The Yahoo article on retirement lifestyle tries to convince us that older citizens with meaningful jobs - advisory posts, caring for other elderly and disadvantaged people and Peace Corps - have a better life than oldies who sit and vegetate at home. Yeah? What, they are really saying is that for the majority of people of retirement age, bagging groceries until the age of 80 is good for your quality of life!

Looking through the post, I was thinking, surely this is a concept promoted by a government who a) needs as much cheap labor as it can muster, and b)wants to stifle every cell of imagination in its people, leading them to believe that work is the only important and fulfilling option in life - even in your dotage.

Personally, of course, age 45, I think it is a totally absurb idea to work post 65 for an improved quality of life. Just from observing my own knackered out parents, I am sure there comes a time when, however able you may be, you step aside, let the young ones take the work reins and you move on, finding pleasure in leisure pastimes and developing new interests that don't revolve around earning the big buck.

My father retired as soon as he was able and set about reading every bloody book on an enormous list of Must Read books before I die. . Interspersed with copious napping and eating good food, he is still reading and enjoying himself without any pressures from work - and that is financed by a very basic income that every pension planner on earth would say is impossible to live on.

And my mother retired at the same time, and she definitely had no desire to occupy herself with workplace heroics. She had a garden to tend to. However, (as a prime example of what the article talks about?) a year later she did begrudgingly return to work to finance a home improvement project. According to this article it would have been the best thing she ever did for her well being, interacting with people, feeling like she was making a contribution to society. The truth - she hated every moment of post retirement employment, dealing with bickering soppy co-workers. She didn't feel good until the day she had earnt enough cash to resign and get back to the fresh air and her plants.

I suppose this idea of not retiring for good when you are an old git seems a bit radical to me, perhaps because I come from a country where old folk have free health care and anyone over 40 is deemed unemployable because of dodderiness and mental incapacity. As far as I am aware, you only work post 65 in the UK if you are like my mother and have a weird desire to pay for a few uber luxuries. Otherwise at age 65, get your bus pass and go learn to play bingo and bridge.

What do you guys think? Is there really no option in the US but to work forever? Answers on a postcard...

I know, that for some of you who find this article via the search engines, what you are going to read will be a major disappointment. I concede that the development of door openers is a riveting niche subject that keeps you awake at night in giddy excitement, and it deserves the very best treatment. Alas I am not qualified to tackle the subject in any serious way.

So, instead of an indepth study of hydraulic or motorized devices that open and close front doors, garage doors or vault doors in an ultra convenient manner, here are some of my observations on how people open boring normal doors, the ones with a couple of hinges and a handle.

Public bathroom door openers

Don't get me wrong, I don't hang around bathrooms out of choice, but when you have no working toilet at home, you have to take whatever facilities are going. So, here in Berkeley, fortunately there are a string of public bathrooms at our disposal, usually in a row of 4.

From time to time, I have seen the bold ones who stride up to the first door and decisively twist the handle and push - only to find that it is locked. Thereafter, they are on the back foot, not quite so confident. They move to the next one and a little more tentatively, repeat. No joy. By the time they get to door number 4 you can see by their body language that they are definitely not as relaxed and bold as they were trying to open the first door. Hopping from leg to leg bent over double, positioned to the side not in front of the door, (in case someone bursts out, escaping the plague that lurks inside?) they snatch at handle 4, twist and shove - voila, it is open and they fall inside.

Ghetto door openers

Years ago I knew a Scottish guy who grew up in the Gorbals tenements in Glasgow. (These apartment blocks made Fort Apache the Bronx look like 5 star accomodation.) He told me that even to this day, if someone knocked at his door, he never opened it standing full on, but always turned to one side, so he wasn't such a big target! I had never considered answering the door to be such a technical exercise in self defense, but then again, I never grew up in Glasgow in an era when nasty types would knock, and when the door opened, they'd whack the person standing in the door in the face with a 2 x 4 wrapped in barbed wire.

I wondered if it wouldn't have been better to peak through the letterbox first, to see who was there, before you opened the door, but that would have played into the hands of really nasty boys who poked their victim in the eye. Braveheart was alive and well.

Garage door openers

Fricking batteries in remotes, that Duracell advert about going on and on, is a con. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to get out my car, walk around to the front door, walk through the house and open the garage door manually from the inside. Of course, to add to the pleasure, it was usually pissing down with rain or blowing a gale or doing something that made you want to stomp all over the dead remote, rip the garage door opener mechanism out the ceiling, and revert to a good old fashioned up-and-over door with a simple handle.

There we go, Ed's A to Z of door openers!

What handles or openers or doors get your attention, or on your nerves. Feel free to share.

Or How not to drive an SUV

We were pottering down a tree-lined street in the Bay Area at a measly 25mph, a few feet behind an SUV. Its super shiny back door was plastered with 4WD All Terrain stickers. It had tires the width of the front seats in my Camry. What a hunk!

Suddenly I realise I am only a few inches behind this poseur. He has slowed down almost to a halt. I jam on my brakes in time, thinking that there must be a surprise jay walker or stray cat in the road. Wrong. Slowly the SUV rolls to the left then to the right and... jesus this retard has slowed down to 2 mph to navigate a 2" high lump in the road. Slowly does it, so he doesn't tip over? Give me strength.

To make a point, I waited for the SUV to get a way ahead, then I accelerated and hit the bump at 25mph. Our Toyota Camry 2-wheel drive POS with no suspension worth a dime glided over the obstacle and continued on its merry way, none the worse for wear.




This image has nothing to do with my story, but a hats off to the driver for scratching their SUV.

SUV retard revisited

I was driving down the same road an hour or so later and blow me if another SUV, a Range Rover, (which according to the marketing brain-washing from its parent Land Rover, is probably the ultimate off road vehicle), did the same slow-to-a-crawl deal.

Do these people have no idea what they have? Sling a cable up a mountain and that Range Rover would make the summit in no time. But no, the owner treated the suburban roads of San Francisco as if they were in the middle of a landslide in the jungle. It is like they owned an oven and were scared to turn it on beyond 35 degrees - just in case.

I seriously think someone needs to confiscate SUVs from anyone without the balls to give their vehicle a good off-road thrashing, and redistribute them to people who appreciate and use them for what nature intended. Like this Hummer in water

Burmanet news paints a rather bleak picture of Burma's squandered teak resources The big bad military government over there is bad news, locals are being screwed and the environment is being raped daily. Of course the west is getting in to the fray, to effect change. A pisstaker would suggest that they are posturing because Burma is China's friend, not because they want to see peace and harmony prevail unfettered in a land full of precious resources - a long way from European and American markets.

Did you hear the one about a teak embargo?

You cannot import teak from Burma any more. This was a quick diplomatic tactic to ensure that lumber yards in America can cream their clients for an extra 30% overnight. Most helpful all round, unless you are a US carpenter or a Burmese person.

President Pisstaker says that the US should drop the current teak embargo. It won't stop deforestation, but at least unemployed Burmese elephants, their drivers, and American wooden boat builders could get back to normal production and start to put food back on their family's tables (made from sustainable teak). Economic hardship on both sides of the globe would be alleviated. Result!

The only downside to this idea of economic empowerment is that it cuts out the need for Western government intervention and posturing. I guess it wont happen!

"Better to be a logger than a prostitute"

People say that buying products harvested by exploited elephants is a bad thing, but when money is tight, elephants would say that any job is better than working the streets.

A teak house is environmentally friendly.

Teak for construction has a nice ring to it, unless you are a green terror monger. Teak will last 30 or 40 years if cared for - and that is in a marine environment, so teak is ideal for quality house building!! Therefore I think the US should go green and ban cheap softwood.

As with all problems, it takes a couple of policies working in tandem to make real change. So how about introducing a teak house-building quota too? With the way the housing market is dying, no one should notice an environmentally sound limit of 200 new homes a year under the new teak directive.

Where do you stand on teak decking etc

Freeadforum is a major directory, and I was privately asked (via a standard email sent to millions of other webmasters) if I would sign up.

Sure, I'll sign my life away for extra traffic.

I was all geared up to register, but sadly, when looking for a Humor category to lump myself under, the closest I could find was entertainment. No humor in a directory? Surprisingly, it comes as almost no surprise to me. Despite the power of funny, (almost 1 billion results in search) humor is a rarely found category on many listings.

I didn't give too much thought to being incorrectly categorised, (who looks at directories anyway?) but then it occurred to me that in the wild event that the listing did attract millions of new visitors looking for gossip about the stars - I would piss them all off. Instead of glamor gossip (the sort of gems found on Celebrity Insider), all they would find was unglamorous working class crap spewing from unfamous Ed's rambling mind.

At best, the newbies would never return.

At worst, someone might tell the Google bots that I am pimping my site as entertainment, Google will have a brain fart and penalise me for pretending to be what I ain't. Traffic would drop to zero and my online life would end.

So, just because of lack of a humor category on Freeadforum, people who don't know me could hate me and Google might ban my butt from the internet, excommunicate my domain name and do all sorts of Google is a bully type heavy handedness. Cheers, Freeadforum!!

But do I care?

Erm. With a PR5...Ahem. I was all for scrubbing my application, but wise Mrs Ed said it is like a pig in a poke trying to find my site in Freeadforums anyway, so I was unlikely to be a source of annoyance to a single person, let alone a robot.

And you shouldn't care either about the impact of directory listings on your site, because directories are not worth worrying about. Ask Court about the mere 10% of your time that should be dedicated to building links.

Anyway, enough rambling, trying to create a link to Freeadforum.

To conclude, why do so few directories and category-based web sites have no allowance for HUMOR? I guess that if you are in the business of compiling lists, you are unlikely to have a funny bone in your body? What do you reckon?

For years I used to funk around looking for new applications and plug-ins to make my Mac go faster or look snazzier. Funnily enough, though, when I started this blog, I stopped the mindless searching and fine tuning for my own ends and limited myself to the occasional software review for my readers benefit.

Kicking around for 5 minutes yesterday I decided it was time to break the habit of a blog lifetime and go geeky again for my own pleasure, so I went to Versiontracker to seek out some ways to spice up browsing the web on Safari. Despite a lot of extra Safari info, my tweaking started and finished with Inquisitor, a funky Web 2.0 search plug in.

Wot is Inquisitor?

Basically, as you type a search term, Inquisitor turns up all sorts of related search terms, reading your mind. It seems more like it is trying to change your mind, because as you type, it shows words and terms you never dreamt of.

For instance, in my mind I was searching HELP, but as I typed at my normal 34 words an hour, it turned me onto Heroes, then Hello Kitty. By the time I had looked through Hello Kitty's site, I forgot what i was looking for, and decided to write this post instead.

It is free, artsy and works with Yahoo search as default. Apparently you can use Google too. Buggered if I know how, but there you go. Looks sweet doesn't it?



And it found The Pisstakers, so all in all, a neat improvement on the standard fare for searching.

Funny Quote of the Day is by far the most popular page on the Pisstakers site. How annoying that the easiest to come by material attracts the most attention.

I jest, I am not annoyed, just saying that compared to writing real material, it was a doddle to compile a list of funny quotes that I found around the internet, in real life and on TV.

My own favorite is

If we were meant to be vegetarian, why did god make animals out of meat. Why not tofu? (Dan Nainan)

If you want thousands of people to continually call by and spend a few minutes perusing your blog, why not add a funny quote of the day page yourself, there is always room on the 'net for easy-to-read gems.

At a time when oil has hit $122 a gallon, some one still has the nerve to pump out an article warning against dumping your gas guzzler for a lean mean hybrid machine!

According to this (exxon?) sponsored post, owners of 30mpg cars would spend about $1700 a year less on gas than owners of a 15 mpg truck. This sounds all well and dandy and what can possibly be wrong with buying a fuel efficient run around - until you get to the premise of the article - that you need to sell your brand new truck, eat the depreciation AND spend $22,000 to acquire this hybrid car.

Now, of course the wheels fall off being efficient, and on that basis, $1700 savings at the pump only partially offset the overall cost of changing cars. So, there is no incentive to being socially responsible, as you were.

Except that instead of beating your head against a wall of stupidity and throwing money endlessly into the gas tank of a spanky new truck, how about this. Keep your truck for posing at the weekend, and spend $3500 on a second hand Japanese car that you can drive in the week. That way you break even financially by end of year one; from your low down sedan seat, you get to see just how stupid and overkill most trucks are for driving around town; and you can be fuel efficient.

Sorry to be sensible and all, Messrs Exxon and co. but who can afford to think the same old ways that got us into this gas dependent mess? Not me.

No doubt we will revisit the argument when oil hits $200 a barrel. Till then, happy driving.

I have noticed a lot of resistance to change, which surprises me, considering we are all so well educated, open minded and exposed to new ideas these days.

Resist the iPod

I remember loads of resistance to the iPod, with critics saying it would never take off because ALL it did was play MP3's. I suppose we expect the latest new thing to be ultra complex and have loads of bells and whistles and flashing lights. Perish the thought that we give up the fiddly and unreliable electronic device we already can't make work for something simple that does work!

Resistance in Germany

Talking electronic gizmos, a friend of mine was a big shot with Mercedes Benz and he said they met with constant resistance from suppliers whenever they asked them to produce new state-of-the-art components. It seems crazy to me that any high tech manufacturer would shy away from advancement, but there you go! Vorsprung durch Zwang? Progress by force.

Resistance from painters

I know a little bit about paint, and the construction industry, a domain that embraces the whole idea of resistance to change.

When I was working as a painter in the UK, I used to do a lot of research into new materials. I was a great fan of the Dutch, who are the masters at house painting, and so I gravitated towards paint from Dutch conglomerate Akzo. It was easy to get a perfect finish using their basic oil undercoats and gloss paints and fillers, and I raved about it to colleagues, but to almost no avail. There was a lot of lunatic reasoning against change - saying that it was best to stay with what was known; that the price of the known brands was right; that customers would think they were being gipped when contractors turned up with paint from a company they had never heard of. Whatever.

I was a lone voice banging my head against a wall, but thanks to millions invested in marketing, Akzo did change the minds of painters, convincing them to change paint and get an advantage so they could make money more easily. It makes you wonder why they bothered helping such curmudgeonly old bastards.

In fact I was talking to a tech guy from Akzo and he said they had many products in mainland Europe that would not be available in the UK for years, because, not surprisingly, the island mentality market wasn't ready for them. You get the product you deserve.

Conclusion

It is hard to criticise people for not wanting to change, especially as I have just retrograded 50 years by getting a wood, not fiberglass boat, but it does annoy me when people stick with the same old same old, despite new options. Do you often come across Luddite mind set and scratch your head? Or do you think there is too much change going on for our own good anyway, so change is not a good thing?

Change a habit of a lifetime and resist the urge to not comment...

A wise man was telling me a couple of gems to help us get through family life.

Never let the sun set on an argument. Great idea, but if I lived by that maxim, I would get to sleep once every two weeks.

When your first daughter is born, go and talk to a tree for 15 minutes. Repeat this tree-talking ritual every night for 13 years, by which time you will be ready. (This sort of reminds me of a school teacher I once had, who said that kids are great, as long as they are born at 18.)

And then he finished with a story about a friend who had lost 2 wives. The first wife died from an overdose, and the second from a fractured skull. That bitch wouldn't swallow the pills.

Got any more?