well but lucky for my kids they were already reading by then. They went back to phonics without skipping a beat or admitting failure. We shudder to think what might be next – new traffic laws?

 

So, it remains to be seen how this new election practice will fare. I fully expect that Californian’s will shrug the new practice after a year or two off and return to the old ways. I fully expect that the politicians will shrug it off as well just like they shrug off any responsibility to the people who elected them. What I do anticipate is that whatever the intent of the bureaucrats that designed this monstrosity, they will be upset when nothing much changes. That isn’t good either.  I can’t believe that they will be satisfied with letting things go back to normal. Fortunately there are always plenty of new ways to do things.

Even California normal.

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Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Up with L.A.

 Posted by at 18:17  Up With
Jul 072014
 
Nighttime view of Downtown L.A. and the Hollyw...
Image via Wikipedia

“L.A. Where there’s never weather, and walking is a crime. L.A.: where the streetlights and palm trees go on forever, where darkness never comes, like a deal that never goes down, a meeting that’s never taken. The city of angels where every cockroach has a screenplay and even the winos wear roller skates. It’s that kind of town.” Ian Sholes

I admit to liking LA. I lived there for 35 years, made a career and raised two sons. It was hard to give it up but now 400 miles away, my wife and I love to visit even for a few days and even if LA like the rest of California has been declining. My LA is from the 70′ when I arrived, fleeing from the stifling conventionality of my Midwest home and the pretentious cultural snobbery of the East coast. LA represented freedom; Anything goes; A fantastic freeway system and parking on the street – anywhere and every where. Alas all that is gone now, destroyed by Jerry Brown and his acolytes. His goal was to stop building infrastructure so that people like me would stop coming to California. It took 30 years but he has finally done it. People have stopped coming to California and I am primed to leave as well.

L.A. Is dead and unworkable and all of California is not far behind. LA freeways are impossible. The politicians are out of control. Living in LA means denying the reality that you see on the overcrowded freeways and overpopulated, urine-infused underpasses. Still it is great to get back from time to time and live the fantasy that LA used to be. You can do that when you visit because you can avoid rush hour traffic – to a degree- and enjoy getting from one part of LA to another quickly. You can remember the relaxed and casual feeling of shopping in Beverly Hills on a Saturday afternoon or finding a place to park at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.  You can remember the ticket books at Disneyland.

We will be reliving our L.A. History, visiting museums and some of our old haunts as well as spending some time with our older son who still lives in LA. LA isn’t what is used to be; it isn’t what it wants to be; and it isn’t quite dead yet but L.A. Is unique and American to the core. It may be an acquired taste but once you get L.A. In your heart, you never get it out.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Down with Politicians!

 Posted by at 18:17  Down with
Jul 072014
 

“Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.”   Henry Kissenger

Unfortunately, the founding fathers set up the country to be run by politicians. Elected representatives presented the best of the bad choices offered by history. Unlike royalty, the public would be able to replace politicians when they overstepped their role. This system has kept our country going for over two hundred years despite the concerns of Benjamin Franklin.

Now that government is failing all around us. Ordinary citizens and voters seem to be getting the short end of the stick in terms of the services that we expect the government to be providing in exchange for our taxes. Here in California, we hear that the City of Oakland, never known for it’s safe streets is reducing the police force because it can’t afford to pay the retirement commitments to officers. The legislature in Sacramento can’t balance a budget but can ban plastic bags and aluminum baseball bats.  Is that what we told them to do?  Our national politicians are no better, spending money we don’t have to grow government, paralyze private industry and abandon national security issues like controlling the border.

How did we get in such a mess? Whatever makes us reelect politicians who blatantly refuse to do what we pay them to do? Why are we so trusting? And so forgiving?

I think the simple answer is that when it comes to politics we are all fools. We will buy into any story that a politician is willing to spin. And when we don’t know, we are willing to assume that the incumbent deserves to stay. That was my excuse and I am learning that it is a piss poor electron strategy because it is based upon assumptions that give the incumbent advantages without requiring him to earn them. Most of the time I don’t have a clue what my representatives have been up to in Sacramento or Washington. They don’t tell me and I don’t ask. Come election day, I assume that they have been behaving themselves and give them a thumbs up. Look what that kind of thinking has produced – total dysfunction.

I’m not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt any more. If I don’t absolutely know that politician has done something good during their term, then they don’t get my vote. If everybody would take that position, I think we would have a whole new class of accountable politicians. How do you know what they have done? Not my problem. If I don’t know what they have done, they don’t get my vote. Instead of candidates trying to convince me whey they should replace the incumbent, the burden is on the incumbent to prove that they should stay. Voting made easy. Vote the incumbent out!

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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