​Don’t drink and shave. That’s my new motto.
 
Like not drinking and driving, not drinking and shaving protects you and others. You’re safer it you don’t put a razor in your hand after a few cocktails.

I have multiple examples to buttress why this is so important. I butchered my beard recently after months spent growing it.
 
In October, after foot surgery, to save time I stopped shaving. Since then, I’ve kept the facial hair. It starts to turn into a forest at times, so similar to thinning out branches, you have to trim down the beard unless you want to ride a Harley or become part of the band with ZZ Top. I’d be okay with either of those, but it would take a few years to get the proper beard length.
 
So, to stay semi-respectable on the professional front, I trim the beard. There are many ways to do this. Probably the best and safest is one I don’t employ: Buy one of those electronic trimmers designed specifically for beards and use it. Uh, okay, but of course, I don’t take that simple route.
 
Instead, I deploy regular scissors at times. At others, I use the tiny ones on my Swiss Army knife. And, finally, sometimes when I’m trimming up the edges with the razor, I will glide the razor over the major protruding blades of hair that poke out and look like they should be chopped off.
 
Any trimming leads to potentially excessive trimming. You get started and you can’t stop. “Hmmm, that looks uneven.” So you take some more off on the other side of your face.
 
You look in the mirror: “Whoa, that’s a lot thicker over there.” So you attack the other side. Suddenly your face looks like a relief map of the moon.

This past weekend, I was supremely motivated before going to bed. I’d imbibed a few, got ready for bed, looked at myself in the mirror, and decided to edge around the beard with the razor. Then I looked closely, and said to myself, “Man there are a lot of hairs poking out like crazy.”

So I gently used the razor to slice those off. I hit several spots on both cheeks, under the chin and on the mustache. Seemed okay when I left the bathroom. I even admired it before brushing my teeth and hopping into bed.

But what you see at night and what you see the next morning are not the same. Brushing my teeth, I turned my head to the right and YIKES, “What the heck happened to the left side of my face?” There was a large hole where my beard had been. Kind of like a crater – a hollowed out patch cut down to the nubs.
 
It looks bad, so when I shake hands with people I turn my face to the right and they get to see my good beard side of the face. The hair will grow back. That’s the good thing.
 
I know better now than to drink and shave my beard. Maybe the scissors would still be okay? Uh, probably not. So wait until the morning before you do any trimming. It’s the safe way to groom.

​Most people know about Pavlov’s Dog. But do you know about Pavlov’s cat?
 
The Pavlov dog experiment found that if you reinforced a behavior over and over through a food reward, you could get a dog to do certain things. Get the dog to salivate when you issued a command.
 
Humans are the same way. If we do something repeatedly and get a reward, we’ll go through the same action to make sure we get that bonus.
 
Our household, in contrast to a dog or human, has Pavlov’s cat. His name is Smudge. He has determined that multiple actions on his part will lead to positive consequences.

For example, like most felines, he likes to drink from running water. In a modern home, that means he wants you to turn on the tap, so he can lap from the faucet (I can only presume that these furry creatures had some native sense that tap water equates to a stream, river or brook, so they prefer that to lapping out of a dish, which would equate to a pond or lake).
 
Getting to the kitchen in the morning, I pop the dog food can to feed the hounds and Smudge leaps to the counter. What does he want? Turn the faucet on.
 
So I give him what he wants, and he starts tonguing the running water. Sometimes he toys with me and turns his back on this morning gift, but if I shut the water off, he gives me a look and paws the tap until I twist it back on.
 
It isn’t just at the kitchen sink where he pulls this routine. The bathtub works nicely, too.
 
Go into the bathroom to sit down and take care of business and Smudge hears you. He comes bounding, leaps up onto the bathtub and sticks his head under the faucet. He looks at you while you’re unrolling toilet paper and flushing, “What’s taking you so long?”
 
All it takes is a certain sound and he figures this out. Is it the creak of the toilet seat as you sit down? How does he know you’re doing number one or number two?
 
We keep grated cheese on hand for many different dishes. If I pull out the bag and he is anywhere within cat hearing vicinity, he bounds into the room. What incites Pavlov’s cat in this instance? It has to be the crinkling of the plastic as you pull open the bag to stick your hand in and grab some cheese.

He knows you’ll be holding some of those tasty morsels when he hears the plastic crinkle. I wonder if he salivates.
 
One of our other cats is more manipulative, but she is just as much a Pavlov cat as Smudge. She decides to mournfully manipulate my wife with meows each morning until she gets some cream. Her senses are attuned to the scraping of a small plastic receptacle sliding along the floor and the pouring of a small amount of cream into that container. Make any of those sounds and she comes running. God forbid you don’t, because she’ll let you know about that failure if you don’t service her needs first thing in the morning.
 
We’ve all got a little bit of Pavlov in us, whether we’re a dog, cat or human. Ring the bell, watch us lick our chops.

​If you happen to be a sports fan of a game that is governed by a clock, take a minute and think about this: How many times have you heard something along the lines of, “Their shots are falling early.” Or, “They’re really moving the ball quickly.” And the announcers make those statements in the opening seconds of the game.

It pisses me off when announcers do that. They don’t know anything about how the game is going in the first minute of a contest but they LOVE to make pronouncements like they know exactly what has happened for the past 45 minutes. I wish they’d keep their darn mouths shut. Let the game play out. Let us watch and judge for ourselves.
 
Maybe I need to turn the sound off on the tube. I’d probably be happier. But I do like to hear the crowd noise and intensity, and would lose that by turning off the sound.
 
Last week I was watching Purdue play in the Big 10 basketball tournament. Whoever was announcing said the following 29 seconds into the game (I know the exact time because I wrote it down), “Purdue is going inside early.” Twenty-nine fricking seconds. Oh yeah, I guess you can dictate temp and establish a rhythm that early in a game.
 
Why do announcers do this? Do their bosses want them to speak more? They already speak enough.
 
Do they like the sound of their voice? Probably.
 
Do they feel they have to fill a void? Most likely.
 
Is it because they earn their pay by talking, so the more they talk, the more they feel they’re earning their paycheck? I don’t know.
 
Regardless of the reason or rationale, the syndrome of judging (or prejudging) a sports contest happens far too frequently when you listen to an announcer on television. Prognosticating beforehand is bad enough. If you listen to all the predictions, it can get to the point where you wonder why you even watch the game. The announcers have all the answers.

I understand these guys and women have played the game. They have the insider dope. I appreciate that type of information. TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW. That’s what I want to hear from an announcer.

Be silent, and when something unusual happens or you can provide a unique perspective, weigh in then. Fill the dead time with odd facts and little known pieces of history.

The announcer who stuns you with some trivia unearthed through solid research is the announcer I want to listen to. Those people do exist.
 
Even the good ones often make those early game statements. Maybe there should be a silence period for the first 10 minutes of every game. Kind of like going to church and praying or sitting quietly to meditate on a higher power. Let the game come to you. Let the viewer come to his or her own initial conclusions. Then the announcers can weigh in with some perspective.
 
“It’s clear at the end of the first quarter that Quazzewski just doesn’t have it tonight. He should be benched for Lickbetter.” If you hear that about Quazzewski as the game heads into quarter two instead of after his first incomplete pass, you’re more likely to listen.

So, to all you announcers, “Put a lid on the early pronouncements.” Watch the game and enjoy it for what it is. One play is NOT a trend!

​Sometimes I swear there’s an alien in our house. Or maybe I’m the alien and I just don’t belong on this planet. Something happens that is totally illogical and I think, “Is that me? Or is this situation just too weird?’
 
These types of activities occur (where you can’t figure out why something happened or what happened) typically involve technology. Just recently, two of my coworkers were joking about which of them must have touched their keyboard to eliminate some files that were available the day before. Those are the types of situations where you wonder if a force has seized your keyboard, your computer, the software or the cloud itself to change something and drive you batty.

It’s the “change” element that baffles most of us who are IT illiterate. Our expectations on a daily basis are to turn our laptop, iPad or desktop on, and the screen lights up. We tap in our password. Like magic, we get access to data and can go almost anywhere in the world to look at pictures, read things or watch videos.


We get used to that simplicity. Because we really don’t understand how our typing actions affect the inner workings of the programs running on our devices, we get completely lost when something goes wrong.
 
The coworker example was about some files used for stories. Typically, my two coworkers just clicked on what they needed, did their work, saved it and moved on. But then for no apparent reason the aliens took over and they couldn’t get where they wanted to go. Neither could the IT troubleshooter. The help desk was no help. That’s probably never happened to you, right?
 
Despite how integral various electronic devices are to our daily lives, they really are not our friends. The slightest miss-tap causes a mistake. We get lost. The cursor goes into nether-nether land and never comes back. You need an expert in language AND technology to explain things and figure out how to fix it. An alien might be a better able to solve the problem.
 
Scarily, the alien has access to many things about where you go, along with personal information. We trust the alien because we presume his goodness. If we work with him closely, he will not do us wrong.
 
But we don’t have proof of that. And when we get locked out, or our files disappear, we know the alien haunts us.
 
Recently, I found my files reversed on my home desktop computer. Why? Who the heck knows?


One day I accessed some Word documents and rather than them coming up starting with the “A’s,” they came on the screen starting with the “Z’s.” That’s okay. I can figure that out. But what did I do to piss the alien off? I’m sure it was something simple like accidently hitting a key but that doesn’t allow you to replicate the action to figure it out and reverse the complication.
 
Last week, Facebook stopped showing videos that are downloaded from other sites. I don’t know why. Initially they come up, then as you scroll down the Facebook page, they disappear and turn into different shades of black, inaccessible. That’s okay. I really don’t care. But still, why does the alien care about videos on Facebook?

I wish he’d figure out something more productive to do. Then again, maybe he’s telling me where I should stop wasting my time.