I watch for the iWatch

 There’s been a lot of news lately about the supposed new watch from Apple that has been dubbed, obviously, the “iWatch.” Of course, Apple isn’t saying anything, but there is a lot of speculation.

Let me tell you about my love affair with watches. Unlike this modern generation that refers to their cell phone when they want to know the time, I’ve always had a wristwatch. I’d feel naked without it.

I prefer looking at hands rather than digital displays since my eyes are not as good as they used to be. (Nor are my arms, legs, chest, or even my brain … but that’s a story for another time.) I did have one of those early LED watches back in the seventies, but I could not tell the time when I was outside since the sun blotted out the dim display.

I’ve had many watches over the years, and gravitated toward the fine mechanical ones. I’ve spent $300, $400, and even more for my watches. I’ll pay for the quality I desire.

I’m a stickler for accuracy. I want the time on my wrist to be as accurate as the National Bureau of Standards Time Broadcasts. I want to know to the minute, if not the exact second. I used to teach a lot and starting on time was a key goal of mine. I still stress about being late and I set all the clocks in all my cars to the correct time.

I’ve owned Citizen, Seiko, Pulsar, and Bulova. I’ve had electric watches and self-winding watches, and even one that was like a self-winding watch, only the movement of the wrist charged a battery. Some were destroyed by battery corrosion and some just didn’t work as well as I wanted. I was particularly disappointed in the quality of a recent Bulova watch that I paid nearly $500 for, and it lasted about one year.

About five years ago, I bought a nice new Seiko that had the automatic charging stuff. It wasn’t real thin, which is a desirable design characteristic, but it was nice and simple and I thought quite pretty with a silver case and a blue face. Besides the time, it showed the date in a little window by the numeral three. I had just received that watch in the mail, when I was distracted by a new idea. (I shop a lot on the Internet. Lots of choices and good prices.)

I ran across an article about a Casio watch that would automatically update the time to the Atomic Clock at WWV or other time transmissions. Plus this watch had a solar cell built into the face and would automatically charge its battery. Top that off with the small LCD display able to show date and I was sold. In addition, this watch was less than $200. I ordered it right away and ended up gifting my new $400 Seiko to my friend Steve.

(Look close at the picture above. Click on it to make it bigger. See the center part that looks like it has little squares all over it? That's the solar cell. The four buttons are around the sides. One turns on a light for the dark, although the hands do have fluorescent paint. The LCD screen can show time in different time zones or other information. However, no weather report, temperature, heart rate, or any of that "smart" stuff.)

Man I love this Casio watch. I’ve had it now for over five years with no problems. Since we live less than one hundred miles from Ft. Collins, the home of the National Bureau of Standards WWV time transmissions, it reliably sets the time each night at midnight … to the second! It has other functions such as multiple time zones, stop watch, and alarm clock; but I just use the simple date and time function. (I usually know what day of the week, but that shows with the date.)

I’m so happy with this watch. It is quite attractive and came with a good band I’m still using after all these years. Part of the case is plastic and it is fairly thick, and I have to read the manual every time I change time zones because it has four buttons and you have to use a fancy combination of the buttons to change zones, but I’m happy. I just keep a copy of the manual on my iPhone.

Now we read about the iWatch and the current implementations of smart watches in all the news. I’ve heard about these new smart watches and someone at the hockey game the other day had one. It looks like a tiny TV on your wrist. You have to press buttons to see the time, and I doubt it works well in direct sunlight. So I wasn’t impressed. Plus I suspect you have to charge it all the time. I wear my watch to bed in case I wake up in the middle of the night and want to know the time.

Then I read this article by Bruce Tognazzini (or just Tog). He’s a former designer with Apple. He has a lot of good suggestions as well as a good review of the current crop of smart watches.

My son, Mark has one of those Nike sensors in his shoes that record his running and send the data to his iPhone. I've got a Polar watch that communicates with a band on my chest recording heart rate. The treadmills at the club can receive the data from the Polar watch. I haven't used it for a couple of years because the battery is dead. I'm going to have to send it back to Polar to get it replaced since the watch is sealed.

I've also looked at new wrist sensors such as the Nike Fuel Band and Jawbones Up. So I do understand some of the special things a smart device on your wrist could do. Tog has a lot of examples in his article.

With all the talk about Apple using curved glass (they are so good with glass) and Tog’s suggestions, I can hardly wait to see that new iWatch. Whether it will replace my Casio or my Polar is a good question. Tog addresses several disadvantages and good points. But then I do have two arms.

http://asktog.com/atc/apple-iwatch/

Passwords

Passwords: the key to security. From logging into your computer to logging into a network to logging into a website to logging into your private data, the “password” is the key to security. There are a few other ways to assure that only the authorized user can access data and systems, but the password is the ubiquitous key to most all things digital.

So what’s in a password? What’s its purpose and how can it be designed or created to best accomplish that purpose? The best passwords are ones that are easy to remember, but hard to guess. That’s the “key.”

The “easy to remember” part is important. If we can’t remember our passwords, then we’ll have to write them down and refer to the writing every time we log on. That fact means we usually don’t use random combinations of letters for passwords, although they would actually be the best. In some cases, writing down the password is just a time consuming annoyance. In other cases, recording the password can make it possible for a thief to steal the written password and eliminate the requirement to guess it.

To make it easy to remember, most people use familiar things to construct a password. They might use the names of their children or pets. Of course, is someone knows them, that might be easy to guess. Or they could use familiar things like important dates or addresses or common words. But using common words or constructing passwords with predictable patterns make it much easier to guess than using a truly random collection of characters to construct a password.

The length of the password is also a factor in making it harder to guess. It is much easier to guess a four-character password than an eight-character password. In fact, most systems will insist that a password be at least six or eight characters to be accepted as a password.

Let’s examine the mathematics behind that idea of longer passwords are harder to guess. The difficulty of guessing something correctly depends on how many choices there are to guess. If I said, “guess which hand has the quarter,” there are two choices, “left” and “right” and the odds of guessing correctly is 50%. In addition, if you got two guesses, you would be bound to get it right.

If I said, “guess what day of the week we’re going to the party,” you’d have 1 in 7 chances of getting it right. And, if I gave you seven guesses, you’d be certain to guess it correctly.

So we have to give the hackers trying to guess our password a lot of choices to try because they are going to try more than once. In fact, with modern computer hardware, they are going to try billions and billions of times. (I’ll have to write a more technical article about the methods hackers use. I’ll save that for later.) For now, let’s figure out how many possible passwords you can create of a given length.

Suppose we created a single character password using only the lower-case letters on the keyboard. There are 26 letters from “a” to “z.” So there could be 26 possible one-letter passwords.

Now suppose you could have two letter passwords? Then for each of the letters as the first letter, you would have 26 passwords made up of different second letters. For example, “aa,” “ab,” “ac,” … “az.” Since there are 26 “first” letters, that would be 26 times 26 total passwords. Twenty-six times 26 is 26 squared or (26)².

If there were three letters then the total number of unique combinations would be 26 x 26 x 26 which is 26 cubed or (26)³. It should be obvious now that the formula for the total number of combinations of lower-case letters in a password of length “n” would be (26)ⁿ. You see, the bigger the “n” the more possible combinations.

A password made up of eight, lower-letters would come from a possible collection of (26)⁸ = 208,827,064,576. Seems like a pretty big collection to guess the one right answer from. That’s 208 billion possible passwords. If we chose only random combinations of letters, then that is how many guesses it would take. Or, put statistically, if the hacker guessed half that many, then the odds would be 50-50 the hacker would guess right.

But we also want the password to be memorable. So we are more likely to make the password some word we know, such as “aardvark” or “workroom.” The problem is that the hacker knows we are likely to use common words, so he (or she) will not try all the possible 208,827,064,576 combinations of letters, but just common words out of a list called a “dictionary.” There are only about 50,000 common words in the normal dictionary. Of course, people use names too as passwords, so hackers will add all the common names to their word lists, but you can imagine that that only comes to around 60,000 eight-character words. That’s a lot less to guess than our original 208 billion possibilities.

For that reason, most passwords are created with numbers in addition to letters. That raises the total and makes passwords that don’t exactly match common words. Since there are ten numerals from 0 to 9, now the formula is (36)ⁿ and an eight-character password would include (36)⁸ possibilities which equals 2,821,109,907,456 combinations. We’ve increased the number of possible passwords by ten times, but – more importantly – a simple dictionary search would be prevented, assuming we are smart in how we use the numbers.

You see, hackers know what we’re doing because they are people too. In addition, they’ve analyzed millions and millions of actual passwords to determine just what people are most likely to do when choosing a password.

For example, we may just take a seven-letter word and add a number on the end, such as “realize5,” or we may take two short words and put numbers between them such as “big5tent.” That does make it harder for the hacker as they might have to test a lot of dictionary words with one or more numerals at the end or they may test putting two short words together separated by a numeral. That greatly increases the number of guesses required to have a possibility of guessing correctly, but, remember, they are using powerful computers that can make a lot of guesses in a short time.

Many systems will require the addition of capital letters and even other symbols to make passwords harder to guess. That’s a good idea. Suppose we used all the lower-letters, all the upper-case letters, and numerals? Then there are a total of 26 + 26 + 10 choices for each character and an eight-character password could be any combination of (62)⁸ = 218,340,105,584,896 possibilities. But, more important, the number of dictionary words increases greatly too.

Unfortunately, most people will do something very predictable, such as only capitalize the first letter in the password. Hackers know this, so now they just have to test every word in their dictionary twice, once with no caps and once with the first letter capitalized.

Remember that random passwords are the hardest to guess, and so try to be a little random. It does help to add some more symbols such as punctuation and special characters such as “#,” “$”, or “@.” There are actually 256 total ASCII characters in most computers character sets, but we need to stick to characters on the main keyboard. Since passwords are almost always entered without seeing what we’re typing to increase security, we want to stick to simple characters on the keyboard. Plus, some of the ASCII characters have special functions that we don’t want to have in a password to keep things simple for the programmer writing the programs that process the passwords. Still I count an additional 32 special characters on my normal English keyboard so adding them gives us 26 + 26 + 10 + 32 = 94 total characters. So an eight-character password using all the keys on the keyboard and upper and lower case letters would yield (94)⁸ passwords = 6,095,689,385,410,816.  The bigger the number, the harder it is to guess. (Certain characters may not be allowed in passwords such as the comma or the period; so I tend to stick to the characters across the top of the keyboard.)

In fact, with modern computers that the hackers are using to guess passwords, I suggest longer than eight character passwords. Making the password ten characters, and not even bothering using special characters, just the upper- and lower-case letters and numerals yields (62)¹⁰ = 839,299,365,868,340,200. That’s about a thousand times as many possible passwords as we got with eight characters and all the funny symbols.

I don’t want to say in public how long my passwords are because I don’t want that information known. Even the length of your password is something to keep secret because the hacker actually has to test all lengths that are likely. That increases the total even more. So they will have to use their dictionary to create all six-character, seven-character, eight-character, nine-character, and … well, they’ll probably not even try more than eight characters. Remember, it isn’t important that the locks on your house be impossible to break into. They just have to be good enough to discourage the burglar so he (or she) will go next door and rob your neighbor.

Make your passwords hard enough to break, and the hacker will just go find an easier target. It’s “every man (or woman) for themselves in this scary world.”

So make your password long, I suggest 10 to 12 characters or even 16 if you’re truly paranoid. Use upper- and lower-case letters, but don’t just capitalize the first letter. Don’t use common words or names. You can use common words, but mix in numbers and even special characters. Oh, and a warning. Those of you that think it is a good idea to substitute a “3” for an “E” or a “1” for an “I,” the hackers know that.

One of the first passwords they’ll test is “s3cr3t.” Remember, the hackers are smart. They’ve studied how most people make passwords. They use powerful lists of common words and they add all kinds of special rules to handle capitalization and or use of numbers and they know most people put the first letter capital or end the password with numbers of make these silly substitutions. Those are the first million guesses they try. Then they move on to harder and more random combinations.

Here’s a good suggestion: Some people think of common phrases and then use the first letter of each word in the phrase as the password. It appears random, (and it’s been proven to be equal to truly random letter combinations in difficulty to guess), but it is easy to remember because you recall the known phrase. For example, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” becomes “tbontbtitq.” A rather nice, ten character password. Go ahead, substitute zero for “O” and one for “I.” This helps in this case, and makes it even harder, “tb0ntbt1tq.”

Now, I suggest a little less common phrase than the famous “to be or not to be” phrase, but it isn’t hard to come up with phrases that won’t become words in the hackers list of words. Bible verses are a great choice since we know all the hackers are heathens. :-) How about “fgsltwhghoaos.” But then I told you not to use really, really famous quotations. (It does depend on which Bible translation you use. Some say “only begotten” instead of “one and only.” That’s a hint folks to the last phrase.)

Also notice that this phrase technique tends to produce fairly long passwords. Some web sites will require capitals and numerals and even special characters. You can still use the phrase technique by combining it with the silly number substitution, which, are now, not so silly. You could also substitute “$” for “s” or “&” for “e” or “@” for “a.” Be creative, but consistent. That will make them easier to remember. Your passwords will still be nearly random and not open to dictionary attacks. You can also be consistent in capitalization. You might always capitalize the fifth and the seventh letter.

Finally, and this may be the best advice of all, use different passwords for your different accounts. I know that can be very difficult and may drive you to recording your passwords. But hackers can break into some web site of company computer and recover your passwords. (I’ll write a more technical article about that too … someday.) If the hacker was able to steal your actual password from some computer system, then, no matter how strong your password creation algorithm is, the hacker doesn't have to guess. He (or she) knows it now and will likely try it on every bank that exists.

So, at the very least, use unique passwords for your bank, credit union, and stockbroker. They should each have separate passwords. Also protect your email account or accounts with strong passwords. If a hacker gains access to your email account, they may request new passwords for other important accounts and these new passwords will be mailed to your email. Guessing passwords isn’t the only trick up a hacker’s sleeve.

It is also a good practice to change your passwords periodically. At IBM we had to change passwords every 60 days. Since I had a couple of dozen IBM passwords, that was almost an all day chore, and I had no choice but to record the passwords. I used an encrypted file on the computer to do that.

Computers and browsers may offer to memorize your passwords for you. That’s OK in some instances, but I worry that if your local computer gets hacked or stolen, this may backfire on you. I don’t have a strong opinion on the use of such features. If you create really strong passwords, then that is good. If you have your “every-day” computer memorize those strong passwords, well … I just don’t know if that is a good or bad thing. I’ll have to research that more.

Well, that’s all folks. Now you have some good ideas for making good passwords that will defy hacker attacks. And don’t be stupid. They know what letters you are likely to capitalize or where you’ll probably put the numbers. Be different. Be creative. Be hard to guess.

Don’t be a donkey … or a jackass. Do you know how many people use “secret” for their password? But you know better now. You’d make it “sEcr3T5.”

The Tale of the Monkey's Tail

The Monkey’s Tail … a tale all made up by Mickey Cheatham

Prologue

I assume that readers are familiar with the short horror story written by W. W. Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw.” This popular story written in 1902 sets up the familiar scene of three wishes granted via the talisman of a monkey’s hand. Of course, nothing good will come to anyone who so tempts fate by asking for a wish. Remember the saying, “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.” Well that often produced for television tale is a good moral lesson for those that don’t understand the meaning of the warning.

So, tonight, ladies and gentlemen, in my best Rod Serling voice, I’ll be introducing a minor tale, the story of the “Monkey’s Tail.” Like most things in “real life,” it isn’t as dramatic as Jacobs’ familiar story, but more in line with the pedestrian life of one Mr. Michael J. Wozikoniks of 221 Elm Street in any city you can imagine, even yours.

Mr. Wozikoniks works in an office. Not one of those modern offices with computers and break areas. No, this is an old fashioned office for an old fashioned tale. This office has rows of desks with people typing and filing. I don’t really know what Mr. Wozikoniks does, but it does involve a lot of typing and filing. And, of course, he has a surly boss who always is ordering him around to type something or file something or something.

Our Story Begins

(Scene One, his large office.) (Our hero is seen glancing around.)

M.J. (as his friends call him) always has one eye on the clock. He’s wishing for 5:00 to arrive, but – of course – the wish doesn’t come true because we haven’t gotten to that part of the story yet. But eventually the “slowly moving hands of time” arrive at the magical “quitting hour.” (Take that Mr. Serling. You’re not the only one that can write that purple prose.)

M.J. heads out to the parking lot and locates his car. It’s an old sedan with a big dent in one side, but he can’t afford to have it fixed. He can’t even afford to have insurance. But that’s another tale. He hops in and makes a wish that it will start. Again, the magic isn’t here yet, but that wish is granted and the old jalopy roars to life. Did I mention it needs a new muffler?

As he drives toward home, making every red light along the way … I never said he was lucky, I said he made a lot of wishes. When? Why just now. Reread the last paragraph!

Finally he arrives home just in time for dinner. Now, let me introduce M.J.’s wife. She may have been a beauty in her teenage years. We don’t know. If she was, there is no sign left of that fact. She’s pear shaped. You know, narrow on top and wide on the bottom. I think that comes from a lot of sitting … at the doughnut shop. She’s got long flowing hair, and it is put up in curlers. Why the lady is in curlers at supper time, well … I’m just the author … I don’t know all the answers.

Anyway, she’s prepared a nice home cooked meal for M.J.: a TV Dinner. This was before they invented microwave ovens, and you actually had to cook this TV Dinner for 45 minutes, the last 10 with the tin foil rolled back off of the “Baked Betty” desert. If you ever saw that movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” you might remember the rather drab food the astronauts ate on the trip to Jupiter. There was big green thing that you ate along with a white thing and an orange thing. They all had the consistency of mashed potatoes, only without any butter or sour cream or chives.

Well, what those astronauts were eating was the 21^st century version of a TV dinner. They had a improved a lot by then. M.J. took one look at his food cooling on his plate … errrr … tray … and decided what he wanted was a stiff drink. They were out of milk, and even cool aid. So he took a drink out of the half set jello in the frig. Now that’s a stiff drink.

He would have settled in for a little TV watching to go with his TV dinner, but his TV hadn’t worked since he’d thrown his shoe at it during the Jackson vs. Doolittle fight when he thought the ref was giving Doolittle a long count. He actually missed the TV, he’s not much of an athlete, but as “luck” would have it, at that exact point in time, the TV blew a tube. For my younger readers, I’ll explain that tubes came before transistors which came before iPods. There is a family resemblance, but tubes had to “warm up” and they would sometimes “go out.”

He called a repairman, but he wasn’t able to fix it right away. He said he’d have to order a part from the factory. He’s been back several times, but the TV still isn’t working. The frequent repair bills are one reason M.J. had to cancel his auto insurance. How he wishes he’d hired a more competent repairman, but … remember ... wishes aren’t happening to M.J. … at least, not yet!!!

He decides he’ll read the paper. Unfortunately, the paper was used to wrap some fish that the TV repairman had caught on the way to M.J.’s house just today. Why a TV repairman would stop on the way to a service call and catch fish, or bring them with him on the call and request a newspaper to wrap them in, or why his wife didn’t ask for the fish and fry them for supper since her husband had already spent a month’s pay trying to get the TV fixed, or why this story asks so many questions … these are just thoughts that didn’t occur to M.J. He was tired from a long day of typing and filing.

So he went to bed. Besides, tomorrow was Friday and that meant the weekend was getting close. Maybe the boss would let them go home early tomorrow. Just then, as M.J. was thinking about wishing his boss would let them go home early, when he heard a knock at the door. It was probably just a Jehovah’s Witness, and he thought he’d let his wife answer the door. Besides, he was down to his underwear getting ready for bed.

Soon his wife walked into the bedroom, just as he was climbing between the sheets and wishing he had a hot water bottle to warm the bed. She said there was someone at the door. He already knew that because he had heard the knock. She said it was for him. He didn’t realize that Jehovah’s Witnesses asked for people by name, but he got up and looked around for his robe. He wished he could remember where he had left it. That wish didn’t come true either, so he put on his wife’s robe. It was way too big for him, but that’s OK in a robe.

Soon he was meeting a man in a suit with a briefcase. He sat down on the couch opposite of the chair the man was sitting in and said that he was Michael J. Wozikoniks and “how could he be of service.” The man said that he was an attorney and he was delivering a message. He said M.J.’s distant uncle had died and had left an item to M.J. in his will.

That seemed odd to M.J. since he didn’t think that uncle liked him. In fact, he thought his uncle hated him ever since he threw that baseball through the front window of his uncle’s house on the day that the garden club was over to see his prize Begonias. The ball had continued through a large and assumedly very expensive plate glass window and arrived at the exact a point in space-time occupied by a rare Chinese vase, which just happened to contain the only living specimen of the special Begonia that the uncle had raised from a tiny seed. The ball proceeded to demolish the vase, knocking the flower to the floor, where the uncle, overcome with grief at the sight of so much broken glass, inadvertently stepped upon, thereby destroying in one fell swoop his beautiful and rare flower and his hopes of ever being elected president of the garden club.

Following that upsetting occurrence, the uncle had retired to the orient, perhaps in search of a replacement for the irreplaceable vase damaged during the nephews wild pitch. So it was only natural for M.J. to assume that the last thing in the world that would happen is that he’d be mentioned in his uncle’s will. So, what wonderful (and assumedly valuable) relic of the orient could have been the uncle’s last wish?

He was soon to learn as the lawyer opened his case and withdrew what appeared at first to be a short, hairy serpent. The lawyer quickly explained it was the “Monkey’s Tail.”

M.J. could not, for the life of himself, figure out why his uncle would have left him the last six inches of the south facing part of a north-facing monkey. Perhaps the uncle had not forgiven him for his youthful transgression. But the lawyer quickly explained that the tail had magical properties. If you held the tail in your right hand, over your heart, and pressed in down against you chest, and then say your wish out loud, it would be granted.

"That's all there is to it?" M.J. asked. "Yes," the lawyer replied, "and one more thing, the tail is only good for three wishes. No more, just three."

“Poppy cock,” M.J.’s wife blurted out, as she had been listening from the doorway. M.J. was startled to hear his wife swear like that. The only other time he had heard any curse words from his wife’s lips, was on the night of the day they were married. Apparently she was disappointed by something. Anyway, she never talked much any more any way since there was usually something in her mouth that she was chewing. So M.J. was quite startled by the sudden outburst.

So he bid the lawyer adieu, took the tail with him into the bedroom, putting it next to the alarm clock, and climbed into bed. He was so filled with thoughts of the day’s events he even forgot to take off his wife’s robe, but that was OK as it warmed up the bed and he was soon asleep only to be awoken at the early hour of six AM to prepare for work.

Fortunately his car did start per his morning wish, although he had not used the monkey appendage to make the wish official. He had, however, put the tail into his shirt pocket along with two number two pencils, the yellow kind. He thought he found a new dent on the side of the car, but it was hard to tell since it was in the middle of the old dent. Besides, it was Friday and he would soon be enjoying his weekend, although – just at that exact moment – as the engine started to turn over – he remembered: he was supposed to take his wife to the grocery store on Sunday.

He didn’t like taking his wife to the grocery store. It seemed like the “scene of the crime” to him as he recalled his wife, who possibly not beautiful, at least she could fit through doors without having to go sideways like she did now. She would get several boxes of doughnuts and several boxes of TV dinners and a box of jello. Hopefully there would be enough money left to get a bottle of milk since M.J. was tired of drinking jello.

On the way to work he thought about the tail sitting in his pocket. He noticed, for the first time, that it was rather odorous and it also seemed to be leaking a gooey liquid which stuck to his two number two pencils. Now he would have to wear his coat all day instead of the more comfortable shirt only because he could already see the stain of yellow dyed goop clinging to his shirt. He wished he had a clean shirt at the office, but that didn’t come true either.

Then for a moment, it seemed that one of his wishes had been granted. (Read carefully, he has not used the tail to facilitate a wish yet. So far he’s only made random wishes which never have come true in his entire 45 years of miserable life.)

Just then the boss came in and announced to the entire office that they could go home early today, at 4:45. However, they would have to work on Saturday as a fresh shipment of paper had just arrived and they would be required to type all day Saturday to have something to file on Monday.

M.J.’s hopes dropped to the lowest ebb in a long, long life of ebbing. Now he would not be off on Saturday to pursue whatever M.J. pursued in his miserable, downtrodden, and boring life. And Sunday would be spent with his miserable, downtrodden, and fat wife at the grocery store as she selected the week’s perishables.

Finally, by lunchtime, when all the other workers consumed bags of lunch prepared by loving wives, and M.J. had a cup of coffee with three sugars, (his wife had once sent a TV dinner with him, but remember this is before microwaves, and he tried to eat it frozen. Not at all like the picture on the package,) M.J. had reached a point that can occur in anyone’s life. A point where he just knew things must change. He’d been down so long that he forgot what it was like to be up. He was just wishing there was something he could do when he remembered the tail. It was still in his pocket leaking that odd liquid.

He grabbed the tail in his right hand, and following the instructions from the attorney, he proceeded in the most formal manner to make a request … a wish.

Now if you have been following along, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that M.J. didn’t wish for anything really magical. He didn’t wish for a new car, although he really needed one. He didn’t wish for a better job or even to be marooned on a desert island. No, he was as boring as this story. He just wished that “he didn’t have to work tomorrow.”

He waited all afternoon for his boss to come in and announce that, magically, the truck with paper had not arrived and no one had to work on Saturday. Or for the building to catch fire and the alarm to sound and they would all be rushed outside. Or for world war three to be announced and the city struck by atom bombs.

But, sadly none of these wishes came true. So, M.J. headed for home and a Friday night that was pretty much an exact repeat of the previous night, sans the visit from the lawyer. He did put on his wife’s robe because it had kept him warm the night before, climbed into bed, and soon the alarm clock was signaling time to go to work.

He had almost forgotten about his Monkey Tail enhanced wish when, as he walked toward his car, he saw it had a flat tire. In fact, all four tires were flat. Just as he was starting to worry about how he would ever get to work with four flat tires, it dawned on him. His wish had come true. The Monkey’s Tail really worked. He had got his wish. He would not have to work today. He’d probably be fired on Monday for not showing up, but he’d burn that bridge when he came to it. No he was happy.

For the first time in his life, his wish had come true. Now he wished he didn’t even have this crappy old car. Of course, he didn’t use the tail for that wish. It was not official.

He went inside and sat down to read the paper. Unfortunately, there is no newspaper delivery on Saturday.

He looked for Friday’s paper, but it was also missing. Probably the TV repairman with fish again. He looked in the refrigerator, but all there was was TV dinners and doughnuts. So he decided to take a walk and listen to his stomach growl. He was in a good mood and nothing was going to change that.

He took a walk down by the creek and thought about the tail, when suddenly, he realized he didn’t have the magical talisman. It was in the laundry still stuck to the shirt pocket. Fortunately, his wife never did the laundry. That was M.J.’s job and one he usually did on Saturday.

With that reminder he headed back to his home to regain the tail and start the chore. Upon arrival and noticing the very large pile of laundry he realized it would take all day to complete the task. Then he spied the tail.

Grabbing it in the required manner and stating the required phrase he quickly wished all the laundry was done. Recall I said he was unimaginative. However, the tail proved effective as always, and just at that exact moment when he finished the wish, he heard a loud noise outside.

He rushed out to see what had happened and, there in the street, he saw a large Chinese Laundry truck. It had smashed into his parked car making the earlier dents rather insignificant in the complete efficiency upon which the truck and demolished his automobile. The rear bumper was stuck in the engine in front and the headlights were on top of the car. Various fluids were leaking out of the vehicle and all four, flat tires had been expelled from the collision with such force that each had found a home in a neighbor’s front window, except for the tire that was half embedded in M.J.’s front window.

The driver of the truck, which by the way didn’t seem to even have a scratch … the truck, not the driver … he rushed up and started speaking very fast in a strange accent that M.J. could hardly make out.

He was so “so solly” and he was afraid he had no car insurance or truck insurance or insurance of any kind since he had only recently immigrated to this country and bought the laundry and it included the truck. In fact, the little man explained, he really didn’t even know how to drive, which also explained the giant crash that they were observing. Plus he had spent all his money buying the Laundry and was completely broke.

But, the little man said, he would be happy to pay for the damage with trade and proceeded to load up all the dirty laundry in the not damaged truck and later that day he returned it washed and folded and ironed and in nice paper packages wrapped with string and Chinese letters stamped on the paper.

M.J.’s second wish had come true.

Just then a loud curse came from the bedroom. M.J.’s wife had just arisen … she typically slept late, until 4:00 PM, just time to put a TV dinner in the oven. She had just woken up and found that M.J. had been wearing her robe. Why she hadn’t discovered this fact the previous day since M.J. had now worn the robe to bed for two nights is just to preserve the plot of this story.

So, getting back, she was now swearing and cussing because her favorite robe, apparently a gift from some aunt, was now in a heap on the floor since M.J. had forgotten to include it in the laundry pile.

Now, there comes a time in every man’s life when he has just had enough. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had slung their last glob of dung. It was time for the worm to turn. You may have a few favorite cliques of your own to describe times like this. I’m frankly out of gas.

At first M.J. didn’t say anything. Only a slight increase in the typical red-faced expression gave away the fact that his breaking point had been reached. Twenty years of marriage and what did he have to show for it? Just 365 times twenty TV dinners, a wrecked car, probably a lost job, and a wife so fat that local billboard companies are starting to propose she wear their wares.

At that point there was nothing left to do but use the Monkey’s Tail for his final third wish. Just then he realized he didn’t know where it was. He searched all through the house and failed to find it. Suddenly, in one of those plot twists that defy reason, he realized it was still in the pocket of the soiled shirt, even though he had used it to wish for clean laundry. Apparently he had returned it to the pocket just before he heard the crash outside. Doesn’t make sense, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it like the tail stuck to the shirt.

His heart leaped into his throat as the realized that just what I explained in the latter half of the last paragraph and he started tearing apart the packages in search of the shirt and tail. He found the shirt. The laundry man had done a wonderful job of removing the stain. Where the stain had been, now there was a big hole where caustic chemicals had eaten away the simple cotton polyester fibers.

But no tail. Just as M.J. reached his lowest ebb. More ebby than the ebb he had reached earlier in this tale, there was a knock at the door. It turned out to be Jehovah’s Witnesses. He bought a Watchtower and promised to let them come back and study with him later.

Now he was really down. Really the lowest possible ebb that any skilled author could describe. Why I’m at a complete loss of words to describe just how low M.J. felt as he would now, never, or at least it seemed, get to make his final wish.

But, I don’t want to leave you in suspense. So, I’ll tell you what he was planning to wish for. He was going to wish that his wife was gone …

Now, those familiar with these ironic horror tales and those that have observed that his first two wishes were actually granted with great loss to M.J.: his car and possibly his job typing and filing. So wishing his wife was gone would undoubtedly result in some terrible thing like the house being hit by a meteor killing them both or he would accidently kill his wife and be charged with murder. (Saw that one on the Twilight Zone.) So I’m sure you are all breathing a collective sigh of relief that this tale will end on a high note, leaving M.J. at his lowest point in life, but safely still married to his large wife.

But wait! Just then there’s another knock at the door. It’s the laundry man. He says he found this tail in the shirt and forgot to return it. He did clean up the stuff oozing out of the bottom of the tail as a special gift for the fact that M.J. was going to have to pay for the replacement of his neighbor’s windows, and, again, he said he was, “so solly.”

M.J. was so flabbergasted that I can’t think of what he said. He just grabbed the tail, slammed the door in the face of the little Chinese character, and rushed to the center of the living room where, for the third and final time, he grasped the tail in his right had, placed both hard against his chest just over his heart, and recited hurriedly the magical phrase followed by his wish to be rid of his wife.

Now if this were a screenplay, I’d indicate some solemn and dramatic music be played at this point of the story. But it’s just a tale of a tail, so you readers will have to imagine the music.

M.J. was nonplussed. (I always wanted to use “nonplussed” in a story. Don’t really know what it means, but I’ll bet most of you readers don’t’ know either and this would be a very poor time to check a dictionary since the climax is rapidly approaching.)

So, back to the tale of the tail. M.J. stood fixed in the spot he had stood just a moment before. He hadn’t moved, but his brain was spinning. He waited for the sound of a crash, or maybe a phone call. I know, a knock at the door. No, none of that. Give me a moment. I’ll think of something.

Oh yes. He starts to tour the house looking for his wife since he no longer heard her muttering like he had heard her mutter just before he reached his lowest ebb. He looked in the bedroom. She wasn’t there. Not under the bed or in the closet. He quickly searched the rest of the house. No sign of her. I did mention she was a big women and unlikely to be hiding behind the floor lamp.

After three times around the small house, M.J. could only draw one conclusion: she was gone.

Then it hit him. The "mistake"!!! He forgot to say “gone … FOREVER!!!” You know this three wish stuff has real drawbacks. The Federal Trade Commission should get involved with a truth in advertising suit or something. M.J. was certain that she’d be back and he was fresh out of wishes.

Just then he noticed a note on the table. It was written in his wife’s handwriting. He recognized it right away by the doughnut stains on the paper. He picked up the note with shaking hands. He read it three times to make sure he could believe his eyes.

She said she had been having an affair with the TV man, and she was leaving M.J. … for good! Oh, and the TV worked fine, just plug it in!!

M.J. lived happily ever after. He got a new job at the car wash and makes plenty of money in tips. He’s met several ladies, but enjoys playing the field and hasn’t remarried. He gets post cards from his former wife. She’s stranded in Tahiti and can’t raise the boat fare home.

The TV is working fine and it turns out that TV dinners are quite good when you eat them on a TV tray in front of the TV. So that lowest ebb in M.J.’s life turned around and now M.J. is no top of the world. Just then, there’s a knock at the door … “Who is it?,” M.J. cries.

Epilogue

Oh, wait, what about the Laundry Man. Remember, he was from China. He had the rest of the monkey. That gave him unlimited wishes. He gave up on using caustic chemicals and just wished the laundry clean. At first he was a great success, but then his secret got out amongst the people of Chinatown and he had to leave and go back to China where he died a poor man.

You may wonder why his fellow Chinese, who usually favor commercial success, were so upset with his method of laundry. It seems he was too wishy washy.

Who turned out the lights?

Is anyone wondering what happened to the lights in the “Mercedes-Benz” Superdome during the Super Bowl? One thing we all learned is that you don’t turn those big stadium lights back on quickly. We also learned how a long delay can shift the momentum in a crucial game like this, and the 49ers almost won the game with their play following the extended delay.

The US Department of Energy had recently praised the upgrades and improvements at the Superdome, especially the colored LED lighting on the outside of the building. I too have added colored LEDs to my home lighting scheme. Using the new Philips Hue LED lights, I’ve not only added some real energy savings to my home lighting, but the multicolored LED bulbs are controlled via my home wireless system, and I can use an app on my iPhone to control the light. It is a very impressive setup with a special attachment to my home router giving me wireless control over the lighting just like the Superdome lights.

Here's more about the Philips Hue Lighting system.

http://www.meethue.com/en-US

Here’s a link to the DOE article.

http://energy.gov/articles/super-bowl-city-leads-energy-efficient-forefront

The DOE cited the installation of 26,000 LED lights that would illuminate the exterior of the stadium in a spectrum of rainbow colors, noting that the lights only drew 10 kW of electricity, “equivalent to the amount of energy used by a small home.”

However, along with some minor updates to the stadium electrical systems and installation of new insulation, the $336 million renovation was not necessarily an energy efficient upgrade. The main stadium lights continue to be the less efficient metal halide technology. Most of the money was spent restoring the stadium to its former glory before hurricane Katrina, putting in new seats, bathrooms, and renovating the sky boxes.

But, then, the new LED lights were not the cause of the failure either. In fact, at this point, we don’t know for certain the root cause. It may have been a failure in the power distribution infrastructure of the stadium itself (Superdome), or a failure in the external power from the local power grid (Entergy).

What we do know is that the lights went out due to a “piece of equipment sensed some abnormalities” in the electrical load and “shunted the power in the Superdome,” according Doug Thornton, Senior Vice-President for stadiums and arenas at SMG, the Superdome management company.

http://www.entergy.com/news_room/newsrelease.aspx?NR_ID=2664

That “piece of equipment” was almost certainly a tripped circuit breaker. A joint SMG / Entergy press release issued Monday confirms as much. Mind you, this isn’t the simple breaker found in circuit panels in houses like yours and mine. Larger circuit breakers like those found in a modernized stadium such as the Superdome are pre-programmed with safety logic that will trip the breaker for various reasons: under or over voltage, overcurrent, frequency mismatches, or arc or ground faults are a few. Depending on the scenario, the actual cause of the trip could have come from the utility side (Entergy) or the customer (Superdome) side of the circuit.

Breakers like these will likely have a code that says exactly why they tripped. If and when officials decide to release that information, we’ll have a better sense for why the blackout happened and what we can do to prevent it from happening again.

In the meantime, we’re left to speculate as others have done. Those in favor of better energy management and “green power” are asking if a “smart grid” and other modern energy management systems would have prevented this failure.

For example, if a smart grid sensed that the Superdome was approaching an electrical load trip limit, and also had some fashion of automated demand response (such as load shedding), the stadium’s blackout probably could have been avoided. Similarly, if a problem arose from the utility side of the grid (Entergy) instead of the stadium side, and the Superdome had some level of “micro-grid intentional islanding capability” plus on-site electricity generation and storage, the stadium could have kept the lights on even as the area grid went dark.

(As it was, backup generators kicked in and restored some power while technicians scrambled to return full power to the complex.) And of course, ever on my efficiency soapbox, if the Superdome had invested in much deeper energy efficiency efforts and reduced its overall load, would it have even approached limits that theoretically tripped the breakers in the first place?

Such smart grid technology successfully prevented a blackout at the 2011 Orange Bowl, when a smart system detected that an aging transformer was close to overloading and diverted power elsewhere.

The latest news suggests that the Superdome’s breakers tripped due to a voltage surge on the Entergy side of the grid, protecting the stadium’s electrical equipment from potential damage. As for what caused the voltage surge, that may prove much harder to pinpoint. Last-minute upgrades to the stadium’s electrical system may also be partly to blame.

http://www.nola.com/superbowl/index.ssf/2013/02/super_bowl_blackout_could_be_t.html

There are many lessons to be learned by the NFL, the Superdome management, and the local power utility. As a greenie focused on power saving and modernizing of the power grid, I would ask if reducing loads through energy efficiency and the use of smart grids and other technologies would help to make our electrical systems more flexible and resilient. We don’t want the lights going out at the next Super Bowl.

Broken Bones

All right. There is no STEM or even any A or D in this note. I’m in pure memoir mode thinking back to broken bones and scuffed up elbows. Here comes some motorcycle  and emergency room stories.

In the Navy, in order to indicate that a story was the gospel truth and contained no exaggerations, we had a code phase: “This is no shit.” So, trust me, this is no shit.

We’ll start with my first motorcycle, if that diminutive little, under powered, and poorly geared machine can be called a motorcycle. It was actually called a “motor-bike,” but that didn’t mean putting a motor on a bicycle. No Sir Ree … it was a real motorcycle frame, with tube shocks in front and spring shocks in back and a real gas tank located somewhere between those two suspension features. Now the little weak-kneed 50cc engine and simple two-speed transmission limited speed to a maximum of about 35 mph. Still that was plenty of velocity to get a young kid in trouble.

Once I was chasing my friend John Barr across a field West of town … at least I think it was John. Now back in the early 60’s, that field was just a field. The area between the truck bypass and US 87 was little but farmer’s domain. These days, it is filled in with commercial and residential buildings, but back then it was open field beckoning for the roar of motorbikes speeding across the freshly harvested ground.

I was zipping across the field at my top speed when I went right through a pile of barbed wire on the ground; possible the remnant of an old fence. I turned to look behind me to acknowledge the close call. When my head swiveled back around, there, in front of me, just a few short feet away, was some kind of hole. It was about three feet deep and six or eight feet across. The bike and I flew into the hole, but upon contact with the wall on the other side of the hole, we separated company.

I did a swan dive over the handlebars landing on my right shoulder. As I looked back, I was treated to the view of my MoPed standing straight up on the front tire. It then settled ungraciously to the ground. As I got up to inspect the damage, I found the handlebar bent and the front fork at a new angle. I hopped back on and it started right up, but I noticed I had problems with operation beyond what a bent handlebar would invoke. I had some sort of problem with my right shoulder.

With the help of my friend, John, somehow, we got me and the bike back home. My dad decided to call our family doctor rather than visit the hospital. The doc was home and said to bring me on over. He escorted us into his front room and quickly diagnosed the problem as a broken collarbone; all that without the aid of X-rays, nurses, or any form of health insurance.

He dug up some brace, which was sort of like a backpack without the pack. It pulled my shoulder back and he said it would heal up fine, but no Nazi salutes until that was healed. He charged my dad $20, and I headed back home. That’s one reason we called it the good old days back then. To this day I have a bump on my right collarbone where the two ends joined back together, but not exactly in a straight line. It doesn’t matter. The collarbone is really just there to anchor shoulder muscles, or so the doc explained.

I eventually healed, bent the handle bar back with a piece of pipe and – realizing the hydraulic front shock was no longer hydraulic due to the obvious leakage of fluid, but still worked as a spring – I was back on my stead and soon zooming around the neighborhood none the worse for wear.

Fast-forward about five years. I’m in the Navy and living in a small house about five miles from the ship. My roommates all had bikes and we would commute to the ship like a nine-to-five job. There was this street/road we would take that had three lanes. The middle lane went into the base in the morning, and they turned it around and it went off the base in the evening. If you visit Norfolk now, all that is gone, replaced by interstate like highways. But that made them good old days too.

So my buddy, Mike, and I were headed home from “work” one late afternoon in the heavy traffic when the cars in front of us suddenly slammed on their brakes. I immediately made a plan in my head. I was going to grab all the brake my old Triumph would provide and, as I approached the car in front, at the last moment, I’d let off on the front brake and steer for the space between the two lanes. One upon a bike must be cautious of turning with strong braking force on the front wheel. Otherwise, one might end up eating the dirt … literally.

I was a very experienced motorcycle rider. At that time I was about 23 years old and had been riding for nearly ten years. I knew the front brake was, by far, the most effective at stopping the bike, but it did present a danger to stability, especially on water, rock, or ice. So it had to be used with the utmost of caution.

Of course, a motorcycle can stop quicker than a car, so I didn’t need the second half of the maneuver. Unfortunately, my buddy riding right beside me, tried a similar maneuver in a combined format. In other words, he hit the brakes hard AND tried to turn out of the lane. Sadly the result was he and his bike sliding on the ground. He didn’t hit the car either and, as he got up, he said his leg was really hurting and possibly broken. At that point we were closer to home than the ship, so we continued on and got him and his bike safely home. As I recall, another buddy arrived and we manhandled the bike into the trunk of his car. It was an old Ford and had a very big trunk. Upon arrival at home and parking the bikes, I loaded him into my car, and we headed back to the base to visit the dispensary.

They took X-Rays and diagnosed him with a fractured leg … more like a crack, but painful and in need of attention. The Navy Hospital was about twenty miles away in Portsmouth, Virginia, and they said they would request an ambulance. Rather than wait, I got permission to drive him over. About half way to Portsmouth, Mike started to complain about pain and asked me to stop at a liquor store and buy him a bottle of painkiller. So I purchased a 100 proof medication and he took a liberal dose.

The remainder of the twenty-minute ride he partook of the soothing nectar, finishing off the quart bottle, and he was three sheets to the wind upon arrival at the hospital. Now references to the number of sheets and wind is an old nautical comment about sails and sailing ships. In landlubber terms he was intoxicated, feeling no pain (which was the point of the exercise), besotted, blasted, blitzed, bombed, blotto, canned, crocked, boiled-as-an-owl, dipso, drunk-as-a-lord, fried, giddy, groggy, hammered, high, in-one’s-cups, juiced, loaded, looped, pickled, pie-eyed, plowed, plotzed and polluted, plastered, ripped, shit-faced, sloshed, soused, slozzeled, sauced, and stewed, stinking, and stoned, tanked, tight, tipsy, and toasted, under-the-influence, wasted, wiped-out and woozy, zoned and zonked, and actually quite inebriated. You get the idea.

I went into the hospital and explained I had a patient in the car with a broken leg, and I’d need a wheel chair and two strong attendants as he had broken out in sea shanties and was threatening to keelhaul any sailor that got too close. The big corpsmen were able to corral the exuberant drunk and he was soon resting peacefully in a hospital bed with no need for any anesthesia. That’s the end of that story and everyone lived happily ever after.

That brings me to Colorado for another chapter of the tale. Another Navy buddy by the name of Woody had moved out to Longmont, and we were seeking fame and fortune here in Colorado. Woody brought some bikes with him, including a two-stroke Japanese rice burner that he would take on the motocross tracks in Florida. My futures brother-in-law, Chuck, had a very nice Honda 250cc Thumper, and we were out at a raceway North of here. It had both a motocross track and a TT track.

For those not familiar with all the sorts of motorcycle racetracks, a TT track is more rugged than a flat track with both left and right turns and at least one jump, but it was like a city street compared to a motocross track which is similar to riding up and down the grand canyon.

We were enjoying ourselves one fine day racing around the TT track, and I borrowed Chuck’s Honda. It was a finely tuned Japanese motorcycle, and I quickly copied Chuck’s method of braking hard before the very sharp turns and then letting go of the brake at the last second before executing the slide into the turn. Now remember from my last story that it is important not to use the front brake in the turns as that can be disastrous. On Woody’s bike, in true motocross or flat track style, you just threw the bike into the turns and slid around using the motor and spinning back tire as a brake. I was able to beat a lot of the other bikes by accelerating on the straight-a-way and then braking very hard on the Honda just before the turn.

Later in the day, I tried the same maneuver on Woody’s bike. Recall that it had been on the motocross tracks in Florida, and the front brake was full of sand. Oh, it grabbed all right, but it wouldn’t let go. So into the turn I flew with the front wheeled heavily braked. Although I released the lever on the handlebar, the brake kept a tight clamp down and I was soon duplicating the swan dive I described earlier in this essay. As before I hit the ground on my right shoulder, but the bike was fine, and I thought I was too.

I sat out the rest of that race and was noticing that my shoulder was getting more and more sore. So I told Woody.

We had driven my van to the track with the motorcycle secured in the back with bungees and tie downs. But, sensing an emergency, Woody just rolled the bike into the back, put it on its kickstand, navigated me into the passenger seat, jumped into the driver's seat, and proceeded back to town and hospital at a high rate of speed.

We were soon cruising down main street at about warp 3 when, suddenly, the stop light in front of us turned red. Not wishing to put more people in the hospital, Woody slammed on the brakes. I heard a sound from back of the van … it was a long van: a Dodge Maxi Van. As I turned to look back, I saw one of Newton’s laws in action as the object continued its velocity even though the truck had stopped. The bike flew toward the front, hit the engine mount, rose up into the air, hit the roof of the van, and settled back down, upright, on its kickstand. Woody and I exchanged puzzled looks being at a loss for words. Then we both remembered my busted shoulder, and the light turned green, and off we went.

Upon arrival at the emergency room, it was slightly crowded, and I succeeded at seeing a doctor in less than four hours. “No broken bones. Take this for pain.” So we were soon looking for the pharmacy and exchanging stories about the bike crashing to the front of the truck and noting that we were now getting hungry and where was a good burger joint?

Now as a parent, I’m very familiar with emergency rooms. My oldest, Mike, was a frequent visitor. We took him to the hospital so many times that we had a punch card, and our tenth visit would be free.

It’s not that he was accident-prone. No, accidents didn’t have to seek him out. He actively sought perilous positions providing predictable problems and cuts and contusions and broken bones. It always seemed to occur during the late evening hours while mom and dad were anticipating a good night’s sleep when the phone would ring. Mike would explain his latest predicament and ask if we’d bring the insurance card down to the local hospital. He’d been wrestling with a friend and fell on the sidewalk, or he had to slam on his brakes to miss a cat in the road and jammed his foot under the pedal or he was walking out the front door when he was distracted by a plane flying overhead and, as he looked up, he fell over a kid's bicycle. Oh, he had a hundred stories, and I didn’t believe a one of them.

I think he broke every one of his appendages, at least once, and some twice. We ended up just buying crutches so we would always have them ready. We kept a wrist brace in the bathroom and bandages in our car. Several pints of plasma were in the refrigerator and we kept the car running in the garage and the ambulance on speed dial. We were always prepared.

So soon we arrived at the hospital. Now if you’ve ever been to the emergency room on a Saturday night, it is sort of like a war zone. There are guys … always guys … sitting around with bloody towels wrapped around arms, legs, and heads. The whole extended family is with them including the babies crying and the toddlers playing with the toys; teenagers plugged into music boxes and worried adults ... worried about the injury and the hospital bill. People moaning and people trying to watch the little twelve inch TV as they await their turn with the doctors and people sleeping on three chairs across. It's a scene burned into my memory. No wonder they call it "trauma."

It is a form of triage, and not exactly first-come, first-serve. So as the knife wounds and gunshot victims move to the front of the line, it was often a long night’s stay. I used to read the magazines. I learned from the Popular Science that the United States expected to land a man on the moon … soon. The news magazines trumpeted the end of the Korean War. That was before iPhones and Kindle Apps, so I would just sit around and stare at the victims with a sense of worry for Mike while I planned his punishment as soon as he was well enough to be horse whipped.

Things weren’t so bad with  our second son, Mark, but there was one spectacular exception to that rule. Do you remember the “Capri Sun” juice package? They were all the rage and little kids loved them. It was a metal envelope filled with juice. You would access the drink using a straw that was plunged through the side of the bag. Well, Mark enjoyed those little drinks and one night, when no one was watching, he climbed up on a chair and found a pottery jar with a cork in it that served as an oil lamp. It had a plastic tube through the cork and a wick in the tube. It had never been burned and was full of some kind of lamp oil.

Well little Mark, he was two or three at the time, thought it looked like a Capri Sun, so he pulled the wick out of the tube and proceeded to take a big drink. We found him coughing on the floor in the kitchen and, from the evidence at hand, realized what he had done. I immediately followed poison emergency procedures. 1) Administer Ipecac to the patient. 2) Call Poison Control. They told me: 1) Don’t give him Ipecac and 2) My emergency procedure was in the wrong order. Well, what’s done is done, so we grabbed a bucket (the medicine was having the intended affect) and headed for the hospital.

I don’t mean to make light of things. It was a serious incident and our son could have died. It did all turn out well, so I can laugh about it now. The medicine made Mark throw up most of the poison. The danger is that he’d get it into his lungs while puking. He spend a day in intensive care with oxygen as the doctors and parents worried he would have lung damage as the volatile gasses came out of the bloodstream via the lungs. If his lungs filled with the vapor from the lamp oil, he could suffocate. I think it may have been good that I gave him the medicine since it got rid of some of the lamp oil via mouth rather than lung, and he did fully recover with no permanent damage.

So with all this emergency room experience, I’ll tell one more tale. We were out visiting my dad who was 82 years old at that time. We were helping him with chores around his house and it was time to clean out the gutters. Now Oregon is well known for big trees and so his oversized gutters were brim full with Fall’s blessing. Linda and I were both up on ladders scooping the fallen plant matter out when my dad got a third ladder and joined us. You have to know my dad. He is not one to watch others labor. He’s a hard worker since he plowed cotton fields behind a mule at the age of eight, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is “no shit.” He’s worked hard all his life and so he joined us despite our protests to the contrary. We just couldn't stop him.

No one fell off the ladder, if that was what you expected, but later in the evening my dad began to complain of chest pains. Now a man at his age, a heart attack is a common occurrence, so we gave him a hand full of Bayer Aspirins and piled him into the car for a trip to the emergency room. I pulled up at the local hospital, and Linda rushed inside to get help. Soon two attendants were helping him into a wheel chair. Linda accompanied him inside as I drove off to park the car.

I soon returned and went to the waiting room. (I had dropped him off at the nearby ambulance entrance.) As I waited for someone to direct me to his room … or curtain … or whatever, there was a discussion going on in the crowded emergency room waiting area. Seems it was a busy night … aren’t they always? Folks who had been waiting for … likely … hours and had observed my dad get rushed into the treatment area immediately. They were commenting that they thought they should announce they were having chest pains to speed their service. I completely understood the sentiments.

Now for the happy ending: My dad did not have a heart attack. He was in a bad car accident back in the 1980’s, which has left him with a lot of scar tissue on his diaphragm from chest and stomach injuries. So he had simply aggravated the scar tissue in his insistence to participate with the ladder work on the leafy gutters, and he was sent home … after a night’s precautionary stay … with simple pain meds.

Now, almost four years later, he’s still trying to straighten out the hospital bill from that visit. They charged him for a night’s stay in intensive care, but he was in an ordinary hospital room. He said he got no rest since they woke him every hour and apparently his room was next to the airport waiting room and bus loads of people could be heard boarding the planes all night.

As we story tellers like to state, “All’s well that ends well.” And that is no shit.