Home  >> Stories  >> The Tale Spinner #2017-48

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IN THIS ISSUE

• Paula Hodges recalls a generous gift given in secret
• Shirley Conlon sends a calendar illustration for December
• Catherine Nesbitt writes about Vitamin F
• Tom Telfer likes growing older, he writes
• Judith English forwards an article about conspicuous consumption
• Marilyn Magid sends a tale of a mechanical expert
• Here are a number of Murphy´s Technical Laws
• Sites are suggested by Catherine Nesbitt and Tom Telfer

In Heroic Stories, Paula Hodges of Michigan remembers

CHIPS AND SO MUCH MORE

It was 1967. The year I turned 11, my father was in the hospital with cancer, and it was a very bleak December. There was lots of snow and cold, and an old furnace ruled our household with demands for fuel oil and attention. The neighbor had the required touch on the reset buttons, and when awakened by nocturnal phone calls, he never failed to respond with a visit to our basement. On one early dawn foray, he showed me the trick of relays and resets. From then on, half asleep, I went downstairs and pushed buttons, feeling powerful as hot air again pushed through vents upstairs.

One night, as I sleepily pushed the sequence to restart the furnace, I looked toward the garage doors. My heart stopped as a jumble of unfamiliar shapes cast odd shadows. The weak flashlight beam revealed a heap of grocery bags. I was now totally confused. Grocery store trips were boring, once-a-month excursions; we never left bags in the garage. Why would there be grocery bags there? But I was sleepy, so I took my cold bare feet back upstairs and into bed.

At breakfast next morning, I asked Mom, "How come you have all those grocery bags in the garage?" She looked at me with her "You have no idea what you´re talking about!" expression. She replied, "It´s probably just detergent boxes...." I interrupted, "It´s grocery bags, Mom. I´m gonna go see...."

"Sit!" she commanded, "I´ll find out what´s going on." She was gone so long we got nervous. Then she came slowly up the stairs, her arms full of bags, a disbelieving look on her face. She put the bags on the kitchen table and sent the twins down after the rest. I looked at the bags and then at Mom.

These were not our groceries. The things in these bags were things we looked at, but never bought. Potato chips in bright yellow bags, Shredded Wheat, coconut, chocolate chips, jellies, canned soups, Jello! 12 boxes! One bag was meat, another held cheese and fresh vegetables, even cottage cheese and chip dip! Chip dip! Wow! It took forever to put it all away. There was a turkey, cola, and so much more. It was like Christmas, better than a birthday, and my mom´s face was young and glad that whole morning.

Not until I was a grown woman did I find out the answer to that December mystery. The local grocer, Mr. Weston, had been our Santa Claus. Kind and generous, he had filled those bags to feed the hearts of three lonely kids.

To us, it was a miracle. Long after the cottage cheese carton held odd buttons, the feeling of sweet well being stayed on. All through that hard winter we talked about the morning the groceries came.

Thank you, Mr. Weston. I just wanted to tell you how much we appreciated the groceries.

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Shirley Conlon forwards this month´s calendar filmed in a retirement home in Essen, Germany, using seniors to recreate famous movie scenes. This is the December page:

EASY RIDER

Walter Loeser, 98, and Kurt Neuhaus, 90

Catherine Nesbitt sends these thoughts about

VITAMIN F

Why do I have a variety of friends who are all so different in character?

How is it possible that I can get along with them all?

I think that each one helps to bring out a "different" part of me. With one of them I am polite. With another I joke, with another I can be a bit naughty... I can sit down and talk about serious matters with one. With another I laugh a lot. I listen to one friend´s problems. Then I listen to another one´s advice for me.

My friends are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When completed, they form a treasure box. A treasure of friends! They are my friends who might just understand me better than I understand myself. They´re friends who support me through good days and bad. Real Age doctors tell us that friends are good for our health.

Dr. Oz calls them Vitamin F (for Friends) and counts the benefits of friends as essential to our well being. Research shows that people in strong social circles have less risk of depression and terminal strokes.

If you enjoy Vitamin F constantly you can be up to 30 years younger than your real age, but I´ll settle for 10. The warmth of friendship stops stress, and even in your most intense moments, it decreases the chance of a cardiac arrest or stroke by 50%. I´m so happy that I have a stock of Vitamin F.

In summary, we should value our friends and keep in touch with them. We should try to see the funny side of things and laugh together and pray for each other in the tough moments.

Some of my friends are friends on line. I know I am part of theirs because their names appear on my computer screen often, and I feel blessed that they care as much for me as I care for them. Thank you for being one of my Vitamins!

The most beautiful thing about friendship is that we can grow separately without growing apart.

Tom Telfer writes about

WHY I LOVE GETTING OLDER

1. My goal for 2017 was to lose 10 pounds. Only 15 to go!

2. I ate salad for dinner. Mostly croutons & tomatoes. Really just one big round crouton covered with tomato sauce. And cheese. FINE, it was a pizza. I ate a pizza.

3. How to prepare Tofu:

a. Throw it in the trash
b. Grill some meat

4. I just did a week´s worth of cardio after walking into a spider web.

5. I don´t mean to brag, but I finished my 14-day diet food in three hours and 20 minutes.

6. A recent study has found women who carry a little extra weight live longer than men who mention it.

7. Kids today don´t know how easy they have it. When I was young, I had to walk nine feet through shag carpet to change the TV channel.

8. Senility has been a smooth transition for me.

9. Remember back when we were kids and every time it was below zero outside they closed school? Me neither.

10. I may not be that funny or athletic or good looking or smart or talented.... I forgot where I was going with this.

11. I love being over 65. I learn something new every day and forget five others.

12. A thief broke into my house last night. He started searching for money so I got up and searched with him..

13. I think I´ll just put an "Out of Order" sticker on my forehead and call it a day.

14. Just remember, once you´re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.

Judith English forwards this article by George Monbiot, which was published in the Guardian:

PATHOLOGICAL CONSUMPTION

has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it.

There´s nothing they need, nothing they don´t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a "hilarious" inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or - and somehow I find this significant - a Scratch Off World wall map.

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they´re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.

Researching her film "The Story of Stuff," Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale. Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).

But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production. We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility. Forests are felled to make "personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets." Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.

In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot. No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. It´s grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption.

This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask "spending on what?" When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. "I always knit my gifts," says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. "Well you shouldn´t," replies the narrator. An advertisement for Google´s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7´s special features. The best things in life are free, but we´ve found a way of selling them to you.

The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population. The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished.

So effectively have governments, the media, and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week´s Moral Maze programme, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism. When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.

Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god´s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don´t.

Marilyn Magid forwards this story about a

MECHANICAL EXPERT

A young man runs into a bar in Williams Lake and orders a double scotch, then just sits at the bar and stares at his drink. After about five minutes, the bartender goes over and asks, "What´s the matter?"

The man says, "Well, I´m from Vancouver and I just got a job last week selling nuts and bolts. The company told me to drive up to Prince George to see what the market was like, so I got in the company truck and headed out.

"About five kilometers south of here I hit big puddle and the engine died. I pulled over and got out, and as I was looking under the hood, a voice said, ´You probably have water in the distributor cap. Pop it off and wipe it out and it will start jut fine.´

"I looked up and the only thing there was an old white horse. I checked around the truck and no one was there. I stuck my head under the hood again and the voice said, ´I told you - wipe the distributor cap and the truck will start.´

"I can tell you I was nervous, and there was the white horse staring at me. I popped off the cap, wiped it out, slammed down the hood, jumped in the truck, and it started. I looked over at the old horse and I´m positive it said, ´See, I told you so.´ I must be going crazy."

The bartender then replied, "You were lucky."

"What do you mean?" asked the man.

"Old Snowball knows more about cars than most of the horses along the highway."

From the Sunday Family Humour publication:

MURPHY´S TECHNOLOGY LAWS

Murphy´s Technology Law #1: You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track.

Murphy´s Technology Law #2: Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

Murphy´s Technology Law #3: Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

Murphy´s Technology Law #4: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Murphy´s Technology Law #5: An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he/she knows absolutely everything about nothing.

Murphy´s Technology Law #6: Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe, and he´ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it, and he´ll have to touch to be sure.

Murphy´s Technology Law #7: All great discoveries are made by mistake.

Murphy´s Technology Law #8: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

Murphy´s Technology Law #9: All´s well that ends ... period.

Murphy´s Technology Law #10: A meeting is an event at which minutes are kept and hours are lost.

Murphy´s Technology Law #11: The first myth of management is that it exists.

Murphy´s Technology Law #12: A failure will not appear until a unit has passed final inspection.

Murphy´s Technology Law #13: New systems generate new problems.

Murphy´s Technology Law #14: To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

Murphy´s Technology Law #15: We don´t know one-millionth of one percent about anything.

Murphy´s Technology Law #16: Any given program, when running, is obsolete.

Murphy´s Technology Law #17: A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as 20 men working 20 years make.

SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Catherine Nesbitt sends the URL for beautiful photos from around the world. After you have looked at each photo, click on the screen and it will automatically move on to the next photo:

Tom Telfer forwards this link to a video of magician Darcy Oakes making a woman disappear:

In this quiz, you are asked to fill in the missing word or words in famous quotations: