January 23, 2019 Article

The Old Coot can’t wait.

By Merlin Lessler

I bought an RCA, “color” TV in 1968 at “Little Joe’s” in Elmira, NY. It cost $300, a virtual fortune at the time. Mad-Man-Dewey had the same set for ten dollars less, but I picked Little Joe because he specialized in electronics and was more than capable of making any repairs or adjustments it might need. This was the “good old days” before we turned into a throw-away society. Things broke; we fixed them or got them fixed. I was a high roller (Ha Ha), earning $128 a week, so I opted for the easy payment plan: $25 down and $5 a week. I plugged it in, connected it to our antenna, turned the combination On-Off-Volume switch to on and Presto! A color picture appeared, INSTANTLY! The TV had the highly desirable, “Instant On” feature. Little Joe told me that a small amount of electricity tricked into the picture tube and the circuit tubes, keeping them in a warmed-up state, even when the TV was turned off. You had to unplug it, if you wanted to stop the trickle.

A lot of things needed warming up in those days: radios, cars, stereo sets and old men. Not any longer. (Except for the old men.) Today’s electronic devices don’t have tubes that need to heat up before the sound or picture comes on, everything is solid state and snaps to attention the instant you turn them on. BUT here I am, 50 years later, with a TV, twice the size of that old RCA, yet I’m sitting in front of it at the moment and I have nothing to look at, except a notice that says, “Please wait!”

Wait for what? The cable is hooked up; the cable box is turned on; the TV is on and has a picture, otherwise, I wouldn’t see the “Please wait’” notice. Eventually, the waiting will be over, but it could take several minutes, unless I messed up, (or the system did; I’m never sure why this happens) and get the dreaded “Initializing the host platform” message. This usually stays on for a minute or two and then comes the “Acquiring initial application” notice. Several more minutes go by and finally comes, “Downloading initial application,” followed by the lie of the century, “Your TV will be right with you!” A circle appears with an 8 in the center. Then a 7, 6, 5,4, 3. You get excited. The end is near. But, it’s not! The “3” stays there for another five or ten minutes before a TV show finally materializes.

I should be used to this stuff by now. It’s that same “few minutes” that the airline pilot says you’ll have to wait before he can pull up to the gate and let you get off. Sometimes a pilot will say the wait will take 10 minutes, OR SO. It’s that “OR SO” that always gets you. Ten minutes OR SO, is never less than 20 minutes and can stretch to an hour or more. There are plenty of cases when passengers were held captive on a runway for several hours. Why they don’t revolt, take over the plane and deploy the emergency chutes proves how much we have been bullied by the TSA and the entire airline industry! They’ve turned us into sheep. If we insisted on humane treatment, we’d be arrested and put on the No-Fly list. I’m off the subject, as usual. I’ll get back to it, “In ten minutes, OR SO.”

Comments? Complaints? Send to mlessler7@gmail, or text to 607-972-6102

January 16, 2019 Article

The Old Coot is overcome.

By Merlin Lessler

Here we go again, fighting against human nature. We do it all the time. We do it with legislation. We do it with school rules, company rules and organization rules. We do it with politically correct speech. Make one misstep and the speech police pounce on you like vultures on a fresh carcass. It’s fun to watch these efforts, gives old coots like me a chuckle. We need chuckles, so it serves us well.

My latest chuckle came when I changed the kitchen garbage bag the other day. I pulled a new one out of the box and was immediately engulfed in an aromatic storm that transported me to a magical garden of lavender & sweet vanilla. It was a heady experience. I looked at the box and discovered the aroma was a “Patented odor neutralizer – a combination of Arm & Hammer odor control + Hefty strength.”

The Hefty people found a way to make garbage smell delightful, working against human nature, against hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that taught our brains to react to bad odors: rotten food, dead creatures and other dangerous materials. That “bad odor” reaction protected us from illness and disease. Not anymore! Now, the rotten smell has been replaced with the wonderful scent of lavender and sweet vanilla, at least in my kitchen. Take the garbage out when it gets ripe? Not on your life, the bad smell signal doesn’t make it to my brain. I feel more like doing a series of ballet leaps across the kitchen flour, so rich is the permeating blend of lavender and vanilla.

I feel sorry for the racoons, mice, skunks and other critters that have taken turns feasting at the garbage can on our back porch or the one securely sheltered in the garage. Now, there is nothing to draw them to the leftovers. The scent of lavender and sweet vanilla offers no lure to nourishment.

I had another point to make; I’m sure it was a good one, but I’m overcome with the heady scent from our trash bag. It washed away my line of thought. The assault on human nature has won another victory.  

Comments? Complaints? Send to – mlessler7@gmail.com or Text to – 607-972-6102

January 9, 2019 article

The Old Coot regrets losing his “mumble.”

By Merlin Lessler

When I was in 2nd grade, I had to leave the classroom for one hour each week, climb two flights of stairs to the library on the third floor and attend mumble class. They called it speech therapy, but not me. I knew the goal was to get me to stop mumbling. It only took a month or two, an eternity for a seven-year-old, but people no longer said to me, “Stop mumbling!” I didn’t know it then, but that mumble correcting therapy prevented me from a slew of employment opportunities. Mumblers rule the world. At least, the loud speaker world.

Been on a plane lately? One, with a chatty pilot who makes announcements that sound like, “We will be flying over Graphello Suniuite Deusourtto. Look out the siduaule windowen.” I have no idea what was said, what was mumbled, so I ask my wife, who has better listening skill. She says she has no idea either. We’re left to wonder, “Did an engine fail? Are we are going to make an emergency landing?” It’s even worse in the terminal. The loudspeaker blares a mumbled message. I all I get is the tail end, “At gate 16.” Should I go to gate 16? Has our gate changed? What?” I’m nervous enough as it is, having surrendered my one-inch, miniature Swiss Army Knife to a TSA (Nazi) agent.

 Now, even more nervous, because the flight might be delayed or cancelled. It added to my list of flying concerns, getting stuck three seats from the aisle and hit with a leg cramp, forcing me to swim over my seat mates to get to a place where I could “kick” it out. Or, that the guy next to me, hogging the arm rest, should have, but didn’t, pay for two seats to enclose his oversize frame, and worse than sitting next to Mister Humongous is that the plane will have to make an emergency landing. There are so many thoughts swamping my muddled brain that it cannot translate the mumble-speak coming through the PA system.  It seems to me, that most of the people on public address systems, never had to go to mumble class on the third floor in their elementary schools.

These mumblers are all over the place - in train stations - on subways, coming to life when the train stops, and the lights go out - at a charity event when the winning raffle ticket numbers are announced - on the phone, when talking to a call center rep. Maybe they didn’t skip speech therapy, maybe they weren’t mumblers and instead, learned their craft at mumbling college, where they learned the fine points of effective mumbling. It has to be. There are just too many of them out there.

Comments? Complaints?  Send to mlessler7@gmail.com Or, text to 607-972-6102  

January 2, 2019 Article

The Old Coot Can’t Find a Terlit!

By Merlin Lessler

The merchants in the Village of Owego are about to open a public restroom, in the “New” building on Front Street. (50 years from now we’ll still be calling it the “New” building, just like we call the Court Street Bridge the “New” bridge, though it’s been in place for more than a decade.  

But, back to the public rest room, it’s a vast improvement in a society that ignores the lack of public Terlits in this country. There aren’t any! At least when you need one. Public rest rooms are as scarce as proverbial hen’s teeth. Our government has turned its’ back on the problem. OK, they’ve thrown us a few bones, there are rest rooms along interstates highways, and sometimes we are allowed to use the facilities in municipal buildings, provided we go there on Monday through Friday, between nine and five, it isn’t a public holiday and we can make it through the security checkpoint with a nail clipper (or some other deadly weapon) in our pocket. But, for the most part, our elected officials have ignored the “Terlit” crisis.   

Actually, they haven’t just ignored it; they’ve exacerbated it. They’ve made nature’s call a crime. If there aren’t public “facilities” around and you get caught behind a bush, you will be ticketed. We’ve just gone through a state and federal election, yet not a single candidate mentioned the Terlit crisis. Politicians have strapped us in our cars, taken cell phones out of our hands, defaced all the products we buy with warning labels and are forcing our favorite restaurants to prepare food in politically correct cooking oil, but they stick their heads in the sand when we ask them, “Can I use the Terlit please?” Candidates promise all kinds of new programs, but not one word about what we’re supposed to do when we’ve had three cups of coffee and are walking around in a downtown area looking for a rest room. All levels of government have failed us: village, town, county, state and federal. “Go find a gas station,” they say.

It’s time to fight back, to tell the politicians to shut up about new programs, to get down to basics. Build us public terlits! Don’t make us go from store to store, begging to use an “employee only” rest room. I’m not optimistic that anything will be done, not even in the next presidential election cycle. It’s just not a problem that politicians are willing to take on. Who wants to be known as the “Terlit” president? We’ll just have to depend on the kindness of strangers until some smart entrepreneur comes along and figures out that there is money to be made, and a lot of it, by simply opening a chain of public Johns. In the meantime, I’ll keep asking, “Where’s the Terlit?”

Comments, complaints? E-mail to mlessler7@gmail.com. Or text to 607-972-6102