Author Archives: Jon Lowder

I Agree With Dilbert-Man on This Topic

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Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, recently wrote a blog post claiming he’d roughly doubled his IQ while on some meds because those meds killed his libido. From his post:

The first thing you need to understand is that when your sex drive disappears you don’t miss it. You can’t miss what you don’t want. Rather than feeling irritable about losing the core organizing principle of my life, I felt relieved. It was like crossing off half of my to-do list with no effort whatsoever. My mind was clear. I was focused. I could go deep.

Losing my sex drive felt like a superpower. I had some of the best ideas of my life that week…When you have the option of putting all of your energy into one function – in my case my brain – it makes a huge difference.

My IQ as a eunuch was sizzling. In fact, if a eunuch applied for a job with me I wouldn’t even ask any other questions. I would hire him on the spot. It would be like hiring Superman to move your furniture. I would know that guy was focused.

So I’m closing in on 50 and while I don’t feel like a eunuch just yet, I do feel like a eunuch on more occasions than I could have ever imagined a few years ago. Unfortunately since my eunuch-ness is related to age I don’t think I’m experiencing any kind of IQ boost, but just so you ladies understand where Adams (and I) are coming from let’s continue with his post:

I should pause here to explain a few things to the women reading this blog. The typical male brain is a computer that has to reboot every 30 seconds. Men can think about non-sexual topics for half-a-minute, tops. But we know we’ll die if we don’t sometimes think about food and shelter and whatnot, so we’re continuously bouncing between sex and non-sex thoughts. It never ends.

Sometimes we game the system by merging our sexual and non-sexual thoughts. During the workday it looks like this: If I get this new job, I’ll make a lot of money, and that will increase my odds of sex. On our own time, it looks like this: If I exercise hard enough, my body will look attractive and that will increase my odds of sex. 
  
And if you’re married it looks like this: The news says there will be a meteor shower tonight. I hope my wife doesn’t get hit by a meteor, but if she does it will increase my odds of sex.

I believe that last paragraph explains why most women have no problem with their mate’s eunuchness. Hell, I wouldn’t be shocked if most of us (married men) have been eating food laced with saltpeter since the day our wives figured out they were done having kids and our essential function for them had concluded.

Update on Williams Road Bridge Repair in Lewisville

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From the Town of Lewisville’s Facebook page:

**UPDATE ON THE WILLIAMS RD BRIDGE CLOSURE**

The NCDOT now plans replace the bridge as a part of the necessary repairs that are needed due to a vehicle striking it some time ago. While work will start sometime around the month of January 2015, the bridge is not expected to be closed the until next March (2015).

The bridge will continue to be two lanes, but there will be added width to allow for a sidewalk to be added in the future.

The bridge is expected to be closed between March and August, 2015. Please share this with friends and family that may be effected.

NCDOT had said that the construction would begin this summer, so the delay is a bit of a bummer, but the expanded width to accommodate a sidewalk is very good news.

Best Argument I’ve Seen for Changing the Name

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Let me say this from the get-go: I’m a lifelong, avid Washington Redskins fan. Some of my favorite childhood memories come from games I attended, particularly the Skins NFC championship game victory over the Cowboys before moving on to beat the Dolphins for their first Super Bowl ring. My initial reaction to the name-change argument was typical of most fans’ – I thought it was an overblown, PC reaction to a few protesters’ complaints. Over time, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s really no good argument for the team keeping its name and this article offers the best reasoning I’ve seen for changing the name:

To a greater or lesser degree, the casual denigration of Native Americans sullies all the professional sports teams with Indian mascots, including the Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Cleveland Indians. But only the Washington team incorporates that denigration in its very name. When you a pronounce a slur, you affiliate yourself with the attitudes and actions of all the people who have used it before you, whatever your personal feelings about the group it refers to. There’s no exemption for good intentions, or even for ignorance. “Nigger” stings even in the mouth of a child who doesn’t know it’s offensive…

But everything changes when you come to realize that Redskins is genuinely offensive to some. A lot of fans react by getting defensive, decrying the whining oversensitivity of the complainers, railing about PC and the thought police. At that point, though, the game is already up. Once that testy or belligerent note creeps into the chants and songs, they can’t be innocent fun anymore. Best give it up, so the conversation can return to football.

As Terry Bradshaw puts it, “Finally I’ve given it some thought, and if it’s really offending people … Everybody loves the Washington Redskins but they can be the Washington something else.” This was never about PC, just manners.

I recently had someone tell me that he’d like to see the team name changed to the Washington Senators. My reaction to that was, “Well, these days that’s a term that would be denigrating to all but 100 people in this country.”

Back and Better Than Ever

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Lucy’s been writing the last couple of years, just not on her (in?)famous blog, Life in Forsyth. Now she’s back and better than ever:

You see a boy riding a bicycle.

I see four years of finding parking at CompRehab. I see a special chair in the lunchroom because he collapsed on little, round stools. I see a child laying on his belly over a giant ball and being gently rolled to learn balance. I see therapeutic pencil grips and modified desks. I see the little room where casts were made of his feet. I see IEPs and testing modifications. I see stair exercises with someone behind him for safety. I see adaptive technology.

I see strength and ferocity and determination.

I see a boy at long last riding a bicycle.

Hopefully she’ll forgive me for sharing an entire post.

Tennis Mecca in the Making in Greensboro?

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Could Greensboro’s Spencer Love Tennis Center become the region’s tennis mecca? From the Triad Business Journal:

The city has committed $175,000 to the project, with the management company that oversees all of Greensboro’s staffed tennis centers contributing another $175,000.

That would allow the center to add five or six courts. But if private fundraising is successful, the expansion could add as many as 18 courts.

Doing so would create one of the biggest clay-court centers in the South and make the center a destination for national and sectional tennis tournaments.

As for Winston-Salem, it’s great to have the Wake Forest tennis complex, but what should be our signature courts at Hanes Park could use some serious, well, love. Those things are a hot mess right now and someone should do something about them. Winston-Salem is hosting a bunch of USTA state tournaments this weekend and the out-of-towners who play at Hanes are going to wonder why we our primary downtown courts are a sandbox.

Digging Its Own Grave

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Some property in London is so valuable that it has become more economical to bury excavation equipment after it’s been used to dig new basements than to retrieve it:

The challenge of adding new subterranean floors to London houses has become a highly lucrative business. The heavy lifting – or, in this case, the heavy digging – is usually contracted out to basement-conversion specialists. These firms discovered that it was reasonably easy to get a small digger (occasionally two) into the rear garden of a house on an exclusive 19th-century square. Sometimes they simply knock a hole in the wall and drive the diggers straight through the house. In other cases, the windows are so large that a digger can squeeze through without dismantling the bricks and mortar.

The difficulty is in getting the digger out again. To construct a no-expense-spared new basement, the digger has to go so deep into the London earth that it is unable to drive out again. What could be done?

A new solution emerged: simply bury the digger in its own hole. Given the exceptional profits of London property development, why bother with the expense and hassle of retrieving a used digger – worth only £5,000 or £6,000 – from the back of a house that would soon be sold for several million? The time and money expended on rescuing a digger were better spent moving on to the next big deal.

The new method, now considered standard operating practice, is to cover the digger with “hardcore”, a mixture of sand and gravel. Then a layer of concrete is simply poured over the top. Digger? What digger? The digger has literally dug its own grave – just as the boring machines that excavated the Channel Tunnel were abandoned beneath the passage they had just created.

This sounds like a circa 2006 story which is kind of nerve wracking.

Four Health System Fixes Neither Party Will Touch

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Here’s an interesting article at Vox that outlines four ways the US health system could be improved, but neither political party will dare touch.  They are:

  1. Let in more immigrant doctors
  2. Curtail pharmaceutical monopolies
  3. Let non-doctors treat patients
  4. All-payer rate setting

Those first three are fairly self-explanatory, but the fourth is a little more complex. This excerpt helps explain it:

In Germany, the Netherlands, and the exotic foreign land known as Maryland they practice what’s calledall-payer rate setting. That means that instead of each insurance company negotiating separately with each hospital group on prices, a government commission sets a price that everyone pays. And it works. Maryland has curtailed cost growth without inducing any noteworthy shortages of health care facilities

Another advantage to all-payer rate setting beyond the simple ability to set low rates is that it would eliminate some of the necessity of doing everything through an insurance company middleman. Right now, one of the services your health insurer provides is a real insurance function that helps you hedge against risk. But for many people, the insurer’s most important practical role is as a negotiator. Since the insurance company has a lot of scale, it can get a good price from a doctor or a hospital. An uninsured person would have to pay at a much higher rate.

Reducing the insurance company’s role as a negotiator would let insurers focus more on the insurance function, and allow routine care to be handled in a more consumer-focused way. And by eliminating some of the advantages to sheer scale on the insurance side, it could also promote more competition in the health insurance industry.

Dear Lewisvillians, Roundabouts Work

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When I was on Lewisville’s planning board we had a couple of recurring debates, one about roundabouts and the other about cyclists. I always fell on the pro side of the roundabout debate and I’m happy to see that the MythBusters have shown they are indeed superior to four way stops.

BTW, Lewisville is slated to get more roundabouts in the future so we might as well get used to them.

http://seven.of.nine.wimp.com/loadvideo/d7fe763b17ae760fef524c658c476d20/53932a13/mobile-videos/9c609c887ee3f1c5991919a4bb979641_test.flv.hq.mp4

The Rabbit Hole of American Political Discourse

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A columnist at Philly.com wrote a piece called “America…what the hell’s wrong with us” about the Bowe Bergdahl story and captured the bizarro world that is American political discourse. He points out the hypocrisy of some politicians calling out the President last year for not doing enough to secure the freedom of Bergdahl and then lambasting the President for the prisoner exchange that freed him. He also writes that this whole story arc is predictable (he’s right), and so didn’t really bother him until learning that Bergdahl’s hometown had to cancel a homecoming celebration due to all the nastiness. That’s when he decided we’d really reached a new low in our society:

But the bottom line is that if you see a woman standing in the middle of the road and a Mack Truck bearing down on her, you don’t stop to grill her on whether she just used heroin or left her child on a stoop somewhere. You pick her up and swoop her out of the street, and deal with the rest later. So should it be with saving Sgt. Bergdahl. For God’s sake, where’s the humanity? A couple of decades ago, two Inquirer reporters wrote an award-winning series and book called “America: What Went Wrong?” Today it’s more appropriate to ask, America…what the hell’s wrong with us?

Here’s what one fairly knowledgeable chap said about the Bergdahl affair earlier today. “We don’t leave Americans behind. That’s unequivocal.” That wasn’t some knee-jerk Obama apologist in Congress, that was former Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Bergdahl’s supreme commanding officer when he was captured in 2009, and — if you recall — not a big fan of the president. But he does know right from wrong. As noted here the other day, Israel traded more than 1,000 prisoners, including a sizable number of Palestinians detained for alledgedly murderous acts of terrorism, to win back just ONE of its citizens. Say you will about the Israeli government’s policies, but the Israeli citizens value human life. I don’t know what America values anymore.

Did Bergdahl make a horrible mistake in judgment, or worse, when he left his base? Probably. Did some American troops die in combat because of the search for Bergdahl or related events. Possibly. But we should also talk about the fact that we sent thousands of American soldiers into a war that has lasted a remarkable 13 years, and the longer that a war lasts, the more heartbreaking, soul-crushing things are going to happen. It’s even more tragic when our leaders can’t even articulate why our troops — Bergdahl, the ones who went looking for him, the ones who will be there even after the war was supposed to end later this year — are even in Afghanistan anymore. Today, Pennsylvania lost one of our own — Capt. Jason B. Jones of Orwigsburg in Schuylkill County, killed by small arms fire in Jalalabad. Please take a moment and honor Captain Jones’ sacrifice — if you can hear yourself think over the sick cries of political blood lust.

I agree with the writer that the cynicism is sickening and I fear it’s only going to get worse. Ironically, the people who claim to be bringing morality back to government seem very intent in not following the Golden Rule. We’d be a helluva lot better off if they’d take a refresher course on moral behavior and then started to walk their talk.

What the L?

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The first Super Bowl was held in 1966. I was born in 1966. In 2016 we will have our 50th Super Bowl and, hopefully, I will turn 50. Since the fifth Super Bowl the NFL has used Roman numerals to delineate each game, so the fifth Super Bowl was Super Bowl V, the sixth was Super Bowl VI and so on.

Since my last name starts with an L I was looking forward to having my L birthday the same year we have Super Bowl L, but then the NFL went and pooped on my parade:

The NFL announced on Wednesday that Super Bowl 50 will be graphically represented using standard Arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals, which the league has been using since Super Bowl V in 1971.

It’s a one-year break, said Jaime Weston, the league’s vice president of brand and creative, because the “L” isn’t as pleasing to the eye…

“When we developed the Super Bowl XL logo, that was the first time we looked at the letter L,” Weston said. “Up until that point, we had only worked with X’s, V’s and I’s. And, at that moment, that’s when we started to wonder: What will happen when we get to 50?”

Weston said her team has been working on the Super Bowl 50 logo since April 2013, having gone through 73 versions. At some point along the way, it was concluded that having the “L” stand alone didn’t work.

Personally, I think the NFL’s branding people are incompetent boobs.