You may recall that I blogged on March 29 about a fatally flawed effort by the Gannett Benefits Center to update retiree insurance beneficiary information. They sent a flyer with a form that omitted any place for the retiree’s name. Anyone who completed one ended up sending in the name of their beneficiary with no way to know whose beneficiary it is. Smart, huh?Recently, you were solicited to provide Gannett with updated beneficiary information. If' you’ve already responded to that letter we sent in March, please take a moment to call the Gannett Benefits Center at xxx-xxx-xxxx to confirm we have your beneficiary information.“Confirm?” No, that’s just a way to get the info from the dopes who didn’t realize the first form wasn’t worth filling out. “Second chance” my ass. This is the first real chance. Why not just say you fucked up and get on with it, rather than try to lie to us?
This letter serves as your second chance to provide us your updated beneficiary information if you haven’t previously completed this task. Please fill out the simple tear-off form below and return it in the enclosed envelope on or before June 8, 2012.
I’ve been struggling for the last few weeks to get my computer back to the level of functionality that I had before the hard drive crash on April 30. Today’s challenge is my Nikon Coolscan IV transparency scanner.
Nikon orphaned it when Windows 7 came out, but I had a software fix that had it working before the crash. I tried to replicate the fix and, so far, haven’t been successful.
The only way I can make it work is to use the XP virtual machine mode in Windows 7 Premium. Microsoft recognized that people had a lot of software that wouldn’t make the jump to Win7 when they upgraded from XP, so they created a feature replicating an XP operating system within Win7. But it’s absurdly laborious to make a scan and move it from the virtual machine to Photoshop CS5 on the regular machine.
Here are a couple of scans of long lost images of my son Sean when he was just starting on his musical career. The top photo is Sean performing on the auditorium stage at Orchard Country Day School in Indianapolis where he went from second through eighth grades.
And here he is with his first electric guitar – an Ibanez copy of a Gibson Les Paul. I always loved the look of that guitar and Sean quickly learned to do great things with it.
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Later: I emailed these two photos to Sean and got this email in return:
I see the ESP is in full effect.
Yesterday afternoon, I was telling Ruth about South Pacific and how there's a show within the show, and how we performed SP at Orchard and I played "Blackbird" in my first-ever public performance.
The next morning, this photo was in my inbox.
Thank you Obi-Wan Marshall Flora.
Here’s a photo I shot at a gas station in downstate Illinois on the Labor Day holiday weekend of 1988. BMW rider/friend Rich Nathan were on our way home from a ride to the Ozarks.
Their mom is smoking a cigarette next to a gas pump, but that’s hardly the worst of the kids’ worries.
These fraternal twins – assuming their parents didn’t kill them through negligence or stupidity – would be in their mid-20s today.
Just a reminder to my fellow motorcyclists on the eve of the Memorial Day holiday weekend (no, it’s not the “Memorial Weekend”) to wear all of your gear and make sure your passengers do too. Also, never let a kid ride on the gas tank. Think about what happens if you have to make a panic stop – you either launch the kid off the front of the bike or grab the kid and compromise your ability to brake.
In short, don’t be a moron.
I was rooting through a box the other day when I came across the Tiki God that I thought was way cool back in my sophomore year in high school (1960-61).
It was something I found in a magazine that looked exotic and evoked a vague Polynesian vibe.
It’s a crudely carved 2½” tall wooden image with green glass eyes and a leather thong for wearing around the neck.
I suspect most of my classmates just wrote it off as more evidence of my eccentric nature. Nobody made a big deal about it and I don’t recall any other Tiki Gods popping up in my school to make me a serious trend-setter. Nope. It was just me and my stupid Tiki God.
Here’s a photo from the 1961 yearbook, the Oracle, showing me wearing it and leering at Miss Stiles, a student Latin teacher. I was also wearing my favorite ultra-fashionable shawl collar sweater that day. I really liked shawl collar sweaters. I hope they come back into fashion for men someday.
The girl in the white blouse sitting in front of me is Sharon Hensley, my girlfriend at the time. If she had an opinion about my Tiki God, I don’t recall her ever expressing it.
But she did dump me in the spring of 1961, so maybe the Tiki God was the problem after all. I’ll have to ask her at our 50-year class reunion next year.
My new Browning cold weather sleeping bag arrived on Monday, in plenty of time for the BMW RA rally in Copper Mountain, Colo. next month. The problem is that I’m not all that keen on freezing my ass off getting in and out of the bag and waiting for the day to warm every morning. Also, the bag takes up a lot of space in my waterproof “camping stuff” bag, which will necessitate replacing my Thermarest air mattress with a Big Agnes Q-Core air mattress.
The latest watercolor from our granddaughter Lisa in Las Vegas. She’ll be 8 years old on the 30th. I printed it and put it on the refrigerator door.
I pre-registered for last year’s BMW Motorcycle Owners of America national rally at Bloomsburg, Pa., but had to skip it when Maria developed serious back problems. (I count myself lucky, since those who went had to suffer through a murderous heat wave.)
But not going to the rally meant I wasn’t there to claim my patch and pin. I’m not all that keen on patches, but I really wanted the pin for my collection.
I contacted the MOA earlier this month to see if I could buy one and Rhonda Glasgow of the MOA Country Store said she’d send me one gratis – well, almost gratis, since I already paid for it with my registration. It was waiting in my post office box when I returned from the European Riders Rally on Sunday.
Thanks, Rhonda!
I didn’t post over the weekend (the autographed photo of the day was a robo-post timed to publish on Saturday morning) because I was in a Wifi/Sprint Data Service black hole in southeastern Kentucky.
It was my first time at the European Riders Rally, sponsored for the past 14 years by the BMW Motorcycle Club of Nashville (Tenn.) at Burkesville, Ky.
Besides being in a techno vacuum, Burkesville is in a dry county, which necessitates rides 14 miles south to a beer-selling convenience store just across the state line in Tennessee.
Burkesville is a little shy of 400 road miles from here. I left at 8:15 a.m. Friday and arrived about 3 p.m., startled to discover I was still in the Central Time Zone.
We ended up with about 35 members of the Indianapolis BMW Club present which earned us the top club attendance award for the third consecutive years. Peggy Rose Garrison won the Long Distance Female Rider award.
I had Friday night dinner and Saturday morning breakfast at a café on Veterans Street that had great food at ridiculously low prices.
My grilled tenderloin sandwich with a mountain of home fries Friday evening was $5.50. Breakfast was 2 eggs over easy, a big sausage patty and two pieces of toast for only $3.25.
Since our rally fee ($40 in advance, $45 at the gate) included Saturday lunch and dinner, I ended up spending $16 and change on food for the entire trip. It 
also included a rally pin and a very nice long-sleeved t-shirt emblazoned with the rally logo. The only glitch was the misspelling of Burkesville on the rally pin. They got it right on the shirt.
(It’s not the first rally pin screw-up I’ve seen. The BMW MOA rally pin from 2006 put the rally in “Burilngton” Vermont.)
We were sitting around shooting the breeze before lunch Saturday when I asked if anyone had any thoughts about my ABS warning light flashing when I start my bike in the morning, then staying off if I re-start the engine a few miles later.
The consensus was that it was an early warning sign of a dying battery not having enough power to boot up the ABS circuitry until it had been charged from riding.
I called the service department of Bloodworth BMW Motorcycles in Nashville and Dave Bloodworth agreed that was the most likely cause. If I could get to their service department by 3 p.m., they could install a new battery for me, he said.
So I threw on my gear and hit the road. My Garmin Zumo GPS estimated my time of arrival at 2:44 p.m. as I rolled out of the rally grounds. But Garmin had no way of knowing about a funeral procession and miles and miles of yard sales around Lafayette, Tenn. And just as I closed in on the dealership, it started to rain.
I arrived at 3:10 p.m. and asked if I was totally screwed. I was not and they were happy to take my $247 for the battery, labor and (showing my gratitude – a shop t-shirt) before they closed at 4 p.m.
The ride back was equally hellish with some rain and a couple of miles-long construction backups. I arrived back at Burkesville about 7:10 p.m., exhausted and severely dehydrated – more dehydrated than I knew.
The Nashville Club ladies were cleaning up from the steak dinner, but found me a plastic knife and fork and set me up with a big steak and a serving of peach cobbler.
I’d stopped at the state line beer store and bought a six-pack of Busch beer, so I had libations for the evening. I drank three beers and then donated the rest, crawling off to bed about 9:30 p.m.
Nature failed to call me during the night and I awoke, drank three cups of coffee and packed without feeling the need to whiz. I also had a serious muscle cramp in my left thigh as I packed my Thermarest air mattress and my nearly 40-year-old North Face down sleeping bag crouched in my tent. I forced the restroom issue just to be safe before I hit the road. That is serious dehydration.
I was vexed to notice that my ABS warning light issue was still present when I fired the engine Sunday morning. I gassed at a convenience store on the downtown Burkesville square and headed out of town about 7:30 a.m., pausing a few miles south of town to photograph a barn with quilting graphic over the open door. I did a restart of the engine about 20 miles later and the ABS light went out and stayed out.
Wary of I-40 construction, I took state and U.S. highways down to Nashville and the interstate, logging 42 mpg on the first tank of gas. I stopped at a McDonald’s in Lafayette, Tenn. for a parfait-and-coffee breakfast and to do a quick blog entry. But my netbook had crashed, telling me it couldn’t find the config.sys file. (When I got home and consulted my computer mentor Tim Balough, we concluded the best fix was to wipe the SSD and reinstall Windows XP.)
I was home by 3 p.m., took a shower, had a bite to eat and hung my dew-soaked tent up to dry in the garage.
I had taken a Walmart folding chair that I bought at the 2010 Falling Leaf Rally, having finally learned that it’s damned uncomfortable not having a chair at a rally and not wanting to invest in the oh-so-stylish $139 Kermit Chair. I can buy a $19.99 Walmart chair at each of the next seven rallies and still be ahead of the game.
My Walmart chair, however, made it hard to see in my mirrors when lashed on top of my waterproof bag holding tent, sleeping bag and air mattress.
So I left it standing forlornly next to the fire pit along with a couple of blue chairs which I’m sure were eventually packed and schlepped home. It’s my gift to Burkesville in gratitude for their hospitality.
Here’s another Ebay find – a photo of Astronaut Nancy Currie autographed “to John.”
Currie, 53, is a veteran of four Space Shuttle missions, most recently in March, 2002.
Jack desperately wants someone to play tug-of-war with him and the Friendly Fox.
Pete absolutely will not condescend to play that game with him, probably because he outweighs Pete by a considerable margin.
