Category Archives: Personal History

Professional wrestling is returning to Kennett

Posted on by

In the hierarchy of professional sports, professional wrestling is just below shooting rats at the town dump. But for some reason it was extremely popular where/when I grew up in the 50’s. Live coverage every Saturday morning by one of the Memphis TV stations. And these guys would take the show on the road, performing before packed houses. (I wrote about this ten years ago) And they’re back!

“Professional wrestling is returning to Kennett. Fall Brawl presented by American Hostile Championship Wrestling is slated to take place at the American Legion Building in Kennett Oct. 6. American Hostile Championship Wrestling owner Mark Manley said wrestlers scheduled to be on the six-fight card include: WWE Hall of Famer Koko B. Ware, Memphis Wrestling icon Superstar Bill Dundee, young up-comer Marko Stunt, the Missouri Bad Boys, Austin Lane, Meklakov, Naughty by Nature Rude and Kennett native J.T. Ice.”

Please note that Bill Dundee is now 74 years old.

UPDATE 10/9/18: Here’s the follow-up story on the “Fall Brawl” with accompanying photos. And just who are these small town fans of professional wrestling?

Goodbye DSL

Posted on by

I remember my excitement, all those years ago (2005), when I upgraded from dial-up internet access to “high speed” DSL. It was never great but it was the best thing available (we can’t get cable). The local phone company (CenturyLink) advertised 10mbps download (1mbps up) but we never got more than 8 and that was good enough. But for the last six months we’ve had continual problems. Good fast connection one minute… then almost nothing five minutes later. Lots of phone calls and two visits by technicians (image of large man scratching his head) and the service is still unreliable. So today is the day we cancel the service (which only costs $45/mo).

I’ve replaced it with AT&T’s wireless internet service. I’m now getting — on average — 35mbps down and 5mbps up. More than 4x faster! And almost certainly more reliable.

I’m paying $60 per month for the service and that gets me 50gb of data a month. Because we’re also DirecTV customers, they give us an additional 50gb. 100gb/mo should be enough but if we run over, we have an additional 30gb on our phones which can serve as wifi hotspots. I’ll monitor this for a few months to see what our usage looks like. DSL is ancient tech and while it has been mostly a good experience, I happy to see it go.

UPDATE 10/17/18: Or maybe not. Looks like we’ve used three quarters of our 100gb just halfway through our billing period. The overages could mount up fast. And we just don’t want to have to watch and budget. So we’re going back to DSL and will learn to live with slow speeds and unreliable service. But hey, I remember dial-up.

DSL vs. AT&T Wireless

Posted on by

We have a DSL line from our local telco for internet access. We pay $45 a month for 10 megabits download speed (never get more than 8) and less than 1 megabit upload speed. Not great but all that’s available where we live.

Been having problems for the last couple of weeks with technicians coming up to check lines, etc. Keep thinking they have it fixed but the problem persists so we’ve been using the hotspot feature on our iPhones. Yesterday I stopped by the local AT&T store to talk about our data plan to avoid getting surprised by a huge bill.

We’re currently paying $130 a months for 15gb that Barb and I share. Historically, we use very little of this but if we start making heavy use of the hotspot feature that could change. Without getting any further into the weeds here, I upgraded to an “unlimited” data plan for $150 a month. But the plan lets us stop paying for HBO and we get some other discounts so the faster service winds up costing me less than I was paying.

I’d never checked to see what kind of speeds I get from our AT&T wireless so I figured this was a good time to take a look. We’re getting 18 mbs down and 5.6 mbs up. More than twice as fast as the DSL line!

We don’t stream a lot of movies but do have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. I’ll keep the DSL service for a few months while we monitor our wireless data use, but I’m thinking I can adios the DSL.

This is might be more noteworthy to me because I remember the dial-up modem days. 2400, 14,400, 56K. Dark days? An exciting time? Could never have imagined I’d be able to connect to the internet with a mobile phone. Could never have imagined a mobile phone.

700 Days

Posted on by

I started meditating in 2008 but didn’t make it a regular (daily) part of my life until November 30, 2014. At least that is the date I started keeping track. Since then — as noted here previously — I have missed just two days, for a total of 1,343 days on the cushion. Today’s practice was 700 days without missing.

I sit for either 30 minutes or 45 minutes depending on what’s going on. I am a firm believer in making meditation a daily part of one’s life, if only 10 minutes.

I hope to share “1,000 Days” with you next year.

Government Websites

Posted on by

Logged in to my Medicare account recently to update password. They used to require an update every six months but got so many complaints they dropped that requirement. After half a dozen unsuccessful attempts to create a new PW I started a chat with a support person. She began by informing me the password guidelines on the Medicare.gov website are wrong. Why are they there if they are wrong? She had no idea and gave me some different guidelines:

1. You should create a NEW password that is 8 – 16 characters in length.
2. The password must not include # or &
3. Must include at least one letter, number and at least one special character such as (@) ($) (%) [but not at the end of the password!]
4. Cannot be the same as your username.

Additional guidelines: please do not follow the creation guidelines in the system at this time. You will need to use at least one capital letters, four numbers and a special character however; you may not use a number or symbols at the beginning or at the end of the password. An example of a good password would be “Home1234$Home.” Alternatively “Red2015$car” You will need to use a minimum of three numbers in the middle.

These didn’t work either so I wound up on the phone with a gentleman who explained these guidelines are not right either. (“Sorry about that. Ha ha!”) Wound up creating a new account with a really lame-ass password.

ME: “Should I change this from time to time?”
SUPPORT: “I wouldn’t.”

My grandmother’s whetstone

Posted on by

I found this whetstone in a box of keepsakes when I cleaned out the attic of my parents home (many years ago). It belonged to my maternal grandmother, Inus Perry.

Neither my mom or dad carried a pocket knife or a pen knife (a British English term for a small folding knife) but I never saw my grandmother without one. And she kept it razor sharp with this stone, or one exactly like it (Eventually they became so thin they’d break).

I remember the blades on my grandmother’s knife (one long, one short, both sharp) showed similar wear from constant use and sharpening. Over time the edge would become thinner, concave.

I suspect pocket knives — of the sort I’m remembering — were a rural, small town thing. People needed and used knives on the farm and kept them when they moved to town. There were a couple of wooden benches just outside the county courthouse where old men passed the time. Known by one and all as “the spit and whittle club,” these guys endlessly swapped pocket knives, back and forth. Pausing from time to time to squirt a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt.

I still see men carrying knives but, as with all else, they’re more high tech these days and you are unlikely to see them lovingly dragging the blade back and forth on a whetstone. No emotional connection. Just a tool. If there is anything more zen than sharpening a knife on a whetstone, I can’t imagine what it might be.

“Meditation is not about doing anything”

Posted on by

“Meditation is not about doing anything. It is simply paying attention.”

Not counting basic hygiene (brushing my teeth, etc), the only thing I do every day is meditate. I sit for 30 minutes, sometimes longer. Every day for the last 500 days. I keep track but I’m not sure that’s good idea. Too easy to get fixated on the streak, keeping the string going.

I’ve missed twice in the last 1,000+ days. Once when I was sick and again when out of town attending a high school reunion (#50). I’m not sure why I keep track of my practice. Maybe it’s for the same reason prisoners make marks on their cell walls (do they still do that?). They’re afraid they’ll forget how long the’ve been in prison? I’d rather think I keep track because it gives me a little added encouragement to sit, although I really don’t think I need that anymore. My daily meditation is the best half hour of my day. But why?

Steve Hagen says meditation is useless. The only reason to meditate is to mediate. Which sounds like something only those who meditate would say or understand. I’m sure when I started (10 years ago?) it was for stress management or relaxation or something but somewhere along the way it became an end in itself.

I find it simultaneously the simplest thing in the world and the most difficult. I’m sitting on a cushion on the floor, focused on my breath. What could be easier? And within seconds my mind has jumped to some random thought… I gently bring my awareness back to my breathing… and the cycle repeats, endlessly. Why would anyone invest half an hour every day doing this? Again, Steve Hagen: “At the heart of meditation is the intention to be awake.”

Meditation Now or Never (PDF of favorite excerpts)

The world was running out of cassette tape

Posted on by

Although the birth and growth of audio cassettes began in the 1960s, its cultural moment took place during the 1970s and 1980s as a more effective, convenient and portable way of listening to music.

By the time I started working at KBOA in 1972, portable cassette players were finally starting to get affordable. Instead of having to coax people into a studio to do an interview we could not take a cassette recorder into “the field” and get the interview with “nat(ural) sound.” It was wonderful.

Cassette audio tapes were a part of my life for the next 30 years. During my years at the station and later — at a regional news network company — we bought a lot of audio tape cartridges from a company in Springfield, Missouri, called National Audio Company. A former coworker sent me the story below. A few excerpts:

Nobody has made audio cassette tape in this country since about 1983 or 1984. […] National Audio is set to begin production this month, having rescued a 62-foot tape-coating line weighing 20 tons from obscurity. Its former owner had converted it into a machine for making credit-card strips. […] Soon, the tape coater will be back to its original purpose, after many months of reassembly and testing. It will crank out 20,000 feet of tape per minute.

If you have (as I do) fond memories of audio cassette tapes, I think you’ll find this story worth a read.

Credit Freeze

Posted on by

A couple of years ago UnitedHealthcare was hacked and customer data was compromised. The company paid for credit monitoring and fraud alert and a bunch of other (probably) worthless stuff. That was my first encounter with a “credit freeze” which I put in place with all three of the credit reporting agencies. The freeze stays in place until I lift it.

I was thinking about this in light of the Equifax cluster fuck and came across a story explaining how these work:

“Credit freezes, also known as security freezes, place a lock on access to a borrower’s credit report. With a credit freeze in place, lenders and other companies cannot view the borrower’s credit. As a result, freezes prevent the consumer from gaining access to new loans, such as credit cards and mortgages, but they also keep fraudsters from opening new accounts in that person’s name. […] Credit freezes go further than either credit monitoring or alert by making credit reports inaccessible to lenders and others who might have an interest in viewing a consumer’s credit history.”

Here’s my favorite line from the article:

“Those who sell credit freezes don’t like them much. “Freezing your credit file is an extreme step that removes you from the credit marketplace,” says Rod Griffin, director of public education with the credit bureau Experian.”

Hey, Roger? Tough titty. I can say that because I’m well past the age where credit is important. (Yes, lucky me) And a credit freeze doesn’t protect you from everything. It’s probably like The Club… the crooks just move on to an easier target.

Eventually every hacker will have every piece of personal information on every person on the planet. It will be like all baseball card collectors having every single card for every team. Nobody to trade with.

Here’s a puzzler: have you ever heard of a member of Congress having their identity hacked? I haven’t either and perhaps that’s because such a breach would be kept very quiet. I like to think that it happens. I hope it happens.

Meditation: 365 Days

Posted on by

According to the app I use to track my meditation practice, today was the 365th consecutive day of sitting. Cool. One year with zero misses. Which means absolutely nothing other than I’ve been consistent in my practice. I started keeping track on November 30, 2014 and ran up a string of 371 days before missing a day (pneumonia). The next run — 271 days — ended while I was out of town attending my 50th high school reunion. Which might be the worst excuse imaginable. And now I’m less than a week away from beating that 371 string. Two days without meditating in the past 1,007 days.

The only day that counts, of course, is today. The app and keeping my streak alive give me a little extra incentive to sit every day but I don’t need much incentive these days. The time I spend in meditation is almost always the best part of my day.

Next milestone? 500 days.