Check, Mate

The use of checks has become a very Boomer thing in recent years, as electronic payments have come to the fore. Still, this Boomer, genuflecting to The Future, has been paying most things electronically. Yet typically, I still average writing a check a month, for various reasons. Now I write two.

A couple of months ago I went to pay the household bills online. While I was at it I decided to pay the electric bill for the Shop. To my surprise and dismay, though I had paid that bill online for years now, Electric Company would only allow me to do so with a $9 surcharge, apparently because I am a business. By all appearances it isn't something innocuous like a one time set up fee. It's every month I try to pay electronically.

Well, forget that. I wrote them a check and mailed it, and will continue to do so so long as that added charge is demanded. What's more, and although we have turned the power off at the old barn at closing time for as long as I can recall, I now turn it off every time I leave. For example, if running to the hardware, a chore which typically takes about a half hour, I kill the lights. All of them. Even when I'm working I only keep on the ones necessary, such as above my workbench. The far end of the Shop? I turn on those lights only for as long as I need them. The side room we have? Ditto. I've turned back into a Dad about the lights.

The Shop bill is usually around $24, so I know I'm not depriving Electric Company much with my actions. But there's a principle at stake. I ain't paying nine bucks a month, adding around thirty five percent to my bill, for the privilege of giving you my cash, and if I only save a buck turning lights on and off frequently, well, it covers the postage on a check you must now process. 

So. There.

Butterflies Aback

I once knew a girl, I'll call her Cloycette just to give her a name, who worked in a butterfly house. You know, one of those tourist trap places where butterflies flit about freely in a controlled environment. She had worked everywhere in the business, from ticket taker to the inspector who checks patrons for butterflies as they leave. "What's that last job about?" I asked.

"As a customer is about to exit, I ask them to do a slow pirouette to see if any of the insects have perched on their clothes. If there's one on their backs, I lightly brush them off," she answered.

"Ah, I see. Ever tempted to have a joke on them?

Cloycette was confused. "What do you mean? 

"Well, like asking one to turn around, then slap them on the back like an old friend and say, 'Ha! I got one!'"

She sighed. "No, Marty, I was never tempted to do that."

Cloycette never was very much fun.

2026 Tigers Rant

The 2026 baseball season is over for the Detroit Tigers. To call it a disappointment feels like understatement. Profound understatement. I don't think I've been this downhearted since the 2006 World Series loss.

There were some good signs. It will be an injustice if Kevin McGonigle is not the American League Rookie of the Year. Hao-yu Lee also had a solid rookie season, and Max Clark has looked good since being called up around mid-year. Dillon Dingler has shown he's an everyday backstop. The team had a couple of feel good moments to boot. Justin Verlander's farewell counts as one, of course, but the emergence of Eduardo Valencia ranks high as well. He spent a lot of time in the minors yet has shown his mettle in the bigs. From a position player standpoint, the future looks good.

Pitching, especially relievers, failed miserably, so we should expect an overhaul in that department. The Tigers lost too many games against division rivals, and that 6-22 month of May alone likely killed the season, although the 3-16 stretch in August, right as they were on the cusp of controlling a playoff spot, cut deep. 

They lost too many one run games. Their record was a dismal 19-28 in contests decided by a single score. But how do you improve on that? Even the nerd boys in the sabermetrics office believe that one run wins or losses are basically matters of luck, and they eat numbers like Garfield scarfs lasagna. If they have nothing to offer, what else can be said?

I'll still watch a lot of the playoffs because, hey, it's baseball, and we have a whole 'nother month of games yet. But 26 just seems like a classic 'what if' season for the hometown Nine. They should have been better.

I Don't Get It Either

Ah, September. I do love you, and October afterward. Fall is my favorite season. Only I'm not really sure why.

The energized colors on the trees as they change are exhilarating. Crisp fall air is a delight. Hot coffee is tastier, hot cider and hot chocolate wonderful warmers. Pumpkins and harvest feelings, things coming of age, are hints of maturity and grace. Yes, I like all that.

Yet Autumn also means winter is peeking over the shoulder, and I do not like winter at all anymore. Well, fresh snow is pretty, and cleansing of all it covers. Then it becomes dirty and brown and murky and uglier than what it hid. And cold, cold, cold. It all comes after fall, so I should look upon autumn with a fair dread.

I don't. I love it. It helps that I'm not really a fan of summer. Take away baseball and golf and summer would mean nothing to me at all. That means, rather oddly I'll admit, that I find in Spring (other than the beauty of things growing) greater dread. Spring heralds hot and sticky discomfort, and I profoundly dislike heat more than cold. I prefer neither, but that's not an option.

So here it is, my favorite time of the year. Even though I'm not entirely sure why.

Official Everything

I am as big of a free market capitalist as anyone I know. I firmly believe that free market forces, people working and exchanging among themselves with no government interference whatsoever, could cure what ails society much more quickly, efficiently, and especially peacefully than government order and regulation. Still, there are times where I wonder if there is a line in the sand, the other side of which is absurdity.

While at Fenway Park in Boston with me boys recently, we came upon a samples table. They were giving away free small tubes of toothpaste, Dr. Sheffield's Original Toothpaste for what that's worth. Apparently it's a marketing ploy, as Dr. Sheffield's is the official toothpaste of the Boston Red Sox, the baseball nine who call Fenway their home. 

Isn't that a bit much? Do major league baseball franchises need official toothpastes? And what's more, we were given samples of four different types. The first was extra whitening; no surprise there. Then there was peppermint, an okay taste, followed by cinnamon, which is beginning to strain the flavor parameters of mouth care yet is still not particularly outside the park. 

Outside the park...a little sports humor reference there.

The fourth tube is chocolate flavor. I'm not sure at all that that's an acceptable toothpaste flavor. But more so: I don't really understand why anyone would want or need such a range of dental care products. 

There's nothing wrong with any of this of course, other than that it's all rather bizarre. Still, it does leave me to wonder what it might cost me to become the official drain snake salesman of the Detroit Tigers. I have actually sold them snake cables and parts, so the relationship is already established. Could I get a sign on the outfield wall for a reasonable price though?

Mint Condition

Me Pops was on a trip one time with an old friend; I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name. While in Philadelphia, they decided to take a tour of the US Mint.

Miraculously, they were able to park within a block. But as they were climbing the steps to the Mint Cloyce remarked, "Bill, should I tell them at the door that I've got my pistol with me?"

Pops stopped in his tracks. After a second or two of thought he explained quickly and quietly, "Okay, Cloyce, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna stand here a minute and talk, pretend we're discussing an issue, act like we forgot something, and then we'll go back to the car. Then we're gonna leave your gun there."

"I don't go nowhere without my gun!" Cloyce responded indignantly.

"Then you ain't going to the US Mint!" Dad said firmly. They got back to the car and drove off.

What a waste of an ideal parking space too. 

Saturday Mitchell

Schools are in favor of sensitivity and opposed, of course, to insensitivity. In the traditional curriculum there are still some outdated things which cause insensitivity. Historical dates cause insensitivity. The square of the hypotenuse causes callousness. Untempered grammar and spelling produce elitism. The multiplication table can engender inhumanity, and precise diction has been known to produce fascism.

Richard Mitchell, the author of Less Than Words Can Say, wrote those words in 1979. They're on page 90 of that book. They sound prophetic, yet were based on a review of teaching practices way back then.

What do we hear these days? That math is racist. So are speaking and writing well. One might suppose they always have been if you listen to teachers in 2026. They have been trained in this approach for decades now, and kids can't read, write or cipher at alarming rates of ineptitude which have been rolling downhill, building like a snowball since, well, I was in school. We are raising in our public schools a nation of illiterates. 

But they feel good about themselves, so it's all right. They are sensitive, whatever that means, about the ills of the world. Never mind that they might actually feel better if they knew things whereby they might be able to do something about them. Yet those are hard to teach. Everyone can get an A in Sensitivity.