thebartleyeffect

[thebartleyeffect]

Ahhh, the Glory Days of air travel, where everyone is polite, attractive...

..and well-dressed.

:(

[thebartleyeffect]

I was helping Lucy clean up the kitchen after breakfast. I washed a couple plates by hand and went to put them into the drying rack in the sink, when I noticed right away that something wasn't right.

Did she remove the drying rack and then put it back in to the sink the wrong way? What's going on here? And why can't I fit the plate into the drying rack all of a sudden?

Ah.

Brand-new drying rack.

I didn't know that drying racks needed to be periodically upgraded.

So now my problem is: How am I supposed to get this regular-sized dinner plate into the drying rack?

Turns out that some first-year Industrial Design intern thought it would be an absolutely SPLENDID idea to locate the little utensil holder in such a way that it prevents any plates from being set into the drying rack for...

Well, you know... DRYING?

So I set the plate aside and lifted this brand-new, Version 9 drying rack out of the sink to examine it more closely and see if I could move the little utensil holder and relocate it to the side, where it wouldn't interfere with this drying rack's primary duty of...

You know... DRYING?

I figured it must snap off fairly easily enough and so I tugged on it, and of course, like all poorly-designed drying racks, it resisted, more like... REFUSED any attempts at relocation to a more sensible position on the drying rack.

I figured maybe a little firmer tug would break the resistance and it did not, at which point I exerted something like, oh, I don't know... 125lb of upward force, during which I did a spot-on impression of a frustrated, adult male gorilla struggling with an unopened box of ripe bananas.

Not surprisingly, the recalcitrant little utensil holder exploded into a shower of little plastic shards onto the kitchen counter and into the kitchen sink

Needless to say, we now need to upgrade yet AGAIN, this time to the Version 9A drying rack.

In the meantime, Lucy is supremely pissed.

And that's why we can't have nice things.

[thebartleyeffect]

Great photo, isn't it? You never know what you're gonna stumble across when you're surfing the Web

Love the vintage vehicles all around it.

It looks like a prop out of Lost in Space

Can't get over all those vintage cars, though.

When I was little, my uncle used to drive those things routinely and they were awesome. Something about the interiors of those old cars - the fabric that they used for the headliners all smelled the same, and when you climbed into those cars to go somewhere, it was like walking into Grandma's stuffy living room, you know - Grandma's house, where the furniture never changed for decades and the smell from the upholstery permeated the living room.

Same with those cars.

The motors in those days (can't call them engines yet, they were still "motors") - each had their own personality that YOU had to adapt to if you wanted to have any chance of going anywhere.

This included learning over time that your motor required a certain number of pumps of the gas pedal before turning the key (or pushing the floor button)

Too many pumps, and you'd flood the carburetor.

Too few, and you'd be starving your motor for fuel and the starter motor would warn you about this by spinning slower and slower, dangerously close to draining the battery.

(The batteries back then were temperamental, too.)

But, just like getting married, eventually the two of you - you and your car, would get to know each other's idiosyncrasies and triggers and you would go on to enjoy many happy years together.

A gentle pressure applied to the gas pedal, and the motor up front would rumble (yes - rumble) up through the octaves, lugging you, your passengers, your cargo, and 2,500 lb of toothpaste-green Detroit slag iron down the street as you pulled away from your driveway.

The motor itself would keep time as if humming its own favorite tune with a rhythmic little tic-tic-tic-tic that would ebb and flow with the pressure of your foot on the gas pedal as you rolled around town together.

It was a happy time and the cars were happy, agreeable things, not at all like these hulking behemoths that we have all come to accept on our highways and byways, their menacing grillework designed to evoke images of a shark's gaping jaws, bearing down on you, the hapless pedestrian, in the middle of a crosswalk.

No, it was a simpler, happier time and everybody who piled into Grandpa's Buick Electra-Glide on a warm summer evening took their favorite places in the backseat, rolled down the windows and enjoyed the passing scenery on their way over to their favorite ice cream joint after dinner.

Yep - happy times.

[thebartleyeffect]

"I'm a nut"

and

"I'ma nut"

Are two VERY different things.

[thebartleyeffect]

You've got a better chance of getting an Uber in the middle of a goddamn Iowa cornfield than you do ANYWHERE in Western Massachusetts.

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Just finished phone calls to three different airlines.

Jesus, what a shitshow trying to buy tickets.

Leg room: $144/seat

Seat selection: $$$

Buffer zone between your seat and nearest door plug: $255

It's fucking crazy.

Basically, they're trying to nickel and dime you into saying 'fuck it' and popping for the next higher cabin class, in my case something they call Comfort-Plus.

I was looking for a checkbox that said "Avoid Surly Gate Agents", but that's not an option they're offering at the moment. I would have gladly paid extra for that.

Remember airline travel in the years before Reagan and his wave of airline deregulation in the early 80's? Air travel was a formal affair and you got dressed up nicely for it. Your dedication to their desire for decorum was rewarded with inflight meals that were actually pretty damn good, and even came with a side salad topped with a single cherry tomato!

All accompanied with your choice of coffee, tea, or some other beverage of your choosing.

There WAS NO JetBlue and there WAS NO Spirit and people sat the fuck down and behaved like goddamn grownups, instead of these in-flight Jerry Springer episodes that are so popular these days on YouTube.

I can't wait for them to finish building that Texas-Belize causeway. It's gonna be awesome.

They'll have rest stops every 17 miles and you'll be able to buy a Big Mac, large fries and a Big Gulp, all in the middle of the goddamn Gulf of Mexico.

The kids can pass the time at these elevated rest areas tossing french fries into the water at the sharks.

7-Eleven will be well-represented too, stretched across the Gulf of Mexico at 17 mile intervals like a goddamn string of red, white and green pearls.

Just another great example of man conquering Nature, bending the elements to his will.

[thebartleyeffect]

The owl and the fishercat went to sea

in a beautiful pea-green boat...

*

<<Record scratch sound here>>

*

WAIT!!! STOP!!!

STOP PRODUCTION!!!

Did you just say ”FISHERcat?!?"

PUSSY cat!!! Not FISHERcat!!!

It's supposed to read "The owl and the PUSSY cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat"

There are NO FISHERcats ANYWHERE in this childrens' rhyme, ok?

So where's the owl?

WHERE'S THE GODDAMN OWL?!?

JESUS CHRIST!!!

What the FUCK happened to THE OWL?!?"

[thebartleyeffect]

It was the Norwegians who began the holiday tradition of lighting their Christmas trees by attaching small candles to their trees' branches.

Not coincidentally, it was also the Norwegians who were responsible for incorporating the world's first-ever fire department.

[thebartleyeffect]

Back in April, I took a Saturday day trip, and headed out for Providence to check out the Providence arboretum.

It was a cold April day and I was tired of being cold here in New England. My wife was down in Texas for two weeks, visiting our daughter, so I had the latitude to do pretty much anything I wanted.

This particular Saturday was uncharacteristically bright and sunny, with just enough warmth in the air to remind me that Spring was just around the corner.

Glass-domed to admit the maximum possible amount of natural sunlight, the interior of the arboretum is maintained at a nice, warm and humid 80-something degrees, the perfect respite from the worst of what New England has to offer.

I made it as far as East Putnam, CT when, without warning, my Altima shut down completely, my dashboard a constellation of red and yellow indicator lights. Without the power of the engine to spin the pump, the hydraulics quit completely, meaning no power steering or power brakes, leaving me to rely on my aging biceps and calf muscles to manhandle the steering wheel and brake pedal while using my rapidly dwindling momentum to glide across the oncoming lanes of Route 44 and into this stranger's driveway to await rescue in the form of a friend's tow truck from back home, 54 miles behind me.

The reasons for the engine quitting I can explain another time, but in addition to the arboretum, I also harbored a deep ulterior motive for journeying to Providence (of all places!).

In addition to that arboretum, I was going to indulge my long denied desires for A STRING(!!!) of New York System hot dogs at their Olneyville location.

I could taste them already and, in my mind's eye, I could easily see the well-worn stools and Formica countertop at which I would be sitting.

I was a mere thirty-five minutes away from my hot dog heaven when the engine quit and, if I had been a kid in the backseat of the car when something like this had happened, I would have burst into tears at such a sudden denial of what had only moments before seemed practically at hand.

As an adult however, I sat there in my quiet car, the heater no longer working and the chill of the outside air slowly entering the car through the rolled up windows, grimly accepting yet another cruel twist of fate, the cruel twists that life routinely delivers us as adults and that we are expected to absorb with dignity and maturity.

I'll get down there eventually - mark my words on that one.

But for now, those New York System hot dogs remain tantalizingly just beyond my reach, calling to me with the siren song that is familiar to anyone who lives in or around the city of Providence...

😒

[thebartleyeffect]

On the day of my colonoscopy five years ago, I must say: I was on fire that day.

The anesthesiologist leans in close as I'm laying there on the table and he has this checklist on his clipboard.

His first question was actually a trick question, but I was ready for him.

"So what'd you have for breakfast?", he asked, with seemingly genuine curiosity.

"Oh! I had two leftover bowls of my wife's firehouse chili!!", I responded, enthusiastically.

The guy draws back from me ever so slightly, trapped in his own WTF? moment, not unlike a bomb technician who suddenly realizes he's in way over his head.

That's when I burst out laughing at his reaction, right there on the table, thoroughly hysterical at my own perfectly-timed response.

He looks at me, realizing he's been had, shakes his head and continues on with his checklist.

The cute nurse behind him covered her mouth, stifling a quiet giggle.

😆

[thebartleyeffect]

Multiple times, everyday, I get this little notification saying Android 12 is available for download.

After 5 days of ignoring the messages, then I get this in-your-face pop up that I can't get around by dismissing it. The only option was to tap it and let the update come down.

When the update was finished, I went back to using the phone and it wasn't long before I went to go make a phone call and discovered that, for all the work these Google guys do pushing out these updates, the only noticeable change that I could see was that the buttons on my phone app were now pastel-colored (with rounded edges!) and the features that I had come to know the locations of were all moved around and I had to go searching for them and I'm like, "Is this their idea of an update? Changing the colors of the apps and just moving shit around for the sake of moving shit around?"

I was just grateful that they didn't break the Bluetooth this time around, like they did on my old Samsung, years ago.

The way I see it, it's MY phone now and they have no business taking shit away or moving buttons around for the sake of moving buttons around.

I know I sound like a crotchety old man with all of this, but think about it for a second, security aside:

Can you imagine in the old days if a Telephone Company truck pulled up to your house and a Bell System guy let himself into your house without even knocking, while you're taking a nap, in the shower, whatever...

... and without a word, unbolts your kitchen phone off the kitchen wall, takes it apart on your kitchen table, adds a bunch of shit that you don't even know what it does and, in the process, accidentally takes away your ability to dial the numeral 7, breaks the microphone/mouthpiece in the process, and then puts it all back together, and before leaving, pulls out a can of Krylon® and spray paints your black telephone with a lovely shade of toothpaste green and then walks out the door and drives away?

Then you try to call the phone company (Thank GOD there's no 7 required to dial the phone company!) to complain that nobody can hear you when you answer the phone because they broke your microphone/mouthpiece and they just keep hanging up on you because they can't hear you and they think you're just another crank caller?

And because it's property of the Telephone Company, (It's not REALLY yours, despite what they tell you) you can't just go in and fix whatever they broke.

Your only option is to go out and buy another $400 black telephone from the Telephone Company and pray that the microphone and the numeral "7" both still work and that they haven't had a chance to fuck it all up yet.

And so what you do going forward is: you keep a sharp eye on your driveway at all times so that the NEXT time the Telephone Truck pulls up out front, you can lock all the doors and windows (because they WILL climb in through the window if you don't) run downstairs, throw the main breaker and plunge your house into darkness and silence and pray that they think no one is home and wait for them to drive away.

Yeah, that pretty much sums up Google's business model.

[thebartleyeffect]

My dad used to absolutely LOVE one of my stories for the punchline that came at the end. I must have told it to him two, maybe three times over the last 15 years and, even though he knew the punch line that was coming, he loved it anyway and would laugh every time like he was hearing it for the first time.

It was a true story, and it happened at lunchtime in Hartford.

Warren, my uncle, sent me down the street one afternoon with a twenty in my hand, telling me: "Go get us a couple'a hot dogs from the hot dog cart."

So I jumped in my old '86 Ford and drove the four blocks down the street from where Warren worked at the time and parked it near the hot dog cart and walked over.

There was some guy in line in front of me already, a salesman I'm guessing, based on his clothes: a London Fog raincoat (It was misting that day) open in the front, revealing his suit underneath.

The guy inside the little hot dog cart looked like an angry Mario from that Mario game: short, with black hair, stocky build, with heavy, black eyebrows like twin strips of Velcro.

He was pushing the spatula around on his griddle, so that the caramelized onions wouldn't burn.

That's when this guy in front of me made the fatal mistake of trying to engage Mario in small talk: "So... think we're gonna see some rain today?"

Mario at this point began to push all of his onions, followed by the red peppers and the meat for the Philly cheese steak grinders off to the edges of the griddle.

Once everything was safely at the edge of the cooking surface and not at risk of burning, he angrily banged his metal spatula against the griddle three times - HARD - to get any remaining food off of it before pushing that to the edges as well and setting the spatula down.

Mario whipped around and his facial expression told us both that he was supremely pissed at being interrupted in the middle of his workday with something so vanishingly unimportant as small talk.

With one hand on his hip and the finger from his other hand pointing at the area above his twin strips of Velcro, he says to the poor bastard in front of me:

"Da FUCK's it look like?!? Like I got a fuggin' WEATHER RADAR in my FOREHEAD?!? How the fuck should *I* know what it's gonna do?!?"

Having settled that question, Mario whipped around and went back to the business of caramelizing his onions and cooking the steak.

The salesman, thoroughly cowed at this point, lowered his gaze to the ground and waited quietly for his order, so as not to further antagonize The Hot Dog Psycho.

When it was my turn to step up, it must have looked like a scene out of Seinfeld's Soup Nazi episode: I respectfully ordered two hot dogs and kept my fucking mouth shut while he went about the business of preparing my lunch.

Pretty sure we stuck to Burger King from that day on.

[thebartleyeffect]

I remember being in first grade and being bored out of my mind after returning to class from lunch.

I was staring out the window, admiring the changing colors of the leaves on the trees, while Miss Brinkerhoff droned at the chalkboard.

I raised my hand.

"Yes, Christopher?", said Miss Brinkerhoff.

"Can we go home now?", I asked, the boredom and impatience unmistakable in my little first grade voice.

"Not until 3:00", she replied, turning back to the chalkboard.

I looked at the clock; I may as well have been looking at a hieroglyph, for I had not yet learned how to tell time.

My hand went up again.

"Yes, Christopher?", said Miss Brinkerhoff, more as a sigh than a question.

"Can we go home NOW?" I asked her hopefully, for when you can't tell time, you also have no SENSE of time, so it may as well have been an hour since I asked her last, even though maybe just six minutes had gone by at this point.

"Not until 3:00", she replied once more, certain now that the matter had been settled once and for all, but I wasn't done yet.

"How do I know when it's 3:00?", I asked her, with a genuine desire to know.

This time she paused, and pointed at the clock on the wall: "When the big hand is on the 12...

...and the little hand is on the three."

The matter finally settled, she turned back to the blackboard and continued her scrawling.

"Cool!", I thought to myself. I finally got the information I need so that I can bolt the fuck outta this place the minute 3:00 rolls around.

Miss Brinkerhoff continued her efforts at the blackboard while the rest of the class looked on.

Well, everybody except me, because my eyes were glued to that fucking clock. It was probably 1:30 when this all took place, but the physical distance between the one and the three on the clock face was measured in mere inches, so how long could it take? I reasoned.

Yep, any minute now...

The clock clicked and the big hand jerked momentarily backwards and paused for what seemed like an eternity. Miss Brinkerhoff's voice was, by now, like a far-off echo somewhere in a deep, dark cave and the birds in the trees outside all went silent while we collectively waited to see what the big hand on the clock would do next.

The suspense was agonizing. I slid my left foot forward, just so I could be the first one out the door and onto the school bus that was, certainly by now, waiting patiently outside for us.

And just like that, the big hand jerked forward by one full minute. The hour hand remained stubbornly in place, trapped somewhere between the one and the two on the clock face.

The process repeated a minute later and that's when the sinking sense of realization settled in and I began to think that maybe this whole thing called "school" might be a whole lot bigger than I realized.

My hand went up for a third time.

"Yes, Christopher?", said Miss Brinkerhoff, clearly annoyed and almost out of patience at this point.

"How many more years do we have to go to school?", I asked, optimistic that the answer might be somewhere around another year, maybe two.

"Twelve", she replied, turning back to the blackboard for the final time.

I sank into my chair, the weight of 100 lb anvil on my chest. I felt like I had just been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

I don't remember a thing from the rest of that day. The clock on the wall continued its minute-by-minute ticking, but by now it was irrelevant to me. Nothing else mattered. Forget about the remaining two hours of the afternoon, the next twelve years of my life had been just pulled out from under me and I realized that my life, carefree as it had been up until the arrival of this bright September morning, was no longer my own, but instead now belonged to The Massachusetts Board of Education, which would dispassionately rule the next twelve years of my life, governing everything from what time I would wake up in the morning to how late I would stay up studying for the following morning.

It was all too much for a naive first grader to process and so I just sat there, alone in my thoughts while surrounded by a gaggle of little kids like me whose names I didn't even yet know.

I could not have known it at the time, but I had just been presented with my first rock, the first of several rocks that I would receive throughout my lifetime, to push up a series of never-ending hills.

🪨

[thebartleyeffect]

I can remember a time when the phone company came out and hung a 3lb anvil on my kitchen wall.

It came in my choice of banana yellow or office furniture green.

For the price of a car payment, I could get an extra long handset cord that would let me wander all the way out to the living room from the kitchen while talking on the phone.

It was worth it though, because the neighbors were always impressed when they saw the extra long cord dangling all the way down to the floor next to the refrigerator.

And that was it - there were no upgrades required. Once the phone technician left, I never saw a phone company representative again as long as I lived there.

A contact list?

Yeah, it came with that too. Now THAT got regularly scheduled updates every spring when the new phone books arrived.

The old phone books were still plenty good, though, and would get relegated to another part of the house so that you wouldn't be constantly running back and forth to the kitchen to look up the number for Showcase Cinemas to check a movie listing.

It didn't have GPS either, but that's okay because you PAID THE FUCK ATTENTION to where you were going when someone else was driving so that you could memorize the route for yourself.

There was no sleeping in the passenger seat (LUCY!). And if you didn't know the route, there was this thing called A MAP that was in every glove compartment! You would orient yourself to where you were and figure out where you wanted to go and then trace the route. It was actually kind of fun because you could impress people with your cartography skills. So finding your way to some destination you had never been to before was like a treasure hunt! Kind'a like these escape rooms that are so popular right now, except you didn't have to pay to escape! The gas station attendant would give you one FOR FREE with every fill-up!

I remember the first time I got a cell phone. Perreault was there to witness it.

He was there when I put the handset to my ear for the very first time and said:

"There's no dial tone! How do I get a dial tone?"

That was my sign.

That was my red flag right there and I completely ignored it, like the drunk driver of the '60s who blasts through the barricades with the yellow flashing lights that the highway department had spent so much time erecting to keep people from driving off the end of the bridge just like Thelma and Louise.

Yep. I blasted right through those fuckers and into the telecommunications abyss...

...and I've been desperately trying to swim back to shore ever since.

[thebartleyeffect]

My wife bought a battery-powered "back massager" on Amazon. It's charging in the kitchen right now, as I write this.

She really DOES believe that "it's just a back massager" LOL

She can't wait for me to try it out on her shoulder muscles.

I can't wait to try it out on my taint. 🤣

[thebartleyeffect]

So the mechanic comes out to the waiting area where I've been waiting to hear the results of his inspection of my car, which is still up on the lift.

"How bad is it?" I ask, steeling myself for the answer, which is no doubt going to involve some serious cash to get whatever's wrong with it fixed.

"Looks like you blew a tranny", he says, wiping his dirty hands on an equally dirty rag.

"Well, yeah...", I replied, somewhat defensively, "I needed a ride!"

[thebartleyeffect]

There are old popular songs of the day out there that describe the excitement surrounding the legend of the Wabash Cannonball, and I'm sure you've no doubt heard of it as well.

To see this bridge not only preserved, but actively in use makes me very happy.

As the guy drives across it, I try to imagine that I'm the engineer aboard a fast passenger train, pulled by a monstrous steam engine belching coal smoke from the stack and steam from the driving rod cylinders. The mournful wail of the Baldwin 4-4-0's whistle echoes off the banks of the river as the train approaches the first span of the bridge, alerting anyone nearby (including the bridge tender) that the Wabash Cannonball is about to begin pounding its way across the bridge at speed, followed by a consist that might have included a parlor car, a dining-lounge car, a couple of chair cars and a pair of reclining seat coaches, the last of which sported a pair of softly-glowing kerosene rear marker lanterns with four lenses that included three amber: two to the sides, one to the front, and a red lens facing to the rear, the train's taillights, if you will.

Another, fainter wail of the whistle, this one doppler-shifted, as the last of the cars exited the last span and the silence of the river descended once again over the scene.

The stars in the sky shone brightly, while an orange-tinted crescent moon hung low in the Northeast sky. Three red and green navigation lanterns atop the center swing span glowed green for approaching trains, while displaying three corresponding red indications to any nearby river traffic, while the soft white glow of a reading lamp could be seen emanating through the windows of the bridge tender's hut, located off to the side of the tracks, midway out across the center span.

Hours might pass before the next train, perhaps a rumbling freight, would announce its approach with the distant wail of its own morose whistle, as the first gray light of dawn began brightening the Eastern horizon, faintly visible through the branches and thick canopy of River Birch and Black Maple that line the banks of this lonely stretch of the train's namesake Wabash River, marking the beginning of a new day along the route of the famed and legendary Wabash Cannonball.