Somehow product designers can often really have their heads .... etc.
Why does my pick-up truck not have any cup holders? No place to put your coffee mug when you're driving. Worse this is Virginia, southern Virginia - where are you supposed to put your open beer can? And, nothing will stick to the dashboard material. Go to Walmart, buy a cheap cup-holder. Won't fit over the door thickness window place. None of the ones that are supposed have a stick-em patch stick - at all, even for a minute ... well, at all period. The stick-em don't stick. Heavy-duty glue, SuperGlue, Gorilla Glue. All of the glueiest glues hold for at the most, a week. And they don't break off, leaving a mark. They just fall off. No mark they were ever there.
What is the stuff they make those dashboards out of?
So I've had this truck for two years and I still have to jam my coffee cup up against the seat with some heavy object to hold it there. It's a five-speed on-the-floor manual - a stick shift!!! This means a constant juggle a thousand times every time I drive it anywhere!
Now!! Why is it our cheap Kia Salantra sedan, which seats four people, have SIX cup-holders!
Four of them up front. You might squeeze three people in the back, there are seatbelts for three people, but they would have to be pretty small people. But up front there are bucket-seats. Two of them. And those two people get two-cup holders apiece!
And my pick-up has NONE!
Designers - you really dropped the ball (or cup) on this one.
Driving my cup-holderless pick-up to town today, I spot a small boot, looks like it's gotta be a woman's boot, in the middle of the left lane. Hmm... "That curious." I'm thinking. Then about a quarter mile further I spot the other boot on the breakdown lane. These boots look new, or nearly new.
Brain is saying, "How does this happen? Two nearly new women's boots get chucked out the window of a car; one out of the left side of that car and the other out of the right side? A quarter mile apart? There is a story in this scenario somewhere. Gotta be."
(c) Copyright 2014 by Dale Clarence Peterson
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
I love you ... but you're fat!
So I'm picking up my daughter at the after-school Y program she loves.
Tuesday is Ballet Day, I'm guessing because the waiting room outside the gym is full of little girls in their leotards. I am maybe way out of line even mentioning it, but ALL of these little girls - like twenty of them - are very overweight. Wa-a-ay overweight for such young children. And it's simply obvious, to anyone and it bothers me.
Of course, they are all happy, running around like young children should be. All excited to get in the gym and start dancing around doing what ballet dancers do, I guess.
It crosses my mind how cruel it is of their parents to let this happen to their kids. But the parents, mothers and fathers, also there in the waiting room, are overweight - really really fat. Currently we live in the south where they deep-fat-fry butter, so it's kind of a culture thing to be chunky. Guys! This is getting out of hand though.
I have two daughters. Neither were ever, like, overweight. My youngest is disabled and she exercises with me for about ten minutes every night. She can do thirty sit-ups with a sixteen lbs rubber weight ball in her hands. It really doesn't take much. Eat about half the carbs and walk to the mailbox and you won't get that big.
I do believe in political correctness and social sensitivity, but holy cow who's gonna take care of them when they get to be thirty and the airlines run out of belt-extensions. They're going to die from exposure in the Walmart parking lot when the little battery powered go-cart battery runs down.
Believe me, I understand, I sympathize. At my age I'm loosing the battle with gravity too. I go to the gym nearly every day and I can't brag on being tiny myself anymore. I seem to have developed the metabolism of a tree sloth. Not to lie either, it hurts. Arthritis, my knees are shot ... I feel like I need an ibuprofen I-V drip. I've noticed that these days most of the people I see there are gettin' on in seasons like me. Why is this? Where are the youngsters?
You might be against taxes, but somebody's gotta pay to fix the roads and bridges or nobody's gonna get to Dunkin' Donuts. And then the whole economy is going to crash. If all the young ones can't fit in their cubicles at work, who's gonna pay any taxes? That and the whole Art of Ballet is going to become a distant memory.
Admittedly the food the food industry is producing nowadays is mostly corn syrup and salt. Has all the nutrition of plain candy. Thing is, there is a produce section and they do sell vegetables (whoops! I didn't mean to swear. Can't help it ...vegetables!!!)
My daughter and I spent a half an hour trying to find the humus the other day. Half an hour! I finally had to call my wife. With her help we located it - in the bakery section in-between a huge rack of cakes (massive three layer cakes with enough frosting to give anyone immediate type 1 diabetes) and deli-gourmet bread.
Little boys aren't any slimmer. I encountered the information that the Armed Forces are having a real problem because close to half of the enlistees can't pass even the most basic physical fitness tests. It's going to get so bad that when the republicans send us to another war they will have to re-institute the draft. But it won't be based on age, it'll be based on cholesterol and blood pressure levels.
Which means, I'll get drafted again! Well, at least the uniforms are more in line with southern fashion - by which I mean camo. (They even camo their fishing boats down here.)
Bill Gates has a policy, I've heard, that his employes can make any criticism they want as long as they include a suggestion for a solution. So with that in mind, I say put leotards on the Moms and Dads and make them get out there with their daughters and dance. If it doesn't kill 'em, maybe it make them think about not eating every single thing on the dinner table every night.
Tuesday is Ballet Day, I'm guessing because the waiting room outside the gym is full of little girls in their leotards. I am maybe way out of line even mentioning it, but ALL of these little girls - like twenty of them - are very overweight. Wa-a-ay overweight for such young children. And it's simply obvious, to anyone and it bothers me.
Of course, they are all happy, running around like young children should be. All excited to get in the gym and start dancing around doing what ballet dancers do, I guess.
It crosses my mind how cruel it is of their parents to let this happen to their kids. But the parents, mothers and fathers, also there in the waiting room, are overweight - really really fat. Currently we live in the south where they deep-fat-fry butter, so it's kind of a culture thing to be chunky. Guys! This is getting out of hand though.
I have two daughters. Neither were ever, like, overweight. My youngest is disabled and she exercises with me for about ten minutes every night. She can do thirty sit-ups with a sixteen lbs rubber weight ball in her hands. It really doesn't take much. Eat about half the carbs and walk to the mailbox and you won't get that big.
I do believe in political correctness and social sensitivity, but holy cow who's gonna take care of them when they get to be thirty and the airlines run out of belt-extensions. They're going to die from exposure in the Walmart parking lot when the little battery powered go-cart battery runs down.
Believe me, I understand, I sympathize. At my age I'm loosing the battle with gravity too. I go to the gym nearly every day and I can't brag on being tiny myself anymore. I seem to have developed the metabolism of a tree sloth. Not to lie either, it hurts. Arthritis, my knees are shot ... I feel like I need an ibuprofen I-V drip. I've noticed that these days most of the people I see there are gettin' on in seasons like me. Why is this? Where are the youngsters?
You might be against taxes, but somebody's gotta pay to fix the roads and bridges or nobody's gonna get to Dunkin' Donuts. And then the whole economy is going to crash. If all the young ones can't fit in their cubicles at work, who's gonna pay any taxes? That and the whole Art of Ballet is going to become a distant memory.
Admittedly the food the food industry is producing nowadays is mostly corn syrup and salt. Has all the nutrition of plain candy. Thing is, there is a produce section and they do sell vegetables (whoops! I didn't mean to swear. Can't help it ...vegetables!!!)
My daughter and I spent a half an hour trying to find the humus the other day. Half an hour! I finally had to call my wife. With her help we located it - in the bakery section in-between a huge rack of cakes (massive three layer cakes with enough frosting to give anyone immediate type 1 diabetes) and deli-gourmet bread.
Little boys aren't any slimmer. I encountered the information that the Armed Forces are having a real problem because close to half of the enlistees can't pass even the most basic physical fitness tests. It's going to get so bad that when the republicans send us to another war they will have to re-institute the draft. But it won't be based on age, it'll be based on cholesterol and blood pressure levels.
Which means, I'll get drafted again! Well, at least the uniforms are more in line with southern fashion - by which I mean camo. (They even camo their fishing boats down here.)
Bill Gates has a policy, I've heard, that his employes can make any criticism they want as long as they include a suggestion for a solution. So with that in mind, I say put leotards on the Moms and Dads and make them get out there with their daughters and dance. If it doesn't kill 'em, maybe it make them think about not eating every single thing on the dinner table every night.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Continuum
Back in my office (Starbucks) in Gloucester, Virginia.
Yesterday we held services for my Dad, who passed away the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. My brain won't do the math to give the date.
It was 6:30 p.m. on the dot when his spirit left. I had been staying in the Hospice with him since the Saturday before. Sitting there at the foot of his bed watching him breath for three and a half days. He was in a great deal of pain from a bad fall that put him there. At ninety-five, a person really can't fall. Especially if they are over six foot tall.
When you have lived close to a century, floors are especially hard.
He did everything. Raised as a child during the Great Depression on a dirt poor hard scrabble dirt farm in the high desert of Utah. A place where nothing grows unless you damn near pull it out of the ground. He also served with high valor during a World War. Married and remained married to the same woman for nearly seventy years. Is survived by three children, ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
When my oldest son had Dad's first great-grandchild, he said, "It's not so much I think about being a great-grandfather, but being the father of a grandfather really does stick in my mind."
And his passing was peaceful.
When I first received word that he had fallen and due to his age and state of health, he was not expected to be able to pull out of it, I was truly crushed. Hours of intense weeping in the company of my wife, who also loved him dearly. Everything, reality seemed to stop - on hold until I got my plane tickets and got to his bedside.
One of my niece's sons picked me up at the airport and took me directly to Dad's hospice room. As soon as I walked into his room, he knew I was there. Some may find it odd, but as soon as I saw him, was in his presence, much of my intense grief left me. Something about the thought of him passing without my being there, was worse than actually being there.
He seemed to have an aura of serenity and gratitude that I had come.
For the first two days he was quite aware. He spoke with many of his grandchildren on the phone and my brother in Australia. He was always such a tough dude, for a while we all thought he might pull out of it. After all he had twice before.
Every year after ... oh ... say eighty (or so) seems to be like five or six when a person is younger though. The difference between ninety-four and ninety-five, I think, is more like ten years than one year. Jeez, he had had cancer and recovered so many times, I don't even remember how many. For the last twenty years he was always being treated for cancer of one sort or another.
I am not a religious person. None of the major faiths ever actually made sense to me. I did try, really tried. The whole logic was missing something. Still is. That is another topic. And yet there is something that says to me this physical life is just not all that there is. It keeps coming back to me, if matter cannot be created nor destroyed, how can a human awareness, a mind, just be created or destroyed.
So whether his sentient being was with us just after his last breath or not may be suspect to some, but I felt he was there. Still do. I feel my mother presence in the same way, though it's been some three years since she died. I cannot balance (?) the concept of life in the physical body as being one thing. It has nothing to do with there being a God, or prophets, or scriptures, or morality being based on some arbitrary set of rules written by men and women.
Odd? It seems scientific to me that awareness is universal and timeless - infinite in all directions. That every once in a while all the elements required to bring a physical life, as we think of say - human - just co-aless and congeal. The elements themselves that make up a new body generate enough energy - and it all must be exact and precise - to produce awareness within the life form.
How is this any different from two highly flammable gases combining under similarly required precision to produce a compound all earthly life forms require to maintain those lives? And some compounds, like water, seem (according to most scientific data we posses) remains as water throughout the infinite universe. It can be boiled, frozen, fractured in all kinds of ways and poof it reforms as water.
It might be highly polluted, but we have exactly the same amount of water on this planet as we did when the surface, the mantel, solidified. Exactly, down to the molecule.
So is my father, is the loved ones, of any person or persons gone because their bodies are nonfunctional as far as we can determine? I don't think so.
Yesterday we held services for my Dad, who passed away the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. My brain won't do the math to give the date.
It was 6:30 p.m. on the dot when his spirit left. I had been staying in the Hospice with him since the Saturday before. Sitting there at the foot of his bed watching him breath for three and a half days. He was in a great deal of pain from a bad fall that put him there. At ninety-five, a person really can't fall. Especially if they are over six foot tall.
When you have lived close to a century, floors are especially hard.
He did everything. Raised as a child during the Great Depression on a dirt poor hard scrabble dirt farm in the high desert of Utah. A place where nothing grows unless you damn near pull it out of the ground. He also served with high valor during a World War. Married and remained married to the same woman for nearly seventy years. Is survived by three children, ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
When my oldest son had Dad's first great-grandchild, he said, "It's not so much I think about being a great-grandfather, but being the father of a grandfather really does stick in my mind."
And his passing was peaceful.
When I first received word that he had fallen and due to his age and state of health, he was not expected to be able to pull out of it, I was truly crushed. Hours of intense weeping in the company of my wife, who also loved him dearly. Everything, reality seemed to stop - on hold until I got my plane tickets and got to his bedside.
One of my niece's sons picked me up at the airport and took me directly to Dad's hospice room. As soon as I walked into his room, he knew I was there. Some may find it odd, but as soon as I saw him, was in his presence, much of my intense grief left me. Something about the thought of him passing without my being there, was worse than actually being there.
He seemed to have an aura of serenity and gratitude that I had come.
For the first two days he was quite aware. He spoke with many of his grandchildren on the phone and my brother in Australia. He was always such a tough dude, for a while we all thought he might pull out of it. After all he had twice before.
Every year after ... oh ... say eighty (or so) seems to be like five or six when a person is younger though. The difference between ninety-four and ninety-five, I think, is more like ten years than one year. Jeez, he had had cancer and recovered so many times, I don't even remember how many. For the last twenty years he was always being treated for cancer of one sort or another.
I am not a religious person. None of the major faiths ever actually made sense to me. I did try, really tried. The whole logic was missing something. Still is. That is another topic. And yet there is something that says to me this physical life is just not all that there is. It keeps coming back to me, if matter cannot be created nor destroyed, how can a human awareness, a mind, just be created or destroyed.
So whether his sentient being was with us just after his last breath or not may be suspect to some, but I felt he was there. Still do. I feel my mother presence in the same way, though it's been some three years since she died. I cannot balance (?) the concept of life in the physical body as being one thing. It has nothing to do with there being a God, or prophets, or scriptures, or morality being based on some arbitrary set of rules written by men and women.
Odd? It seems scientific to me that awareness is universal and timeless - infinite in all directions. That every once in a while all the elements required to bring a physical life, as we think of say - human - just co-aless and congeal. The elements themselves that make up a new body generate enough energy - and it all must be exact and precise - to produce awareness within the life form.
How is this any different from two highly flammable gases combining under similarly required precision to produce a compound all earthly life forms require to maintain those lives? And some compounds, like water, seem (according to most scientific data we posses) remains as water throughout the infinite universe. It can be boiled, frozen, fractured in all kinds of ways and poof it reforms as water.
It might be highly polluted, but we have exactly the same amount of water on this planet as we did when the surface, the mantel, solidified. Exactly, down to the molecule.
So is my father, is the loved ones, of any person or persons gone because their bodies are nonfunctional as far as we can determine? I don't think so.
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