Thought That Came Unbidden

The turtle rodeo is the best part (don’t worry; it’s harmless)

Courtesy National Geographic

Last night was the second night in a row that I’ve dreamt about hamburgers and family. This is especially odd for a couple of reasons one of which is that I rarely eat beef.

Oh, during bar-b-que season I will splurge on a couple of pounds of Laura’s Organic Ground Beef, some really good pepper ham, spend 20 minutes in line at the deli to get the Swiss cheese you can practically see through, get some extra crisp dill pickles, and make up a batch of Bobby Flay’s Cuban burgers. You wouldn’t think it would work but garlic in mayonnaise has an extra special something that combines with the other flavors to make everything taste the way food always tastes when you’ve spent a long day outside doing physical activity: like nothing else you’ve ever eaten has ever or will ever taste that good.

Normally, though, my diet consists of a lot of chicken, increasingly more fish these days, and days on end of vegetarian meals which is why two nights in a row of dreams about trying to order or find a place to order hamburgers with either people I haven’t seen in a while or relatives who live far away is perplexing.

True, when visiting the out of town relatives the ritual is that the first night’s dinner, and subsequent snacks because we always over estimate how many we’ll eat that first night, consists of White Castle which, for some reason, spreads across the Midwest and the South like a weed and then jumps over the Mid-Atlantic to New Jersey. I suppose if they appeared at home, or if Little Tavern had been able to survive, getting them when visiting the relatives wouldn’t be as big a deal. Still, the sack of 10 or the sack of 20, always with extra pickle if you please, is a once, maybe twice a year thing.

And I’m usually pretty good and figuring out what my dreams are about. The work anxiety dreams are pretty obvious despite the guises they may wear. The palpable aura of frustration, people not following directions, me wasting time to do projects or evaluations that are then discarded with rationalizations that are unsupported by any objective facts even though the justify some manager’s preconceived conclusion, all of this mimics my normal work day enough that it takes but a few minutes for the semi-conscious part of my brain to realize, oh, this is a dream about work, and flip the mental channel.

But why the quest for hamburgers? Why the withholding ex-girlfriend (her father owned the food court housing the restaurant where I couldn’t order)? Why the non-supportive family (who happily ate while I couldn’t order)? Why the rental car? Why the niece in Iraq that I worry about sort of semi-constantly (this makes more sense; when visiting out of town she usually goes on the White Castle run)?

Dream interpretation on the web says to dream of hamburgers means I am lacking something in my life, emotional or physical satisfaction. That seems too Freudian and simple to me. Maybe I just need to have a hamburger.

Or at least, that’s what the weather people are saying, which is unusual considering that DC gets most of its snow in the middle of February. If you consider weather phenomena to be the analogue watches of scheduling, two weeks late isn’t all that bad when you think about it.

Still…the whole point of the February vacation is to avoid the snow, to be able to sit some place warm and watch the anchors on CNN or The Weather Channel try to balance smugness against the seriousness they think is required for their jobs while they talk about how badly DC copes with snow. The whole point is to be able to sigh into your mojito or your pina colada, shake your head, and wonder if it’s time to put on more sun screen or whether or not you’re going to want the nap after lunch.

Oh, there will be pictures, of the doors of San Juan, of the beautiful Atlantic coast (somewhere around Georgia the Atlantic gets the message that oceans “should” be blue not green which makes a trip to the Caribbean a riot of hues near the short end of the wavelength spectrum), upside down root systems in one of two rain forests in America, and other random things that caught the eye all of it designed to remind me that two weeks ago at this time I was having breakfast outside in shorts and sandals and a t-shirt.

The primary influences on my basic approach to life tended to view society and the systems that make it up as a big puzzle. Every external challenge you face, from how to get the car repaired to paying your bills while maximizing your take-home pay, is an element in a system and every system has rules. In some systems, those rules must be followed to the letter or the penalties are steep but in most systems the rules can be bent, circumvented, or outright ignored largely with no fear of reprisal (some of this is due to lax enforcement on the part of the keepers of a given system but that’s for another time). The chief things you need to realize to get what you want out of a system are that you have to know what your goal is, that you have to figure out what the rules are, and figure out what tools you have to get what you want.

All of this may sound nefarious, like I’m advocating setting up a multi-billion dollar ponzi scheme but I’m not. Take, for example, a decision you might have to make about reducing your monthly bills and how much you spend on phone service. The goal is to keep both phone and internet service but to spend less money every month. The rules are that you have to pay for phone service; Internet service…well…if you’re willing to settle for a crappy, insecure connection and your neighbors are dumb enough to have unsecured wireless, and you don’t mind stealing, you may not have to pay for. But let’s look at the tools.

It used to be that your choice was Ma Bell or Ma Bell. Then deregulation happened in the 1980s. Then cell phones and the Internet happened. Now you have choices. If you have a cable modem, for example, and you are happy with your cell phone service and what it costs, you can dump your land line phone altogether. Or, if you’ve got a non-phone company provided Internet connection you can keep your same phone number but get all over calls using the magic of Voice Over IP. In this decision, your primary tool is math because it is a given that you aren’t going to be able to circumvent the rule that says you must pay for phone service so, you use the tools available, alternate providers and your ability to add and subtract, to figure out how to get the most service for the least amount of money.

My cable company of more than 10 years recently made a major change to their channel lineup. Like all cable television providers, they offer tiered subscriptions. With basic service you get all the broadcast channels plus a few others (’cause in this economy more people need access to the Home Shopping Network). With the “signature” tier you get what is commonly referred to as “basic cable” – all the broadcast channels plus things like Comedy Central, the Sci-Fi Channel, TNT, TBS, and on and on. The “premiere” tier gets you everything the two lower tiers get you plus things like Sundance and the National Geographic channel. And, of course, you can at any time add “premium channels,” HBO, Showtime, SkinCinemax, to any subscription. The smart marketing change they made was to mix all of these channels together. It used to be that if you paid for “signature” – the middle tier – you didn’t get any channels numbered over 99. Pretty easy to ignore the things you weren’t paying for. But now to entice you to buy up to the higher priced tier, they’ve mixed them all together so as you’re scrolling through that handy on-screen program guide you’re more likely to see something you might want to watch on a channel you don’t get. Frustrating as all hell sometimes and I resent its transparency as a marketing ploy.

All of this became relevant when I sat down to clear some things I’d recorded off the DVR on very gray, cold Sunday. Lurking there on the DVR’s hard drive were several episodes of a show called Dogtown.

Dogtown is a co-production of the National Geographic Channel and an organization I wholeheartedly support, Best Friends Animal Society. Best Friends is the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States boasting 30,000+ acres in Utah and dogtown will take in any troubled dog or even dogs that just need to find a home.

This first episode focused for two hours on the rehabilitation of some of the dogs seized from Michael Vick‘s dog fighting operation in central Virginia. Heartbreaking stories about dogs that had never known love or affection, never gotten to play, only train and fight and live in fear. The trainers at dogtown worked with each animal to figure out what he or she needed to become a social, happy, and hopefully adoptable dog (full disclosure: some of the Vick dogs will by court order spend the rest of their lives at Best Friends having been deemed by the court too dangerous to live in a family setting).

But as I discovered that gray Sunday, I only had four episodes of Dogtown which I knew was about to go into its second season. What happened to the others?

Well, at some point we made some reductions in our bills and dropped the tier that includes the National Geographic Channel. But wait, said I to myself, isn’t NatGeo one of the HD channels that is offered free in the tier I do subscribe to? Free HD channels, of course, being one of the features on which cable companies have chosen to pretend they compete.

Lo and behold, yes, I get the National Geographic Channel in HD form right there on my regular 4:3 non-digital, non-flat screen, 15 year-old TV. How, you might inquire? Because that lovely DVR that we rent from the cable company is HD capable. Which means, yes, boys and girls, I’m getting channels for free that I would otherwise be paying an extra $15/month for the privilege of watching. So this DVR that I am renting anyway allows me to circumvent legally the rules of the system that say that I must pay extra to watch certain channels.

Every system has rules. Some rules can be bent, others can be broken. Still others can be ignored altogether. Sometimes the tools you have – the ability to research and read – can get you things you want by allowing you to figure out which rules are which.

Google’s gone batshit.

Apparently they’ve decided to add a feature to the search engine that identifies sites that might be harmful. Apparently they also didn’t read the config file when they set it up and released it to the public. At least, that’s the only thing I can determine since they’re labeling themselves and all their products as “This site may harm your computer.” Check it out.

What’s even better is when you follow any of the links to get more explanation you get a server error.