Category: Odds and ends

A product endorsement

I have never endorsed a product on this blog, and receive no remuneration for doing so. This blog is 100% non-monetized. However, this morning as I was showering, my wife came up to tell me there was  a beeping in the basement. I quickly toweled off and got dressed and went down. Sure enough, the product to the left here, the Watchdog Water Alarm was sitting in a puddle of water by our water heater.

I had been troubled by the water heater, as the hot water coming out of the faucet seemed too hot to me – I used a meat thermometer to register it at 140 degrees when the thermostat is set at 125. I did what we all do, went to YouTube, which said that I probably had a buildups in the tank, and that I needed to flush the water heater to get rid of the debris. That should be done every year, I was told. I thought well, heck, I don’t do that every year, but I do it often, like … well, never.

At the same time, we had two leaks in our boiler room, so I called Weatherbee, the people who tend to our boiler, and while they were booked till Monday agreed to send a man over who was in the area. As it turns out, all leaks had a common source.

Continue reading “A product endorsement” →

Friday tidbits

Paul is not dead (PIND)

It seems odd to need to explain this to some people, but Paul McCartney has always been two people, a set of twins who, for lack of better information, we call Paul (the original crooner seen far more often in the early days) and Mike (who turned out to be a much better stage performer).

The people behind the Beatles, some very talented musicians, artists, psychologists and writers, knew that the two did not look enough alike that they could pull off the ruse forever. But professional propagandists as these also knew that lying is not an effective tool for misleading people. It is far better to misdirect. So with McCartney they started, even as the group was still touring, placing clues on the albums indicating that Paul might have been killed and replaced. Lyricists planted words in some of the songs (“He blew his mind out in a car”), and even George Martin did his part, knowing a camera was running, by referring to McCartney as “Billy.” (Part of the misdirection was that a lookalike named Billy Shears had become the new Paul.)

As Ab said to me this morning in a message, “I agree it’s all fun, like a cat playing with mice.”

Continue reading “Friday tidbits” →