A newfangled, old-fashioned telephone

In the past several months I’ve spent a lot of time and effort dealing with telephones. Not answering or making calls, but putting up with them.

It took me a while to warm up to cell phones when they first hit the market. I finally got one, and although I appreciated its value over a pay phone in an emergency, most of the time I’d forget to recharge it. They don’t work so good when they’re not recharged.

Last summer the Big Phone Company said they’d give customers a new cell phone because the old cells were no longer hooked up to the towers. The freebie phone was so tiny I couldn’t keep track of it, and I couldn’t hear the silly thing ring. I decided to upgrade and got an iPhone. I wanted an iPhone anyway. It seemed convenient to be able to check my email on it.

It also made me wonder what Alexander Graham Bell might think, after all the effort it took for him to make sure people at a distance could talk to each other, about a phone that enables you to write messages to people, or check the weather, or read the news. I’m sure my iPhone can do everything but scratch my back, but I learned enough about it to make it useful to me.

Unlike a lot of people, I kept my landline. It doesn’t need recharging like the cell phone does, so I know I’ll have phone service if I’m home. A few years back I got a snazzy cordless phone with caller ID and a built-in recording machine. The buttons on it were on the handset. I could walk around the house and talk at the same time to prove I was coordinated.

Recently its battery gave up and I’d often hear little beeps until eventually I heard nothing. The battery had run out and after recharging, it seemed to hold less and less of a charge. So — do I get a new battery or a new phone? They cost about the same.

One issue I had with it was when I tried to follow prompts — “if you are calling to place an order, press 1. To talk to a human being, hold your breath.” By the time I heard the instructions, pressed the appropriate number and put the handset back to my ear, the recording was off on a tangent somewhere else. And the buttons were so small I frequently pushed the wrong one. By the time I finished what I needed to do, I’d made five or six separate calls.

So I set out in search of the perfect phone, and I FOUND IT! It has buttons large enough that I don’t miss hitting the right number. And the keypad is separate from the handset. It doesn’t need a battery, except to keep the Caller ID display going. It looks like the kind of phones we all used 40 years ago because that’s all there was to use. I can still walk around and talk on it because it came with an extra-long cord. It doesn’t send text messages or receive them, but isn’t the whole purpose of a telephone to be able to TALK to someone?

It just goes to show, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Having that old-fashioned desk phone the Big Phone Company still makes is a step in the right direction.  

Alexander Graham Bell would be proud! Or maybe relieved.

Signs of spring

February hasn’t yet yielded to March, and already some signs of spring are showing. I didn’t see them, but I did hear a flock of geese honking across the sky earlier this week. That’s always a good sign.

And daffodils are either blooming or are about to bloom, and shoots of iris have poked through the ground. Tulips can’t be far behind.

But for me, spring means dandelions. If you Google dandelions, the first thing that pops up on the computer screen is how to kill them. That hardly seems fair. Dandelions are pretty, they’re yellow like sunshine. Spring sunshine. They smell good. Their scent tells me spring has arrived. A field — or at least a yard — dotted with those pretty yellow flowers is a sight to behold.

But to some people they’re weeds. Maybe it’s because one doesn’t have to beg dandelions to grow and bloom like more temperamental orchids or roses. They just willingly put down long tap roots and hang on for dear life, blooming readily, eager to please. Maybe if they played hard to get they’d be appreciated more.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A weed is just a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." Actually dandelions aren’t weeds, they’re herbs. According to WebMD, people use the above-ground parts and root to make medicine  to be used for loss of appetite, upset stomach, intestinal gas, gallstones, joint pain, muscle aches, eczema, and bruises. Dandelion is also used to increase urine production and as a laxative. It is also used as skin toner, blood tonic, and digestive tonic. Dandelion contains chemicals that may decrease inflammation.

Every part of a flowered dandelion is edible. The flowers and young leaves can be used on salads. The more mature leaves make a nutritious greens dish, and the root can be skinned and eaten like a turnip. The flowers are good for making wine, jelly, and tea. They are packed with vitamins A, B, C, and D, as well as minerals, such as iron, potassium, and zinc.

Dandelions have deep roots, which is what makes them so hard to remove – but this also leads to many benefits for the soil. The deep roots break up densely packed soils allowing for more water and airflow, which is healthy for soil ecosystems.  These roots also bring up nutrients to the surface, benefiting plants like tomatoes which have shallower roots. The leaves of the dandelions are nutrient rich and can make great compost or mulch for your lawn and garden.

Dandelions are major attractions of pollinators and ladybugs. They flower frequently and are therefore a regular source of food to bees, butterflies, and moths. Anything that helps bees is good for our earth, and who doesn’t like honey?

And an added bonus: after they bloom, they turn into long stalks with fluffy seed heads on top. Some children are taught to make a wish before they blow on them and disperse the seeds.

How can anyone dislike such a pretty, agreeable flower?

Marketing a new season

So it seems that the groundhog saw his shadow last week and we can expect six more weeks of winter.

This prediction says more about collective boredom than it does about weather prognostication.

Christmas is now a faint memory, and Valentine’s Day is just an excuse to pause and eat chocolate; people are looking for something to occupy themselves until it’s safe to go outside and play. So someone came up with a rodent who predicts weather. Idle people can debate the pros and cons of when spring will come to take away their boredom until it gets here.

It’s all about marketing.

According to Wikipedia, “The American Marketing Association has defined marketing as ‘the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.’"

A snoozing groundhog becomes a process for creating a means for giving people something for which to look forward. The interesting thing about marketing is that people buy into its message, whether it makes sense or not.

For instance: In 1982 in St. Louis a guy named Richard Serra put up slabs of metal, called it a sculpture and the city hired people to cut the grass around it, wash off the graffiti, and call it art; those people call themselves curators of that slab of metal. The same artist has slabs of metal sitting in a scrap yard in New York. They’re called scrap metal.

Marketing.

So how can a groundhog in Pennsylvania predict weather for an entire nation, and even get national news coverage every year? There are similar animals doing the same thing in various places: Staten Island Chuck, General Beauregard Lee in Georgia, Chattanooga Chuck, Jimmy the Groundhog in Wisconsin, Woodstock Willie (Woodstock, Ill.) – even a Canadian groundhog Shubenacadie Sam (Shubenacadie, Alberta). Now you know the Canadian beast isn’t likely to predict an early spring that far north. No one hears about these and others like them — even a couple of groundhogs with female names. Punxsutawney Phil evidently has a better agent.

Punxsutawney Phil has cornered the market on getting a town to host a party in his honor while he sleeps and then sticks his head out of his burrow to see where all the noise is coming from. He meets dignitaries and probably gets fed special groundhog treats. People across the country take seriously whether or not the cranky beast sees his shadow.

Marketing.

Because if you think about it, six weeks or so after Feb. 2 is the first day of spring. Does anyone really need a groundhog to predict the obvious?