Bluebird Singing in the Dead of Night

retard /0rɪˈtɑ:d, in sense 3 0ˈri:tɑ:d/ noun. L18.
[ORIGIN French, from retarder: see retard verb.]

1 Retardation, delay. L18. ▸ b = retardation 2b(b). rare. M19.

T. Jefferson A single day’s retard.

in retard retarded, delayed; in retard of, behind (lit. & fig.).

2 In a motor vehicle, an adjustment for retarding the ignition spark. M20.

3 A person with learning difficulties. Also used as a term of abuse. offensive. L20.

Ummm…this is from the Oxford English Dictionary v.6. If I say something you’re doing is “fucking retarded” it means that you are slow to get it. You are delayed. You do not do it fast enough. (see def. one). If I am pointing at a person who is mentally challenged and calling them a “retard” see definition number three.

It’s funny because I have made this case for years to the chagrin of people around me that I love. You can be a retard and it means nothing about definition three unless you really have gone off your rocker of being politically correct. This is the OED6 folks. You are slow. You retard an engine. You retard an idea. People that are slow and idle are retards.

And in some cases, they are “fucking retards.”

Crap…this has gotten too crazy if you can’t say that the democrats are acting retarded. What dictionary are we using? What language? Seriously…it’s fallen this much that my stupid fight for 20 years that people are slow and called “fucking retarded” is really a political hot button?

This all began for me when I said someone was acting “niggardly” about paying a bill in a restaurant for a group. This is about 20 years ago. I used it. I was taught it. It was not racist.

niggard /0ˈnɪgəd/ noun, adjective, & verb. LME.
[ORIGIN Alt. of nigon by suffix-substitution of -ard.]
► A noun.
1 A mean, stingy, or parsimonious person; a miser; a person who grudgingly parts with, spends, or uses up anything. (Foll. by of.) LME.

2 A movable piece of iron or firebrick placed in the side or bottom of a grate to save fuel. Also niggard iron. dial. L17.

► B adjective. Now literary.
1 = niggardly adjective 1. LME.

†2 = niggardly adjective 2. LME–L16.

► †C verb. rare.
1 verb intrans. & trans. (with it). Act in a niggardly fashion. L16–E17.

2 verb trans. Be sparing or niggardly of. L16–E17.

3 verb trans. Put off with a small amount of something; treat in a niggardly fashion. Only in E17.
†niggardise noun [-ise¹] niggardliness E16–L19. niggardize verb (rare) †(a) verb intrans. & trans. (with it) be niggardly; (b) verb trans. give in a niggardly fashion: E17. niggardness noun (now rare) niggardliness L15.

I about got my head bitten off! It “sounded” bad.

I could go on, but I am not the William F. Buckley of language. The point is that it’s stupid to not be able to call you a “fucking retard” without having it have some big political fall out. That’s fucking retarded. The niggards are using it as political capital for false purposes by grabbing it in for their own.

I have working on a writing project this week, a story about a kid.

And I made it through 95-percent of the story and I was messed up on the ending. What happens to this kid? He has to make a choice at the end. I’m telling you, I was hung up on a few lousy sentences or paragraphs. I’d created this beast of a great character, this whole story, and I had no idea how to solve it in the end.

Now, if I was 19 and doing this as a college paper, I would have been quick and dirty with the out. My mentaility would be to bank on all the good stuff I had written and figure he just rides off into the sunset.

When I was 29, I would have made it very updbeat and “boy beats world” in the end. Everything comes up roses.

At 39, I am going to write it so it’s still cloudy at the end to the point you don’t know, even at its conclusion, whether to like his, hate him, root for him, or just think it’s all tragic. Waaaaaaay more complex ending at 39 than I ever would have thought of 20 years ago in college.

I think it’s like almost always, depending on the decade and time and place; you could teach the literary merits of To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance, from several perspectives. Was it about hope or was it was about tragedy? Was it about feeling good or feeling sad? I mean, in the hands of the various ages you might have read it, you could make lots of arguments.

The same comes with writing. I am writing this way different than I would have before. I’m ending it different, too.

Nothing may ever come of any of it, but it was fun to write just to realize that.

This has been honed over decades. Nah.

Actually, yes…now that I think about it.

Let’s just say it involves more than 30 years of Super Bowl watching and trying to keep kids and adults into the party before everyone leaves the room. But it has it roots bedded in really bad Mariners games in the early 80s where my dad and I would start betting pennies on anything that moved; in the end it was never for more than anything but a dollar, but it amused us to no end.

1) Everyone agrees on an amount to throw in the pot. Maybe $10; whatever. Kids get to buy in half or less, but they have to use their own money. (This is an important rule…feel the pain of gambling, kiddos.) (In fact, adults should try to do that to, just to set an example, but it’s murky with marriage et al, I know.)

2) Everyone gets a roll of 100 pennies. You can adjust the denomination, but I have found this works the best.

3) From 30 minutes before kick off (2:55 p.m. Sunday PST, in this case), you can bet on anything. Anything. But here are the limits:

   a) If you call out a bet offer it goes to every person who knows of the offer. Anyone who hears it can call any bet. Now, this doesn’t preclude just making bets in casual conversation and someone hears it, any overheard bet offer is fair game to anyone (this is the mingling part). Odds are fine to play as long as it’s understood. (This comes from other Mariners fans hearing our game and chiming in.)

   b) Anyone can accept (now, we have played it with a “accept and raise” option, but that gets too complicated in a party atmosphere). The person offering the bet has to accept all calls on the offer. Period. (e.g. You bet one penny, five people call, you lose; you owe all people a penny. Every bet offer is like the house offering a prop.) All stakes need to be covered at the time (if you bet 50 pennies before kickoff on the final score, you only have 50 pennies left…you have money in an escrow account, per se).

      b-1) We’ve played it with buy ins at half time. Just FYI.

   c) Adults play winner take all and kids lose all; if a kid wins, all kids with skin in the game split it equally. (Which is the only little thing here…watch for older kids…they can be really funny once they get it. We say “kids” are 12 and under unless they want to swim in it as an adult by their choice.)

  d) You will probably lose to the kids.

Now, I said you can bet on everything. And I mean everything. We have done everything from “talking animal during the next commercial break” to “Peyton Manning touches his mask before the next play.” Heck, it could be a range of minutes (on the real clock) before the first commercial break. And there’s all that football stuff you can bet on, too. Once the kids get playing odds, it’s even more fun.

4) The person with the most coins, at the final gun, wins.

Why and how this has become so much fun over the years is a long story. Mainly, it was trying to keep people interested during blowouts and games where they had no horse in the race. And then kids get older and it’s just a harmless way to get them a little into it. I tell myself that it developes math skills (ahem).

But remember…you can bet on ANYTHING. Will someone in the room throw up? Will someone in the room sneeze? Will it rain outside your window during halftime. Anything.  It’s the Lalapooza of gambling. But it’s simple and it pays out in real time all the time. It just has to happen 30 minutes before the scheduled kickoff and until the final gun.

(If you’re hosting and want to try this…just make sure to order your pennies ahead…it can be hard to find them on a Sunday morning. And give everyone plastic cups to clank their pennies aroung in.)

For a newbies…the older posts are found in “The Old Moving Out Blog” to the right. Goes back to 2004.

OK…I have established I hate planning trips. But for our two weeks in Europe, I realised that I had to throw “me” out the window, because a 10-year-old kid and my wife won’t travel at all like I do.

The irony is that I talk a good game about not planning, but I was always the “scout” in school who would be sent ahead, make the plans and then people would catch up. I was the canary of Europe, in a way. But I did always did have a pretty roughed out plan in my head, but I could just adjust as things changed. This was sooooooo before cell phones, cheap calling cards, and WiFi. We would just pick a spot, a place on a map, and decide we were all meeting there at X-time someplace 12 hours away and those that were in, were in.

This meant learning a great leson about Europe…just wing it.

But that was when I was 21. It was a very good year.

Then the times I have gone back have all been business trip, except for a trip to Penzance (which was awesome) on my own dime, attached to a business trip. I’m pretty fearless in Europe when it comes to “no worries.”

But how fair is that to a 10-year-old girl making her first intercontinental trip? Not very; I could see it and think it.

Then panic set in, that I have to have some skeleton barebones plan for this couple of weeks. She’s 10…she doesn’t need to see all of Europe.

Which brings me to my “AHA!” moment…this isn’t about me or Pilar at all…it’s giving Big A a taste of actually living in The Netherlands. We’re not going to schlep around and jump on trains and read schedules and be crazy for her first trip. And wait…I’ve done that when I played Tonto back in 1991…it does mean planning.

So with this epipheny I started e-mailing around to old haunts and old friends. DOH! Ummm…the reason our airfare was cheap was because Easter fall right smack dab in the middle of it. So I had to keep playing the cards, playing the contacts, and finding people that could not only tell me they were booked but hand me off to others that could help me.

Now, I won’t be shy about this…I was throwing Big A’s name around like a bribe. And I was futzing around with Dutch using a translator. The funniet thing is that some of my Dutch reading skils started coming back as I cruised around websites and e-mails. But it seemed like everything was booked. What had I gotten us into? Two weeks of being nomads? NOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

And then late Monday night, things started to change. Found an apartment in Amsterdam for a week. Found a hotel in Haarlem for a couple of nights. Found a large room in downtown Maasricht for the rest…BOOM! Down to one last night to book!

I have no clue where that one night will be…it’s a plan with just enough mystery, it’s almost like I planned it to not happen correctly. I needed just a little bit of leaving and figuring “it will work itself out.” Big A needs home bases for the bulk of the trip.

But once I realized that just because we were near Paris, Brugge, Brussels, Berlin, et al…it didn’t mean we had to go there. That will just be a blur to her. She needs to shop in the market and fiddle with what’s on TV and see a church service in Cologne. Play around with the places. Fall in love with the idea.

Yes, we’ll day trip and do that stuff. No problem. We might even rent a car for a day or two.

I am just happy with this little mix of an adventure. She is old enough to be acutely aware, young enough to be a little tepid, smart enough to absorb it, and silly enough to have fun with it. Add to that the fact she’s pretty damned flexible, within a structure.

I can’t be a single traveler just zipping around place to place this trip. It’s got a bigger meaning that I hope Big A will get in her gut the rest of her life.

Funny how plans work…

I recorded “The Diary of Anne Frank” on the DVR in the main living room this last week. My thought was that I hadn’t seen it in a long time, and it might be worth watching before our spring trip to The Netherlands.

Little did I think of the fact that Big A might stumble on it and start watching it.

Oooops.

Here’s the rub with a nearly-10-year-old girl in this day and age…she has only read the “children’s book” version of the diary. She knew about Nazis and the hiding and stuff, she just didn’t really need to know much more than that. But this viewing of the first part of the movie raised a lot of questions in her head, because maybe things weren’t so great and hopeful after all. She asked P a bunch of questions, but she wants to see the rest of it, etc.

Here’s the thing…she is going to go to Anne Frank’s house in a few months. She’s also going to learn a ton of stuff about a lot of things that are just part of the history of central Europe. It ain’t all tulips. But, suddenly, I realized, what better of an introduction to some of those things than 1950s movies for a 10 year old? Yes, yes, it’s all sanitized and basic, but it sanitized and basic to almost the perfect pitch. There is a lot more too it, of course, but she doesn’t need it or want it much more than movie goers in 1959 America wanted it.

So we’ll watch it with her. It will scare her, shock her, make her sad…all the stuff the movies do…but if you or I watch it, you think, “Ummmm, it was worse than that.” She doesn’t need to know that right now. Just a couple of years she will read the source material for herself if she wants to read it.

This falls into that weird area of the fact we have to treat her a little more “mature” on some things because of the information age. I mean, when I was 10, it meant going to a encyclopedia published in 1970…she has the freaking internet. But the trick is to keep here satified that she is learning, without feeling like she has to go digging to the interenet for every piece of information out there. That might not make sense, but I hope it does.

As long as she’s got the 1950s model of basic knowlege about the world before about 1960, we’re good to go.

Is pretty boring.

I am writing this from Big A’s computer because I have complete parental control. Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz…er, dad.

No, nothing that dramatic at all. I just needed to do some simple maintenance and load a program on her computer. But I did do some digging around and some learning.

I feel like the mom putting clothes away in her kid’s dresser drawers…I mean, they made the mess, I am doing all the work, I own the stuff technically, so why not have an extra peek in the sock drawer of the computer.

What I have found is that she has no clue how programs work on a computer or how much she accidently downloads (all relatively harmless) and doesn’t block. She had 17 seperate copies of Explorer open and five RealTime movies, and she was wondering why her computer was slow and the battery runs out so fast. I think it’s time for THE talk. Yes, the dreaded, “How we safely deal with cache memory, pleasure and the internet.”

My little girl is getting so big.

I was seriously pleasantly surprised how well all the parental blocks and other gizmos held up, but also that she didn’t seem to trip any of them on purpose. And the ones she did trip over were all for less than five seconds advertising kid’s stuff at kids’ sites. Yawn. But in a very good way.

However, there was a part of me that realized she really does have to get computer lessons from me to realize how awesome this five-pound portible DVD player can be if she uses it correctly. Honestly, I think she just doesn’t understand it yet and she’s playing…which was the point of the starter laptop. No expectations.

But everytime I look at what she’s doing on it…I think there is a point that she has the VERY BASICS down to where we need to start taking it a little more seriously. It really isn’t a toy.

Best part…I am impressed with the computer. It should have everything ok to get her into high school for less than $700. It has no bells and whistles on the edge, but it has a bunch of bells and whistles that I don’t see changing anytime soon. The software is pretty basic Vista with all the upgrades that we can make Windows 7 if we ever need to do that. It’s thin on RAM, but it was never meant to be a gaming sysatem. Good battery life. Light and compacy. Definite A-.

P has the suped up version, so what will happen, if my plan works, Big A will get P’s for high school, and then we buy P a new one, and this one replaces the oldest bull in the coral. This will become my new junker laptop.

Overall, very thumbs up on my monthly snooping in the sock drawer. I even left cookies…just so she knows I was there.

Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz.

Screw the art stuff. Remember when you (maybe) got married and paid ungodly sums for those photos?

People still do that.

So in the last few weeks I’ve been fiddling with it. Not so much wedding photos, but how to make money off of photos. I’ve been a little surprised by the results. People want quality, control over the images, and ease of use. And cheaper is better.

I’ve got some more digging to do about some parts of the plan, but the bottom line is that I am surprisingly good at candid-shot photography and details; I am just verklumpt about what to do with the skill. However, I have been doing a lot of research, and it might not be as uphill as I thought.

…but I took the revamped laptop out on a couple of “road tests” and I am liking it. It’s picking up all the WiFi and hotspots.

It’s funny, but I use the same thinking about my old cars…I’ve owned them and I know where the kinks are since they were new. But it’s weird to have a computer so slow. Not bad, just strange.

I was thinking about this as Apple just released th new iPad…do we need it? Does it really fit some niche that Apple is going to invent? Here is a nearly decade old Dell that I’d practically threw away, and I can’t figure out what anything new would do except for speed…but then I have other computers for that. It will be interesting. I just know it plays movies just fine, burns CDs, runs my GPS software, connects to the internet, and really is disposable at this point.

The iPad thingy will be interesting.

For less than 50 bucks I got the old laptop working with a new battery and a new charger.

This has been like getting a Model T sputtering and driving with chicken wire. It’s the geek equivalant of being Dr. Frankenstein.

But I will be honest…to do it on the cheap, I bought some parts and pieces I don’t really trust. I have no reason to not trust them, exactly, but they just are eBay specials. And Dells have a history of running really, really hot.

But it works!!! I even watched a two-hour DVD last night on the new battery. Perfect.

This computer (I’m on it now) is a proven work horse in Europe and on the road. And, if it blows up in a flaming ball, it’s ok. So I sent my money on a new hard drive to start throwing photos onto. It’s not fancy, but when I get the camera and the computer and the hard drive talking together…everything but a studio on the road that doesn’t have a color-corrected screen.

Here’s the key…I paid waaaaaaaaay too much money for this particular laptop when I bought it. Let that be a lesson for people buying computers out there…wait until you really, really need to upgrade, and then only do it when you upgrade higher than your pay scale. My “main” laptop does backflips around this thing and laughs. In fact, it’s four years old and it can do backflips around most computers. This model is eight years old. About every four years, it’s suck it time.

However, I can hear the little fan kicking in and I feel it getting hot. She ain’t perfect but she’s my Model T of a road to the internet for now.