Married to the Sea, on lawn care.

How to tell when you should get off the damn train.

Chase That Happy.

You know, for the months when we don’t actually need the fireplace.

They’re back, for all your giant puppet needs. This time, they’re even the subject of an In Focus at the Atlantic.

On NPR just now, during some sound bite of a European reacting to the election results, I was momentarily confused about the complaints in re: “immigrants” because the speaker’s accent rendered it much closer to “Amy Grants.”

I generally parse complaints about the former as simple xenophobia at best and overt racism at worst; it is, however, entirely unclear to me how I should parse hatred of late-80s contemporary Christian pop artists.

Sure, most of it is accurately described as adorable dog guards bicycle, but stay with it for the payoff at the end for maximum awwww-ism.

But I’ll bet you didn’t think about this before.

Case in point: there are now books about how to fake the authenticity people have learned to value in an effort to avoid plastic bullshit artists who think of PR and marketing as honorable pursuits on par with producing actual items of value.

This is just an outgrowth of clueless corps trying to capitalize on social media by appearing “real” on Facebook or Twitter. Hiring a twentysomething social media specialist to manage MegaCorp’s twitter feed is just so much more bullshit, people.

It comes down to this: 99% of the time, you’re either dealing with a human who controls the business you’re dealing with, and who values you as a customer, or you’re dealing with a giant faceless public corporation’s mouthpiece who neither values you nor has any power to affect your experience therewith. Megacorps are obviously eager to convince you they really do care — they “value your business” and “take your concerns seriously” — but they don’t. They care about profits and shareholder value.

You pick who you want to deal with. Vote with your dollars. And people who work at dissecting “authenticity” in an effort to extract some essence that can be sprayed on Monsanto or whomever can go DIAF, along with the people who think “branding” is something other than a natural outgrowth of making good products, charging a fair price, and treating customers with respect.

Sometime when I was about ten, maybe a little earlier, my father’s mother taught me to play Canasta. In these mad-for-Mad-Men days of 2012, maybe a retro card game sounds like a very hip thing to do, but back then, not so much.

I’m sure she taught me to keep me settled and focused on something, because to hear my elders tell it I could be a bit of a hassle — constant questions, lots of ideas, etc. Canasta, with its seemingly endless arcana of rules and plays, probably seemed like just the ticket. She even had a Canasta deck — it’s played with two decks, including jokers — and a draw-and-discard tray that I think is made from Bakelite.

Canasta is a rummy game. The object is to accumulate melds of the same rank and, eventually, to discard your final card. Seven or eight in a meld is a Canasta, and scores bonus points — 300 more with wild cards, 500 without. Red threes are bonus cards. Black threes and wild cards freeze the pile. Twos and jokers are wild. Aces are worth 20. Face cards are 10. Draw two, discard one. We play to 5,000.

We’d play game after game on my visits, hunched over an endtable in the living room, with her on one end of the couch and me appropriating the recliner that had been my grandfather’s before he died in 1979. Mary — called Mom, as her “nom de grandparent” — had been trained as a schoolteacher, so I guess she knew something about teaching little boys. She had also raised my father, who by all accounts was no less of a handful than I was, and for the same reasons.

Fueled by the sorts of indulgent foods only grandmothers in the 1970s bought, we’d play for hours every time I visited. The rules stuck; I played a little of the four-hand version (the “real” version) in college, when a girlfriend and I would have cheap dinners with another couple we knew. And recently I’ve returned to that two-hand variant with Erin, at which she’s skunked me more often that not. But I never play at all without remembering being small in a big green recliner, struggling to hold the massive collections of cards one ends up with in that game, and listening intently to my grandmother giving me pointers. I can still hear her voice, and I can still remember the worn places on the wooden arms of the chair where my grandfather’s hands had been.

Life is weird. I have friends with children older than I was then. My mother is older now than Mom was then, but seems so much younger. This is how life is, people say, and it just becomes increasingly true and obvious as we age — yet another tedious thing that cannot be explained to a 20 year old.

Mary Opal Janous Farmer was born on April 8, 1915. This seems impossibly long ago now, but it’s true. She attended Delta State for her teacher’s training, where she met and was engaged to Isaac Chester Farmer, from Simpson County, then preparing for medical school. Their engagement lasted five years;they were married two days after Christmas in 1937. She was 22, he was 26, and the rest of their lives stretched in front of them.

My grandfather’s journey ended in 1979. Mary traveled on quite a bit farther. She lived to see her grandchildren — my brother and I, and our two cousins Lauren and Lydia — grow to adulthood. She attended weddings, and met great-grandchildren. Frank and I even got to take her to lunch at Galatoire’s one summer afternoon in 2001, which is a story my aunt says she’d tell to anyone who would listen for months thereafter.

However, to the very best of my knowledge, she taught nobody else to play Canasta.

This afternoon, about an hour ago, Mary laid down her cards and went out. She was 97.

A side conversation at work this morning had the following awful fact come to light:

The end of the war in Vietnam (1975) is now longer ago than the end of World War II was in 1980.

Apparently, this, which hits “Christian the lion” levels of adorable.

Pithy, vulgar, and completely accurate.

I am:

• 1337% of π, which is kind of cool.
• The answer to life, the universe, and everything.
• Old enough now to drink twice, which means it was 21 years ago today that I turned 21 standing in line at The Corner in Tuscaloosa, holding a two-pack of Grolsch and a 12-pack of Beast Light.
• Happy to make it this far.
• Still mildly vexed to be sharing a birthday with L. Ron Hubbard, but that it’s also Adam Clayton‘s, which sort of makes up for it.
• There are other birthdays noted in my first birthday post eleven years ago.

In celebration thereof, we’re heading to the Mythbusters live show this evening, preceded by some happy-hour tomfoolery at Samba.

Reached for comment, Agent Rob described this as “not out of place on southeast Hawthorne.”

Jesse Thorn has a great piece on Transom you should go read.

I’ve already gotten my first birthday card, and I won’t turn 42 for another 11 days.

It’s cool that my first card this year is from a bourbon distillery, right?

While it is MUCH MUCH easier with two carriers, it turns out certain kitties have long enough memories to fear the sight of the damn things. Stealth is indicated.

“No, Gus! No!.”

You should go read about AJ’s plan for 52 new Adventures in 2012, because she’s delightful and funny.

No, really. You do.

The original is, apparently, at NPR.

Wolf pup and bear cub are friends in this video, which also includes stills of them as adults. They are still friends now, apparently.

As a direct result of a delightful yet convoluted series of social connections, last night I was engaged to attempt to repair a broken piece of video installation art at the home of a local collector. The gallery owner who sold the collector the piece is a friend of a friend, and because I’m widely perceived as being generally good with technology (by which I think people mean “he knows how to hook things up”), I got asked to help. I wasn’t able to do anything for them other than confirm that the screen portion needed replacing, but hey, you help your friends.

Anyway, the gallery owner had her assistant drive me out to this woman’s house, which was about half an hour away on Houston’s west side. Said assistant is the sort of bright-eyed, right-out-of-school type I remember being, which of course made me feel old because I have shoes older than she is. But I felt much, much older when, on the way back, we started discussing live music venues and bands we’d seen in them, and it came to light she’d never even heard of Steely Dan.

Ouch.

Well, if that hurts you, then what Joey DeVilla has up today will really break you. Prepare yourself for the shock that is What If Back To The Future Was Made Today.

Enjoy, if that’s the word for it.

Yeah, really. I mean it.

Heretofore, the Heathen Household has been sort of generally supportive of both Komen and Planned Parenthood, but really moreso the latter. We attend parties and PPYL functions, and drag people to fundraisers, and give money when it occurs to us. We’ve made the odd donation to Komen, too, but frankly their approach (“Hey! Let’s paint everything pink, and sue folks who get too close to our charitable model!”) suggested to me that they didn’t need as much help from us as PP did.

Now this new development has made it clear they care far more about pandering to right wingers than they do actual boots-on-the-ground health care. Clearly, Komen doesn’t need ANY of our money. Clearly too, Planned Parenthood does more than ever. And it turns out, it’s pretty easy to make this happen.

I’ve just signed up to donate to our local PP affiliate every month via my Amex. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it means I don’t have to think about it, or write a big check at the end of the year. Pick your credit card carefully, and you’ll even get frequent flier miles out of the deal. What’s not to like?

Oh, and Komen? I gave them your money, too. Good luck with that backlash.

We were totally gonna invite some of you Heathen people over for dinner, but decided champagne and the bath sounded better. Sorry.

John Hodgman Lays It Out For You.

At one point on my book tour, I was approached in the airport by a former banker.

He told me he was a life long Democrat and a huge fan of The Daily Show, but he also felt that Jon and the show had it all wrong.

(Because he was a multi millionaire, he has the right to just start critizing anyone in the airport he wants.)

He said that the bankers were not the bad guys in the subprime mortgage scandal and near financial collapse that they had everything to do with. They were just doing what the government allowed them to do.

And so: he felt it was unfair and hurtful to make the bankers out to be the bad guys.

I was very happy to finally have the chance to say this to someone’s face:

I told him that as a freelance person, I had no idea how much money I would make this year. I never do.

But during the previous few years, due to hard work and exceedingly strange circumstance, I had made more money than I had ever conceived of making in my life. I had also paid a huge bucket of local, state, and city taxes, and that was JUST FINE WITH ME.

Because I knew that I had very little to worry about when it came to providing for my family and me this holiday season. And I suspected he didn’t as well.

But there are many, many people who are VERY worried about this. And out of consideration to them, it seemed to me a little unseemly for wealthy to care so much about the names they might be called.

“From my point of view,” I said, “I think you and me and other wealthy people should just suck it in and take it.”

I have never said anything like this out loud to a stranger before in my life, never mind a stranger who has money; but as I am now a Deranged Millionaire, I now have that right to speak my mind.

Go read the whole thing.

XKCD covers the not-at-all surprising chronological clustring of holiday songs. The title here is from his hovertext.

Over at MeFi, there’s a great single-link video post of a man having a very, very close encounter with a group of juvenile mountain gorillas in the care of a simply tremenous silverback.

Take five minutes. Watch this. Nature is amazing.

Now, having watched them, realize that the gorillas on this video are unfortunately a statistically significant proportion of the remaining wild population.

Go read the whole thing. I’ve never faced the kind of financial black hole that would make such a default a good move for me, but I believe I’d make the same analysis the author has.

We normally say that a company “went bankrupt,” implying that it had no choice. But when, recently, American Airlines filed for bankruptcy, it did so deliberately. The airline had four billion dollars in the bank and could have kept paying its bills. But it has been losing money for a while, and its board decided that it was foolish to keep throwing good money after bad. Declaring bankruptcy will trim American’s debt load and allow it to break its union contracts, so that it can slim down and cut costs.

American wasn’t stigmatized for the move. Instead, analysts hailed it as “very smart.” It is now generally accepted that when it’s economically irrational for a company to keep paying its debts it will try to renegotiate them or, failing that, default. For creditors, that’s just the price of business. But when it comes to another set of borrowers the norms are very different. The bursting of the housing bubble has left millions of homeowners across the country owing more than their homes are worth. In some areas, well over half of mortgages are underwater, many so deeply that people owe forty or fifty per cent more than the value of their homes. In other words, a good percentage of Americans are in much the same position as American Airlines: they can still pay their debts, but doing so is like setting a pile of money on fire every month.

These people have no hope of ever making a return on their investment in their homes. So for many of them the rational solution would be a “strategic default”–walking away from the mortgage and letting the bank take the house. Yet the vast majority of underwater borrowers keep faithfully paying their mortgages; studies suggest that perhaps only a quarter of all foreclosures are strategic. Given how much housing prices have fallen, the question is why more people aren’t just walking away.

The Onion, 2003: Christopher Hitchens Forcibly Removed From Trailer Park After Drunken Confrontation With Common-Law Wife:

Noted author, social critic, and political gadfly Christopher Hitchens was once again the focus of controversy Monday, when he was forcibly removed from Happy Trails trailer park following a drunken confrontation with Noreen Bodell, 39, his common-law wife of 14 years.

Responding to a domestic-disturbance call, police arrived at the couple’s double-wide trailer at approximately 2:15 p.m. to find Hitchens and Bodell throwing dishes at each other. When the officers attempted to remove Hitchens from the premises, the leftist intellectual became physically and verbally abusive toward the officers, calling them “shitkickers,” “bitches,” and “effete liberal apologists for the atrocities of late-stage capitalism.”

Having consumed what sources described as “a substantial amount of single-malt scotch,” Hitchens then burst into tears, yelling, “That woman never understood me for who I am. I want to talk to [Harper’s editor Lewis] Lapham. Lapham’s the only one who understands me.”

Go read it all.

Mrs Heathen is plagued by the winter. Despite being a native Chicagoan, her formative years were spent in Florida. As a consequence, she’s woefully unprepared for these brutal Houston winters.

So maybe one of these is the answer?

Go check out this tiny orphan bat.

Over at MeFi, a pointer to this excellent bit from Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets.

Go watch this video of Ice Cube talking about Charles and Ray Eames.

There’s a follow-up interview at NYT; the somewhat shocking reveal is that, before NWA, Cube studied architectural drafting.

Go check out this MeFi post; it’s video of a guy being sorta played with, sorta stalked by a coyote. Being Canadian, the videographer is unfailingly polite, which is kind of adorable.

It’s not 100% clear to me that this is predation behavior — a man is way bigger than a coyote, so a lone individual probably wouldn’t try to take him down — and the animal’s body language is very, very similar to domestic dog “play” behavior, but it’s still a neat nature encounter.

…to remind you that the Salvation Army is an anti-gay organization, and that your casual holiday charity dollars would be of better use at other organizations not quite so committed to outright bigotry.

In Houston, may we at Heathen suggest the Houston Food Bank?

Be careful where you kayak.

In the last of tonight’s MeFi-sourced passalongs, here’s an interesting feline encounter fortunately mediated by plate glass. I saw one of these shots on Reddit a while back; I’m glad to see the larger context.

At Heathen HQ, we pay nearly $30 a month, and have for years, to maintain a plain-old-telephone-service (“POTS”) line just for the alarm system. We use Vonage for our actual telephone, which is infinitely preferable to AT&T’s products.

I finally got fed up with this, and called ADT to see if there was some way to interface the alarm with Vonage. No, they say. No one seems to know why (I can fax with Vonage; seems like the alarm signal would work, but whatever).

What ADT does offer, though, is a quasi-cellular wireless hookup. The device itself is $99. There is no installation fee. It raises my ADT monitoring cost by $15 a month. It’s a no-brainer; they’re coming to install it this afternoon.

Think about this: Cellular alarm monitoring is more cost-effective than land-land. Why? Because AT&T wants to live in your pocket, that’s why. Treat them accordingly.

This literally decades-old Calvin and Hobbes pretty much explains 21st century Wall Street behavior.

We’d all be a lot better off if more the so called “Christians” in public life spent any time reading the Bible. Fred Clark reminded me of this passage I’ll quote completely here; it’s from a part of the Old Testament not all that far from the verses the antigay bozos are fond of quoting — but, then again, those books include all sorts of rules those right-wingers manage to forget, so it’s no surprise they’ve ignored Deuteronomy 24:17-21:

You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this.

When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings. When you beat your olive trees, do not strip what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

Imagine for a minute what it might mean if the idea of “politically active Christian” conjured not images of Pat Robertson and know-nothing right-wingers like Perry and Bachman and Santorum, but of men and women who remember verses like these, or the Sermon on the Mount, or — and this is a real stretch — what the Bible says Jesus actually did and said, and with whom he kept company, instead of cherrypicking Old Testament proscriptions designed to incite hatred and xenophobia in their base.

Yeah. Never happen. But it’s nice to think about.

I am now absolutely certain that there should be more marching band pranks.

Check out these UNDERAGE HOOTERS.

The NY Observer’s “Scooter” thingy is running the full collection of our pal Chris’ Reviews of My Son’s Toys, which contains easily the best reference to thigmotaxis you’ll read today.

Also, apparently someone thinks he’s poachable. Go Chris!

Dude befriends and rehabs injured owl on his farm. Owl hangs out thereafter. Owl essentially adopts family — including one of the cats — and brings them food.

Via MeFi.

You’ve by now probably all seen Apple’s home page which, in a week they’re launching a new iPhone revision, is nevertheless dominated by their memorial to their founder and leader. That’s classy.

What you may not have noticed unless you’re really nerdy is that the photo of Steve has the name “t_hero.png”.

Computing pioneers, like rock stars, are all mostly postwar baby boomers. Actually, the rock stars — the first ones, like the Beatles Jobs idolized — are a bit older, which is hilarious. In either case, though, we’re on the narrow leading edge of a demographic inevitability. The next 20 to 30 years will be costly in terms of musical and technological giants, but I’m a bit at a loss to figure any whose loss we’ll all feel as acutely as this one.

Say what you will about the remaining Beatles or the Stones, but their best work is undeniably years behind them — Jobs was still churning out vastly influential hits.

He was able to do this because, as he was fond of quoting, he liked Apple to “skate to where the puck will be.” He started doing this very early. From a 1985 interview he gave with Playboy — when he was all of 31 — we find an early example. Younger Heathen (are there any?) may find it hard to believe, but back then the broad reaction to computers was “well, they’re cool, I guess, but what can you do with them that’s useful?”

Playboy: Those are arguments for computers in business and in schools, but what about the home?

Jobs: So far, that’s more of a conceptual market than a real market. The primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run educational software for yourself or your children. If you can’t justify buying a computer for one of those two reasons, the only other possible reason is that you just want to be computer literate. You know there’s something going on, you don’t exactly know what it is, so you want to learn. This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes.

Playboy: What will change?

Jobs: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people‐‑as remarkable as the telephone.

Playboy: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?

Jobs: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.

Now, the Internet existed in 1985 — I got my first email address only two years later — but it was nerdland, and very few were thinking even a little bit that grandmothers might use it to look at pictures of their grandkids someday. Apparently, Jobs was in that crowd, which is how we find ourselves with devices today that delight instead of confound, and how, odds are, you learned about his passing on a device he made. Lots of you will read this post on one, too.

Godspeed, Steve. We’ll miss you.

(It’s proper to note that, given the twin legacies he’ll leave, Bill Gates may well be the runner up here. His contribution to computing hasn’t been as dramatically evolutionary or as prolonged as Jobs’, but his business savvy and technical acumen did much to make business computing a foregone conclusion. His real legacy, though, may turn out to be the fact that after having founded Microsoft and become the richest man in the world — a title theretofore usually held by inheritors of wealth, not self-made men — he decided to take on a new, ambitious humanitarian mission instead of settling into a very expensive and luxurious retirement.

But nobody ever stood in line for a new copy of Windows.)

You can quibble with a couple, but if you take the list as “rules a man should follow if he’s dressing well,” and also accept that sometimes you’re just not gonna bother, then these 25 are well worth your review.

Go watch this. H/t to Rob.