Mindful Digressions

Under pressure

I need a minute of your time. I’m going to tell you more about blood pressure than you probably ever wanted or needed to know. Assuming, that is, that you’re not a doctor, a nurse, a home-health aid, or a hypochondriac. But it’s a necessary introduction to put the rest of this post in context. So stay with me, okay?

Blood pressure is the measurement of the force against the walls of your arteries as your heart pumps blood through your body. The readings are usually given as two numbers, such as 120 over 80 (120/80). The top number, systolic blood pressure, measures the amount of pressure that blood exerts on vessels while the heart is beating. The bottom number, diastolic blood pressure, measures the pressure in your vessels between heartbeats.

If your blood pressure is too high, you suffer from hypertension, which is defined by readings of 140/90 or higher. Hypertension, if uncontrolled, increases your risk of serious health problems, including heart attack and stroke. If your blood pressure is too low, say 90/60, you've got hypotension, which can cause symptoms such as dizziness and fainting. 

Hey, are you still with me? Wake up!

During my annual physical exam last month, my doctor checked my blood pressure; it was 140/92. Now I’m not someone who gets all worked up about this sort of stuff. My total cholesterol is higher than it ought to be, while my “good” cholesterol is below, and my “bad” cholesterol is way above, the recommended levels. Even so, my attitude has always been that it is what it is. And, of course, I blame my parents.

But blood pressure has historically been the one medical diagnostic test that I have passed with flying colors. Just a few years ago, it was 110/72, an excellent reading. The results of this latest check, though, indicates that I am standing at the precipice of hypertension.

My doctor expressed concern about this unexpectedly high reading. “I don’t think we need to prescribe a high blood pressure medication just yet,” he said. “Diet and exercise are the preferred course of action.”

Oh man, I am totally screwed. The truth is that I live a relatively sedentary life. My typical exercise routine consists of scaling the 19 steps from the kitchen to my home office five or six times a day. And while my wife prepares healthy meals for the two of us, I am never one to turn away from between meal sweet or salty snacks or from that third or fourth cup of coffee.

And I loves me my burgers and fries.

When I got home and I told my wife about my blood pressure results and that the doctor wanted to see me again in four months to take another reading, she said, “That’s ridiculous. You don’t need to see the doctor again just to get your blood pressure taken.”

Then she muttered something under her breath about my “questionable” decision late last year to enroll us in a high deductible health plan.

Determined to mitigate the need for me to go back to the doctor just to get another blood pressure test, the full cost of which office visit and test would be applied to the incredibly high deductible of my high deductible health plan, and, therefore, borne by me, she sat herself down in front of her computer and proceeded to spend the next several hours scouring the internet to find the perfect home blood pressure monitor.

Ultimately, she ordered an Omron monitor from Heart Rate Monitors, and it arrived about a week and a half ago. It’s an incredibly easy to use device. You simply wrap the inflatable cuff, which is attached to the base via a 36-inch air hose-like thing, around your upper arm and press “START” on the device. The cuff quickly inflates and then slowly deflates, taking readings along the way.

I have started to take blood pressure readings each morning while sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper, and enjoying my first cup of coffee. Unfortunately, some of the articles I read, especially those of a political nature, cause my blood pressure to go up a few points. Damn those Republicans!

So far, though, my daily blood pressure readings have been significantly better than what they were at my doctor’s office last month. In fact, most of the time they come out at 120/80 or better! And on Mother’s Day, as shown on the actual reading on the left, it was 106/72!  Booyah!

It's a like a friggin’ miracle. My hypertension has been cured! I think I'll go out and celebrate my restored good health with a nice, thick, juicy, rare steak with a side of delicious french fries. Hold the green stuff.

Oh yeah...and some tiramisu for dessert!

Phenomenon

A phenomenon, according to dictionary.com, is “something that is impressive or extraordinary.” Well, something really “impressive or extraordinary” seems to be happening to my blog.

I’ve mentioned several times in past posts that my blog doesn’t have much of a following. In fact, according to the statistics provided by TypePad, my blog hosting service, this modest little blog of mine goes mostly unnoticed.

Since I started this blog in July 2009, it has averaged barely nine page views per day, and I personally account for at least half that number because I am, unabashedly, my blog’s biggest fan.

Just last month, though, my blog averaged 21.6 page views per day, peaking at 66 on April 22nd. But this bump in traffic has a perfectly rational explanation. My recently retired and moderately Republican brother-in-law, who moved to Florida last year, just “discovered” my blog and has been commenting on some of my politically provocative posts. Thanks for singlehandedly driving up my page views, Larry.

What's a page view?

The concept of page views is very important to bloggers. As the standard unit used to measure website traffic, it’s an indicator of a blog’s popularity. Each time a webpage is viewed, it counts as one page view. The more traffic a blog generates, the more page views it gets. The more page views it gets, the more commercially “successful” it has the potential to be.

That’s because blog sites that generate a lot of page views...and by “a lot” I mean hundreds, if not thousands, a day...may attract corporate sponsors that are willing to pay high traffic bloggers to put links to their corporate sites on their blogs. Then, for each person who goes to the blog and clicks through to the sponsor’s website, the blogger is compensated. Cha-ching!

I’ve been eagerly waiting to hear from a potential corporate sponsor so that I can retire without having to resort to applying for a job as a Walmart greeter. But, honestly, with an average of fewer than 10 page views per day, half of which are me viewing my own literary handiwork, that’s not likely to happen. Welcome to Walmart.

Up Up and Away!

Okay, now you know what page views are and why they are important, so it’s time to get back to the phenomenon that is the subject of this post. Over the past four days, the number of page views on my blog has inexplicably skyrocketed. On Friday, May 4th, my blog received 12 page views, which is just slightly above average.

But on Saturday my blog got 273 page views! That’s around 30 times the number of page views my blog usually gets. On Sunday, there were 358 page views. Holy shit! Yesterday there were 255 page views and, as of late this afternoon, there have been 87 more page views...and counting!

The mystery in this unexplainable spike in page views is that almost all came from a September 2010 posting. It’s about a bogus print ad for a fake Breyer’s ice cream flavor. What’s disconcerting to me is that I have no clue why, more than a year and a half after it was originally posted, that particular posting is suddenly drawing a crowd.

But the good news is that, with all these page views, all I have to do now is sit by my phone and wait for some deep-pocketed corporation to call me up and offer to sponsor my blog and pay me lots of money.

Waiting...

Waiting...

Waiting...

It's a game of inches

In my last post, I reported that, in preparation for the Republican National Convention this coming August, the city of Tampa, Florida would be banning, among other dangerous items, “string longer than six inches” in what it refers to as the “Clean Zone” in the downtown area.

It turns out that I passed along incorrect information and, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I am duty bound to publish a correction. However, in my own defense, I merely reported the facts that were published in the press. And as everyone knows, if you read it in the newspaper, it has to be true. So once again, we return to the press to get to the truth.

The Tampa Bay Times reported that city officials actually intended to ban string longer than six feet, not six inches. The confusion stemmed from a human error. Apparently some city worker “mixed up the symbols for inches and feet, and it took several conversations to straighten things out.”

Look at the graphic on the left. It shows the universal symbols for feet and inches. It’s no wonder that some Tampa city worker was confused by the meaning of these somewhat esoteric symbols. Does it make sense that a single quotation mark (or the symbol for apostrophe) should mean the longer measure of length and a double quotation mark should mean a shorter measure of length? Of course not. That’s totally backwards.

Double quotation marks are two times longer than single ones. Feet are twelve times longer than inches. Therefore, common sense would dictate that a single quotation mark should reflect the shorter measure (inches), while a double quotation mark should reflect the longer measure (feet). Clearly, something has to be done to right this wrong.

Floridians, it’s time to mobilize. You need to take the initiative in a drive to reverse these symbols so that they more appropriately represent the measure of distance or length commensurate with their own length. Create petitions demanding that the two symbols be reversed. Solicit your friends and neighbors to sign your petitions.

And if you happen to be collecting signatures in a gated community, make sure you’re not wearing a hoodie.

Write to your state legislators, your senators, and your congressman. Appeal to the governor. Let all of them know that Floridians are confounded and angered by these ill-conceived, arcane symbols that would lead many city workers to confuse their meaning.

No doubt, in his quest to win the important Florida vote this November, presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney would embrace this symbolic flip-flop.

Alternative, Floridians, you may wish to invest more in education for your children and review your hiring practices for city workers.

Cutting off your nose to spite your face

Who hasn’t heard, at one time or another, someone say, “He cut off his nose to spite his face”? It’s an idiom, a common expression used, perhaps even overused, to describe a needlessly self-destructive response to a problem, like when you do something crazy that will get you in trouble and cause more harm than good.

Legend has it that the expression originated way back in the 12th century when pious women disfigured themselves in order to protect their virginity. Hey, you’ve come a long way, baby, over the past thousand or so years.

One Austrian man, though, seems to have taken that expression a bit too literally, even though he apparently got a little confused over body parts. His unemployment benefits were about to be cut off, so decided that he’d rather cut off his foot than have his benefits cut off. He sawed off his left foot, and to be sure that doctors could not reattach his severed foot to his leg, he threw it into a wood stove. I swear, I’m not making this up!

The man, who nearly died from loss of blood, was airlifted to a hospital and is now out of danger, although he’s been transferred to the psychiatric ward. Maybe he should have stuck with the nose-cutting thing.

Speaking about cutting off body parts, an Egyptian woman turned out to be quite the cut-up. She decided to exhaust her husband by having sex with him all night long. Once he fell asleep, exhausted as planned, this human praying mantis stabbed him to death and cut his body into little pieces, which she then threw into her backyard, where they were consumed by stray cats and dogs.

The woman calmly sat on her balcony, she confessed, and watched the cats and dogs eating the pieces of her dead husband’s body. “Every time they finished a piece, I threw them another,” she said. I guess she didn’t think the sex was that good.

How about the Californian who tried to poison his wife by putting paint remover in her cereal? Fortunately for his wife, she detected a “horrible taste and smell in her Rice Krispies” and stopped eating, thus avoiding any serious harm.

Of course, the husband claimed that he “accidentally” spilled paint remover into his wife’s cereal bowl. One way of preventing such “accidents” is to be sure that you’re not keeping paint remover in your refrigerator.

And as long as we’re talking about ingesting toxic liquids, did you hear about some guy in North Carolina who decided to light up a cigarette after having taken a swig from a jar of gasoline? Sure, having a cigarette after sex back in the day...before smokers were stigmatized...seemed to be the norm. Maybe it was the calm after the storm or just some way of avoiding that post-sex awkwardness or having to actually talk to the person you just diddled.

But what was this dude thinking when he decided to grab a smoke after drinking from a jar filled with gas? Supposedly he mistook the jar of gas for a beverage, and once he took a big gulp and realized it was gas, he spit it out. He then went outside to smoke a cigarette and guess what happened to him? He burst into flames, Duh! He was transported to the UNC Burn Center in Chapel Hill, NC, were he later died.

Here’s an idea for a new warning label to put on cigarette packs. SMOKING CIGARETTES IMMEDIATELY AFTER DRINKING GASOLINE MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.

I swear, I’m not making this up!

Men, women, and overhead bins

Do you remember that book from the early 90s written by relationship counselor John Gray titled Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus? Gray’s premise was that most common relationship problems between men and women are due to fundamental differences between the genders. Gray metaphorically suggested that men and women are from different planets (i.e., Mars and Venus) and that each gender is acclimated to its own planet’s society and customs, but not to those of the other.

Twenty years after Gray’s book hit the shelves, men and women are apparently still coming from very different places, if not different planets. There was a blurb in a recent issue of The Week, my must read weekly magazine, that caught my eye. The blurb was titled, “Why women seek conflict,” and opened with the sentence, “Men who say that their wives or girlfriends deliberately pick fights may be on to something.” Interesting.

The referenced study, “Eye of the Beholder,” was published in the Journal of Family Psychology. The study found that women “are most content when their partners are upset or agitated, because the intensity of their emotions shows they’re invested in the relationship.” Researchers discovered that “women tend to want to engage around conflict.”

One of the study’s authors, Massachusetts General Hospital psychologist Shiri Cohen, told NPR.org., “That’s because women feel most connected when they can tell that their partners are distressed—or when the men understand that the women are suffering.” Cohen continued, “Men, on the other hand, find conflict threatening, and feel best about their relationships when their partners are in a good mood.” Very interesting.

The bottom line, according to Cohen, is that “the more men and women try to be empathetic to their partner’s feelings, the happier they are.” Conclusion: women have to accept men when they’re blithely content, while men must be willing to deal with women’s occasional need to be unhappy. Yup, Mars and Venus.

Wait just a doggone minute, young lady. Um, make that 72 hours.

Speaking about being from another planet, Utah’s Republican governor, Gary Herbert, signed a law extending a required waiting period for women seeking an abortion to 72 hours. The governor feels that “the bill appropriately allows a woman who’s facing that decision to fully weigh her options and the implications of that decision.”

I wondered if there are any other elective medical procedures that require waiting periods. You know, like cosmetic plastic surgery or liposuction. What about hair transplants? Apparently not. Only for abortions. And 26 states currently have such waiting period laws, although most that do limit the waiting periods to “only” 24 hours.

But why impose a waiting period only upon women who are seeking to get an abortion? Why is there no law requiring a man who wants a vasectomy to wait one to three days after discussing it with his doctor before having the procedure? Why not require men to speak with contraception counselors three days before they can purchase condoms?

What I find truly fascinating is that Utah is imposing a three day waiting period before a woman can get an abortion, but there is no permit required to purchase a handgun and no waiting period whatsoever. In Utah, it’s apparently fine to require a woman who wants an abortion to wait three days so she can understand the implications of her decision, but anyone who wants to purchase a handgun can do so immediately, without considering the implications of such a purchase. God bless the NRA and the religious right.

Up in the air

According to the Federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics, cash-strapped U.S. airlines’ revenues from checked baggage fees were $3.4 billion in 2010. That’s billion with a B, as my barber, Bob, might say. Jim Corridore, an airline analyst with Standard & Poor’s, commented that, “If it weren’t for the fees, the airlines would most likely be losing money.” In fact, in 2010, the major airlines made a combined profit of $2.6 billion, less than the amount they collected in bag fees.

Why then, if the airlines are hauling in the big bucks with checked baggage fees, would they be spending what has to be a sizable chunk of change increasing overhead bin capacity? Well, apparently they want to make boarding smoother and reduce passenger dissatisfaction with having to pay for checked bags and having to push and shove their way to get their carry-on bags in the small capacity and limited availability of overhead bins.

I’ve spent days (okay, minutes) searching the internet trying to find out how much it will cost the airlines to increase the size of all of these overhead bins. I would think it’s not an insignificant amount of money. So instead of doing that, why not reduce demand for the larger overhead bins by simply eliminating the fees for at least the first checked bag?

For fliers that need to check two or more checked bags, make ‘em pay. But if the first bag flies free, won’t that significantly reduce the volume of bags passengers try to stuff into the overhead bins? And wouldn’t that, then, mitigate the need for the airlines to spend megabucks enlarging the overhead bins?

But what do I know? I’m just a guy who writes a blog that nobody reads.

Homeshoring

I’ve been working from home for three different companies since 2005. I love working from home. Not having to get up every day and commute into an office in order to get my job done is a wonderful thing. I consider myself fortunate that my role affords me the opportunity to work out of my house.

Current technologies such as e-mail, the internet, virtual private networks (VPNs), web-based meetings, conference calling, instant messaging, and, of course, my ever-present BlackBerry, make working productively from virtually anywhere a snap.

Of course, in the world of business and commerce, it is necessary to have a name that is more formal and business-like than simply “working from home.” Some companies refer to working from home as telecommuting. Other companies embrace business-speak terms for their home-based workers such as remote employee or virtual employee. Regardless of what you label it, as long as I can continue to work from home, telecommute, be remote, or be virtual, I’m good.

Last week my boss sent e-mail to his team, all of whom work out of their homes, with instructions to go to our company’s employee portal and complete the homeshoring application. Homeshoring? What the hell is that?

I’m familiar with the terms “offshoring,” which is sending jobs overseas to places like India, and “nearshoring,” which is sending jobs to Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Missisippi.  Oh wait, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Mississippi is still part of the U.S., so sending jobs there technically doesn’t qualify as nearshoring. More like hellshoring.

I’ve even heard some companies use the term “rightshoring” as a way of explaining how they will provide resources, whether onshore, offshore, or nearshore, as needed to get the job done in the most cost effective but highest quality way. Some marketing executive probably got a big bonus check for coming up with that catchy buzzword.

So what is homeshoring? Quite simply, according to website netlingo.com, homeshoring is when an employee regularly works out of his or her home instead of the office. The term homeshoring is a derivative of the word offshoring, and involves the transfer, primarily of service industry jobs, to electronically-connected home-based employees, or essentially turning office jobs into work-at-home jobs.

The word homeshoring, then, is just another label for telecommuting, working remotely, or working virtually, all of which are fully synonymous with working from home. Seriously, how many different terms do we really need to describe working from home? Don’t we need at least one more? How about “home-officing”?

So even though I’ve been working from home for years, I now have to complete this damn homeshoring application. I also have to certify that my home office is ergonomically configured, which, for the most part, it is, and that my office equipment, both company-issued and personally supplied, meets the standards set my employer.

This all seems kind of silly to me, and, being the cynic that I am, I started wondering if this was a ploy by my employer to decline the homeshoring applications and require most employees who had been “virtual” to revert to being “physical.”

Fortunately, my boss, who also homeshores, reassured me that the company is not intent on having its current homeshored employees return to working in one of the company’s facilities. He explained that it’s all about accounting, expense control, and reporting.

The motivation (i.e., hammer) for us to complete and submit the homeshoring application is that, until approved, the company will sit on our expense reports for recurring home office expenses, such as the phone, internet connectivity, and necessary office supplies.

Okay, please excuse me. I am now highly hammered, albeit still fully clothed, and need to complete my homeshoring application.

What could have been

I’m not what one would call an emotional guy, so it would be highly unusual for something I came across in a magazine or newspaper to cause me to shed a tear. However, when I read last week about someone whose comic book collection sold for $3.5 million, I cried like a baby. Why, you ask, would some other person’s good fortune elicit such a response in me? Good question.

It dates back to my childhood in the 1950s. Each week, my parents gave me a dollar allowance, which was a small fortune for a pre-teen back in the day. I would hop on my bike, ride to the local newsstand, and spend much of my dollar buying the latest edition of ten cent comic books. Whatever was left over was spent on packages of baseball cards. Each package included a flat, square piece of bubble gum and seven baseball cards with the players’ photos on the front and vital statistics on the back.

This weekly ritual continued from the mid-Fifties through the early Sixties, during which time I amassed a collection of thousands of baseball cards and hundreds of comic books. Most of the comic books were superhero comics from DC Comics and Marvel. Yes, I admit that I would occasionally buy an Archie comic book and, in my younger days, I would sometimes pick up a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck comic book.

By the time I got to high school, my collection of comic books and baseball cards, which I kept neatly organized in our finished basement, was unrivaled in my neighborhood. But when my mother opened up a knitting store just a few doors down from the very newsstand where I acquired my vast collections, she asked me to move my comics and baseball cards from the basement so she could store all of her extra yarns and knitting supplies down there.

Our house was a three bedroom split-level, but because we needed four bedrooms, my parents re-purposed what was originally intended to be a lower-level recreation room, which is what “family rooms” were called back then, into a fourth bedroom. My bedroom. When the closet for the recreation-room-turned-bedroom was constructed, a wide and deep storage shelf was built into the back. It was the perfect place for my collections and I carefully moved all of my cherished comics and beloved baseball cards from the basement to that shelf in the back of my closet.

Kid stuff

Then, when I went off to college, the unthinkable happened. I came home during one of my sophomore year breaks and went to hang up the clothes I brought with me. When I opened my closet door, I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing...or more precisely, not seeing. The huge shelf in the back of the closet was filled with skeins of yarn. I ran upstairs to the living room where my father was sitting in his easy chair reading the newspaper.

“Where are my comic books and baseball cards?” I screamed. My father calmly explained that he needed space in the basement for his tools, so he moved my mother’s yarns and knitting supplies to the back of my closet. “Okay,” I said, fearing the worst, “but where did you move my comic books and baseball cards?” I could sense from the expression on his face that what I was about to hear would, indeed, be the worst.

“That’s kid stuff,” he dismissively replied. “You’re in college now. You’re too old to be playing with comic books and baseball cards.” And then he dropped the bomb. “So I threw them all away in order to make room for your mother’s yarns.”

I’m not suggesting that my 50s-60s comic book and baseball card collections would have fetched $3.5 million, as did the 30s-40s collection of the guy in the article. But I had some classic baseball cards, including rookie cards of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Harmon Killebrew, along with a whole host of cards, all in pristine condition, of mid-century baseball legends. And my comic book collection was vast and most were in great shape, having been read only once or twice.

So let’s put it this way, I’m reasonably sure that my two collections, had they not been unceremoniously tossed out by my father, would have permitted me to have retired by now and to feel financially secure for the remainder of my life.

As I learned during my Werner Erhard est training in the early Seventies, what is, is, and, after all these years, I have forgiven my father, who, in his defense, was clueless as to the true worth of what he had so casually discarded.

Still, reading about the 3.5 million dollar take on fewer comic books than I owned, not even including my immense collection of baseball cards, did bring about a strong, visceral reaction as I pondered not what is, but what could have been.

Manscaping

My wife asked me the other day if I’d ever heard the term “manscaping.”

Uh oh, I thought. This is surely a set up question. You know what I mean, right? It’s a wife-asks-her-husband-a-question-for-which no-answer-he-can-give-is-safe question. It’s a “Honey, do you think I look fat in these jeans?” kind of question. If he says “no,” she’ll accuse him of being dishonest and of patronizing her. If he says “yes,”...well, I don’t even want to think about that. It’s one of those loaded questions and he’s gonna find himself in the dog house no matter how he responds.

But I digress. I thought for a moment about the word in question and figured it had something to do with lawn care. You know, the manly art of landscaping. Then I thought perhaps this was a lead in to being taken to task for paying a landscaping company to do that sort of stuff instead of saving us money and doing it myself.

But because I still wasn’t sure what it meant, I asked her to ’splain it to me. “You know how women often trim their pubic hair, get a ‘bikini’ cut, or a ‘Brazilian’ trim,” she explained. “Well, manscaping is when men shave or trim their body hair.”

“You mean down there”? I asked, pointing toward my groin while moving my legs tightly together in a crotch-protecting stance. “Why would a guy do that to himself?” The word “ouch” came to mind. This is something that simply never occurred to me.

My wife patiently explained that men might engage in manscaping for the same reason that women shave their arm pits, their legs, and shave or trim their pubic hairs. It’s cleaner, it’s smoother, it’s sexier.

Too much information

Fair warning: what you’re about to read might be considered TMI, so proceed with caution. I’m a hairy guy. I have thick, flowing hair covering much of my body. Except, of course, on the top of my head, which is the only place I would actually want to have thick, flowing hair. Nothing but puny little fuzzies can be found growing up there anymore.

But I digress yet again. When I was going through late adolescence and early adulthood, I couldn’t wait for my chest hair to grow. Back then, a hairy chest was considered manly, masculine, and a sure sign of virility. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had acquired a thick, fur-like covering of chest hair. In fact, my back and upper arms were nearly has hairy as my chest. And I was blessed (or some might think cursed) with a thick patch of the short-curlies “down there.”

I hadn’t given much thought to my abundant body hair until my wife asked me about manscaping. In fact, I was content with, and maybe even a little proud of, my man-fur. It simply never crossed my mind that some might think it gross or perhaps a bit too Neanderthal.

I Googled “manscaping” to see what it’s all about and was surprised to find more than 600,000 hits. I came across an article in The Daily Beast with the dubious title, Why ‘Manscaping’ Isn’t Just for Porn Stars Anymore.

It seems that male deforestation, while not yet the norm, is gaining in popularity and is starting to move into the mainstream of men’s grooming habits. There’s even a term for the male equivalent of the Brazilian female trim, the article noted. It’s called the “Boyzilian.” Cute, eh?

Not so cute, though, was when the same article mentioned that some guys regularly get their butt cracks waxed. Hey, I warned you...TMI.

Manscaping seems to have become a big business. Who knew? One site, About.com, goes into depth about the whys, the dos, and the don’ts of manscaping. I learned, for example, that “keeping a neatly trimmed chest, back, shoulders...and more...will make you appear cleaner and send the message that you care about grooming.” I did not know that.

And I was shocked when I read in that same article that “nobody likes a hairy back and shoulders.” Omigod, nobody likes me!

Okay, it’s not as if I needed yet another reason to shun being seen in public in a bathing suit. Isn’t it bad enough that I have spindly chicken legs? Now I’ve got to be concerned about causing people to puke when they see my disgustingly hairy back and gross hairy shoulders that nobody likes!

Well, it is what it is. I am not going to succumb to this ludicrous manscaping trend. I’m announcing here and now that there is no way any hair removal wax, razor, or shaver is going to get anywhere near my body below my neck. I may be hairier than the average bear, but it’s who I am.

Besides, my wife is secretly into braiding the hair on my back.

Hallmark holiday

Valentine’s Day is almost upon us and aren’t our little, romantic hearts all aflutter?

Not mine. Call me an unromantic, jaded cynic, but to me, Valentine’s Day, as celebrated in this country, is a totally bogus “holiday.” That’s why a column that recently appeared in the local newspaper caught my eye. The column in question was written by syndicated columnist Tom Purcell.

Purcell wrote, “To men, Valentine’s Day is a contrived undertaking that makes mandatory the things...flowers, dining out, expensive jewelry...that should be reserved for the times when we do something really stupid and are desperate to make up.” Hear, hear, Mr. Purcell!

I started to wonder what really was behind this so called holiday, so I Googled “Valentine’s Day.” It turns out that Saint Valentine’s Day was originally observed to honor early Christian martyrs. The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine, all of whom were martyred. Interestingly, no romantic elements are present in the original early medieval records of these martyrs.

According to the site history.com, some historians believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Saint Valentine’s death. Hmm. Were all three saints named Valentine martyred around the same time? Did it happen in Chicago and was Al Capone invovled?

But others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place Saint Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia, which was celebrated around the middle of February.

Lupercalia was a festival in honor of Lupa, the she-wolf who suckled the infant orphans, Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. Lupercalia translates to "Wolf Festival." During the festival, Roman priests would sacrifice a goat for fertility and a dog for purification. They would then cut the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood, and take to the streets where they would gently slap both women and crop fields with the goat hide strips.

Oh wow, it doesn’t get any more romantic than that, does it?

Having educated myself on what Valentine’s Day is really about, I am more convinced than ever that it is the epitome of the expression “Hallmark holiday,” a somewhat disparaging, albeit completely accurate, term to describe a holiday that exists primarily for commercial purposes. I know this to be true because I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Valentine’s Day as a romantic holiday was probably concocted during an intense, closed-door brainstorming session at the Kansas City headquarters of Hallmark Cards, Inc. The Hallmark executives were no doubt trying to figure out how to sell more cards during the lull between the Christmas and Easter holidays.

And that, my friends, is the true story about how Valentine’s Day in America was born. Of course, as Mark Twain once said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”  Hear hear, Mr. Twain!

Of course, when my wife reads this blog post, there is no doubt that, as Tom Purcell warned, I will have done something really stupid by posting this and will be desperate to make up.

Damn you Hallmark Cards, Inc. and your stupid Hallmark holiday.

Super Bust

At the risk of sounding like every other bummed out, whiny, frustrated New England Patriots fan, sure, I was disappointed by the outcome of the Super Bowl. I would liked to have seen the Patriots win and bring the Lombardi Trophy back to New England. And I hate the New York Giants almost as much as I hate the New York Yankees.

Still, I can’t deny that the Giants deserve kudos. They won, fair and square. Quite simply, Eli Manning and his guys outplayed Tom Brady and his. The Giants’ receivers made some remarkable clutch catches, while the Pats’ receivers seemed to suffer, particularly during those crucial, late-game drives, from a serious case of the dropsies.

So we need to cut Giselle Bundchen some slack. Brady’s supermodel girlfriend was just standing by her man when she reacted to “Manning rules” taunts by a Giants fan after Sunday’s game. “You have to catch the ball when you’re supposed to catch the ball,” she snapped back at the fan. Adding fuel to the flame, she continued, “My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time. I can’t believe they dropped the ball so many times.”

And while that is so true, Giselle, perhaps next year, when Brady and the Patriots return to the Super Bowl and do win it all, you should try to keep in mind that old adage about how kids...and supermodels...should be seen and not heard, right?

But I digress. Getting back to the game, which was distressful for those of us who are Patriots fans, the real disappointment for me was the mediocrity of this year’s highly anticipated crop of Super Bowl commercials.

Make no mistake. I do enjoy the Super Bowl games, even when one of “my” teams is not playing and I am, therefore, relatively indifferent about the final outcome. As long as it’s not a lopsided blow-out, that is. A close, exciting, well-played football game is great to watch, even when you don’t really care all that much about the teams on the field.

But let’s be honest. When you aren’t really invested in the success of either team, the real attraction is the ads. As the New York Post recently reported, a Nielsen survey found that 51% of those who watch the Super Bowl do so more for the advertisements than for the actual game.

After all, when companies pay an average of $3.5 million for a 30-second spot and are competing for the hearts, minds, and, most important, wallets of more than 110 million viewers, you expect a lot.

So yes, I look forward to the creative, innovative, and entertaining Super Bowl ads. And no, I didn’t go to the internet to take a sneak peek at the Super Bowl ads released on the web days before the big game. I wanted to be surprised and delighted in “real-time” during the game.

Sadly, this year there were considerably more misses than hits. When you get right down to it, it was pretty much the same old thing. Dogs, polar bears, babies, mostly second-tier celebrities, beer, soda, cars, and, of course, sex. Honestly, I didn’t see much that was genuinely new and exciting...or even very entertaining.

I was really looking forward to this much anticipated rematch between the Patriots and Giants, the grudge game in which the Pats were going to achieve redemption and would show the world that what happened at the Super Bowl four years ago was a fluke. And I was eager to see all of the clever, creative, funny Super Bowl ads.

In the end, both turned out to be a super bust.