Stephen Lindquist(CHS) Lindquist

Posted on: Jul 07, 2024 at 4:33 AM

Happy Birthday

Posted on: Jul 07, 2023 at 4:33 AM

Posted on: Nov 28, 2021 at 9:26 PM

Happy birthday--- a few day's early in a vain attempt to make up for everyone I have belated

I am very happy to see another friendly face--- perhaps a reason to attend the upcoming reunion. To make things easier, I am selling my house in GF and moving to the Twin Cities.

Happy belated birthday---this is a dangerous trend. We are getting older and every day counts---wait a day and it could end up being a eulegySaturday, 25 November 2017

Dear Bob,
   It was certainly very nice to have you at home for a while. It is good to be able to have somewhere to go to rest your brain for a while. It is nice to have a place of refuge. There are many of your generation that are living in their mother’s basement, not having a job, never exercising, and playing video games all day. Some seem to think that this is a modern phenomenon: the urge to be a bum. This is not. Plenty of people have had this urge in the past. The difference between the guy living rough on the road and the guy in the basement is the parent: the bum was thrown out of the house until he got a job. He didn’t get a job. Of course, I am talking about (relatively) mentally normal people, not the poor bastard walking around arguing with himself making the people around him uncomfortable enough to ignore him (if he would just put a discarded cell phone up next to his ear; no one would give him unwanted attention). It seems as if humans were made to struggle. I do not think we were necessarily made to like struggle, but we have fooled it. Once we got over the hump of bare subsistence, we took our accumulated wealth and turned it into buying stuff and leisure time. Many still cannot handle leisure time, but that is because you have to learn how to use it--- a bit of struggle. Now we can keep ourselves entertained and help, as the fighter jocks say in The Right Stuff “maintain an even strain”---stress is the pressure upon something; strain is how it reacts. We have, in a way, conquered struggle. We actually have harnessed it and engage in it more intensely than our ancestors. The trick is: we get something out of it and we balance it with leisure. It is not perfect, but it works---in a way that people that work all the time or lay about all the time cannot understand. Somehow, I’ve compared struggle with inertia. I am not sure how to overextend the metaphor, so I will stop now.

There was an old cigarette commercial that said, “Are you smoking more, but enjoying it less?” The same can be said of another addiction: television watching. The trick is---and I think the Lindquist family has this one down---is to watch less and enjoy it more: watch either high quality stuff or some dumb stuff that amuses us, but select and evaluate it carefully. It is better to say to yourself, “I wonder if there are new episodes of ‘The Tick’ yet?” rather than, “I wonder if there is a rerun of ‘The Lucy Show’ where she and Mr. Mooney get locked in the bank vault---again.” Before I got a VCR, I would sit through an hour and a half of sitcoms. I liked the first and the last one, so I’d sit through the middle one so I would not get occupied with something else while waiting. The concept of not having the clock dictate when I watched something for my amusement was empowering. Once I got the VCR, I would skip the commercials and it fifty-four minutes, I saw the undiluted shows---assuming I did not cut off the ending (I soon learned about to put a two-minute “buffer” at the beginning and the ending of each show). When I first started recording television, only six minutes of commercials were allowed for each hour. The shows were twenty-six minutes long versus twenty-two now. This sounds minimal, but the ratio of commercial to show went from 6/60 or ten percent to 16/60 or almost twenty-seven percent. This will led, eventually to the total and utter destruction of network television. How so? Well, the television people contributed hugely to Ronald Regan’s campaign and his kept promise to deregulate television (and everything else). It was as if they thought people would sit through an infinite number of interruptions. They fought against VCRs--- on the grounds they were copyright infringement---but lost. They thought more commercials would give them more revenue, but since the viewership plummeted, it did not (apparently, the advertisers were not stupid, either and were not going to pay more money to reach fewer people). “No one would pay for television,” was the network credo. No, they would not---at least not the crap that you guys put out for years. When the head of the government agency, the FCC, described the medium as a “vast cultural wasteland”, I think that gives a good hint of the quality. I am amused when television viewers are described as “better educated” now---in entertainment matters. They are because they now have a choice. It is odd to me that the very American businesses that touted “free enterprise” did their best to restrict our choices for so many years: crappy entertainment, crappy cars, and crappy electronics. “Hoisted on their own petard,” is even more amusing when you look at the origin or the word---and its implication of fart: something smells here.

Love,
Saturday, 25 November 2017

Happy Birthday. Congrats on retirement. Personally, I am going to stay true to the original spirit of Social Security and retire closer to death.

Posted on: Jul 07, 2015 at 4:34 AM