This is a collection of events and things, not quite stream of contentiousness, but running along that line.
I would have entitled it differently, but the entry is too long for software.
Herein we shall shall address: The Slipstream of Incompetent Killing; A Cautionary Tale of Frustration and Similar Nonhuman Interactions Concerning Charter Communications’s Inoperative High-Speed Internet Line; Mysteries of Hexagenia Limbata Flies; Debates Over the Real Identity of Wm. Shake-Spear, That is, He or She Who Actually Penned the Plays, (or Shagspur or Whomsoever – Spell It as Thou Wish);Passage of of the Summer Solstace: and, What is The Sound of a Falling Tree, When You Are Sleeping Within Ten feet Of It?
Playbill stated, let us away anon.
Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and reconsider something you’ve done.For example: The explosion of chipmunks and squirrels in the neighborhood is beyond comparison over my 38 years in this house. Chippies have even been in the garage, chowing down on birdseed in their storage boxes. Chippies everywhere and they come to the bird feeders from five, six houses away — and greater distances. So I bought a live-trap cage, figuring I’d trap and eliminate some.By eliminate I mean kill, not spend $2.75 per-gallon-gas to relocate the sorry little problem rodents like wolves and bears.
It took a few days, and several trap placements to get a result, but finally the trap sprung (peanut butter was the magic bait). It then took me ten shots with the Red Ryder to finally dispatch the poor creature – this during pained rodental screams, writhing, flip flopping, and such suffering and pain as I have rarely witnessed and administered by yours truly, the hotshot outdoorsman, the result being I felt like a total shit, but continued to bling until I finished the job. In the cage it’s too difficult to make a single kill shot, therefore there will be no more BBs flying. The next trapee goes via Green Streamer to a land far, far away, and I do not use that as a euphemism for a dirt nap.
It’s Sunday night, Summer Solstace, the sun’s been out today after couple of nights of nasty thunder bumpers and sundry atmospheric hysterics. And, the high-speed cable was down since 0300 Friday morning. When I called Charter Communications, midday Friday I had to go through the entire prompt menu to reach a computer-germinated, estrogenically androidal voice which said most woodenly: “We have an important message for you!” Do tell: The message was that Charter was aware that phones, cable, and high speed lines were all out in my area. Huh and duh. Obviously the phone wasn’t out, nor was my cable, but definootely the high-speed had been derailed.If the message was so damned important, why did I have to go through an entire menu to receive it? Especially since it involved outage of all of their services? By Saturday they had changed the call-in-system to greeting all calls with a message about the outage, blah blah, no need to traverse menus. Hey it was some improvement, but the stark reality remained that the high-speed line remained inop – which is a nice civilian word for FUBAR. They asked then if I would like to be called when it was back on line, and I assented. By late Sunday night Charter was back to making me go through the menu to get my same “important message” unchanged since I heard it both Friday and Saturday. Charter is tres expensive, and neither the organization nor its employees appear to have the slightest concept of service or care a wit about customers. After years of gobbling up other cable outfits, Charter reportedly has deep financial problems and is said to be treading water in the wilderness of Chapter-Number Land. But last night I talked to a woman who told me she would reset my modem, which allegedly she did. Still no go. So I went to bed. Awww.
I wrote this off line to upload when [if?] the service came back, presumably sometime in this calendar year, but with Charter you never know. As that great philosopher Yogi Berra once told us, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” And if this fork involves another vendor for cable service, take that one. Please. One final thought: will Charter knock 10 percent off the high-speed bill if the cable is down 3 days, which is ten percent of June? Don’t take bets. So, this morning I go through the whole damn exercise again and now we learn that the modem is not working and that Charter can send someone to replace it around Wednesday (or it could be Thursday) OR I could go pick up a new one at the Charter office. Thence there to fetch, a new modem is conveyed home and then another Charter menu to get some Forn-based Bobo to activate the damn thing and finally around noon, after 81 hours, I am back in business, figuratively Of course if this was a business with customers trying to place orders, or transact other business, I and they would be SOL, but this is the cyber-nether — where 90 percent reliability is bragged about. Last night at 2330 I talked to a Charter rep in the Philippines (ISYN) who basically wanted me to disassemble my entire system. Double talk. I told her about the messages and how they were supposed to call me. She had no explanation of why not. Wonderful. Customer service from The Philippines. Sweet. Let’s hear it for the captains and lieutenants of American industry. Obviously we outsource to the PI because workers there are more competent technically than are workers in this country. Excuse my sarcasm, but this argument from business is abject bullshit,and has been for decades. Outsourcing is about bottom line and profit, nothing else. Employees area strictly an expense, never an asset in this day and age and all institutional memory is fading fast.
Changing the subject: less than three weeks or so and we’re off to the Yoop. Not sure I will be blogging (this always sounds to me like a made up word for blind-logging, which fits in a way) but will at least drop into one of the community libraries in the Keweenaw or elsewhere to see if I can connect to the blog. If so, might post from there. Otherwise, the aural null will descend upon us for some time until our return and I can get sorted out to write and post pix.
Sad to say there will be no hex fishing for this household this year. Budget realities nec issittated some belt-tightening and prioritizing (sound familiar?). Decisions made, I can’t help obsessing about big brown trout slurping ginormous flies in deep the ink of night, and me not being there to keep them on their toes (fins?). There’s no report of of hex flies on local lakes around here yet, which suggests the whole hatch will be late this year, here and north of here. If it runs really late, it should go long into July on the upper Manistee, as it did at least once before. Hex flies hatch in one place and tend to migrate up river to await mating. These swarms are so large they have been seen on dopler radars. If you are sitting on the river and they pass overhead, it sounds like a swarm of Harley Hawgs passing over you in mass formation. Very, very strange indeed, and therefore wonderful.
As history: July 18, 2001, Joe Guild and I fished with yarn flies all day, floating the Manistee, and hit an unexpected hex hatch and spinner fall at dark. No giant fish that night, but lots of respectable 14-17-inchers. Brook trout that day were mostly in the middle of the river and looking up aggressively, not cowering close to the usual bankside cover. Normally we fish hex the third week of June, so this day was weeks later than usual, which again goes to prove that MaNat has her own timetable and rationales. Every time you start thinking you have the fishing thing figured out, you learn otherwise.
Last summer rain kept the Kalamazoo River blown out for most wading for most of the summer. This year is looking like a repeat of that scenario, which is too bad. In case you don’t know it, the poisoned waters of the Kalamazoo are home to a sizeable population of scrappy smallies. I don’t do canoes, so if there’s no wading, there’s no fishing. I’ve got a float tube, but it’s too much work especially on a long river float.
The grand-puppies were here this weekend, Mssrs. Cooper and MacThor, both vying to be alpha dog within the pack of canids and humans. Shanny just rolled his brown eyes at the upstarts. Hey, life could be more fun if dogs were in charge!
The things going on in Iran are extremely interesting and troublesome, but I wonder if our media are making more out of what it all means than it actually does. For one thing no media are allowed to operate inside Iran at the moment, and here’s a preview of what America will be like when newspapers fade into history to be supplanted only by the chaos of the internet and Twitter and Facebook, etc. One wonders where they events in Iran will lead. From my limited perspective, the “opposition” reminds me of Martin Luther, not wanting to overthrow the church, but to take it back to its original values. Some or our politicians want change in Iran; sometimes you get what you ask for and only then decide that’s not what you wanted. Let’s hope that’s not the play-out on this set of circumstances. And as for encouraging the Iranian people to revolt [southern Iraq, Hungary, the Czechs, etc], it seems that every time we do that we hang people out to dry, so why listen to the the American government? We’re not so good at stepping up when people need us.
I continue my lifelong interest in Shakespeare and am, of course, intrigued by various schools debating whether the simple man from Stratford on Avon was the actual author, or played some other role for the genuine author. Many others have been put forward as candidates for the true author, but I wonder something else.
Part of the mystery stems from a couple of things: When Queen Elizabeth died, Shakespeare penned not a word in memorium, a singular oversight in that time for a lot of valid reasons – while all of his literary colleagues waxed on and on about Bess. And, when Shakespeare died, there was not a single word written about him, at least none that has survived. Now Shakespeare likewise never wrote anything nice about his poetical competitors and colleagues, so maybe the omission on the queen is explainable, And likewise, if he never commented on other poets, maybe they ignored his death intentionally. Who knows, but it is really odd, nothing written at all by his colleagues, collaborators or admirers. Or by anyone in his town of Stratford of Avon. And nothing in his will about any of his literary works or business. We have no rough drafts, no manuscripts, no nothing from his writing career and in this regard it is like he either did none of it, or perhaps someone else did. In the years when he was most productive he was living in Stratford and presumably commuting. Odd to the nth degree, I’d say.
Okay, if the dude was indeed the greatest and most successful poet in England in his day– and thereafter– and fawned over by intellectuals and the nobility and the vulgar general alike (in today’s parlance, that would be the general public – us’ns), and the object of jealousy and admiration of his contemporary writers, why would there be no mention by anyone of his passing? Not a word.
Mayhaps the answer is that Shakespeare’s true greatness was undiscovered until long after his demise and that he became a much bigger phenomenon in the popular mind of later ages than he ever was in his own time. This certainly has happened to other great writers – and many painters for that matter.
I know: too much time on my hands. But still. Not that they compare exactly, but if Steven Spielberg passed away, is it thinkable this could go publicly unnoticed? I thinketh not.
Okay, most importantly at the moment; any one out there ever use live leeches to inveigle brook trout in streams? If so, and you don’t mind, let me know how that went and how you rigged your gear. We mean to eat brook trout this trip to the UP and will not be messing with a flyrod to achieve the desired end. Meat fishing requires garden hackle, something alive and wiggling to be sacrificed in return for a fine fried repast
Early this morning, a branch cracked like a rifle, and fell into the backyard, landing not ten feet from the bed, but inflicting no major damage except to a small section of fencing. For something two feet in diameter, we are lucky nothing animate was frolicking below when the branch fell. Ergo, it will be chainsaw and removal time soon. It’s always something, eh?
Enjoy summer. It’s here!
Over.
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