Uncategorized – Page 22 – Auxiliary Memory

Nora (1994-2011)

Back in 1994, Susan and I were eating at our favorite restaurant, Salsa, and talking to our favorite waitress, Wendy, who mentioned that her cat had recently had kittens on Halloween. We told her we were looking for a couple of kittens and went to see them. They were all brown-grey tabbies, and we picked out a boy and girl and named them Nick and Nora after the Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Today, September 17th, we had to put Nora to sleep – she was six weeks shy of her 17th birthday. It was a hard decision to make this morning because Nick and Nora are my all-time favorite pets. Susan and I have been married for 33 years, and for the first half we had Yin and Yang, two sister cats. We loved Yin and Yang, but they weren’t very affectionate. Before Yin died we got Nick and Nora. So we’ve had cats most of our marriage. We never had children – cats were our substitutes.

Nick and Nora loved us, slept with us, and if we were sitting down, slept on our laps. Nora was more skittish than Nick, and would retreat to the bedroom when company came, but when it was just Susan and I, Nick and Nora always hung out with us. They were like dogs. The photo above is me, Nora and Nick in my reading chair.

Nora became mysteriously ill a few months ago when we noticed she had lost a lot of weight. We never found out what was wrong with her, but we eventually noticed she wouldn’t use her tongue to lap water. Nick and Nora loved to drink water from the faucet. They would stand in the sink and turn their heads and lap water from the stream. When Nora started losing weight we noticed that she didn’t do this, but stuck her head under the water and let it roll down the front of her face.

For her last months, Nora became very close to me and would often sleep on my chest at night, sometimes even wrapped around my neck. Because Nick had fought off an illness last year after shrinking down to nothing and returning to health and becoming a giant fat cat again, we kept hoping Nora would do the same thing. We eventually realized it was more than weight loss, but pain. We think she might have had a tumor in her neck or throat, but we never knew. I’d wake up with her restlessly walking up and down on me. I’d get up and give her some pain medicine and she’d settle down for a couple hours.

We kept hoping it was a temporary kind of pain, but today when they weighed her at the vet and she’d lost .8 pounds in a week, down from 5 pounds last week to 4.2, we knew it was something more. She once weighed 12 pounds. We have been spending a lot of time visiting Green Animal Hospital trying to figure out what was wrong with Nora. Dr. Kahn tried so hard to save Nora, but it wasn’t meant to be. Debra, Amy and Jo Beth were so nice to us that I feel bad that I won’t be seeing them again unless we can teach Nick to be a hypochondriac.

Even though the people at the clinic are wonderful, our cats have always hated being at the vet, but today Nora just laid on the table not showing any signs of wanting to go home, so I took that as her way of saying it was time to say goodbye. We had been trying all kinds of treatments for weeks. I was giving her water with a syringe five times a day against her will. But she was still eating, but not gaining weight. It’s hard to decide when a creature should die, especially one you’ve been living with for seventeen years. But I realized we were prolonging her life only to avoid making the decision, and it was obvious she wasn’t feeling good and never would again.

I wish I had more photos of Nora. I have a lot, but they are mostly of her curled up asleep. Here’s one of her reading my magazines.

What I really wish I had were videos of Nick and Nora playing fetch. They both loved fetching paper balls. We could get them to sit on a footstool, throw a paper ball over their heads, and Nick and Nora would leap up into the air to catch the balls and make wonderful backflips before they landed – and then bring us back the ball.

They would even bring us paper balls when they wanted to play this game. Susan and I would be watching television or reading and look down to see a cat and a bunch of paper balls they had stacked by our chairs. Sadly, they quit playing this game when they got old.

I’ve decided that when Nick goes we won’t have any more pets. I don’t know if I could outlive another pair of cats, and I definitely don’t want to outlive them.

JWH 9/17/11

Astronomy Rock Video

Be sure to turn up your speakers, set to 720p and click on the full screen button.

JWH – 5/30/11

JCPenney–Customer Service

The other day I saw a story on the news about how angry people get over customer service. It was about how unhappy people are over what they feel is a major decline in customer service. Now I understand that companies and their employees can make simple mistakes, so I’m not talking about how often we get bad service. What I’m talking about is how companies go about fixing their mistakes once they make them. How I rate a company’s customer service is by how they solve problems that they caused themselves.

I’m a guy that doesn’t like to shop, so I buy online. Buying online is convenient unless you have to send something back, and I hate to send things back. So I try to always order exactly what I want. I’m not one of those people who order three different digital cameras and send the two back they don’t like. I especially hate buying something and then discovering it’s a returned item. When I pay for new I expect new.

If I do take a chance on ordering something sight unseen and I don’t like it, I’ll just give it to Goodwill rather than take it back. With clothes I tend to find brands and styles that don’t change and order them time and again, expecting that what I buy online will be just like what I’ve bought before.

I like undershirts with long tails, so I buy Stafford Vneck Tees that are X-Large Tall from JCPenney. I like to get them in a six pack. Recently I ordered another six pack but I received three tees in a plain plastic bag with a computer label slapped on it. The three tees looked new, but I was grossed out by the idea that someone probably bought a bag of six and returned them and some flunky in shipping threw the three shirts in a plastic bag without counting and sealed it with a computer label which clearly says Pk6. There wasn’t even a cardboard photo of a guy modeling a tee shirt like you’d expect with a new package.

You’d think they’d have a law against selling returned underwear?

But anyway, I believe it’s obvious that JCPenney made a mistake. I called them up and my options are to send the shirts back at my expense or return them to a JCPenney store. They offered to immediately send out new shirts, but to bill my credit card. I would only get credit when the others were returned. I believe that is horrible customer service!

At best I would have been impressed if they had said, sorry, we shouldn’t have sent you returned underwear, so throw those away, and we’ll send you an unopened new package right away. Next best, because I understand they can’t trust customers not to cheat them, would be to send me shipping bag with automatic postage so I could just leave it for my mailman or UPS guy to pick up.

It’s their mistake, why should I pay for it?

I can understand telling customers to pay for return shipping for items the customer didn’t like. That’s not JCPenney’s fault. But when a company makes a mistake they should do everything to fix it at no cost to the customer. That’s good customer service. Evidently JCPenney feels that it’s more profitable to have a certain level of customer dissatisfaction over bad customer service than to spend the money for good customer service.

My final choices are:

Throw the shirts away and never shop with JCPenney again and lose my money
Assume the three shirts are okay and wear them and actually pay twice as much
Take them back to a store and get credit and quit shopping at JCPenney

In none of the three options does JCPenney end up paying for its mistake. I either let JCPenny rip me off, or spend the money and time driving out to the mall to take the shirts back, or wrap them up, drive to the post office and pay to send the shirts back. I got 90 days, so the easiest thing to do that would get my money back would be to wait until I need to go to Best Buy and then run the shirts back to JCPenney.

JWH – 12/5/10

Don’t Fear the Future

Whenever our country goes into an economic downturn we have outbreaks of Chicken Littles crying the sky is falling. In today’s New York Times there is an article “Imagining Life Without Oil” by John Leland. Leland profiles new groups claiming the end is near because oil is running out. Kevin Kelly gives all Chicken Littles a modern name, Collapsitarians, which is a good enough word for me. Science fiction has always loved Collapsitarian stories. While some people like to plot a future where everything gets better, other people like to plot a downward slope for civilization.

These end of oil is near folks will love The Windup Girl, which just won a Nebula and has a good chance of winning the Hugo in a few months. But bleak stories of the future should only be lessons in teaching us what to avoid.

We have a weird national psychology, when things are booming on Wall Street everyone thinks they’re going be billionaires, but when stock prices head south, everyone thinks the USA will become a set for Mad Max chaos. Few people see life as merely a bumpy road.

Our world has only depended on oil for a little over a hundred years. Even if we’ve reach peak production like the Collapsitarians claim, it doesn’t mean all our tanks will go empty on the same day. It will take decades to finish off the global supplies of petroleum. We should have plenty of time to transition to new energy technologies. Oil disasters like current Gulf Coast nightmare, and the evil Avatar like rape of the Amazon, only illustrates it’s time to give up the oil habit.

The problem is not oil, but people. What the Collapsitarians fear is society going through withdrawal from it’s oil addiction and how painful that will be. The Gulf Coast oil disaster only teaches us how painful living with oil is, like a heroin addict realizing their drug is destroying their body. What we need to do is man up, admit our problem, go on a global 12 step treatment program, and change our lives. That will certainly be less painful than what the doomsters are predicting.

Many Americans have embraced Big Oil like evangelicals embracing Jesus – they put all their faith in the word of Big Oil. Whereas, the Big Oil companies should merely transition to thinking of themselves as Big Energy companies and embrace alternative forms of energy themselves, rather than trying to stomp out alternative energies as heretics of the faithful.

Just applying conservation techniques and energy efficiency should match the rate of oil production decline for a few decades. The eight Bush years has nearly ruined our chances of becoming the world leaders in green technology, but we could still catch up if we stop running around crying the sky is falling. We must fight the Drill Baby Drill desire with Build Baby Build competition of constructing massive green energy producing sites. We have to transfer our faith in oil and coal to wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal, nuclear and all the other emerging technologies.

Actually, we have two major addictions, oil and coal, like heroin and cocaine, that we need to throw off. The way to fight negative addictions, is with positive additions, like a alcoholic who goes on the wagon and takes up running. Things might look bad now, and bad on numerous fronts, but there are lots of positive fronts too. Too many people see the gloom in each scenario. For example the health care crisis. Yes, it’s costing us too much. But on the other hand, modern medicine is working miracles. Oil is running out, but technology is inventing numerous alternatives. The sky is not falling. It’s just a little cloudy.

The key is always us. The future only looks dark when millions get scared. When those same millions find hope, people start seeing the return of good times. We need to be realistic Pollyannas, because when we get depressed we’re our own worst enemy. Don’t listen to the Collapsitarians.

JWH – 6/6/10

Flood by Stephen Baxter

Flood by Stephen Baxter has the feel of a typical mega-disaster novel, one where a cast of characters confronts a huge threat from all angles. Flood, appears to be a warning about global warming, but it’s not, not really. Baxter predicts yet another source of water flowing into the oceans to make their rise far more dramatic than the worst global warming predictions. Flood can almost be called a prequel to the film Waterworld.

For the average reader, maybe even the average science fiction reader, Flood is a scary novel that people will equate to the effects of global warming. That’s unfortunate. Flood is more in the tradition of end-of-the-world disaster novel, especially when you consider it’s sequel due out soon. Think of Flood as a special effects movie, like the recent film 2012, were movie goers go to watch the special effects of Earth being destroyed. Readers of Flood get to observe one great city after the another destroyed by water – Katrina times 1,000,000. Along the way mankind makes one valiant stand on high ground after another, each time hoping to gain a foothold to build a new world order, and time and again, each gallant effort is drowned by relentless rising waters. Baxter gets to show a variety of political solutions to the problem, and that in itself is interesting.

It’s quite fascinating to compare a literary end-of-the world novel like The Road by Cormac McCarthy to a science fiction genre novel like Flood. McCarthy’s story is 90% characterization and 10% details about the end of the world. Baxter’s story is 90% description about the end of the world and 10% characterization. The Road was 256 pages, and Flood is 490 – so we get a lot of details. Writing a novel like Flood is mind boggling to contemplate because of the massive amount of information involved. While reading Flood, I kept thinking about all the research Baxter had to do to create each page. Depending on your mood and reading tastes, Flood could seem like one long info-dump, or it could be a thrilling vision painted in words.

Now here’s the funny thing, McCarthy’s book is far more realistic. It’s far more likely to happen than Baxter’s story. I could even call The Road ultra hard literary science fiction. Flood, on the other hand, is something different. It’s totally unlikely to happen. It’s a made up scenario to make an epic science fictional fable. Baxter goes for the Big Wow! A superficial glance at the story would suggest it’s a warning about global warming – but again it’s not. If Baxter had written a more realistic tale of 2016-2052, with as much characterization as Cormac McCarthy’s story, we might be hailing him for writing a literary prophetic novel of global warming, but he didn’t.

Science fiction generally goes to for ridiculously big story, and in this case I’m torn between really enjoying the wild ride and being disappointed that Baxter failed to be serious and write a believable SF novel about humans altering the planet. McCarthy proved that deadly serious catastrophe novels can be big best sellers. I doubt Flood will receive any notice in the world of books at large, and only minor notice within the small world of science fiction readers.

Science fiction has always been about ideas, but not necessary realist ideas. On every page of Flood, Baxter gives his reader something big to think about, but the novel doesn’t have a traditional fictional structure, it’s more like a documentary that takes thirty-six years to film. For characterization, we get to watch a handful of reporters get old. It’s the kind of story that would have appeared in Astounding Science Fiction or Thrilling Wonder Stories.

The book does have plenty of ideas to explore philosophically. For example, at one point people in London are wondering if they should run for the hills, and then country folk blow up the roads and bridges letting them know they aren’t wanted. Will that happen in the real world? It’s a lot to think about. Throughout the book we hear about one species after another going extinct, but the one I was most chilled at was my kind, “The global extinction event has claimed the coach potato.” Flood does try to realistically portray collapsing urban environments, and it made me realize I wouldn’t have much of a chance.

Even with the weak characterization and monumental info-dumps Flood is a real page turner. Before mother nature gets Biblical on humanity, the book can be read as an illustration of what global warming might do to some cities, but after a point you realize Baxter is a kid bent on blowing everything up for the sense of wonder thrill of it all. And it is epic fun, in the same way When Worlds Collide thrilled me as at thirteen. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel Ark, which is why this book isn’t realistic, but ultimately very science fictional.

Baxter has created an amazing vision but I wished he had made the mixture at least 25% characterization and 75% details. The characters occasionally moved me, but for the most part they were pawns in the plot. Only when Grace does a runner did I feel any character acting on their own agenda and breaking free of Baxter’s strings. That’s how you tell great characterization – when all the characters have their own agendas making any plot meaningless. Characters are slave to plots in genre stories, and seldom get to break out. Great characters take control of their strings and make puppets of their authors. I wanted to rate Flood much lower because of the weak characterization, but the far out A+ science fiction overwhelms the story.

Final Grade: B+

JWH – 12/30/9