They Just Don't Seem So Innocent...

Another Old Coot Marginalizing Himself

Forbes editor Rich Karlgaard had an interesting post the other day on his blog. He was at a hotel and sent out his pants for dry cleaning. Turns out, they sent him someone else's clean breeches. The dilemma was, he liked them much better than his own and thought about wearing them. You can go read the whole thread here if you want. My post today is about some Old Coot cluelessly admitting more stuff than he should in that comment thread. Here's his first comment:

Several items along this line.

I almost never buy my own clothes. Shirts, especially, simply show up hanging in my closet. Leather jackets. Blue jeans too. Even shoes. My wife shops.

I do get to go with her when good suits are involved, of course. But casual stuff...who cares? Knock yourself out, Baby.

There are three grown women in my household...In addition to my wife, our daughters who are 36 years old and 34 years old are unmarried, have their own homes in San Francisco and Chicago but visit their mother quite a lot. Especially when I am out of the country. The one in San Francisco seems to like our washer and dryer more than her own...free soap? I don't know.

Sometimes shirts, etc. that I find hanging in my closet really do not fit me at all. Way too big or entirely too small. I do not ask any questions about such matters. All sorts of possibilities come to mind...none of them worth talking about.

Accuse a grown woman of...what... exactly? There's three of them. I don't even have a 50-50 chance of guessing right.

They would each just look at me like I might have been saying something...but they have no idea what it could be.

When I take my shirts to the laundry (20 at once) from time to time I discover that an orphan has found its way into my lot. Hard to catch this with the white shirts...but the colored shirts...I can pretty much pick out the newcomers. If the shirt fits...shoot, wear it!

When we played football we threw our incredibly sweaty and foul tee-shirts (worn under the shoulder pads) into a canvas bin on wheels and walked to the showers...We simply took a clean one from the stack the next day on the way into the locker room.

So what? Some of you are squeemish about any of this? What were we saying last week about the "Wussification of America"?

For crying out loud!



Did you get what this Old Coot just said?

He said that in his household, consisting of his wife and two daughters, random men's shirts make frequent appearances.

Bear in mind, that as a financial blog, almost everyone who reads Digital Rules is a dude.

This guy has no clue how bad that admission makes him look. Do you think a bunch of married women get together at tea parties and glibly divulge, "You know, I find random bras and panties lying around the house...it's no big deal."

I THINK NOT! (at least outside France)

This situation reminds me of a frequent parley among the Neanderthals down in the trading pits of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Some guy would come in donning a hideous new shirt:

OtherTrader - [laughing] Yo, where the *blank* did you get that ugly shirt?

UglyShirtWearer - Out of YOUR closet this morning, *sshole!

If you don't get the comeback, I'll translate - It means he diddled your woman/wife and grabbed the shirt out of your closet on his way out.

Down in the pit, every joke was your-mother, your-wife, your-sister, etc. Just like 4th grade!

But the rule most of us young coots understood, is that you certainly don't go into a roomful of men, paint yourself as a cuckold and set yourself up for such well-deserved ball breaking.

Though I have a slight antagonistic relationship with this fossil, out of the kindness of my heart I swallowed all jokes this time. I have had some pretty acerbic exchanges with him; nonetheless the Old Coot is likable in an avuncular sort of way.

But then he opened the door some more. Here's a subsequent comment he posted:

My girls are drop-dead beautiful and bright. Really. Just like their mother, they simply own just about any man they get around.

The older one brings home these heavy hitter Silicon Valley engineer types and the occasional professional athlete. She now tells people she is 27 (instead of 36)...She's simply having too much fun.

The younger one in Chicago manages clinical studies inside one of the major Pharmaceutical houses...and there is a guy that we do know about now...she never let us meet any of her young men before (although her girlfriends always whispered to my wife that she had them scattered around the country...) so this might be serious. Good.

My own little woman is known to everyone as the Big Boss...I myself took a Vow of Poverty after the divorce (when that first one) dropped me to zero a very long time ago.

The Big Boss owns everything...literally. Including the pants she lets me wear.

Fries,

When I was dating girls in my own ill-spent youth I did notice that the easiest ones had the most-likely-to-take-a-human-life (again) fathers. When my daughters hit 16 I looked in the mirror and realized I was exactly that same way too (West Virginia breeding).

"Boy, let me explain to you how easy it is to turn a bull calf into a steer...if you got a razor blade and can count to two..."

Maybe that has been the problem all along. Thanks.



So, after blithely notifying the entire world that random dudes' clothes show up at his house, he goes on to elaborate lest anyone not fully understand.

One of his daughters simply has "too much fun" and the other has men "scattered around the country". Then, to boot, he compares himself to the fathers of all the "easiest" girls he's dated throughout his youth.

Talk about self-mutilation!

For the record, my daughter will certainly not be allowed to have any such "fun".

And if she does, I will be neither deluding myself about how flattering it is, nor blogging about it on the World Wide Web.

Furthermore, if I do devolve into an incontinent Old Coot myself, I am quite sure my kids will muzzle me.

As Will Durant has said - Silence is trebly golden after the age of sixty...

Indeed.

Another Marketing Misnomer

How can you possibly call a retirement home Sunrise Assisted Living?

Shouldn't it be more aptly named SUNSET Assisted Living?

Or, how about these more accurate names:

Final Inning Care

Last Lap Living

Grande Finale Nursing Home

The DNR House

???

I love how when these Baby Boomers outsource their filial responsibilities to a nursing home their justification is invariably, "Well, it's better for them to be around their peers..."

Peers?

It's better for your parents to spend their golden years with other doting parents who also have self-centered, irresponsible kids?

Fossils Can Boogie Too

I think this is called a "mashup". Someone dubbed the hip music over the square dancing.

It doesn't matter whether or not you think it's stupid - I FOUND IT FUNNY!!!

Old Coots - Aging Gracefully

Feeding Rats and Lawyers...

Some deranged "old coot" near me has adopted the neighborhood rats. No wonder the local egg rolls melt in my mouth.

According to Gruss and ISD, Hanron realized there was initially a rat issue in July 2005 when she hired a contractor to remedy the problem. When that work did not completely eradicate the rats, she started feeding the creatures because, as Gruss described her, she loves animals and taking care of others and “even agreed to feed me as a lawyer, if you can believe that.” (link)

My mother-in-law is also an inveterate "feeder" - but she restricts her bounty to humans.

She cooks for her neighbors. She cooks for her contractors (and their kids) and I also suspect she feeds her local garbage collectors. She has sneaked pancetta and prosciutto through customs on her way back from Italy (spraying the sniffing dogs with perfume to mask her smuggling). She has toted chicken soup as a carry-on halfway across the country to bring to her sick daughter. I maintain that she would feed Bin Laden if she showed up at her house hungry.

Marginalizing My Father

My father drives out fifty miles each way to my place once a week to spend time with his two grandkids and to "help" me in general (get work done, relax a bit, etc.) It's a win-win situation for all involved and I greatly appreciate his visits. But...

So today at 10:45am I watch him pull up to the curb. He's wearing shorts even though it's 59 degrees. It may have been 80 the other day, but wardrobe selection probably ought to be made based on current weather. It reminded me of when I worked at a golf course in Philadelphia. Without fail, the first few sunny days of spring saw tons of stupid kids (college, high school,...) show up at the course wearing shorts and freezing their *sses off. They'd come into the clubhouse at the turn, if not sooner, and ante up for a jacket to at least warm up half their bodies.

Why do Morons opt to guess the weather forecast when they could spend one second ascertaining what meteorologists have called for?

So my father is not only wearing shorts, but also a light blue jacket. I chided him,

CaptiousNut - "Dad, a good rule of thumb is that if you need to wear a jacket, then it's not a 'shorts' day."

Now my son usually drags Grandpa down into our basement where his cache of toys is. He makes his grandfather stay down there for hours on end. After my son's nap, he immediately demanded that Grandpa take him back down to his toys for round two of basement time.

Grandpa - No, no. It's too cold down there.

I usually try to stay detached when I have "help" and concentrate on losing money in the market, but today I could not ward off interjection. It's bad enough that Grandpa didn't dress warm enough to say, take my son out to the park, but apparently he didn't even dress warm enough to visit certain rooms within the house!

CaptiousNut - Why didn't you turn the space heater on if you were cold? It's right there in the middle of the room. It's been used almost everyday for the past six months.

Grandpa - [unintelligible grumbling]

Again, I try to disengage myself from the "help". Who could say no to such a trifling grandchild demand? They go down to the cold basement.

An hour later I hop down to check on them. The heater is still not on. My father is sitting in a chair right next to it. I holler,

CaptiousNut - Dad, why didn't you turn the heater on? What the heck do you think it's for if not to warm the room when needed?

Grandpa - [unintelligible grumbling]

Many horses won't even let you lead them to water - never mind get them to drink.

Filed under Jurassic Butterfly Effect.

By the way, I could go on for a while about Grandpa's idiosyncrasies. He is blog fodder incarnate.

I'll bet your family members are cut from the same exact cloth.

The Jurassic Butterfly Effect

Technically, the butterfly effect describes an outcome or process that is highly sensitive to initial conditions.

Metaphorically, it's been sold as a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia and causing a tornado here in the United States.

(Actually, there's also a pretty decent movie titled The Butterfly Effect, starring that mimbo Ashton Kutcher.)

The Jurassic Butterfly Effect is when one of your older relatives or friends does one little stupid or idiosyncratic thing that spirals into a much larger drama or crisis.

Take this weekend for example. I have been trying for years to persuade my parents to do numerous life-enhancing, labor-saving things: get an electronic transponder to pay auto tolls, get broadband internet (that took years), actually turn their cell phones on, get caller ID, get call-waiting,...

For a while now, I have been trying to get my parents to ante up the $9 per month for a DVR. They won't even contemplate it because, "The cable bill is already too high". That's it. There's not even a superficial consideration of weighing the tiny cost versus the considerable benefits.

So Friday, the weather forecast couldn't have been clearer. Massachusetts was going to have a lot of snow then it would turn to sleet and ice late at night and continue through the early morning. So twice that night, I went out and shoveled/snowplowed my driveway. Regular snow is easy to manage; icy snow is not.

Meanwhile, my father is sitting at his house watching the NCAA basketball games. Without a DVR, he was disinclined to step away from the TV and make a dent in his snow-filled driveway. The games ended around midnight, so he went to bed.

It just so happens that I had to drive out to my parents' house the next day. So after I spend all of ten minutes pushing the residual icy slush off my driveway, I ventured out to see my folks. As I pull up, I find my father at the end of his very large, unshoveled driveway.

CaptiousNut - Dad, why aren't you using the snowblower?

Dad - It broke.

CaptiousNut - How did it break?

Dad - [incoherent mumbling]

CaptiousNut - HOW DID IT BREAK?

Dad - [more incoherent mumbling]



I looked down, there was at least a foot of snow clear across his driveway; there was an inch of ice on top of it; and of course there were a couple of feet of compacted snow at the edge from the city's street snowplow. The snowblower broke because my father tried to use it on a mound of slushy, compacted, and ice-crusted snow.

My Dad has lived in this horrible state for over sixty years. He knows the drill. You clear the snow when it's light and fluffy - before the wet stuff. Wet snow of that magnitude is a disaster even when it doesn't break a snowblower. It's so heavy that each scoop of the shovel can only handle 6 inches of depth; it's really hard to throw the white stuff; AND the snow annoyingly sticks to the shovel. One has to bang it against a tree or something to release the slush.

So after clearing my own driveway (albeit the night before) and trekking the 50 miles out to my parents' house, I had to spend almost two hours helping my father dig out their extremely large driveway in my sneakers. My fragile back was shot two minutes into the drudgery.

In this case, the butterfly wing-flap is the boneheaded DVR cheapness. Not only would a mere $9 per month have enhanced their television viewing, it would have spared the $700 snowblower, not to mention both my physical and mental health (the real tornado).

My otherwise wonderful parents also have to bear in mind that the next time I am bringing their grandchildren out for a visit, if it snows the night before, I'll probably find some excuse to cancel the trip.

The Jurassic Butterfly Effect is a brilliant societal insight (if I do say so myself). I doubt there's ever been a meeting within my peerage, where the conversation hasn't turned to a narrative starting with, "You wouldn't believe what my Moronic parents did the other day..." Conforming to the theory, one little snowball always sets off an avalanche of inanity. During these sessions, nods of empathy abound; and most definitely someone will succeed in one-upping the story with a yarn of their own.

Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish could also pass as a title befitting this post but I prefer the fossil bashing angle.

My most recent indictment of the jurassic, Marginalizing Reflexive 'Old Coots', was a big driver of web traffic to my site.

I may have found my elusive niche!

Marginalizing Reflexive 'Old Coots'

As predicted, six inches (now nine) of snow have fallen today here in Boston - so what did every 'old' person in the Northeast do last night?

Well, they ran out and bought milk, bread, and eggs of course!

If you have never lived up here, you're probably not acquainted with this phenomenon. Every time snow is forecasted, everyone over the age of sixty dashes out to the supermarket to buy milk, bread, and eggs. I should have brought my camera last night to the store because I could have taken a pic of a completely empty bread isle. It looked like it had been looted by a bunch of high-carb dieting Katrina victims. Nonetheless, I found this illustrative pic on the web,



From whence did this custom emerge?

Apparently it was from the Blizzard of '78.

From Wikipedia,

The Blizzard of '78 eventually gave birth to a tradition in Southern New England known as the "bread and milk runs". This was because when frantic people went to the supermarket, all the bread and milk that the markets had were gone in a flash. Thus, some of the injuries incurred because there was a shortage of bread and milk.[citation needed] In one situation, a plane had to carry supplies of milk to Providence College because all the roads to Providence College (which also services Rhode Island College and La Salle Academy, a Catholic high school in the vicinity) were blocked by the snowfall. After the Blizzard of '78, it became a custom in regions of Massachusetts and Rhode Island that whenever a severe storm approached, such as a hurricane or a blizzard, most Bay Staters and Rhode Islanders jammed supermarkets to buy bread and milk, while the markets tried to keep up with demand.

God forbid we go a couple of days without milk, bread, and eggs!!!

Could we not just drink water and eat Spaghetti'Os for a day or two?

One issue I take with the Wiki entry is that the "bread and milk" run is not limited to Southern New England. I regularly saw decimated bread aisles when I lived in Center City, Philadelphia. Also my mother-in-law in New York needs to be counted among the afflicted; in fact her unapologetic bread run last night was the catalyst for this very post.

It's bad enough having to listen to weathermen hyperventilate about every impending snowstorm; as if March 2007 was the first time humanity was ever dealt a few snowflakes. These robotic, Pavlovian shopping trips only aggravate the inane alarmism. Guess what they are going to be eating all week?



French toast!!!

If the supermarkets were savvy, for each storm, they'd move a maple syrup display right next to the dairy or bread aisle.

Running to the store before a storm doesn't automatically make one a two-digit IQ-ed Moron, but it minimally exposes a person as a slave to custom and/or groupthink. It's been almost three decades since the Blizzard of 1978. Fifty-four deaths were blamed on that storm but I'll wager that since then, over the course of thirty years, even more people have died in car accidents on "bread and milk" runs.

Phenomena like this always remind me of what Seve Ballesteros said of his mother.

Seve, who has made millions playing professional golf, lamented that his poor mother, "...still lived in the past. All she does is run around the house turning lights off."

Devil's Advocate - Why are you always picking on the older folk; or as you call them 'fossils' and 'old coots'?

First of all, I Marginalize plenty of dumb kids as well. So you DA, and the hypersensitive dinosaurs need to relax.

Secondly, I have to pander to my base.

I know. Soon enough I too will become a jurassic old coot; my learning curve will inflect; and I'll also mutate into an incorrigible creature of habit.

But until then, I've got some Marginalizing to do.

UPDATE

After conversing with several geriatric members of my family, they all proudly confirmed that their "milk, bread, and eggs" runs have been a tradition since they were kids (1940s and 50s) So, as I suspected, Wikipedia is wrong in stating that the Blizzard of 1978 birthed the inanity.

Marginalizing the Jurassic

Alan Greenspan said the other day that the worst of the housing market was over.

Really Alan?

Let's see, does he have a track record on big market calls?

Remember his famous Irrational Exuberance speech in December 1996?

Well the stock market roared for over 4 more years, with the NASDAQ tripling in value. Thanks again for that untimely warning Alan.

It's a pathetic thing to watch old timers who just don't know when to hang it up. Is Rickey Henderson still playing in the farm leagues?

Another example would be Red Auerbach, patriarch of the Boston Celtics. I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that I am glad he is dead. It's not that I disliked him, but more so that I couldn't stand the baseless reverence he invoked. He was old, and washed up 20 years ago for crying out loud.

In 1989, he drafted a stiff from BYU, Michael Smith, hailed him as a Larry Bird on offense and promised he would be "taught defense".

When Coach Rick Pitino left the Celtics, walking away from $30 million bucks, Red begged him to stay and ride out the storm. Then a couple of years later, Red started bashing everything Pitino did. As soon as Pitino was gone, Red intervened and insisted on drafting Joe Forte over Tony Parker. Forte is out of the league while Parker has a couple of championship rings and a Desperate Housewife.



Ninety percent of these old guys age like bananas instead of fine wine. Harry Truman became a nutjob in his dotage. Jimmy Carter is another trenchant example though it's debatable how sane he was to begin with. Just wait ten years and see how bonkers Al Gore and Bill Clinton become.

Everyone gets a little whacky when they age. Think about your own parents. But certain species really go off the deep end like the 60s hippies who became journalists and college professors. Their psychological demise is palpable over just the last few years. Ten years ago the New York Times defended a white student who called a bunch of black girls "water buffalo". Oh yeah, and they were also in favor of a $0 minimum wage. Can you stretch your imagination enough to see that in today's paper?

I certainly can't.

I have an undeveloped theory that people who cling to dehumanizing ideologies are most apt to go cuckoo long before the Grim Reaper visits. Imagine you are Al Gore and every SUV (not in your entourage) that drives by makes your nerves frayed? How long can your sanity survive?

Are your parents sullen hippy socialists? Maybe you should send them to Sunset Hall, a rest home for Commi's.



Of course sub-species exist. Pathetic football jocks Al Bundy and Biff Loman could not let go of their high school glory days. I am sure everyone has a couple of real life analogues in their own social circles. They are the ones that push their kids the most at sports, yell the loudest at games, and become fanatical youth coaches themselves. Don't get me wrong, I love sports, particularly basketball. But it's really sad every year to see a fresh-faced 24 year old as the new 5th assistant for Mike Krzyzewski, a guy whom you recognize as a recent Duke player himself. These young guys have the whole world in front of them but choose to keep playing a game which has already consumed twenty years of their precious life.



What makes these fossils disproportionately nuts is the descent from their pedestals. They were once on top of the world and haven't since recalibrated their egos. Dan Rather used to be "the man", now he's "the loser" embarrassing himself with every movement of his lips. Another problem for the dinosaurs is the present-day ubiquity of cameras. Think Michael Richards (though like Jimmy Carter, he likely started a few cards short of a full deck.)

I could easily list here at least 50 people from the sports world: Brett Favre, Joe Paterno, thrice retiring Michael Jordan, Joe Montana on the Kansas City Chiefs, Arnold Palmer, etc.

How many thousands of high school coaches belong in this category? Once hired, these guys think it's for life.

Speaking of life tenure, do you know how many Supreme Court justices have held on while absolute invalids? Mark Levin itemized the long list in his book. These guys should serve twenty year terms and that's it.

I was talking to an older guy (65?) about Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, I casually mentioned his age of 83. My older acquaintance interrupted me and exclaimed that he didn't think octogenarians should be in charge of ANYTHING.

Amen to that.

It's one thing to offer a wealth of experience (Stevens worked for Eisenhower) but if your memory is shot, it's really beside the point.

I fully expect my kids to email me this post, many times, starting in my pre-dotage.