One of my recent pleasures is perusing old blog posts from when I used to sit at my desk in the family dining room in the days before I had a laptop and write stories about my children, a constant source of inspiration and entertainment in those more innocent times. They all grew up to be pretty awesome, so they are still inspiring but starting a business, getting massive promotions or conquering the frozen north aren't as funny as the stuff they did as adolescents. We didn't have a ton of money in those days, so having little people to make me laugh was economically necessary. These days I can afford Netflix. Here's another tale from the 90's.

Cereal Boxes

Late last year the cereal companies slashed prices by over a dollar a box on most brands. Suddenly, the lie I had been telling my children since their birth became obvious. When I said, "We don't eat Captain Crunch. All that sugar is bad for you." I meant, "We don't buy Captain Crunch. It costs four dollars a box." Now that the generic box of corn flakes (white box, black letters, CORN FLAKES) and the multi-media hyped Puffed Toast Cinnamon Crunch Smacky Flake Treats cost roughly the same amount, a new cereal culture is evolving at my house.

Any boxes of "sticks and grass" cereal purchased mistakenly or with an eye towards incipient diabetes are ignored or converted to bird food. After 2.5 children ate 4 (yes 4) boxes of cereal in one weekend, I had to lay down the one bowl per child per day rule. How did this go over, you ask. I can tell you in two words, Jethro Bodine. Yes, I caught my oldest daughter, Anna, with the mixing bowl normally used to make brownies for the church youth group (11 high school kids). She hoped that a quart of milk and half a box of Frosted Mini Wheats could forestall starvation one more day.

Some of the trends from the good old days are still with us for nostalgia's sake. No one will eat the last half bowl of cereal left in the box. I usually discover this when I venture into the kitchen after midnight looking for a satisfyingly quick snack. In quick succession I grab one and then another box of sugar coated vapor in an abortive attempt to find an entire bowl of cereal all for myself. I'm usually left with a mongrelized mix of stale Fruit Loops and Grape Nuts. There is always plenty of milk though. I buy milk two gallons at the time to lessen the number of trips I have to make to the grocery store. You may not know it but children cannot tolerate a closed milk jug in the fridge. Both jugs must be opened and it normally makes the most sense to the juvenile mind to use the jug that expires last----first. It is also a kid's rule to always, always, always leave on the counter the little locking strips that come on the caps of milk jugs. If a countertop is unavailable, the strip may be left on the floor or under the counter beside (NOT IN!) the trashcan

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Sign 1 - Unlimited Internet Is Not, In Fact, Unlimited

My Internet service provider sent me a nastygram today, or rather they sent a snitch letter to Wonder Woman because technically the account is in her name. They wished to inform us that we (meaning me) had FAR exceeded the normal amount of bandwidth during our current billing cycle. As a result, according to the nastygram, they will be throttling our connection speed during "congested hours" until the cycle renews. Did I mention that we pay an extra fee each month for an upgrade to our connection speed? Or, that our plan is called "The Unlimited Ultimate Plan"?

I went and looked at the data usage for the month. It's a lot, slightly over 3TB. I haven't been downloading torrents. You think I'm 12? What I've been doing is retrieving my data from Amazon and Google, primarily a lifetime of photographs, but also over 1,000 book purchases, split almost evenly between Kindle and Audible formats. After removing the limits that Amazon tries to impose on usage through digital rights management, I uploaded all the information to European servers.

Well, I guess a billion (trillion?) dollar bloodsucking corporations stick together because Verizon is now discouraging me from making full use of the service I pay them for.

Sign 2 - Ad Free Television Actually Contains Ads

I quit watching ad supported television a long, long time ago. Only once, in 2015, did I watch regular TV and that was only to follow the (almost) undefeated season of the Carolina Panthers. The amount of adverting in a football game, along with the collusion against Colin Kaepernick and the epidemic of brain damage put me off the game shortly thereafter. I pay less for the premium streaming channels than I paid for cable television, even with all the price increases. I opt for the ad-free experience because life is short, and I just don't want to waste it enduring marketing. Now that the fascists are in power and corporations can do anything they like without repercussions, one of the things they are doing is inserting advertising into the feeds of people who pay to opt out of it. What are we going to do? I know what I'll do. I'll go right back to the Lou of the early 21st century and start sailing the high seas again. I gave up the pirate life in 2006, but war is war, and I'll not be trifled with by Peacock, Hulu, Netflix, or anyone else.

Note to "Steve", the anonymous coward who left a comment and thinks that my mockery of torrents and my planned re-embrace of them are worthy of a confused face emoji. You might have a point. I haven't needed torrents in almost twenty years because I am willing and able to pay for the entertainment I consume - as long as I get what I pay for. If the mega-corporations who take my money don't deliver what they promise, then all bets are off.

Sign 3 - You Can Choke to Death on the Bones in Boneless Chicken

Dissenting justice: “The question must be asked: Does anyone really believe that the parents in this country who feed their young children boneless wings or chicken tenders or chicken nuggets or chicken fingers expect bones to be in the chicken? Of course they don’t.

“When they read the word ‘boneless,’ they think that it means ‘without bones,’ as do all sensible people.”

Yeah, a man in Ohio had a bone from a plate of "boneless wings" served to him in a restaurant get lodged in his throat, causing a serious infection. A jury, using what we normal people call common sense, found in his favor when he sued the joint for false advertising. Not to be deterred from protecting pretend people (corporations) from actual real people with, you know, families and jobs, the Republican majority on the state appeals court decided that "boneless wings" describes a cooking style and is not offered as a description of the food you are paying for. They took away the damages that a jury of his peers awarded him in a decision decided by a one-vote majority, One of the dissenting justices was pretty scathing in his critique of how much the court Republicans suck.

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Some people are so selfless that they seem almost saint-like. They aren't common, but they aren't rare either. There are usually one or two in most work situations. They are the people who seem to have endless patience for answering questions and never seem too busy to lend a hand to people who need it. There isn't a time in anyone's memory when they hurt someone's feelings or made them feel bad. I have never been one of those people. I'd like to think that I'm just an average guy, one who gets a little impatient sometimes, a little stressed at others and who slips up from time to time and says things he wishes he could take back. I have a mental playlist of those occasions that just decides to start running through my brain from time to time.

Once a co-worker made a mistake setting up a school's computer image for a new year and didn't find it until she had erased and reinstalled the software on hundreds of devices. It happens. She was far from incompetent. She just made an unfortunate error and as a result had to do a lot of extra work. It could have happened to me a hundred times over. I was laughing about it with a couple of people on my team, nothing mean spirited, just being glad it didn't happen to me. Yeah, the problem was the person I was talking to was on the phone with her, and she heard every word I said. Ouch. I spent the next five years trying to make it up to her. I felt horrible. Still do when it pops into my mind.

Like many tech people, I joke about being my family's go to for computer issues. I write about it on this very blog. Because I've done this work for so long, it's a rare, rare day when a issue causes me any stress. It might be aggravating, but I'm up to most challenges given enough time. I forget that normal people don't have that mindset. All they know is that this expensive piece of equipment they rely isn't working, and they have no idea why or how to solve it. It is no joke. One Thanksgiving, I was at my poor sweet Mother's house when she came and told a group of us guys that she needed some help with some tech issue after lunch. I started joking with my brother and broth-in-law that they would have to help her because I just didn't have the patience for it, which was jerk of a move and made my mother cry, since what she wanted was in no way a big deal. Man, I wanted to crawl into a hole. I don't know what possessed me to be so callous. Thankfully, I have tried to be the most patient person who ever lived with every tech problem she's asked me to look at since that day. Lesson learned.

Let me be clear. I don't think I am some kind of monster. We all have our ups and downs. I have just as many good memories of having been helpful at work and supporting loved ones in tough times. I think we evolve to have these memories of our mistakes as a way to help us grow. Having a conscience is a survival skill, unless you are some kind of sociopath.

The difficulty in 2025 is that half the country have stopped evolving. They've stopped having a conscience. They no longer feel any empathy for those whose suffering they've contributed to. In fact, they seem to take some perverse pride in it.

Even during times when the economy has been in the dumps and I didn't have much extra money, I was still fine as far as having my basic needs met. I never wanted the state (my employer) to take money away from child nutrition or health care programs just so I could have more disposable income. I think it's a good idea to use tax money to do research on breast cancer and sickle cell anemia, even the chance of me getting those illnesses is minuscule. In no way would I ever think that winning the cosmic lottery and being born a middle-class white American makes me deserving of anything, rather than a poor immigrant whose struggles I cannot even comprehend. Only a sociopath would be uncaring in the face of suffering. Yet, here we are.

In the movies, generally, the bad guys know they are bad people. These days, we are surrounded by horrible people who seemingly have no comprehension of their own rotten souls. The head of the Southern Baptist Convention recently gave an interview explaining why empathy isn't Christlike. How do these people even sleep at night? I feel bad about hurting someone's feelings 15 years ago and my fellow Americans are celebrating their president taking away aid from a country under attack from an invading marauder. I just don't get it.

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