Way to go, Dick’s Sporting Goods!

Thank you, Edward Stack, CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, for doing something that not one politician seems to have the guts to do—take a real stand against the idiocy that passes for gun control in America. You did so on February 28^th, 2018, a day that should go down in American history as a turning point in the gun control war that has paralyzed politicians and polarized America. You got involved, you took a stand, you stood up for what’s right. You stated clearly that you were “deliberately steering your company directly into the storm over gun reform” and that you were “immediately ending sales of all assault-style rifles in your stores”. You also said that your store “would no longer sell high-capacity magazines and would also require any gun buyer to be at least 21, regardless of local laws” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/walmart-and-dicks-major-gun-retailers-will-tighten-rules-on-guns-they-sell.html). Way to go, Dick’s Sporting Goods! I applaud you. You stood up to the National Rifle Association (NRA) and showed up the politicians for the spineless wimps they really are (so many of them are in the NRA’s pockets).

Walmart followed your example later in the day. I applaud them as well, and the many companies who stood up to the NRA last week, publicly ending their relationships (discounts, etc.) with them.

The NRA has about 5 million members according to many of the online sites I checked for information about this organization. The population of the USA in 2017 was 324,459,463 people. Five million members is circa 1.5% of the entire population. So tell me why this group wields so much power over America’s politicians? They’re no more than a minuscule percentage of the entire population. But they hold the politicians firmly in the palms of their hands. It all boils down to money, as does nearly everything in this world. They buy the politicians, and the politicians don’t want to lose the campaign contributions and support they get from the NRA, so their stances on gun control are those that are foisted on them by the NRA. The NRA are excellent lobbyists for their cause, I’ll give them that. But beyond that, I see no reason for why their points of view should determine public policy on an issue as important as gun control.

I am not opposed to hunters owning a hunting rifle (think Winchester or Marlin models) if the owner uses it to hunt animals or for protection out in the wild. But I have zero understanding for why any hunter would need an assault-style rifle like an AR-15 (used in wartime) to kill a deer or an elk. I have zero understanding for why any hunter would defend the use of assault-style rifles against any animal. They were designed for use in wartime, nothing more and nothing less. I don’t care if you are sound in mind and body; you cannot in good conscience defend ownership of assault-style rifles for hunting. My take on it is that you buy one of these rifles knowing full well that you may use it on a human being. You may think this is what it takes to defend your house, property and family. I have a hard time trying to imagine how you think or why you defend these weapons for personal use, together with the NRA. All I know is that how you think has evolved into how many people apparently think these days in modern America. The Second Amendment of the US Constitution certainly did not have assault-style rifles in mind when it said that we as Americans have the right to bear arms (The Second Amendment reads: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"). Let’s amend that Amendment to something that makes sense, not continue to support a misguided idea that owning and using such weapons are protected by law. Really, use your heads, use the common sense God gave you. Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart finally did. Kudos to them. 

Seasonal contrasts

Apropos my previous post, I'm a spring and summer person, and when you look at these photos, you'll understand why. I can't wait to get back to my garden (a plot in the Egebergløkka community garden). These photos are from last August, when the garden was in full bloom. There is nothing like it--warm sun, the greenery, the beauty, the peace. Summer cannot come too soon. I'm hoping for a sunny and hot summer.

A cold winter in Oslo this year

We are currently experiencing a cold spell—Arctic temperatures—making it difficult to be outdoors. This winter has been one of the longest on record (my record); it has dragged on and on, with snow one week followed by a quick thaw, then plunging temperatures that make roads and sidewalks icy, and then the snow starts all over again. This must be a record year for snowfall; I cannot remember this much snow in all the years I’ve lived here. I’m hoping this is an aberrant year and that next winter we’re back to ‘normal’, however that is defined. I actually have not had much cause for complaint; the winters in Oslo are not very different from those I left behind in NY. The main difference is the shorter days here and the intense darkness. It’s sometimes hard to adjust completely to that.

Winter does have its charms, and when the temperatures are not bitingly cold, I am outdoors walking and taking photos. I took these photos last week on one of my regular walks around St. Hanshaugen park.

1970s style--I feel so bad by Kungs ft Ephemerals

When I first saw this video, I was intrigued. I like the song 'I feel so bad' by Kungs ft. Ephemerals. But I really like the video-- with the self-possessed and tough woman who makes her entrance--all eyes on her--and then proceeds to rob the men in the room of their wallets and jewelry. It reminded me of the film Jackie Brown from 1997. I'm not sure why, because the woman in the video doesn't look like Pam Grier's character Jackie Brown in the film. But she does look like another badass character that Pam Grier played--Coffy, from the 1973 film Coffy. In that film, which I have not seen, but for which I remember the posters advertising it, Pam Grier's hairstyle was an afro like the woman in the music video (google Pam Grier Coffy and check out some of the images--I won't post them here due to potential copyright infringement). And the clothing style in the music video is a 1970s disco look. So if the music video creators were going for the look of that era, they succeeded. And the song is pretty damn good too.

One day soon, it’s bye bye Apple....

......Well, in the foreseeable future—when the batteries in my iPad and iPhone die. Both devices are slowing down; the iPad is older than the iPhone, so this is understandable. I haven’t had cause to complain until today, when suddenly my iPad was ‘forced’ to download and install the newest IOS software. Up until today I have managed to prevent the iPad from doing this, because I know that the newest software versions will only end up slowing down the device and rendering it obsolescent faster than if I don't install the upgrades. And it’s already slow, but I’m used to it. I’m fine with it because I mostly use my iPad to read Kindle books and to read emails/listen to music when I travel. When I turned it on today, I was unable to activate my device at all. I received the following error message instead:

Your iPad could not be activated because the activation server is temporarily unavailable. Try connecting your iPad to iTunes to activated it or try again in couple of minutes. If this problem persists, contact Apple support at apple.com/support.

So I did what I normally do in such situations—got irritated, then googled ‘why can’t I activate my iPad?’ And wouldn’t you know, this is a problem for others too, and is connected to the installation of the newest IOS software, which I didn’t want and which I have prevented from being installed up to this point by always pressing the ‘Remind me later’ option when prompted to download the newest software. But for some unknown reason, it installed itself between Friday evening and this morning (the iPad was off during that whole time) and created a problem on which I used most of my afternoon—how to reactivate my iPad. Not nice, Apple. Could someone explain to me how this happened?

You ask, why don’t I want the new software? Well, it’s a well-known fact that Apple (and probably other companies) deal in ‘planned obsolescence’ as discussed in a recent article in Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamsarhan/2017/12/22/planned-obsolescence-apple-is-not-the-only-culprit/#5fff6f7f3cf2  Here’s the opening paragraph of this article:

Apple just got smacked with a class action lawsuit after the tech giant admitted it slowed down older iPhones. This act is also known as planned obsolescence. Wikipedia defines planned obsolescence (or built-in obsolescence) as: "in industrial design and economics is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete (that is, unfashionable or no longer functional) after a certain period of time."

Here’s another article dealing with the same: https://www.cultofmac.com/77814/is-apple-guilty-of-planned-obsolescence/; planned obsolescence forces us to buy new gadgets sooner than we want to. I don’t like this one bit. For the first, I don’t want to be buying new devices every other year. I’m not interested and I’m not that wealthy. Nor do I need to be cool by having the latest gadgets; I don’t care about this at all. I care more about the environment and about using things until they simply cannot be used anymore; we don’t need to pollute the world with lithium batteries year after year, when we don’t know how to deal with them at all.

So what did I learn from googling this problem about not being able to activate my device? I found the following website that discussed the problem and gave some solutions: https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/ipad/how-activate-old-ipad-after-update-3638936/. I tried what was suggested there--connected my iPad to iTunes on my laptop and tried to ‘recover’ my iPad (updating that keeps the current setup). It didn’t work. So I had to opt for ‘restoring the factory defaults’, which essentially resets the entire iPad. This took a long time, with promptings along the way to type in different passwords and pass codes to this and that. Finally, I was able to activate my iPad, and what I ended up with was an iPad that had installed all the apps that are currently on my iPhone—in other words, way too many. But at least that was something—I didn’t have to download all the apps again from the app store. I deleted the apps I didn’t need on my iPad and opened my Kindle app. I had to download all the unread books again, and adjust the settings back to where I had them. Then I went to Music, and realized that I have to download all the songs in my library so that I can listen to them offline, like when I travel and there’s no wi-fi. I’m saving this job for another time. Something else I don’t understand; we buy these songs from Apple and yet they’re not ‘ours’. If I buy them and download them once to my music library, why aren’t they mine? This is amazingly and unnecessarily complicated.

I have no idea how these things are done on devices made by the other cell phone/tablet companies. They cannot be that much different. But it’s getting to the point where I prefer simplicity in all things. Why can’t Apple make it simple to use their devices, and leave it up to the individual user to decide whether he or she wants to install software that will in many cases deactivate their devices? We paid for them. Why can’t we decide when we want to upgrade them? At least on computers running Windows software, an upgrade doesn't result in the deactivation of the computer. Now I have new IOS software on an old iPad. Let’s see how long my ‘new’ old iPad survives. I’m betting not past summer, at which point I’m going to buy a cheap computer tablet (not an iPad), or simply a Kindle from Amazon.