Ralph

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

Up with Tea!

Posted by Ralph at 10:57 Up With

Mar 252013

I’ve been drinking more tea lately. It’s not that I like tea so much. It is for my health. I read somewhere that three cups of tea a day would help with the arthritis pain in my knees which is beginning to annoy me. I’ve been in denial about the arthritis for a few years now figuring that if I ignored it long enough it would go away. Well I formed a new plan. Last month I decided that it was time to mention it to my doctor. He told me that yes I did have arthritis and to tell him if I needed something to handle the pain. So much for modern medicine.

I’ve been cynical about medicine since my brothers died back when I was in high school. Medicine couldn’t keep them from dying then and I don’t think it has made much progress since. Notice that my doctor didn’t tell me he could do anything about the arthritis. He only offered me relief from the pain. So much for doctors.

It’s all up to me!

I did some research about arthritis and learned that tea is supposed to help reduce inflammation. I’d taken up green tea a few years back as a health thing but the stuff tastes like dishwater and I gradually stopped. At the timeI understood that green tea was the best tea to drink but my new research said that there wasn’t any difference between the benefits of green tea and black tea so now I’m drinking black. It’s got more flavor.

A tin of loose Earl Grey tea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think one of the problems I have with tea is watching too many old British movies. Tea always suggests overdressed people in over decorated rooms sipping tea from delicate bone china cups. Tea is effete snobbery that I can’t relate to while coffee is how I live- a legacy from my father’s Swedish heritage. For me, the only American way to drink tea is iced.

Still I am finding that black tea has enough taste to at least partially satisfy my craving for something hot and stimulating while I work. I have decided to get better acquainted with the different types. I just worked through a box of Oolong. The description on the box said it was perfumed and delicate which is how they try to sell you on insipid green tea so I was skeptical. It was perfumed all right but still tasty enough to know I wasn’t drinking plain hot water.

Today I opened a new box- this one is Earl Gray- or is it Grey? This is much more like the Lipton’s I grew up with. It has more flavor but unlike Liptons I can smell some perfume as I hold the cup under my nose. I took a break from writing to brew a fresh cup and discovered that Earl Grey tea is enhanced with oil of bergamot (a kind of orange). I guess that makes it a predecessor to Constant Comment.

How long can I keep this up?

I don’t know how long I can continue this tea trip. It’s not as bad as I expected but I just don’t get the satisfaction from a cup of tea that I do from coffee. Right now it’s a mind trip to improve my health and improve my understanding of tea. Sipping my second cup, I can imagine the orange scent. At this point I can’t be sure if I really smell it or just imagine it. It’s got flavor but it doesn’t compare to the rich café dobles that I remember fondly from my days in Buenos Aires.

What will make or break my new commitment to tea is if I believe that it helps with the arthritis. I know that I will not eliminate it. My goal is to mitigate it’s destruction to my knee joints and keep the pain levels manageable. So far I’m managing to feel positive about the effort. The pain seems less. The tea is more tasty than I expected. Still, it’s coffee that stirs my soul and rouses me to action. Time will tell.

Ralph

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

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Down with Google +1

Posted by Ralph at 09:38 Down with

Mar 192013

Image by marc falardeau via Flickr

I’m no whiner like Bob.

Sometimes, though, you just have to tell it like it is. The world is just not fair. Some people are ‘Cool’ and some people are not. I thought that those days were long over for me, I mean worrying about being ‘Cool’. I know it might be hard to believe but back in high school, I wasn’t cool. In those days, there were two kinds of kids.- the ‘Cool’ ones and the rest. I was one of the rest. I never knew what it was like to be ‘Cool’. I had to guess but it sure looked good to me. The ‘Cool’ kids all hung our together doing ‘Cool’ things and the rest of us watched. Most of my high school fantasies involved somehow being mistaken for one of the ‘Cool’ kids. Well it never happened.

Going through life, being ‘Cool’ faded in importance the farther I got from high school. At work, it wasn’t so important being cool. In fact, sometimes to my delight being ‘Cool’ was a disadvantage for my competition. Over time, I forgot about my painful high school years. I still wasn’t ‘Cool’ but it didn’t keep me from being moderately successful in life. My kids knew but it really didn’t matter because even ‘Cool’ parents aren’t ‘Cool’ to their kids. I coped. The scars healed and I was able to pretend that it was never really very important. Then I started blogging.

UnCool Redux.

Before long, I was in the same sorry state as when I started high school. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know where anything was. And once again, the world was divided into two groups- the ‘Cool’ kids like Darren and Leo and the rest. It’s pretty much the same hopeless state of mind because what separates the ‘Cool’ from the unCool is stuff you can’t learn – at least I can’t figure it out. In high school, the ‘Cool’ guys were the jocks, the cheerleaders and the student government smooth talkers. Band geeks like me just didn’t qualify.

So what makes ‘Cool’ guys ‘Cool’?

It is stlll a mystery to me what makes a ‘Cool” blogger ‘Cool. The ‘Cool’ bloggers aren’t necessarily great looking. They have other qualities that set them apart. The trouble is that those qualities are hard to identify and harder to learn. It isn’t the number of words that they write. It is that in those words they manage to touch their readers. You can’t bottle that skill and sell it (although number of the ‘Cool’ bloggers try and us unCool bloggers are willing to buy). It’s like that Supreme Court Justice said about pornography. He can’t define it but he know it when he sees it. Because it is so hard to identify the difference, the Blogging Gods invented Google and on the web, you know that guys are ‘Cool’ when Google tells you the are Cool’.

Well, I’m still not ‘Cool’.

These days with all the social media like Facebook and Twitter it’s easy to build up a following. They may all be band geeks just like me but it takes a little effort find that out. After getting my feet wet I began to feel comfortable with social media. Facebook and Twitter were great. Why add any more? But then I started hearing about Google +1. It sounded ‘Cool’. I wanted to find out.

But it is by invitation only.

That’s why I’m so upset withGoogle and their new Googlie +1. At first I just dismissed it as another Social Media site. I told myself why bother. I’ve already got friends. But the buzz got stronger. People talked about how it was different from Facebook, how it gave your community different dimensions. I was intrigued. Then the enchanting Guy Kawasaki posted about it. I read the post and decided to investigate. Maybe I could still be ‘Cool’. Maybe I could even be part of Guy;s community, The old high school freshman in me was still working. I wanted to belong with the cool kids.

So the problem is that Google +1is by invitation only and I’m not invited. Sure, Guy is “Cool’ and he says jump right on board. But he didn’t mention, that you have to be ‘Cool’ to do it. Google rubbed my nose right in it when I requested to join, “Maybe later.” they told me. “We are still working out the kinks.” Well, I know what that means. It mean that I’m not ‘Cool’ and everybody knows it. Google didn’t even have to check. They knew that if I was cool enough for Google+1, I’d already have been invited.

Ralph

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

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You want millions of monkeys? Look elsewhere.

Posted by Ralph at 09:38 principles

Mar 192013

: Cover of William Shakespeare

“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that it is not true.” Robert Wilensky

Coots are modest human beings. We don’t hold high regard for our intelligence or marketing skills. That appraisal is reinforced daily when we check for comments here at our blog or review the reader stats. We are not about to produce literary genius here. There will be no Coot Sonnets pledging our unrequited love for all time; no epic poems glorifying Coots past. Our only softening in the realm of art is Justin’s sweet kettle bells
playing from time to time.
The web is a circus sideshow full of smoke and mirrors, snake oil and pretense. There is a sucker born every minute and from what we see, they all have blogs. They bought the notion they probably learned in the public school system that they have something to say and even worse that somebody cares. The web makes it easy to indulge that ignorance so here we are today with billions of words of drivel to wade through each day when we venture into the web.

So the Coot message for today, shared modestly with our small select group of discriminating readers. Spread the word about Coots. Here you won’t find snake oil or smoke and mirrors. What you see is what you get. We don’t know shit! We don’t pretend to know shit! But we have been around the block a few times. We have seen much and we don’t like it. And that’s what we share. We tell it like it is. We call ’em as we see ’em. And we don’t demean our readers by sucking up to them. So if you want straight talk and real opinion, you are in the right place. If you want monkeys writing Shakespeare, try the Huffington Post. Sign up for our mailing list and you even get priceless lessons on how you can develop your Cootness. Where else can you get that?

Ralph

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

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Coots Lesson 19- You can’t have it all!

Posted by Ralph at 03:54 Coots Lessons

Mar 182013

BEHIND WHICH DOOR, WILL YOU FIND ONE BILLION D...

Image by marc falardeau via Flickr

Bummer!

Let’s face it Coots, we’ve been sold a bill of goods. We grew up in what seemed to be a golden age. The sky’s the limit. Anything goes. You can have anything you want. You deserve it all. Nobody got snookered more than the women. Back in the 70’s feminists announced that women were the superior sex-capable of doing it all and without any help. Men were just chauvinist pigs, easily expendable. It was great news for men and for women. Suddenly the burden of supporting a household was lifted from men while at the same time women were freed from domestic slavery. Everybody wins – or at last that’s how it seemed at the time. We all bought the story because it excused weakness and self indulgence. Nobody ever expected to pay the price because post war babies were raised to believe that all we had to do was ask and it shall be given. And nobody was ever going to have to pay.

But we forgot biology.

All this self indulgence failed to recognize the physical limitation of human existence- our bodies. Women postponed families past the prime reproductive years and then struggled with infertility and miscarriage while they fretted about how it would affect their careers. Men failed to step up and take charge, not willing to earn enough to support the family lifestyle or take a stand and cut back. Nobody understood what was wrong but it wasn’t how we expected life to be. And this is just what my wife and I experienced.

Life was controllable. Not.

There is a lesson here about understanding what is important and finding good models in your life. Listening to popular culture and the latest new idea is always a temptation but it is far more important to observe what works. Human beings have been around for thousands of years. The human body works as it was designed and cannot be messed with particularly the reproductive cycle. Radical changes in living that conflict with tradition and biology are risky strategies. Just because an idea is new and dressed up in modern clothes doesn’t mean that it is better. But it is much easier to believe in fantasies than reality.

I know.

I messed up my life because I was naive and because I listened to the wrong voices. The real problem came from allowing myself to believe that short term thinking was enough to build a life on. Sooner or later even the stupidest and most naive individual begins to sense that it is all going terribly wrong and if he has any sense or responsibility, he changes. .

So what to do?

So the point of this lesson is not that bad principles can take your life off course. Even the best of us goes off course from time to time. The point is what you can do about it and how to create value from those painful life lessons. Now that you know that you can’t have it all and that those short term goals left you far from where you would like to be in life, what can you do?

You choose.

You pick what is important and let that decision guide you. You can’t anymore manage to have everything at the end of your life than at the beginning. You should have learned along the way, what things are really important and which are trivial.

You can’t have it all and only a stupid old coot will be able to hold that belief after years or experience. So pick what’s important and go for it. Maybe you can still make up for being so dumb up until now.

Ralph

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

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Taxed to Distraction

Posted by Ralph at 03:54 rants

Mar 182013

I’m grouchy today. I’m getting my tax stuff ready and it is hard to have positive feelings when you think about how much money gets syphoned off by the government before I get it. The income tax is something we take for granted today. It’s just a fact of life like death and…but back 100 years ago when my grandparents were whippersnappers; there was no income tax at all. Imagine that.

I don’t know what an average individual today pays in income tax. Obama just raised the top rate again so I think that the most anybody pays is about 40% on the margin but the average rate is lower due to the ridiculous amount of complication in the tax codes. Let’s just say for discussion purposes that it is 25%. Since the government takes the money up front you never really miss it. You see the amount on your paystub but it isn’t real. Then at tax time you try to arm-wrestle some small part of it back from the government and feel pleased when you get a refund. The truth is that the only reason you get a refund is that you let the government take too much in the first place. You lent them your money with no interest. It amazes me how clever the government can be at making us feel grateful after our pockets are picked.

My impression is that back in 1913 we had a pretty respectable government. We had services, roads, communications, and defense. There was pretty much everything we needed and it all happened without taking a 25 percent cut of your paycheck. It’s hard to believe.

When they started the income tax it was small-hardly noticeable. But later when the government decided to take the tax before we got the money the floodgates opened and led us where we are today, taxed to death. Somehow you don’t feel robbed when the money never gets in your pocket. These days it is a struggle to assert that the money you earn belongs to you. The government has taken the position that everything is theirs and only grudgingly permits individuals to spend what they have left. It is a decidedly un-American turn of events- a 180 degree retreat from the principles our county was founded upon, the idea that people can decide how to spend money belter than governments. These days the government knows best.

I might feel better if I had some feeling that the government was a good steward of the money it appropriates but it seems that the government is only able to spend like drunken sailors and enough is never enough. They demand more and more. And we get less and less- both of our hard earned money and the services which the government has promised to provide. We have enabled a monster that apparently will not stop until it sucks us all dry.

When there is any attempt to get the government spending under control, it screams bloody murder. I paid no attention to the frantic cries from the insatiable government last week about this impending doom of the sequester spending cuts. The cuts don’t amount to a hill of beans, won’t stop the government from borrowing more money from the Chinese and yet the President tells us that our country id doomed unless we raise more taxes. Then he shuts down the White House tours just to emphasize how dire the situation is. It is a pathetic cry from a spoiled child. We’ve created a monster.

So, as I work up my tax information in a futile attempt to take control of my income, I’m just glad the government leaves me anything. My grandparents didn’t know how good they had it but they were asleep at the switch when they let the government start the income tax. Maybe those Tea Party folks are on the right track.

Ralph

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

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