Tomversation by Tom Falco

Painters, construction and street work, oh my . . .

I saw this old 1954 cartoon by A.E. Beard recently, and I didn’t get it at first, then I realized – that’s one of my past neighbors. Every time it was time to paint the building, he would say, “Why do we need to paint the building? The only people who will see it are the people in the water.”

We live on the bay, so he meant the people out in their boats, boards and kayaks would see the building and we wouldn’t since we are looking out at them, not at the building.

I explained to him it was to protect the building, not to show it off, although I guess it should look nice by being painted ever few years.

I think we have the building painted every seven years. We had it done recently.

My neighbor passed away last year, so he had no say in the job being done. We are also changing all the pavers out in the parking area, which he has been opposed to since I have known him. For over 20 years he stopped that job. Now it will be done. Some areas are sinking. It needs to be done!

We have had a lot of work done around here recently – lots of workers around. The painters were here for a couple of months, they even washed my car for me a few times. Before that, we had structural work done, due to the 40 year recertification rule, a Florida thing – they were here before the painters for a couple of months.

And now, for many months, the streets are being “repaired.” They are putting new drainage pipes in the streets, raising the streets and raising the sidewalks. Our cul-de-sac has been taken over since November and it is supposed to go on until June!

There is all sorts of big construction equipment blocking our paths daily. It’s a chore going in and out. But the workers try to be accommodating.

One of my neighbors said I was in and out too much. He said, “Why don’t you try and stay home during the day, like I do.” I should have told him I have things to do and people to see, but I just ignored him.

A funny thing about the whole street job is that I was gone a few weeks in the summer, and one of my neighbors was gone for almost two months. We both thought we were beating the system, by being gone while all the work was being done. Unfortunately, they started the job months later.

I do have to say that the guys doing the construction work about the building, the painters and these guys working on the streets are and were all polite and friendly. Overly friendly.

Just the other day, a cement truck sat by for a half hour or so just waiting to get by, while a neighbor down the street had his car washing company block the road with his big trailer set-up. I honked and made the car washers move. The cement truck guys just sat and waited patiently.

Till next time . . .

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Why I’ll avoid that Coral Gables road in the future

There’s a section of Coral Gables that is the worst. For driving.

There’s a stretch of road, about a mile long, that has torn-up streets and potholes every few feet. No exaggeration.

As I drive down this street – Sunset Drive – I dodge the pitfalls. But the other day, I hit a huge pothole as I was driving home from Whole Foods and my tire exploded! Literally.

I believe the damage to the streets is done by construction equipment – dump trucks, cement trucks and more. The street is not some back alley, it’s lined with multi-million dollar mansions and houses, but it’s under constant renovation and construction. I’m really not sure how these well healed residents don’t complain to the city leaders, who seem to not give a damn.

They don’t have to redo the whole street, but someone to fill in potholes on a fulltime basis would be nice. The total Miami-Dade County is full of potholes, but this one street is one of the worst.

Luckily cars now have no-flat tires. They are airless tires. They eliminate punctures unless your tire explodes, like mine did. But the good part is that I was able to drive on it. You can drive up to about 50 miles on no-flat tires.

There are no spares and no jacks in the car. The first time I had a flat, I went into the trunk to look for the spare, and there was none. The space in the trunk is still there, but it’s empty! I freaked out at first, thinking they left the spare and jack out when I purchased the car! Then I learned about no-flat tires.

The tire gage will go down to zero, to alert you something is up. But the bumpy ride and explosion sound alerted me.

I ended up bring my car to get a new tire, and I was able to drive there without being towed. And that’s the end of that adventure. I won’t be taking Sunset Drive to Whole Foods anymore. I’ll take an alternate route. One that is outside Coral Gables and pothole-free.

I’m laughing about writing about potholes. I remember way back, when I wrote the daily news of our village, I would write about potholes sometimes and people outside the village thought I was crazy writing about a pothole, but it was a big thing, literally and figuratively, for the village. I guess not so much for much larger Coral Gables.

Anyway, $330.00 later, I am back on the road – only not that road, I actually took an alternate route to Whole Foods yesterday.

Till next time . . .

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Turning green, Flintstones, Password Manager

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

Paper or plastic?

I was Whole Foods the other day getting dark chocolate covered almonds- a superfood – both the dark chocolate and the almonds combined. Here’s my bag of almonds.

Next to me was a lady getting some sort of nuts.

The way it’s set up, the items are all in bins and you take what you want in a paper bag, write down the code number and use the code number to pay when you check out. It’s charged by the pound or the ounce, or the miniscule ounce, according to the lady.

Here are the bins, you take one of the paper bags and do your thing. But this lady was struggling with one of those green plastic bags used for fruits and vegetables, which are not rigid, once you figure out how to get them open – and don’t really work well for the candy and nuts dropping from the bins.

I said to the lady, “Here are the paper bags, it’s easier to use these.”

Her reply had everyone in the vicinity who heard the conversation, stop in their tracks. She said, “The plastic bags are lighter.”

I stood there for a minute and said, “What do they save you, a tenth of a penny?” People laughed and the lady huffed off.

I know times are tough and things are expensive, but I would assume anyone shopping in Whole Foods could afford the extra tenth of a penny that might be the difference in the bag weights.

It got me thinking – are we paying for the bags when we weigh the candy and nuts? And then I slapped myself out of it, the lady almost had me thinking like her, “How could I save a tenth of a penny by avoiding all bags?”

Anyway, I just found the whole incident funny. I wasn’t trying to make fun of the lady. But she was a Karen if ever I saw one. A silent Karen because I’m the one who started talking to her, she was quiet and doing her own thing.

Oh right, she said as she huffed off, “It’s easier to eat from the plastic bags than the paper ones.”

Whatever.

Till next time . . .

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

A visit to the 16th Century

Every year about this time, a bunch of us go to he Florida Renaissance Festival up in Deerfield Beach. It’s a trip back in time to the 16th century.

There’s so much to do, I think my favorite has always been the horse jousting. They are right there doing their thing, a few feet in front of you! Real life 1500s!

There is a lot of food and drink a lot of my family drink their way through the festival – and there are plenty of marketplace items with jewelry, clothing, wooden toys, blown glass and so much more.

On Friday, it poured in South Florida – torrential rain, and it was supposed to rain all day Saturday, but it was bright and sunny all day – and very, very hot.

It’s a great way to spend the day – in another time and place. So many shows are going on throughout the venue, you can spend all day doing that, but of course we like to eat and drink. While there are turkey legs, the food is of this century – gyros, pizza, Chinese food, etc. And so are the drinks – IPA’s and other beers.

And of course they take credit, Apple Pay and all the 21st Century payment methods, especially cash. Many vendors require cash. But I did see a sign that said, “We accept Master Card and Lady Visa,” so there’s that.

Till next time . . .

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

Talking trash, Van Gogh and a 2000 year old traffic ticket

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Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

How far we’ve come

I saw this old “Lefty” Wright comic strip in “Stripper’s Guide” blog recently and noticed this strip from 1937 used the phrase “Be Cool.” So it’s interesting to see that some of the expressions we use today, were around so many years ago.

I would have assumed “Be Cool” came from the 1950s or 1960s, but I guess not.

Now if you never heard of the “Lefty Wright” comic strip, that’s understandable, according to Stripper’s Guide, it was short lived – it ran from April 8 to May 27, 1937.

As for “Stripper’s Guide,” – no, it’s not about anything naked, you know, “Strippers” and “stripping.”

Strippers are people who work in the newspaper business, or I should say worked in the newspaper business. They put everything together back in the dark room so many years ago before computers. I know a guy named Richard to this day, who used to work at a newspaper I worked at years ago, and he was a stripper.

They took the articles and headlines and photos, mostly the photos and “stripped them” together on the negatives, where plates were then made and put on the press and printed.

We used to put big red boxes in place of the photos, including the comics and anything that was an image, that red came out as clear on the page negative and then the photos and images were then “stripped” into the blank spaces. It was a process.

I remember so many years ago, our boss, the owner of the newspaper we worked for, told us about “pagination.” It was a process coming up in the future where the whole page would come out as one piece, instead of stripping everything in one piece at a time. We were in awe when he told us that. Imagine that, one whole piece of paper or negative, that would be all put together and ready for print.

I remember when computers first came out, I asked one of my brothers who worked in IT if it would be possible to have different fonts on the computer, so that when we typeset, we could bounce back and forth from one font to another and make it different sizes at that.

He thought it over and said it probably could be done by being programmed some way, but we never did figure out that way at the time.

Amazing how far things have come from stripping to font creation and beyond

Reminds me of a segment I saw on CBS Sunday Morning – about the creation of the iPhone, which was flabbergasting to everyone at the time. Flabbergasting. Is that a word? The article and video are here, “Apple: The First 50 Years.”

Till next time . . .

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

Lucy and Ethel, witches and salty soup

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

My publishing schedules

My Tomversation cartoons are posted online early in the morning, they are scheduled. But as for social media, I usually do it myself by hand, at around 8 am, usually a bit before, but never the same time each day, but like I said, around 8 am eastern time.

So there I am on the computer or my iPhone posting to Facebook and Instagram and I’ll post to Substack and Twitter/X later in the day.

You can subscribe free and receive all five on a Friday in your email, by going here: https://tomversation.substack.com/embed – it’s mailed out through Substack, but you don’t have to sign up for Substack, it’s just my mailing platform.

I was thinking the other morning, that when I used to publish our village’s daily news, the first post was published at 8 am for a bit, I eventually changed it to 5 am since I realized many people were up that early and waiting for the 8 am post.

One guy told me, “Every morning I am sitting there at the computer waiting for you to hit ‘send’ so the first post of the day comes up.”

I told him, I was not sitting there, watch in hand, waiting for 8 am (like I do now), I told him it was timed ahead of time to post at that time.

I usually posted the stories throughout the day, I don’t know why, it might have made more sense to just post them all at once, like any news outlet would do. I think I may have done it so that people would be coming back all day and perhaps see my advertisers over and over again. I’m not sure, but maybe that was the reason.

I am asked almost daily if I miss publishing the daily news. I don’t. It was a full time, never ending job. A three minute story on the village council meeting might have had me sitting through six hours at the meeting for that story which took a few minutes to read. I was at every event every day of the week – village meetings, merchant meetings, parties, openings, closings, committee meetings, event meetings, parades, etc. Sounds fun, but I had no outside life.

I remember one time it was earlier in the day for an event, The Bed Race, a charity event, coming up later that day, and I was walking the race track, which was a street in the center of the village, with a friend. She had to run to get to work at 10 am, which was down the block, and she said to me, “Tom, you are always in the middle of everything. It must be so much fun,” I was literally thinking, at that same time, mind you, “Is it 6 pm yet? I just want to go home.”

The grass is aways greener.

Till next time . . .

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.

Rained out street fair

Our last art show of the season was a washout. Literally.

We haven’t had rain for a long time, we are in a drought situation, but it really came down during our yearly village street party on Sunday, which is a mini art show as well.

It’s a place where everybody knows your name. The whole village seems to come out and it’s very special. There were a lot of people in the village because it was a Sunday, but they were not part of the street fair. They don’t really know about it.

Usually this art stroll/street fair is sunny and seems to be the hottest day of the year each year. The cucumber punch stand is the most popular. But this past Sunday, the weather was ok for a bit, and then the skies opened.

I hung out with some friends for a bit, which was nice, but I see them all the time. I look forward to seeing people that I don’t see so often, but that was not to be.

One friend and I separated and we went to a local restaurant, where there were a lot of people who ran over to get out of the rain. There was a 30 minute wait, and not many people we knew. But the food was great and the waiter remembered me from last time and brought me my favorite dish, so that was nice.

When I returned home, the street out front was flooded. The city has been working on adding new drainage pipes for a few months now. But in the process, they closed up the current drainage pipes, so that causes quite a lake when it pours, which luckily hasn’t been often. I think the last time was on Thanksgiving day.

Anyway, it’s the end of art season and the beginning of Spring and Summer. New seasons to enjoy.

Till next time . . .

Subscribe via email to my blog and cartoons here – the cartoons will arrive each Friday plus occasional short blog posts are sent during the week.