Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

We brought our Nissan Xterra to a mechanic earlier this week. The "service engine soon" light had come on after the car occasionally stalled out at idle and had recently started having trouble catching ignition. Although we brought it this time to a trusted local mechanic, Mr. Le, I dreaded getting a repair bill like we'd gotten from the Nissan dealer the last few times we went there for repairs. The dealer always seemed to find $1,400 of things wrong with the car and their explanation always was, "You got it muddy."

We followed up with Mr. Le yesterday to check the status. Good news/bad news: It was so simple he'd already fixed it. Without giving us an estimate first. But it was just $150.

"Problem simple," he said. "It your drain sensor."

I'm familiar with at least the names of parts that could explain the problems we'd experienced, and drain sensor isn't one of them. Plus, there isn't even such a thing as a drain sensor, AFAIK.  I asked him to tell me again what part was broken.

"Grain sensor," he said louder, emphasizing the Grr- sound of the word.

Knowing our Nissan is not a farm tractor I was pretty sure it doesn't have grain sensor. I asked again.

"Brain sensor! Brrrrrrrrrain sensor!"

Yes, he trilled the R good and long like a first year Spanish language teacher teaching kids the difference between "r" and "rr".

I silently asked myself what all the sensors are that rhyme with drain, grain, and brain. I couldn't think of any. I decided the conversation wasn't getting anywhere I would stop asking Mr. Le for clarification and just go pay the bill. At least then I could see the description of the part printed on the bill. 🤣

It turns out it's the crankshaft position sensor (CPS). I guess the guy was trying to say "crank sensor", though I've never heard any other mechanic call it that. Others have always called it "CPS" or used its full name.

At least Mr. Le fixed it for $150 instead of $1400 and blaming the problem on mud.

Italy Travelog #17
Chia, Sardinia - Tuesday, 27 May 2025, 4:30pm

Our flight from Rome to Cagliari this morning was uneventful. And mercifully short, at 1h15m. That's because we were cramped into average-minus economy seats— not that Aeroitalia even has roomier seats, except in the exit rows— and there was no wifi. Sigh. Yet another budget European carrier. At least so far they've only joked about having to pay €5 to use the toilet.

BTW, if you're wondering how to pronounce "Cagliari", it is not Cag-lee-ARR-ee. That's kind of an Anglo pronunciation. In Italian the g is basically silent when paired with an l. Thus the locals all say CAL-yah-ray. It sounds a lot like they're saying Calgary— the city in Alberta, Canada. But fortunately the weather here is better. It's sunny and around 80° today.



It was a long ride in a van from the airport down to our hotel. We're not in Cagliari/Calgary but in the small town of Chia, on the southern tip of the island of Sardinia. Parts of the drive were through fairly rural areas. The roads in this spread-out resort hotel are mostly dirt roads.

Once on the property, we checked in and stowed our luggage. Our room wasn't ready yet. We rode in a golf cart over to a hotel restaurant near the beach. There we met several colleagues and joined them for lunch. And to put our food on my sales VP's tab. 😅 Not that the company isn't paying for it anyway; this is Club.



We drew out lunch waiting for a text from the front desk that our room would be ready. Actually pretty much all of my colleagues were waiting for the same. Around 4pm I gave up because I felt like I was about to fall asleep and rode a golf cart back to the front. Our room was ready; they just hadn't texted us. 😒

The room is large, reasonably comfortable, but also kind of bland. The one interesting feature it does have is a large, private patio (see above). We're on the first floor, though, which kind of means no view.



I lifted my camera up over my head to look over the bushes around our patio. Yeah, we can kinda see the ocean from here. But this is not what I think of when I think "beach resort". I feel like my company either got rooked on picking this location... or cheaped out. I'm already reconsidering my choice to stay an extra day here at my own expense. It's not worth the nightly rate for this. 😔

Recently Hawk and I both encountered the term Altruistic Narcissist. I'd seen it in a new article I'd skimmed this week; she'd seen it in a social media forum she follows about dealing with difficult people. When I saw it I immediately thought, "OMG, that totally describes one of Hawk's relatives who passed away a few years ago." Hawk agreed on that, though her first thought about the term when she saw it was a difficult person she has to work with in a professional context.

I don't remember what article I saw the term in, but the best one I found in doing a search today is this page about Altruistic Narcissists at MentalHealth.com. The simple layperson's definition I'd give is:



Curiously that last phrase in the definition, and is abusive to their family at home, appeared in every source I checked today as a classic marker of the type. And it's also what made the relative I'm thinking of such a frustrating riddle to figure out at the time. If only we'd known this term it would've made sense in two seconds!

This relative was like a woman of two personalities. To her family she was a monster. She'd been emotionally abusive to her kids when they were young, distanced herself from them as they became adults, and treated them as house-slaves when they rallied around her to take care of her in ill health toward the end of her life. Even when they were helping bathe, dress, and eat, she had nothing but nasty things to say to them. Nothing they did was ever good enough. (Personally I would tell a parent who abused me all my life she could die rotting in a gutter for all I care, but not everyone shares my values.)

To friends in the community, though, this woman was a saint. She was active in a support group for people with a specific type of cancer. With these people she shared links to information, personal stories of her struggles and victories, and gave them a shoulder to cry on. They loved her. She was like an angel to them.

It's common for altruistic narcissists, also called charitable narcissists or benevolent narcissists in different texts, to act as givers, martyrs, or heroes... in visibly public situations. They're not motivated by actually helping others, though. They thrive on the positive attention they get for being seen as do-gooders. They enjoy the praise, the admiration, or just their own sense of self satisfaction. They may also use their good deeds as a form of manipulation. "I did this nice thing for you, now you need to do this for me." If they don't get enough praise, or if the value of their actions is questioned, or if the return favor they expect is refused, they'll react angrily. That's a classic narcissist tell.

The shit start to the new year still isn't over. While I'm mostly okay and have been since Sunday/Monday, Hawk still has what her doctor diagnosed as Traveler's Diarrhea. Apparently that's the modern, culturally sensitive term for Montezuma's Revenge. Curiously, I read a year or two ago that Montezuma's Revenge supposedly isn't't even medically a thing, that it's just a fabrication of racist, mid-20th century beliefs. Ooops, that was political correctness run amok.

Anyway, in addition to having the symptom that's right in the name Traveler's Diarrhea, Hawk has bad stomach cramping after eating almost anything. So she's limiting herself to a diet of bland foods in very small portions. She's also had fatigue and difficulty focusing. I didn't have any of the cramping last week, and I got over the diarrhea and fatigue after 4-5 days— which is normal for how most people handle the infection, from what I've read on clinical sites.

While I'm glad I'm over that illness already I'm not back to 100% yet. I'm still dealing with a lingering cough I've had since early November. No, it's not long Covid... I've had it since before I got Covid from a conference in December!

By now I probably don't need to define the term shrinkflation— because you've probably already noticed it. It's a combination of the words shrinking and inflation, and it refers to when manufacturers shrink the size of a product instead of raising its price (inflation). Though lately it seems they've been doing both at the same time often enough. 😡

One bit of shrinkflation has hit the crapper. I noticed when I bought a package of toilet tissue several weeks ago that the package is smaller. By how much, numerically, I couldn't tell you. I haven't memorized the number of square feet per roll. But I do know how big a package of 6 or 12 rolls is, and the packages have definitely gotten smaller.

I wasn't sure what exactly what the difference was until I opened a package and hung a roll. Then I noticed. The new rolls are narrower. Here's the new roll in the package I just opened placed side by side with the spindle of an old roll I just finished off:



Yeah, the new roll is smaller by about 15%.

And the price went up by about 20%.

Fuck inflation and shrinkflation.

Recently I read a Buzzfeed listicle* about things people born since the 1980s won't remember. A few of the entries from the Reddit thread they scraped for the listicle ("listicle" is a portmanteau of list and article; it's a lazy writer's way of producing content) compared how watching TV used to be way different than it is today. I agree! I'm old enough to remember all the differences Buzzf— I mean Redditors— described, and then some. Here are Five Things:

1) Black & White TV. The first TV my parents had, or at least the one they had from when I was old enough to remember, at age 3 or 4, was a black-and-white set. It also wasn't terribly big, even by the time's standards. I think it was a 16" diagonal tube, but it could have been as small as 13". BTW, this was not back in the days when all TVs were B W and tiny. My grandparents had a set that already looked ancient at the time, a TV in a big wooden console, that was larger and color. I think the issue was my parents just didn't watch a lot of TV so didn't value spending money on anything more than the cheapest possible set.

2) The Time Before Cable: So Few Channels. Before cable there were, like, 5 channels. We got the three major commercial networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), the city's PBS affiliate, and one local station. But actually we got two copies each of ABC, CBS, and NBC: our city's affiliates plus the affiliates from another city 80 miles away. We got those through this thing called Community Access TV, or CATV. You might've seen the CATV acronym from years ago and thought it meant "CAble TV". Not quite. It did involve a physical cable... but it was a cable network in our town that was connected to basically a big, shared antenna at the center of town so people didn't have to climb up on the roofs of their houses to strap individual antennas to their chimneys. (Note: years later so many people thought "CATV" meant CAble TV that cable equipment manufacturers appropriated the misunderstood acronym and it became a de facto standard.)

3) Early Cable: A Few Channels More. Having community access TV in our town made it easier to get real cable TV as the industry matured. Basically the CATV company became a Cable TV company, and we got more channels. Though only a few at first. Mostly they were big stations from more distant cities, like Atlanta's WTBS and Chicago's WGN, but there was also Nickelodeon— which was a big gain for us as kids. Though early on Nickelodeon was mostly reruns of American TV staples from 25 years earlier like Leave it to Beaver and Lassie, plus some Canadian and European imports that were kind of hit-or-miss.

4) Free Pay Channels— Briefly. One bonus, for a short while, was that you could watch premium channels like HBO for free— if you had the right TV. It depended on how the TV's tuner was built. Older TVs with chunky analog knobs could only to tune in to channels 2-13 in the VHF range. If they had a knob for higher number channels they shifted to the UHF range. With cable everything was transmitted win VHF range, with channels up into the 30s, 40s, and beyond. Newer TVs at the time with fully electronic tuning controls could select those channels. The cable company glommed on to that after a few years and killed it by scrambling the pay channels so you could only watch them with a descrambler box they provided when you subscribed. Though that led to the brief phenomenon of teens and tweens watching scrambled porn channels hoping to catch a brief glimpse of wavy boobs.

5) Be There or Miss It. The way most of us watch TV is so fundamentally different today from the 1980s. Nowadays with streaming TV we decide when we want to watch TV and pick something from a vast library of available content. In the long long ago there was no choosing your own schedule. If you wanted to watch show "X" you had to be watching when it aired. Like, if it was on Thursday at 8pm, you didn't get to watch it Saturday afternoon or binge-watch 3 episodes on Thursday 2 weeks later. You sat in front of your TV Thursday at 8 or you missed it. Good luck catching it on reruns... those could be months later, and often were shown out of order. VCRs became widely available in the 1980s and changed this equation somewhat, but IMO the quality of recordings and the ease of programming VCRs didn't reach a level of making them practical for routine viewing until around 1995.

Vegas Travelog #5
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Wed, 29 Nov 2023. 3pm.

I wrote yesterday about my room on the 54th floor at the Resorts World casino. There's something that's been bothering my engineer/architect-fu all week, though. It's not actually the 54th floor. Sure, the room numbers all start with "54" and the button in the elevator says "54", but in truth it's 10 floors short of that. How? There are no floors 40-49.

There are no buttons for 40-49 in the elevator. None of the three banks of elevators goes to 40-49. And when the elevator's floor indicator goes from 39 to 50 on the way up, and 50 to 39 on the way down, it's an immediate transition. There's no pause like it's bypassing 10 secret levels. Those levels just don't exist.

Why no floors 40-49? My best hypothesis is that it's because 4 is considered a very unlucky number in Chinese. The Chinese word for "4" is a near homophone for "death" (they have the same sound but different tonality). The gambling company behind Resorts World is based in Malaysia and Singapore. When I've traveled in Greater China I've observed that buildings frequently don't have floors 4, 14, 28, etc. I don't think I saw an elevator with all of 40-49 missing... though the few times I visited a building at least that tall I didn't look too carefully at the elevator keypads.

After our treks at Susan Creek Falls and Fall Creek Falls Monday morning, plus over 100 miles of driving, it was getting to be time for lunch. We found a little gas station convenience store perfectly located in Steamboat, about a dozen miles before Toketee Falls, our next hiking spot. While there I learned that I was pronouncing Toketee wrong. It's not "toe-KEE-tee" but "TOKE-uh-tee". It's a Chinook word meaning pretty or graceful.

So, do the falls live up to the name? It was a short hike, less than 0.5 mile each way, to find out.



Pretty? Hell yeah. But graceful? More like thunderous. There is a lot of water coming over these falls. And this is only, like, half the flow (see below).

The falls feature a 30' drop in two steps in the upper part of the gorge then a drop of 80' into the wide pool at the bottom. The water cuts through a chasm in columnar basalt rock. We saw some of that over at Fall Creek Canyon, too.

I mentioned that this is only half the flow. Where's the other half? Would you believe... an unintentional carwash?



At the trailhead parking area there is a huge diversion pipe. It's 12' diameter (in my voice-over narration I estimated 10') and made of wood. It's got a lot of leaks going. People were taking turns driving through the sprays as a free carwash.

This pipe is a penstock, diverting water from Toketee Lake just upstream to a hydroelectric power plant further downstream. Only a 1,500' length of the wooden pipe, built in 1949, remains. The rest has been replaced with a concrete tube.

In a recent blog I mentioned how I've never had Covid. While almost everyone I know has had it already, and many have had it twice, I've never even had it once. I'm like a unicorn.

That would be a nice term for people like me— "unicorns"— but alas that's not what the media are calling us. Months ago it was "Covid virgins", aligning us with the negative social stigma of things like "The 40 year old virgin". Then "Covid dodgers", aligning us with the negative social stigma of draft dodgers[1]. The latest term, which I saw while researching how many people have never had Covid, is "Novids". Novids.... Hey, at least that doesn't sound like stigma!

By the way, the question I was researching, How many people haven't had Covid, is not answered by the media or the scientific establishment anymore. In articles from a year ago there are estimates like "fewer than 50%". In the past few months all the articles are tut-tutting pieces like, "So you think you've never had Covid? Think again, you probably have, hahaha!"

Fuck their snotty pandering to the lowest common denominator. I'm a Novid and proud.

_____
[1] Yes, I'm aware there are arguments to be made why each of these things are/were actually good. The point is, the popular meaning of them is bad. They are insults.

Several days ago I wrote about the intellectual bankruptcy of conservatives blaming the failure of banks like SVB on them being too "woke". So what is "woke"? you might ask. The term has actually been bandied about quite a bit on the political right. The recent failure of a few banks was hardly the first time conservative political leaders and pundits have used it. They've actually been railing against "woke" this and "woke" that steadily for two years. It's pretty clear it's something conservative leaders want their followers to hate, but what is it?

Briahna Joy Gray, a streaming interviewer with news outlet The Hill, popped that question to conservative author Bethany Mandel on her streaming show. In a moment that went viral Mandel stumbled over the definition. Watch the first 1:45 of this video retrospective by Gray, or watch the whole thing for greater context:



Ironically Mandel herself says, "This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral," as she gets stumped trying to define the term.

Note, this was not "gotcha" journalism. This was not a journalist ambushing a minor politician with a question about, say, issues causing political unrest in a tiny nation 10,000 miles away. Mandel co-authored the 2023 book, "Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation". It's all about the alleged sinister perils of woke-ism. In that book Mandel wrote an entire chapter defining what "woke" is. She is clearly an expert on the topic. Yet when asked to give a concise definition she stumbles and says it's not possible.

BTW, after Mandel's inability to define "woke", a term she co-wrote an entire book about and speaks about frequently in interviews with sycophantic media, went viral she posted multiple times rejecting the question as completely unreasonable and basically had a meltdown about The Left was "attacking" her.

So, what is "woke"? I'll act like I am getting interviewed and offer an extemporaneous answer— not researched, not checked against a dictionary, not even wordsmithed. This is basically off the top of my head:


See? That wasn't so hard.

Again, I wrote this in one pass, no editing, no research, not even consulting a dictionary. How did I do? Followup coming soon; share your thoughts now in the comments.