Non-Privacy Policies

How can we help (ourselves)?

 

I recently received an email from Lowe’s informing me they have changed their “Privacy Policy”. These are the same folks who — every time I purchase something and try to check out — matter-of-factually ask me for my telephone number. I always refuse. Why do they need my telephone number? I mean, chances are good (since I normally use a debit card for my purchases) they already have access to WAY more than just my telephone number.

The Lowe’s Privacy Policy Change email contained a link to their new Policy Page, no more or less frightening than other such policy pages, I’m sure. I spent some time reading through all the gobbledegook, finally taking a breather at their “Your Choices” section, wherein they pacified me a bit into believing I could remove myself from the insanity of online shopping data sharing, because everyone is in cahoots nowadays; Google, Amazon, Facebook — all of the biggies — wantonly swapping, sharing and receiving personal information and shopping habits as if it belonged to them, not you. How many times have I purchased something at Amazon and a day later the item I just bought is plastered on every browser page I visit? Depending on the item, that can be rather embarrassing if you have a visitor who asks to use your computer.

“Hey, Tim, how do you like that hemorrhoids cushion?”

I suspect the Lowe’s Privacy Policies are no different than most, but I gotta tell you, when I got to the part that said: “To be removed from all of Lowe’s official email, telephone and postal mail marketing, choose one of the following options: email customercare@lowes.com and type “REMOVE FROM ALL MARKETING” in the subject line…” I felt a shimmy of hope wiggle through me like a bolt from that first shot of tequila.

I opened my email program and began to reply. That’s when I read a couple more sentences and got down to the: “For any of these options, please include your name, address, phone number and email address in the request, and let us know how you provided us with the information.” part.

You have GOT to be kidding me. Let me get this right. They want MORE private information about me so they can remove my “old” private information  from their “Lowe’s official email, telephone and postal mail marketing”? How crazy is THAT!  Damn, they also want me to tell them HOW I provided them with “the information” they already have about me. Give me a break.

Little did we know — years back when we rushed like children toward the Google Candy Store and all the other personal information black- holes-from-Hell-blood-sucking-vampire-ish-mega-sites — the can of worms we were uncapping. Did I just say children and can of worms? Silly me. My bad. I really meant lemmings and Pandora’s Box.

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Lost Luggage, Last Men Standing

Yesterday, I was snipping rosemary from a very large rosemary bush growing in a pot on my deck. Rosemary is one of those plants whose leaves exude an oily essence. That’s the only way to describe it. This rosemary essence is incredibly potent and, for me  — like lusty Patchouli oil aroma from sweaty 60s-era girlfriends past — fires memory synapses only the way aromas can.

Which is how I found myself remembering being picked up by my friend, Rich one evening at the Norfolk airport. I had been returning from a trip to visit Mom in Florida, and I was ready to come home. About an hour later, it was Rich who noticed that we were the last folks standing in a now empty baggage area. “Uh, Tim?” he asked.  “Why are we the last people standing in an empty baggage area?”

I thought about my golf clubs. I thought about my hang bag, filled with my favorite tee-shirts and shorts and suntan lotion. I thought about *Tad Williams’ yet unread “Mountain of Black Glass“ (Otherland, Volume 3) novel. I thought about my brand new prescription sunglasses sitting, perhaps, on my seat as I had hastily deplaned, and I thought about Stephen King’s “The Langoliers“, a novel about parallel universe-hopping airline travelers who find themselves stranded in an airport from Hell whose reality is in the process of fragmenting into nothingness, just like my hopes for ever seeing my luggage again.

“I don’t want to think about it,” I said.

After a while, I noticed a tiny glass room set off from the rest of the baggage claim area. Inside, leaning against a scuzzy wall and bathed in the sickly green glow from an overhead fluorescent light, sat my golf clubs and Samsonite hanging bag.

“Those your bags?” asked a security-looking-type guard, gruffly. A handgun hung loosely from his belt.

Uh, oh, I thought, suddenly remembering my sister, Pat having stuffed a HUGE bundle of fresh rosemary into the golf bag just before she drove me to the airport in Florida. Maybe they found some hitchhiking bugs being transported across state lines. Maybe — I was about to get busted!

“Yes, they’re mine!” I exclaimed. “Is there something wrong?”

“Nah, they came in on another flight,” said the guard. “You got your baggage claim tickets?”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

A few minutes later Rich and I were standing in the parking lot. A cool evening breeze blew in from the nearby Chesapeake Bay. “Hang on a second, Rich,” I said, unzipping the golf bag. I slipped on a Zebco Pro-fishing jacket. The inside of Rich’s truck smelled like rosemary all the way to a sushi bar.

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Tim Says: *Author Tad Williams and I have a somewhat twisted relationship, culminating in years of a rather rage-hardened distrust. Sounds like a Simply Tim to me!

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Sooner than We Think

VIDEO CURIOSITY

I was chatting with an UberStrike gamer earlier today, discussing how my generation became the “TV Generation”, and how today’s generation is one of “technology”.  Every time I turn on the Discovery Channel, or the Science Channel, or the Smithsonian Channel, I am reminded that, in a sense, we all are still living in the “TV” generation, that the Information Age is everywhere. But, I have to admit, when I peek at, purchase, play with all those things that technology is putting in our grasp, I am more than a little bit jealous about not being more of a part of it.

I suppose that’s what every generation has felt since civilization first began to crawl from the primordial muck: a feeling of being left out of a grander scheme of things we can never quite obtain, but one destined for — in the words of “The Moody Blues“, circa 1969, “our Children’s Children’s Children”.

Here is a video link my new UberStrike friend, Adam, passed along to me. He said, “Next generation will have…”

–submitted by “Adam”

Can you imagine?

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Tim says: if you’d like to submit one of your own You Tube “Video Curiosity” discoveries for consideration, use the “Contact” form at the top of the blog. Include the link and your first name only. Email addresses (if any) will not be published.

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It was a Penny Kind of Day

I was in a Mom & Pop fast food joint the other day. When the cashier was making my change, he noticed an off-color penny sitting in the change drawer. He fished the penny out of the penny compartment and examined the coin. “Wow, this is OLD!” he exclaimed, showing it excitedly to a fellow worker. He put the penny back in the drawer. After a while, he handed me my bag of burgers and fries. I couldn’t stand it.

“Uh — just how old is that penny?” I asked.

“Nineteen eighty-five,” he said. “It’s older than I am!”

I sat down with my meal at a very tiny table, feeling a little less hungry and a whole lot older than I did a few moments before.

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Plastic Wrats

I really hate the new kind of plastic packaging, the indestructible type that is heat-vacuum-shrunk around the purchased item; the type whose packaging design offers no means of opening it short of using a hacksaw. The plastic itself is so thick it is impossible to tear or pry apart. And I know that even if I am somehow able to slip a finger in-between the plastic joins, I run a very real risk of severing a digit or two on the wickedly sharp edges.  Every time I cautiously approach one of these packages, I wonder how many finger-related law suits have been filed.

Since kitchen shears are no help at all, I decided to purchase an inexpensive pair of tin snips. But when I found the pair of industrial-grade snips I wanted at my local Lowes Home Center — you guessed it — they were tightly cocooned in an impenetrable spent-plutonium plastic diaper.

“Would you please open this package for me?” I asked the checkout person after purchasing the snips. “My fingers aren’t what they used to be and I’d like to keep them that way.”

The cashier slipped her own pair of tin snips from under the counter. Snip, snip. A couple of dangerous daring finger maneuvers, and the metal snips separated from the packaging. She made it look so easy. “There you go sir. Works like a champ.”

They must. She still had all of her fingers.

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Insomnia

Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, my brain begins to think rather than falling back to sleep. Like last night, when I woke up puzzling over a Dean Koontz novel I had been reading immediately before nodding off. Reading often puts me to sleep. No offense, Dean. One of the characters had just died of a heart attack.  A sputter here, a synapse there, and — bingo!  I began wondering where the story would go next.

Too late. I was wide awake.

At times like these I have often found that taking a very, very hot shower helps prepare me for a re-visit by the Sandman. Something about the influx of heat and the sound of the shower striking my skull is what does it. My master shower happens to have one of those shower-chairs (with armrests and a back) sitting in the bathtub, which makes taking a shower a lazy and comfortable experience.

“Pssssssst”, went the hot water. INnnnn went the heat. Pitter-Patterrrr went the friendly little water-sounds on my naked scalp. So pleasant. So nice. “AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” I awoke about an hour later, screaming — eyes wide open — within a very cold, 50-degree rush of well water. I had fallen asleep in the shower chair.

Man, oh man, I was so totally AWAKE even Dean Koontz couldn’t help.

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Small UberVictories

Sometimes, small victories are the best kind.

As many of you know, about a year ago I became heavily involved with the free, online shoot-em-up video game, UberStrike, where my screen name is “Gray Mouser”, a fictional character introduced in 1939 by the famous science fiction author, Fritz Leiber.

It wasn’t long before — with some amount of trepidation — I joined the UberStrike Forum, a game-related “chat room” of sorts. As the year progressed, I became fascinated with a particular section of the UberStrike Forum called “Cmunity“, a special area where appointed UberStrike gamer-”WRITERS” published Uber-related articles.

I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to become a part of it. After wrangling with UberStrike’s Manager, I was quickly accepted as an official Cmunity Writer. It wasn’t long before I was promoted to Cmunity LEADER, the equivalent of Spider-Man’s boss, Jonah Jameson. Gray Mouser had suddenly become Cmunity Newsroom’s Editor-in-Chief!

Soon, word got out there was a new, 62-year old UberKid on the block.

Cmunity Writers are hot stuff, all of them volunteers and highly admired by the mostly 13-19 year old UberStrike gamers. Everyone wants to become one.

It was somewhere along this timeline that I decided I wanted to help these aspiring wannabe writers. It was time to give something back.

After much juggling and jostling, I managed to get my boss (screen name: “Lady Daga”) to agree to something I called the  [Cmunity FREELANCE] Program, a program designed to encourage these aspiring non-Cmunity Writers in a self-discovery kind of way, by giving them a taste of the real publishing world complete with rejection letters. The Cmunity FREELANCE program gives these young wannabes the chance to have their writing displayed right beside the Cmunity Writer big dogs.

This past weekend, I “accepted” the first [Cmunity FREELANCE] Program article, a small victory made larger for me by the fact that I shot and edited a YouTube video to enhance the writer’s (screen-name “Elite|Phoenix”) article. I had spent 20 years of my working career as a television editor-writer-story producer, shooting and editing all kinds of stories, but none of them as rewarding as “Springs for the Win“, my personal return — after 30 years — to the world of editing. It was like riding a bike once again, a bike super-powered by light years of technological editing advances.

Sometimes, small victories are the best kind.

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Tim says: Point-and-shoot games like UberStrike are not for everyone. But if you geezers out there want to join me in jump-starting your heart rate, getting those hand-eye coordination brain cell synapses firing again, and discovering that today’s international youth are pretty damned amazing after all, I invite you to get off your butts and give UberStrike a shot. The game needs more of us seniors showing these young whippersnappers a thing or two. Mac user? A free Mac App version is available in the Apple App Store.

Cya in game!

–Mouser

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A Rock is a Rock

A place to float away...

I’ve always admired rock gardens. Simple in design, zero maintenance, and pure as the driven snow. Curious, I visited a garden center to check out the price of a large display stone. I fell in love with one of those rocks –  five feet long, four feet wide, and three feet tall. It weighed several tons, no doubt. It would look great sitting in a 20-foot circle filled with raked sand, which is definitely NOT zero maintenance.

“Okay,” I finally asked a salesperson. “How much is that rock?”

“Four hundred seventy-five dollars.” She was serious. “And — of course — delivery is EXTRA.”

Of course. Turns out “delivery” was an additional two hundred dollars. Purity and simplicity.

In the old days I suspect farmers paid handsomely to have someone REMOVE large stones like that, or it took them weeks to do it themselves. Which got me thinking: beware of anyone who can afford to buy a seven-hundred dollar rock!

Unless — of course – - you’re a clever farmer who knows there’s folks like me who fall in love so easily with a rock: “Yep, — four hundred seventy-five dollars. But you gotta MOVE IT yourself!“

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TV Shots (Movies I Never Want to Watch)

(gleaned from the preview guide)

Tim says: it’s time once again to flush out wacky preview guide snippets. Based purely on these plot lines, it’d be fun to have been a fly on the wall during the hype and subsequent pitch to whichever movie producers finally decided these screenplays were destined for box office greatness. Or not.

VALERIE FLAKE 1999
“A nice guy with an ill-tempered mother pursues an embittered widow who drinks, bed-hops, and demeans sympathizers.”

I particularly like the “demeans sympathizers” phrase. Not sure, though, what it means.

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RETURN OF THE SWAMP THING 1989
“A mad scientist’s vegetarian stepdaughter falls in love with one of his leafy failures.”

I watched this movie for about twenty minutes just because I wanted to see Heather Locklear eating salad.

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RATZ 2000

“A woman from Indiana uses a magic ring to turn two rats into dates for her teen friends.”

Why pick on Indiana? Why not a woman from Iowa, or Kansas, or – - just “A woman uses a magic ring to turn two rats into dates for her teen friends.” Never mind. I still wouldn’t have watched it.

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BLOOD AND DONUTS 1995

“Stuck in an all night doughnut shop, a vampire hunts a rat, saves a cab driver from things, and deals with an ex-girlfriend.”

I used to dive a cab. My things were never saved. Not even by vampires. Of course, maybe the rat was in the cab while the vampire was being driven to the doughnut shop. Naw. More importantly — how come “donuts” can also be spelled “doughnuts”?

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Maybe, Maybe Not

Sometimes it’s difficult figuring out why we’re all here. I mean — no matter what ones’ beliefs — we’re born, we die, we live on forever or we don’t; we’re alone or we’re not; there’s a plan, or maybe not; order, chaos, the same (but different?) or — maybe not. No matter what, one thing’s for certain: we’re born, we die, we live on forever or we don’t; we’re alone or we’re not; there’s a plan or maybe not.

And, no matter what, we’re a part of it.

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