Down for the Count

Last week, The New York Times listed 11 popular pastimes that, thanks to Covid-19, may already be "things of the past."

According to reporter Bryan Pietsch, you should no longer expect to see people:

• Blow out candles on a birthday cake
• Drag on a buddy's vape pen
• Let their kids jump into a ball pit
• Get a department store makeover
• Play in an escape room
• Drink at a crowded bar
• Sip from a scorpion bowl
• Host a poker game
• Perform karaoke
• Shop for pleasure
• Shake hands, kiss, and hug

I'd add a 12th activity you're unlikely to see people engage in again:

• Attend trade shows

Wait, what?

Face-to-face events are vital.  

Schmoozing is irreplaceable. 

Trade shows mean business.

Yes, once upon a time, that was true. 

But the world has been turned upside down by a microbe.

It's hard to imagine a world without trade shows. 

But whoever thought trains, alarm clocks, encyclopedias, maps, drive ins, and pay phones, would disappear?

Eighteen years ago, SARS dealt the trade show industry a body blow; but the disease was contained swiftly, and the industry rebounded.

This time 'round is different. Covid-19 isn't SARS. 

The punches keep coming.

Bark

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do and bark. 

— Samuel Johnson

Only now has it occurred to me: I launched a new business in the midst of the pandemic.

Call me crazy. 

Speaking of which, last week I wrote about life's brevity in my new blog, also launched during the pandemic.

Frankly, fears about mortality—not income—drive me to succeed in my "encore" venture as a still life painter. (Certainly income's a driver, too; otherwise, I'd be neck deep in a hobby.)

Behavioral scientist Richard Johnson calls retirement a path on which "we are called to become more interesting, more curious, more personal, more diverse, and more meaningful in all that we do."

All that is true, but fails to pay respect to the "inner hound."

How about you?

Who's your inner hound? 

Will you sit and growl? 

Or come out and bark?

Excepted Perils

What fortune has made yours is not yours.

— Seneca

An antique mirror of ours crashed to the floor last Monday morning when the nail that affixed it to the wall failed. The mirror didn't shatter, thank heavens, but its ornate frame was mauled.

Our insurance adjuster made clear late Friday that no money would flow from the company's coffers due to this misfortune. As our policy proclaims, she said, shoddy nails are among the "excepted perils."

So now we have to decide whether to spend the stimulus check that may never arrive on the mirror's restoration.

Parting with money is never easy, but the mirror's an oddity. Years ago we named it the "Phil Collins Mirror," because the singer previously owned it; and it appears to be a relic of the World's Columbian Exposition. Gilded and gaudy though it be, the mirror's too pretty a thing to toss on history's trash heap. We can't in good conscience just put it on the curb for the garbageman.

Seneca sure nailed it (much better than I did the mirror): What fortune has made yours is not yours. The gift given can be withdrawn. 

Excepted perils can pulverize it.

Shinola

My father's frequent use of World War II lingo amused me when I was a kid.

One phrase he reserved for encounters with people he disagreed with went, "You don't know shit from Shinola."

My five-year old self had no clue what Shinola was, but context always made the meaning of the expression clear: "Your judgement's off."

Call me a procrastinator, but I have at last looked up the meaning of "Shinola."

Today, the name is owned by a luxury goods retailer; but in the now-faded past Shinola was a shoe polish manufactured in Rochester, New York.

Shinola was the brainchild of a Gilded Age chemist named George Wetmore, who formulated the stuff in his spare time, experimenting in a makeshift lab in his basement. 

The product was a hit, fast becoming the world's leading brand and making Wetmore fabulously wealthy. Manufacturing continued until 1960.

The luxury goods company bought the abandoned brand name in 2001, in large part because its investors thought my father's funky phrase would make a good tagline.

What'd they know?

Cry Baby

At a farewell ceremony at Los Alamos, physicist Robert Oppenheimer handed every member of his lab a silver pin stamped "A BOMB."

"If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world," he told the team, "the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima."

A week later, Oppenheimer visited the White House, where he told Harry Truman, "Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands." Truman flew into a rage and ushered the "cry baby scientist" from the Oval Office.

Truman had missed Oppenheimer's point: he felt guilt not for Hiroshima, but some future nuclear genocide he imagined.

But other members of Oppenheimer's team weren't so imaginative. They saw the hard evidence of the effects of the the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and it horrified them.

Fellow physicist Mark Oliphant, considering that evidence, would later lament, "During the war I worked on nuclear weapons, so I, too, am a war criminal."