Author: J.J. Probasco

Every day, man is making bigger and better foolproof things, and every day, nature is making bigger and better fools.  So far, I think nature is winning.

Okay, I’ll confess I found out already, but I had to ask the question when Sugar Babe saw the new cover photo posted by her niece on Facebook, showing her daughter dressed in a princess outfit.

“Looks like she’s sittin’ on a croker sack,” Sugar Babe opined.

“That doesn’t look like a Kroger sack,” sez I.  “Those are plastic and have handles.  This looks like a gunny sack.”  I looked askance at her, as I am wont to do.  She grew up in Georgia and they talk funny down there.  Being a normal person who grew up in Iowa, it takes me some doin’ to figger out their weird turns of speech sometimes.

“Not ‘Kroger’,” said she.  “Croker!”

“What the heck’s a croker sack??” I asked.  See?  I had to ask, just like I said.

We discussed it all up and down, and I finally pestered her into researching the origin of that term.  She burned up the Googleways until she found an opinion that felt really authoritative, so I accept that I’ve actually learned something today and had to pass it on to anybody who might find themselves bored enough to read this.  It’s from the Word Detective website, which I’ll link here, and paste the meat of it below for easier finding.  And I have to point out that the person asking the question came up with it after moving to. . .you guessed it. . .Georgia.

I rest my case.

Make mine extra-crispy.

Dear Word Detective: When I moved to Georgia I heard a number of people refer to a burlap feed sack as a “croker sack,” but never got the origin of that name. Finally, while coon hunting with a good ole boy who referred to the southern sack, I asked for and got his take on “croker sack.” He told me that he and others who frog gig, or frog grab, carry burlap feed sacks to put the frogs in and thus the name. Since frogs may be called “croakers,” I suppose that it is actually then “croaker sack.” Somehow I am not convinced that this is the only origin of the “croker/croaker sack,” and I’d like to know if you’ve ever heard of this name for burlap feed sacks. — Catherine Symanowski.

Bags of frogs, huh? Sounds like fun. I was planning on eventually moving to someplace with bookstores and decent restaurants and maybe even a symphony orchestra, but I now have a new criterion for my ideal abode. I saved a snake the other day, incidentally. It was crossing our road and a truck was coming, so I jumped up and down in front of it until it turned around and slithered to safety. I know the truck wouldn’t have stopped for the snake because it didn’t even slow down for me. We gotta get out of this place.

It’s true that “croaker” is slang for a frog in many places in the U.S., as well as a term used to denote a wide variety of fish species, some of which apparently actually make a croaking sound. “Croaker” has also been used at various times to mean a person who complains or speaks in a depressing manner, a person or animal close to death (about to “croak”), and, especially in U.S. prisons, a doctor.

But none of these senses of “croaker” underlie “croaker sack.” The forms “croaker sack” and “croker sack” are both variants of “crocus sack,” the coarse burlap bags used to ship crocus. The crocus, known to most of us as a colorful flowering plant, is, more importantly from an economic standpoint, also the source of saffron, an orange-red powder used in flavoring and coloring food. (This saffron differs from “Indian saffron,” which is the spice turmeric.) While “croker sack” is primarily heard in the American South today, “croker” as a term for a crocus merchant dates all the way back to 16th century England.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works, but how to make it stop.

— P.J. O’Rourke

Always remember you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Well, this is fascinating. I just found my book (published 3 1/2 months ago) available as a used (but in very good condition) paperback on Amazon for $15.88 + $3.99 shipping, from a seller in Connecticut.  Right next to where you can buy it new for $9.99, with 2-day free shipping if you have Prime.

Another interesting aspect, to me at least, is that I haven’t sold thousands of books — I know that’s hard to believe, but so very true — and the market for used books written by me isn’t particularly huge.  And, actually, most of my sales have been pretty much to friends or friends of friends, and I don’t know anybody in Connecticut.

A lot of authors have noticed similar things happening with their books, and the consensus seems to be that the people selling books like this will get orders from buyers who accidentally click the wrong thing and end up buying that more expensive book.  Or perhaps someone will think it’s somehow a special edition, or something, and buy it just because it’s more expensive.  The seller gets the order, orders a new (and therefore in very good condition indeed) one themselves from Amazon with Prime shipping (it’s print-on-demand so there’s no inventory to mess with) and then mails it to their customer in a few days, and makes about six bucks profit.

Upon pondering this for a few minutes…they’re pretty smart.  They’re making more money per book than the author gets in royalties without having to do anything more than place an order and put a book in the mail.  Wish I’d thought of that, except for the part about it being unscrupulous…but there’s no law against it.  I do wonder how many people actually buy things from these scammers, though.

I’d sure love to hear from anybody who does, so they can explain why.  ‘Cause that would be even more fascinating.

If you’d like help finding it, here ya go…

New Used Book For Sale 

OOPS!  Gotta do an update now.  Checking the Amazon listing on 10/13/18, I see that the used book is no longer offered.  Gee…it must have been sold!  Or the seller was discouraged.  In any case, the situation still exists with other books and may again with mine, so now you know how this works.  Or might.

This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.

–Will Rogers

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

–Winston Churchill

Cruising the California coast, soaking up the ocean view, gliding through the beautiful rolling hills, reveling in the glorious late spring weather…we were on vacation.  Well, maybe I shouldn’t call it a vacation, because I’d been retired from the Air Force for a year.  We were all settled into our new place out in the wilds of the Missouri Ozarks, and now our primary job was doing whatever we felt like.

We were on a mission, though.  Our son, who was a doctor in the Air Force and doing his residency at Travis Air Force Base, had been captivated by a bewitching lawyer lady and they were getting hitched.  It would be a lovely outdoor ceremony at dawn the next morning, out in the lush hills of the wine country.

We had set up camp in Santa Rosa at a Motel 6, the only place in the area that allowed pets without a hundred bucks’ worth of non-refundable cleaning deposit.  Bear, our shepherd/Lab adopted son, was on his normal professional guard duty, pretending to snore peacefully on his blankie next to the bed while staying ever-alert for encroaching evil.

It was two in the morning when my eyes snapped open.  My innards were in a turmoil that suggested our take-out from the local A&W had gone rogue in a big way.  I felt light-headed as I stumbled to the bathroom, and was thinking this was a heck of a time to come down with the flu.

I was sitting there scratching my head before I realized I was doing it, and then started scratching a little more.  And a little more.  And then I realized my whole scalp was itching.  A LOT.  And it started down my arms.  And my chest.  And then the fleas of a thousand junkyard dogs, in fierce competition with a massive swarm of ravenous chiggers, were gnawing on every square centimeter of EVERYWHERE.

I headed back to the bedroom so Sugar Babe could share in my misery, ‘cause that’s what marriage is all about.  The world was spinning.  My throat was tightening up and it was getting hard to breathe.  I collapsed on the bed.

I was starting to suspect this just might not be the flu after all.  Sugar Babe quickly concluded that circumstances called for a little more than her stash of Tylenol and Band-Aids.  But what we did have was a doctor in the family, who could use a heads-up that there might be a slight snag in us getting to his ceremony as well as maybe even providing some free medical consultation.  She dug out the number of the bed and breakfast where he was staying and dialed him up.  I scratched and moaned.

Rousted out of his deep slumber at oh-dark-hundred on his wedding day, and needing to be out in the boonies in three hours for the festivities, Doc shook off the blearies and agreed with her that it sounded like some kind of allergic reaction was going on and I needed to get to a hospital before it got worse.

So, like any good retired military officer, used to quickly analyzing a situation and making lightning, but informed, decisions — and this being way before the widespread use of smart phones with GPS and Google — Sugar Babe grabbed the yellow pages and started looking for emergency rooms.

I did my part — lying flat on my back because I’d pass out if I tried to stand up — struggling into my clothes.  That was the limit of my capabilities, and I didn’t do that very well.  Bear helped by sticking his wet nose in my face to ask what was going on.

She found two emergency rooms, thought it would make a lot of sense to see which was closer, and looked for a map of the city.  Would you believe that the yellow pages for Santa Rosa, California, would have 18 pages of instructions on how to recycle everything from paper and plastics to Aunt Fanny’s old bloomers, but only had a tiny, one-page map for a city of 175,000 people??  Yeah.

While she was calling emergency rooms to see if they would take our medical insurance, Doc woke up just a little bit more and realized she had been telling him that besides the itching, I was too dizzy to stand up, which just might mean that my blood pressure had dropped a lot and I just might be having a close, personal relationship with anaphylactic shock.  He figured he’d better call her back and tell her to forget about the emergency room and just call 911 and get an ambulance there pronto.

He called Information and they gave him the number for “the Motel 6.”  He tried that number and the motel clerk said there was nobody by that name registered.  It turned out that there were two Motel 6’s in Santa Rosa — on the same road, no less — and he got the number for the north one while we were in the south one.  Nobody realized that at the time, but when we found out later, it sure resolved a lot of questions.

Meanwhile, the first emergency room — the closer one, of course — wouldn’t take our insurance.  The second would, so Sugar Babe got directions to supplement what she could make out of the tiny lines on the map and asked if they’d please have somebody meet us with a wheelchair or something because I couldn’t walk.

She helped me stagger out to the Expedition, went back for Bear, and off we went.

Finally, something went right and we were met in the parking lot by a wheelchair, which I plopped into, a pathetic pile of quivering wretchedness.  I was whisked inside to sit in front of a bored woman with paperwork, who rejected Sugar Babe’s offer of pertinent info because she wanted it directly from me.  Me, the guy who could barely breathe, let alone sit up and converse coherently about identification and medical insurance.  I tried feebly to comply.

A nurse appeared and put a blood pressure cuff on my arm, pumped it up, glanced at the dial for a few seconds, and said, “Oh, sh…”

Medical folks are rigorously trained not to say, “Oh, sh…” and I was proud of her for managing to choke it off as she grabbed the wheelchair and zoomed me out of the waiting room, hollering at the paperwork person to get the info from his wife because he needed to be elsewhere, and right now.

It was finally exciting for a bit as people appeared and wrestled me onto one of those uncomfortable beds while grabbing equipment and wheeling it around and checking that pressure one more time to make sure.  I asked the nurse what it was, and she said, “66 over 37.”  I suggested that didn’t sound really good.  She assured me she was impressed…she’d never seen a pressure that low on somebody who was actually still breathing.

I felt special, anyway.

I spent the next 7 hours in that bed, watching a doctor occasionally walk in, stare at me from across the room while stroking his chin thoughtfully, and tell the nurse no, let’s hold off with the epinephrine for a little while longer and see what happens.  I was an impromptu, involuntary, single-case medical experiment conducted by a psychopath.  I focused on somehow getting my hands around his throat.  Couldn’t even sit up.  Had to be content that the itching faded.  Mostly.

I stayed in that dizzy, breathless limbo for hours until he finally relented and let the nurse shoot me up.  And then, in short order, all was well.  They observed me for a little while, scratched their heads in wonder, and discharged me.

I was in the emergency room from 2 hours before the wedding started until 15 minutes after the reception was over.  I guess I wasn’t meant to be a witness to it.  If I’d only known that in advance, I could have saved the 4,000 miles of round-trip driving…though we did manage to have dinner with Doc and LawLady before heading home again, so there’s that.

What caused it?  No clue.  The subsequent allergy test revealed only a little hay fever in conjunction with ragweed and suchlike.  I carried an epi-pen for years, but never used it.  The mystery reaction showed up a dozen more times over the intervening decades but was always nipped in the bud by a little benadryl before it got to the hard-to-breathe stage.

Conclusion?  Mother Nature’s trying to kill me.  For the previous year since I’d retired and moved to the Ozarks, she’d been attacking me with wasps, snakes, poison ivy, bats, falling trees, armadillos, spiders, and forest fires, and still I lived.  So now she was sending in the assassination squads with methods apparently undetectable by modern science.  I’ve foiled them…for now.  But they’re relentless.

So I moved to Tennessee to escape…and it turns out she’s here, too.  The attacks are escalating.  It’s only a matter of time now.  But I have a yard tractor, weed whacker, and chainsaw, and I’m taking as much of her with me as I can.

You might want to stand back…this is gonna get messy.

The epidemic of hacking or cloning or spoofing accounts on Facebook seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I know three of my own friends affected in the last week, so let’s try to beat it back a little. I think we need to start out with a little clarification of what those terms really mean.

When someone pretends to be you and sends new friend requests to people on your friend list, a lot of people think that means you’ve been hacked and you need to change your password. This is very seldom the case. If your account is actually hacked, someone can get into it and make posts or messages that look like they’re coming from you, or change or steal information in your profile, or change your photos, or do anything they want. That’s serious, but usually if someone makes a post that looks like it’s coming from you, it’s because you left your phone or computer logged in and somebody came across it and they’re playing with you. If you actually did get hacked, you need to change your password if the intruder hasn’t already done it and stolen your account from you. You also need to get ahold of FB customer service and work with them to fix it.

Like I said, that’s rare. What most people experience is that somebody who isn’t you is pretending to be you and sending friend requests to people on your list. Almost anybody can steal your profile picture and your cover photo and use them to open a new account using your name. This is called cloning, also known as spoofing.

Why do they do this? Many reasons. They may pretend to be in dire circumstances and request money. They may be able to get people to click on links they provide, which may lead to malware, or ransomware, or even just ads that they get paid to get people to click on. They may be able to glean a lot of information from people who reveal things to friends that aren’t available to the public, which can be used to steal their identities. Lots of bad people are out there doing bad things.

What you can do to help prevent this is restrict a lot of information in your security settings. But if it happens, whether it happens to you or if you get a suspicious request from somebody who’s already a friend, you need to report the offender to Facebook. This is how to do that.

The easiest way is to go to that fake page. Do this by typing your name (or your friend’s name) in the search window, and select the one that looks like you or your friend, but isn’t.

On the bottom right corner of the cover photo is a little square with 3 dots. That’s if you’re on my computer…if you’re on my smart phone, the 3 dots are in a little circle to the right under the profile picture, labeled “More.” Hopefully your computer and phone are close enough to mine and you’ll figure it out…I’ll cross my fingers.

Click on those 3 dots and you’ll get some choices…click on the one that says, “Give feedback or report this profile.” In the next window, click on “Pretending to be someone.” Then you’ll get a choice under that, and you can click on “Me” or “A Friend,” depending on which you’re reporting. After that, click “Send” at the bottom and follow any further prompts that might show up. When I’ve done “A Friend,” it’s given me a list of my friends to pick from so their troubleshooters can determine who’s fake and shut them down. If it’s your account and a friend reports it, you may get contacted by the FB folks to get it sorted out, or it might be obvious and they’ll just fix it. It’s usually pretty quick.

Just remember these tips and if it happens to you again or you get something suspicious from a friend, it’s easy peasy to shut ’em down.