Saturday, November 26, 2016

November 23, 2016 Article

The Old Coot was at the zoo.
By Merlin Lessler

I was at the zoo the other day. I go to zoos every once in a while. The animals fascinate me. This one was in Ormond Beach, Florida; Kenny and Annie were the scheduled keepers that afternoon, coming in to replace Diana, who was on the early shift. There is a long, waist high barrier separating the keepers from an odd looking, and acting, assortment of bipeds. Kenny and Annie took turns approaching each specimen to provide liquid and solid nourishment, ego stroking and other small services to keep the subjects happy and under control. It’s a difficult job; you never know when one of the specimens will go ballistic and start a ruckus. It happens infrequently, but it happens.

Of course, I wasn’t really in a zoo. I was at a bar. The Charlie Horse Restaurant on Atlantic Avenue, a short hop north of Daytona Beach. Marcia and I go there once a week when we’re in the area to escape the cold north. We sit at the bar, have a beer or a glass of wine, and eat dinner. It’s a very busy place; Kenny and Annie go 100 miles an hour, handling drink orders for a large bar crowd and an adjacent dining room. I remarked to Kenny one night that watching him was like watching a caged specimen in a zoo, as he ran back and forth preparing drinks, taking meal orders, working the register, changing kegs, serving meals to people at the bar and handling a pretty active take-out crowd. 

That’s the night I learned that I really was in a zoo, but had it wrong. Kenny responded to my observation, while down on his knees changing the third keg of the night. He said,  “You are right. It is a zoo, but you have it backwards. The specimens are on your side of the counter. Watch the bar crowd in the mirror for a few minutes and you’ll see what I mean.”

It didn’t take long; he was absolutely right – I had a clear view of a long parade of jackasses (myself included), blowhards and boisterous, demanding bipeds, ordering drinks and meals and picking up take out orders while conversing about the world’s problems and coming up with idiotic solutions.  The mirror didn’t lie; the animals were on my side of the bar.

It’s like that in every place a counter is lined with bar stools. Once you come to the realization that you’re an attraction in a zoo, you can’t help but be a little embarrassed and modify your behavior. Which is why this article is being published. It’s a public service. Be a good specimen; the zookeepers are watching you.  


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Saturday, November 19, 2016

November 16, 2016 Article

The Old Coot is not100%!
By Merlin Lessler

This article is 83 & 41/100 percent factual. Which is quite high for me; I usually stretch the truth and bend the facts more than that to fit my opinion. Most old coots do this to some degree, but nowhere near as flagrantly as politicians and corporate marketing executives. We’re lily white compared to those masters of deception.

Take the marketing executive that came up with the ad campaign for Zicam. It claims that people who use Zicam at the first sign of a cold will reduce their symptoms by 45%. The stuff works to some degree, as does any product with zinc as a prime ingredient. But, 45%? That’s just pure fiction (in my old coot opinion, which is why I lowered my “factual” score by 16 & 59/100 percent). How do you measure 45% less cold symptoms? Count the number of times a Zicam user sneezes and compare it to a non-user? Count the number of tissues used over the duration of a cold? There is no scientifically accurate mechanism to make a claim as specific as 45%. The marketing staff made it up, cleverly selecting a specific number to make the assertion sound credible. It is a clever ploy, much more effective than saying, “Your cold symptoms will be reduced.” (Now comes my 2nd favorite, and overused, old coot reaction.)  “Bull!”


How about the Ivory Soap people? They’ve claimed their soap to be 99 and 44/100 % pure since 1895.  Pure what? The chemical lab that analyzed the soap determined that 99 & 44/100 % of the ingredients were fatty acids and alkali; only a small fraction consisted of other materials. Thus, the claim of 99 & 44/100 % pure? If you define pure as fatty acids and alkalis. Not my definition of purity. But, it made good ad copy, and is still in play 121 years later.

Ivory’s,“It floats,” ad campaign has an interesting history as well. A worker in the factory forgot to turn off a mixing machine and whipped in too much air. The company decided to sell the “ruined batch” of soap anyhow and pretend it was OK. They got letters! Customers loved this floating soap. They didn’t have to fish around in the bathtub for a sunken bar. I don’t know if the worker got a bonus, but his mistake became the standard operating procedure and kicked off the “It floats” campaign in 1895.

And people wonder why old coots like me are such skeptics. We’re not skeptical; we’re realistic. We know when we’re being fed pabulum by the media, the politicians and the marketing campaigns of big corporations. Especially, the pharmaceutical companies that won’t be happy until every person in this country is ingesting a costly collection of medicines on a daily basis. From cradle to grave! Thus ends my 83 & 41/100 percent factual rant of the week. And, a warning, “Beware of ads that use percentages in their claims (and many do). They are always pure BULL!” 


Comments and complaints can be sent to – mlessler7@gmail.com

Saturday, November 12, 2016

November 9, 2016 Article

The Old Coot Doesn’t Want to Know!
By Merlin Lessler

When you’re a kid you want to know everything. “Why is the sky blue? How do airplanes fly? Why? Why? Why?” Not true when you are an old coot. You don’t want to know anything. Anything new that is. “What kind of gas mileage do you get on that?” someone will ask me, pointing to my two-seater at the gas pump. “I don’t know,” I reply; (“I don’t want to know!” I say to myself. I’m sure it would be disappointing). When I was young and wanted to know everything I checked the mileage every time I filled-up. It was always less than I hoped for. It was a downer. I finally gave it up. If someone persists in asking, I tell them’ “It gets forty miles to the gallon, but I haven’t checked it lately,” They don’t hear me say under my breath, “I never check it.”

I live in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” world. It’s nice here. You should try it. What’s the weather supposed to be this weekend? I don’t’ know. I don’t want to know. I’ll be able to adapt to it; I’ve done it for more than 70 years; our species has done it for hundreds of thousands of years. I avoid weather forecasts. They’re wrong a lot of the time, at least the ones five days in advance. People cancel events on a bad forecast - a snowstorm that misses us - a thunderstorm that mysteriously never materializes. Why dread things in advance? Especially if there is a good chance the prediction will never come true.

Now, there is a new forecast mechanism under development. It won’t predict the weather; it is supposed to measure how well the hippocampus (hippocampi, to be accurate, since there are two) sections in our brain are functioning. It’s an important mechanism, dealing with short-term memory, among other things. If it gets messed up, we start forgetting what we are doing, or are about to do. That, “What did I come into the kitchen to get,” sort of thing. Of course our hippocampi get messed up all through our lives. We overload those portions of our brains when we try to do, or think about, too many things at one time. The portals are narrow, and just like traffic that backs up on the highway when three lanes get compressed into two, so do the short term memory lanes in our brain.

This new forecasting mechanism will continuously monitor our hippocampi functionality using an App on a smart phone or a wristband device. It will predict that we are headed for Alzheimer’s or some other senility affliction. We’ll know, but since there is no cure, why go to all the trouble to measure it and give ourselves a bleak view of the future, ruining our present.

Us old coots don’t need a device to measure this; we do it all the time, have been at it since we first noticed memory lapses in our early 50’s. Every occurrence sent us into a panic. “Am I losing it?” We’d ask ourselves. Finally, we settled in and accepted the truth; we are deteriorating, physically and mentally. In addition, we have a legion of people that monitor our failing memories: spouses, children, grandchildren, neighbors, strangers and the severest and most brutal of all, our friends. Who, love nothing better than to witness a fellow old coot make a mental misstep and pounce on it. It’s a, “Better him than me,” kind of thing, until it’s our turn in the barrel.

We know we’re headed deeper into the murk. The science guys can keep their monitoring apps and wristband devices. When they find a cure for the defect they are monitoring they can come around and try to sell us the mechanisms. We won’t buy them, but they can try. We’ll respond with our 3rd most favorite “old coot” reply, “Leave me alone!”

Complaints? Comments? Send to mlessler7@gmail.com

Saturday, November 5, 2016

November 2, 2016 Article

The Old Coot makes his mark.
By Merlin Lessler

To dog-ear a book or not? That is the question. If the book is from the library or borrowed from a friend, there is only one answer, “No!” But, if you own the book, you might have to wrestle with the question. I did, and now my books contain a series of dog-eared pages. You can easily see where I folded over the corner to mark my place. The book also contains a scattering of notes with a large concentration on the first page. That’s where I keep a list of the characters in the story and a short description to help me remember who is who, “Matilda – the lady down the street with the Great Dane,” that sort of thing. I keep forgetting because I usually have several books going at the same time. I switch back and forth. I desperately need a list of characters. 

I never used to dog-ear or write notes on the pages of a book. The stern librarians of my youth, who scolded me so often for minor “library” infractions, made me afraid to. I still harbor a fear of librarians when I enter their kingdoms (except for Linda Williams). When I turn in a book after the due date, I pay the fine with trepidation. Even though today’s librarians are friendly, welcoming and helpful, it doesn’t matter; my fear is too deeply ingrained. I attribute most of it to the two librarians who patrolled the aisles in my high school library. Their persona was that of drill instructors at a Marine recruit training camp. The frowns with which they glared down at me from an elevated command center haunt me to this day. So does the memory of those steely fingers that pinched my ears when I got caught from behind when talking above a whisper.

In spite of that fear (and guilt) I decided to make my books my own. Not only do I dog-ear the pages and jot notes inside, I also sign my name when I finish reading, the date and a rating (on a scale of 1 to 10). I started the date and rating thing when I discovered I could reread a book after about five years and it would be as though I never read it. When I read a book a second or third time (those with a 9 or 10 rating), I appreciate that I don’t have to recreate a character list. I don’t know why authors or publishers don’t provide this, or a map, when the story moves all over the landscape. My rating system is not as sophisticated as the New York Time’s Best Seller List or Oprah’s recommendations, but it serves me well. 

And, why not make books your own, especially considering how much they cost today and how little they are worth a few years hence. It’s a shock when you see a book you paid $27 for now being sold for a dollar or two. I fought the war and the dog-ears won; I make a book my own. How about you? 


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