Cell Phones Big Buttons

All of the sales staff in the Apple Store looked like little kids. We were working with one who looked 14 – 14½ tops. “So you’d like to buy a new iPhone 5?”

“Yes, we’d like one for my wife, but I just want something simple. My fingers and hands don’t work very well anymore. I need big buttons, not a touchscreen.”

He stroked the peach fuzz on his chin, deep in thought. “I’ve never heard of a phone with big buttons.”

There was a picture on the wall behind him of a woman with the caption “Hi, I’m Klare, the Store Manager. Let me know if I can help you!” She looked confident, knowledgeable, experienced. She looked at least 22. “Can I talk to your manager? Maybe she’ll have an idea.”

Thirty seconds later, Klare was there, ready to help. “I just need a cell phone,” I said. “I don’t care about a touchscreen or the internet or texting or talking to Siri or any of those extra things. And it has to have big buttons.”

“I’ve never seen a phone like that, but I’ve read about them on Wikipedia.” It was reassuring that Klare had done so much research at such an authoritative source. I could see why she was the Store Manager. “You might be able to find one on Ebay. The only problem is that often the seller doesn’t have the cords anymore.”

My wife and I looked at each other and smiled. Our kids make fun of us because we have two boxes in the basement containing every electrical cord we have ever owned. It would be sweet revenge if we actually got to use one of them!

Once home, I got on the internet and started to go to Ebay when I had a better idea. I googled “Cell Phones Big Buttons”. Exactly .29 seconds later I had about 1,830,000 results and bought the first phone on the list.
I’ve had the phone about a week now and really like it, but clearly, its target audience is much older than I. For example, the phone gets FM radio reception. Only people over the age of 80 would think that was cool. (Mabel: “George, the cell phone comes with FM radio!” George: “Mabel, what in tarnation is FM?”) The ring tones that come with the phone are a phone ring from the 1920s, the Andy Griffith theme song and “Chattanooga Choo Choo”. The cool great-grandpas can also choose “Dragnet”, “Hawaii Five-0” and “James Bond”. It also has a special “funeral mode” which automatically changes the ring tone to “Amazing Grace”. The ring tone volume is adjustable, but even the softest level is louder than an infomercial in the middle of the night.

There is also a keen safety feature which only people of a certain age can appreciate. If you can’t wait for help to arrive if you dialed 911, there is a big red button on the back of the phone you can use to call for more immediate help. When you push the button, a VERY loud voice yells for help. The three standard yells you can choose from are “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”, “Help! I have no idea what I’m doing here!” and ”Help! Someone stole my clothes!” You can also record a custom message. Mine says “Help! I can’t find my TV remote!”

You may think my message is silly, but you would be wrong. Just the other day, I called Comcast to get some help with a technical issue we were having. The woman on the phone fixed my problem, then asked helpfully “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Well, do you know where my TV remote is?”

“The one upstairs or the one in the basement?”

“The one upstairs.”

“Did you look under the red pillow on the sofa?”

Sure enough it was there! So you just never know.

David LeSueur lives in Littleton, Colorado with his wife Mary. He still has his TV remote, but is missing a brown dress sock. Could someone from Comcast please call him?

WHY ARE DINOSAURS EXTINCT?

Dinosaurs are in the news again. Leading scientists now say global warming (and not an asteroid) may have caused the extinction of dinosaurs. And the main cause of global warming was, AHEM, dinosaur flatulence. Professor Graeme Ruxton of St Andrews University, Scotland, said the giant animals spent 150 million years emitting the potent global warming gas, methane. The report said:


Large plant-eating sauropods would have been the main culprits because of the huge amounts of greenery they consumed.

The jokes write themselves. In fact the first draft of this column was full of bad puns and raunchy humor. I want to be classy so I cut the cheesy comments (sorry, I kept one bad joke).

The team calculated the animals would have collectively produced more than 520 million tons of methane a year – more than all today’s modern sources put together.

How can scientists know how much methane dinosaurs produced? The study said that scientists calculated the amount of methane emitted by a modern cow (about 50 gallons of methane daily). They used that information to estimate the amount of methane that would have been produced by a giant dinosaur - thousands of gallons of the greenhouse gas each day. The report didn't explain how you measure the methane emitted by cows, but I don't think I really want to know!

How could dinosaurs have produced enough methane to cause global warming? One of the animals, a 90-ton argentinosaurus which measured 140 ft. in length, would have consumed at least half a ton of food in one day. Since Mayor Bloomberg hadn't been born yet, these creatures also drank scores of large sugary drinks each day.
I'm trying to imagine the job posting scientists at St. Andrews University placed on the university website:

Unpaid summer internship available for qualified applicant. Science background preferred. Sense of humor will help. You will take measurements to help determine causes of global warming. Must never have participated in cow tipping. Stuffy nose will help.

If you know any 12 year-old boys interested in science, I recommend showing them this study. Writing about the report has been painful for me. My kids and grandkids will testify that I love them very much and would forgive them for most felonies they might commit. But if they discuss burping or tooting in my house, I will remove them from my will.

The politics surrounding this new study are predictable. Some right-wing groups refuse to accept the results of the study and are known as "Flatulence Deniers." Left-wing groups have been seen with signs reading "Make love, not toots."

The report gravely concludes:

Did the dinosaurs help to wipe themselves out by changing the climate? The implications for the human race are obvious.

I have read the conclusion many times and I have to say that the implications for the human race are not obvious to me. Should we be eating fewer vegetables? Should beans be outlawed? Should we be consuming massive amounts of Bean-O? If you have any ideas please let me know. By the way, I already asked Ted - that guy from down the street - and he didn't know what to think either.


David LeSueur lives in Littleton, Colorado with his wife Mary. Until more is known, they have decided not to eat at any more Mexican restaurants.

Facebook Surprise

Those of us with MS sometimes feel isolated when our symptoms prevent us from doing things with our friends and family. To help remedy this, my neurologist encouraged me to use "Social Media" (like Facebook) to keep in touch. I never took his advice because Facebook seems more like "Anti-Social Media" than "Social Media." After all, you are communicating without having to actually use any spoken words But everything changed recently when I received an email from my friend Curtis inviting me to be his friend on Facebook. At first I was suspicious. You see, we are both closer to the Social Security retirement age than we are to the legal drinking age. And though we are both computer and internet savvy, you wouldn’t normally associate us with something like Facebook. I wondered if this email was really from him. I have watched enough television news to know that you have to be wary of sexual predators. What if the email was from a 12 year-old girl pretending to be Curtis? Or what if the email was from a guy in Nigeria who wanted to steal my identity? Maybe if I clicked on the link he would find out my credit card numbers and steal my entire 401(k) account. I decided to call Curtis, just to be safe. He confirmed to me that he had just joined Facebook and had invited me to be his friend, though he wasn’t sure yet what that meant. I opened his email and clicked on the link. A mere 2 ½ hours later I finished signing up as his friend. That was 3 weeks ago. We haven’t spoken since. I am not sure what is supposed to happen next. Will he send me a message to go look at his Facebook page? Or am I supposed to go there periodically to see if he has a message for me? I was going to call him about something but I was afraid he might be mad at me for not ever checking Facebook. Then I had a brilliant idea - I would send him a text message! That way I could communicate with him without risking actually talking to him. I could just pretend he wasn’t angry with me. I decided to tell him in my text that my internet wasn’t working in case he was wondering why I hadn’t been to his Facebook page. Now I just needed to learn how to send a text message. A few days ago I asked my niece Marissa to teach me. She can text 416 words per minute and has calluses on her thumbs. Yesterday I decided to send her a test text message, but I couldn’t find my cell phone. I don’t use it much. Last month my usage was 3 minutes. I only received two phone calls, both of them wrong numbers. I tried calling my cell phone, hoping I would hear it ring, but of course its battery was dead. Eventually I found it. It took me only 20 minutes to type the following message: HI MARISsa how are lol U unCle daVID I sent the text, then called Marissa to see if she had received it. She is 15, so naturally she had her cell phone with her and turned on. Yes, she said, she got my message. I quickly ended the phone call because it felt like cheating to actually talk out loud. I didn’t even find out how she was LOL. I started to compose my message to Curtis when I realized I didn’t have his cell phone number! Maybe I could write him a letter instead. Unfortunately we don’t have stationery and writing on computer paper seemed impersonal. I checked in our folder where we keep greeting cards for a variety of occasions. I found two birthday cards, three thank you notes and an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party. None of them seemed appropriate. We also had some blank cards but they all had girly flowers on the front. So I won’t be sending him anything in the mail. I am stumped as to my next step. Curtis, if you are reading this and aren’t too mad at me, instead of being friends on Facebook, can we be friends in real life? David LeSueur lives in Littleton, Colorado with his wife, Mary. He was diagnosed with MS in 2000.

INVASION OF THE DINOSAURS

In the world of science, there is some good news and some bad news. Let's start with the bad news.

According to a study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, giant, advanced and dangerous dinosaurs may be the dominant life form that has evolved on other planets. The study said that man dominates earth only because dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid hitting the earth 60 million years ago. "We would be better off not meeting these dinosaurs." reads the conclusion of the report.

Yikes!! Dinosaurs from Outer Space?

As if we didn't have enough to worry about - like a nuclear Iran, our national debt and whether the Cubs will ever win the World Series again - scientists warn of a possible invasion of dinosaurs from Outer Space! I have only been able to sleep at night by reassuring myself that the dinosaurs may not be dangerous. We would just have to look for signs that would indicate whether they had come in peace or meant to destroy us. For example, if their spaceships had the "peace sign" painted on them, or the dinosaurs wore hippie beads around their necks and flowers behind their ears, we probably would have nothing to fear. But if they seemed upset seeing dinosaur bones in our museums, were wearing green berets or carried a book titled "How to Serve Man" (like the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens had such a book that turned out to be a cookbook), that would be a bad sign.

Let's get to the good news.

A few months ago, scientists announced that some tiny particles called neutrinos had traveled faster than the speed of light, a result that contradicts Einstein's Theory of Relativity. According to Einstein's theory, if an object travels faster than the speed of light, it travels backward in time. When I read this report I lost sleep for several weeks. Everything I had always believed about the Universe was a lie!

The good news is that the result turned out to be false. Order has been restored.

What went wrong? Physicists built a research facility in Switzerland in order to shoot neutrinos in one direction of a 17-mile circular tube and protons in the other direction. They hope the ensuing collisions will create a never-before-seen particle which scientists have dubbed "The God Particle." The ACLU objected to this name, citing the separation of Church and State. As a result, in the United States this particle is nicknamed "The Holiday Particle."

But I digress.

The search for the God Particle is not scheduled to start until 2014, so scientists there were looking for something to do. One of them said, "Hey! Why don't we send some neutrinos 450 miles through the earth to another facility in Italy and see how long it takes!" In performing this test, scientists discovered that some neutrinos arrived before they left (admittedly by only 60 nanoseconds, but still . . . )!!! This could only happen if the neutrinos travelled faster than the speed of light - a startling result.

It turns out that the experimental results were wrong. Spokesman Antonio Ereditato explained that they have "identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result." The first problem was a faulty connection in one of the cables. The second problem was an error in providing the correct synchronized timestamps. These explanations are kind of mysterious, so I found an anonymous source who told me what really happened.

The cable problem occurred in Switzerland. When they built the 17-mile track, they bought cables that were 6 feet too short. They sent an intern to the Swiss equivalent of Best Buy. He knew the project was over-budget so he saved money by buying some cheap cables. "Needless to say," said my source, "he should have bought Monster Cables.

The timing problem occurred in Italy. The time elapsed from when the neutrinos left Switzerland and when they arrived in Italy was measured by two guys with stopwatches. The Swiss scientist pushed his watch when the particles were sent, and the Italian scientist pushed his stopwatch when the particles arrived. Apparently the Italian guy had been drinking before he came to work so his reflexes were a little off.

I have slept better since finding out it is still true that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And I was just beginning to not worry about alien dinosaurs. But as I write this, I am having a more frightening thought. What if super-intelligent dinosaurs find a way to travel faster than the speed of light? Then we have to worry about being invaded by giant dinosaurs from Outer Space FROM THE FUTURE!

Double yikes!!

David LeSueur lives in Littleton, Colorado with his wife Mary. In case anyone from another planet is reading this, they LOVE dinosaurs.

STUDY CLAIMS WOMEN GOSSIP FIVE HOURS PER DAY

Recently an online British newspaper headline caught my eye. It read "Women Gossip For Five Hours Per Day, Claims Study!" The study seemed legitimate but I am very careful to fact check these things before I write about them. My process is two-fold. First I check with Wikipedia. If that doesn't satisfy me, then I ask this guy, Ted, who lives down the street because he seems to know a lot of stuff. Wikipedia said nothing about how much women gossip each day, so I asked Ted and he said five hours sounded about right.

So I am running with this story.

The article doesn't say how the data was gathered. I doubt that researchers followed 1200 women around for a week, recording how much each woman talked each day, how much could be classified as "gossip", and what subjects she gossiped about. It is more likely the study asked women to guess what their personal experience was.
What is gossiping exactly and is it really such a bad thing? Fortunately we can find the answer in one of the books of the Apocrypha (these are holy writings which are not included in the Bible because we are not sure of their authenticity).The Book of Sins states clearly that gossiping is a sin and describes in detail what it is. Here is the relevant scripture verse in The Book of Sins 146:23:

Thou shalt not gossip. He who gossipeth doth commit a sin. Thou shalt not criticize a man or woman, neither their manservant nor theirmaidservant nor their cow nor their gerbil. Speak not ill of another's character nor his hair or lack thereof; neither criticize another's national origin or double chin. Nevertheless, if thou endeth thy rant with the phrase "Bless his heart" it shall not be counteth against thee as a sin.

In other words, we can gossip all we want about someone and it is not a sin if we end with "Bless his (or her) heart." A few verses later it says that if we are gossiping about a deceased person we have to say "may he (or she) rest in peace."

The survey also asked women what they gossiped about the most and the article listed the top 20 subjects. To men, the fact that women could find 20 subjects to talk about is as surprising as gossiping five hours per day. Men could never talk about 20 topics in a day unless you count each NFL team as a separate subject.
Not surprisingly, shopping was the #1 topic, and diet and exercise were 2nd. "Holidays" were 3rd (I asked Ted and he said he thought that meant "Vacations" in Great Britain). The 4th most common topic was "What they would do with a lottery win." I was surprised this was so high on the list, but as I write this, a woman in Maryland claims to have had a lottery ticket worth $200 million. She says she hid it in a McDonald's where she works and can't find it. I am sure many Americans are now gossiping about what an airhead she is (bless her heart) and what they would do with the money if they found the winning ticket in a Big Mac.

In general, women are more interested in talking while men prefer doing things, so a similar study would probably find that men gossip a lot fewer than 5 hours a day. However, there is a saying that "All generalizations are false," so there are surely some men who gossip more than some women. Actually, that saying has always bothered me because, if it is true, then isn't it also false? I asked Ted about this and he said he would think about it and get back to me.

David LeSueur lives in Littleton, Colorado. If you have any questions for Ted email me and I will pass them on. Allow a few months for the answer because Ted has not been very dependable lately. Bless his heart.