I think someone needs a new editor

Uhhhhh. Dollar general and 5 below are not the same store....

A whole new (cr)Apple experience!

Got new iPhones. For the most part, they were easy to setup, and transferring data was simplified from last time. Hey no iTunes required!

But there was a minor issue that my phone needed an iOS update, and when I tried to do that during the setup, it hung for an hour.

I had to start over and set it up as a "new phone" and do the update first. Then start over again and do the transfer.

But then it came time for purchasing apple care...that was just stupid.

We had some money on apple gift cards, so we put it on the "apple account" and then set out to sign up for apple care.

Sorry. You can not purchase it online using your apple account.

You can, however, go into an apple store and use gift cards there.

Which meant that we had to make a call to refund the money from the account to the gift card, and make a trip to an apple store to simply buy apple care.

So much for "for everything apple"

** with some exclusions, which you won't know until you can't do something.

Funny how this all works (campaign fundraising edition)

Never forget that for some people *cough* Trump *cough* elections are about money and profit. 

I saw a headline yesterday that Trumps lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to the GOP; they weren't allowed to use his likeness in any fundraisers. Only he may do that. They summarily shit canned the letter; Trump is a public figure and former head of the organization. Of course they can, in their opinion. 

And here's where things get interesting. 

As I've noted before, at some point the RNC fundraising effort (you know the machinations, data, and fundraising for the GOP) was folded into the Trump campaign. 

Politico broke that news, and you can read about it here: 

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/18/trump-machine-swallows-rnc-1067875

And since, they've put the keystone cops in charge of it, and according to some it's basically a mess. 

And this latest move by trump to control rights to his own likeness builds on that. 

And while there are many examples of how this has gone wrong, one of the best summaries was in this article:

https://www.sentinelsource.com/news/local/gop-operatives-decry-move-to-merge-trump-campaign-national-party/article_9dec3bff-98b4-5c9c-9632-a14b04e67c7d.html

John Weaver, the chief political strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, stressed that the Republican Party cannot afford to lose more members than it already has under Trump, especially given the changing demographics in the U.S. with a shrinking white majority and changes in voting patterns among those with a college degree.

In the big picture, according to Weaver, any short-term gains for Trump are far outweighed by the long-term implications for the party's standing.

"We're in a demographic death spiral, and math isn't spinnable," Weaver said. "... There's a (party) re-alignment taking place right in front of us."

In many ways, they know that if "something" doesn't change, it could be bad news for the GOP. 

And yet he represents them, anyway!

During the election cycle, by and large the Venezuelan population in Florida decided to go all-in on Trump because... reasons!

There was some chattering that "obviously" trump hated Maduro and he'd be likely to grant visas for people who were here, fleeing the regime.

Never mind that he never actually said anything about it. It just had to be true!

And Biden, well, he was a socialist, so therefore he was just like Maduro and won't help them.

Flash forward to this morning. Oh look, Biden doesn't like Maduro either. Shocking, I know. And he's not much like him, either, it turns out.

Oh, and he represented the interests of people who didn't vote for him, people who openly opposed and mocked him during the election. And without even telling them they had to apologize first.



The conclusion to one part of my genealogy research

If you read a piece I did some time ago, you may remember that I had a family mystery with my grandmother - she had a legal issue and I thought she went to jail.

I felt determined to figure out what happened. So I dove right in. Once in a while you get lucky, and hit on a thing or two and can get rolling.

At first I struggled with her name. She used several variations of her name almost like stage names. She also did a lot of misdirection. So it was slow going for a while.

But then I found her divorce record which included her legal name. I went to the dade county court site. Nothing. Then I visited the Miami herald archives.

And bonanza. There were articles and it was easy enough to follow the story.

She held a lease on a 4 unit building (I'm not clear whether her stake was just one unit or the whole thing) and it was insured for $14,000 (it appears to have been on the contents, what's up with that)...

She found a 16 year old "troublemaker" and offered him $500 to burn the place down. Its a little sordid, because she found him via my dad, and met him on a park bench to work out the details of the fire.

She left gasoline and other combustibles in one unit, and gave him a key and $100. She offered $400 more when she got paid from the insurance. She also said she'd get two of the tenants out of the building - but not a third, elderly man.

The boy took the money, and then had second thoughts. He told his parents, and they went to the police. The police investigated and found the gasoline and arrested my grandmother, at a store she owned (I don't know where in the world she got the money for the store or this apartment; this wasn't where she lived - she resided on Miami Beach).

The trial was fairly short, and she was convicted, and got 3 years, but had the sentence reduced for good behavior.

My mom told me that jogged her memory, and my grandmother wound up paying off the attorney's fees by going to work for him as a receptionist for a few years.

That settles that piece of it, but of course raises more questions.

Now I can sleep at night. Ha.

An intriguing family mystery of sorts

A while back, I talked about my own genealogy research.

And then this week, I got a random letter about some property a distant relative owned.

So I opened up the Family Search history and poked around, curious about whether this person was related. It turns out that my paternal grandfather had a sister, which I knew.

She travelled from Newfoundland to NY, at some point to room with my grandfather, which I did not know.

And later, she married and had a daughter. That would be my dads first cousin, who lived in NY.

And, my grandfathers sister lived in NY and died in the mid 70s. So she outlived my grandfather.

I asked my mom about it and she remembered that my grandfather was "close to his sister" ... and yet my mom doesn't think he saw her after he moved to Florida, in about 1942. And she doesn't recall my dad ever meeting (or even knowing about) his cousin. Or having seen his aunt.

Aside: my dad spent some of the summer in NY at the worlds fair in 1964, and didn't "look her up" while he was there, most likely because he didn't know she was there.

That's just strange in a way.

I also poked around my grandfathers other siblings, and they each had children, and they'd be dads first cousins as well. They were in Canada, so I get why we never saw them. But I didn't even know about all of them.

We met some of them a number of years ago, but there are more than we knew about.

It's weird how family simply drifts and loses touch. Or at least used to in this pre-connected world.

Intriguing premise

I found a show called Bletchley Circle on Amazon Prime video.  And I have to say that while the show is good, the premise is what grabbed me, and its really has stuck with me.

So here's the underlying story: while the men were off fighting the second world war, a few were left to oversee the operation of intelligence gathering, codebreaking, and determining how to best counter German actions.  But the grunt work of actually breaking the codes and understanding what was in the messages was left to a group of gifted women.  They were good at recognizing patterns, looking at threads, and generally following up on leads as they sat behind desks in Bletchley or worked with Turing on his enigma machine.

And then the war ended.  Turing was outed as being gay and ostracized and shunned for the rest of his life (before committing suicide).  And the women went back to doing the mundane chores that were allotted to women in England.  Everyone that worked on codebreaking or intelligence was required to sign documents that they would never reveal what they did during the war, under penalty of treason. 

A group of these women, upon whom the story revolves, had agreed to "never be ordinary..." and yet here we are 9 years after the war, and one is a librarian, one is married with two children, one is married with an abusive husband, and one has been anything but ordinary.  

But the bug to follow their passion and be creative and use those skills still lives in them, and they wind up chasing down a serial killer.

Its the nature of this utilizing women when they were needed, and yet putting them back into "traditional roles" after the war that got me.  Its kind of sad in a way.  They were never given their due, well perhaps until recently.  And the work they did mostly remained secret.

I wonder how much further ahead England (or society in general) would have been if they had been encouraged to continue being clever along the way?