Frozen Puerto Rico (The Distractors)

The whole point of this Greenland hoax is to distract us from what is really going on.

Trump is at his old antics again.  He does or says outrageous things and the media (and the populace) eat it up, either as fans or as outraged haters.  It is always ridiculous stuff, too - things he never or rarely follows up on, like his chunks of "wall" which are now in disrepair as they can be sawed through with a battery-operated sawzall.

He brought up this Greenland thing before and it never went anywhere because it couldn't.  Short of declaring war on the EU by invading Greenland, there is no way we could acquire it or want to.   After all, we've had a military base in Thule since 1950 - what other strategic value could Greenland provide to us?

And what burdens would be involved?  You know the old legend - that Iceland was so-named to discourage settlers on that small fertile island, while Greenland was so-named to encourage settlers to its icy wasteland.  Greenland has a lot of snow and ice - so much so that airplanes from WWII that crash-landed on the glaciers are now buried under hundreds of feet of packed snow and ice.

Denmark subsidizes the Greenland economy, which in turn exports fish to them.  It is hardly an "asset" but more of a burden, much as Puerto Rico has become for the US.  And speaking of which, if Greenland became a US territory, would that mean Greenlanders could move to the US as citizens, as Puerto Ricans currently do?  For a guy who hates Immigrants, Trump seems to want to bring in more.

The only way this would make economic sense would be if there was something in Greenland that the US wanted.  Oh, right, oil.  Perhaps Greenlanders will become the new Saudis in the future - unless the US steals their oil out from under them.

But the point is moot.  It is doubtful that Demark will sell Greenland to Trump, and taking the island territory by force would trigger a war with the EU - or perhaps that is part of the plan?

I doubt it.  I think the point is to distract us from what really matters - the slow descent into fascism that we are witnessing.  In an eerie parallel to Nazi Germany (or Communist Venezuela) Trump is appointing people to his cabinet with no qualifications whatsoever, other than a blind loyalty to their fearless leader.

It will not end well.  In the meantime, enjoy your media kibble?  Seen the new Melania biopic?  It pus the Barbie movie to shame! Lol.

Go Get Yourself a Cheap Dishwasher

 

Should you spend a lot on appliances?  If you want to....

Our old Kitchen Aid (Whirlpool) dishwasher died after 18 years.  Well, it still ran, but it leaked all over the floor, more than once, ruining the Engineered Hardwood floors.  Those bastards at This Old House have a lot to answer for - Engineered Hardwood was one of the neat-o products that Tom and Norm hyped on the show.  Vinyl planks and tile planks seem to be the new thing - at least they promise to be more water-resistant.

18 years is a long time - most appliances are designed for a 15-year design life and this is three years beyond that.  Throw in hard water and what's not to love?  We found the dishwasher encrusted with lime a few years back and ran some lime-away through it.  It sparkled!  A few years later it leaked all over the floor - not a lot and not all the time.  I cleaned the door seals with lime-away and that seemed to fix the problem.

By the way, during these episodes, I removed the dishwasher from the cabinet and was appalled by how sloppy the "professional installation" was.  They left the cover off the electrical connection box, and the wires were just hanging down (not secured with a conduit clamp or anything.  Yank the plug wire (they wired it with a plug) and the whole thing would become disconnected and probably electrocute you.

Where the unit was supposed to attach to the cabinet, the screws were not even threaded all the way in.  House flippers, man!  Why?  So I fixed the install as best I could (sans the connection box cover which was AWOL.  Did I mention they failed to put an air-gap trap on the drain line or even a trap loop?  Anything that backed up in the main sink went back into the dishwasher!

That's what you get with "free installation" from the local appliance store. No thanks, I'll do it myself!

Anyway, last month it started leaking again and more frequently - turning our blonde hardwood floors black.  If you let it dry out, as I noted before, most of the color comes back, with some grey stainage.  Again,  Engineered Hardwood was a fad at the time, and time has not been kind to it!  I tried cleaning the seals again and realized there was a LOT of crusty lime on the bottom of the door that I had missed before.  I scrubbed and scrubbed and applied lime-away gel until my hands burned, but to no avail.  After 18 years, the door seals were just not sealing.

A new door seal is $88 at Whirlpool, plus shipping.  Amazon has a generic gasket for $25.  I already replaced the silverware basket ($25 for a generic) and the rise agent cap (fell off and melted to the heater coil) which cost another $25.  Was I ready to throw another hundred bucks at an end-of-life appliance?  Rust was starting to show around the door and the plastic control panel had turned from white to a putrid chartruse - as certain types of plastic are known to do. The drain hose has turned yellow and powdery and is hard as a rock.  There comes a time to call it quits.

It was a nice machine - stainless steel body with a white painted door.  Today, most machines are plastic bodies with stainless steel doors - painted in clearcoat.  We went to Lowe's and they had a Whirlpool, very similar, but with a plastic body, in stock, for $499.  It was the second-cheapest machine they had.  They had a "Frigidaire" model in white for $399, but out-of-stock.

These "big box" stores carry very little inventory, other than a few "cash and carry" items.  We went to La Salsa for street tacos and beers and tried Home Depot.  They had a Whirlpool, but not in stock, but had a GE model for $448, identical to the Frigidaire.  I asked the nice lady if they could do anything about the price and she knocked $50 off without blinking, bringing the price to $398, beating Lowes by a dollar.

Besides, our cheap new microwave is a GE, so it "matches" so to speak.

Put it in the truck and off we went.  I decided to buy a new install kit ($20) as the plastic supply hose looked sketchy after 18 years.  Also, for some reason, newer dishwashers require an adapter for the supply line - garden hose to 3/8" compression.  It all came in the kit.

The old dishwasher was wearing a "jacket" of insulation and Mr. See suggested we transfer that to the new machine.  Piece of cake and I am sure it cut down on the sound level.  The machine is not noticeably louder than the old one.  The old machine had a stainless body, covered with a tar-like sheet to cut down on drumming noises.  Plastic bodies don't have as much of a problem, apparently.

The cheaper machines do cut some other corners, though.  The seal between the frame and cabinets (which clips on) is "optional" so I took it off the old machine, cleaned it, and put it on the new on.  It gives the install a finished look.

I added a trim piece under the edge of the counter, as the opening (again, flippers!) was at least an inch too tall, and you can't screw the retraining clips into Corian anyway.  Problem solved and it looks better than the old machine did, not that you'd notice unless you are sitting on the floor.

Why not buy a $500 or $900 machine? Well, the old machine lasted 18 years and 18 years from now I will be 83 years old, if I live that long.  I have already have had a (mild) stroke and am taking small doses of anti-dementia medication and.... a new twist, Parkinson's medication.  It isn't as bad as it sounds, and I am feeling better on the meds.  BUT.... I doubt we will be living here in 18 years, much less five or ten, tops.  We have talked a lot about downsizing in the past, and the time may be coming sooner than we think.

Our 18-year-old kitchen with its custom-made honey-brown cabinets and Corian countertops and white appliances was already outdated in 2006.   Today, a buyer would rip it all out and half the walls as well.  Perhaps we might paint the cabinets white and the walls "sea salt" grey (already so 2020!).

But as you get older, throwing money at houses gets really old, really fast.  Sure a fancy kitchen is nice to show off, but that's about all they are good for.  Most people I know with "gourmet" kitchens can't even boil water without burning it and they eat out - all the time - at fast-casual restaurants.  They call themselves "foodies" too.  I am not being judgmental here, just observing.  They are nice folks, but the fancy kitchen is just another accessory - like the Lexus in the driveway - designed to denote status.  And humans are status-seeking creatures.  We all are.

Well, I think until you reach a certain age and realize that just being healthy and financially secure is really all that matters/  What other people think of you quickly loses its importance in your life.  And even the "pride of ownership" of nice things fades quickly as those nice things turn into an endless stream of chores or people you have to pay to do those chores for you.

At this point, all I want is a dishwasher that doesn't piss all over the floor!

Joint Tenancy (With Right of Survivorship)

When legislators change the laws, it can result in unintended consequences.

We put the condo on the market and got two offers fairly quickly.  The first wanted us to "take back" a note (mortgage) with the buyer paying cash for the rest.  As I have noted before, this can be advantageous from a tax perspective, as instead of having a one-time capital gains, you can have a spaced-out income stream (including interest!) over a number of years.  That offer did not pan out.

A second buyer quickly came in, looking to buy and then rent out the condo as a landlord.  They offered $150,000 cash with closing in two weeks.  We moved closing to January 7th so as to have the reported income in 2025, not 2024.  But then all hell broke loose.

The title insurance company balked, claiming there were "clouds" in the title.  The chain of title is pretty short.  The condo company bought the apartment complex from the original landlord and then created the condominium and sold off the individual units to buyers.  The first buyer, in 1982, was a flight attendant who bought the place for $38,000, with her Father co-signing the loan, I believe.  They were listed as "Joint Tenants" on the title.  Nearly two decades later, she sold the unit to us in 1999 for.... $38,000.  The units had appreciated to over fifty grand in the interim, but the real estate bubble of 1989 burst and it wasn't until the 2000's that the properties started appreciating again.

Her Father had since died, and as was the practice in the 1980s, a copy of the death certificate was filed, which under the old law would have perfected title solely in the flight attendant's name.  She, in turn, conveyed title to us, in fee simple, as the sole owner of the property.

So now, 25 years later, we are trying to sell.  What's the problem?  Well, under Title 55-20.1 of the Virginia code as amended in 1999, the term "Joint Tenants" no longer includes "survivorship" unless explicitly set forth in the deed, for example by saying "Joint Tenants With Right of Survivorship" or "JTWROS" as they say on car title deeds.

I talked about JTWROS a long time ago.  If you own a property in JTWROS with another person, when one of you dies, the property automatically conveys to the remaining party(s).  No will, no intestate, no probate. Just record a copy of the death certificate and you're done.

Property can be held in a number of ways.  You can be a sole owner, own through an LLC or other corporate entity, own as Tenants in the Entirety (if you are married) or as Tenants in Common or as  Joint Tenants. (We will leave Life Estates for trick questions on the Bar Exam). Tenants in the Entirety is similar to JTWROS, in that if one spouse dies, the property automatically conveys to the other. Each spouse owns the "entirety" of the property, hence the name.

Tenants  in common means each tenant owns a share of the property - usually 50/50 for two owners.  When we bought Washington Road in 1989, the title company handling the closing put us down as Tenants in Common.  I asked him to correct this to JTWROS and he balked.  "If you died, Mr. See would get the whole house?  Don't you want your half to go to your family?"  Being gay back then was something of a novelty still - and may soon become so again.  But the documents were corrected and the closing attorney shook his head in amazement that two men would want to own a property together in JTWROS.

And  by the way, I made sure the phrase "with right of survivorship" was in the deed.  And it is a good thing I did, as at that time, the law in Virginia had been changed, such that unless those magic words were included, "Joint Tenants" was presumed to mean Tenants in Common.  The raises the question, if Joint Tenants (sans magic words) means Tenancy in Common, then why have two legal terms for the same thing?  It makes no sense at all.

I am not sure what the impetus to change the law was.  My gut reaction is that it was a housekeeping statute, designed to bring Virginia property code in line with the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) a movement that has been going on for some time to bring various State Laws into conformity with one another so as to avoid confusion.  In this case, it created it.

Or maybe they changed the law because those nasty gays were buying houses in Joint Tenancy and during the AIDS crises, families who threw their gay kids out of the house as teens, now wanted half of the rapidly appreciating homes the gays bought in gentrifying neighborhoods.  Let's hope it wasn't that!  Then again, what explanation makes any sense?

The question is, of course, whether it was meant to be retroactive.  I found one source that said it was not (I cannot find it again, thanks Google AI!).  Meanwhile, Google AI, without any sources, other than the code, claims it was.  If the latter is the case, it throws the validity of a huge number of property titles in the Commonwealth of Virginia into question.  In the hundreds of years property has changed hands in the State, surely there is a "Tenants in Common" deed in the chain of title of nearly every property!

This Richmond School of Law, Law Review article seems to imply that the legislative intent was to make the law retroactive, unless....

"The better view would suggest that the amendment and reenactment of the effective date provision in section 55-9, which occurred in pari materia with the enactment of new section 55-20.1, shows a legislative intent that section 55-20.1 should be treated the same way, i.e., retroactively, except to the extent that such retroactivity would affect vested rights. See id. §§ 55·9, -20.1 (Cum. Supp. 1999)"

In this case, after the death of her Father, the flight attendant had vested rights.  He died in 1989, vesting her rights to the property a decade before the law was passed.  It seems so simple to me!

So, 25 years have passed.  Believe it or not, the flight attendant is still alive, but it appears that there may be other heirs descendant from her Father.  If they can be found and persuaded to sign a quitclaim deed, the problem is solved.  But of course, what is their motivation to sign?  They might argue that they are entitled to a share of the property - maybe even up to one-half!  Although I suspect the flight attendant is one of the heirs and thus the share would be far less.

There are other options, of course.  We could (and probably will) bring a Motion to Quiet Title to perfect out title claim.  If my legal argument is correct and the "new" Title 55-20.1 doesn't apply retroactively, then the issue is moot. I would also argue that since we have been "notoriously occupying" the property for 25 years, we take title by adverse possession.  What constitutes notorious occupation varies, but paying the property taxes and utilities is one sure sign.  There may be some statute of limitations issues, but I am not sure of that.  25 years is a long time.

No matter what happens, it appears we lost the buyer and we will have to put the property on the rental market again, as it may take months to sort this all out.

But what about title insurance?  Yes, we had a policy - for $38,000 - and the title insurance company went bankrupt in the meltdown of 2008.  We can file a claim with the State Insurance Commission, but that may return only pennies on the dollar and take years (I plan on doing it anyway).  Meanwhile, a motion to quite title will run $5,000 to $10,000 in attorney's fees.

This leaves the original title company - do we sue them?  They should have "errors and omissions insurance" of their own, which should cover the cost of the motion to quiet title.

In any event, it is a real hot mess, and if you know someone who wants to rent a condo in NoVa, let me know!

What Was Once Easy Is Now Hard

Cover letters and resumes are a thing of the past?

Many young people, when applying for a job, are chagrined to hear that they have to supply a cover letter and a resume - after entering the same data into a company website and attaching it all to an e-mail.  Why do we have these antiquated requirements and why are they so hard to deal with?

A patron recently donated some equipment to the Parcheesi club and we needed to send a thank-you letter acknowledging the gift, not only as a courtesy, and not only to encourage future donations, but to provide written evidence to the donor should they try to deduct the cost of the gift.

It took us four days to write and send the letter.

Back in the day, my office would send out dozens of letters a day, as well as thick FedEx (and later, Priority Mail) envelopes with 50-100 page documents and accompanying photocopies of supporting documents.  The world ran on paper, not just a few years ago, and not surprisingly, we had systems in place to generate reams of paper documents.

Before the advent of computers, it was row after row of secretaries, banging away on IBM Selectrics and in years before that, Royal manual typewriters.  In an era before wite-out, your error rate had to be very low.  Every executive had their own secretary, to prepare and file documents and even set up phone calls.  They were human computers in an era before computers.

With word processing, it got even easier to generate volumes of letters - and fewer people were needed.  I had templates set up in WordPerfect for DOS, for routine reporting letters and with a simple keystroke or two, a "macro" would enter the client name and address, salutation, and "re: line" for the matter at hand.  A cover letter could take as little as 15 seconds to prepare.

Cover letters and Resumes were de rigeur back then, even after e-mail became a thing.  A properly drafted cover letter and resume was a chance to show you knew how to draft proper business correspondence, as well as demonstrate your attention to detail.  Woe be to the applicant who had typos in his resume or cover letter!

But letter writing was historically what drove the business world back then.  "In response to your letter of the 6th, I bring to your attention..." and so on an so forth.  Particularly in the era when phone calls were expensive, the business letter ruled.  It put your words right on someone's desk and they had to deal with it.  

Even personal communications - particularly personal communications - relied upon the mail.  I recounted before how we found a collection of "antique" post cards from Mark's Grandmother.  One of them was just a blank card with the inscription, "Coming up on the train tomorrow, meet you at the station at 3:00!"  They were confident that if the post card went out in the morning's mail, it would arrive the same day or the next morning at the latest.  When a communications channel is essential, it is made to work well.

Today?  Well, I am waiting for a medication that was mailed on December 20th and is shown as "in transit" for the last four days.  No one cares anymore as most of the mail is just junk anyway - advertising circulars and such.  We SPAMmed the USPS and like an old Usenet newsgroup, it has devolved into ads for come-ons and scams.

But even phone calls and voicemails today are never returned and e-mails are deleted ("must have gone to my Spam folder! Whoops!") without a thought.  Communication has broken down.  And yes, even letters are ignored and often not acknowledged.

Today, well, letters are seen as an anachronism.  We just don't send them anymore.  Even e-mails are seen as old-school, with major corporations communicating via text with their customers and partners.

So, in a way, it is not surprising that sending a letter is now as difficult as it is.  Microsoft WORD was the first step in the degradation of letter writing ability.  A program designed to format books is a poor choice for the one-page business letter.  Hewlett-Packard made printing itself a toxic nightmare of high costs and proprietary "cartridges."  A full-time secretary from 1960 and an IBM Selectric would be cheaper to use than an HP printer these days - even accounting for inflation!

To prepare this one-page letter, we had to get the letter template - which was riddled with embedded codes and orphaned tabs (using tabs to format a document is just wrong! Set your margins!).  Left-justified?  Please, no!  And for God's sake, pick one font and stick with it.  At least they didn't use Comic Sans.  Oh, and if you are going to use pre-printed letterhead, format your documents so they don't print on the letterhead.  And yes, instead of ten carriage-returns, you should just set the top margin for page 1.   But this is lost on people today - formatting printed documents is a lost art.  Use that white space, people!

Anyway, once I fixed the letter, got the right address and so forth, obtained letterhead and envelopes, I was able to print the letter - after doing a test run so I could remember which side went "up" in the printer.  Got any stamps?  I bought a roll - a lifetime's supply at this point.

It was frustrating for me as I used to crank out form letters like this in minutes.  But today, well, we just don't write letters anymore so our systems are old and rusty or non-existent.  At one time, every town had at least one blacksmith and a stable for horses.  At one time, every town had a number of gas stations with a "mechanic on duty" sign out front.  Times change and things become obsolete - and harder to do.

The cover letter and resume seem antiquated - an antique as the suit-and-tie, which many employers expect applicants to wear, even today, for blue collar job interviews.  That being said, these anachronistic artifacts are a chance for a job applicant to stand out from the crowd, provided they are read at all.  Many companies are now using AI-enabled programs to screen applicant data, rejecting anyone (and everyone) who fails to mention a number of keywords.  It is kind of sad - and self-defeating for corporations.  I never would have been hired for any job in today's market.

There is a lot of noise going on over H-1B visa workers in the tech industry.  They often have the right credentials and proper keywords in their resume, along with the requisite degrees from acclaimed universities.  Well, that and they basically can't quit without being deported.  So it is like slave labor, really.

But think about it for a minute.  In today's job market where every employer wants ten years of experience and a masters degree for an entry-level coding job, would today's tech mavens be Billionaires or pizza delivery drivers? Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Dell, Ellison, and a host of others, all dropped out of college.  None would be hired today by the AI hiring algorithms, even with a good cover letter.

Back in the day, the cover letter was a chance to explain yourself to a human being.  Today, it is a pointless formality.  Letter writing died not only because no one writes letters anymore, but because no one reads them, either,

What's The Worst Christmas Song?

If you want immortality, record a Christmas song.

In the movie About a Boy, Hugh Grant plays a layabout who is living off the royalties of a song his father wrote, Santa's Super Sleigh, an obnoxious Christmas song created for the movie.  The movie was OK, I guess. But what struck me was how the writers fit into the plot what every musician knows - that if you record even one Christmas song, you will have royalties for life.

By this time tomorrow, you won't hear a single Christmas song.  So popular one day, dead-to-me the next, put out to the curb like a dried-out Christmas tree.  Odd, too, as in some Christian sects, Christmas runs 12 days (hence the song) until January 6th, at which time Congress convenes to tally Electoral College votes.  It's in the Bible, people!

And every year, it seems, there is an "it" Christmas song, just as every year there is the "must have" Christmas toy that is worth assaulting another shopper for.  Eventually, people get sick of the song and claim to hate it.  For example, All I Want For Christmas is You is objectively a "good" Christmas song, but rubs a raw nerve because it was overplayed.  In the past, other songs, such as Santa Baby (Popularized by Driving Miss Daisy) were played to the point where people said, "enough, already!" Then there is the brouhaha surrounding Baby, It's Cold Outside, which some claimed glorified date rape until it was explained to them otherwise.

Then, there are novelty songs, like Dominic(k) the Donkey which was all the rage one year and then forgotten about the next.  Chinga-D-Ching, Mofo! Or take, I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas - please!  A song that is bad objectively and also due to repetition.  Jingle Cats is reviled by Mr. See, but only because I obsessively played it on repeat one year just to freak out our felines.

There are, of course, songs that are bad, objectively, but don't get a lot of airplay.  The Waitresses (I Know What Boys Like) recorded Christmas Wrapping which is literally painful to listen to.

The gold standard of Christmas Music, of course, is The Vince Guaraldi Trio's A Charlie Brown Christmas which was released when I was five years old.  You can listen to nearly the entire album, again and again, without getting tired of it. Moreover, you can listen to some tracks, such as Linus and Lucy at any time of the year.  It is the standard by which all Christmas albums should be measured.

It is not, however, without its faults.  For example, the track, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing seems innocuous enough until the children's chorus chimes in, singing - as children are want to do - at high volume and off-key.  Screaming, really.  You can't hit "skip track" fast enough.  I basically erased this track from my Christmas play list.

The album also contains the best rendition of what I think is the worst Christmas song of all time - the Little Drummer Boy (Carol of the Drum).  Why do I despise this song?  A number of reasons.  Objectively, it is an obnoxious song, with its phrum-a-rum-bum nonsense.  But worse is its creation of a holy Christmas mythology - the presence of a drummer boy at the manger.  You can just hear Joseph shouting, "Will you keep that racket down!  We're trying to sleep here!  My wife just gave birth, for son's sake!"

To be sure, the nativity has been embroidered upon over the ages.  The "Three Kings of Orient Are" were apparently some kind of astronomers or wise men, not actual monarchs.  But at least the characters existed in some form in the Bible.  The little drummer boy, on the other hand, was manufactured from whole cloth.  And who in their right mind thinks banging on a drum is a suitable gift for a newborn infant?  It  just makes no sense.  And the song is obnoxious as well.  David Bowie and Bing Crosby, in a duet (no, really) managed to make it even worse, which is quite an accomplishment.

To be sure, Christmas is loaded with tacked-on mythology.  But it is secular mythology.  You can make up Santa and reindeer and Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman as secular icons, but I think there is something wrong with creating new Biblical characters for the sake of selling a song.  You know that Muslims wouldn't tolerate that sort of nonsense in their religion.  And I am sure Orthodox Jews are none-too-keen on Hanukkah Harry.  Make up secular icons all you want to, but when you start adding on to the Bible, you cross a line.

Then again, I guess that's how Christianity got started.

Merry Christmas and Yippee-Ki-Yay!

HONORABLE MENTIONS:  A reader reminds me that Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer is a classic horrible Christmas song.  Although the song dates back to 1979, I recall it being on continual rotation as recently as a few years back.

What's your least favorite Christmas song?