Flotsam and Jetsam

Random stuff

I was saddened yesterday to hear that Jane Marczewski passed away at the age of 31. I don’t watch regular television (does anyone?) but somehow—maybe through Youtube or some other site—I saw her June 2021 performance on America’s Got Talent. Her attitude and her song left me stunned. There are very few people I can point to and say, “Now that’s inspirational!”

She was one. Watch:

It is OK. “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.”

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There’s a word we use in our family when we tackle a dog (or a cat) and make them a prisoner of love for a petting session. We call that “being muckled”. As In, “Oh…you want to be beggy? That’s it…I’m gonna muckle you!”

It’s a strange word. The only other time I’ve heard it used was in elementary school, when we would play a game we called Muckle. There could be two, or ten, or a hundred kids on the field and we’d toss a football as high as we were able. We’d all scream “Muckle the guy with the ball!” and then, whoever caught the ball would try to make it to the goal before being tackled by everyone else. It was always a pile on, like a wounded zebra being dragged down by a pack of hyenas.

So, for my entire life I just assumed “muckle” was a perfectly good word, and that it meant a cheerful bout of slightly more violent than normal roughhouse. I looked it up this morning. It doesn’t mean that.

I’m keeping it, anyway. The actual meaning is archaic: “a great amount”. No one ever says, “He’s loaded! He’s got a muckle of cash.” I’m going to assume that the word has been abandoned and is vacant, and I’m as free to plant my flag there as anyone.

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A year or so back I began noticing signs at retail shops claiming that there is a national shortage of coins. The signs are still up, so whatever had caused the “shortage” has not been relieved.

My initial take was that this was a concerted effort by Big Business to move everyone away from cash and toward a digital economy, because it solves so many problems for business. No one has to make change, for example, or count tills at the end of the business day. You can’t be robbed, and there are no deposits to be made at the local bank. I now think I was only partially correct. We are being moved, incrementally, to a cashless society and business is on board with the effort, but it is government that is making it happen.

Like living organisms, bureaucracy learns from experience, and we have taught ours that we will accept enormous overreach so long as it is done gradually. When I was a child in the 60s, people smoked everywhere. In planes, on elevators, in bars and coffee shops and restaurants. In the 80s we started to worry about secondhand smoke and the rights of non-smokers, and that is well and good, but if smoking was just banned outright someone would have to explain why a business, a bar for example, couldn’t be opened exclusively for smokers. If you didn’t want to breathe secondhand smoke? Don’t go there. Easy peasy.

However, by allowing every restaurant to have a smoking “section”, the non=smoking nature of the establishment, whatever it was, became the normative, and when smoking was banned? It’s not like they shut the bar down. They only moved the smoking “section” outside.

The same is happening with cash. It would be too onerous to just ban cash, but if a slight tweak is made that causes using cash to be a little bit of a pain in the ass? Gradually, over a period of time, people will use it less and less, and as that happens it will more of a pain in the ass to use.

Now, imagine the power that gives a government that is willing to track the citizens. Every dollar could be traced. With a click of the mouse any curious official could see, to the penny, exactly where every nickel a citizen earned was spent. And, perhaps more importantly, as we saw in Canada, if the citizen doesn’t play ball by their rules, the tap can be turned off in the blink of an eye and anyone can be completely shut out of the economy.

Were I a younger man, this would worry me. We do not elect the best and the brightest, nor the most even tempered and fair minded, and it is only a matter of time before a tool so powerful is employed. Odds seem good that when it is, it will be employed by some self-important bozo who thinks anyone who disagrees must be a Nazi or worse. It won’t be pretty when it happens.

Anyway…just a few things I thought I’d mention.