Items

—1) “Unauthorized charger:”
-Every night, before we go to bed, I charge up our two cellphones.
Our cellphones, Motorola RAZRs from Verizon, are now about two years old, which makes them outta date in the current frenzied cellphone market.
But they’re fine for what I want to do, which is to no longer be tied to the landline network.
Easy to use too; large keyboard buttons, a bright display, and large display numbers.
I sometimes wish the display was brighter still, more visible outside.
I have to go by memory and feel, or find shade.
The phonebook I have to see; although I suppose I could use voice commands.
But that would require set-up, and I don’t have all day.
And I ain’t always jawing with just a couple contacts.
I don’t need voice-commands.
Last year a lady unholstered her cellphone in the dark on the tour-bus returning from our railfan excursion in central Pennsylvania.
The display was so bright she was illuminating the interior of the bus.
My cellphone is charged, so I set about charging Linda’s phone. Plug charger into phone side-port, and then the outlet.
I returned an hour-or-two later and looked at Linda’s display for “charge complete.”
But what it said was “unauthorized charger.”
“WHAT?”
This is the same charger we got with the phones.
It’s the Motorola charger.
We’ve used it almost two years!
I unplugged it and plugged it in again.
“Charging battery.”
Who programs these things?

—2) Extreme Home Mayhem:
-ABC’s “Extreme Home Makeover” invaded nearby Geneva to do a project.
The local TV-news is making hay of it, as is the mighty Mezz.
There’s Pennington leaping out his luxo-coach, yelling into his portable bullhorn.
“Hellooooooo Geneva!” he screams.
Tearful homeowners quiver and shake.
Manna from Heaven.
The homeowner is a retired boxer who broke his back, got his degree as a social-worker, and set up a free boxing program for troubled youth.
I guess he lives in a 150-year-old house (tonight, Wednesday, August 20, 2008, it was 200), and runs his program in it.
So Pennington and his merry mayhem makers are gonna demolish the house and build another.
Could they ever do otherwise, like repair the house instead of demolishing it?
A 150-year-old house is a treasure; although I’m sure it needs a lotta work.
I can just imagine what they’d do with the Stone-Tolan House, the oldest house in Rochester, built about 1790. BRING IN THE BIG-BOY’S TOYS!
“Extreme Home Makeover” is “This Old House” Americanized; bombast, violence and destruction. I remember them once lassoing a house to a monster-truck, and supposedly the monster-truck was gonna pull the house off its foundation.
Worked, sort of......
Except the house fell apart when the lasso broke.
No matter; we got mayhem on video — good for ratings in NASCAR-land. GIT-R-DUN!
I also remember them strafing a house with the Blue Angels. Napalmed it.
The front page of the mighty Mezz had a picture of one of Pennington’s languorously lipped, long-legged lithesome lassies walking languidly with a child of the homeowner. (Lassie was wearing short-shorts and cowboy boots.)
Another mega-cleavage buxom young tart who didn’t make it in Hollywood, so gravitated to “Extreme Home Makeover.”
And the TV-news interviewed that disgusting Moloney decorator dork: yada yada yada yada. I hope they can rein that guy in, so he doesn’t turn a bedroom into a sweat-stained boxing-ring.
In the words of the so-called “Hasidic Jew:” “How do ya ever pay the taxes on such an extravagance? I bet their assessment triples.”
And as my wife says: “How do ya ever clean such a thing? They turned a bedroom into a piano!”

—3) “We won’t conscience bullying!”
-There ya have it, Dr. Lindley; the whole reason I can’t make any sense of “International Relations.”
Here we have the premier Iraq bully saying he won’t accept bullying by the Russians in Georgia.

RE: “Railfan excursion in central Pennsylvania......” —In June of 2007 we did a dinner-train excursion on the Tioga Central Railway (a shortline operator on the old New York Central Williamsport branch in central Pennsylvania) with the Rochester Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. The NRHS is nation-wide. We went on a tour-bus. I’ve been a railfan all my life.

“Linda” is my wife of 40+ years.

“Geneva” is a large town (actually a city) east of where we live. It’s the next large town after Canandaigua.

The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over two years ago. Best job I ever had.

“Hasidic-Jew” is L. David Wheeler, an editor at the Messenger newspaper. —Upon seeing a photograph of Wheeler, my ever-tolerant sister in south Floridy declared he looked like a Hasidic Jew.

“Dr. Lindley” was the professor of my “International Relations” course at Houghton College. She gave me a “B.” —I was always complaining to her that the course “made no sense.”I graduated Houghton College in western New York in 1966 with a BA degree. I’ve never regretted it. Houghton is a religious liberal-arts college. Wheeler was also a Houghton grad (‘91).