Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

When science and math people put on a strong push for adoption of the metric system a few decades ago, Isaac Asimov jokingly proposed we needed some other metric units. He proposed several, the only one of which I remember was the Milihelen, which is the amount of beauty it takes to launch one ship. When I worked as a lab tech, my lab mate and I, in response to Dr. Asimov, invented many of our own, especially on Friday afternoons. Most of them I have forgotten, or am unwilling to repeat. Two of them I have included below. I got to thinking we could use a few right now. So here are my offerings:

• The kilobachman could measure so many things. Lets say dishonesty and insensitivity.



• The microcheney equals a common everyday lie.
• The decabeck describes a thumb skewed ten degrees from opposable.
• The macromartha is 1,000,000 hours of pointless media time.
• The unbiddenbidenbabble is 15 seconds of careless comment.
• A mccain mile is the distance is decent man goes to find the larger view. (But the mccain mile has some potholes, the depth of which are measured in decapalins).
• A Yankee penny equals $1,000,000 of player salary.
• A nanodale meters the speed of cleverness.



• The Connelly Constant expresses an ever-lighthearted point of view.
• The Clyde Constant expresses an ever-lightheaded point of view.
• A decacoffeesnort is a small bit of humor.
• A kilocoffeesnort is too crude to discuss.
• A kilobartholemew reports on the contents of TGitH’s closet.
• A squarerenee measures yard space turned into garden.
• Dynohollies express Utube searching skill.
• Hemisemidemiquibbles are needed to measure rudeness on the Trail.
• Gusgrits measure the rate of a Northerner’s adjustment to Southern life.
• The lurker curve is a line below which are hidden unknown wonders and a too-quiet goatherd.
• A decakilobaboon is a 100-post day on the Trail.
• Centiblevin equals a ten degree forward nod of the head from boredom.
• Thirteen duorhondas helped out with Steve’s tree.
• A centitim equals 100 typing errors.
• A megahurts measures fibromyalgia pain level.



• OMGdro’s number: number of pointless text messages sent everyday in America (6.022 ×10 to the 23rd power).
• Potatoes cubed is what I am working on for supper.
• An angstdrum holds 120 gallons of fret and worry.
• Kilowhats measure, well . . . some folks just don’t get it. At all.

I could not think of a good measure for basic human goodness, which says something about me, the state of the times, the media, or all of the above.

What would you name the unit for human decency/kindness/generosity?
(Or anything else I missed.)

Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

Sisyphus was a man in Greek mythology assigned the punishment of rolling an immense boulder to the top of a steep hill. At once it rolled back to the bottom, from where he had to push it back up, only to see it roll down again. Endlessly, eternally, up and then down the hill. It is one of my favorite images from mythology.

Who has not felt like Sisyphus?

We tend to think of Sisyphean tasks as onerous. But not necessarily. An example for me was sermon-writing. When I was a pastor, I had a weekly process I followed, which led me through a seven-day cycle of inspiration, creativity, and soul-searching. Struggle, too, but that made the climb meaningful. I am about to give my last sermon, or maybe I gave it already, depending on two factors out of my control. Either way it was a good climb which I did about 700 times, counting all special services as well as Sundays. I have a friend who has done it over 3400 times, as I estimate it.

School teaching was another example for me. I would spent a year pushing the boulder up the hill, that is, getting my students to where they should be at the end of the year. Three months later I would come back into the classroom to meet the rock at the bottom of the hill. Not that I am complaining about that. It was a joyous and rewarding thing to get them to the end of the year, with many a struggle along the way. Life comes in many cycles, and that was one of the best in my life. Until, with my low threshold of boredom, I had done it just too many times. Twenty years ago I met a strong, vibrant, and life-filled woman who pushed that rock up the hill 54 times, claiming, and I believe her, to have loved every trip up the hill. She did it exactly twice as many times as I did.

Why had I burned out on a nine-month climb and I did not on a seven-day climb? Hmm?

Life is full of the unappealing hill climbs, such as housework. You clean and it gets dirty again. My own particular bane is making beds.

At this age I have discovered that my primary Sisyphean tasks have shrunk from nine months or seven days to 24 hours. Such is aging; tasks get more personal and come in shorter spans of effort. Also, now there seem to be a few boulders to push up each day, such as pain-management, keeping the filtered water bottle filled, following this blog, and forgiving myself for stupid mistakes.

How would you be punished or rewarded in a Greek myth? For what?

Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

As my wife’s permanent chauffeur, I spend much time in medical waiting rooms. Even though I have learned to bring my own entertainment, I have informally cataloged what is provided as reading and viewing material.

One clinic provides nothing because they believe that the reading material spreads germs. Two have taken out play areas for children on the same principle.

As a casual observer of marketing, I notice how the marketers have, as they will, found the captive audience. A few places provide the standard array of magazines, usually with a plastic cover over them on which are imprinted ads for the company which paid for the magazine.

Much more common is to devise ways to market medical services and products, almost entirely drugs, to the captives. Or is that victims? Let’s say patients or impatients, as is maybe more often the case. The two favorite media are TV screens and medical-interest magazines. The technology is slowly expanding. It usually extols the virtues of the organization holding you prisoner. Ads for drugs are also slowly creeping in.

I scan the medical-interest magazines before reading my Dickens or Hardy, two authors I read in waiting rooms because it takes an environment such as that to make them interesting. Most clinics contain two types of such magazines: a general medical health publication, or ill-health as I shall explain, and a magazine aimed at the focus of that waiting room, such as arthritis or neurology.

The content of these magazines has made two things clear. 1) No disease is real until someone famous gets it, or as second-best, the parent of a famous person. 2) There is a myriad of diseases of which I should be terrified, things of which I have never heard, which get catchy names as if Madison Avenue named them. Did it?

Overstatement is standard fare, especially on the cover. For instance one magazine on its cover suggested that all Boomers have a mysterious disorder called HepC, which turned out to be hepatitis C. The reason, as I read inside, is that we all, it seems, shot up drugs, shared toothbrushes, and participated in orgies. I guess I wasn’t invited.

The purpose of these magazines is ads for drugs, with long legal statements in very minute print, too small for most of the patients in the waiting rooms to read. Another Madison Avenue decision? The listed side-effects are more terrifying than anything Stephen King would dare write. All the ads tell me to ask my doctor about the drug, meaning to prescribe the drug. I tried to talk my wife into taking a list of the drugs in with her and asking her doctor about each of them. My wife has no sense of fun.

Doctors hate ads like that, and they hate articles which tell people that they have the latest dread disease. But I am quite sure the management of the clinic or hospital is placing them there and not the doctors.

The slowest passage of time known to humans is that spent in waiting rooms. People need distraction, but the content of the TV screens and the magazines seems to me so contrary to what people really crave or to the purpose of the visit.

What would you put in medical waiting rooms to distract and or comfort people?

Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

I am not the man I used to be. My doctor told me so.

Well, it was her nurse who told me that I have become a lesser man. The way she said it was, “Your height is 5 feet 10 inches.”

I said, “Really?”

She said, “I’ll check it again. You’re 5 feet 10 AND 1/8 inches.” Ah, me! Phew! That 1/8 made me feel better.

Since my height for most of my life was 5 feet 11 7/8 inches, it is not a stretch, pun intended, to say I have lost two inches in height. Because I always claimed a height of 6 feet, it is only fair that I now claim a height of 5-10. I lost most of that height in a short time, less than a year. Ah, me! I think I’ll call myself a Settler. Maybe gravity suddenly became stronger in Mankato. Maybe my load of care is getting me down. Now I really am in depression. It has to be something the Republicans did. “They’re turning me into a Newt!”

Don’t you think I would have noticed? That it would have been harder to get things down from shelves, for instance. Harder to reach light bulbs. I am a typical male: I don’t see the thing right in front of my face unless you point at it. Wait a minute, it was harder to reach light bulbs. It should now be easier to reach down to the floor, but it’s not. Ah, me! Go figure.

Another bad thing is that I am now ten more pounds overweight, even though I have lost weight. Ah me!

Then I noticed that the cuffs of my pants and pajamas are getting frayed. One could say I’m dressed in drag. I told the launderer he should have spotted it and told me, but he has lint for brains. Now I really have a problem; I cannot buy off-the-rack anymore. I have a rather odd body. Despite having once been 6 feet tall, I had a 30 inch inseam, which is the bottom end of rack-sizes for my waist. I seem to have a 29-inch inseam or closer to 28 perhaps. Ah me! I could take up sewing.

Wait! A friend just sent a picture of fourth graders in the Two Harbors of my youth. All the boys had the cuffs of their jeans turned up three to four inches. Could we bring back that style, please?

What style do you want to bring back?