Sorry about the size issue. Sweat me later!

Pete pads softly down the stairs, holding the phone and smiling.

Pete: It’s your mother.

Maybe he’s grimacing.

Tata: What’s up, Mom?
Mom: Remember when – maybe you know – could you help me with something? – I’m not sure how to ask this but – when you were in the garage – perhaps the cat – the garage door clicker is still missing and – Tom says he told you –
Tata: He told me to pick up the gray thing and press the button. I picked up the gray thing, pressed the button and put it back on the shelf next to the macaroni.
Mom: It’s catfood. Did you by any chance – while you were walking around –
Tata: No. It was missing while we were still there. He asked me this question before we left Cape Cod and I told him the same thing. He was there and watched me put it back next to the macaroni and catfood. I never touched it again.
Mom: So you didn’t pick it up and walk around and forget about it?
Tata: Nope. Look under the stairs, okay?
Mom: Under the stairs! I’ll do that. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that.
Tata: Me, neither. Look behind the catfood macaroni while you’re there, huh?

When that fails, Radio Shack opens at 9 a.m.

Photo: Bob Hosh

I have a cold. You get this picture from my co-worker, who takes the most startling photographs of flowers. You’d think this patch of mums was the face of a beloved child, and perhaps it is.

So I came across this picture –

The description:

Designer Harri Koskinen
Year 2006
Architonic id 1076989

“The basic idea was to create a lamp series with space and atmosphere. I put my trust in the natural material of glass, in its beauty and its changing reflections. The lamp series consists of a white and grey version that both, and in their own way, bring forward the beauty of electrical light. The lamps are at their best in the late evening, creating a cosy mood around them.”

MATERIAL Mouth blown glass, textile cord
COLOUR White
DIMENSIONS Large version: ø 34,8 cm, Height 26 cm; Small version: ø 25,4 cm, Height 19 cm

The form is kind of interesting. The soft light source makes a lot of sense to me, especially since that site offers other lamps by the same designer that aren’t nearly as successful. The lamp is made of glass, which I suspect would last about half an hour in my house full of cats. Generally speaking, I like this designer’s ideas, but what do you think this might be?

Designer Harri Koskinen
Architonic id 1001840

Single coloured relief.
Material: Handtufted 100% New Zealand wool.
Colours: Standard.
l: 2000 mm w: 1580 mm
l: 2000 mm w: 645 mm
Customers size

It’s pretty. What is it?

Topaz is curled up on a caramel velveteen pillow with one paw resting on my left elbow. Sweetpea snores peacefully a few inches from my right thigh. In a few minutes, she’ll inch closer to my hip, then closer again, then lay her head on my lap and stare at me with the boo-boo eyes, then crawl on my lap. She won’t stay. She’s a restless sort. And Drusy’s upstairs, telling Pete all her girlie secrets. It was only two nights, but according to the cats we were gone forever.

Sweetpea actually pretended not to know me. I was like, “Girlfriend, PLEASE.”

Saturday morning, we drove up to Cape Cod in the misty and sometimes blinding rain and fog that was the tail end of Hurricane Ida. We had arranged a quick trip to replace the warped and waterlogged storm door and cross a few small tasks off the big DIY list. Sunday morning, Mom, Tom, Pete and I drank coffee and talked about the door, which came with a frame. Mom busied herself elsewhere. Pete tore out the old door while I counted hardware pieces and Tom read the instructions. It quickly became apparent that this was a two-person job. Mom proposed that she and I go visit Grandpa. I cleaned up and we hopped in the car, where Mom recounted the saga of Grandpa’s shoes.

Briefly: a few weeks before, she’d picked up a second pair of Grandpa’s favorite shoes at KMart, but the shoes were too small when he tried them on. Mom tried returning them but KMart didn’t have a pair half a size larger. An employee – let’s call her Alberta – promised to call when a shipment of Grandpa’s favorite shoes arrived. Alberta called Mom the day before we arrived: a pair of shoes would be waiting for her. I didn’t think much of this except that this meant we were going to KMart, and shopping with Mom is fraught with peril. It’s hard to explain.

The strip mall was sad. At the other end, a Filene’s Basement had gone out of business, leaving a huge empty space. The parking lot was full of holes and broken places. As we walked through the store to Customer Service, we passed people whose skin was colorless, people who were oddly shaped and looked damaged. At the desk, we found one lushly beautiful young woman of Middle Eastern descent to page Alberta for us. When after a long moment Alberta did not appear, the young woman went to the shoe department, which was maybe 30 feet away and plainly visible from where we were standing. We saw her walk around. We saw her pick up the phone at the jewelry counter. She came back to the desk. Then out of nowhere Alberta appeared. WHOOSH! And she looked mighty familiar because when we walked in and asked for her, she walked right past us. Anyway: WHOOSH! At the same time Alberta appears, we hear her talking.

Alberta: Hi, I’m Alberta! Did you get my call? I called you! I called because I knew you wanted these shoes so I put aside a pair for you and another for another man. He was actually here at the same time as you. You might have seen him. Did you see him?

In the shoe aisle, a large box sits on the floor and a number of shoeboxes await Alberta’s attention. Mom is no slouch when it comes to talking a blue streak and I don’t quite understand what we’re doing so I keep wandering off and coming back. Finally, Alberta realizes I have something to do with this situation and extends a hand.

Alberta: Hi, I’m Alberta.
Tata: Hi, I’m Domenica and you’ve met my mother.
Alberta: That is your mother? That cannot be your mother. How old are you? And how old are YOU? I cannot believe you have a daughter her age. You’re both kidding, right?
Tata: Want to see a picture of my grandson?
Alberta: You can’t possibly be old enough to have a grandchild! You don’t look old enough to have a kid who has a kid. It’s the curly hair. That makes everyone look younger. See how young I look? It’s the curly hair! How old do you think I am?

Mom and I look at each other.

Tata: There’s no right answer to that question!

Alberta laughs, rushes to me and pulls her hair out of a clip.

Alberta: It’s the curly hair that makes me look young. My youngest is 18. I don’t look that age, and curly hair makes you look young, and you too –

Mom’s hair is poker-straight. Alberta keeps talking as Mom’s phone rings and Tom says, “I have a few things to tell you.” I am holding the shoebox of replacement shoes in the correct, larger size. Mom repeatedly listens to something Tom says then responds the same way over and over. Alberta has noticed my nose piercing and we are off to the races.

Alberta: Did that hurt when you got that pierced because it really hurt when I got my tongue pierced –
Tata: I had to take my tongue ring out because it started chipping away at my dentalwork. Mom, say goodbye to Tom.
Mom: I don’t have time to talk about this.
Alberta: I was never sure about leaving my kids with babysitters –
Tata: It’s always a dilemma. Mom, hang up.
Mom: I don’t have time to talk about this.
Alberta: Your hair was more recently frosted than mine but we have the same hair. It’s nice hair. Do you wear makeup? I can’t believe you have a grandchild –
Tata: You’ve been very helpful. Thank you so much. Mom, HANG UP THAT PHONE. WE ARE LEAVING.

Mom shut her phone and stared at Alberta. Mom doesn’t listen like other people listen. You don’t so much talk as have a story sucked out of you. I am not at all kidding when I say Mom makes car dealers cry. All she has to do is fix her gaze on them and listen until they beg her to sign something and for god’s sake please go listen to someone else. Though I was absolutely certain Alberta was hopped up on diet pills and hair dye, I knew what would happen if matter and anti-matter suddenly realized they were at the same party and wearing the same dress. To save the universe, I stood up and shouted mysterious words. I think they were something like, “ISN’T THAT ANWAR SADAT? I NEED HIS AUTOGRAPH!” And I bolted toward Customer Service, knowing that Mom would follow because obviously there was a story to suck.

If she’d followed a little more closely I would have sprinted to the exit. I stopped at Customer Service, declared to the lushly beautiful young woman that we’d made our exchange and didn’t wait for an answer. Mom turned the corner, staring at me with wide eyes and the same expression cats fix on mice. I said, “We’re done here,” and made a break for the door. I hate shopping! I was thrilled when Grandpa’s shoes fit because I didn’t want to discuss hair care products with Alberta.

The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people. -Helen Adams Keller, lecturer and author (1880-1968) Via Wordsmith.

CREDO action:

Did 20 pro-choice Democrats forget what happens when women are denied access to abortion?

Why did pro-choice Democrats vote to approve the Stupak Amendment, the most serious assault on abortion rights in a generation?

According to FiveThirtyEight.com, 20 of the 64 Democrats who joined Republicans to pass the measure are nominally pro-choice. We’re telling these 20 Democrats — all of them men — to reconsider their vote and urge Congressional leadership to do everything they can to ensure the health care bill that comes out of committee does not take us back to an era of coat hangers and back alley abortions.

Sign our petition and we’ll send a coat hanger to the 20 formerly pro-choice Democrats who voted to take away women’s rights.

About twenty years ago, I participated in an action where we mailed hundreds of signed drycleaner hangers to anti-choice congresspersons. Maybe we should make it an annual public scourging.

It couldn’t be easier to sign the petition.

You can ask ten people what the hell something means and you’ll get ten versions of I Don’t Have A Fucking Clue:

The Fat and Short of It

I’m feeling more Poirot than Clousseau. Tape on your detective mustache. We’re going in.

At nearly 6 feet 2 inches and about 175 pounds, Barack Obama may be the slimmest president since the Civil War. His body-mass index hovers near 23, well within the healthy range and somewhat to the left on the bell curve of American bodies. Perhaps he has some credibility, then, when he encourages the rest of us to shed a few pounds. During the presidential campaign, Obama suggested that rolling back obesity rates would save a trillion dollars for Medicare.

This is just the first of fourteen paragraphs of amateurish logicating and thinkerizing. I bet he wrote this drunk.

He’s right that there is a connection between excess fat and public health. Obesity is associated with a higher risk of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other problems. If we could somehow slenderize the fattest people in America all at once, we would prevent an estimated 112,000 deaths a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But girth shouldn’t be the only dimension in the health care debate. There’s at least one more bodily attribute that’s eating away at the Medicare budget: shortness.

Once again: 100% of people drop dead eventually. If you live 130 years, you will still go tits up and your life insurance company, far from being sorry, will still laugh all the way to the bank. Sucker! You lived 130 years! Your premiums sent executives’ kids to Yale!

We’ve long known that stature can serve as a crude measure of public health. If everyone came from a perfect home, the average height across the population would be a function of our genes alone. (There would still be tall people and short people, but we would all have grown as much as we possibly could.) Anything less than an ideal standard of living, though, tends to stunt a child’s growth.

Aha. Author Daniel Engber took a connecting flight to a dumb destination: tall people = healthy, short people = expensive loads. Sort of:

Many problems associated with being overweight correspond to being “underheight.” The shorter you are in America, the more likely your chances to develop coronary heart disease, diabetes or stroke. Fat people and short people lead briefer lives, and they put an increased burden on the health care system. Economists estimate that excess weight alone accounts for 9 percent of the country’s medical spending. There’s no such figure for insufficient height, but we do know that obesity and shortness play out in similar ways across the socioeconomic landscape.

Underheight? I’m fucking exhausted from these logical leaps. Not a shred of evidence, but a metric assload of innuendo.

In the labor market, the effects of height and weight tend to run in parallel. A 2004 study by John Cawley of Cornell University found that severely obese white women who weigh more than two standard deviations above average — women who weigh, for example, more than 212 pounds if they’re 5 feet 4 inches tall — are paid up to 9 percent less for their work. Likewise, a decrease in a man’s height to the 25th percentile from the 75th — roughly to 5 feet 8 inches from 6 feet— is associated with, on average, a dip in earnings of 6 to 10 percent.

One study? One? I could find one study suggesting we’re actually characters in a failed Vonnegut novel.

And like obese people, short people are less likely to finish college than those of average weight. A paper from the July issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology used survey data from more than 450,000 adults to conclude that male college graduates are, on average, more than an inch taller than men who never finished high school.

I bet they’re whiter and upper middle-classier, too. Call it a hunch.

Moreover, just as a buildup of abdominal fat increases the risk of chronic illness, so can short stature have a direct impact on physiology. Smaller people, for example, have smaller lungs — and reduced lung capacity is a risk factor for death from cardiovascular disease. Shorter people also have narrower coronary arteries, which may be more susceptible to atherosclerosis.

I guarantee you no one looks at me and thinks about reduced lung capacity.

Whatever the cause, higher weight and lower height are associated with chronic disease, low wages and poor educational attainment. And while we are getting fatter, we may be getting shorter too. The economist John Komlos has shown that the United States is losing height relative to other developed nations, and some American demographic groups are even shrinking in absolute terms. Yet we tend to discount shortness as a mere byproduct of genetics and early-life experience, while treating the obesity epidemic as if it were a grave danger to public health. Why can’t our campaign to reshape the American body have two fronts? If we really want to make our country healthier, let’s have a war on shortness too.

What the hell is this guy on about? Does he even know? And why do I want to mail him a toy gun and a card telling him his Declare A War On Whatever problem is absolutely not at all about a tiny penis?

You’re excused for scoffing. You probably think of weight as a problem we can fix, while height seems beyond our control. We could try to make people thin by taxing junk food or by raising their insurance premiums unless they go on a diet. But what kind of policy could make someone taller?

I’d thank him for his permission, but I’d scoff without it. By the way, we will come back to this paragraph soon, because:

Controlling our country’s height may be just as plausible — or implausible — as controlling its weight. It’s true that someone who is fat can lose weight on purpose, while a short adult can’t do anything to gain height. Yet instances of radical, lasting weight loss are exceedingly rare. Diet and exercise schemes tend to yield only minor effects over the long term. While lesser changes to your weight may be associated with modest health benefits, they won’t help all those obese adults to become slender. For most of us, changes in body size follow a long, slow pattern across our adult lives. Every year, we lose a tiny bit of height and gain a pound or two of weight until, in our older years, we shrink in both measurements.

So…we can’t really fix our obesity problem, or this height “problem” and we’re shrinking and gaining and WHAT IS THIS GUY TALKING ABOUT?

Given how hard it can be to lose weight, a realistic war on obesity starts to look a lot like a war on shortness. In both cases, we’re dealing with a complex function of genetics, social class and poor health in childhood.

Can’t we try height and weight diplomacy?

Early-life experiences play an important role in the development and consequences of body size. Exposure to malnutrition, infectious disease, chronic stress and poverty stunt a child’s development and seem to explain many of the long-term problems associated with short stature. Environmental factors may promote obesity, too: lack of breast-feeding, bad nutrition, chronic stress and poverty have all been associated with early weight gain and a higher risk of health problems down the road.

We veer so close to a real point – but no. This paragraph goes nowhere.

A range of sensible interventions could address both problems at once. To win a war on shortness, we might promote the consumption of fruits, vegetables and other foods that are low in calories and high in micronutrients. Or we could invest in education as a means of alleviating poverty and environmental stress. Better access to doctors for children and their parents would improve prenatal and postnatal care and stave off the stunting effects of childhood disease.

Education. [W]e might promote the consumption of fruits, vegetables and other foods. All right, let’s talk about that. The feds fund a program called WIC that is run by each state. This is the rather straight-forward website for New Jersey. Pennsylvania’s is ornate and condescending, and the charming Nutrition facts in the foods list is an especially stinky touch. You should have a look at your state’s WIC website and ask yourself this question: do people who can’t afford food have computers and net connections?

From the outside, these programs look like a reason for optimism. If so, you’ve never spent a day shuffled from desk to desk and line to line with endless demands for documentation, suspicion about your identity and disdain for your need for help. I applied to this program when I was starving. Apparently, I wasn’t starving enough, which was news to me. Anyway, WIC is perpetually underfunded. The checks are very small. The rules are very strict. I recently waited in a checkout line behind a customer using WIC checks for groceries and watched the lengthy checkout process with horror. It seemed designed to publicly shame and humiliate the customer. But hell, why not? That woman’s children are probably short. She’s got it coming!

None of these policies treat body size as an end in itself. We would never just prescribe growth hormones and bariatric surgery to every child who doesn’t fit a tall, slender mold. Obesity and shortness are society-wide measurements, not reflections of individual virtue or good health. To that end, our goal should be to improve the quality of life for children. If we can manage that, they just might end up a little taller — and thinner too.

One doesn’t have to be a fictional detective to notice that at no point did our author prove anything at all about health advantages of height. Nowhere. Nothing. He said smaller people are unhealthy and did not document it. His reference about shortness distinguishes between ordinary variations in size and a medical condition that needs treatment, but that distinction is lost on Engber, who seems more interested in economics than health anyway. Look, I have no credentials, but I can read. I asked a woman with some public health experience in Africa to read this article and offer an opinion. Her opinion was that Daniel Engber had no idea what he was talking about.

This is bothersome:

…we would all have grown as much as we possibly could.

If Engber were intellectually honest, he would come out and say that Americans have to suck it up, get over our terribly terrifying terror that someone, somewhere is getting more than he or she deserves – we’ll talk about that word deserves very soon – and get down to the business of properly feeding and caring for the people within our shores. No hissyfits about socialism. No hiding behind bullshit libertarian economics justifying selfishness and inequality. Children grow taller and stronger if they are properly fed and cared from even before birth, which requires money and resources; they will lead longer, healthier and more productive lives. Mostly. What Engber doesn’t have the balls to say is that if better public health is our priority we should collectively pay for it, enjoy it and shut up, and if taxing fast food and increasing insurance premiums is what we do instead, then we don’t actually give a shit about public health. No. We’re just scapegoating the short, the fat, the poor, the uninsured, the malnourished, the sick, the defenseless.

There’s more to talk about and I’ll get to it, but I’m going to have a glass of wine and calm down before this dumb fucker’s nonsense gives me an expensive aneurysm.

Previously on Poor Impulse Control, I caught wind of a wild idea.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing recycled products in the paper aisles. At least, I don’t remember recognizing specifically recycled products. I don’t use tissues because everything I own has sleeves – kidding! Paper towels work better for me and efficiently exfoliate the tender nostrils at the same time. Yes, I’m a brute. I use regular kitchen towels, sponges and mops most of the time but for what I use paper towels, I could switch to recycled. In fact, bring it on!

It was brung:

I switched to recycled toilet paper and while I didn’t love it, the idea of loving toilet paper is too much for my tiny mind. In an upscale grocery store near Mr. DBK’s house, I discovered more brands of recycled paper products than I knew existed, which seems promising. The switch to recycled paper towels went fabulously, which might sound like exaggeration except it also provided me with occasions to drag grocery store managers through anemic paper product aisles and demand better selections, which havoc you can wreak also wherever you shop. It’s a blast, and until everyone has a decent selection of recycled paper products in their grocery store, convenience store, drug store or bodega, you can pretty much bet on world-changing havoc and hilarity wherever you go. It’s a renewable resource, like solar energy and celebrity hijinx – though, since I don’t pay attention, about once a week I wonder when Britney Spears’ husband took up championship tennis.

And brung some more:

I was just about to declare my happiness with recycled paper towels when Karama Neal of So What Can I Do? suggested ditching paper towels entirely and going with cloth napkins. I don’t want to advocate anything without giving it a go myself, so after 10 August, I haven’t bought any paper towels of any kind. Let’s talk specifics.

1. What cloth napkins? Years ago, Auntie InExcelsisDeo gave me a hamper full of the ugliest ancestral cloth nakpins you’ve ever seen in your life and some that were just silly-looking, with the admonition that my beloved grandmother Edith would spin in her grave if I set fire to them. So I started out with a bale of cloth napkins I’d pretend I don’t know in public, which I tossed into the washer in my kitchen Sharkey describes as “the world’s largest bread machine.” I didn’t have to buy or make them. I had them – and they had me.

2. What do I use paper towels for? Other than emergency spills – for which paper towels are ill-suited – I use paper towels because I am allergic to only two things: oxygen and nitrogen, and I sneeze a lot. Tissues are flimsy, wasteful and useless. Handkerchiefs have always seemed disgusting. Are you kidding me? I blow my nose, fold my hanky and stuff it in my pocket – where I’m certain to stuff my hand eventually? That can’t be sanitary. On the other hand, my grandfather, whom I adore, has always carried a hanky. The old Cape Codders have always been very careful about their resources and creating garbage. I couldn’t deny it would be a sensible course of action, and I could diminish the Ick Factor by dropping used cloth napkins directly into the washer.

3. What do paper towels mean? We didn’t have paper towels when I was growing up. Rich people had paper towels and air conditioning. We didn’t have those. When I started thinking about the meaning of disposable stuff, the expense, the trees, the toxins, I couldn’t even argue with Me. Thus, clean cloth napkins sit in colorful piles all over my house.

That was a very good year for things going tragically wrong and hilariously right, so when I had dinner napkin-shaped hankies all over my swingin’ bachelor pad only I was chagrinned. I got used to tossing them into the washing machine and quit thinking about paper towels completely until kittens yakked on my kitchen floor. Kittens became cats, I moved house, we acquired another kitten and tenants; we’ve stuck to recycled paper products and cloth napkins. But a funny thing happened when I stopped thinking about what I was doing: I stopped thinking about what I was doing. The other night, I had one of those embarrassing revelations that make my life a rich pageant.

Tata: You know how we sit here during our undeniably fabulous dinners trying not to eat with our fingers because we wish to virtuously avoid using paper napkins?
Pete: I guess.
Tata: And you know I have piles of cloth napkins still boxed up from one of Dad’s restaurants?
Pete: That I know, yes.
Tata: Well, it finally fucking occurred to me we could use then as dinner napkins.

I’m a slow learner.

I hab a code ib by dose, what wit aw da sdeezig. Dis zucks.

Poop!

Someone asked me if I remembered this commercial.

No. I’m from New Jersey. We didn’t play with toy cows. We played with explosives.