Edward J. Pluchar - The Blogsplitter

“I have an important call for you, but all of our representatives are busy right now.  Please hold.”

Can you believe the nerve of a telemarketing firm, to make an automated call to a person’s home or business, only to put that person immediately on hold?  Is there anyone who stays on the line?

(Hopefully, that wasn’t actually an important call, but my attitude is that such a company should at least announce its name before asking the receiving party to wait on hold).

At the urging of Neal Lyons, I was introduced to Lupe Fiasco, a hip-hop artist (What’s that in back? Oh, he’s a rapper? I should just call him a rapper? Isn’t that the same thing as hip-hop artist? Oh, there’s no hyphen there?) from Chicago.

My disclaimer is that, usually, I dislike being introduced to musicians. I’d rather happen upon them, or have someone play a new artist without any kind of announcement - Just let the music hook me in, alright?

In spite of that, I instantly liked Lupe. Off the first dozen or so songs that I’ve listened to, I would say that he’s probably my ideal rapper. Until now I liked Tupac best, and I’m not ready to say that’s changed, but there are plenty of Tupac songs that are either juvenile, almost purely vulgar, or else uninteresting. So far I like every Lupe song that I’ve heard.

Self-promotion seems inherent in rap music - even so, Lupe seems relatively modest. Throw out Kanye West, who more and more repulses me with his self-centeredness.

Lupe seems smart, and not just “smart” for a rapper. He has a better handle not only on vocabulary but on sophisticated concepts than someone like Eminem, whom I have admired for those reasons. Eminem has a flair for satire, but nothing like the penetrating, sweeping depiction of evil/Satan/the dark side that Lupe offers in “Put You on Game.”

What will be interesting, for me, is to see how Lupe’s heart comes out in his music. That’s the real reason I appreciate Tupac - Agree or not, the man was fierce about his convictions. If Lupe keeps his intellectual edge and maybe lets rip in a few more songs, he may have the edge with this hip-hop connoisseur. (Yeah? Calling myself a connoisseur makes me sound pretentious? No? Oh, it ACTUALLY makes me pretentious…)

I don’t know exactly what your impression of my life might be, particularly if you’ve never been to my part of West Virginia. I should say that I don’t feel technologically or socially stranded in any way. I have just enough access to the Internet to keep me connected to the larger world and many of my friends, our phones get plenty of reception, and socially - well, I did want to get away a little bit, so this works great.

Ah, but the self check-out lines at the grocery store, they have just arrived. I found myself, perhaps strangely, anxious about their arrival, even before I knew of any plans our local grocery store had for installing them.

Yes, Friday was the day, and with a few items in tow I made my way toward the open lane.

Like a veteran, I placed my groceries on the scale before the scanner and swiped my customer card. I scanned the first item.

Then, there was an employee behind me, probably a manager.

I scanned another couple of items and a second employee joined the manager. He began coaching me on the procedure for scanning the items and placing them on the post-scan scale.

As I finished my order, a third employee rounded out the party, all of them watching me swipe my credit card. I thought I should feel a little self-conscious, but I followed through like a pro.

The machine spits out my receipt when, almost bursting, the manager says, “Congratulations! You’re the first customer to use our self check-out line!”

If I wasn’t so amused by this, I would have asked for a prize. At least give me the chocolate milk for free, right?

I continued to smile on my way to work, dwelling on the fact that this technology was so novel, three grown, professional men couldn’t help but look over my shoulder as I scanned V8 juice like they were showing off a new toy.

The lasting benefit is that I can now say, when a clerk asks, “Would you like some assistance with our new check-out lines?” - “No thanks - I was the first customer to use them, ever!”

On my way to a work site recently, I encountered every kind of animal you could imagine on a country road, most of them daring my vehicle to crush the life out of them.

You can give a break to butterflies, of course.  I only mention them because I saw an inordinate number of them in their snowy whites, blacks and yellows, and stormy blues.

But a turtle, a cat, a baby rabbit, a chipmunk, a squirrel, several birds, and countless centipedes ventured along the high wire of the highway, all of them surviving because of my benevolence and leave-you-breathless reflexes.  Evading all of these, I thought to myself - Well, at least dogs have the good sense to get away from the road in plenty of time, not like these other foolish creatures.

Ah, but just around the bend I encountered an old beagle dog with long ears that nearly dragged along the ground.  There he was, all but sleeping in the middle of the road before I hit the brakes, which was only just enough to get him on his feet, lumbering for the roadside.

Even the dogs.

This also is a two-for-one, and I’m starting to realize that the full experience of person is usually brought out by another with strong and distinct characteristics of his/her own.

Character #1 is Mrs. Wiley, an 81 year-old African-American woman for whom Joe and I are installing new windows. We accomplished some of this work with a volunteer crew from Bethlehem Farm, including a chaperone named Jim. Now, a short blurb about each of these fine persons before the interaction that I found to be so pleasing.

Mrs. Wiley was on our waiting list for the home repair program when her name finally came up a few weeks ago. Joe gave her a call to arrange a visit and the work days. Mrs. Wiley answered the phone suspiciously and, on hearing that we were calling about her windows, staunchly insisted that she didn’t want no windows and never called about getting new windows. Joe eventually talked her down and explained that the windows would be installed free of charge, which is a pretty compelling cause for any homeowner to listen further.

Shortly thereafter we visited Mrs. Wiley, and she was exactly the opposite of our impression of her from the phone call - Friendly and outspoken, she made sure we had been to church last Sunday and let us know that we were “handsome, not her color though.” Her manner and charm made me believe that she could get anyone to go along with her way.

On the other hand, I had met three of Jim’s children and his wife before I finally met him. One of his sons, Mark, has spent a good deal of time at the Farm over the past few years, so I probably knew Mark best leading up to this encounter with Jim.

Mark is an intelligent and earnest young man, and there’s probably not a soul who has met him who could deny it. One common manifestation of these two traits comes out in conversation: I found I could hardly answer a single one of Mark’s questions without having him finish the answer for me. On the positive side, it demonstrates an impressive breadth of thought, a sense of thoroughness. On the negative side, one feels one hasn’t added much to the conversation, sometimes.

Now it would be easy to assign this tendency in Mark to projected vices, such as pride or even arrogance. I think people tend toward their emotional responses - if one is annoyed, one projects an insidious cause. If one is charmed, one projects a benevolent cause. My projection onto Mark became overwhelmingly positive when I met his father.

Jim, to the fine details, conversed just like Mark. Since I knew what to expect, I fully enjoyed our meeting, and even (happily) asked Jim to install a storm door with a couple of the high school volunteers. This is a task I would, as a rule, be sure to supervise, since it’s an expensive item and the many precise steps can be difficult to follow exactly. Knowing Mark, I felt fully confident that I could leave the door to Jim and work on other things.

After pre-reading the directions and reading them again as he worked through the installation, Jim was eager to demonstrate for Mrs. Wiley the many useful features of the door. We asked Mrs. Wiley to come over to see the finished door.

“Oh Lord can you believe that? What a beautiful door! I didn’t ask for all of that.” (”I didn’t ask for all of that” should be read as an expression of bountiful graciousness).

“We just wanted to show you some of the nice things about this new door, Mrs. Wiley,” said Jim, leaning over to raise the glass in the window so that the screen could let air in and out. “You can open this in the Summertime and close it again to keep the cold air out in the Winter.”

“Oh, I can’t believe it!”

“Now, we want you to know that if you open the door all the way, it won’t quite close. But if you open it about 3/4 of the way, it’ll swing completely shut for you,” Jim said while demonstrating the two different open positions. The cause of this, which I didn’t interject at the time, is that the screws on the hinge side were not fully drilled in, which will be corrected later.

“That’s alright, it’s a fine door and I can’t thank you enough,” Mrs. Wiley said, satisfied with the presentation. But Jim had a few more features to demonstrate, and as he bent over to point one out, Mrs. Wiley said in the same stream of speech, “Oh, don’t tell me anymore!”

Now, at this point, “Don’t tell me anymore!” could be interpreted as another expression of graciousness, which might literally mean, “I can’t believe how many useful features this door has and I feel blessed because of it.”

“Down here is a door stop-” Jim said, before being interrupted.

“I said, don’t tell me anymore!” Still sounding gracious, it was clear that Mrs. Wiley now meant the phrase more literally, as in, “I’ve heard enough, and I no longer want to hear about the door.”

“Well, Mrs. Wiley, there’s just one more thing I want to show you, and you don’t even have to remember,” said Jim, bending over to find the metal door stop.

As Jim turned his attention back to the door, Mrs. Wiley turned to me and gave me the most priceless facial expression. It said, “Can you BELIEVE this man is going to keep talking after I told him twice, ‘Don’t tell me anymore!’?”

She respectfully let Jim finish, though it was indeed clear that she wasn’t going to remember what he was saying. Everyone went away satisfied, most especially me.

It is true that life’s treasures can’t be bought and sold.

I’ve meant to share this one for a while, because it’s priceless. In fact, I’ve met a few people in the last few years who are so densely alive, with such concentrated personalities, that I can’t help being charmed by them. Therefore, I will begin an informal series called, “Characters.”

Our first character attended a town council meeting in Rupert, WV sometime in the middle of last year, along with his relatively quiet wife. The man, who we’ll call Jack because I can’t remember his name, came to complain about a neighbor who is also quite a character, so you’re getting a two-for-one special today.

A few of Jack’s lines require little or no context, so I’ll start with those. If you can, imagine a man, probably in his 60’s, well-dressed and with an easy style of talking.

“People in West Virginia are different. They’ll shoot you. You know, under the right circumstances.”

Referring to a councilman, “I like him. He tells it just the hell like it is.”

Now for the longer quotes, which require some context. Essentially, Jack came to complain about a neighbor whose property was in bad shape. The neighbor, apparently, would not make a move to keep his property clean unless he suspected that a town official might be coming by to enforce the ordinances, which Jack declared are “so old, if you bend the pages they’ll crack.”

To explain how this man became his neighbor in the first place, Jack related the following story:

“When that land was for sale, we wanted to buy it. But he (the neighbor) when right up to Townsend (the seller), took him out and got him drunk, bought the property on his Mastercard for $4,500 less than we offered, went down to Lewisburg to his attorney and filed for bankruptcy the next day. Bought that land for $150 (attorney fees). You tell me that’s not a crook.”

Jack goes on about his neighbor, “When animal control comes, that’s the only time he’ll clean up all the dog manure in his yard. I have pictures of him shoveling the manure into 5 gallon buckets, he walks across y’all street (points to the council members), I’ve got pictures of him, with the bucket in the air, dumping the manure right on the train tracks.

“He’d have been dead by now if he lived here 30 years ago.”

Ah…such good fun.  Usually, the headlines are really funny, and the stories are somewhat disappointing, although there are surprises.  Anyway, I subscribe to the Onion through Google Reader (Thanks Fish!) and got a chuckle out of this headline:

“Now That I’ve Learned About Foreshadowing, I’m Going to Use it in All of my Stories.”

Read it if you like.  I didn’t.

If there were any doubts that my readership extends into the hundreds of thousands, witness!  Cynthia1770 has voiced her agreement with my opinion of High Fructose Corn Syrup.  Next we’ll have XObama2008X writing to talk political strategy, or maybe foreign policy!

For now, see that Cynthia has provided further information on High Fructose Corn Syrup.  I skimmed through the link she offered, but it’s pretty dense in geek-speak.  You might like it, Neal, since you are allegedly familiar with chemistry and such.

Notice that Cynthia found me through a Google alert.  I feel sure someone will soon find Siko’s blog under a different “keyword.”

Cynthia1770
papierniak2004@yahoo.com | 99.140.226.117

Hi,
I picked up your post with my google HFCS alert. Yes, HFCS has invaded
our food supply. Courtesy of the Corn Refiners Assoc., go to
http://www.corn.org/NSFC2006.pdf P29-30 list all the foods and products
that contain HFCS. StopHFCS.com lists foods that are HFCS-free.
European import stores are a good bet because Europe wisely doesn’t
allow GMO foods which safely eliminates HFCS.
Take care.