testing one two three, ok it almost works, fromn 12/29/11 or 29/12/11 depending on your continent in Normal entries

Feel a little weird about tossing videos at the bottom instead of quotes at the beginning. Gotten used to my trademarks, the song quote, disembodied, out of context, seemingly unrelated (though, in truth, completely unrelated) and the I’m spent ending. Some passing noting stranger “understood” the spent feeling. Often as not there’s a margin of truth, but mostly it’s just my sign off, like And that’s the news or Good Night and God Bless or Joke them if they can’t take a fuck. Sometimes Ramblings from Oregon is very much aware it is only a small fish on a small pond site, one of the oldest such ponds, not one of the famous or well used ones. Mostly that’s how Ramblings From Oregon likes it, it can get drunk, strip naked and jump in the green water with the tadpoles. Ramblings from Oregon isn’t bitching, rambling from Oregon is thinking about the Bill Murray rah rah chant from Meatballs “Remember kids; It just doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter”

You would think there’d be certain advantages to the information age, and there are, but pitfalls too, ones you’d think would be worked out. I’m not going to go into any cynical rant about all the fancy technology at the consumers fingertips being driven by games and social networking and shiny sparkly things, machines that calculate Pi out to twenty numbers between ordering your happy meal and throwing that first fry in your mouth, but instead is launching a bird at a building or texting to some casual acquaintance or tweeting the world “I m sooo bored, OMG”. No, no, though I’m sure there’s enough grist for that mill to serve over a billion grist burgers. No, I was thinking more along the lines of disinformation and, worse yet, a sort of hierarchy of overload.

Not so very long ago if you typed a key word into a search engine the first several hit would be porn related. If the keyword could in any way be put into or around or be worn on genitals the first several hits would be porn, even if you were more specific (e.g. You type in Amateur to get the amateur tennis matches scheduled for your area, and of course you feel foolish when the first five hundred sites are Amateur housewife Does Pizza boy! Because you knew that would happen, so you type in Amateur + Tennis + Your Locale. Five hundred sites of Amateur vidclips of bored house wives and/or twinks putting tennis rackets in their own or someone else’s orifice (s).) Then the next item on the pyramid of sideways information was consumerism e.g. Buy Amateur Tennis Your Locale — search Biz Rate for the best price, thousands of Tennis Amateur your locale. Then song lyrics or perhaps definitions and that’s where I’m stopping. Definitions.

Modern search engines, the sort that second guess where you’re going based either on your usage or the most common search, always have definition and review as a possible destination. I think this feature was designed to clean up searches, keep them from being overwhelming, and to speed up commerce. Saying that commerce drives the information age is not going to come as a shock to anyone and likely shouldn’t be seen as a political statement or in and of itself denigration or even anything warranting its own sentence. The thing is, and again no shocker or spoiler here, under definition lies a good chunk of the information ages mis and/or dis information. I will not mention Wikipedia except to say I’m not mentioning it, too easy a target; submissions of technical or cultural research and/or fictions by guys and gals just sitting around at home or waiting for their break to be over to get back to the grill and flip more burgers. There are a great many sites with alleged experts that, oh, let’s not use value judgments like right or wrong, are, well, conflicting. In some respects in makes cruising the web for information like using a day planner to organize your schedule. The day planner does not save you time, it costs you time, it’s a redundancy that involves you writing or typing the information from one source to another, but, most of all, if you’re organized enough to keep a day planner, you’re organized enough to remember your appointments.

Then, there’s the inherent problem of a number of these separate issues rolled into one. I bought something very cool, pretty selfish, and more than I could really afford. I have justifications and rationale like I would over the next few months spend that much or more on the product as I’m a nicotine addict and it’s not really a choice except, maybe, whether to buy or steal, but I have not nor ever intend to steal cigars or cigarettes or a pipe. Yeah, still … What it is is a limited edition humidor with forty eight limited edition cigars (or, as the industry likes to make everything sound more Cuban — Edicion Limitado). I purchased it from a place that had it eighty to two hundred dollars less than everyone else. Here are the problems I had.

First off I wanted to research the company, not the cigar manufacturer, the retail cigar distributer. The objective type of info comes from places like the Better Business Bureau and Consumer Reports. Consumer reports is a paid site and the BBB doesn’t really tell you shit except complaints and lawsuits and how or if they were resolved and whether or not the business subscribes to BBB. There are a few consumer watchdog sites and a few bitching sites that you might find yourself fortunate enough to find a mention of your business and then, perhaps, a credible review. The next set of listing will be from the site itself. It’s rare that a site will post complaints or problems and when they do it’s hardly objective. So you’re down to news groups and forums. It’s like Wikipedia only without even the pretense of protocol (e.g. Wikipedia entries try really hard to be in a format consistent with professional definition, sort of like playing fictionary or the board game version, Balderdash. You try and make your fake definition sound like it was written by someone at the OED or Websters). The thread begins with something like — I saw a really cool deal at such and such has anyone used them? And there’s one or two or a few hundred conflicting responses half or which sound like fishing stories.

So you decide that the best recommendations coupled with no implication that the company runs guns to terrorists, kills children, pees on the product or takes your money and skips town, makes the place worth the risk. At this point you’re feeling a bit clever and a bit insecure but aren’t thinking information age schminformation schmage. So your next search is try to find out some things about the product. You start with calling the company and they are polite but don’t know the answer you’re looking for and it’s ok, because 1) You know it’s a good question and a difficult one and 2) they were polite and put you on hold to see if they could find the answer. Oh, wait, I don’t have to be vague, I told you the product. The question was, since the photo shows bare cigars (no cellophane) set in the humidor and obviously shipped that way; is the humidor already seasoned? Because there are a lot more cooks than cigar smokers that read this I’ll make a brief analogy; you would not make a stir fry in a new wok without seasoning it. Everything would stick to the wok and pretty much fuck it up. A seasoned wok, however, just gets better with time. A really well seasoned wok will give Clean freaks and OCD folk the heebie jeebies as will a seasoned grill, but will add character and joy to the food. It has parts of every meal before it in the metal itself.

What I did find out from the company was that the humidor does not come with a humidifier. It’s ok, most people throw out the cheap ass plastic sponge humidifiers that come with even fine humidors. Still, it’d be like the wok coming loading with raw stir fry — the question being, do you need to take the ingredients out and season the wok first, or, because they had the nerve to put the ingredients in already has the wok been seasoned? Is it good to go? You want to think the wok folks want you to have a good impression of them and your first experience of this limited edition to be flawless. But, they might assume any idiot knows you have to season a wok first.

So I searched the internet for an answer. The first several sites just wanted to sell me the product and didn’t have any more information than the site I purchased from. So I added a plus review, still, mostly consumer sites with reviews from customers, mostly positive, and exclusively reviewing the transaction and the quality of the cigars. I did run across something interesting but not helpful. There are folks that collect limited edition humidors stocked with cigars. Not a bad collectable idea, typically these things are limited production and the boxes and/or cigars are numbered. No one mentioned any single humidor quality or whether it was seasoned and they all seemed to have fancy walk in or large closet machine humidified areas. And why not? Like any collector you mention and boast about your rarest piece. The art collector shows off his Van Gough, not his weird neighbor’s canvas or daughters crayon drawings on his fridge. The van gough is not thumbtacked to the wall or held on the fridge with magnets. If you have a walk in humidor the box the cigars come in is just for show.

So, the next option is to ask in a forum. I belong to a few I never use. So I tried using one, puff dot com. I wrote a short but eloquent question and even blew some smoke up their asses (e.g., because you guys are so smart and well informed …). Turns out you’re not allowed to post unless you’ve posted thirty times. I checked what that meant because that seemed silly. Most newbies first several posts are “Hi I’m (screen name) love this site, thanks for having me”. I reckon you need to post something like that thirty times. They aren’t really that smart or well informed, I was planning on adding up the comments and finding the average or mean opinion or answer.

I am not a fantastic searcher, but I’m adequate and tenacious. Information ages my ass. I probably could get a lot of hits with Information age plus my ass. It would be disconcerting to find a picture of myself with a humidor up my ass though. I didn’t even see the cameras. Oh, and I’m not paying a buck ninety nine to look at amateur porno of myself. I’ll know the answer in a day or two anyway. The only place it would make sense to post that answer wants me to write thirty times “haredawg. Love you guys.” Fuck that. And I’m spent.

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