All the Things I Do Not Understand
As one ages, it is always tempting to feel that one doesn't...age, that is. Certainly one can't help but notice that the body features and the once-insurmountable strength has changed, but keeping up with the times stays rather easy...until it doesn't. So here's one rather (or so I thought) simple example: 4K. Walk into the electronics section of any large department store and it's usually quite easy to get lost among the labyrinth of televisions, each displaying the same picture like a house of mirrors; prices here in the U.S. have dropped to about $400 for a 55" UHD television (Ultra High Definition which replaces the old HD television category). As for those 70" television going for a bargain price (we noticed several at $700 including an LG), well, those are likely headed for the antique pile as well, ready to join their 50" and 60" cousins.* Okay, getting ahead of you? Step back for a minute and think of that solo television generally placed right at the front, the one you'd have to pass as you enter that library of televisions. It will likely say 4K, UHD, LED/LCD and a host of other monikers, as well as OLED or QLED, and it will boast a rather stunning picture of a rose slowly opening on a solid black background, or a cascade of golden honey falling onto a solid black background, or a set of bright red berries bouncing on a speaker's cone in front of yes, a solid black background. The colors are vivid, and the blacks are truly black say the advertisements; colors as you've never seen them, say other marketing words. And of course, you emit a "wow" and a gasp, not only for the picture but for the price...once again, the latest and the greatest is here and marketers are delighted that they can convince you that you just have to have it. Fast forward as you unwrap the darn thing at home, turn it on and discover that, well, that picture is nowhere near as great as what you saw at the store. Turns out that 4K requires 1) a subscription to a 4K service (as an example, the Netflix 4K package is double the normal Netflix plan), a new box or receiver (the Amazon Fire Stick 4K runs $69 and replaces your old Fire Stick while Direct TV requires an additional receiver for its 4K), new USB cables (your older cables can't handle the increased data while the newer 2.1 cables are capable of handling the coming 8K sets), and likely a new modem or ISP carrier (a minimum speed of 25 Mbs is recommended, if not higher). Wait, you weren't told all this at the store?
It was much the same when the Sony Walkman debuted, an audio relic from the days when the strange revolution of cassette tapes were flooding the markets due to their compact size (yes, there was a time when magnetic tape was the recording standard). Sony was the first to introduce this portable reproduction of a life-like sound, complete with soft spongy and lightweight headphones and milked its invention for all that it was worth. First the bulky intro model, then a year later a more compact unit, then one with equalizers, then a model with "extra" bass, each unit arriving separately and costing a bit more (and causing you to replace your old unit). It was a marketing dream, eventually reaching 150 million units sold. Take this marketing model to cars and refrigerators, clothing and wine glasses (it's one reason stores such as Costco keep moving displays around throughout the store making things appear as "new" arrivals). And now the 4K clarity (as a side note, the lowest to highest pixel display resolution today would go something like this: VHS-DVD-HD-UHD-4K. What, my old DVDs are the worst resolution? Uh, yes...my young friends might now likely ask, "Do we even have a DVD player?" Don't take my word for it -- jump to a site such as TechRadar.
My lesson that I had slipped more than a bit in keeping up came when I was handing a few nursery song CDs to our friends for their new baby (our library had them on sale for five cents). They thanked me then looked at each other with a puzzled look and said, "Do we even have a CD player?" Yikes...my OG status just went from Original Gangsta to Old Guy. Dot matrix printers, corded land lines, tube radios...the tech stuff is easy to lose track off since it changes so quickly. But try this example. You're working for the government and find that something or some rule is hurting the general public...bad air or polluting chemicals, or a food additive or an addictive pain medication. Only your report falls on deaf ears. In fact, funding for your department is suddenly cut or eliminated altogether, your report is buried and your job is now at risk since the people you are fighting against worked for the large corporations or chemical or oil companies and well, they're now officially running your department having been appointed by the president or premier or prime minister. But if you think that this is a scenario from today's world (okay, it is) it has been happening throughout our history.
Here's part of the opening of Deborah Blum's Poison Squad on milk in 1850: dairymen, especially those serving crowded American cities in the nineteenth century, learned that there were profits to be made by skimming and watering down their product. The standard recipe was a pint of lukewarm water to every quart of milk--after the cream had been skimmed off. To improve the bluish look of the remaining liquid, milk producers learned to add whitening agents such as plaster of paris or chalk. Sometimes they added a dollop of molasses to give the liquid a more golden, creamy color. To mimic the expected layer of cream on top, they might add a final squirt of something yellowish, occasionally pureed calf brains. Unfortunately, it gets much worse as copper and arsenic begin to be used for coloring (green), as well as lead (yellow, rose and pink). Children died from eating such brightly colored frostings, pickles and candies. The penalty for one such candy producer (who added arsenic instead of the plaster of paris) was £5...there were no laws on the books saying that such additives were illegal (the £5 "fine" was introduced --but no jail time-- only after a food additive law was passed in 1860). It would be another 40 years before the U.S. would respond when babies began to die from drinking formaldehyde-laced milk (the "preservative" was commonly added to both rotten meat and soured milk to hide the taste of spoilage). But it didn't stop there as both industries and presidential appointees fought off food safety laws (even feeding such tainted meat to its soldiers in the Civil War). All of which makes one wonder about what is happening in today's world and has anything really changed?
So one can understandably be puzzled at questioning if such antics still happen, especially in today's world. Surely not, one would think. But sometimes when looking around and hearing racist chants or that our oceans are becoming more polluted or our glaciers are melting at an ever-quickening rate, it makes one wonder if anything has changed since back then and if so, how such things could thus be occurring. Have we not learned anything? And yes, I admit that I don't understand how we can still have hunger and poverty and drug wars and mass incarcerations, or, how weapons of mass destruction can still be something to aspire to and how our planet can still be viewed as something to use and to take from until its resources are exhausted. All that oil and gas we're now pumping were once living things, as were the chalky cliffs of Dover; even the petrified salt of ancient oceans is still being mined as if its past "life" was little more than just that, a blip of time. People come and go, as we all will, whether we feel entitled to parade through innocent people with spiked shoes searching for that next fortune or to block laws which might prevent a catastrophic ending for all of us. And for me, that 4K jump was indicative of how quickly things can change without us noticing and how easily we can be swayed with a few marketing words. All those decisions come from the top, from our elected leaders (okay, technically not true since this is the 2nd time that a Republican president has lost the vote of the people but been "elected" by the system; confusing yes but nowhere near as confusing as the recent election in England where just 1% of the population "elected" Boris Johnson as its new prime minister). And let's face it, we have to trust somebody since there's no real rule book (well, there is but rules are made to be broken or amended). So we continue to drink our milk with trust in our government just as early mothers did before watching their babies perish (at the time it took a magazine to expose what was happening, followed by readers writing in to Congress and demanding change; the governments and rules shifted a bit but little did change). Added Blum in her book: The pioneering industrial chemist Charles Pfizer, who had founded his New York pharmaceutical company in 1849, now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar, and citric acid for use in food and drink. Chicago's Joseph Baur...invested in a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical company, to produce saccharin in large quantities...The food and drink market also attracted Herbert Henry Dow, founder at age thirty-one of the Dow Chemical company in Midlands, Michigan...The company's first venture was based on a new process Dow had invented for extracting the element bromine from brine for antiseptic use. But within a few years, Dow also made magnesium for incendiary flares, phenol for explosives, and agricultural pesticides -- and was becoming a major producer of food preservatives such as sodium benzoate.
Often we think that since we are where we are, whether its in a job as leader or foreman or even in the home, that we know --or should know-- what's right. But not always. Take the example of comedian Tig Notaro telling The Moth of her stepfather, someone she did not get along with and yet had to face that reality after the unexpected death of her mother: He said, "I was wrong, and I wanted to apologize for that. I never understood you as a child. I didn't get you at all, and I tried to project onto you my life and my route, and I expected you to take that exact same route. And I'm realizing that it's not the child's responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It's the parent's responsibility to learn who the child is, and I didn't do that, and I'm sorry. One of the bumper stickers I placed on my car reads: It is far easier to build strong children than it is to repair broken men.
So to take the opposite tack, here's what I do understand, that each of us is on our own journey and that it is not my place to judge the other person. Do no harm rings true for doctors as well as Star Trek explorers, but many whom I feel may be doing harm to others or to our planet quite likely feel the opposite and sleep very well at night, perhaps confident that what they have done or are doing is for the betterment of their country or the world as well as themselves. And while I personally don't think that it's okay to snub a person due to their race or color or position, or to separate mothers from their children, or to walk into a mosque or picnic or shopping center and shoot and kill innocent people, or to legislatively stop enactment of tougher gun control laws, or to keep selling weapons which bomb innocent civilians, or to...well, you get the idea, there are many others who seem to think nothing of it. How there can be such disparity throughout our history is puzzling but I know that it exists and has existed for centuries. But I also know that there is little that can top the feeling I have of just sitting outside in the early hours of the morning with my dog and sipping a nice hot cup of just-brewed coffee. For just those brief moments, all is right with the world, it is resting, it is quiet and it is still functioning. My dog's eyes tell me that it's so, at least in those moments. And if you happen to want a good read of someone escaping life to perhaps unwittingly become a city-slicker farmer of rescued ducks, geese and other various wild critters, then look no further than the hilarious reflection (in my opinion, at least) Enslaved By Ducks. Said author Bob Tarte at the end of his book: Outside in a burst of clear grey light, as clouds lingered between gathering and dispersing, I sloshed dirty water out of a plastic swimming pool. Ducks and geese nibbled mostly at the lawn. Across our lot and behind the barn, one-eyed turkey Hazel and her former tormentor, Lizzie, sat together on opposite sides of a fence. A mosquito threatened my neck, as flecks of mud and manure accumulated on my pant leg. A goldfinch sang a song that celebrated his freedom from the burden of keeping pets. I breathed hard walking up the hill to shut off the hose. I lumbered back down carrying two pitchers of scratch feed. I just wasn't built for manual work. But still, I could be seized by the mindless certainty that I was doing exactly what I should be doing with my life, and for a little isolated instant in time, everything felt essentially right about the world. Even if another animal disaster lay just around the corner, clacking its beak.
*For some reason, after the odd lower numbers of the 30s and 40s (here in the U.S., we commonly had such odd screen sizes as 32" and 43" & 49"), manufacturers began a love affair with 5s and the 55-65-75" format became standard, which now seems to again be changing as the new screens enter the world of 82" and above; flexible screens now coming into production will likely be even larger, allowing you to simply lower them from their hidden compartments in the wall because well, the new rollout screens will likely BE the size of your wall.
It was much the same when the Sony Walkman debuted, an audio relic from the days when the strange revolution of cassette tapes were flooding the markets due to their compact size (yes, there was a time when magnetic tape was the recording standard). Sony was the first to introduce this portable reproduction of a life-like sound, complete with soft spongy and lightweight headphones and milked its invention for all that it was worth. First the bulky intro model, then a year later a more compact unit, then one with equalizers, then a model with "extra" bass, each unit arriving separately and costing a bit more (and causing you to replace your old unit). It was a marketing dream, eventually reaching 150 million units sold. Take this marketing model to cars and refrigerators, clothing and wine glasses (it's one reason stores such as Costco keep moving displays around throughout the store making things appear as "new" arrivals). And now the 4K clarity (as a side note, the lowest to highest pixel display resolution today would go something like this: VHS-DVD-HD-UHD-4K. What, my old DVDs are the worst resolution? Uh, yes...my young friends might now likely ask, "Do we even have a DVD player?" Don't take my word for it -- jump to a site such as TechRadar.
My lesson that I had slipped more than a bit in keeping up came when I was handing a few nursery song CDs to our friends for their new baby (our library had them on sale for five cents). They thanked me then looked at each other with a puzzled look and said, "Do we even have a CD player?" Yikes...my OG status just went from Original Gangsta to Old Guy. Dot matrix printers, corded land lines, tube radios...the tech stuff is easy to lose track off since it changes so quickly. But try this example. You're working for the government and find that something or some rule is hurting the general public...bad air or polluting chemicals, or a food additive or an addictive pain medication. Only your report falls on deaf ears. In fact, funding for your department is suddenly cut or eliminated altogether, your report is buried and your job is now at risk since the people you are fighting against worked for the large corporations or chemical or oil companies and well, they're now officially running your department having been appointed by the president or premier or prime minister. But if you think that this is a scenario from today's world (okay, it is) it has been happening throughout our history.
Here's part of the opening of Deborah Blum's Poison Squad on milk in 1850: dairymen, especially those serving crowded American cities in the nineteenth century, learned that there were profits to be made by skimming and watering down their product. The standard recipe was a pint of lukewarm water to every quart of milk--after the cream had been skimmed off. To improve the bluish look of the remaining liquid, milk producers learned to add whitening agents such as plaster of paris or chalk. Sometimes they added a dollop of molasses to give the liquid a more golden, creamy color. To mimic the expected layer of cream on top, they might add a final squirt of something yellowish, occasionally pureed calf brains. Unfortunately, it gets much worse as copper and arsenic begin to be used for coloring (green), as well as lead (yellow, rose and pink). Children died from eating such brightly colored frostings, pickles and candies. The penalty for one such candy producer (who added arsenic instead of the plaster of paris) was £5...there were no laws on the books saying that such additives were illegal (the £5 "fine" was introduced --but no jail time-- only after a food additive law was passed in 1860). It would be another 40 years before the U.S. would respond when babies began to die from drinking formaldehyde-laced milk (the "preservative" was commonly added to both rotten meat and soured milk to hide the taste of spoilage). But it didn't stop there as both industries and presidential appointees fought off food safety laws (even feeding such tainted meat to its soldiers in the Civil War). All of which makes one wonder about what is happening in today's world and has anything really changed?
So one can understandably be puzzled at questioning if such antics still happen, especially in today's world. Surely not, one would think. But sometimes when looking around and hearing racist chants or that our oceans are becoming more polluted or our glaciers are melting at an ever-quickening rate, it makes one wonder if anything has changed since back then and if so, how such things could thus be occurring. Have we not learned anything? And yes, I admit that I don't understand how we can still have hunger and poverty and drug wars and mass incarcerations, or, how weapons of mass destruction can still be something to aspire to and how our planet can still be viewed as something to use and to take from until its resources are exhausted. All that oil and gas we're now pumping were once living things, as were the chalky cliffs of Dover; even the petrified salt of ancient oceans is still being mined as if its past "life" was little more than just that, a blip of time. People come and go, as we all will, whether we feel entitled to parade through innocent people with spiked shoes searching for that next fortune or to block laws which might prevent a catastrophic ending for all of us. And for me, that 4K jump was indicative of how quickly things can change without us noticing and how easily we can be swayed with a few marketing words. All those decisions come from the top, from our elected leaders (okay, technically not true since this is the 2nd time that a Republican president has lost the vote of the people but been "elected" by the system; confusing yes but nowhere near as confusing as the recent election in England where just 1% of the population "elected" Boris Johnson as its new prime minister). And let's face it, we have to trust somebody since there's no real rule book (well, there is but rules are made to be broken or amended). So we continue to drink our milk with trust in our government just as early mothers did before watching their babies perish (at the time it took a magazine to expose what was happening, followed by readers writing in to Congress and demanding change; the governments and rules shifted a bit but little did change). Added Blum in her book: The pioneering industrial chemist Charles Pfizer, who had founded his New York pharmaceutical company in 1849, now also produced borax, boric acid, cream of tartar, and citric acid for use in food and drink. Chicago's Joseph Baur...invested in a new business in St. Louis, the Monsanto Chemical company, to produce saccharin in large quantities...The food and drink market also attracted Herbert Henry Dow, founder at age thirty-one of the Dow Chemical company in Midlands, Michigan...The company's first venture was based on a new process Dow had invented for extracting the element bromine from brine for antiseptic use. But within a few years, Dow also made magnesium for incendiary flares, phenol for explosives, and agricultural pesticides -- and was becoming a major producer of food preservatives such as sodium benzoate.
Often we think that since we are where we are, whether its in a job as leader or foreman or even in the home, that we know --or should know-- what's right. But not always. Take the example of comedian Tig Notaro telling The Moth of her stepfather, someone she did not get along with and yet had to face that reality after the unexpected death of her mother: He said, "I was wrong, and I wanted to apologize for that. I never understood you as a child. I didn't get you at all, and I tried to project onto you my life and my route, and I expected you to take that exact same route. And I'm realizing that it's not the child's responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It's the parent's responsibility to learn who the child is, and I didn't do that, and I'm sorry. One of the bumper stickers I placed on my car reads: It is far easier to build strong children than it is to repair broken men.
So to take the opposite tack, here's what I do understand, that each of us is on our own journey and that it is not my place to judge the other person. Do no harm rings true for doctors as well as Star Trek explorers, but many whom I feel may be doing harm to others or to our planet quite likely feel the opposite and sleep very well at night, perhaps confident that what they have done or are doing is for the betterment of their country or the world as well as themselves. And while I personally don't think that it's okay to snub a person due to their race or color or position, or to separate mothers from their children, or to walk into a mosque or picnic or shopping center and shoot and kill innocent people, or to legislatively stop enactment of tougher gun control laws, or to keep selling weapons which bomb innocent civilians, or to...well, you get the idea, there are many others who seem to think nothing of it. How there can be such disparity throughout our history is puzzling but I know that it exists and has existed for centuries. But I also know that there is little that can top the feeling I have of just sitting outside in the early hours of the morning with my dog and sipping a nice hot cup of just-brewed coffee. For just those brief moments, all is right with the world, it is resting, it is quiet and it is still functioning. My dog's eyes tell me that it's so, at least in those moments. And if you happen to want a good read of someone escaping life to perhaps unwittingly become a city-slicker farmer of rescued ducks, geese and other various wild critters, then look no further than the hilarious reflection (in my opinion, at least) Enslaved By Ducks. Said author Bob Tarte at the end of his book: Outside in a burst of clear grey light, as clouds lingered between gathering and dispersing, I sloshed dirty water out of a plastic swimming pool. Ducks and geese nibbled mostly at the lawn. Across our lot and behind the barn, one-eyed turkey Hazel and her former tormentor, Lizzie, sat together on opposite sides of a fence. A mosquito threatened my neck, as flecks of mud and manure accumulated on my pant leg. A goldfinch sang a song that celebrated his freedom from the burden of keeping pets. I breathed hard walking up the hill to shut off the hose. I lumbered back down carrying two pitchers of scratch feed. I just wasn't built for manual work. But still, I could be seized by the mindless certainty that I was doing exactly what I should be doing with my life, and for a little isolated instant in time, everything felt essentially right about the world. Even if another animal disaster lay just around the corner, clacking its beak.
*For some reason, after the odd lower numbers of the 30s and 40s (here in the U.S., we commonly had such odd screen sizes as 32" and 43" & 49"), manufacturers began a love affair with 5s and the 55-65-75" format became standard, which now seems to again be changing as the new screens enter the world of 82" and above; flexible screens now coming into production will likely be even larger, allowing you to simply lower them from their hidden compartments in the wall because well, the new rollout screens will likely BE the size of your wall.
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