#502 Nickel a Nick

One of the coolest things about getting older is you begin to get that feeling of having been here before. “What goes around comes around,” that old phrase your grandparents used to trot out whenever you put on fashionable bold-colored Converse hightops, now seems to mean something entirely different. A lot more real than it did when the gramps were laughing through their gums. Sometimes things change but the position they occupy in our lives doesn’t. Like in relationships¾there always has to be one of the partners who’s more anal retentive than the other. Every set of roommates has an Oscar and a Felix. Two Feli can not survive. Clean that squeaky would suck all the oxygen out of air.
So it is with something I call analogous increments. Analogous increments are what salesmen use to persuade you to buy something now. And you ought to buy it now because it’s not that expensive. It used to be: “Why this baby cost less than a pack of cigarettes a day. That’s only 720 dollars a year.” The power of analogy is used to break down your defenses and point out that you are already spending that much of your budget on something that is relatively useless in the larger scheme of things. So why not buy the new relatively useless thing you’re being offered? You convince yourself you will give up the cigarettes and buy the big TV. But you don’t—you end up with both. And when the new credit card comes around to help you float your debt and it offers you free miles on a vacation you can’t afford either, you snatch it up. The new analogous increment of the early 21st Century is the fancy coffee drink. “Why, for the price of 2 lattes a day you could be driving this brand new Hyundai.” Cool. I suppose its fitting coffee replaced cigarettes as an analogous increment of value. It replaced them as an increment of addiction as well. I heard this guy at the club the other day, “Yeah, between coffee and steroids I was getting a little testy, so I had to cut back to one macchiato a day…”
America, ya gotta love it

#501 Numbers Game

Society and we parents have lost the capacity to draw a line in permanent ink. Maybe that’s why young people seem to crave tattoos. They want something they can depend on. This is a story about drawing the WASL line.
I hate the WASL. I hated that schools started teaching to the WASL. Even so, a lot of students screwed up the math/science part of it. The big threat was that if they didn’t pass the WASL, they couldn’t get out of high school. Now that so many kids have actually failed the WASL, the threat seems a little harsh. So now we waffle on the WASL. Maybe, some say, if we change the test we’ll get more kids out into our declining workforce. There is a shortage of workers, so it’s not like we can keep them out of the workforce and dependent on their parents for the next couple of years while they take remedial math.
Three things. One: They’ll be living off their parents anyhow. Two: The potential positions in the work force all require a good knowledge of math and science. And three: the community colleges manage to actually teach remedial math and science to those who decided to waste high school with social opportunities and sports.
What they really need is a more powerful incentive to learn math. My suggestion: The other day I was at an event where we gave out lottery scratch tickets as a prize. One ticket featured three rows of numbers that, if they could be added up to 7, 11, or 21 would result in winning big dollars. It was amazing how many young people managed to add up 3 numbers on the fly. So try this, WASL lottery. Learn the WASL math with scratch tickets instruction. Do this binomial equation, get big money. Kind of puts that “your lifetime income will be better if you learn math” up close and immediate. Because they already have a powerful incentive in the other direction. Some teenagers are looking for any excuse to keep living off their parents. It’s a simple math equation they all understand. For every mooch there’s an enabling coddle.
America, ya gotta love it

#500 Nibbles and Bits

There’s an old urban legend about Spam—the meat product, not the internet scourge. The legend is that Spam is much favored at those Polynesian islands where cannibalism once existed because it tastes like the meat of human. And here I thought it was because it didn’t spoil in the tropical heat. But it raises an interesting question. Does it? If you kind of like spam, like I do, does it mean that you are more inclined to cannibalism than, say, a wheat germ-gulping, kelp-flossing vegan?
Brief aside here. I’m never able to say vegan without thinking of that Star Trek series where all the different humanoid species with varying degrees of wrinkled forehead hung out at a space station. And it’s interesting that in all the episodes I remember of that show—which aren’t many because I’m even less of a trekkie than I am a cannibal— there were never any that actually dealt with cannibalism. Or even inter-humanoid snacking. And you would think that if you took the entire universe as opposed to, say, one small section of southern ocean on one small planet, you would be able to find at least one humanoid species that was up for a little cross-cultural buffet. Star Trek never even had anyone making the mistake of accidentally gobbling sentient chickens. And everything odd and foreign supposedly tastes like chicken.
Folks who eat gamey dear and bear swear by it. And love nothing better than plucking pellets out of a hindquarter of wild duck. So I suppose developing a taste for exotic human parts or spam is possible, and would make it hard to settle for relatively flavorless missionary cow. Still, depending on diet and all, I’d be willing to bet people taste pretty different from person to person. Corn-fed in Iowa or granola-fed on the coast. And forget about any form of human-eating when asparagus is in season. But Spam is always consistent. And, legends aside, it’s more popular in Appalachia than Micronesia. Because everyone knows Spam comes from the parts of the squirrel no one else wants.
America, ya gotta love it