Stand up, stand up

Sitting may be hazardous to your health.

I saw a video clip the other day—and I don’t remember where or who—but the “expert” seemed to think that sitting was second only to smoking in terms of being a health hazard.

Now, health hazard information goes through phases. Yesterday’s cholesterol-laden eggs are today’s source of good nutrition. However, the sitting thing seems to have some common sense behind it.

Plus, anecdotal evidence.

(That’s me. I’m telling you anecdotes.)

I left one of the most walker-friendly cities in the world to live in something that’s a cross between rural and suburbia. Nobody walks anywhere. This is because there is nothing you want to go to that is less than five miles away.

In general.

We do have an excellent pizza place only half a mile away. The Park-and-Ride, when buses actually start to visit it, will be a mile and a half. There’s a shopping center a little beyond that whose main claim to fame for me is a Subway restaurant. Two miles in the other direction is a Kirkland’s, a Michael’s, a Kohl’s and, even more wonderful, a Dollar Tree.

But, quite often, the heat and humidity are just too high for a stroll to the store.

Back in the day, when I worked outside of my home office, I would walk to work, and I would walk (some) around work. Now that I’ve “retired” to become a writer? I walk nowhere.

I could ignore pop culture warnings, but it is clear to me that I have gained weight and lost energy. I have aches and pains that have multiplied exponentially—far more than one would think likely in the mere three years since I made the transition from New York to Florida.

People have been advertising standing desks, with and without attached treadmills. These seem like a good idea, but it doesn’t have to cost that much money.

Today, I am writing this blog post with my laptop on the counter and me standing in front of it.

My tip for this Tuesday is that you should do the same.

As often as possible.

No fooling!

Happy April Fools’ Day!

There aren’t really any miracles surrounding April Fools’ Day.

Unless, of course, you count the miracle that I’ve never really been the victim of a big April Fools’ hoax. I’ve never really been able to pull one off, either—except for that one election year where I managed, for about five minutes, to have my mom convinced that my crazy uncle had decided to run for Congress.

The only reason that was plausible is that he was just crazy enough to do it.

He’s passed on now, but he was an entertaining character—for those of us who didn’t have to live with him or be responsible for him in any way. And he gave me the great gift of verisimilitude in my first play where I managed to build a pretty good character out of some of his sayings and doings. It was a bit of a miracle the moment I realized that Uncle Vance had wandered into the pages of the script.

Truly, I suppose much of my family might think it appropriate that Uncle Vance should come to mind on this day. Certainly, he devoted much of his life to activities most people would consider foolish.

For instance, he was soon parted from pretty much any money he ever had.

On the other hand, he seemed to enjoy himself and to get by without working very hard. And, when he wasn’t threatening to throw you into the swamp with the alligators—just to hear you scream as he carried you thither—he’d do anything he could for you.

I think the miracle of April Fools’ Day might be to remind us all that the world doesn’t come to an end if you do something foolish. After all, the only way to get the life you want is to risk being thought a fool—and to actually be one, now and then

Kate Smith

God Bless America

Our alternative national anthem was written by Irving Berlin in 1918 for a revue called Yip Yap Yaphank. He was stationed at U.S. Army Camp Yaphank at the time.

In 1938, he revived and rewrote it, and Kate Smith introduced it on her radio program. Ever since then, it and Kate Smith have been considered among our most patriotic symbols.

During World War II, Kate Smith broke records in selling war bonds to raise money for the United States’ war effort.

Things weren’t always easy for Ms. Smith, personally. She had a long-lasting career, recordings, a hit radio show, a TV show. She was, however, a target of ridicule on numerous occasions due to her weight. Her long-time manager, Ted Collins, helped her to come to terms with that and guided her career until he passed away in 1964.

She achieved a new wave of popularity, later in life, as a good luck charm for the Philadelphia Flyers. The team began playing her recording of God Bless America instead of the national anthem before certain games. They were noticeably more successful on those occasions. In 1973, Kate Smith appeared in person to sing and continued to do so intermittently. The Flyers still show a video of her, prior to important games.

In 1982, President Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on her.

After her death in 1986, she was conducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, and had a postage stamp issued in her honor.

All in all, it doesn’t seem like a bad way to be remembered to me.

Here are a couple of YouTube clips for your viewing pleasure.

God Bless America

Cher, Tina Tuner, and Kate Smith (an incongruous trio if I ever saw one) singing a Beatles Medley!

Singing horses

Could there be anything sillier?

Honestly.

This is one of those internet sillinesses that has been around for a while. It’s always fun, however.

So, check it out. Or revisit it.

Turn your sound on.

Click a horse or four.

And have fun.

Singing Horses — who’d have thought?

Trippingly upon the tongue

Speak the speech, I pray you.*

Hamlet’s advice to the players is always good to follow.

It can be a little tricky, however, when you encounter unfamiliar words.

This is clear to me from my work with Round Robin Shakespeare. Take an American who may have limited experience with Shakespearean English and throw some of those dukes’ names at her, and you could have a problem.

Phonetic spelling is not exactly how it goes.

Gloucester. Worcester. Leicester.

Now, of course, at our monthly meetings, we are not sticklers. We don’t really care if you trip over your tongue rather than speak the speech trippingly upon it.

But maybe some of you will have an audition at some point. Your agent (should you be so lucky) will email you the sides, and there’ll be some mouthful of unfamiliar names or scientific jargon.

What are you going to do?

Well, if all else fails, just say whatever it is confidently—as if you know what you are saying and how to pronounce it. If you get the part, somebody will make sure you get the correct pronunciation.

However, it is probably better to make some attempt to get it right. You can always look it up in a dictionary. But then, you have the additional problem of trying to decipher the diacritical marks put there to help you with pronunciation. I’m not sure they still teach those in school, anymore. (I mean, what can you expect from a curriculum that has decided that cursive is not going to be taught? A generation of people who can’t sign contracts, for one thing.)

Anyway, I found a site to help you out—and not a diacritical mark in sight!

Howjsay.com

Just enter those unfamiliar names (or other words) into the search box on howjsay, click submit, and listen to a lovely British voice pronouncing the word.

It turns out that Gloucester is Glawster, Worcester is Wooster, and Leciester is Lester—and the Shakespeare will go trippingly on.

* Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Sc 2

A taste of home

Sort of.

Back in NYC, after many, many years of searching, I had found a hairdresser I liked. I always got a good haircut at a reasonable price and, best of all, he was only two blocks away from my apartment!

The proximity is important because I have—I won’t really call it a phobia—let’s just say, it’s a severe dislike—of getting my haircut.

It’s not that I mind scissors snipping around me. It’s just that it seems an awful lot of trouble and money for something that so rarely seems to be an improvement. That, of course, was until I found Joe.

I had tried various other routes.

The Astor Place Barbershop used to be very popular. $8, you take whatever barber is open, and you get what you get. Definitely affordable in my young, starving actor days but not necessarily reliable.

There was a school in the basement of the Empire State Building. Also affordable—but they were “cutting edge” (no pun intended), and when you got what you got there, likely as not you got something rather weird which didn’t match the headshot on which you’d just spent hundreds of dollars.

There were stylists on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side who gave cuts of varying degrees of proficiency. The problem with them is similar to a complaint of Jean Kerr’s in one of her extremely funny books. If I remember the quote correctly, it was something to the effect that they always acted as if, in another moment, it would have been too late.

I don’t need a hairdresser looking down his or her nose at me. I mean, I’m sure they do. I just don’t need to feel it every minute I’m in the shop.

So…along came Joe.

I loved having my hair cut by Joe. He was fast and good and friendly.

Moving down here to Florida, I was worried about finding a place to get a good haircut.

How thankful I am that there is a little shop over behind Whitey’s Fish Camp where Susan of Susan’s Total Image hangs out!

A friendly welcome and no sense that she thinks she is doing me a favor even to run her comb through my hair.

And walking distance!

Susan and Joe.

My hair and I are thankful.

Ducks in a ditch

(I just love that headline.)

I’m not exactly sure what the content of this post will turn out to be, but I couldn’t resist the headline.

I was out for a walk the other day. Trying to get some exercise, maybe lose some weight. I’ve been walking as often as I can.

I vary the route so as not to get bored. This particular day, I got the MotH* to drop me at a nearby shopping center on his way to the golf course. My plan was to look through the stores and walk home.

And I carried it out.

The route takes me down the county road, past a condominium complex where the sidewalk passes between a big retention pond and a ditch. The retention pond is an attractive feature of the complex. It’s landscaped. There are fountains spraying water high in the air, both for decorative purposes and to keep the water moving. (The latter discourages mosquitoes.)

And there are ducks.

Several species, in fact.

I don’t know what they are. Some big ones. Some small ones. Some brown and white ones; other of more uniform foliage—er, feathers.

I’ve passed by there on numerous occasions. Usually, the ducks are swimming around or sunbathing at the edge of the pond.

On this day, they were in the ditch.

On the other side of the sidewalk.

The voice in my head said, “Ducks in the ditch!” as if it were a Red Alert situation on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

I don’t know why.

The voice in my head is often inexplicable.

But there they were. Ducks in a ditch.

Now, what do you suppose possesses a duck possessed of a perfectly good retention pond to take possession of a far less—one would think—desirable ditch?

Is it a case of the water always being greener on the other side of the sidewalk? A natural illustration of the adage that one man’s algae-ridden swamp is another duck’s paradise? Did they just get tired of manicured perfection and want to take a walk on the wild side?

Your guess is as good as mine. But I’m thinking there’s a sci-fi parody in there somewhere.

* MotH = Man of the House

If you’re going to be a fraud

Be a good fraud.

Seriously.

Since I started this blog, it has become a target for spam comments. I don’t suppose that is unique to my blog. I think they must have software that harvests blog URLs and randomly posts comments. The hope, I guess, is that the blog will have a large readership that will then see the link’s posted in the comment.

Now, let’s consider the math—and the odds.

First, how many bloggers allow unmoderated comments? Obviously, some must, or this would be a futile endeavor from the get-go. But, can it really be enough to make it worth the set-up costs?

Second, how many bloggers are crazy enough to approve these spam comments? They are so obviously fraudulent. I suppose, if you were blogging daily with serious nutritional advice or plumbing repair tips, a comment like the following might entice you to approve it.

I’ve been surfing online more than three hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It’s pretty worth enough for me. In my view, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the net will be a lot more useful than ever before.

What you need to know about this comment is it was made to go on my post NSFW. For those of you who don’t remember, this is the one with the incredibly silly pirate video posted on a Silly Saturday.

All of you wondering how to make the net more useful, take heed. Apparently, all it takes is silly pirate videos.

This one, too, might be tempting.

Thank you incredibly substantially for your exciting text. I have been looking for these types of message to get a definitely very long time. Thank you.

I didn’t realize there was an Alexis Smith fan out there who didn’t know how to use YouTube for his or herself.

I guess my tip is two-fold.

First, as a blogger, don’t be dumb enough to fall for this.

Second, if you’re trying to fake it ’til you make it, fake it better.

A double miracle

New glass. No lizards!

Two for the price of one today.

I have new window glass!

When we bought the Casa, we had four windows that were either fully or partially fogged. That’s when the seal gets broken, whatever inert gas that was inside the double panes leaks out and condensation and dirt leaks in. You can’t see out of the windows, and you can’t get them clean.

Right after we moved in, we had a visit from a company called Miracle Windows. They have a great product, seemingly. Windows you can jump up and down on without breaking them. Built in screens.

There were only three problems.

One, their opening estimate was $50,000 to replace all the windows in the house. The fact that, in the same breath, they came down to $25,000 didn’t really inspire me with a desire to hire them.

Two, they lied. They told us that we could not get replacement windows the full size of our picture windows because this is now against code. And, they told us that we couldn’t get the bronze color frames we have because this, too, is against code. I see new construction all over town with bigger windows and bronze frames. I haven’t checked the code, but I am fairly confident that they lied.

Three, they didn’t mention that they were going to have to cut the coquina stucco to replace the windows or that somebody was going to have to repair and replace that. I know that adds an additional $250 minimum to the cost per window.

So, that was the end of Miracle Windows. I’m not the sucker born in the minute they needed.

Having had the glass alone replaced in our NYC co-op apartment after the building next door burnt down several years ago and the glass cracked from the heat, we knew that it is possible to replace only the glass and not the entire window.

We began collecting estimates for that, and—golly! I think this post is a triple miracle!—the whole job, all four windows (six if you count the upper and lower sections), came in well under $1,000.

I call a savings of $49,000 a miracle, don’t you?

So, Glass Doctor of Jacksonville came out on Friday. Three hours later, I can sit in my desk chair and see the creek. The front window looks like somebody could accidentally walk through it. It’s so clean it’s practically invisible. I now need curtains or a shade or something for the laundry room window, and upstairs in the Easter Egg Room, the view is clear!

That’s miracle number two.

The third and final miracle?

Those intrepid lizards never once even attempted to take advantage of the big holes in the house occasioned by the removal of the windows. As far as I can tell—and believe me, I was on lizard patrol—none of them came into the house.

Yay!

You knew we were going to get to him.

Sooner or later.

Sir John Smith, Admiral of New England—otherwise known, more famously, as Captain John Smith.

Most school children in the United States know the story of Captain Smith and the Jamestown Colony. Most of us remember all the exciting details of the capture by Powhatan and the rescue by Pocahontas.

And most of us now know that the truth of those tales is somewhat suspect.

Captain Smith made a good few enemies. His veracity has been questioned over the centuries. Investigation is complicated by post-Civil War scholars attempts to give precedence to the New England colonies over Virginia’s early settlers.

And Captain Smith seems to have made a habit of being rescued by young girls, since he tells the same story about his time in Transylvania prior to the voyage to Jamestown.

So, who knows?

Did he embellish his memoirs? Was he an ally or enemy to the Native Americans? An honor to the Smith name or not?

We’ll never really know.

But he was an adventurer, a survivor, a leader, and an explorer.

We’ll have to settle for that.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants