The Curmudgeonly Professor

Tulips Continued from the Jordan River LDS Temple Tulip Gardens: Photos of the Day May 16 2009

 

More Tulips from the Jordan River LDS Temple Tulip Gardens: Photos of the Day May 13 2009

 

The Curmudgeonly Professor's Irritations for May 13 2009: The Ordeal of Magazine Subscription Renewal Notices

In keeping with our quest to make this blog more distinctively curmudgeonly, we continue with gripes, complaints, criticisms, and other negative thoughts to enhance our appreciation of everyday life, as follows:

• The curse of the magazine subscription.  After receiving a plethora of pleas, special bargains, and ever-falling subscription costs, you finally relent and subscribe.  The specific magazine does not matter.  It could be Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, the Atlantic, or any other periodical.  What is the next thing you will receive in the mail either before or after you receive your first issue?  You guessed it--an urgent, special lowest ever rate, renewal notice!  Then the drum roll begins.  Month after month, junk mail day after junk mail day, the renewal notices continue.  Your Last Chance to Renew at This Special Rate!  Renew now and lock in your low, low rate!  Don't miss a single issue! (no matter that your subscription will not expire for another eleven months).  Free tote bags!  Free gift subscription to your friend!  Your last, absolutely, positively, last opportunity to subscribe to American Bloviator Monthly until the rates double! (or we go out of business for lack of subscribers)
• Let's say you feel sorry for your poor magazine spending hundreds of dollars on special consideration for you so that you will save money on your subscription, get a free tote bag, get a free brownie baking pan, and never miss an issue of Monthly Prevaricator and Dissembler.  Do you think you are through receiving subscription renewal notices!  If so, you are badly mistaken.  Now that you are locked in as an eager subscriber, the tempo will  increase even more.
• Brokers who represent numerous magazines may get into the act, pestering you numerous more times.
• Then the telemarketers enter the game, calling, and calling, and calling, and ignoring do-not-call requests to make certain you are aware that the weekly editions of Washrag Blues will continue unabated.
• Urgent!  Your very, very, positively last issue!  But your subscription still has months to run.

Let's examine a few factors involved in this subscription scam, er, I mean scenario.  First of all, when was the last time you actually read more than a few article headings, if even that much, in an issue of Disgusting Liberal (Or Conservative, as your inclinations may determine) Monthly?  I love lots of magazines.  I used to subscribe to The Smithsonian, an outstanding magazine, which I subscribed to for years, intending to read through them all some day, and never got around to.  Same for National Geographic, which also suffers from the "rainy day magazine syndrome" which means they are piled in the attic until you get a rainy day which never comes to read through them.  I still subscribe to several.  Some I get at an academic rate for having taught college for 45 years, but I always have to write and ask them to renew at the academic rate.  Next, reflect on the fact that the magazines are working on "float," or extracting interest-free funds from you they can invest over the length, say, of a three-year or five-year magazine renewal (for even higher float).  It mattereth not that the float might be for one night, one month, or five years:  just multiply the number of early subscribers by some possible interest rate, and determine how advantageous it is to the magazine to humiliate or browbeat you into subscribing early.  True, the rates may go up.  But $1 today is worth more than getting $1 a year from now anyway, so don't worry about it.  Besides, at my age, we have to debate whether we should buy the green bananas, let alone buy Movie Gossip in Revue by the issue instead of subscribing to it.

My method is to wait until the magazine expires.  Wait a month or so (which may mean missing a few issues that I would probably not read much anyway).  Then renew your subscription.  Toss all magazine renewal forms in the waste basket.  Do not answer telemarketer renewal calls.  I just remembered:  I haven't been getting my New Yorker issues lately, a magazine I do really enjoy.  For the cartoons, at least.  I'll have to send in a request to renew at the academic rate.  Mean while, I have a bit smaller pile of unread periodicals around the house which my spouse attempts to postpone comments thereon until she can stand it no longer, whereupon she inquires whether I ever intend to read said piles of magazines, and, if not, when I intend to free up the space.

Happy magazine subscribing, from the Curmudgeonly Professor.  Your own tales of woe are welcome in my comments.

   

A Robin in Her Nest with Three Blue Eggs: Photos of the Day May 12 2009

See what I found outside my backdoor this morning.  Remember the birds nest in the pink flowering tree a few days ago?  Now if the neighbor's cat will just leave it alone.

From the Tulip Gardens at Jordan River LDS Temple: Photos of the Day May 12 2009

  

                                             

Yellow Iris: Photo of the Day May 12 2009

The Tulip Gardens at the Jordan River LDS Temple: Photos of the Day May 11 2009

 

A Book to Read: Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God by Jonah Blank

Jonah Blank's impressive work "Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India" was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992, then revised in places and reissued by Grove Press in 2000.  New copies are scarce, but used copies are available through Amazon, B & N, and other booksellers.

Clearly this is a book I never would have known about, let alone would have read, had it not been chosen by our book study group leader for this month, who is an expert on India among countless other topics.  Like all books that open new territory, one reads it not only acknowledging the depths of one's own ignorance, but also with a growing incentive to learn more.  Among other bits of information provided by our discussion leader are these:

• Due to absence of birth control, India continually generates increases in population sufficient to people another country the size of Taiwan.  
• Along one seven hundred mile stretch of the Ganges River,  a new language can be found every fifteen miles or so due to the fact that no one has ever traveled more than five miles from home in these rural areas .   

Of course, modern India provides a dramatic example of the effects of economic growth and accompanying shifts in living standards for those who have participated in this remarkable change.  But these recent developments are another story.

I was impressed, first of all, with the author's remarkable ability to assimilate the complex culture, the intricacies of various religions, and to provide remarkable insights that not only illuminate the emergence of modern India, but also which have applications for other cultures and lands.  I understand the author was in his early 20's when he wrote the first edition of this book, which makes his work even more impressive.

The author's goal was to retrace the journey  of the god Rama, the legendary god of the ancient Sanskrit epic, across India.  As a 1992 review by Reed Business Information, Inc., observes:

Coupling journalistic detachment with piercing lyricism, he samples the subcontinent in all its horrific, multitudinous, overwhelming diversity, from Bombay's Hollywood-style dream factories to Calcutta's leper-filled streets.

Blank takes us through the labyrinthine culture of "lingering" caste divisions, the Indian bureaucracy, and the lingering impact of the British Raj, as he writes "beautifully and taps into India's elusive indestructible soul." (Reed Business Information quote).

I'll provide just a few quotes that stood out when I read the book:

• The Hindu faith places greater emphasis on an individual's actions than perhaps any other religion in the world. (p. 33)
• A quote that demonstrates Blank's powers of observation and lyrical writing:  Not that the desert suggests any luxury.  It is a bare land, full of herds of black-headed sheep jumbled up with herds of shaggy-legged camels, a dirty plain where dun-colored goats can scarcely be distinguished from the dun-colored earth.  The only shocks of color are the clothes of the inhabitants:  women drape themselves in exuberant purple saris, men wrap their heads in turbans dyed flaming red or neon green.  Such flamboyance seems out of place here, but a ruler can break any rule.  ( p. 59)
• India is more a conglomeration than a country, a hodgepodge of hundreds of cultures, languages, and people held together by an idea.  I am not sure what that idea is.  (p. 207) 

Some times we need to be jolted out of our complacent state of life and learn something new to unclog our mental pores.  "Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God"  will make you wonder why you never learned anything more than seventh-grade geography about one of the most diverse and important countries on earth.  Let me know if you read it.   

Curmudgeonly Irritations for Monday May 11 2009

This morning the Curmudgeonly Professor has decided to lump together all irritations evident at this juncture, so to speak, rather than just isolate the sports irritations.  He is working hard to show more curmudgeonly attributes, since posting flowers all the time tends to make him forget his true role and identity in life.

• Irritations numbering 1-100:  The Los Angeles Lakers, who forgot to show up yesterday expecting to be preordained to knock off the lowly Rockets without Yao Ming.  Surprise.
• Next irritation:  the refs who avoided calling two bumping fouls at the end of the Nuggets-Mavs game, which enabled the Nuggets, almost equally as irritable as the Lakers, to make a three point shot at the end of the game and win it rather than make two free throws and send the game to overtime.
• Old irritations that are now non-irritations:  Artest and Scola, on the Rockets team.  Now that the Rockets show signs of at least humiliating the Lakers a couple of times, I just love those guys.
• The next irritation:  the back rubber in church yesterday.
• The obvious frauds over mail and phone notices that your car warranty has expired and you will be in deep trouble if you don't renew it right now.  My absolutely, absolutely, totally, completely last chance to renew my car warranty happened about three or four years ago, following a continual assault in my mailbox and on my phone to get me to renew it.  Now, lo and behold, that wasn't the absolutely last opportunity to renew my warranty since I get new opportunities to do so each day.
• The banks who keep calling to tell me this is absolutely, totally, the last chance I will have to lower my interest rate on their stupid credit cards.  Really?  Honest?  Then why do you morons keep calling me week after week.
• The Geico lizard makes the honor roll again today.  Get lost.
• The news moguls showing the waterboarding video clips over and over and over and over every time the term is mentioned.  Worse than using the Clinton-Lewinsky crowd hug for fifty years after the event every time the name of Clinton was mentioned.
• The in-depth news reports that are actually 60-second sound bites.
• The fact that the media would never think of interviewing anyone else during or after the game except Kobe Bryant during any game Bryant ever plays.  Even when Bryant is not his world-famous best and someone else has substantially outplayed him.  Must we?
• The Curmudgeonly Professor must admit that he dare not reveal his true irritations on this blog for fear of upsetting those who may have different opinions.  Like 95% of my viewers.

I-15 from St. George to SLC, continued: Photos of the Day May 11 2009

Slow traffic over the Black Ridge, about 30 mi. south of St. George.  How many dozens and dozens of times have we gone over this road?  

Typical of countless cone-shaped hills in southern Utah, many of which showing volcanic rocks.

 

Pansies from the Dixie Regional Medical Center, St. George: Photos of the Day May 11 2009

 

More Photos from Within a Photo: Tulip Gardens at Thanksgiving Point: Photos of the Day May 11 2009

I started a little game the other day to see how many photos I could extract from one photo.  To see the main photo, scroll down to earlier post.  Here are five more photos, for a total of 10 photos from one photograph.  The overall view is amazing, but the details are often more amazing.  Moral to the story:  take one photo, crop the daylights out of it, and you'll end up with all of the photos you will want.

                                                    

                                            

                                                               

                                             

Happy Mothers Day: Photo of the Day May 10 2009