Author: Kevan

“Dog people” are like gravity or sunlight or something: they just are
and there’s nothing that will change it. I’m not a dog person. I like
dogs, just as most people do, but I have no desire to adopt one. I
have enough problems already.

Dog people tend to think that the world and humanity were made for
dogs, and their own dogs particularly. If it comes down to it,
humanity must give way so that the dogs can flourish. I’ve seen this
a hundred times in my travels through the tri-state area. Someone
will have a psychotic beast that barks viciously at me when I am
working in the next yard. Do they come out and correct the situation?
Hahahahaha! Of course not! They blame me for being there and bothering the dog.

People will walk their dogs on a leash and allow it to excrete its dung
on my grass where, quite obviously, I have to mow.  As I walk down the
street, they allow the beast to come up to me and plant its slobbery
muzzle in my crotch and on my hands, as though either (1) I like it or
(2) the dog has that right and it doesn’t matter if I want the
attention or not.

And, of course, dog people talk to their dogs as though they were
human. If I had a dog I’d do the same, but such behavior is
irrational. I don’t talk to my computer. I give it commands, but I
don’t pretend it converses with me and I don’t wish to get started
pretending that a dog is conversing with me.

We love dogs because they love us. They’re easier to get along with
than humans. We are tempted to ask “Why can’t so-and-so accept me the way my dog does?” The answer is that so-and-so is smarter than your dog.  Rather than flee to a dog, I think my responsibility is to mend my relationships with other people.

Americans spent $14.4 billion on dog food and treats in 2014, according
to the Pet Food Institute.  Since the annual trend was upward, I assume that it was higher in 2015 and will be higher still in 2016.  The SPCA says it costs about $1,400 to properly keep a dog for a year, including grooming, vet visits, and kenneling while you’re gone on vacation.  I suppose a few million also go into medical care for dog bites.  Doubt me?  Google “dog bite injury” images.

Why do people do this?  Oh, there has been a library’s worth of books extolling the excellencies of dog companionship — millions of pages to justify the billions of dollars — but I summarize it by simply observing that dog people are and there’s nothing that will change it.

Few of my readers will know what an MVNO is, so I will begin by explaining that it is a reseller of mobile phone services, a company such as Boost, Straight Talk, or Virgin Mobile. The closing of P’Tel could be an unfavorable omen that mobile phone costs may rise. Such things are explained by my friend Daley over at Mr. Money Mustache.

I was recently working at an apartment project inhabited entirely by blacks except for the white maintenance man.  As he and I conversed about life in general, such as the fact that he’d been mugged three times in five years (once jumped by five, who beat him up for recreational purposes and didn’t even rob him), he observed that a small number of blacks in America had been killed by police under questionable circumstances, but in our city there are one or two blacks murdered every week by other blacks, yet his neighbors weren’t complaining about that.

It caused me to point out that, even in the cases of police shootings, the officer is usually exonerated when the case is examined calmly in the process of the law.  On the other hand, I added, we are recruiting men to go up against sociopathological miscreants so that we, ourselves, don’t have to.  These men have to display courage, strength, skill, and — perhaps most importantly — the roughness of character to be cursed at, spat upon, and attacked with deadly weapons, and yet fight the goblins into submission, cuff them, and haul them down to 201.  And then we complain that they in some way or another fail to display the gentleness of a hospital chaplain?

In what reading I’ve done regarding the profession, everyone affirms that today’s police are better trained than any in the history of the world.  I’m willing to believe that.  When I was a rent-a-cop in the late ’70s (a “security guard”), I was told in no uncertain terms that I was better trained than any rookie policeman was just forty years earlier.  Street-level experience, of course, would have put a real cop back then ahead of me in a week or two, since my own duties consisted merely of signing people in and out or patrolling a property to keep an eye on things.

Despite the training that policemen undergo, there is still the problem of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  Cops aren’t like the rest of us; that’s why we hire them.  If we could do it ourselves, we would.  When we are threatened by criminals, we say in essence, “Officer, wade into that pack of feral dogs and throw those suckers up against the wall for me.”  And he does, usually.  He’s ready for confrontation, unlike you and me.

I asked the white maintenance man, “You ever been mistreated by a cop?”  He replied, “Sure!”  I smiled and said, “Me, too.”  I’ve always considered such events a small price to pay for an effective police force.  Once I was driving a used car which I’d purchased from an individual the day before: cop wrote me up for an expired license tag, even though I had the paperwork to show him that I’d had no time yet to change the vehicle’s registration.  A cop hid near a malfunctioning traffic light and, when my wife finally proceeded through the intersection carefully, he pulled her over and wrote her up, just collecting scalps.  When I was a long haired teenager, I commonly got pulled over on some pretext and my car was searched illegally (without my consent).  The maintenance man told me of a recent case where he, his car, and a passenger were stopped and searched because he looked suspicious: lower-class white man with black female passenger.  He consented to the search because (1) he knew he was clean and (2) it’s better to have your rights violated than to endure the difficulty of standing up for them.

Police misbehavior has always existed and always will.  “Bad cops” are continually being culled from the herd in every large police department in the nation.  But even “good cops” often find it expedient to ignore certain proscriptions in order to catch offenders and keep order.  I remember one case a couple of years ago where a cop was struggling with a problem and somehow solved it by thrashing several of the scumbags who were making society unfit to live in.  There was a national outcry against him for his unprofessionalism.  My own opinion was that, indeed, if he cannot control his anger, he cannot work as a cop — but give the guy a medal for valiant service as he leaves, because he made the world a better place by taking out the trash for us.

I don’t want counselors and massage therapists patrolling Memphis and trying to keep our diverse population from dragging the city into third-world status.  I want tough and aggressive warriors.  That means they will sometimes make problems that we have to work through, but it is suicidal to shame them for being tough.

I would add in closing that I’ve been ticketed a dozen times for minor traffic infractions over the past forty-four years and almost always the officer has been polite and professional.  I heard some professional whiners on NPR recently complaining that blacks shouldn’t have to learn how to strategize a traffic stop to avoid getting shot, as though keeping your hands visible and following instructions were beyond them.  Apparently having been taught to submit to authority is an element of white privilege.

Stupidity is a word that appears often as a general intensifier: “Bring me the stupid hammer.”  In fact, such usage is the topic of this post: the stupidity of using words senselessly.

“Stupid” is derived from a Latin word for being knocked senseless.  Sadly, such trauma isn’t even necessary to evoke what passes for English now.  I don’t know if things were ever better in English and I assume that every language has the same malevolent aberrations.  I call it “grunt & point” English, as though one were pointing at the salt and uttering “Ugh!” instead of “Pass the salt, please.”  When confronted (which only happens when a parent corrects a child), the offender offers “Oh, you know what I mean.”  And indeed I do: pointing at the salt and uttering “Ugh!” would indicate clearly that the speaker wishes for me to pass the salt.  And having studied Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, and German, I have enough linguistic facility to decipher such barbarity as: And I was like, “Duhhh,” and he was like, “Really?” and I was like, “Dude!” and he was like, “HellO?” and I was like, “Come ON,” and he was like, “AWKward,” and I was like . . . you get the idea.  But the fact that I can decipher it does not lessen its stupidity.

Today I decided to read up on how to plant a tree.  I came across this statement: As you look around town at well formed and healthy trees, invariably you will discover that the root flare is exposed.  It isn’t important that you understand what a root flare is, or what its benefit is.  Just read the claim as it lies, noticing the word “invariably.”  That word means “there are no exceptions.”  But the next sentence in the article said There are always exceptions to the rule.  In other words, there are no exceptions except when there are exceptions.  The writer should have said “usually” instead of “invariably.”  And if he were to object with the defense “Well, you know what I meant,” I would point at my previous paragraph and utter “Ugh!”  He used the word “invariably” with stupid disregard (or ignorance) of its meaning.  The meaning was of no more significance than “Ugh! would  have been; it’s just a placeholder.

Reading that barbarism this morning reminded me of a letter to the editor that I read in a magazine years ago.  A woman gushed that she enjoyed the magazine a lot and her young son did, too.  In fact, “He literally devours each issue as soon as I bring in the mail.”  I needn’t explain to you that “literally” is exactly what she did not mean.

You: Oh, you know what she meant.

Me: Ugh!

The very word “barbarism” is enlightening.  It referred originally to the unintelligibility of a foreigner’s speech, as though it sounded like “bar bar bar bar.”  Now it refers generally to an inability to conduct oneself according to traditional standards.  Verbal stupidity is a kind of barbarism: using words not for their meaning, but just as meaningless sounds which get the listener’s attention and help, along with gestures, intonation, facial expression, and the situation generally, to convey the speaker’s intention.

I rent cars several times per year for long-distance trips, usually to visit relatives.  Ordinarily I use Enterprise.  I used to price-shop until Budget cut my throat one day: they took my reservation, but when it was time for me to depart, they announced that they didn’t have any cars.  That can really mess up your travel plans, so I swore off Budget (which is owned by Avis).  I used Enterprise exclusively after that, always with good results.

We needed a car recently and, because I was shopping within two weeks of departure, the prices were too high.  I started price shopping again.  I found a bargain at Dollar, but I had to drive twenty miles to the Memphis airport to get it.  The tradeoff was worth it.  I booked it online and a week or so later, went to pick it up.  Time was of the essence.  I had to get there, make the transaction, and get gone.

Dollar tacked on about $200 worth of charges for garbage I’d never seen at Enterprise.  The price I paid bore little resemblance to the one I’d agreed to when I reserved the car online, except that the new price, like the old one, was written in Arabic numerals.

I’ll never use Dollar Rent A Car again.

My Eko (“eeko”) breathed its last yesterday.

I’ve had only one guitar since college.  My roommate Alan Behn sold me his Eko when I was a freshman (1973) and he taught me a basic fingerpicking pattern for folk music.  I had been a rock & roller and had an old Gibson Melody Maker, which wasn’t useful to me any more.  I paid $50 for the Eko and sold the Gibson for $50 to a friend in Houston.  I considered it an even swap.  You should search for “gibson melody maker” on eBay now.  😀

The Eko Ranger VI is built like a locomotive.  It weighs a lot more than today’s guitars and is probably harder to destroy.  Modern instruments sound better, though.  The finish on mine has cracked a lot through the decades, so it’s fairly ugly when you catch it in the light just right.  The pick guard had warped and fallen off years ago and my kids got tired of looking at the old glue (daughter said she thought it was jelly when she was a child) and they snuck it to a tech and had a new pick guard made for it one Christmas.  Another Christmas my wife bought a decent case to replace my pasteboard one that had been ruined since traveling with a drama ministry in 1975.  The thing has purtnere been through the war.

The bridge plate has been trash for years.  Half of the strings were held in by passing numerous safety pins through the ball ends and then feeding the string up from inside the body.  (Safety pins are made of hard, somewhat inflexible steel.)  The bridge itself had various shims here and there, elevating the saddle and keeping it propped in a more-or-less vertical orientation.  This probably contributed to the bridge cracking yesterday — it just split at the two ends of the saddle.

I’ve had the bridge unglued and reinstalled before and it’s just too much trouble to go through again for an instrument that’s on life support already.  So now I’m in the market for another guitar.

The Eko never gave up in the forty years I’ve played it.  The top stayed flat; the neck stayed straight; the rosewood fingerboard still looks good; the tone stayed true; the finish (albeit cracked) still shines like new, despite decades of travel and performing.

If someone wanted to repair and refinish this guitar, there’s no telling how many decades of life it still has.  But a guy like me has no business investing the requisite hours and dollars to curate an artifact from the ’70s.

Thanks, Eko; it’s been great. I don’t wanna see you go, but you’d better go now.

This December I finally got around to reading Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God (2008).  It was worse than I expected, and I didn’t expect it to be good.

In some ways it is well-written (or perhaps well-re-written by his editor).  Although it swarms with filthy language, it occasionally presents lucid commentary on his famous family and the evangelical world they lived in.  On the other hand, it suffers from the mixed up mind of a man who was always immoral but nevertheless was taught that he was a Christian.  His own wickedness attracted others who were like him while blinding him to the biblical Christianity he could have enjoyed and furthered.

Messed up by his weird parents?  Probably.  I wasn’t there, but he relates that his father suffered from extreme mood swings and routinely quarreled with his mother, even to the point of throwing flower pots or bruising her arms.  His mother had her own aberrations, detailing sexual information and testimony to the young boy (and his sisters).  Both parents being famous and busy, they neglected Frankie and he largely reared himself, acquiring almost no education until they sent him from their home in Switzerland to a boarding school in England.  His education progressed little even then, hampered by dyslexia (and disguised behind his natural brilliance and talent).

We “knew” Franky (as it was spelled) back in the ’80s when he was an antiabortion firebrand.  That is, I and the Christian Activists around me read, watched, and listened to Franky’s material.  It was commonly acknowledged even then that he was a jerk, but he was our jerk and we were glad that he scared and enraged the enemy.  We did not know the depth of his hypocrisy as he describes it in this memoir.

The book suffers from Schaeffer’s lack of education.  He thinks he has an inside track to the truth because he was there when it happened, but even that attitude betrays a lack of historical perspective.  He simply repeats what leftist haters say about “fundamentalism” because he, like they, doesn’t know the real history of the movement.  He takes a swipe a Charles Colson, accusing him of faking conversion in order to get out of prison — which anybody knows is false if they actually research the question.  It’s an accusation that can only be made by supposing that someone would do that.  Twice he accuses James Dobson of being a demagogue who plays people for suckers while dominating and manipulating them; but I recall that even Gil Moegerle, former co-host of Dobson’s radio program, couldn’t find much of anything to complain about when he wrote his attack, James Dobson’s War on America (1997).

All of which is to say, this book is simply unreliable because Schaeffer himself is unreliable.  Actually, he says as much in the book, but considers it to be a point of honor because he’s so honest about his deceitfulness and so enlightened about his confusion.  Not surprisingly, most reviewers agree with him because they, too, labor under delusions of what Christians must be like and they swallow whatever he feeds them, bubbling out praises for his honesty and insight.

He does say some good things, but little that couldn’t be found elsewhere in a presentation where the learner doesn’t have to wade through Schaeffer’s vulgarity and breathe its sickening odor.  He could have told the truth while still respecting the human dignity of his readers — but guys like this have been so far gone for so long, asking them for common decency is like asking a Bostonian to speak with a Southern accent.  He would consider such a request both unreasonable and demeaning.

It’s been nearly three weeks since I put my Nexus 4 in the repair shop and began using the Alcatel C1.  Somebody somewhere was failing to deliver the goods and my Nexus languished for want of a replacement screen until yesterday.  What went wrong?  You never really know who might be lying to whom in order to cover their mistakes, but I was told that the supplier was out of stock.

It wasn’t a problem, really.  I’ve continued to explore the little Alcatel, add Christmas wallpapers, modify the settings, add ringtones, and learn generally how to get along with it.

In my earlier post, I stated that the Alcatel’s graphics and call quality were sketchy.  As it turns out, those problems were specific to the individual handset I was using.  I returned it to Best Buy, thinking that my Nexus would be ready that day.  When I found out that another week was yet to transpire, I bought another Alcatel C1.  Interestingly, the price had dropped from $50 to $40.  There are no problems with the new one.

I don’t know what version of Android my handset started with, but it immediately upgraded itself to 4.4.2.  It restored most of my apps and settings from the Google backup.  I’m actually quite satisfied with this little phone except for one thing: the small screen makes it hard to use a map.

When I got my Nexus 4 back, the first thing I noticed was its angular edges.  The Alcatel has smooth, rounded edges.  Combined with its size, it’s much more comfortable in the hand.

I’m struck now by the elegance of the Nexus running 5.0.1.  The difference is strikingly beautiful.  But theres nothing unattractive about the Alcatel’s appearance or behavior.

I’m almost sorry to retire the C1, but such is progress.  If we have only two hands, we have to set something down in order to pick up something better.  If I’d had my way fifteen years ago, I’d still be running TRS-80s, which I liked much better than the Windows PCs I adopted in order to create and maintain a web site.

I will restate something from my earlier post.  My friend Will McClendon can show you in this article how to to leverage the power of VoIP and Wi-Fi to get talk, text, and data on a mobile phone for as little as $2/month.  Combine that with a $40 smartphone and one of the greatest of modern technological miracles is within the reach of nearly every American.

On Thursday I bought an Alcatel C1, technically known as a 4015T.

My Nexus 4 is at a repair shop, having sustained a small crack in the touchscreen.  I picked this up at Best Buy for $50, which compares favorably to the $300 I originally spent on the Nexus.  One might expect the C1 to offer 1/6th of the value; I instead place it at about 3/4ths.

To be sure, this is a $50 smartphone.  The graphics tend to be grainy and the audio (both directions) is inferior.  It has less memory, storage, and speed.  The screen only looks good if you’re looking squarely at it.  It has fewer ringtones, notification tones, and menu options.  It’s running Android 4.2.2 and seems uninterested in snagging an upgrade.  Perhaps it is incapable of running a higher version?

And yet, for all that, I like it.  I like its smallness.  The 3.5″ screen is tiny compared to the Nexus’s 4.7″, but I have to admit that I don’t mind the smallness very much.  I used to think that acreage was king when it came to smartphones and I always wondered why the iPhone, Cadillac Of Them All, didn’t grow like the others.  Now I see that the small screen has its own appeal.  Overall, the little phone is more comfortable.

It also has its problems.  Google Maps is much harder to use.  Many websites can’t get their content small enough to fit, requiring the viewer (moi) to scroll horizontally.  The poorer resolution makes the little I.D. pictures beside Facebook posts pretty much worthless, and this problem persists anywhere small graphics are displayed.

I’ll be glad to get my real phone back.  It’s a central tool in my business and daily life and, as with my other tools, quality makes me money.  Even still, it makes me happy to see a little gizmo like this Alcatel available for $50.  Its something close to a miracle.  With free wi-fi all around us and VoIP cloud numbers available for free from Google Voice (questionable quality) or for $3/month from a provider like Voipo (which I use), a person could get a $10/month plan from an MVNO and an app like CSipSimple on his $50 phone and be running with the big dogs for very little money.  (For more info, check out my friend’s essays on the topic.)

There’s a well-known rule that one mustn’t criticize a politician or an influential person.  If you haven’t heard that rule, then you must need for me to tell you the complete version of it: one mustn’t criticize a politician or an influential person if the rulers agree that you mustn’t.  For instance, even many blacks had uncomplimentary things to say about Mike King before he was murdered in Memphis in 1968 under his assumed moniker Martin Luther; but once he was apotheosized, he became untouchable.

So it is with Abraham Lincoln.  A number of books have appeared throughout the last 100 years which interpret his presidency in an accurate and unflattering way, the most devastating of which, despite some inexcusable errors of detail, is probably DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln.  Lincoln, however, has been declared untouchable by our rulers to such a degree that, for instance, Mel Bradford could be borked from his nomination for chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities because he interpreted Lincoln unfavorably.

If I were in any way dependent upon the rulers, they would do the same to me for writing this blog post.

In one episode of the Beverly Hillbillies, Granny, explaining the Civil War, declared “That was when the Yankees invaded America.”  Theres a little bit of truth in that.  The South, for all of its faults, had the Constitution on its side and, as such, held the rightful title to the American tradition.  Lincoln’s War was a revolution which, like all of Lincoln’s politics, had as its goal the fundamental transformation of the United States.

The Emancipation Proclamation now comes to mind.  Lincoln declared that the slaves in Rebel-held territory were no longer slaves.  Where did he get the authority to declare that a slave is not a slave?  He made it up.  If you pretend that he had authority from God, doesn’t that imply that everyone else had the same authority from God to declare federal laws and annul state laws in spite of the entirety of human history– pagan, Jew, and Christian alike?  Wouldn’t that make for an interesting body politic, where each man went around speaking reality into existence and declaring as law whatever he thought desirable?  Sorta sounds like a banana republic, doesn’t it?

Lincoln didn’t have the authority, but he did have lots and lots of guns; and, as Chairman Mao pointed out, “Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”  In the Western Christian tradition, however, we believe that the natural rights of man dictate that constitutional laws are supreme over all government officials.

I’m writing, of course, because Obama made his own Mexification Proclamation tonight in defiance of Congress and the clear majority of Americans.  Where did he get the authority?  Why, from Lincoln, of course!  And Lincoln won it through conquest.

What we’ve been enduring for the past century is the outworking of the principles set in place by the revolution of 1861.  Clear-sighted men wrote about it, especially in the years 1830-1860.  Many understood then, but they were outgunned.  As Jefferson Davis observed later in his monumental Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, “When the cause was lost, what cause was it? Not that of the South only, but the cause of constitutional government, of the supremacy of law, of the natural rights of man” (2:763).

This alone explains the unbroken failure of conservative activism and the steady slide of the nation into Marxism.  Blaspheme a god and you’ll be excommunicated; that is to say, criticize Lincoln and his heirs and “you’ll never work in this town again.”  Theoreticians are therefore cowed, and their strategies can never strike at the root.

I like cheap stuff and do-it-yourself stuff.  I wish that there were a way to generate my own electricity.  I’ve looked into it for years.  The answer is always the same.

I got to thinking about the solar farm at the Agricenter this evening.  I drive by it occasionally while traveling out Walnut Grove.  It is one big honker.

I decided to run the numbers on that boondoggle and see what they looked like.  I got the data (and the above photo) here.

The farm was supposed to generate 1.6 gigawatt-hours per year.   Whether it is meeting that goal, I don’t know, but it seems very unlikely that the goal was understated, so let’s assume it’s reliable.  Basic arithmetic converts that into 1,600,000 KWH.  Residential rates for electricity vary somewhat, but $0.07/KWH is pretty close, so multiplying that by the farm’s output yields $112,000 worth of juice per year.  And that’s the retail price.

The farm cost $4,300,000.  Dividing that by its annual output, it would take over thirty eight years to reach the break-even point.  Of course, a solar farm doesn’t operate itself.  You must pay maintenance people, some of whom must be technically astute and, therefore, expensive.  One salary might run $50,000 when you include benefits, Social Security, and so forth.  Can they maintain that farm completely by hiring one person and no outside contractors?  Is the equipment insured against hailstorms, tornados, and flying beer bottles?  Just what are the annual maintenance costs?  Might be approaching $112,000, depending on how you figure it.

Will it last thirty eight years?  Oh, be serious!  Warranties on these panels tend to be twenty to twenty five years, but even with that, their electrical output diminishes with age, which shifts the numbers into even more unfavorable territory.  Additionally, the Agricenter is proud to point out that their panels slowly rotate in order to be always facing the sun, which improves their output twenty percent!  How much power is consumed moving 4,160 solar panels throughout every sunny day?  And how long will the motors last which accomplish this nifty feat?

This nonsense is built and owned by an outfit called Silicon Ranch, the principal of which is former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen.  You might think that poor Phil isnt good at arithmetic, spending $4.3 million on something that is guaranteed to lose money.  But I assure you, his arithmetic skills are doing just fine.  First, he sells the electricity to MLGW at market rates.  Next, he gets a handout from the TVA (your wallet, in other words) amounting to $0.12/KWH.  Thats $192,000/year, in case you don’t have a calculator handy.  Last, he will sell the junk to the Agricenter in ten years.

Is this a great country, or what?

Earlier I wrote a post about a scam that’s going around, but I didn’t name names.  I got another version of the scam in the mail today and it irritates me enough to go ahead and identify the perps.  Luckily, nobody reads my blog; so if they come after me, they can’t claim damages.

The outfit is HomeServe and the big name they use for promotion is Rudy Giuliani.  (Apparently hes got some skin in the game which doesn’t matter one way or the other.)

Their latest disgraceful move has been to mail out material that is carefully crafted to look like it came from the utility company.  To be sure, each piece in the mailing has a paragraph stating that HomeServe is an independent company separate from the utility company.  But why did the graphic designers make it look like it came from the utility company?

I know the answer.  And if your capacity for abstract thinking is high enough that you can read this without moving your lips, you know the answer, too.

For several reasons, I consider such deception to be nearly the lowest form of scumbaggery.

Glacier Bay is the house brand for Home Cheapo’s plumbing fixtures. In other words, it’s just a label they slap onto some disgraceful junk made by Hu Flung Dung far across the ocean.

Glacier Bay is good at making their stuff look presentable. A hapless shopper wouldn’t know the difference. Six months later it’s gonna look like its been through the war; but on the shelf at Home Cheapo, a Glacier Bay faucet looks pretty good.

But it isn’t good. It’s bad. Bad, bad, bad!

I found one on a customer’s sink one day, dripping woefully. Customer said it was installed about a year previously. I took it apart and found that the actual cartridge had broken. (The cartridge is the internal part under a hot or cold handle.) I had never before seen a broken cartridge, especially not one that had barely seen one year’s worth of residential use.

And get this: I took it to Home Cheapo to buy a replacement and was informed that such cartridges were not available any more. The customer had to buy a whole new faucet. You can bet the new one wasn’t a Glacier Bay.

Tonight I got to a house where a Glacier Bay faucet had been leaking internally for quite a while and dripping into the cabinet below.

Don’t you make the same mistake.

This scam has been circulating in Memphis for a while.  Today I got another postcard in the mail, advertising it.  Customers have asked me about it.

The ad begins with the polysyllabic trigger word failing infrastructure, as though America is crumbling from the shorelines inward.  All they’re referring to is the fact that your plumbing might break, duh!  Even people who voted wrong in the last presidential election probably know that already.  You can figure it out by studying the trucks that go around in your city.  Do you see any with decals indicating that the driver is a plumber?  Well, just a little higher-level thinking will tip you off that he probably makes his living fixing broken plumbing.  It happens.

Next revelation: repairs cost money.  I will just leave it at that.

Punchline: these postcard-mailing bloodsuckers will sell you an insurance policy that says they will cover the cost of the repair or replacement if your water service line has an emergency.

As with all insurance, the question is “What are the odds?”  Quite obviously, the company cannot make money unless the odds are in their favor.  In this case, however, the game is rigged; it isn’t even fair.  The odds of anybody needing this coverage are pathetically small.  Your water line is fine!  Save your $60/year in a jar somewhere for when you really need a plumber.

This company, by the way, is just one more home warranty provider and the water line scare is a low-cost gateway for them to upsell you later.  I mean, if you’re going to cover your water line, then why would you leave your air conditioning system at risk?  And your indoor plumbing and drains?  And your appliances?  And your computer?  And . . . and . . . and . . . .

Home warranties are a bad deal.  They’re overpriced and usually the service techs they use leave a lot to be desired.  Many customers have told me of their bad experiences with home warranty companies.  Yes, sometimes they’re a godsend and sometimes people hit a jackpot at the casino.  I recommend neither.

This came today via a text message:

I just wanted to thank you for doing such a great job fixing our plumbing issues. We’ve been suffering with that shower for years because I was told they needed to tear open the wall in order to fix it. I’m so thankful to have found someone knowledgeable AND honest. Thanks again for your work. We have a toilet that might be leaking from underneath so I’m sure well be using you again! ?

It isn’t hard to understand how to be a super hero in the service business.  If you just show up on time and keep your word, you’re already 90% there.  Admittedly, keeping your word isn’t always easy.  Sometimes it can even cost you money.  When Proverbs 15:4 describes those who are accepted by God, it includes “He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.”  It’s a rare trait.

In my opinion, the remaining 10% of being a super hero is mostly desire.  For some reason, I want to help people.  That makes me go out at night when I’d rather stay home, keep trying to find a solution when I’d rather give up, take extra time on a job when I’m already losing my shirt.

As I said, it isn’t hard to understand.  As a comparison, it isn’t hard to understand how to be slender: except in cases of medical abnormality, it’s just diet and exercise.  Yet, everybody’s still fat.  Likewise, plumbing companies struggle to stay afloat and try to compensate for their failure with expensive advertising and rapacious pricing and overselling.  Their customers hate them, but they keep using them (unless they discover me) because, like abused children, they think that’s just the way the world is.

Dr. Gus died today.  He was the dean of the School of Fine Arts while I was at Bob Jones University and he was my first and only orchestral conductor. He was one of the most gracious people who ever endured me.

As a sophomore I sat at supper one night and a cellist at our table complained that she had to play double bass in the orchestra because there were no bass players.  Intrigued and ever adventurous, I asked her how someone might join the orchestra?  “I guess you’d talk to Dr. Gus,” she replied.  (Music majors never had to ask such questions; the opportunities were actually requirements.)

I found Dr. Gus somewhere on campus the next day and said “I’ve heard that you’re short on bass players in the orchestra.”  He conceded, “Oh, we need bass players badly.”  I announced “I could probably play as badly as anyone else.”  I then outlined my professional experience: I had played the electric bass in beer joints as a country musician and in high school as a big band jazzman.  And although I had plucked an upright bass a few times, I’d never held a bow in my hands.  “But I could learn!” I cheerfully chirped.

Always gracious, he lamented that there was no way for me to play at the level of the university orchestra, but I could join the “string ensemble” and perhaps try out for orchestra the following year.  That satisfied me and I joined the string ensemble right away.  I could read music well, but knew nothing about the bow.  After watching me on my first day, a cellist had to inform me “You’re supposed to change your bowing direction with every note.”  Oh.

I worked hard, excited by all that I was learning.  In about three weeks Dr. Gus dropped by our class and just observed.  After class, Mrs. Pollard approached me and said, “Dr. Gustafson says that you are to report to orchestra practice this week.” Thus ended my career in the bush league.

No other member of the university orchestra loved it more than I, but none knew less than I.  They were patient with me, but Dr. Gus could be very firm when he thought it wise.  I remember an oratorio when we were in the final hours of rehearsal before performance and he had admonished the huge choir up in the loft to project.  They weren’t getting it, so he stopped the music and upbraided them, showing a bit of anger.  He ended by shouting a one-word command: “PROJECT!” I’ll warrant you, everybody projected!  But I noticed his daughter Dianne (1st chair violin) smiling up at him with an expression that subtly said “Oh, Daddy, quit putting on!”  He just wanted us to do our best.

In our first reading of Verdi’s Rigoletto, we came to a place where the entire orchestra became silent except for the double bass “buzzing” a note behind some offstage trumpets.  That trumpet group wasn’t in place yet, so I would be playing those four measures all by myself.  I knew nothing about the piece, and when I heard everyone else stop playing, I thought I must have read my music incorrectly, so I also stopped.  Dr. Gus continued directing in the silence and called out “double bass!”  I quickly tried to play, but that “buzzing” (tremolo) was a bowing technique entirely new to me and I didn’t have the dexterity to do it.  I clawed and gouged for a few beats and then, in a characteristically irreverent attempt at humor, asked, “Had enough?”  He looked at me as he continued beating the time and shouted “PLAY!”  I played.  And I doubt that there was ever a bassist in the instrument’s history who practiced a tremolo more assiduously than I did that week.  You can bet I had it down by the next rehearsal.

Despite my meager attainments on the instrument, Dr. Gus always treated me like a colleague.  As we took our places after an intermission, I recall him catching my eye from his position at the conductor’s stand and giving me the “OK” gesture with a wink, just reassuring me (howsoever falsely) that I was doing fine.

He was an immensely talented conductor, partly because of his technical proficiency, partly because of his loving heart.  We wanted to follow him.  And he said such funny things.  I reminded him in his office once of how, years before, he’d put his conducting wand on his music stand and turned to the cellos and said “that phrase should descend like a fat woman slowly sitting down into a huge soft sofa.”  He grinned and asked, “Did I say that?”  Such images arose effortlessly in his artistic mind.  (He was originally a graphic artist.)  Another time he warned the violins that they needed to play the high note in a phrase and immediately go to the next notes without slowing down: “Fiddles, you’re trying to build three tabernacles on that note.”  (See Luke 9:33 if you don’t understand that.)

A few years ago one of my kids was graduating from the university with some degree or another and I happened to see Dr. Gus standing around in the Amphitorium.  He was about eighty years of age by then and, of course, wouldn’t remember me.  I still wanted to greet him, tell him my name and what years I played for him, and let him know what the Lord had done through me in church music with the things I’d learned from him.  Always gracious, he gave me the reply that I’m sure he gave to hundreds of others: “Well, we played a lot of beautiful music together, didn’t we?”

The arctic temperatures continue marauding through Memphis and people’s pipes continue to freeze and burst.  And I continue to hear about it.

Some things cannot be helped.  If  a meteorite comes through your roof and smashes your toilet — well, we all have days like that.

On the other hand, there are things you can do to protect your pipes from freezing and bursting.

First: insulate them.  I got to one home and found the copper icemaker supply line running across the attic with no insulation until it descended into the ceiling over the refrigerator.  After I repaired it, I took a roll of insulation which obviously had lain up there for decades and I spread it over the length of copper tube from beginning to end.  Anybody could have done that before the freeze.  It would have saved thousands of dollars in flood damage.

Second: block the air vents, by which I mean the little windows around the foundation (if the house is on a crawl space) and the gable louvers.  Often I will see all of the pipes under a house doing just fine except for the ones near an open vent.  The ground has heat in it and it radiates under the house.  If the vents are closed up, it helps to keep that heat in.  Also, the moving air has greater ability to freeze a pipe.

Third: keep things warm when a pipe is near an outside wall.  I saw a home where the heating system was poor, so they closed off a bathroom, trying to heat the rest of the house.  Without the indoor heat to help, the pipes in the bathroom wall froze & burst.  This is a common problem in a laundry room because they’re often located in an out-of-the-way spot that, for the same reasons, isn’t heated.

Fourth: add some heat.  You have to be  careful with this step lest you burn something, but adding heat is the only way that some situations will stay thawed.  A halogen work light puts out a lot of heat.  In a somewhat closed-off space, a 60 watt light bulb can make all the difference in the world.  (Think of the space behind a washing machine with, perhaps, some cardboard lying atop it.)  If the attic vents are closed off completely, opening the door to the attic will allow heat in from the house.

Fifth: leave each faucet (except for the outside hose bibbs) running.  Everybody knows this trick; by continually replacing the cooling water with warmer water from underground, the pipe doesn’t freeze.  (If you read some expert talking about a “piston effect,” ignore him.)  A stream as big as a matchstick will do the trick.  For the outside faucets, just insulate them well.  Those styrofoam covers work well, but you can also wrap the faucet with heavy terrycloth or even newspaper, which is a great insulator, albeit short-lived.

Last of all, everybody needs to know how he will shut off his water if something goes wrong one day.  There are a lot of clueless people wandering through life, but you don’t have to be one of them.   Does your house have a shutoff in it?  They’re usually about a foot off the floor in a cabinet or closet.  Is yours in the basement?  The older homes in Memphis (pre-1980 or so) must be shut off at the meter by the street.  Such folks are doomed without a meter key.

The state of “the trades” in this generation, and probably the previous one as well, is abysmal.  There’s still room for more decline, to be sure, but that’s a small consolation.  Little education (albeit much indoctrination) takes place in grades K-12, so we’ve developed this idea that everybody should go to college.  That system of mass re-education and its resultant lifetime of student loan debt scoops up most of the young people and convinces them that they should be able to sit at a computer and make $50k.  Who fixes the plumbing?

Generally, the leftovers.

It is not my intention to denigrate any capable individual; I am one and I’ve met others.  But bright and capable students these days seldom dream of leaving high school and working with their hands, learning a trade, and building a business from it.  One of my bosses, who had been hiring plumbers for years, told me quite sincerely (with acknowledged hyperbole) “all plumbers are either drunks, dopeheads, or lazy.”  Students who are otherwise will ordinarily avoid the trades.

Over time, this sorting process has produced a plumbing industry where plumbers mistreat customers (to put it mildly).  Small wonder, then, if plumbing companies mistreat plumbers.

Every so often I look around and see what the plumbing companies are up to so that I can warn my customers.  I got to looking at ads on Craigslist.  Many companies are seeking plumbers to hire.   Like lonesome singles in the “Personals” ads, they really try to sound adorable:

See what can be yours:
Top Pay & Bonus Plans
Paid Vacations
Flexible Schedules
Drug free work environment
Steady work throughout the year
Paid training on-site and off site
Best equipped/designed trucks in the country
Full Benefits: Medical, Dental, Vision, Prescription, & life Insurance

I began comparing this luscious beauty with what I already have at home (being a sole proprietor) and I saw that all I lack is “paid training.”  (When I read the manufacturer’s websites on new products, I have to do it on my own time.)  I also happen to know that this company charges $1,500 for a job that I charge $700 for.

This one made me smile:

[XYZ Company] has grown to the point where we are adding 2 premier service plumbers! And we offer premier benefits like health insurance, vacation pay, sick pay, holiday pay, retirement plan and year round work!

[XYZ Company] also offers GUARANTEED weekends off! Now who does that?

They’ve “grown to the point” that they’re hiring?  Suuure they have.  One of their former employees told me a few weeks ago “Nobody can work for that guy.”  GUARANTEED weekends off?  My friend told me, “Yeah, once a month!”

I can’t fix these companies.  Like cockroaches, no matter how many you kill, there’ll be more.  All I can do is say “Go toward the light.”  As a sole proprietor I have decentralized plumbing service with the use of computers and a mobile phone.  Memphis could use a hundred more: individual guys building and living off their own reputations, teaming up with friends when a job requires it, providing personalized service to grateful and loyal customers.  Maybe the idea will catch on some day.

Another wave of thawing and bursting swept over the city today.  I received a number of calls, nearly all of which I referred to a plumber friend.  I just spoke with him at about 10pm.  He was on his way to his last call of the day. He made over $1,000 today.  I made about $225, but I only worked nine hours and got home around 7:30pm.  I had some friends in trouble and some promises to keep — the kinds of stuff that don’t pay much money.

At the supply house today I learned that one plumbing company was booked three days out and had turned down forty calls.  My customers were lucky that they know me.  All of my callers were served.

I even missed a chance to be in the newspaper.  A reporter whom I know called to ask if he could do a story with pictures about plumbers and frozen pipes, but I had to decline since I was spending the day doing mundane stuff.  My fifteen minutes of fame — down the toilet.  Story of my life.