Category: Friday Fives

1. What do you think will immediately happen when everyone receives the push notification that he has died?

“Celebration” by Kool and the Gang shoots to the top, and hospital emergency rooms will fill up with injuries from flying champagne corks.

2. What celebrity is the biggest example of “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”?

Kevin Spacey

3. What industry is entirely built on a house of cards and would collapse overnight if people realized the truth about it?

BitCoin and blockchain e-currency

4. What has been the best day of your life?

Sitting fourth row mid home stretch at the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs for my 50th birthday.

5. If money didn’t exist, what would people fight over?

It’s back to the world of “Settlers of Cattan” and battles and wars over resources. Hell, “The Orange One” is already doing that.

haven’t blogged for a few weeks. On March ,my long-time blog buddy, blog reader Kevin Lang, known on these pages by my tens of readers as “Lono,” lost his hard-fought 14-month battle with Leukemia.

For decades, my Thursday evening/Friday morning began with sending this week’s Friday Fives questions to Kevin, who would then answer them and post them on his own blog.

For the last few weeks, taking on the task of gathering a few questions to post and then posting them to my blog felt like an empty task without first sending them off to his home near Elizabeth/Exuban Parker.

We all miss him terribly, and although we all knew the end was nearing when he decided to go into pain management and hospice care after an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant, many, many attempts of chemo and radiation, and unsuccessful drug trials.

A wise kid I have working for me, but Kevin’s passing in a very succinct way to handle the loss: “they may be gone, but not lost, as their story isn’t finished until those that carry the memory are/”

And that is the way I am holding on to my lost brother.

We will meet again, Kevin.

Shalom.

1. What’s a fad/trend from the early 2020s that faded so quickly you can barely remember it?
Spotify used to have this weird car gadget that would plug into your car, but that was dropped about the time that streaming music apps became ubiquitous,s and they dropped the product so fast you barely saw it coming.,

2. What’s a fad/ trend from the 1990s that faded so quickly you can barely remember it?

Nextel phones with the Direct Connect walkie-talkie. Those were pretty cool, and I’d love to have a way to bring that technology back, but they got bullied out of their bandwidth.

3. What was that thing that was such a big deal from your high school years?

Blow-dried hair and silkie disco shirts

4. What were all the cool kids doing in your middle school years?

Listening to music on the new cool tech known as cassettes.

5. What fad/trend were your parents into when you were a kid that, looking back, caused you to say, “Man, those guys are weird?

They were really into the Jaycees – like it was their entire life and social scene. They went to conferences and conventions all the time and participated in locally sponsored events – there was always something. Obsessed.

1. If you could remove one food so that no one would eat it ever again, what would you actually pick to destroy?

Beef spleen or tripe – Who got the wise idea to just cook up weird, grainy organ meats? Yuck.

2. If I just now discovered you by reading about you in the newspaper, what section would I find you in?

I would reside in the books section, making lists and lists and lists of books that I want to get around to reading.

3. You suddenly have to go on the lam. What would your new assumed identity be and your back story?

Unis Cornpone from St. Lisbeth, LA, where my family has resided peacefully in the old bayou for centuries, making our living hand-crafting whiskey bottle cork plugs.

4. What flavor of cake would you be?

Favorite cake to eat, Angel food, but favorite cake to actually be? Chocolate Red Velvet.

5. If you could actually enter the world of the last book you read, where would you end up?

I am currently reading “In Cold Blood,” so I guess Holcomb, KS, is just outside of Garden City and about 200 miles from where I am sitting.

1. What’s the oldest thing in your house?

Out in the garage there are some boxes of my grandmother’s china and among that is a set of really rare crystal forged with uranium glass. Stunningly beautiful and work a pretty penny.

2. Who was your craziest / most interesting teacher?

My high school biology teacher Mr. Peer. He was just a delightful wacko. With a fully fitted science lab full of chemicals and Bunsen burners – he would light the place up.

3. When was the last time you got to tell someone “I told you so”?

When those wack jobs elected Trump I warned that this wasn’t going to go as well as they might think.

4. What smartphone feature would you actually be excited for a company to implement?

Whenever I am asked what new technology I want I also default to the demand to bring me my Star Trek teleportation. I thinking fitting that within a sell phone would be a game changer.

5. What was cool when you were young but isn’t cool now?

Atari Pong? a lot of late 1960s and early 1970s tech has certainly gone out of fashion. I mean really, 8-track? C’mon! I’ll go with “Moon Boots” for winter wear. Growing up everybody was wearing them. They were the O.G. “Uggs.”

This or that?

1. Skydiving or SCUBA Diving?

I trained to be a paratrooper in the army, that wa terrifying. I pick Scuba.

2. Football or basketball

Football from this list, but I am starting to get obsessed with soccer. Less CTE and more finesse.

3. Horseback Riding or Cycling?

Cycling is my thing, especially since buying my e-bike about 2 and 1/2 years ago.

4. Fiction or Nonfiction?

I am kinda OCD on this. I primarily read eBooks, and on the Kindle, it is fiction, and on my tablet with the Kindle app, it is nonfiction.

5. Coffee Cup or Thermos?

I put the French press coffee in a carafe. I don’t like the taste of hot liquids from a metal Thermos, so I pour from the insulated beverage mug thingy into a proper ceramic mug. I know, that’s weird, but I am who I am.

1. What weird food combinations do you really enjoy?

I may have written about this before, but I like to wrap a Pringles potato chip in a leaf of iceberg lettuce and make a crispy “unwich”; the salt, the sweet, and the crunch are satisfying. I also like uncooked egg noodles “raw,” But that is just weird.

2. What would a world populated by clones of you be like?

That is a lot of people making a lot of out loud, inane observations and bad attempts at jokes all the time. As well as a world of pretty clumsy people.

3. What inanimate object would be the most annoying if it played loud upbeat music while being used?

The dishwasher. We have a nice, quiet dishwasher, but it seems to run for a long time. If it played loud, annoying, perhaps inappropriate music that can’t be muted, well, then I guess hand-washing everything would be the course of the day.

4. What food is delicious but a pain to eat?

Pomegranate.

5. What obstacles would be included in the World’s most amazing obstacle course?

I have seen a number of obstacle course competition shows and have run through a few myself in my army days, so I speak with some knowledge. Remember that board game with a table board game-sized obstacles that had to be negotiated with a ping pong ball blown to float in the air by a hand-held blower to negotiate the course? That is, instead of a ping pong, it is a human, and air flow is provided by a drone.

1. Those who were in a gang, what’s the most f-ed up thing you’ve seen?

While a member of the “He-Man Woman Hater Gang, Buckwheat showed up at the clubhouse wearing full drag. None of us were ready for that.

2. What was it that put you in solitary while in lock up?

I started saying a lot of really mean things about Stephen Miller.

3. Why did you deserve that beat down?

I kept insisting on removing the canned green peas from my bowl of Grandma’s beef stew.

4. What happened that forced you to flee the country?

I was caught cheating while playing the all-in game of Risk.

5. You can tell me, I won’t share – how did you embezzle that vast fortune, and where is the money now?

I amassed my vast fortune by taking out tiny ads in the back of newspapers and magazines and flipping all that dough in a collection of rare coffee mugs.

1. What jobs are disappearing because of AI, but no one seems to notice?

I work in call center management, and the most significant AI push right now is for the Quality Assurance team, which listens to calls and scores them to ensure consistent service. Most of that work is now being handled by AI bots to monitor and score. We will have to re-purpose about 12 employees as they are no longer needed.

2. How do you deal with a chronically negative person?

Bluetooth headphones.

3. What was your first long-distance drive?

We drove from Stuttgart to London on aquick run over a three-day weekend while in the army.

4. What’s a small thing that instantly makes your day better?

A freshly roasted and brewed cup of coffee from the French press.

5. What small thing can just ruin your day?

Breakfast eggs when the yolk got broken in the skillet.