The Not-So-Living Doll

Warning ... this post deals with no-kidding adult topics. You may want to not let your children read any further. Just sayin' ...

Dating can be tough. If you're a guy of average looks, modest education, and/or low-wage employment, it can be even tougher. I, of course, being witty and erudite (if not especially studly or wealthy) did pretty well for myself*, but not every fellow is so fortunate.

That's why there's a niche market for ... well ... artificial dates, as I read in this article in CNN online a week or so ago: Making a Sex Doll.

Yes, Dear Readers, there is evidently a good market (300-400 per year) for very realistic, high-end** artificial companions. A southern California company called Abyss Creations makes a life-sized silicone figure with a fully poseable skeleton, interchangeable faces and ... er ... penetrable orifices. It's called RealDoll, and comes in one of 18 female and two male body styles, with a choice of five skin tones and 39 available faces. Prices start around $6,000 for "basic" models, and around $12,000 for "custom" models ... the prices of which depend on the customer's "specific desires."

You can buy a lot of dinners and movies for a real doll for $12,000.

All of this reminded me of a great story told by my brother Mark - who is a world-class storyteller - about the time he was taking a walk in the woods and stumbled upon where some latex lothario had hidden his inflate-o-date under a pile of leaves ... convincing Mark that he'd found some serial killer's stash and sending him fleeing for his life.

Well, anyhow, now you know that there's a weird niche business opportunity out there if you're into exotic crafts. I'd just advise picking a very open-minded venture capitalist to bankroll your effort.

Have a good day. Date a real girl, they're more fun.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* Pats self on back for landing Agnes.

** So to speak.

And You Thought Your Job Was Terrible

We all like to complain about our jobs from time to time. Of course, in times like these, when we're lucky just to have jobs, it doesn't make a lot of sense to complain, but we do it anyway. Some jobs leave us with more to complain about than others ... Mike Rowe introduced us to many of them on his show "Dirty Jobs," which you may have seen on the Discovery Channel. There are not many jobs he tried on that show that I'd want to do, I can tell you.

Now I am, as you know, a history buff, and am fascinated by the ways in which we used to do things in the so-called "good old days." And if you think we have some pretty nasty jobs nowadays, you can thank your lucky stars that you weren't seeking employment in medieval times, where there were jobs that gave new meaning to the term yucky.

Not long ago, in reading an article about the lives of royalty in medieval England, I learned about one of the least attractive jobs I can imagine having: that of the "Groom of the King's Close Stool" (or just "Groom of the Stool" for short) - a position on the royal support staff created during the reign of King Henry VIII to monitor and assist with the king's bowel movements. The word stool referred to the portable commode which accompanied the royal personage at all times, along with water, towels and a wash basin. The Groom of the Stool was responsible for maintaining the stool and providing water, towels, and other supplies needed by the king for the comfortable and timely evacuation of his bowels. The Groom also monitored the king’s diet and mealtimes for maximum efficiency of his bowel movements, and his (the Groom’s) day was organized around his predictions of the royal poops.

The Royal Stool

Oddly enough from our perspective today, the job tended to be coveted because of the … um … close access it afforded the incumbent to the king, and the position often went to the young sons of noblemen or members of the landed gentry. Grooms of the Stool sometimes moved on other jobs in the royal household which afforded better pay and benefits.

The position of Groom of the Stool (later known as Groom of the Stole, perhaps because it looked better on resumes) existed until it was abolished by King Edward VII in 1901.

And you complain about your job.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

Fatbergs!

Last Monday we celebrated Labor Day, the one day a year on which we dignify the common worker in between trips to the mall. There are a lot of ways to make a living out there, running the gamut from comfortable office jobs to hot and miserable jobs people only take because nothing else is available. Of the miserable jobs one can have, one of the most miserable has to be that of sewer worker.

No, I'm not referring to the editorial staff and on-air announcers at Faux News, but to real sewer workers, like the ones at Thames Water in London who are waging an ongoing battle against ... fatbergs.

I call your attention to this article from Business Insider: Gross Photos Show Sewer Workers Battling A 'Fatberg' The Size Of A Boeing 747 Under London.

I will spare you the photos - you can look at them yourself if you go to the linked article. And incredibly enough, that "fatberg" the size of a Boeing 747 (it was 262 feet long, and a 747 is only 250 feet long, depending on the model) was not the largest ever recorded ... that honor* went to a 15-ton blob of congealed fat and sewer crud approximately the size of a double-decker bus that took ten days to break up and remove last August in London.

How on earth does such an enormous blob of congealed fat end up in the sewer? Largely because people pour used cooking oil down their drains, where it congeals around - among other things - discarded bathroom wipes, which are not as safely flushable as their advertisements would have you believe.

So ...

Enough of this disgusting topic. I just wanted to share with you the only thing I've found recently that's more disgusting than American political campaign financing. Well, except for ISIS, of course.

Have a good day. Don't pour your cooking oil and grease down the drain if you don't want your sewers to clog and bring back things you'd rather not have in your home.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* And I use the term loosely.

The Problems You Never Knew You Had

You know, Dear Readers, that you have lots of things to worry about nowadays ... political ass-clownery, an economy in ruins (largely thanks to political ass-clownery), and insane levels of religious intolerance, just to name a few. You also know, thanks to floods of television ads from law firms with names like Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga, and McCormick (thanks, Groucho!), that you may be on the verge of dying a horrible (but financially lucrative in the meantime) death from all sorts of diseases, poisons, and medical malfeasance you wouldn't know about if it weren't for television ads run by big law firms. And on top of all that, the advertising industry wants all you insecure ladies out there to know that your well-being is menaced by all sorts of ghastly things like bad breath, vaginal odor, and ... gasp! ... exposed armpits!

Yes, Friends, you may enjoy this very interesting article by Libby Copeland from Slate.com - The Cure for Your Fugly Armpits: How Advertisers Create Body Anxieties Women Didn't Know They Had, and Then Sell Them the Solution.

The article begins with a look at the recent advertising campaign by Dove Ultimate Go Sleeveless Deodorant, which implies that women's armpits* are naturally ugly, and promises to turn them from the Ugly Ducklings of Summer Exposure to dry, sweet-smelling, and attractive hints of her hidden beauty, waiting to be proudly exposed by the sleeveless dresses she's always been ashamed to wear. It then goes on to discuss other great moments in advertising, including the marketing of Lysol as a contraceptive and vaginal deodorant and the horror of bad breath, which leads unfortunate women to the curse of always being a bridesmaid, but never a bride.

Oh, for pete's sake. Ladies, if the worst thing you have to worry about is whether or not your armpits are attractive, you have a pretty good life.

I don't pay much attention to advertising any more, especially ads for cures for erectile dysfunction, ambulance-chasing law firms, and candidates for political office (who need those cures for erectile dysfunction so they can better screw the voters once in office). Neither should you.

Have a good day. Ladies, don't worry about the sleeveless dresses - I promise not to criticize your armpits. More thoughts - unrelated to armpit hygiene - tomorrow.

Bilbo

* By the way, there are actually websites out there dedicated to celebrity armpits. Don't ask me how I know.

B.

Really, Really Big Numbers (Revisited)

In the absence of our long-lost (and very much missed) fellow blogger Numeric Life, I've written about big numbers several times - you can read two of my past posts about really big numbers here and here. I got to thinking about really big numbers again a few days ago when I read this interesting article in the Washington Post: Exabytes: Documenting the 'Digital Age' and Huge Growth in Computing Capacity.

The point of the article is that we have reached the point at which there is so much data being stored in so many forms and places that we have had to invent a new term for amounts of information - the exabyte. The exabyte is defined as one billion gigabytes ... which, in turn, is defined as a thousand megabytes ... and a megabyte is, of course, a million bytes.

That's a lot of bytes.

I often think about the first computer Agnes and I bought, back in 1988 or so. It was a Cordata AT with the MS-DOS operating system and a staggeringly huge hard drive - 20 megabytes. I distinctly remember telling Agnes that I could hardly imagine so much storage - "We'll never fill it up," I said.

Well, I've been wrong once or twice ... Today, that hard drive would have held about 10 of the digital photographs I take of my grandchildren.

I recently replaced the 500 gigabyte hard drive in my iMac with a new Western Digital Green drive - one terabyte.

For someone as bad with numbers as I am, these are some pretty dauntingly large figures. The Washington Post article linked above contained this very interesting diagram to illustrate the explosive growth in stored information:

If the graphic is too small to read, you can see it in full size here.

So, how do we visualize such vast numbers? The graphic above is good, but it's two-dimensional ... how do we put it into everyday imagery? According to the study conducted at the University of Southern California in 2007 on which that graphic was based, the total world-wide capacity to store information digitally on media of all types was 276 exabytes. To put it in more visually friendly terms, picture in your feeble mind a tower of compact disks, each one representing one digital music album. To hold 276 exabytes, that tower would start at the surface of your table and top out 50,000 miles beyond the orbit of the moon.

That's pretty impressive. Of course, unfortunately, not all data is created equal, or is of equal value. I imagine that a pretty big chunk of that data consists of spam, digital pornography, violent religious bigotry, and other such digital sewage.

Too bad we don't have a better way to store that stuff. Perhaps we need a new term to measure it ... like the flushabyte, megacrap, or gigascum.

We can only dream. And hope that Numeric Life comes back to help us make sense of it all.

Have a good day. Flush some of that old data. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Tech-Enabled, Crazy, or Both?

A while back at the wonderful blog Indexed, Jessica posted this card:

If you walk down the street, take public transportation, or visit the average shopping mall, you understand this.

The advent of Bluetooth technology, which allows us to use wireless, hands-free devices, has changed our perceptions of the world and the people around us. There was a time when you saw a person on the street shouting to himself and knew that this was a crazy person and it was time to cross the street or duck into the nearest store. Nowadays, you don't know if that person is crazy and dangerous, crazy and harmless, or just crazy and clueless, living under the happy illusion that a deeply personal conversation carried on with a Bluetooth-enabled phone is actually private.

I enjoy reading on the bus and the Metro train to and from work every day. But one of the unhappy constants of life is that there will, on any given day, be at least one ass clown sharing his business dealings, his plans for the coming evening, or his fight with his girlfriend with me. Not long ago, there was even a clueless idiot who made his hotel reservations at top volume from the train, including sharing his credit card number, expiration date, and security code. I felt like writing it all down and buying myself a new Mercedes on his dime.

So...

If you are one of those Bluetooth-enabled jackwagons who have an irrational desire to share, here are some points to remember:

1. Bluetooth technology does not include a cone of silence that keeps your conversation private...

2. If you want to rant at someone, get a blog. It worked for me.

3. That Bluetooth device may be okay when curled around your ear, but it will be a lot less comfortable when it's been shoved up your left nostril by an angry crowd.

That's all. Thanks for not sharing.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Remembering to Forget

Depending on how long you've been with me on this blogging journey, you may remember a post I wrote back on December 17th of 2006 on the subject of forgetting...or, more accurately, not forgetting. That post was based on an interesting observation by Lance Morrow in his book Evil: An Investigation - in discussing the mutual, visceral hatreds of all sides in the wreckage of what was once Yugoslavia, he asked a simple, but profound question: what happens if no one ever forgets?

He was addressing the issue of lingering hatreds ... the endless nursing of deadly grudges and animosities that prevents people from making peace and moving on to a better future. Israelis and Palestinians in the Levant, Serbs, Croats and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, Armenians and Turks, blacks and whites, North Koreans and everyone else - what happens when we never forget past ills, real or imagined?

Yesterday I found a new take on this idea in this article by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger - "Remembering the Importance of Forgetting."

In this article, Mr Mayer-Schonberger discusses what he calls "the permanancy of the past in the present," the fact that nothing digitally saved ever really goes away. Every e-mail you ever wrote, every document you ever saved, every digital photo you ever took tends to last forever, because storage is so cheap and easy that the default option today is save rather than delete.

I know it's true. When I bought my first computer in 1988, it had the biggest hard drive you could get at the time: a staggering 20 MB. I remember saying to Agnes, "Wow...20 megabytes...we'll never fill it up!" Today, of course, it's not unusual to have a single photo or document that's 20 MB or larger. When the 250 gigabtyte hard drive on my Mac failed a few months ago, I replaced it with a 1 terabyte drive...and the local stores are selling 1.5 and 2 terabyte drives.

It's now easier just to save everything than to go to the trouble of figuring out what to delete. At the office, we get periodic stern messages from our IT managers warning us to archive or delete files because our shared storage drives are nearing capacity. For a project I'm now working on, I have at least seven different versions of the document stored...and there will no doubt be several others by the time all the coordination comments are adjudicated. Oh, and there are also many versions of the comment adjudication documents that I also have to save to show how we accommodated everyone's concerns.

It's worse at home. In the days of film cameras, we filled up a 12- or 24- or 36-shot roll of film, had it developed, threw away the bad pictures, and saved the best ones in photo albums and scrapbooks. Today's digital cameras allow us to take hundreds of pictures and only print the ones we decide we like...but there's no need to delete the others, because storage is cheap and easy. The picture file on my Mac is 17.83 gigabytes in size...and doesn't include all the pictures I've archived on CDs and DVDs, or the ones I haven't yet transferred over from my laptop to the new 1 terabyte drive on the Mac.

When Agnes and I vacationed in Alaska, I took over 1200 pictures in seven days. When we went to Mexico, I took thousands more. I have no idea how many pictures of the five grandchildren I have.

The default option is save ... up to the point where you no longer have any idea what you have, and what's really important. As Mr Mayer-Schonberg writes,

"...it is worth remembering that there is a lot of value in forgetting. Forgetting permits us to transcend details and generalize, to see the forest and not just the trees."

What if nobody ever forgets? What if we continually are able to dredge up information we'd forgotten was out there, that may no longer be valid but can be reinterpreted and taken out of context to create from the past a false image of the present? Mr Mayer-Schonberg writes that,

"...we are increasingly confronted with outdated information taken out of context, from anachronistic news stories to emotional e-mails and compromising pictures that we had long ago forgotten. For example, more and more employers are researching job applicants through Google and social-networking Web sites. There are already many cases of people being denied jobs or promotions because of what is unearthed. But these are reflections of a person’s past; they rarely provide accurate information about the present."

Can we put the digital toothpaste back in the tube (or, more accurately, squeeze more of it out)? Can we learn the need to delete the unnecessary as well as the need to save that which is truly important? Can we even tell the difference any more? What digital time bombs are waiting in our blogs and our Facebook pages, waiting to blow up in our faces?

It's worth thinking about.

We all know the old adage about digital documents: save early, save often. Perhaps now we need its companion adage: delete regularly, delete ruthlessly.

Because what if nobody ever forgets?

Have a good day. Delete something. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

All the Time in the World

When you're snowed in, the first thing you have to do is dig yourself out. After you've done that and discovered that you still can't go to work anyhow, you find that you have lots of time on your hands. Finding activities to fill that time is easy at first, even if limited by the screaming of muscles you'd forgotten you had until you called upon them to shovel all that snow.

Agnes and I have watched more television in the last week than we have in 27 years of marriage. Agnes has read all the books she bought to take with her on her trip to Germany that has had to be postponed until next week because of the storm. I'm working my way through Season 4 of Lost on DVDs, and have finally gotten about 500 pounds of old files shredded.

But there's still lots of time available.

And speaking of time (yes, I'm finally getting around to my point), you will be glad to know that we are now able to measure it with sufficient accuracy.

According to this article from Neatorama, a team led by Chin-wen Chou of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado has invented a "quantum logic clock" that is one hundred thousand times more accurate than those cheap, shoddy cesium fountain clocks that are the current standard, despite only being accurate to a measly second in 100,000,000 (that's 100 million) years. Who can deal with such a level of gross inexactitude? The new quantum logic clock uses the energy state of a single ion of aluminum to produce accuracy of a second in 3,700,000,000 (that's 3.7 billion) years.

Yes, friends, thanks to this miracle of modern science, a poor fellow can know to an unprecedented level of accuracy exactly how long he has been waiting patiently for his date to get ready, and a wife can inform her husband of exactly how long she's been waiting for him to get cracking on his honey-do list.

Of course, there are practical applications for such an accurate clock, among them an improved level of accuracy for GPS devices. Yes, soon you will be able to have your in-car GPS unit tell you in angstroms how far it is to your next turn, and scientists will also be able to detect the slowing of time predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Of course, anyone who has been snowbound for a week or more can tell you all about the slowing of time without recourse to general relativity.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - How about this spiffy picture of our neighborhood, taken last night at about 10:00 PM...

The job for today is trying to get some of this snow off the roof. Where's Sir Edmund Hillary when you need him?

B.

The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and Nothing But the Tooth

When I say the words root canal, what mental image forms?

(a) Pain? (b) Suffering? (c) Enormous expense? (d) All of the above?

The correct answer is - at least in my case - (d).

This story actually begins last Sunday, when I awoke with a moderately painful toothache. By Monday morning it had gone from "moderately painful" to "AAARRRGGGHHH GIVE ME DRUGS!!!", and I called my dentist to beg for a euthanasia appointment.

So it was that yesterday morning at 1000, I sat in the chair in my dentist's office while he gravely explained the gray and white blobs on the x-ray picture that showed that (a) I needed a root canal, and (b) because of my exceptionally long and narrow tooth roots, he needed to refer me to a specialist in long and narrow roots (translation: very expensive).

One hour later, I found myself checking in at the office of the new dentist. The tasteful furnishings, marble-surfaced check-in desk, and soft, pleasant elevator music had me wary from the start, and I knew I was in trouble when the beautiful young receptionist welcomed me with the standard greeting of the health care industry:

"Drivers license and insurance card, please."

I surrendered the required documents, filled out a ream of papers (which included one informing me that nothing would be done until I was able to guarantee payment by a combination of insurance, cash, credit cards, cut gems, or livestock (oops, sorry, the last one only applies in rural areas). Since I was in relative agony, I filled out and signed everything with only the quickest of readings. This dentist probably now owns my soul.

Since I was a walk-in patient, I then proceeded to wait for nearly two hours until the doctor could fit me in. A Sweet Young Technician with a delightful accent (El Salvador, as it turned out) came out to the waiting room, woke me up, and led me to the room where I would be convinced to confess to whatever I had been accused of.

Here is how a root canal happens:

1. You sit in the chair and answer for the Sweet Young Technician all the questions you already answered when you filled out the forms in the waiting room.

2. You wait.

3. The doctor comes in, greets you, and asks you all the questions you've already answered for the Sweet Young Technician and on the forms you filled out in the waiting room.

4. The doctor tells you to open wide, then identifies the problem tooth by hitting each tooth with a nine-pound hammer until you scream.

5. You get a shot of novocaine to deaden the site.

6. The doctor leaves to attend to another patient.

7. The doctor eventually comes back and begins to drill, dig and blast. You scream because the novocaine has worn off. The doctor gives you another shot, then leaves to attend another patient.

8. The novocaine wears off.

9. The doctor comes back and repeats step 7.

10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 as often as necessary.

11. Eventually, the doctor declares you finished, having extracted all the dead nerve material from the tooth and money from your wallet. He tells you to see the secretary for your follow-on appointment.

At this point, all the novocaine shots had finally kicked in, and the left side of my face was sliding into my lap. I staggered out to schedule my follow-on appointment, and the secretary greeted me with the alternative health care industry greeting: "The balance not covered by your insurance is $450...how would you like to pay that?"

I reviewed the payment options and discovered that "Monopoly money" and "Smiles and handshakes" were not on the list. I grudgingly surrendered my poor, battered credit card.

So...

I have survived my first root canal. The insane pain has been replaced with a dull ache and two bottles of Really Good Drugs, and my credit card bill has skyrocketed.

And today, I get to fly to Colorado Springs for a conference.

At least, I'm already suffering from a dull ache. I'm ahead of the game.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - I will be traveling today through Friday, and on Friday the DC area may have a "significant" snowfall, just in time for me to get back. Sigh. I will probably be able to keep up the blog and Facebook page normally, but be prepared for possible glitches.

You'll get over it.

B.

Thanks for Sharing. Not.

One of the royal pains of modern living is the tendency of people to use their cell phones everywhere, all the time, at full volume, regardless of the topic of the conversation. I've written here about the time I overheard a loud conversation in the airport in which a man was berating the person at the other end for not getting him an appointment at the right time ... with his proctologist. I've also noted people in the Pentagon using the modern equivalent of Maxwell Smart's Cone of Silence - they sit in stalls in the men's room with the door closed and have intimate conversations, as if no one else could hear. On the bus, on the subway, on the street, in stores, and from the next car at traffic lights (when you can hear it over the pounding bass of the stereo) - you can't escape hearing everyone else's conversations.

But it gets worse. According to this article from yesterday's Washington Post, the latest twist on being exposed to everyone else's conversations is exposure to everyone else's ... porn.

Yes, now we can experience the joy of pornography shared by those who play their video players in the next seat on airplanes, buses, and subways, or on video screens in the back seats of cars ahead of us in traffic. We can hear the gasping throes of lust leaking from around cheap headsets the same way we get to enjoy the pounding music some morons insist on playing at top volume so that we can all share it even though they're using headsets. As the author of the Post article writes, "...the increasing popularity of laptops and handheld devices, and the prevalence of wireless Internet access, means there's a greater chance of becoming a bystander to a complete stranger's viewing proclivities. Like being exposed to the cigarette smoke of a nicotine addict on the street, people are inhaling secondhand smut."

This is way too much information for an aging curmudgeon like me.

Now, don't get me wrong ... I've got nothing against porn per se. If your life is so empty of normal relationships that you need porn to get by, hey, more power to ya. But please don't share it with the rest of us. Those of us with lives don't need it, don't care, and don't want to have to see and hear it from you.

Trust me, I'd rather laugh at your attempts to get that appointment with your proctologist.

Have a good day. Invest in a good privacy screen for your laptop, and some really good headphones. The rest of us will thank you.

Tomorrow is Cartoon Saturday. Be here.

Bilbo