Head Above Water

Reader Mike L. sent me this rather sad story:

A Colorado sheriff’s deputy resigned this week after officials learned she’d appeared in pornographic videos — a second career she took to “out of desperation” over mounting bills.

Oh no, how could she? OMG she’s supposed to be a role model, etc. etc. etc.

Right:

In part, that came from a June 2023 storm that left her home with $500,000 in hail and water damage that insurance wouldn’t cover; sky-high interest rates that tripled her adjustable-rate mortgage and led to foreclosure; and increasing utility, gas and food costs. She’d drained her savings, borrowed money from her family and cut spending, she told CBS. But the debt collectors kept calling.

You know what?  I cannot find it in me to judge or condemn her.  We’ve all been there, and she’s just lucky she had the errrr proper attributes to generate her alternative income stream.

That said:

Yowzer.

I just hope she can find another “regular” job, although it’s probably unlikely.

This may not end well, but it wasn’t going to end well anyway.  If I were in a position to offer her a job, I would.

Let’s just hope someone else feels that way.

That 50s Thing

It is no secret among my Readers (especially those of long standing) that when it comes to decades. I have a soft spot for the 1950s.

It happens to be the decade of my birth (1954), and of course my memories of that time are scattered and few, but there’s a feeling about that era that has resonated with me pretty much all my life.

Now I understand that most people have a hankering for earlier times — “I wish I’d lived in the [x] period!” — and it’s brilliantly satirized by Woody Allen in his Midnight In Paris movie, where a modern-day young writer is transported back to what many consider one of the golden ages and places of writing and the arts:  Paris of the 1930s, where Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others of that ilk are the celebrities du jour, and the many soirees at Gertrude Stein’s apartment host them plus other luminaries such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Luis Buñel.  Of course, to our young protagonist, this seems to be the best time to be alive and writing, or being creative in any field.  Then he meets a young woman — a struggling fashion designer — and when the two of them are magically transported back to fin-de-siècle Paris, she astonishes him by saying that she, a creature of the 1930s, would want to live in that time and not the 1930s, because she would perhaps be more successfu lback then rather than in the age of Coco Chanel.

So I’m aware of that longing, and I understand its pitfalls when it comes to talking about the 1950s as my beau ideal.  Indeed, several Readers have taken me to task, outlining the many evils and perils of the 1950s — the relatively poor medicines available  (compared to our modern ones), endemic racism, Puritanical social mores and so on.

And yes, I know that the technology, such as it was, was certainly inferior to ours today, whether it be telephones, cars, medicine or whatever. Nobody would want to go back to that, for sure.

But that’s not the root of my nostalgia.

Let’s just look at a few images of 50s-as-golden-age art to illustrate my point:

Note the simplicity of life thus portrayed:  a family hunting outing, a picnic for two, and a family picnic.

I’ve written about the 1950s over the years, and here are a couple examples thereof:

I have no idea, for example, how to lower the cost of living to, say, 1950s-era levels where a family of four can live in a reasonably-modest dwelling, own one or two inexpensive cars, have enough to eat, and afford to give the kids a decent education — all on one salary, at a stable place of employment. In order to get there, we’d have to make drastic changes to our national way of life, changes that I’m pretty sure that nobody would want to make.

As a comment to Cappy’s excellent take on returning to the 1950s:

Don’t expect the world to revert to the 1950s ethos. In fact, as Cappy points out, modern society is being taught that the 1950s were a bad time because racism / McCarthyism / Cold War nuclear holocaust / oppressed women etc. What’s being omitted from the indoctrination is its purpose, which is to undermine what made the 1950s great:  patriotism, a sense of honor, hard work, deferred gratification, strong family ties, Judeo-Christian morality, modest living and so on.

And:

I’m often teased by my friends (and on occasion by my Readers) for being so unashamedly old-fashioned about life, and the things and people with which we associate ourselves. To this teasing I am entirely inured, and about my attitude I am utterly unrepentant. I am a conservative man, and that’s because I believe that in our own past, and in the history of civilization, there is much worth conserving. Certainly, that is true of our recent history (the 1950s), as much or more as it is true of earlier decades and even centuries.

So yes:  go ahead and laugh at my nostalgia, mock my preference for times gone by, and point out all the things that were wrong with the 1950s.

With all that said, though, I still insist that there was a whole about the 1950s that wasn’t shit:  the culture, the fact that the lines between right and wrong were a lot less blurred, and the roles of the man and woman a lot better defined — and we were all the better for it.

I won’t even talk about the cars…

Not much wrong there, either.

HOW Much?

This one made me shake my head.

Chicago is one of the most expensive cities to reside in the United States, with Angel Reese revealing she’s also a victim of those high costs, as her WNBA salary does not cover her $8,000-a-month rent.

Oh, the poor thing.

This is something I happen to know quite a bit about, because as Longtime Readers will recall, I used to live in Chicago.

“But where did you live, Kim?  That makes a difference.”

Connie and I lived in a 10th-floor apartment in Lakeview, a few blocks from Wrigley Field, which afforded us views of both Lake Michigan to the east, and the city skyline to the south.

Dawn over Lake Michigan.


That’s the John Hancock Building in the distance on the left.  Both pics were taken on a glum fall day soon after we’d moved in.

The apartment itself was massive:  around 2,800 sq.ft (3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms), it also had a basement lockup storage unit, free use of the laundromat, also in the basement, and 18-hour/day garbage pickup from the trashcan outside the goods elevator out the back door.  It was also beautiful, with bay windows and solid brick.masonry walls which were so thick, they actually impeded the wifi signal.  There were only two apartments on each floor.

It was so beautiful that when we had a couple of clients over for drinks during a conference, one — a wealthy owner of a chain of grocery stores — looked over at his wife and said, “We could do this”, and she nodded in agreement.  It was truly a place to be proud of, and only the business need to move to Dallas after 9/11 got us out of there.

At the time (early 2000s), the monthly rent for this wonderful apartment was $3,700 and even with our combined incomes, the only way we could afford it was due to the fact that we’d sold both our cars when moving from the suburbs, and the resultant savings on car payments and insurance (about $1,200 a month) made our apartment affordable.  (And the proximity to both train- and bus routes, not to mention the ubiquitous Chicago cabs, made car ownership irrelevant and unnecessary.  On the few occasions when we needed a car — to venture out of state for a client meeting, for example — there was a Budget rental office four blocks away.)

Anyway, I went online and checked on the current (2024) rentals in that building, and they’ve gone up, all right:  to $4,200 per month, just over half of what that WNBA tart is being charged.

Which begs the question:  what kind of apartment is she living in, at that rent?

I don’t know, but I can guess: some swanky modern high-rise apartment in the Loop, Streeterville or Near North neighborhoods.  Or maybe even a lakeside penthouse apartment just north of the Golden Mile.  Whatever, it’s probably too big for her, and definitely not worth what she gets paid as a WNBA player.

The point about living in Chicago, as we discovered when we looked into it, is that yes, you can pay a lot of money to live in the city;  but if you just lower your expectations a little and make a small compromise here and there, you can find affordable digs a-plenty.

Our apartment in Lakeview was just such a compromise, and I think that everyone could agree that it was not too great a sacrifice to have made.

The 20-year-old Angel Reese has clearly never bothered to look into such a compromise because her several sponsorship deals pay the bills, and not her WNBA salary (which is less than a fifth of my and Connie’s joint income at the time).  In ten years’ time, her career at an end and the sponsorships having vanished, we’ll no doubt be reading about Angel Reese having to live in her car and eating dog food — unless, of course, she manages to snag some rich dude who can afford her.

Not the best outlook, but hey.  According to the article, she has a (paid) “financial advisor” who, on this basis, ought to be fired.

Upright & Locked Position

Via Insty (thankee, Squire), I saw this:

Avoiding couches and chairs might be a good way of keeping your back pain from getting worse, new research suggests.  Finnish researchers found that when people with back pain sat even a little less each day, their pain was less likely to progress over the next six months.

Well, yes, but it depends on your definition of “sitting”, and I’m not being Clintonian, here.

A couple of years before Connie discovered she had cancer, she had back problems — I mean serious back issues, along with crippling sciatica.  Basically, she had three back operations (I forget which, L1S2 or vice-versa), had one of those electrical shock thingies implanted in her butt (electrodes linked to her spinal and sciatic nerves) and of course, serious pain medication.

How had this happened?  Well, basically, as it was explained to us by her back doctor, Richard Guyer of the Texas Back Institute (the man who fixed Tiger Woods’s back), it was because her job was 95% sedentary.  But first, a little history lesson.

According to Guyer, the worst invention ever created by Man was the upright chair.  Basically, the human body was conditioned over millennia of development into two basic positions that could be held for hours on end:  standing erect and lying prone.  The first was for survival purposes (hunting, herding and farming) and rest (sleep).

What the chair did, over a relatively short period of time, was to force the body into a position it wasn’t designed for, which of course placed all sorts of strain onto it, and most especially into the back.  While early chairs (mostly stools and benches) did not encourage lengthy periods of being seated (upright backs and hard seats), the addition of cushions and the creation of non-physically active tasks (e.g. clerical) had the effect of making upright seating a little more comfortable but no less damaging to the spine.  In fact, the added length of time while seated speeded up the damage process.

This is why so many early clerical jobs took place in a standing position, by the way, hunched over tall lecterns instead of being seated at desks — it really helped, and many people in the modern era who have gone back to working in an upright position can testify to the improvement in their physical health thereby.

But what if you can’t stand up for long periods of time?  An aside:

In my case, a youth spent playing competitive sport had messed my knees up — to the point that when I went to an osteopath several years ago, he looked at my X-rays and asked whether I was in the flooring business, because they only time he’d ever seen knees in this condition was from patients who installed carpets for a living.  (I made a joke about it and said that I was on my third marriage, whereupon he laughed and said, “Oh well, that explains it.”)  But my knees were and are no joke — it’s the reason I qualify for “cripple” license plates, by the way, because I can walk a little distance with no rest and without pain, but thereafter I have to start popping pain pills like M&Ms.  My daily pain-free distance at the moment is about 100 yards, cumulatively — about the distance walking to and from the car across a large supermarket parking lot, and a long shopping trip in the supermarket itself.  After that, my knees seize up and I reach for the Tylenol.  But back to the main story…

Anyway, Dr. Guyer’s solution to both my and Connie’s problem was to eschew sitting upright altogether, or at least for any serious length of time.  But for her job (training system design and tech writing) and my writing, that was not possible.

The solution?  Anti-gravity or, as we used to call them, Laz-Y-Boy reclining chairs.

Connie’s back, as it turned out, was too far gone, although her recliner helped some.  In my case, with only a “serious” (as opposed to her “critical”) back issue, the effect was close to miraculous:  my decades-long back pain disappeared within a matter of days, and I could (and still can) remain seated all day without back pain.  (I do have to get up throughout the day for coffee, meals and the related nature calls, relax, so I’m not going to die of deep vein thrombosis.)

So yeah;  as the Finnish boffins claim, sitting down less will help alleviate back pain and -injury.  But if you have to remain seated, do so in a reclining position.  It really works.

Even if the lack of exercise causes you to get other problems, like a fat gut.

You all know how to fix that problem:  eat less, eat better and exercise.  Or pay through the nose for Ozempic, like I have.

Better Or Worse?

I suppose enough time has passed since cell phones became cheap and therefore ubiquitous to ponder the question:  is life better with cell phones?  Denise Van Outen thinks not:

Denise Van Outen reckons smartphones have killed the fun of the hedonistic ’90s as revellers’ antics are now being recorded instead of remembered.

The 50-year-old actress and telly host made her name as one of the ballsiest women on TV more than a quarter of a century ago – partying with the likes of Sara Cox and Zoe Ball.

But the mum-of-one is now lamenting the loss of the ‘Cool Britannia’ decade – and blames the likes of Apple for sucking the joy out of life.She blasted: “We never had access to everything on our smartphone. So, you’d go out and you’d just be in the moment and really enjoy it. I remember going to the big festivals like Glastonbury and Reading and you wouldn’t have your phone with you, you wouldn’t be videoing anything.

“I think people are starting to see now that smartphones can be a hindrance and stop people actually enjoying themselves.”

“And I think we’re gradually getting to a stage where a lot of people… for example, if you’re going to a party – are putting on invites that it’s a ‘No phone policy’.

I dunno.  I find myself hopelessly conflicted about the whole cellular phone business.  Never mind an early adopter, I put off buying one of the things for years, until Connie actually forced me into getting one.  So I had a Nokia flip phone for years until my kids finally shamed me into getting a smartphone.

But maybe that’s just me.  As someone who guards his privacy fiercely (I know, this blog yadda yadda yadda), I don’t like being at someone else’s beck and call, and at least the advent of caller ID made things bearable because I could decide whether or not to take the call.

And cell phones — at least the smart ones — put in an appearance quite long after I’d semi-retired;  I cannot imagine having one in a workplace environment, and finding out that no matter where I happened to be, I was still in the office.

Ugh.

That said, there have been times that being connected to the outside world has had its advantages — a couple of emergencies, helping the kids out of a jam, etc. — so yes, there’s that.  And I can see that for some jobs (e.g. realtor) cell phones have been a tremendous help to productivity.  I remember going to the airport during the early 1990s (when I did most of my business travel) and feeling sorry for those souls who were glued to pay phones (remember them?), contacting clients, the office, family etc. in those few minutes before takeoff.  For them — the people whom Woody Allen in a rare moment of actual humor termed “connectivity assholes” — there’s no doubt that the cell phone has been a boon.

I remain unconvinced, however, that the conveeeenience of the cell phone has been that much of an improvement to society.  And I resent like hell the intrusiveness of the things, enabling the outside world to contact me whether or not I feel like being contacted at all, let alone by people I have no wish to communicate with (politicians, pollsters, scam artists etc.)

I’m not a Luddite by any stretch, by the way.  I embraced email, for example, with a vengeance and to this day I prefer to communicate by that method instead of a phone call.

But I’m a reluctant user of the phone — any phone, not just cell phones, mind you — so don’t expect me to sing its praises.

And the lovely Denise has that part right:  going out is a much better experience without a cell phone.  We all used to make fun of Japanese tourists who experienced their entire trip through the lens of their Pentax.

Now, of course, we are all Japanese, who have to record our every experience lest we forget it.

What bollocks.