Cheesy name

Maria, who is Italian on her mother's side, really dislikes the name of this pizza place.

Why?

Because it mocks the way Italians say "Mario's," rolling the r, supposedly sounding like a d.

I never got it until she pointed it out.

New Canon printer/copier/scanner/FAX

This time last year, I was struggling along with an aging USB connected Epson printer.

Now, thanks to the Amazon Vine Program, I have a couple of wireless 3-in-1 machines that I can access from anywhere in the house with desktop, laptop, netbook and smartphone.

The most recent addition – a Canon Office Products MAXIFY MB2320 Wireless Home Office Inkjet Printer with Scanner, Copier and Fax showed up on Wednesday. I lugged the 33 pound box up to the office and it sat on the floor until this afternoon when I cleared away the Epson and set up the Canon.

I tested the scanner feature with a set of nine 1966 Polaroid prints from my days as production manager and columnist for The Indiana Statesman, the student paper of Indiana State University. The 600 dpi scan looks pretty good and was forwarded to the Photoshop software on my desktop computer, just like it was supposed to be.

The Canon machine has an MSRP of $200, while the Brother MFCJ6920DW Wireless Multifunction Inkjet Printer with Scanner, Copier and Fax I got 13 months ago has an MSRP of $300. I plan to do some side-by-side comparisons for speed and quality before I write a review for Amazon.com of the Canon unit.

The Canon makes pretty good color prints. I haven’t been able to make a color print with the Brother, but I haven’t worked very hard at it, either.

Heated clothing

It was a chilly 41° when I decided to ride to the post office this morning.

Instead of my Polizei jacket and Gerbings jacket liner, I opted for my old 1990s Firstgear TKO jacket with its Gerbings-wired liner and my bulky-but-warm Olympia heated gloves.

I couldn’t help feeling smugly superior as I zoomed down U.S. 49 into a wind chill of 24° experiencing welcome warmth spreading across my back and torso, down my arms and around my hands.

The jacket and custom wired liner are more than 20 years old, but it’s still a supremely useful cold weather motorcycle garment.

BTW, the photo is me at the summit of Beartooth Pass in Montana, warm and toasty in my TKO jacket.

Waiting for the UPS guy again

I have a whole bunch of peripheral devices connected to my desktop computer with USB plugs – so many that I need a couple of USB hubs to keep everything hooked up.

But I’ve discovered over the years that USB connections can be iffy and some ports on hubs can go dead for no apparent reason. Or they can go wonky, like the one that lives on my keyboard tray that stops talking to my wireless mouse dongle when I plug in my iPhone to sync it.

It happened once too often earlier this week, so I poked around on Amazon.com and found this seven-port USB hub that has excellent reviews and only costs $17.95 (shipping is free since I have Amazon Prime).

The UPS tracking site says it’s out for delivery, so I’m sitting at my desk and waiting for the big brown truck to show up.

The UPS guy is a familiar face around here since we make lots of online purchases.

He was here yesterday, delivering a Canon Office Products MAXIFY MB2320 Wireless Home Office Inkjet Printer with Scanner, Copier and Fax that the Amazon Vine Program sent me to use and review.

It’s still in the box, sitting on the upstairs office floor while I try to figure out where to put it.

I’m probably going to have to drag an old printer stand up from the garage, which means shuffling stuff sitting on it around a bit.

It’s cold (53°F) and blustery today and the air is full of falling, flying leaves.

Maria went off to work without her iPhone this morning. She decided she needed it about 8:30 a.m., which gave me a chance to see how the Gerbings heated jacket liner and German Polizei jacket work in seriously brisk weather.

They work very well.

I ranged from toasty warm to maybe a little too warm. My gauntleted Olympia Kevlar gloves were a different story, but once I put my glove liners on under them, my hands were reasonably comfortable. I had the heated handgrips and heated seat on and off and remain convinced that heated handgrips are of very little value. Ditto the heated seat.

They seem like nice amenities, but they only put warmth in the palms of your hands and the seat of your pants. When you’re riding in cold weather, your attention is naturally drawn to the coldest, most uncomfortable places on your body and the grips and seat can’t overcome that.

I have a pair of heated gloves that plug into the sleeves of the jacket liner, but they’re so bulky and clunky that I save them for the most severe conditions when I’m riding long distances on the interstate.

Happy 44th birthday, Steve!

My son Steve drew his first breath at 6:36 a.m. on Halloween morning of 1970 in Coleman Hospital in Indianapolis.

He has grown into a supremely good musician, husband, and father and he makes me prouder than he could ever imagine.

I don't know what to make of this

Can We Auto-Correct Humanity?

Hats!

The hall closet by the back door is where the non-motorcycling jackets and hats live at our house.

I’ve been looking for a particular Buff for several days and this morning pulled everything out of the two upper shelves in the closet. I didn’t find the Buff, but I did come to the startling realization that I was way more caps and hats than I thought.

Thirty-seven of them, to be precise, although I think there are more in boxes somewhere.

This means I could wear a different hat every day from now through Dec. 5 without repeating.

Eight of them are BMW motorcycle-related, four are from our favorite gas stop at Boomland, three from Breckenridge, Colo. (including a Gore-Tex Ski Patrol cap), two from Nepenthe in Big Sur, a couple of Duck Commander camo caps, three from breweries – Beck’s, Spaten and Flying Dog (before they moved from Aspen to Maryland), a fisherman’s cap that Sean brought me from his Alaska adventures, an Irish tweed hat that my dad wore, and a red Nike “swoosh” cap that my mom bought me, just because she liked the look of it.

The unbearable uniqueness of Olioscourge

I coined the word “olioscourge” in May, 2004 when I needed to create a unique URL for this blog.

It derives from my unofficial title of The Scourge of Olio, earned years before when I wiped the town of Olio off of the Indiana roadmap. Details are here.

I did a Google search this morning to see if olioscourge shows up anywhere no connected with me and was surprised to see a few of my images have been purloined without my permission.

Like for instance, this one on a site listing “tips you can learn from your dad:”

Yep, that’s me looking geeky and my dad looking dapper on a vacation to Niagara Falls and New England around 1957. I guess I’m flattered that someone liked it enough to steal it.

And here’s a photo I shot for the local newspaper (which shall remain nameless) and was picked up by the NBC TV affiliate in Chicago. To their credit, they asked my permission to use it:

I can’t complain when my blog images get pirated. I do it all the time.

The President

The “President” tree is the name of a giant sequoia in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park, east of Visalia, California. The tree is believed to be at least 3,200 years old. It is not the tallest giant sequoia tree in the world with a height of about 247 feet (75 m), nor the widest at about 27 ft (8.2 m) in diameter at the base, but it is the second largest tree in the world, measured by volume of trunk.

It predates the Trojan War, the beginning of rice cultivation in ancient Japan, and the beginning of the Iron Age. It was 1,180 years old when Jesus was born.

That is, this tree is so big you can scarcely look at it all. A team from National Geographic with scientists from Sequoia National Park recently took the challenge to take a global picture of this Giant. After 32 days and 126 different acrobatic pictures merged as a mosaic, here is the stunning result.

Language barrier

After seven years in Arkansas, I’ve come to terms with most of the cultural differences from my native Indiana.

But there are some pronunciations that still set me off.

The local TV weatherman refers to the Missouri Boot Heel as the Boothill and pronounces “hail” as if it were “hell.” (A forecast that includes a “hellstorm” is a real attention-getter.)

Maria once told me she was in the break room at the local newspaper when a coworker remarked about the Big Deal Pickle in a vending machine.

“What’s special about it?” Maria asked, only to discover it was a big dill pickle.

And there are commercials on radio and TV that pronounce “sale” as if it were “sell.” I’m waiting to hear someone say, “sellboat.”

Chicago Activists Unchained, Destroy Black Leadership

I ended up with the real thing

Sometime around 1957, my parents took me on a vacation to Niagara Falls and Canada where I picked up what I took to be a hunting knife with a fleur-de-lis insignia in the grip.
I thought it was cool – something about it resonated with me. My mother felt otherwise and somehow made it disappear after a few weeks at home. I searched the house diligently over the years, as late as 2001 after her death, but never found it. I guess she put it into the trash.
Fast forward a few decades when I discovered that my knife was actually a Hitler Youth knife, made after World War II from leftover parts with the fleur-de-lis substituted for the diamond-shaped Hitler Youth insignia.

The original Hitler Jugend Fahrtenmesser (hiking knife) bore the motto “Blut und Ehre!” (Blood and Honor!) on the blade. HJ knives produced after 1938 omitted the motto.
My postwar parts knife is long gone, but I do own a nice pre-war HJ Fahrtenmesser (not the one pictured – I was too lazy to photograph my HJ knife, so I found a suitable image on the Internet, although the pictured knife may be a repro). Kids being kids, they treated the knives roughly, so HJ knives in good shape are rare.
I found a photo of the postwar example online the other day, which triggered this blog entry.

Coming January 8

Maria spent several months collaborating with Ben Bizzle, the IT director at the Jonesboro Public Library, on a landmark book on the future of library marketing and outreach.

It will be published Jan. 8, 2015.

I was delighted to find it listed on Amazon.com this morning.

Jack Bruce died today

Jack Bruce died today of liver disease in Suffolk, England. He was 71.

His publicist Claire Singers said: "He died today at his home in Suffolk surrounded by his family.”

That’s Jack on the left in the deerskin jacket along with bandmates Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton in the dressing room of Clowes Hall in Indianapolis, following a performance by Cream the evening of March 22, 1968.

Bob Basler and I were there. Bob did the words and I did the photography for The Indianapolis News.

Friday stuff

I rode down to the St. Bernards Health & Wellness Center this morning for a stroll on the treadmill.

I chose the K1200GT. I’m always particular about where I park the GT because it’s loaded with valuable stuff like my Garmin Zumo 550 GPS and its SiriusXM satellite radio receiver, along with my tank bag full of useful touring items.

I picked a space next to an extended cab pickup truck that had a friendly looking old (gray muzzle) black Labrador retriever in the back seat, staring out the window.

He was very friendly and let me pet him, so I doubt if he would do much to stop someone from stealing my stuff, but I liked the idea of him watching over it anyway.

You may recall that I went to the main offices of Centennial Bank on Monday to see about getting a new debit card. I was told that, since Maria’s and my card numbers had been compromised in a hack of The Home Depot’s customer database, new cards were mailed to us on Oct. 15.

As of this morning’s mail, they still have not arrived.

Also, the vexing vibration in the Subaru’s steering is still there.

But I was in no mood to remonstrate with the bank and Gateway Tire today, so I’ll let it rest over the weekend and take these matters up on Monday.

In the meantime, the new season of Grimm starts at 8 o’clock tonight on NBC.

Robert Capa "In Love and War" - The greatest photojournalist of the 20th century

Citizenship 101

I’m not ordinarily an advocate of early voting because there could be late developments in election campaigns that would affect a voter’s decision. If you vote early and your candidate is revealed to be a dirtbag, you have no recourse.

That said, I’m convinced that there is nothing that could make me want to vote for nearly any of the Democrats on the Arkansas ballot, so I went with Maria to the courthouse annex and cast my ballot to retire Sen. Mark Pryor, retain Congressman Rick Crawford, and put Republicans in the governor and lieutenant governor’s offices.

While I was in line waiting to vote, I got a call from one of our tenants reporting that their sewer line is backing up. Again. They serve people sentenced to community service time and I suspect one of their clients is flushing inappropriate stuff down their toilet.

I called our fix-it guy and he pledged to have someone there by 3 p.m.

The joys of being a landlord. Happily, they pay their rent on time and are good tenants.

Shhhhhhh!

It’s been more than 20 years since I first saw a “Loud Pipes Save Lives” sticker on a helmet at Daytona Beach Bike Week. I marveled at the idiocy of that statement, almost as much as I am baffled by the stupidity of people who argue that motorcycle helmets cause accidents and injuries.

The sound of really loud pipes triggers the “fight” part of my “fight or flight” response. Loud exhaust creates a negative impression about motorcyclists in the minds of non-riders and makes us all look like inconsiderate Neanderthals.

Edgar G. Ulmer - King of the B Movie Directors

Here's the entire 1:10 movie for your viewing pleasure.