This advert comes up with disturbing regularity on my Kindle. Do copywriters feel the need of an immediate shower when this sort of idea pops into their heads and they then choose to write it down and plan a series of meetings for its refinement? I know I would.
“Mommy, did you thoroughly rinse the awful poisons off this spatula after you washed it last time or am I going to die now?”
Who woulda thunk that? Not me before yesterday. I got these accessories for the Dimplex fireplace in the mail and they’re making me grin. The item on the right is a USB-rechargeable speaker into which you can plug an SD card. Onto that card, I put a 250MB MP3 of the audio I extracted from this ten-hour YouTube video, so now I have actual and non-repeating fireplace sounds. The speaker’s been playing that MP3 for twelve hours now and it’s still going strong, so the battery time is outstanding – but I also found that you can simply leave its USB adapter plugged in all the time while it’s running.
The other item is real wood incense blocks from Santa Fe. I got the sampler of seven – Piñon pine, cedar, juniper, hickory, alder, mesquite, and balsam fir – so I can decide which ones I like best and will purchase just those later. To burn the incense, I’m using a tiny novelty ashtray a friend brought me from Mexico a couple years ago. The clay holder included with the bricks is a little small – the ashes dropped off to its side when I tried the first block, which seemed a bit unsafe.
I can’t wait to get the media console where the fireplace will eventually reside, but wait I must.
For a long time, I’ve had the idea of finding a place to live that has a fireplace or a wood stove, because building, tending, and gazing at fires adds up to a soothing experience for me. However, I usually and conveniently forget the fact that I did once live in a place with a fireplace. I think I used it three times over the several years I was there. The whole place smelled slightly of damp soot permanently after the first time. When I do remember that, and realise the same thing would likely happen, I then change tack and think a wood stove would be nice, so long as it had a large glass door in the front and I could see what’s going on.
In any case, what with my spiffy kitchen not yet a year old, I plan to stay where I am for now, and there won’t be any wood stove in this place, but I still have those dreams of fire. Now, I’ve done something about it. I had seen fake fireplaces in the past, most often in media consoles, and was less than impressed, to put it kindly. “That has all the appeal of a steaming cow pat” was my average review. I decided to do some serious research to see if anyone made an electric fireplace/heater that would impress me. I was surprised to find that someone does: Dimplex of Ontario. (PDF)
Problem is, the firebox model I was interested in is nowhere to be seen in New England showrooms at the moment. Their trademark application for its name, Multi-Fire XD™, is dated March of this year, and their first brochure featuring it – the PDF above – was prepared in September, so I think the product’s only been on the street for several weeks at most. So problem one was that I couldn’t even get a look at it in person. I liked what I saw in this YouTube video posted by Dimplex, and was impressed not just by the look and features, but because no other electric fireplace manufacturer will show you their flame effect close up and at great length. Only Dimplex does. Remembering the other electric fireplaces I’ve seen, I believe the reason is pretty clear.
What I want in the end is a media console much like the one I already have, except with the inbuilt fireplace. However, the model I like weighs 180 pounds with the insert firebox and would cost me a mint to ship back if I didn’t like it. Problem two. And, I could not picture myself buying a fairly big ticket item like this sight unseen. Problem three.
I eventually talked to a helpful dealer about forty miles from me. He didn’t have one of the new boxes to show me (and they have to buy what they put in the showroom), but he did help me formulate a workable plan. He said if I found an online retailer with a decent return policy, I could buy the firebox alone – weighing just 40 pounds – and see if I liked it. If I didn’t, I would be out maybe forty or fifty bucks to ship it back, but at least I wouldn’t have wasted hundreds of dollars buying the whole shootin’ match sight unseen. And if I did like it, I could keep it and buy from him just the media console without the firebox insert.
He also said I had chosen well for someone who hasn’t been able to see any of this class of products in person. He goes to all the home & hearth shows, and said that Dimplex is the manufacturer with the best looking products, every year and by far. He said they’re a pain to deal with, “but they’re the best, so I deal.” Sounded good to me, so I ordered the insert from an online shop with a fourteen-day return policy and no restocking penalties. It arrived yesterday – bearing serial number 147 – and it’s currently just sitting on top of one of my end tables.
So after all that, what do I think? I loved it instantly. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and the inbuilt heater is whisper-quiet. I think I’m going to have a pleasanter winter than usual this year. Here’s a photo I took last night – click to see a larger version:
Sometime in the next several weeks, I’ll take the next step and order the console it will fit inside from that dealer near me. Dimplex’s promo photo of their Windham Mocha console has a boring golf picture on the television and a shockingly poor representation of their nifty firebox, so I fixed it up a bit with a screenshot from last week’s HIGNFY and a photo I took of my firebox from the correct angle to paste in here.
Later updates:
How I added fireplace sound and smell to the firebox is here.
The final installation of my media console is shown here.
In a one-word summary: relentlessly. I found this 37-minute podcast from Slate fascinating:
“Madge? I’m glad you picked up ’cause I can’t text. Look, I’m going to be a bit late. I lost my temper and bellowed at that woman – you know the one – for calling it a swamp again when it’s so obviously a lagoon. She’s fainted dead away, and I can’t just leave her here, so I’m dropping her off at the ER so someone can keep an eye on her.”
I think of soul-sapping conversation openers like the title here every time I read a news story and see random and pointless grafs like the one below, which was plopped, all steaming and evocative of the barnyard, right in the middle of an article that had seemed fairly legitimate up to that point:
It lit up social media with complaints by travelers like @JoeMFox who tweeted, “I’m starting to consider whether a five-hour drive would get me there faster than United. #ohare”
Besides the fact that pretty much every single thing that more than a few people are aware of lights up antisocial media, this sort of amateurish pander-padding is akin to repeatedly reminding readers that people don’t like inconveniences, as if the readers are a little too thick or forgetful to understand and retain that fact. Soon it might be:
A torrential downpour occurred Tuesday, causing traffic snarls in the downtown area.
@ADingBat fnooted, “Ugh…rain again #lol”, confirming that people who don’t like torrential downpours don’t seem to like torrential downpours.
A Dingleface page called IHateTorrentialDownpours was set up within hours and some people, whose total number means nothing, “Loathed” the page within a randomly selected number of hours ending just before deadline, whose duration also means nothing.
When I’m outside my office on a break from the keyboard, I sometimes overhear snippets of conversations between employees of one of the other companies in the building. It’s most often the same script: some variation of how nice or bad or cold or hot the weather is getting lately or how dark or light it’s getting so early or late. There’s usually a back-and-forth of about four sentences by each party droning flatly on the topic. It’s all I can do to stop myself walking up to them and, one by one, shaking them by the shoulders as I bellow, “Jiminy Cricket on a velocipede, say something interesting to them, fercripesake!”
Instead, I stay put and quiet, minding my own business, wondering how often they have conversations like that with their families.
Random antisocial media inserts such as that O’Hare Airport one also – and more happily – remind me of this:
“I recently moved into a new apartment, and there was this switch on the wall that didn’t do anything. So anytime I had nothing to do, I’d just flick that switch up and down…up and down…up and down. Then one day I got a letter from a woman in Germany. It just said, ‘Cut it out.'”
– Steven Wright
This morning, as I drove over to my HMO for an appointment in their first four-hour flu shot clinic of 2014, I half expected to be one of just a handful of people there, an admittedly pessimistic presumption based on the increased visibility of the anti-vaccination “Back to the Middle Ages!/Bring out your dead!” crowd in the last several months, with some sources believing — incorrectly as it turns out — that they were increasingly present in suburban liberal enclaves, which phrase happens to be one of the accepted definitions of the nearby town my HMO is in. Imagine my delight at seeing the car park full to brimming — and it was all for vaccination since they only do urgent care appointments on Saturdays. There were at least a hundred people outside and inside, about half children and half adults, and this in the first hour of the first of about two dozen clinics scheduled.
They organise these events with great efficiency, so I was in and out in about six minutes. I mentioned to the nurse that I was happy to see so many people there despite the anti-vaccination fad. She said she was glad, too. She had learned early why community immunity was a good thing and said she was therefore surprised to hear many students in nursing school question why vaccinations were important at all. I said, “Because Jenny McCarthy does not have a medical degree except maybe in her fevered imagination, and we live in the 21st century.”
I’ve been getting flu vaccine since 2002, a few years after I ended up in hospital over Christmas week with double lobe viral pneumonia — the worst kind, and so bad that the nurses doubted I’d survive my first night in hospital — brought on in my weakened state after I was hit with a particular virulent strain of influenza. Back then, I tended to get sick as a dog most winters, often out of work anywhere from ten days to two weeks. Such winters are a thing of the past for me. My own anecdotal evidence is that I haven’t had flu since 2002; hardly statistically significant, but plenty good enough for me. This year’s US national vaccine is quadrivalent for the first time, protecting against the four most likely strains instead of just three.
On the topic of people speaking out of their arses on medical topics, on “This American Life” a few weeks ago, Ira Glass mentioned another podcast (auto-play audio) called “The Gist”. The third “Gist” excerpt he presented was about George Stephanopoulos unbelievably directing this bit of chowderheadedness at the director of the Centers for Disease Control: “Dr. Friedan, as you know, a lot of anxiety here in the United States about the spread of Ebola, whether we’re taking an unnecessary risk. A tweet that Donald Trump put out just the other day, he said that the US must immediately stop all flights from Ebola-infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our borders. Act fast. How do you respond to that?”
Host Mike Pesca’s ‘talk show karaoke’ that follows, where he provides the unmuddled truthful answer that ought to have been given, is splendid. At the end of the segment, Glass said, “If words really were magic, in all fairness, Donald Trump would vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke after that.” Ah, well. A boy can dream, can’t he?
I’m currently developing a theory that people who like this sort of photo filter might well have one of the several forms of colour-blindness. The first corollary to my theory is particularly handy in that it states:
Corollary 1: They might as well be colour-blind even if they’re not.
I had clicked over to that page to see a photograph of a ‘meatloaf salad’, but it was a non-specific link to the home page. I began to feel slightly queasy after just a page or two of scrolling into that bilious Smurf-toned world, and so closed the window, saying to no one in particular, “You know what? I can’t be arsed.”
I never saw the meatloaf salad, but I imagine it was along these lines
At the old place last month, I wrote:
Jiminy Cricket, a real cracker of a lightning strike perhaps 100-200 feet away — no more than that because the flash and bang seemed simultaneous to me — just dismounted and remounted my external USB drive. There was no power outage or reboot or dimming of lights or any other effect that I could see, so I’m thinking some of that charge came through here to the living room.
I hear multiple fire engine sirens now.
Turns out I was pretty close. I did not go outside that day to gawk, but I just learned that the bolt struck a house precisely 300 feet from mine, setting fire to the attic. A family member of the local fire chief first spotted the blaze and, due to its intensity, seven neighbouring fire departments provided mutual aid to the town, four at the fire and three covering the station. Possibly a teensy bit of overkill, but actual honest-to-goodness structure fires are kinda rare, you know? Everybody wants to have a go.
I love credit unions, especially mine. Monday night, I noted a pending charge on my debit card of an amount and a merchant unfamiliar to me. Last night, it moved from pending to real and right out of my account, so I did a web search on the name and city (Studio City, CA), followed by a local search for anything with that name or an order amount of US$40.00 – nothing – then called the credit union this morning.
The efficient woman in the call centre four towns away said the details indicated it was a point-of-sale charge – with a signature, in California, on Monday. As I haven’t been in California since 2002, and I’m pretty sure that was a Friday, we thought it prudent to cancel the card. She filled out the online disputed charge form for me and said, “We can either mail you a new card or you can stop at a branch and get a new one.” She also said it might take up to five days for the charge to be reversed, but it was actually reversed by the time I moseyed over to the nearest branch three hours later to get my new card, which they printed and handed to me less than two minutes after I gave them my old card and driver’s licence. The problem’s complete resolution: 3½ hours. It would have been less had I not waited until lunch to visit the CU.
I imagine if I was still a Bank of America customer as I was twelve years ago before joining the credit union, that 3½ hours would be about the amount of time they’d’ve spent on just the first day interrogating me to find out just what sort of dastardly conspiracy I was masterminding. I base this theory on their standard policy of assuming that all in-person customer so-called deposits are being perpetrated by people trying to kite checks, and making everyone wait days to access their money. Of course, that was twelve years ago, so I imagine things must be much improved over there at the friendly neighbourhood BoA branch, because monolithic banks, like fine wine, only improve with age, right? Why are you shaking your head? More like old milk, you say?
The web search I did indicated the merchant in question may be a surfing instructor. Surfing? T’yuh.
