That TV is Shot

A few years ago, our TV went on the “blink” as my father used to say. It just stopped working. It was only 14 months old and the warrantee had expired. I never buy supplementary protection plans. Once, I was offered a two year extension on the warrantee on a $99 toaster for the bargain price of $25. I passed. After five years, the toaster is still going strong. Not my TV though. It’s “shot” to use more of my father's vernacular.

A call to the Samsung customer support led me to believe a simple external connection hub, called a "One Connect," was the culprit. I bought a new one for $100. Now I couldn’t care less about TV. I rarely watch it unless there's a new Naked and Afraid or, American Chopper reboot. I just love watching the Teutuls yell at each other. Apart from being the visual component to a game console, television doesn’t offer much in the way of entertainment. In fact, I think it causes Alzheimers.

The new connect component didn’t fix the set so I took the TV off the wall and pried open the backing in search of blown capacitors, a common problem that plagued Samsung TVs in the past. Since nothing seemed fried, I called in the big guns in the form of a congenial repair dude, named "Tim," who was originally from Georgia.

TV With Back Removed

Now that my TV shat the futon, the person in my family most affected was my sister, Jeannine. It’s not like “Aunt Jeannine” as my kids call her because, well, that’s who she is to them, lives with us or anything. She’s also not much older than me so get that image out of your mind of an old lady sitting in a rocking chair, covered by a knitted blanket, shaking a defunct remote control at a blank TV screen while yelling for more canned pears. The reason my TV being jacked affected my sister most of all was because she’s my PubG partner.

Now, Player Unknown Battlegrounds, PubG for short, is a first person survival game which we team play over the internet. The goal of PubG is to parachute into a region of Russia with a hundred other people, loot weapons, then try to kill everyone else. The last one standing wins a chicken dinner as the game displays,

“Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!”

I haven’t been able to achieve chicken dinner status as of yet although Aunt Jeannine has twice. It’s not likely I’ll ever win in PubG because I can’t shoot for beans, and I occasionally can’t get my avatar through a doorway. In gaming terms, I’m what is called a "noob," that is a newbie. The last video game I played required a quarter so I’m also a noob to the Xbox and associated controller as well.

My sister and I played together most of our childhood. We’re close in age and similar in many ways. Anything good which I can recall about my youth always involved her. I think she wants to team with me when playing PubG because it reminds her of when we played with Hot Wheels or Lincoln Logs together as kids. It’s certainly not for any of my stellar gaming skills.

After replacing most of the circuit boards, Tim determined that it was probably the panel which is too expensive to fix. Reluctantly, I took the TV to the dump. While this was going on over several weeks, my sister was experiencing gamer's withdrawal as she refused to play PubG without her bro. Her text messages reflected a growing anguish over the many delays.

First Week

Second Week

Third Week


When my wife, Christine, got involved, she researched the television I picked out only to conclude that the "900F" version was better than the "850E." Of course, it is. It's fifty and one letter better.

"The 900F is superior at rendering black tones," she declared.

I'm not sure why rendering black is all the rage with flat panel TVs. I thought rendering color was the big thing, but apparently handling the absence of light is the cutting edge of flat screen technology. Upgrading to the more advanced set cost another $800, plus a bit longer wait since the new fancier TV is back ordered until July. Our youngest, Willy, didn't want to see the TV discarded.

"I was raised on that TV," he sobbed.

One Way Trip

But he made the best of it.

Time to Create

 And off to the dump.

Goodbye, Ole Friend

Here is some of William's screen art,

TV Graffiti

My sister took the delay reasonably in stride. I'm confident the bigger, better, 900F TV will improve my gaming skills when I return to PubG. If not, there's always Monsters Inside Me.

Editor's Note: Originally published on June 12, 2018.

Scientists Discover a New Shape

The Scutoid

First off, I didn’t even know that anyone was looking for new shapes. I guess I’m glad that research in the field of spacial geometry is still being conducted. I, for one, thought everything that there was to know about geometric shapes had already been discovered decades ago. Now, the rhombus has to move aside like Pluto as it relinquishes its position as the least understood geometric figure, making room for the "scutoid."

Scientists from the University of Seville discovered the new form in nature. The results were published in the peer-reviewed journal, Nature Communications. The new shape was described as having a specific curve and didn’t look like any known mathematical figure. The researchers observed the structure in fruit flies and zebrafish. While the rest of us were filing off to our boring, mundane jobs, scientists were pushing the envelope of knowledge by looking for undiscovered shapes in insects and fish.

The scutoid, named for a structure found in the thorax of beetles, is five sided on one end and six sided on the other. It’s basically a hexagon and a pentagon smashed together. Euclid described many of the basic shapes like the circle in his seminal work, Elements, a 13 volume treatise written in 300 BC. The circle is believed to be known before recorded history because it’s so common. The moon, the wheel, coins. Other shapes like the parallelogram and rhombus are harder to find in nature. It’s no wonder it took scientists so many years to find the elusive scutoid because who would have thought to look between the neck and abdomen of a bug?

There are a lot of complex shapes which one might be unfamiliar with like the frustum, which is the lower part of a pyramid, or the rhombicosidodecahedron which has 20 triangular faces, 30 square faces, 12 regular pentagonal faces, 60 vertices, and 120 edges. Many of these shapes are found in the natural world, the cosmos, microbiology and the ass of a goat. Now that the scutoid has been discovered, scientists are pretty sure there are no more new shapes out there. How do they know? Because the only place scientists haven't searched is a stink beetle's colon.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on August 7, 2018.

Gettys-burger

In the summer of 2018, we were in Pennsylvania at Gettysburg. My son was playing Taps at the Soldiers' National Monument, centrally located in the Gettysburg National Cemetery. The event was part of 100 Nights of Taps, an annual event created by a retired United States Air Force Non-Commissioned Officer, Jari Villanueva. Considered the country’s foremost expert on military bugle calls, Villanueva spent 23 years with the United States Air Force Band.

I haven't been to Gettysburg in over a decade. The first thing I noticed was the many signs denying entry to pets, most notably dogs. While all battlegrounds sites required canines to be on leashes, the cemetery didn't allow them at all. This is unlike solemn, historical sites in New England which are often employed as toilets by dog owners who routinely turn their pooches loose to do their business. There's nothing like going to hallowed ground so Dinkles the Dog can pinch butt truffles.

I also like how everything in our country is monetized. The fast food industry is usually the first to appropriate a local historical event into their menu. While at Gettysburg I ate a buckshot burger with a side of emancipation proclamation fries. In Concord, Massachusetts I once ordered a Paul Revere panini.

Wandering around the battlegrounds, I heard the comments from many tourists. Now I know that most Americans are incapable of passing a citizen's test. Only one in a thousand can identify all five first amendment rights (freedom of religion, speech, press, association, and the ability to petition the government), but one in four can name all of the Simpsons, (Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart and Maggie). A recent poll determined that one in five Americans could not find America on a map of America. There's an old joke my father used to say that war was invented to teach Americans geography.

Here are some of the questions asked of our tour guide while at Gettysburg.

1. What exactly happened here?
2. Is this where Ben Franklin discovered electricity?
3. What side was the Nazis on, the North or the South?
4. Did Paul Revere lead Pickett's charge?
5. Was John Quincy Adams a county medical examiner?

This is the video of my son sounding Taps at Gettysburg, and for the record the Nazis were neutral during the Civil War.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on July 28, 2018.

Are You Sexy?

Recently, I was in the waiting room in my dentist's office with my wife, Christine, while our youngest was in for a cleaning. As I perused the magazines on the table next to a display about gingivitis, I honed in on a woman's fitness periodical which sported a cover with a smart looking, smiling, thirty something woman, power walking in yoga pants while swinging weights in each hand. The long list of articles were primarily for women as in Get Slim & Feel Strong, or 20 Best-Ever Haircuts, and Should You Steam Your Vagina?

Initially, the latter captured my attention, but as it took ten minutes to find the table of contents, which didn't help anyway because of the blocks of unnumbered pages dedicated to advertisements. I gave up on trying to find the article when I came across a quiz entitled, Are You Sexy? Even though the survey was written for women, I decided to take the test anyway because, theoretically, it shouldn't matter because we're the same or something. The first question asked,

What is the average amount of time you spend engaged in a kiss?

I never really timed it, but I surmised probably a second or two. I looked up the answer which indicated that the longer you spend in a smooch, the sexier you are. They recommended nothing shorter than ten seconds. Armed with this information, I leaned over to my wife, bent on kissing her for the requisite amount of time. Midway though our sexy extended kiss, she said with her lips still locked on mine,

"What are you doing?"

"A sexy kiss," I answered.

"This is sexy?”

"It says right here that long kisses are sexy."

"Oh. I thought you had a stroke or something."

That went so well, I dove back into the survey.

Do you experiment in the bedroom?

I definitely do this one. I'm into the scientific method. Once my son and I built a volcano for a middle school science fair. I checked the answer key. More points for me! Eager to be even more sexy, I forged ahead,

Have you ever taken part in a ménage à trois?

I had to look this one up because even though I took twelve years of French in Catholic school, I really can't actually speak the language unless some French person was in need of someone to conjugate the verb "to go." The literal translation of ménage à trois is "household for three." I was disappointed when I looked up the answer. Apparently they were asking if I ever had sex with two people at once which made no sense to me since last I checked I have only one penis. Moving on,

Have you ever filmed yourself and your partner?

Yes! I filmed us at the beach, on vacation, during family gatherings. For some reason, I got a lot of points for video recording my wife and me. They hinted that a video while on an airplane is very sexy. They said that it's proof that we're in what I think is a recreational pot smoking group called, the Mild High Club.

What is your favorite go to screwvenir?

This was a hard one. I had to Google what a "screwvenir" is which is "anything that you keep (whether stolen or given to you) from someone's house after you've slept with them." The answer key gave points for shirts and underwear and deducted points for body parts. I got nothing since I don't have any screwvenirs, but I did keep the cork from first bottle of wine Christine and I had together.

Have you ever had sex with a woman?

Big points for this one. Having two kids years apart proves that I had sex with a woman at least twice, but I can tell you for sure, it was more than that. Way more. Like twice that.

How many different positions have you tried?

I worked for a few tech companies. All in all, I answered "at least five," which got me some points. Apparently, if I worked for more companies I would've been more sexy. Moving ahead,

How many partners have you had?

I didn't do so well here. I've never worked for a law firm so I've never had partners. The next question was likely a Hipaa Violation.

How often do you engage in anal penetration?

I answered once every five years unless they find something. I didn't get any points as that was too infrequent. Moving on,

Who is your celebrity crush?

A celebrity crush is the person who if you slept with your spouse would give you a pass. It was important for me to pick someone Christine would like otherwise a pass would never be forthcoming. Christine is sure that she and Jennifer Lawrence would be best friends. She's really not my type and a bit too young for me. I decided to play it safe and put down "Betty White." She's 99, but I’ll bet she's dynamite in the sack.

Tallying up my score, I got a 27 out of 100 which according to the key means I'm "not very sexy." Furthermore, my score came with the advice that I "should consider spicing things up more." They also advised that "I should perhaps venture outside of my comfort zone." I don't get it. Holding my breadth every time I kiss my wife while constantly coming up with new experiments all while convincing my doctor that I need yet another colonoscopy certainly places me well outside my comfort zone.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on August 21, 2018.