The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration takes the loveliest photos of our doom.
11/30/23
Midnight marks the end of Florida’s hurricane season (…and the crowd goes wild!). To the rest of the United States, this season is known as the Atlantic hurricane season. But come on…. Which location gets sucker punched more than any other during hurricane season? It’s where I’m sitting right now. Florida is almost parallel to the Cape Verde Islands where hurricanes form off the African coast.
Even though hurricanes can form in the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico, late in the hurricane season more of them form near the Cape Verde Islands. And like much of the world’s tourists, once they decide they’d like to travel, they head straight to Disney to see what the big deal is all about.
So, if you’ve ever wondered why there are so many “Florida Man” stories, it’s because Floridians have the best weather (it’s going to be 83 degrees tomorrow) and weather that wants to kill you. Being caught between those two extremes is bound to make people a little nuts.
So, am I counting down the minutes until midnight? No, because, of course, hurricanes have also been known to form outside of hurricane season (June to November). In fact, there’s a 2 percent chance Florida could still see a hurricane this year (so, you’re saying there’s a chance).
For now, the season ends as one of the busiest on record. Twenty named storms, including seven hurricanes, came to life, which is the fourth highest total in a single year since 1950. Fortunately, most of those storms veered into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
But, because of the warming of the oceans, forecasters say there’s “high potential” for an even more active hurricane season in 2024. Gee, thanks global warming. So, I guess that means that I’ll be writing my blog under water next year.
Today is C.S. Lewis’ birthday, which means there was no way I was going to pass up the opportunity to wax poetic about him. Most everyone knows his most famous work, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950, the first of seven children’s fantasy books he wrote collectively called The Chronicles of Narnia. Reading those books changed my life.
Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings) were close friends with similar imaginations. But my childhood was shaped by Lewis alone. I cried when Aslan the lion was killed. Then I cried again when he was resurrected. Even as a Catholic school student, I missed the parallels between Aslan and Jesus. I was just so swept up by the story, by the school-age characters whose shoes I imagined myself walking in, and by the ultimate victory of good over evil.
What an emotional rollercoaster that book was! None of the other books in the series were its equal. Then I set the book down and grew up.
When I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe again in my adulthood, I wondered if I was reading an abridged edition. The book was so much shorter than I remembered. Where was the epic tale that had ravaged my heart and soul?
As an adult, I was familiar with the biblical allusions. It was so obvious that he was writing about Christianity. But Lewis hadn’t set out to deceive anyone. The story came from the wellspring of his faith. I wanted to know more about him. But more importantly, I wanted to read what he had to say about God.
Ten years after he published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis lost his wife to bone cancer. In his book A Grief Observed (published in 1961), he writes about mourning and how faith can survive it. The book helped inspire a TV movie and a stage play, Shadowlands, and an Oscar-nominated 1993 film of the same name, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
The text of A Grief Observed is comprised entirely of entries from Lewis’ private journals. After reading the book, I gained a new appreciation for C.S. Lewis. I was awed all over again. I recommend reading as much about your favorite authors as you can. It’s worth the investment.
But my love for literature goes hand in hand with my love for comedy. So, let me close with my favorite SNL video, an homage they did to The Chronicles of Narnia called “Lazy Sunday.” Happy birthday, C.S. Lewis.
Go to Google. Type “funny travel tales” in the search field. Hit enter. What do you see? Funnytraveltales.com is number one in your search results, right? It doesn’t matter if you do it on your phone or on your desktop computer. The results are the same (not every day, but today I’m top banana in both mobile and nonmobile device searches). So, where’s my cookie?
Hello? Anyone out there? I’d like to speak to whomever is in charge of the internet, please. Isn’t someone supposed to interview me now, you know, to discuss the secrets of my success?
Or am I supposed to play it humble? Wiser men than me have spoken about the merits of being satisfied with a job well done. Two quotes that stand out are “Work is its own reward” (Arthur Conan Doyle) and “The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.” (Jonas Salk)
So, no parade then?
It turns out that being number one in a Google search is more of a prestige thing. Since I started my blog in June 2022, I’ve been on top of the search results plenty of times. Sometimes I’m second. Sometimes I’m third. It just depends on whose generating the most new content.
I remember Googling my blog in its fledgling days. I wasn’t even on the first page. But a daily blog is going to garner some attention just from the volume of words used, and not just any words: keywords.
One of the keys to getting your content to the first page of Google search results is to invest significant time and effort in doing keyword research. You have to use the words that people are searching for, in your titles, in your subtitles, throughout your text. That’s called search engine optimization (SEO). Specifically, you need to identify keywords that your target audience is searching online for. I talk about travel all the time, so that always gives me a decent shot of exposure.
But this isn’t one of those articles that’s going to promise you the keys to the kingdom. In fact, doing a search for that kind of article is going to uncover a million copycats writing about the same topic for the very purpose of getting the most hits. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is only going to speed up the business of search results and the tracking of consumer patterns. In fact, just typing “Google search results” in Google this morning generated a phone call from a Google marketer shortly thereafter.
I’m not motivated by the business of writing, at least not for this blog. I write for fun. I hate to say it, but the popularity of my blog has always been secondary to the license to say what I want. I’ll take popularity if someone is offering it, but being number one isn’t important to me. It might’ve been at the beginning when everything was so experimental (that’s how I view my blog most of the time, as one big experiment), but I’ve gained a lot of perspective in the year and a half since I’ve been doing this.
Maybe those wise men who said work is its own reward were onto something. If so, I better get back to it. Tomorrow’s blog isn’t going to write itself.
I was trying to catch up on some TV-watching last night…. Check that. I should’ve said “this morning” because it was well beyond midnight when I turned on the TV, which is the long way of saying that my show, a sword-and-sorcery program called The Wheel of Time, finished late, a fact that I was reminded of when the phone rang urgently at seven this morning.
Donna and I had promised to let the bug guy into a house we’re watching for a friend. So, off we rushed to let the exterminator in, a pleasant man who shared his knowledge about the best rat traps to get. Anyway, we drove around and around (that’s why they call it the circle of life, right?), and then we were back home. The entire trip took less than an hour. That’s when it hit me.
The wakefulness didn’t take. I was still sluggish. I couldn’t start my day in that condition. So, I marched into the bedroom and deep dived back into bed fully dressed. For all I know, I’m still there catching 40 winks.
By the way, did you know that we have the Brits to thank for the phrase “forty winks”? The expression can be traced back to Dr. William Kitchiner’s 1821 self-help guide, The Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life.
He said: “A Forty Winks Nap,” in a[n] horizontal posture, is the best preparative for any extraordinary exertion of either.”
(Could the dude sound any more British?)
The problem is that he fails to define the length of a wink. So, the lesson here is, if you want to make a name for yourself in science, don’t let the lack of a scientific premise hold you back. Make as many utterly nonsensical statements about your subject matter as you want, then hope for the best.
But Dr. Kitchiner was almost certainly on the money when he referenced the brain’s amazing ability to augment health while you sleep. In fact, your brain and body stay remarkably active while you sleep. That’s when the toxins are cleansed from your brain.
Hmm. I do feel a scrubbing sensation behind my eyebrows. Perhaps I’m still in bed, and this is all a dream.
Almost every type of tissue and system in the body is affected by sleep, from the brain, the heart, and the lungs to metabolism, immune function, mood, and disease resistance. And the lack of sleep increases the risk of disorders like high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, and obesity.
I don’t need to hear anymore. Sleep good. Lack of sleep bad.
So, why am I thinking about rats all of a sudden? How did those guys get in my brain?
It turns out that if you are mentally preoccupied with a specific person, place, object, or rodent right before you go to sleep, you tend to dream about them? This is the result of your unconscious mind continuing to process the last thing you thought about before you fell asleep. Which means you can actually manipulate your brain into generating nice dreams simply by thinking hard about a desired subject right before you close your eyes.
Just think of your brain as a TV remote, and you can dream about whatever programming you select. Just don’t fall asleep with the remote in your lap after a conversation with the bug guy.
Is there something crawling on my leg? Gee, I hope this is a dream.
Many have compared Black Friday to the zombie apocalypse. I wonder why.
11/24/23
As I searched the internet to find a good meme to use for today’s post, I discovered that Black Friday zombie memes were very popular. Too popular. Anyone who knows me knows I love monster and sci-fi movies. So, rather than select a zombie graphic, and besmirch the reputation of my beloved zombies, I went with a more generic image.
So, what’s today’s fuss all about? The term “Black Friday” originated in the 1950s and refers to shopping the day after Thanksgiving. That’s when police in Philadelphia complained about an influx of people coming to the city to shop the day after Thanksgiving. They called it a “Black Friday” because they had to work crowd control. But it soon lost that negative connotation and gained a new negative connotation in the ’70s and ’80s.
That’s when TV stations began showing us footage of shoppers mobbing their favorite stores at the crack of dawn and trampling the neighbors they’d just broken bread with the day before. It was chaos, and marketers eventually got the message. Maybe shoppers would prefer NOT to reenact Lord of the Flies every day after Thanksgiving. Maybe they’d prefer to roll out of bed at a decent hour, pour themselves some coffee, skip the lines, and browse the internet for rock-bottom prices. As a result of that thinking, the retail landscape changed in 2005. That was the year Cyber Monday was born.
Cybor Monday is the Monday after Thanksgiving, and soon after its inception, it became the most popular shopping day of the year. But the dominance of Cyber Monday didn’t last long. Not to be forgotten, Black Friday fired back with their own online sales. Then Cyber Monday became Cyber Week. Finally, Black Friday became Black November, becoming a monthlong savings event.
In 2019, for the first time ever, Black Friday topped Cyber Monday as the busiest day for online shopping. And that’s where we’ve been ever since. Whew. Can’t we all just get along?
So, does that mean that Black Friday has calmed down, that there are no more fights in the aisles, that chaos doesn’t reign supreme in the big box store parking lots?
I wouldn’t know. I’m not a shopper. I’d rather stay at home, munch on my Thanksgiving leftovers, and watch some horror and sci-fi movies. Sound good to you?
I’m taking the day off to celebrate. I hope each and every one of you has the opportunity to do the same. Hardships will always be with us. So, let’s not compound our woes by forgetting to give thanks for all the things we should be grateful for.
When my father blessed the table, he never failed to ask God to give to those who have nothing. I ask you to do the same.
This parent snuck into her kid’s school and attended all the classes. Why?
11/22/23
My wife Donna has always been an involved parent. When Leah and Bradley went to school, she knew their schedules, she knew their teachers, she knew who they hung out with. But there were also times when the dials on her parental controls were turned up too high. For example, if she texted her kids in the middle of the day and they didn’t comply, she’d think nothing of driving to their school to check on them. But she never tried to criminally trespass.
Two years after posing as her 13-year-old daughter at school, a 30-year-old Texas mom was sentenced this week to six months of probation, 100 hours of community service, and a $700 probated fine. The mom recorded her exploits and posted them to social media, stating that she was trying to make a point by showing how easy it is for an adult to enter the campus.
Sounds like her plan to embarrass school security might’ve backfired. Did her 13-year-old daughter impersonate her when the case went to trial? I bet not. So, now who’s more mature, mom?
Are you shaking your head like me? Boy, if I had a dime for every social media stunt that resulted in an arrest I’d… I don’t know. I suppose I’d make a social media video of me counting all my dimes.
Supposedly, the mom attended her daughter’s classes wearing a hoodie, a mask, and thick, black glasses. She said she greeted staff members, ate lunch without her mask on, and made it to the last period before anyone noticed she was not in fact her daughter. (Let me guess: Your daughter is not one of the popular kids.) She even greeted the principal.
Wait a second. Would that principal’s name happen to be Mr. Weatherbee? Perhaps a motivation for the crime can finally be deduced. Is it possible that a certain parent impersonated her child because she was harboring a very adult crush on a stout, bald-headed authority figure. Or was it more than that? Did the incident occur perhaps somewhere around prom time? And were all the girls in class, including that uppity Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge, invited to the prom by their male counterparts, except for one very young 13-year-old? Is that why momma bear came to the rescue of her cub, to demonstrate to the class that girls who wear glasses do get passes?
Eh. The whole story sounds ridiculous. I’m not interested in any story about school hijinks unless it involves Jughead Jones.
Today is World Television Day, the day that people recognize the role that TV has played in our lives. The first television set was invented by a 21-year-old in 1927. Back then, 21-year-olds didn’t sit around watching TV. They only dreamed about the day when they could do that.
Anyway, his idea was to capture moving images, transfer them into code, and then move the images along radio waves to different devices. The following year a television aired its first broadcast. But it wasn’t until 1938 that television sets became commercially available. Ever wonder why they called them “sets”? No? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway.
The early TVs consisted of multiple cabinets, with the larger cabinet holding the tubes and other electrical parts, and the smaller cabinet containing the very small picture tube.
Few people owned TVs in the beginning, and no one owned more than one. They were just too expensive. For example, in 1949 the cost of a TV was $1,295, which would be nearly $14,000 today. Nearly 96% of all households in the United States have at least one TV today, and 1.6 billion people worldwide have TVs in their homes.
I remember the TV set that I grew up with. It was a big honking console of a set. Whenever we played Hide and Go Seek, it was the perfect hiding place. It was a color TV, but even when I watched the black and white I Love Lucy shows, I imagined I could see Lucy’s red hair.
Unlike today, where there are hundreds of channels to watch, back then we only had seven channels. Still, I loved hunching up real close to that TV. I had no idea how bad my vision was. Eyeglasses would come later. If I wanted to see anything, I had to squint my eyes. My mom always nagged me to move back from the TV, but as soon as she left the room, I always moved closer.
But all good things must come to an end. Eventually, the reception on our family TV started to deteriorate. No matter how much we moved the antenna, the picture remained fuzzy or filled with wavy lines. Then the channel selector knob broke. Out came the pliers (sometimes the tweezers), anything that could grip that half-moon-shaped selector rod.
But when the legs of our console TV got wobbly, it was time for the TV to go. If it toppled over, it could hurt someone. It just wasn’t safe.
I don’t think we ever repaired any of our old TVs from back in the day. It was just too expensive to have a repairman make a house call. I can only imagine how many of them ended up in the landfill. But they’d served their purpose.
Now people watch TV on their phones. Oh, how far we’ve come. Happy World Television Day.
To someone who can’t read, this is a frightening sight.
11/20/23
I’m thinking of renaming my blog the Jeffrey Files. Every time I think I’m done writing about him, he pops us again. This weekend I took it a step further and created a video about him. If you’re not familiar with my posts about Jeffrey, just type “Jeffrey” into the Search field above and get caught up. A link to my latest video is below. Let me know how I did.
Some people are victims of bad luck, while other people create their own bad luck. Jeffrey fits into both categories. But Jeffrey has also learned how to survive his bad breaks. Between his disability payments and his side hustles, he gets by.
But the way Jeffrey figures it, he’s due for some good luck. That’s why he moved to Las Vegas earlier this year. It’s his second time there, and, on and off, he’s called Vegas home for 10 years.
Donna and I met Jeffrey in 2002 when he helped us unpack after our move to Florida. He lived in New Jersey at the time, but he lived in New York before that. Jeffrey is Darren’s cousin, and Darren is, of course, Donna’s ex-husband. So, he came highly recommended as a hard worker. But Darren issued a warning to us as well.
“Jeffrey is kind of a nut.”
By that he meant that Jeffrey lived a different kind of lifestyle. He used to homeless. He also used to be hooked on drugs. But that was before. Now he’s hooked on life. He’s a very positive person, which probably explains why he moved to Las Vegas. If any place needs uplifting, it’s that place. His current side hustle consists of taking Polaroid photos of the many tourists that he meets on the Strip or Freemont Street, which means he walks a lot of miles. But he’s never without a smile, and he loves to make other people smile.
But the most remarkable thing about Jeffrey isn’t his positive energy. It’s his love for poetry, a pursuit he’s managed to maintain even though he’s functionally illiterate.
Functional illiteracy is defined as the inability to read and comprehend relatively short texts or understand basic vocabulary, and it affects 18% of U.S. adults (approximately 57.4 million people), most commonly impacting black people, Hispanic people, and low-income individuals. But Jeffrey hasn’t let that slow him down.
In fact, when we saw him before his move to Las Vegas, he gave us pages and pages of typed poetry that he dictated to a friend. His work isn’t typo-free, and he may stray from grammar conventions at times, but it’s a testament to the spirit of the man.
It’s ironic that his dream is to make it rich at the tables and slot machines of Vegas, when his poetry might prove to be the more profitable pursuit. Then again, how can he sell his work without jeopardizing his disability status, which has income limitations? Anyone have any ideas?
It’s just one more challenge that Jeffrey faces. Donna and I will do what we can to help him publish his book of poems. But the truth is, his future will probably always be uncertain.
In the meantime, I have this message for Jeffrey: Keep generating those positive messages. I think your love of God and for helping your fellow man will be your biggest payoff in the long run.
I never thought I’d be writing about Cousin Jeffrey again. The two guys in this photo, have made him famous.
11/17/23
This is day 10 and the final day of our road trip. Boy, do I have a doozy of a story to tell. But first let’s make something clear. The subject of this post, Cousin Jeffrey, isn’t my cousin. But I did introduce him to the world in two posts I wrote in September 2022 (“My Favorite Cousin Jeffrey” and “My Favorite Cousin Jeffrey Part II“). He’s the cousin of my friend Darren, who also happens to be the second of Donna’s ex-husbands (a story for another time, believe me).
I first met Jeffrey when he helped us move to Florida in 2002. Since then I’ve kept track of his exploits through Darren. Jeffrey is a single man in his sixties. He worked as a day laborer for a lot of that time and was once seriously addicted to drugs and alcohol. But with his throaty laugh and the notebook of poems that he’s always carrying around (some of Jeff’s poetry is actually quite good), he’s one of the easiest guys to cheer for. But like a lot of people who grew up in the New York/New Jersey area, Jeffrey never had the money to do much traveling.
So, last year when Darren asked if Jeffrey could cruise with us, we thought, “What would be the harm?”
We learned so much about Jeffrey on that trip, about what a survivor he is. Jeff knows how to make a dollar. Unfortunately, he’s got a weakness for cigarettes and ladies, so most times a dollar is all he has. But he’s never worried. He knows that if he ever gets too far down on his luck, he can support himself through the homeless shelter system. He’s done it before.
On our cruise, Jeffrey was the life of the party. He talked to everyone he met and asked quite a few people to marry him. But his greatest feat came when we got off in The Bahamas. He not only managed to get himself invited onto a millionaire’s yacht, but he also talked his way into a Bruno Mars concert without spending a dime. He left quite an impression on us.
Jeff (left), friend Shenay, and Darren.
So, when I heard that Jeffrey had hopped a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas a few months ago, I thought to myself, “I hope he knows what he’s doing.”
It turns out he did. It didn’t take him long to find an apartment, but you can’t live in Vegas without money. Jeffrey’s lived there before, so he wasn’t worried. He knows there’s money to be made. All you need is an idea.
Jeff’s idea came when he saw a man on the street taking photos of people with a Polaroid camera and charging them for it. (If you don’t know what Polaroids are, ask your parents.) The next day he became the hardest working Polaroid photographer in Vegas. But I bet even he was surprised to wake up this morning and discover that he’s a YouTube star.
The 16-minute YouTube video below is from an Italian videography team. The photo at the top of this post is the Polaroid that Jeffrey took of the Italians. It got them talking to him, and that’s all it takes for Jeffrey to endear himself to anyone. He became their tour guide and told them about coming to Vegas from New York to find his fortune. They fell in love with his poetry and his life’s philosophies.
The YouTube video that the Italians created is titled (translated from Italian), “The Man Who Has Been Living on the Streets of Las Vegas for 10 years.” Well, that isn’t quite accurate. Jeffrey isn’t homeless, at least not at the moment. If you watch the video, you’ll see that he tells the Italians that he’s not homeless at present. But the homeless situation in Las Vegas is what has captured the Italians’ attention. In the video, Jeffrey takes the Italians on a walking tour of North Las Vegas and shows them the homeless community there.
Jeffrey doesn’t waste the spotlight. He strikes a pose and stares out at the people living in the streets.
“These are very nice human beings that have just gone up the wrong road in their lifetime. It could happen to anybody. Be grateful for what you have, and reach out and help those that you can.”
But my favorite line from Jeffrey is when he asks one of the Italians, “You recording this?”
Leave it to Jeffrey to recognize that he’s just given them gold. He could’ve been an actor. Instead, at the moment, he’s a YouTube star. His video has already been viewed 54,000 times. Go Jeff!
You know, I know a little about making videos too. Don’t be surprised if I do my own video about you, Jeff.
