Everyone is pretty much over Alexa except me

An increasing number of us have smart speakers (like Amazon Echos and Dots, and Google Homes) and virtual assistants (like Alexa) in their houses.

We actually have a small-but-growing army of such devices. There's one in our kitchen, one in our living room, one in our master bedroom, and one up in Terry's craft room/office.

At first I thought they were more about having fun than really doing anything useful.

As I've mentioned, I play Question of the Day trivia through our kitchen Echo, and sometimes I'll switch to blackjack or Song Quiz.

And of course if you ask Alexa to tell you a joke or recite a poem, she will do so, be it sometimes ever so cringeworthy.

But then we got a set of those smart lights in our bedroom. Every night when Terry and I are ready to go to sleep, one of us will say, "Alexa, turn out the lights."

And she does. Everything goes immediately dark.

This is, by now, old technology. But I am endlessly fascinated by it.

I tell Alexa to "turn on the lights to 53%," and she will turn on the lights to what I can only assume is exactly 53% of their maximum brightness.

It helps that I am easily amused. I just am. If you give me a fork and a string, I can find ways to amuse myself for hours. I laugh at almost anything and am impressed by the simplest tricks. I find life to to be a series of fun and enchanting events and experiences.

Which is why the act of being able to turn out my lights just by voicing it into existence blows me away. I will never get bored of this technology.

Alexa, give me the definition of "simple minded."

There was a time when Saturday night meant Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and folding newspapers

I am going to sound very old when I describe what most of my Saturday nights were like in the very early 80s.

More often than not, I spent those Saturday evenings:

• Watching "The Love Boat" at 9pm on ABC
• Watching "Fantasy Island" at 10pm, also on ABC
• Stuffing/folder newspapers to deliver the following morning

All three of these things are part of the distant past. The two shows, which were the very essence of cheesy late 70s/early 80s television, have long since been cancelled. And of course, almost no one reads print newspapers anymore.

Except for me, of course. We have covered this before. I still read print newspapers every day. Each morning I go outside to retrieve that day's copies of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Wall Street Journal, and the local News-Herald from the bottom of my driveway. I find it difficult to start my day without having read those papers while eating my never-changing breakfast of oatmeal, a banana, and coffee.

Back in 1981 when I delivered The News-Herald, there were a lot more people like me. You got the paper and you watched the evening news. That's how you knew what was going on in the world.

In those days, the Sunday paper was so large that they would deliver sections of it to newspaper carriers earlier in the week. One section would arrive at your house on Thursdays, I think? And more of it would come on Saturday.

The actual timely news parts of the Sunday paper would of course arrive on Sunday morning for delivery that day.

So, to prepare for the chore of delivering big, heavy Sunday papers, I would take the sections that had already been delivered to me by Saturday night and combine them into one, easier-to-handle chunk. Then on Sunday morning it was easier to combine that with the news and sports sections that would be dropped off by the big orange News-Herald truck that stopped at our house every day.

Folding papers was a tedious chore, so while doing it I would watch whatever little vignettes were to be offered up on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. These shows required little in the way of intellectual engagement, which was good considering I was 11 or 12 years old at the time.

More than anything, I just thought it was funny when little Tattoo would go up in that bell tower and yell, "Da plane! Da plane!"

We were simple folk in the early 80s, you understand.

You'll forgive me if I lack the energy to be outraged by whatever it is you believe I should be outraged about

Social media is, on balance, a good thing, in my opinion.

It's also a place that many people and organizations use to try and get you to do something, whether it's buying a product, contributing to a cause, or adopting a particular political philosophy.

Heavy on that last one. Really heavy.

I have said this before and I mean it: You have every right to use your social media platforms to espouse your political views, and I don't care which platform it is. Some people feel Facebook is supposed to be about sharing pictures of your family and your pets, but who's to say what it's really "supposed" to be about?

If you want to post daily on Facebook (or anywhere else) about your views on politics, have at it. More power to you.

Please understand, however, that most people aren't likely to respond how you might want them to respond.

Many are already firmly entrenched in their politics, and little you have to say, no matter how brilliant or persuasive it may seem, is likely to move them. Most people (including you) are going to believe what they want to believe. That's just how it is.

Then there are others like me. I may or may not agree with you, but it doesn't matter. I'm simply not going to get wound up by something you bring up on social media. I'm just not.

That's no reflection on you at all. In fact, it's more a reflection on me. It does not represent any sort of moral superiority on my part, but rather a core laziness, I suppose.

I am tired much of the time. It's a "good" tired in that it stems from the fact that I get to devote all of my energies to supporting my family and engaging in leisure-time activities I enjoy. But it still means that, at the literal end of the day, I'm spent.

I have almost no spare mental or emotional capacity to devote to getting angry over whatever person, thing, or situation is annoying you. The result is that I will glance at your post and then almost immediately keep scrolling.

I apologize for this. I know you put a lot of time, effort and even passion into saying whatever you want to say. But...please forgive me for saying this...I sort of don't care.

That's bad, isn't it?

I'm not going to lie, though. I simply don't care. No matter how many times you tell me to "wake up" or stop being "a sheep" or whatever, I'm just going to move on.

Again, I'm so sorry about that. There are other things to which I've decided to devote my energies, and your candidate or cause happens not to be on the list. That's doesn't mean he/she/it is unimportant in a larger sense.

They're just unimportant to me personally.

Or at least, they're not sufficiently important for me to get mad about.

Which I suppose is kind of the same thing.

I live in a little bubble where it's easy to forget there are still people who smoke

Like many people of my generation, I grew up in a house where both parents smoked. That was just kind of the way it was. Many teachers smoked, store clerks smoked, and even your little league coaches smoked. It seemed like most adults smoked.

There was never actually a time, though, when "most" U.S. adults smoked. The peak year for American smoking, according to several sources, was 1965, when a reported 45% of Americans 18 or older were regular smokers. That figure has since fallen to about 14% as of 2019.

By all accounts, that's a good thing. Smoking remains "the leading cause of preventable disease, disability, and death in the United States," says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Common sense tells you it's simply not a good thing to do to your body.

(I do, however, still love the quote from Ricky Romano, a neighborhood kid with whom I grew up who seemingly smoked from the time he was in early elementary school. When my friend Kevin said to him, "Hey, Rick, smoking causes cancer," Rick calmly replied, "Ice cubes cause cancer.")

Still, 14% of U.S. adults is a lot of people, something along the lines of 34 million individuals. And the thing is, I rarely see any of them actually doing it.

I work for a non-smoking company, so there aren't people standing outside of our buildings puffing away (though a few do congregate across the street to light up). No one in my family smokes, thankfully. And with most indoor public spaces now designated as no smoking areas, it's not like it used to be in the 70s when housewives would smoke while pushing their carts up and down the aisles of grocery stores.

The effect is that, when I see someone smoking or smell it as a car passes by, it takes me by surprise for a split second. There's a part of me that wonders every time, "Wait, what's going on?" Then my brain flashes back to 1981 and I realize what's happening. "Oh, he's smoking. That's right! That's still a thing!"

The point, I guess, is it's amazing how different the world is today, and how insulated our individual existences can be that we forget people still engage in an activity we associate with the distant past.

This is one of the few times that I'm mostly grateful for my sheltered life.

Happy 15th birthday, Jack

Today our youngest child, Jack, turns 15.

A bit of an awkward age, that one. I once wrote a blog post in which I said the 15-year-old version of myself is really the only iteration of me I don't especially like.

Jack seems to be handling it OK, though. He's a sophomore in high school who takes honors classes, gets good grades, plays the trumpet in band, serves as a class officer, and runs on the cross country and track teams.

All very rewarding activities, and all good for the college resume.

Socially, he's coming along about as well as any 15-year-old boy generally does. He has a small group of friends who hang out together, most of whom started learning to drive a full year before Jack will. Jack was accelerated a grade in elementary school, so he's considerably younger than his classmates.

He's anxious to start driving, if a bit nervous about the prospect of it. I tell him he'll do fine, and he really will. He's smart and he's a good kid.

All parents think their kids are good kids, of course, and in most cases they're right. I like kids. Kids of all ages, really. They're fun to talk to and fascinating to watch as they make the same sort of mistakes you did when you were their age.

There's a lot to be learned from making mistakes, and we should probably let our kids make more of them. The parental urge to keep them from all disappointment and danger isn't always in their best interest.

Fortunately(?), Jack makes his share of mistakes. What he needs to do is get the hang of learning from them and not repeating them (or at least not repeating them so often). He'll get there. Lord knows I didn't have my overall act together at age 15 the way he does.

If he remains the fundamentally decent person he is now—and I have no reason to believe he won't—Jack will do well in life. However the saying goes, nice guys generally don't finish last in my experience, at least not in the long run.

And he's a nice guy.

Happy birthday, Youngest Son Who Is About A Half-A-Foot Taller Than Me.

Having a private instructor makes me feel rich

Until recently, I had never had a private saxophone lesson in my life.

I learned to play as a fourth-grader at Mapledale Elementary School in a group setting with other beginning saxophonists (NOTE: The late Men at Work multi-instrumentalist Greg Ham used to pronounce that word, perhaps a bit tongue in cheek, as sax-OPH-oh-nists, which I just love. I will never say it another way.)

We would squeak and squawk our way through 30-minute lessons with the wonderful Mr. Chuck Baker, a saint of a man who taught elementary and middle school music and band. He is/was a clarinetist by trade but, like most music educators, could work his way around just about any instrument.

That was the extent of my formal training. Whatever else I've learned on the sax over 40 years of playing came on the job during wind ensemble and jazz band rehearsals.

Until now. Now I pay an amazing professional saxophonist named Ed Michaels the criminally low fee of $15 a week to give me lessons every Monday at 5:30pm via Google Duo.

We just started a few weeks ago and already Ed is putting me through my paces. I'm playing scales and etudes, familiarizing myself with the Circle of Fourths (which I should have known about years ago), and even learning the right way to play certain notes on the horn.

Mr. Baker, for example, taught me to play B-flat the way I believe a clarinet player does, pressing down the first finger on each hand. This is at best an alternate way of playing it on sax, and Ed is pushing me to learn the right way, which means undoing years and years of doing it the wrong way.

This is not easy at any stage of life, but maybe particularly so at age 51. But I'm getting through it.

Anyway, the point is, I have Ed, a formally trained expert on the instrument, teaching me. There is something about that arrangement I find to be very cool.

Like I'm Louis XIV having the court musician teaching me the tricks of his trade. Except I lack the power to order Ed to the guillotine.

Not that I would want to. He is a wonderfully nice and patient man who loves the sax and clearly enjoys teaching it to others.

Which is good, because that B-flat thing is giving me troubles. When I get it right, I fully expect him to give me a smiley face sticker in recognition of my accomplishment.

It is only through great struggle that I can remember your name

 

If you have seven minutes free to watch this, one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits of recent years, may I suggest you do?

This is a takeoff on a game show called "What's That Name?" Hosted by the hilarious Bill Hader, the show has contestants John Mulaney and Cecily Strong trying to identify people's names they should remember. John cannot successfully identify his best friend's wife's name, for example, while Cecily fails to come up with the name of the wife of a fellow partner in her firm.

I can painfully relate to both.

It is a basic courtesy to remember someone's name when you are introduced to them. And much of the time I do, but only because I go to great lengths to imprint that name in my brain.

If I just casually hear their name and say hello, it is gone within seconds.

So I must repeat it to myself several times over, which leads to conversations like this:

PARTY HOST: Scott, I'd like you to meet Chuck McGlargle.

CHUCK: Scott, nice to meet you!

ME: Nice to meet you, too!

ME (to myself): "Chuck McGlargle. Chuck McGlargle. It's Chuck McGlargle. Do not forget it. Or at least don't forget the Chuck part. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck."

ME (to Chuck): So what do you do for a living, Buck? CHUCK! I MEAN CHUCK!

The next time I meet Chuck/Buck, whether it's a few minutes or a few years later, I feverishly wrack my brain to come up with his name. If I can't do it, I have to revert back to, "Hey, buddy! Nice to see you!" Or, "Heeeeeeyyy there, big guy, what's going on?"

The other person knows instantly that you have forgotten their name. Most people, like me, will simply gloss over it and move on. But I admire those who, good naturedly, will say something like, "Chuck McGlargle, we met at Bob's party." Or, even bolder, "You don't remember me, do you? I'm Chuck!"

It's not that I think you're unimportant. On the contrary, I love meeting new people, and I find virtually every person on the planet to be interesting (this is part of my personality...I sincerely think everything and everyone is fascinating).

It's just that while my body is very much that of a 51-year-old man, my mind has matured faster than the rest of me and has, for the better part of three decades, been that of a 95-year-old resident of assisted living.

I want to remember who you are, I really do. I simply lack the ability to retain this information.

It is my sincere hope that Chuck/Buck (or, if I've given up completely, "Dude," "Champ," or "Ace") will forgive me.