Occasional Jots and Tittles

State (and other) geographic borders always intrigue me. Rivers seem the logical choice in many cases, because it’s easy to see where the line is – in the middle of the water. Nonetheless, lots of state borders are straight lines. In the late 1700’s and into the 1800’s, advances in optics and other equipment made it possible to accurately survey long straight lines, which made it possible to draw things like, oh, the Mason-Dixon Line. Not that it kept “them” on their side of it.

Or at least, so we thought. In several places a long line is the border between multiple states, with one line dead-ending into another to bring three states together at one point. But there’s only one spot in the country where two such lines cross, bringing four states together – It’s called Four Corners, at the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. Tourists to the area love to sit in the middle and put one foot or hand in each of the four states. I suspect literally hundreds of thousands of people over the years have done it.

Only problem is, the 1868 survey which drew the lines is off. By about 2.5 miles, actually. Thanks to modern things like GPS and satellites, we can measure these things much more accurately. No word, yet, on whether the Four Corners monument will be moved to the correct location, or whether the states are going to fight out back tax revenues for the property.

Remember the scam that record clubs used to be?

As I recall, several of the major labels had them, but over the years they got consolidated into separate entities serving all the labels. They’d offer you some great deal–10 albums for $4.99, or something like that–as long as you agreed to buy, say, two more albums at regular prices during the next year. The “regular price” was always a few dollars more than you could get the album anywhere else, and you had to pay shipping and handling, but… you’d still come out ahead if you got your music, bought your requirements, and got out.

The gimmick was the monthly mailing – you’d get this nice slick catalog each month with hundreds of records listed, from all sorts of music types – and usually, most of them were marked down from the “regular” price. So while you were looking for your “regular price” albums, you’d see a lot more you wanted… and since the mark-downed ones didn’t count for your requirements, you figured you’d get an extra here or there. And in that monthly mailing was a card – listing the “Selection of the Month” – some album you almost certainly didn’t want, but which the company was going to mail you, automatically (and charge you full price for, plus shipping) unless you mailed the card back to them by a certain date.

Naturally, you’d forget to mail the card eventually. You might go two, three, six months sending it in as soon as it came in, but eventually, it would slip past you. Or you’d mail it six days before it was due, and the company would claim they didn’t get it on time, so the junk album was sent. And the bill.

Consumers wised up, and record clubs (and their later derivatives, CD clubs, VHS clubs, and DVD clubs) were in rapid decline until the Internet revived them. Suddenly, they didn’t have to print a new catalog every month – major savings. The “card” could be sent by email, and responded to via the web – again, major savings. And by promising you that you could reply on the spot, the fear of forgetting to send in the card eased. And because credit and debit cards are much more common now, people are more comfortable paying for their initial purchases that way – so the club can bill your card immediately for shipments.

And if you shop wisely, it’s possible to get some really decent deals. Last year, I got all five seasons of Babylon 5, plus all of the TV movies, for less than $200, including shipping from Columbia House. And being anal-retentive, the first thing I do each month when I get the email about the Director’s Selection is to decline it. Then, if I see something I want, either the Director’s Selection or its alternates, I buy it.

Until this past month, when Columbia House insisted I didn’t decline their selection (Law and Order SVU, Season 8), and shipped it to me. Their rules are clear: If you didn’t order something, you can call and ask for a return label, prepaid, to ship it back. (Technically, since you didn’t order it, you can keep it free, but they have your card number, so they’ve already charged you for it, and good luck getting your money back if you don’t return the item.) But I don’t keep confirmation emails for weeks on end, so of course I had deleted the confirmation that I declined the order. If you don’t open the box, you can write “Refused-Return to Shipper” and get the entire thing back, too – but I had to open the outer package to find out what it was and confirm I hadn’t ordered it. So I could only return it – and if you’re just returning something, you have to pay return shipping and when they get the product, they only return your purchase price, not the original shipping and handling ($7.99 in this case).

I emailed Customer Service and asked if they would be willing to a deal: I would pay to return the DVD’s I didn’t order, if they would agree to credit me the original shipping along with my purchase price. It seemed fair, since I knew I’d declined the order. I didn’t necessarily expect them to go along, but I figured it was worth a try. I even mentioned that there were several other TV series sets I was interested in buying.

So, email response comes back, with nothing but cut-and-paste responses from the program rules. They tell me I can return it unopened at their expense – but of course, I’d already told them I opened the box to find out what it was. They then helpfully told me they would be glad to take my order for the additional series sets I wanted via their website.

So, I wrote back, including the previous correspondence, and noting that they had not specifically addressed my question about splitting the shipping costs. I stressed that I understood the program rules, and that I was asking for an exception, given the circumstances.

Response #2 comes in: more cut-and-paste from the rules, telling me I can return the DVD’s at my own expense, and that when they arrive at Columbia House, “appropriate credit” will be issued to my bank card. Which translates to, I’m sure, once we have the merchandise back, then we’ll leave you stuck with both shipping charges. I don’t even mind that as much as I mind the fact that these goobers will simply NOT say “Yes” or “No” to the simple question – will you refund the original shipping fees if I return this? I could cope with “Sorry, we have to be firm and apply policies uniformly”. I could even handle “Sorry, but you screwed up, and it’s not our problem.” It’s the evasive, non-answer answers that have driven me up the wall.

So I’m returning the disks, cancelling the account, and spending the $500 or so on DVD’s that I would have spent there at Barnes and Noble. or Amazon. Hell, even at Wal-mart. Life is too short to deal with people who refuse to answer questions.

Is it rude to say “Sorry, but there’s NO FUCKING WAY I would ever approve a friend request from you” to someone on Facebook?

In some respects, I suppose I had a miserable time in high school. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. I wasn’t happy; I knew I was gay, I’d already started going out and meeting other gay people, and in 1979, in the deep south, that wasn’t an easy task, nor were future prospects particularly bright and cheery. Nevertheless, things should have been better. I was a smart student; I was in a pretty good high school (a magnet school with a broadcast public radio station and five or six foreign languages, including Latin, Greek, and Russian). I think we were the only public high school in the state at the time to offer physics, and there were so many students taking calculus when the state required only two years of math that it was embarrassing.

We even had a gymnastics team (although no football, basketball or baseball), and for a gay boy that was a major plus. As it turned out, my best friend in high school was team captain, and most of his teammates became friends of mine as well. But in terms of actually having friends, the kind you hang out with after school, well, that just didn’t happen. We lived in one corner of the parish (county), the magnet school was maybe 10-15 miles away, and kids were bused there from all over the place, so there weren’t any other kids nearby that I went to school with. My best friend, in fact, lived about as far from me as was possible and still attend the same magnet school.

And let me add–if you think not having football and cheerleaders would eliminate the cliques of “in” people that pervade high school didn’t know teenagers. True, there were folks who were both orchestra people and radio nerds, or fencers and Math geeks, but the cliques were still real. And you were either “in” or not – and I was a not.
I guess that’s why I finally “got happy” when I got to LSU and entered the Honors program. It attracted a quirky bunch of students who shared classes and who (mostly) hung out together before, between, and after classes in the Honors facilities. For the first time, I had an actual circle of friends, instead of just a couple of people who let me into part their lives. I belonged.

You belong to your family, of course, but that’s kind of mandatory. Unless they disown you, but by default you’re in. Belonging with people who have to choose to let you join is something else. It can be a life-changing experience. It was for me.

And that’s one reason I never looked back at most of my high school friends. (Another is that probably 2/3 or more of them went out of state for college – something a magnet school education made possible – and many more moved away after the economic turmoil in Louisiana in the 1980’s.) I haven’t been to a reunion yet, not even the big 25th. There were maybe two or three classmates I would see occasionally, but otherwise I lost contact with my entire high school class. Including, unfortunately, my best friend.

I rectified that part last summer, 27 years after graduation, by obsessively googling his name until I found him. I was surprised to find out he’s a psychiatrist – the real medical doctor/MD kind of headshrinker – and living in Alaska. This past week, my youngest sister (who went to the same school, six years behind) sent me a message about a classmate of mine who died suddenly last week. The message had been sent to a Facebook group for graduates of our high school. and mostly out of curiosity, I signed up.

Since then, I’ve gotten six “friend” requests from the group – a couple from people I had to look up in the yearbook to remember, a couple from folks I really wouldn’t have minded staying in contact with. One girl was a good friend of my cousin Mary, and she asked about her in her request. And one came from a former teacher, which stopped me in my tracks.

This man took over as my newspaper teacher halfway through my senior year. The class was designed to teach us journalism through producing the campus paper. It wasn’t a huge thing – tabloid size, I think eight pages each month. Maybe twelve. It’s hard to recall. But I do remember several things clearly. First, when he came in mid-year, he decided to institute a bunch of regular assignments, outside of publishing the paper, as a key part of our grades. Second, he made absolutely no effort to see that the student editors actually did anything towards producing the paper. Third, there were perhaps four of us in the class who understood that perhaps the key component in newspaper journalism is actually publishing a paper, and we did the work that the rest of the class of 30 or so should have been doing. Fourth, because of that, we often didn’t have as much class time to work on some of the added assignments. And Fifth, I remember getting a “C” in the class on my final report card – lowering my GPA just enough to knock me out of the running for some awards. As did the other students who, like me, had actually produced the fucking paper each month – writing the stories, typing them for the printer, writing headlines, doing the layout, choosing the pictures, writing the cutlines, even packaging up the entire mess to send to the printer by deadline.

When we confronted him about the grades, he prissily told us that he’d informed the class that the additional assignments would affect our grades. What he hadn’t mentioned is that failure to do anything at all on the newspaper – as was the case for over half the class – didn’t merit any grade reduction at all. If you turned in all your miscellaneous assignments and they were satisfactory, you got an A, even if that was the only thing you’d done all year.

Fine – it’s his class, he can set the rules, and I learned a valuable lesson: some people only care about process, not results, and as long as you sit quietly at your desk moving paper from the in box to the out box and you put the right color stamp on each, they think you’re wonderful. Those are the kind of people to avoid. Some people realize that while process is important, results matter too, usually more. Those are the people to learn from.

I haven’t responded to his friend request yet. I’ll have to think on it. I’m almost certainly not going to approve it, but I’m torn as to how much, if anything, I should tell him when I deny it.

There was a time when very little got past me.

I’m not sure when that time was, any more, but the change got past me, and a lot more since (apparently). My best guess is that as we hit our 30’s and 40’s, our brains just stop accumulating a lot of the smaller detail that fills our memories when we’re younger. For one thing, I guess there’s less room for it – or at least, adding too much more makes the brain’s index just too cumbersome to navigate the memories.

And interests change. So whereas 20 years ago, I’d still would know maybe 3 out of 4 of the top 40 pop artists, today I probably couldn’t recognize the names of 3 out of 4. Of the rest, I might have heard the name but wouldn’t recognize a picture. Or a song title. I’ve almost certainly never heard the songs.

Heck, at one time I could tell you if there was anyone new who’d shown up this week at the gay dance club in town. Today, not having been in at least five years, probably closer to 8 or 9, I probably couldn’t identify ten people there. I barely notice when someone new moves in on my block, and if the move happens in my busy season at work, I probably won’t know it for months.

You’d think, though, that I could keep track of who connects to my blog. Only a couple of friends are regular commenters (thank you, Mick and Brett) but I know that there are at least a few others who read it, based on the logs for the webserver–after filtering out the indexers and so forth. Apparently, there are gadgets you can install in Wordpress which will show you where the traffic to your blog comes from, and even (if you want) display that as part of your website.

I noticed this on Tony’s “West of Mayberry” blog recently–the most recent ten “hits” to his blog are listed, along with the (approximate) location of the viewer — in my case, my “hit” shows correctly as “Baton Rouge, Louisiana”. More interestingly, I noticed that it shows I arrived at his page from my own blog (because I use my blog’s links as a way to catch up on the others I read most often). Cool feature – I may have to include that somehow on mine.

But what really bowled me over is that I hadn’t noticed Tony’s updated blogroll. On his previous blog, he’d listed the blogs he reads most often on his “Large List”, and a longer list below of others he looked at as “Rolling Along”… neither of which included mine. Which I understood, because lord knows, I’m not that diligent about posts. I didn’t comment much on his old blog, either, at least not in comparison with his recent, revised edition.

Now, however, on the Mayberry blog, there I am: right on the list under Brettcajun (which, if anyone knows the history between Brett and me, is totally appropriate). I’m flattered that he noticed the posts I’ve made there, enough to come at least check out what little I have to say here. It makes me glad I still notice some things.

After our little barbecue soiree a few weeks ago, I figured we’d take it easy for a bit, especially since we’d had it primarily to show off the work we’d been doing in the back yard. Today, however, was another “let’s tackle the world” day, with Jonathan first mowing and edging the entire yard (mowing doesn’t take long, but edging is a bitch with all the beds we’ve put in). Then he decided it was time for us to act on his idea for rearranging the living room.

We have a good-sized living room, but it’s hard to arrange. For starters, it’s long and (sort of) narrow, so a full-size couch won’t really fit across the narrow dimension easily. With the couch thus restricted to the longer walls, that means the TV has to go opposite. Which itself is okay (it’s a flat-panel set) but Jonathan has two large speakers for the stereo it’s all hooked into. Make that huge speakers. Giant ones. To be effective, THEY have to be balanced on opposite sides of the TV, preferably far apart. Throw in some other living room pieces, including some bookshelves, and add in the fact that there are four windows, two doorways, a big archway into the dining room, and a wall panel gas heater to work around, and it becomes almost impossible. When you factor in the window unit AC that cools the room…. well, the fact that we came up with any sort of workable arrangement at all speaks well of our three-dimensional space aptitudes.

Did I mention that we undertook this changeover while there were still big totes full of Christmas decorations that needed to be put in the attic? Or that, since we live in the upstairs half of our duplex, we can’t bring stuff out the front door temporarily to make room?

Again – kudos to the boy for figuring out how to make it all work. I added a few details, and verified some measurements, but most of the work was his.