Cellaholic appraisal…

A few months ago my daughters Julie and Gina invited me to the AT&T store to buy a new BlackBerry… They insisted I get a one made in this century – the one I had was Ancient and bought years ago and it served me well, but it was slow, had no camera and took forever to Google anything or get Dodger scores, not that Dodger scores matter much to me anymore, or at least so far this season…funny thing tho, I thought my Ancient was an excellent phone as I could send and receive my office emails and have access to phone numbers and addresses with the greatest of ease…but it was not a cool phone…
But it was going to be one of my many birthday gifts and I was tired of the girls and friends laughing at my old cell phone; so they picked me up and drove me to the Lake Forest BlackBerry store.

The sales person who greeted us, a teenage-looking salesperson looked at my BlackBerry and chuckled, but in a nice way…I was expecting a generation gap problem because I don’t think he’d ever seen one that old and motioned for a few sales people to come over and see this relic of the previous century… the Chuckler was dressed nicely, had a shirt and tie on that made me think he just might know what he’s doing…after talking for a few minutes the girls told him about me and how they didn’t want people to laugh at me anymore; he asked me if I had a Facebook account or if I tweeted…I said yes to the Facebook and no to the tweet … I later found out he asked me because of the different applications the new phone could have that my old phone couldn’t… he took me over to the displays and the girls helped me select the new phone…after I picked out a cool looking phone the Chuckster took my old one and walked to the back room to transfer phone numbers, addresses and e-mail addresses...he came back saying he couldn’t get my office or personal e-mail addresses installed; he tried for quite a long time to do it but was unsuccessful…he said I could go on-line and probably get it taken care of...I knew I couldn’t do it myself at home, but thought one of my daughters could do it… they tried and tried but to this day I can’t get e-mails on the new phone…

But now that I’m working out of the house and not having to drive to Riverside to my office and I’m not gone from home that long anymore... I can surprisingly be away from emails for hours and not go nuts like I used to…when I go out to dinner now I sometimes purposely leave the phone at home…it’s kind of neat not being paranoid about missing calls or emails…when I do bring it with me I get more Facebook beeps than I ever thought possible… what can I do?…I have a lot of friends and they love me…I will go back soon to the AT&T store and see if they can add my email addresses; I know I may have to switch to a different BlackBerry model. But enough is enough…I need my e-mails as soon as they’re sent…I’m in business and have to be able to reply to e-mails fairly quickly…if I have to select a non-BlackBerry phone I guess I’ll have to.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE...

St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Montreal was a large concrete and stone building. It was not a warm and welcoming place. It looked nice when a lot of candles were lit…I had to go there every Sunday or face mortal sins condemning me to hell if I died before going to confession. There were priests and nuns all over the place, nuns holding rosaries clinking away as they moved around, almost appearing to glide as they walked around; you couldn’t see their feet as they watched and silently demanded silence of the congregation, especially children. Nuns were scary. They could scare the hell out of you simply by looking at you…In those days they wore habits with giant hats that flared out like airplane wings; have you ever seen the flying nun on TV? The hats made them look menacing.

As a kid I was an altar boy, from around the 4th grade until I went to high school…I don’t think they allowed teenage boys to be altar boys or maybe because the high school was not part of the same parish…but I remember kneeling at the altar during Mass mumbling out responses in Latin trying to be louder than the other alter boy. There was an air of discipline to what we did and there was a high level of precision. Some of us were just 7 or 8 years of age and exercising this discipline and precision for an hour or hour-and-a-half was all the more amazing. It also showed that such an age was not too young to learn discipline. The priest would give us the eye if we forgot our lines or if we were slow in responding. Nuns, priests and mothers were good at the eye thing. The reason altar boys were invented was to give wine and water to the priest and ring hand-held bells during communion time…the bells were the fun part.

I remember waking up very early on weekday mornings, putting on furry slippers before stepping on the freezing linoleum floors; nobody had wall to wall carpeting in those days…my Mom bought the slippers and as long as none of my friends saw them and they kept our feet warm it was OK…or home was heated with radiators that took hours to make the house warm. I doubt if thermostats had been invented yet. My Mom would make me warm breakfasts before I headed out the door and walked to St. Thomas’ to do my altar boy thing. I often wondered what would happen if I didn’t show up, if the priest would even care; I don’t remember ever attending Mass with my parents where there was only one altar boy…
If the other boy showed up the priest would have someone to pour wine in the silver chalice and water into a silver bowl to wash his hands so he could raise the host with clean fingers at communion time. But what if the other boy never showed up? Could the priest say Mass without altar boys? Could one of the ladies of the altar society help out with the wine and water? Probably not allowed. What would the parishioners do if no Mass was said that morning? Would they complain to the Bishop? Would they have to wait for the 8:00 AM mass? If they missed mass would they all go to hell? No, because going to a weekday mass wasn’t obligatory. Mainly old people and nuns went to that early mass. When Mass was over I walked to school three or four blocks away and waited for the first bell to start classes.

Meanwhile back in California when my parents were alive we’d take them to Easter and Christmas services at St Nicholas Catholic Church and I saw that women were active as altar helpers. I don’t recall seeing any altar boys. The day of the altar boy is probably over because unlike urban cities where the church was in a residential neighborhood the churches in the suburbs are miles from residential areas and the altar boys would need rides to church that would pose additional problems for parents…maybe that’s why older women are now altar boys…and because the mass is no longer said in Latin those ladies don’t need much training. There’s no more bell-ringing. The thrill is gone.

Hanging at Nordstom's...

I was sitting around the men’s shoe department at Nordstrom’s one morning while the girls were shopping and noticed a few things about men who buy shoes. There was this oldish guy (60-ish) wearing dark blue Bermuda shorts with unmatched socks, one dark blue one brown…he tried on tan colored Top Siders that looked like a nice pair of shoes, but the socks make him look like a blind man in an old movie…I had to laugh to myself as it reminded me of me sometimes... Another younger man came in with his very young wife or girlfriend, it was hard to see if they were wearing wedding bands, although she had on a pile of jewelry that sparkled as the lights hit her…plenty of diamonds on this woman…he had on a pair of almost brand new running shoes with yellow stripes …he was trying on blue striped running shoes that his little lady had picked out for him… he bought the blue pair and he wore them as they walked out of the shoe department…I almost asked the clerk what size the yellow ones were but didn’t as he threw them in a trash can…

It's on Fathers' Day...

It's one of my favorite holidays of the year...including Christmas, Cinco de Mayo, St. Patrick's Day and my wife's, children's and grand children's birthdays...these are great days for giving, receiving and eating...
But just last month another holiday was celebrated...a gigantic birthday for me when I received so much and so many things...I don't need or want a single thing for Fathers' Day coming up next month...

Fathers' Day is always on the same weekend as the U.S. Open Golf Tournament and what I'd like to do this year is stay home to watch the game on Sunday, all day, until a winner is declared probably around 5:00 PM.

So, my dear children, if you're reading this, I'd like a gift by joining me to watch the game...golfing grandchildren are especially welcome...
I'll be heading over to Bevmo the day before to pick up some delicious stuff:
cashews
pistachios
potato chips
a thing or two of dip
six packs of Sam Adams, Sprite and Diet Cokes
Swiss cheese and crackers
a large jar of cocktail olives with pimentos in case there's some celebrating to do... with a martini...
fixings for chili dogs if one of you knows how to cook them...I have no clue...let me know...
and I hope to pick up a six pack of chocolate golf balls or something else golfy and chocolaty...

Remember...no gifts...no sugar-free treats...no funny tee shirts...and no 'worlds greatest grandfather' coffee mugs...

That darned Catholic Church...

In my previous blog I wrote of a list of forbidden books first published by the Catholic Church in 1559 with the aim of protecting the faith and morals of Catholics. It was meant to save us from reading immoral books or works with theological errors or works that in any way posed a threat to the power of the Church. I did some research on this peculiar list and found interesting facts.

Scientific books were plentiful in those early days, books by Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus were judged to have errors in that these astronomers wrote falsely that the sun was the center of the solar system and not the earth as the Church incorrectly claimed.

The first Index banned all books by Martin Luther, Calvin and other protestant reformers. Translating books in other than Latin were banned. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin showed the Church's narrow mindedness as it was not condemned because it was available only in English and because English was a barbarian language and only Protestants spoke it and all Protestants were going to hell anyway. Even my sweet old Mom, God rest her soul, believed all Protestants went to hell or actually, only Catholics went to heaven. When Harriet's book was translated into Italian, Spanish and French it became dangerous, another of my Mom's favorite words. Harriet was perceived to be spreading Protestant poison.

The Roman Inquisition and Index of Forbidden Books did not represent the best chapters in Catholic history. Updates of the infamous index were added repeatedly until it's 20th edition in 1948 but was finally abolished in 1966 by Pope Paul VI, created originally by Pope Paul IV.

No bookmarks needed...

A month ago I celebrated a big birthday and was gifted a big present...an e-book, the Kindle...it was given to me by my children, grandchildren and friends; and to make the gift even better I found half a dozen Amazon gift cards with it allowing me to buy books on-line...

I'd been thinking about buying an e-book for several months but couldn't decide whether to go Kindle or Nook...my mind was happily made up for me...I've been in the process of getting rid of books on shelves in more than one room in our house...I took some to the public library and Goodwill but I still have a stack of a dozen or more books on my desk waiting to go somewhere...

I recently re-joined the public library and found my favorite section...the section of books in large print... I'm not getting any younger and large print helps old guys like me...well, with the Kindle I am able to adjust the fonts to my preference as well as adjusting the word spacing...no more library except to take my 11 year old grand daughter there so she can continue reading her favorite authors too...but, public libraries may be in the e-book lending business soon and I may be able to read best sellers for free...

Amazon.com sells best selling books for $25 and up, but e-books go from $5 to $15...such a deal...but the happiest thing I've found is being able to get free books, and I mean thousands of free classic books by the world's best authors...I immediately bought a few best sellers and a few free ones...I discovered the Kindle will hold hundreds of books and I plan on loading it up with dozens of free classics I've been wanting to read for years...I'll do it because I can...

In the past few weeks I've experimented with options on the Kindle like switching from book to book to see what would happen...would I lose my place or what...well, as if by magic when I stopped reading a book, went to another then went back to the first, my place had been saved...how do it know? No bookmarks needed and it's even possible to write notes in the margins of the books...I love this thing...

I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas because I thought I had read it when I was in either high school or college; I recently was flipping channels on TV and just missed watching the movie...so I decided I had nothing to lose by getting the free book...I started reading it and discovered I don't remember much about it...I knew it was about a man falsely imprisoned for a dozen years or more finally escaping and beginning to hunt down the men who sent him there...so far I've read about a third of the book and I love it...it is somewhat similar to two other books written by Dumas, the Man in the Iron Mask and the Three Musketeers which I will get next for free...the curious thing about all three of these is at the time I was in high school they were on the Vatican Index of Forbidden Books, books considered by the Catholic Church to be sensual, heretical or romantic...I didn't know it at the time...the key 'ingredient' of the Count of Monte Cristo is revenge...strictly forbidden maybe unless you're Italian or a member of the Mafia or Cardinals and priests who must have read the forbidden books going back two hundred years...I Googled the Index to discover it was abandoned in 1966, after my high school and college days...I will post a blog about the Index soon because it so very interesting; I discovered some of the forbidden books included astronomer Galileo for writing that our solar system revolved around the sun and not the earth as the Church said and Victor Hugo for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables...