Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions by Linda M Au Page A

dinner.)
    • Never pray for
patience.
    • I opened a bag of corn
chips today and noticed a small logo in the lower right corner of
the bag: “Official Snack of Minor League Baseball.” Take note of
that: Minor League. Somehow this bag of yummy snack food didn’t make it to the
Show. What does this say about the chips?
    • Ever notice that clichés
regarding work involve torture-chamber levels of pain? Putting your
nose to the grindstone. Working your fingers to the bone. It’s a
good thing we don’t realize as kids that this stuff is far closer
to literal than any of us want to admit. We’d have thrown ourselves
off bridges the first chance we got.
    • I don’t care how fast
you want it: Never, ever pray for patience.
    • During one week, I see a
news story about a study saying that coffee is good for you. The
next week, a new study asserts that coffee is bad for you. So, just
to be safe, I drink coffee every other week.
    • There’s something about
Velveeta that creeps me out a little bit. My husband may have grown
up with the stuff and may indeed have fond memories of eating it as
a child, but anything called “processed cheese food product” that
can also be branded with a half-life just shouldn’t be
ingested.
    • I’m serious: Don’t pray for patience. It’s a
trick.
     
     

Stuff in My Car That Doesn’t Work
     
    It’s been another of those muggy weeks here in
western Pennsylvania where I become a hermit in my house, enjoying
the constant 74 degrees and low humidity of our central air. I turn
into a wuss unable to leave the house to do anything unnecessary.
Doesn’t help that the air conditioning in my car doesn’t really do
much more than cool off my knees and my right elbow because the
only cold air I feel seeps out of the vents and only the body parts
in a three-inch radius from a vent get cooled off. And frankly,
driving with my face hunched down in front of a side vent really
wouldn’t do much for my driving record. Not really.
    Where was I? Oh yeah.
    We’re moving a big bookcase into the house from our
storage facility, so I may get the rest of my books in here, and
also the rest of my vinyl record albums. Yes, kids, you don’t
remember such things, but we old fogeys played vinyl record albums
instead of CDs.
    It’s a weird thought that none of my now-grown
children know how to operate a turntable. I’m not saying I miss
vinyl, despite the many things I’ve read about how compromised CD
sound is compared to vinyl. I certainly don’t miss playing songs in
a different order by lifting up the needle at the end of one song
and physically placing it on the beginning of the song you want to
hear next (which may have entailed flipping over the album first
and holding in that little metal thingy at the top of the spindle
so the album would fall all the way down and sit flat on the
turntable). And I certainly don’t miss hearing that scraping sound
of a needle scoring its way across the album, leaving a nice
scratch in its wake that usually meant hearing a skip at that
precise point in the song every time you played it from then
on.
    And none of us would have been able to play vinyl
albums in our cars like we can with CDs and now iPods. Can you
picture trying to shove a big ol’ twelve-inch album into a huge
slot in your dashboard, which would have taken up the entire width
of the car? Instead, we’d all still be stuck playing cassettes in
the car, hitting FF or REW in a vain attempt to skip songs on
albums we hate without causing traffic accidents.
    Then again, in my case, even that would be a step up.
Over a year ago my husband got me a CD player for my car. (I’m
driving a ‘92 Corsica, made before technology was invented.) I was
thrilled to replace my tape deck, and except for the fact that it
apparently had no skip protection whatsoever, especially for burned
CDs (“Don’t breathe, Jeremy, or it’ll skip over every three seconds
of your favorite Good Charlotte song”), I was