Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

As if in sympathy with happenings on the Gulf Coast, our weather here, after weeks of placid, sunny days, turned on a dime yesterday afternoon - cooled off 10 or 15 degrees, clouded over and started pouring.  It was pouring again when I got up this morning.  This kind of weather shift is mood-altering.  It’s even had its effect on interspecies relations, as the cats, who have been lounging languidly around the yard the last few weeks and haven’t had much use for us, suddenly find a need for intimate human contact with their wet, scruffy fur.  I feel like throwing them into the shower, or giving them an e-ticket ride in the dryer.  They have their advocates in the house, though, and I’ll probably restrict myself to growling childishly at them when no one’s looking.

I’m hoping this weather change is just a ruse to chase the tourists away, and will give way to our Secret Indian Summer Festival (will the NCAA still let me call it that?), which lasts from Labor Day through mid-October.

I arrived home in Seattle last night at 11:15, on time, but nonetheless a narrow escapee of the mechanics strike against Northwest Airlines.  When I arrived at the Milwaukee airport to begin my journey home, I anticipated an hour or so winding down in the Worldclub there - cramped by most standards, but staffed by the friendliest and most service-oriented people I’ve met in the entire airline.  People who say, “Hi, Phil!” when I wander in on a Friday night looking like hell.

Last night, though, my Milwaukee-Minneapolis flight was showing a 30-minute delay.  I wasn’t too concerned, as I had a 2+ hour layover in Minneapolis.  I knew there was an earlier flight that I could run to the gate to catch, but I was already assigned my first class seat on my booked flight, and I was fine with waiting out any delay.  When checking into the Worldclub, however, the person at the desk urged me to go catch the earlier flight - plus, she said she could get me “up front” - a first class seat.  So, I followed her advice and headed for the gate instead of pouring myself a drink and letting the week slake off of me.

I got my boarding pass and took my seat, “up-front” as promised, and watched as more and more refugees from the later flight poured onto the plane in a tribal migration away from something that they’ve been taught to flee from - the last flight out of an airport that appears to be having “issues”.

We got to Minneapolis without incident, and it wasn’t a bad thing - MSP is a Northwest hub, and the Worldclub is a lot more spacious and opulent, a fine place to spend my (now) 3+ hour layover.  My flight to Seattle departed on time and arrived a little ahead of schedule.

When I retrieved my bags, however, I noticed that the tags read “Frontier Airlines - Rush”, and that they’d been routed on Frontier through Denver to Seattle.  Interesting experience for my dirty clothes.  Curious, I checked the flight information for my originally-scheduled flight, and saw that it had been cancelled for “aircraft maintenance”.  So, if I’d waited around for it, I’d have spent Friday night in Milwaukee, and had to take whatever seats were available on the Saturday flights.

On the surface, if I hadn’t noticed the non-standard routing for my checked luggage, all would have seemed even better than normal.  It’ll be interesting to see what effects this strike will have as more aircraft need maintenance.  I’m scheduled to fly them again Wednesday night.

Wow, is this a strange wag-the-dog story.  Oddly, the person that seems the least traumatized is the 10-year-old child star of the fake films, for whom it may be a great resume-builder if she chooses to bolt the cornbelt for Hollywood.  It all sounds awfully KarlRovian, except for the small scale and the seeming lack of malicious intent.

One of the reasons that this trip seems to have less free time is that a couple other guys I’m working with are staying at my hotel, and, where in past trips I could repair to my room after work with a takeout dinner from Panera’s, on this trip the workday blends into dinner in the hotel restaurant, and I don’t get to my room until 10, leaving me 2 hours to take care of any issues that have come up among my other clients.

That was the case last night.  We ate in the bar and resolved most of the company’s challenges by transferring blame to those not present, but even that process takes a while for people of character - there are resilient layers of conscience that one has to slake off first. 

All the while, the TV over the bar would sometimes distract us.  It must be a slow sports summer here in southeast Wisconsin, as the riveting attraction the last two nights has been the Little League baseball championships on ESPN.  At first glance, it seems benign, if a little frivolous, to give the kids a day in the sun.  Then, as it dawns on you that there are grown men sitting at the bar and shouting, swearing even, at the umpires, and the cameras close in on 11-year-olds with tears running down their cheeks after a miscue or strikeout, it begins to feel a lot like a weird sort of child pornography, demure, but somehow faintly prurient.  I have sometimes favored banning parents from Little League games (especially when I was a coach, a high school kid, and had parents livid with me because their kid wasn’t getting playing time), so how is it better to invite a national television audience to the party?

Ah, it’ll pass.  I wonder who’ll be playing tonight?  You know, some of the moms in the stands are hot. 

Statuary patrolling the breakwater at Shilshole Marina, taken from my kayak on Saturday.

Running ragged on this trip, not much time for the reflective, incisive posts that both of you come here for. (Thanks, Mom!).  Watch this space.

WATCH, I said!  I saw you glance away!

In a refreshing suggestion to pursue fiscal restraint in unseating dictators who offend God by sassing the U.S., Pat Robertson says we should just kill them, and forswear $200 billion military operations.  This is the kind of outside-the-box thinking that our government needs.  And to think we sent that milquetoast John Bolton to the U.N.

I’m sitting at SeaTac waiting for my flight to Minneapolis, then on to Milwaukee for the week.  My reservation, made 3 - 4 weeks ago, is on Northwest, whose mechanics went on strike Friday night.  The airline so far says it will continue flying, and, other than some pickets by the skycap kiosk, everything about my day has been normal so far, although I see my inbound plane will be 40 minutes late.  My brothers helpfully forwarded an article about a Northwest plane from Seattle that blew 4 tires upon landing in Detroit.  I’m thinking that things will be fairly normal in the first few days, but that delays and cancellations will be more likely as maintenance backlogs build up and aircraft are taken out of service, perhaps as early as my return trip Friday night.  I also have a Northwest reservation over Labor Day weekend, when I’m flying to Columbus to visit with family and take part in my Ohio State Marching Band reunion at the game against Miami (Ohio).

I feel badly for anyone involved in the airline business - unions, management, passengers.  Both Northwest and Delta seem likely to declare bankruptcy before the new bankruptcy law takes effect in October, and I’m not optimistic about being able to use my large stash of frequent flyer miles.  I’d sorta been saving them for something big - like Australia.

Here’s what happens when the promoters serve too much fermented lava and don’t provide enough Port-a-Grottos at a rock concert.

My Canon Powershot S300 that I bought to replace one I left at a trailhead last week arrived yesterday, and I strapped it on for a post-prandial stroll to - where else - Gasworks Park. We arrive there just in time to see the not-quite-full moon rise over Capitol Hill.  We also unexpectedly encountered there one of several dozen Cindy Sheehan vigils around the city: people standing on the hill, holding candles, chatting, some low singing.

I’ve always sort of disdained mass protests as a vehicle for public discourse. It’s always seemed to me that, yes, they’re manipulated by their organizers, and they’re too reductive, using sloganeering and the singing of cornball songs to address complex topics deserving of something more nuanced and articulate.

And, I’m not sure what to think of the Sheehan woman’s tent revival in Crawford. On the one hand, I’m all for anything that causes GWB a moment’s discomfort.   However, how wise is it to allow Bush to control the confrontation’s fulcrum point, the decision to meet or not meet?  Project forward to the conversation that might ensue if GW does bike over to chat with Cindy.  Each will have some sort of prepared statement that will be further truncated by the media and spoonfed on the 6 o’clock news.  Bush ends up looking like a human being, and Sheehan like a fool for leaving the better part of a California summer to spend it in godforsaken Texas, where no brush has been left to provide shade.  She’ll go home with a handful of platitudes that she could have gleaned in half an hour’s work on the White House website, and the “movement” will be over.  The only way this ends well is if Bush chooses not to meet her.  But that’s the problem - it’s his choice.

Robert Jamieson, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (does post-intelligence have any analogy to post-modernism?), takes Sheehan to task:

Cindy Sheehan is no Rosa Parks. Nor is she Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. …  I deplore the disingenuous way Sheehan has politicized the death of a son who signed up to fight, but this much is true: In Sheehan, America may be finding its anti-war voice.

I haven’t followed Sheehan’s deeds, writings or pronouncements very closely, but even if Robert has, I don’t think he can be far enough inside her head to make that assertion.  I don’t know why history might not view her as it does Rosa Parks - sitting someplace where the power elite doesn’t want you and daring it to respond according to form.  She’s taking a caustic blistering from a right-wing propaganda machine that was only a gleam in John Birch’s eye in the 50s, so I’m not sure it’s fair to trivialize the consequences she’s garnered.  And MLK was certainly not without at least a dash of disingenuity and megalomania.  If I were Sheehan, I might tell Robert, “It’s a Dead-Kid thing - you wouldn’t understand.”

That said, I’m consonant with Jamieson in being chary of the rush to sloganeering and iconography that Sheehan has catalyzed, unless it morphs into something more substantial - Democrats and journalists finding the backbone to press the case that Sheehan has barely articulated: What were the real reasons the NeoCons bullrushed us into the Iraq war?  Were they so important to the national interest that it was worth engaging in a massive institutional deception in order to pursue them?  And, given that they were, why did they fuck up their prosecution so badly?  (This flatters them by presuming that what we’re seeing in Iraq is not the desired outcome.)  These are questions that should be profferred and answered in congressional hearings, on television, at the highest levels.  It’s not gonna happen between George and Cindy while dodging tumbleweeds on a Texas roadside.

That was an interlewd, not a political discussion.  We don’t do politics here at Perils of Caffeine.  What we do is walk around the neighborhood taking pictures with our new/old camera.  You’re probably getting sick of pictures from Gasworks Park, and wondering if I might actually live in one of those rusted hulks, addled and feverish from exposure to all those hydrocarbons.  I promise I’ll try to expand my range a bit, but for now, I’m gonna lay a couple more on you just because I can (again).

A couple of articles turned up yesterday, independently reinforcing a point I discussed a month or so ago in a post titled Terror Cell.  In that post I described purchasing a cell phone for my mom while she was visiting here, and the dismay I experienced at trying to show someone who’s used to just picking up a phone, hearing a dial tone and punching a number how to do the same thing with a device bristling with buttons, lights and noises.  And this is someone sharp enough to routinely destroy her friends at bridge and keep getting invited back the next week.

It was validating, then, to see an article in the Wall Street Journal about a new product from Vodaphone called the Vodaphone Simply. It:

has no camera, no browser and hardly any icons. Instead of being sleeker and cooler than ever, the phone is large and ordinary-looking.   What it is, though, is easy to use, and if Vodafone is right, the market will love it. That’s because of who its market is: people getting up in years.  

It turns out that this product isn’t a condescending sop for a PR angle:

Vodafone’s plan reflects the need for new sources of growth. Cellular markets in much of Western Europe and Japan are becoming saturated, so that the middle-aged and older are among the few places to look for new growth.

So, this represents a serious attempt to court a market segment that the industry simply wasn’t speaking to, and didn’t know how:

During development, young Vodafone product managers kept trying to add features, like software for sending picture messages. Mr. Laurence said no. He showed them an old TV comedy sketch about an elderly person being humiliated by a hi-fi salesman who delighted in the customer’s technical ignorance.

While developing ads for the phone

Mr. Laurence ran the ad by product managers working on fancy multimedia handsets for young people. “The more they hated it, the more we knew we were on the right track,” he says.

The phone isn’t being offered in the United States yet.  The article explains that cell phone growth is still brisk here, so those who might embrace the product are stuck buying devices that they will spend more time squinting quizzically at than talking into.

I’m far from a Luddite, and I would strenuously resist the dumbing-down of technology to satisfy the lowest common denominator.  I make my living helping people to use software and technology, and a lot of this involves coaxing them to accept change.  But I also have to keep chanting to myself in my 50s a mantra that I coined in my 30s, “Give them what they want, not what you think they ought to want,” because I, along with 24-year-old cell phone store employees, tend to forget that owning my product is not the ultimate goal of my clients, they’re buying my product to accomplish their own ends, however pedestrian and myopic.

Even so, I find myself becoming increasingly weary when confronted with unwanted technological learning curves as a consumer.  For one thing, I carry an uncomplicated travel alarm clock with me on trips in order to avoid spending half an hour setting the bedside clock in my hotel.  Which brings us to the second article in this vein I’ve encountered this week.  Countering a trend that saw hotel alarm clocks evolving into multifunction devices that also brewed your slacks and ironed your coffee, hotels are installing clocks that tests show can be set in less than 20 seconds.  Gives you that much more time to figure out how to use the TV remote to order adult video.