From time to time, I have things to say that aren’t substantial enough to fill an episode.  So, I lump them together into a single episode/article I call, “PonkaBlog Shorts”.  Here are three.

Natural Woman

Nike has decided to support women.  Real women.  Technically, that’s not quite true.  Well, it is, but Nike doesn’t know it yet.  Or, more likely, they do know it but they’re just not admitting it.

Recently, Faith Kipyegon, a Nike-sponsored female athlete attempted to break the four-minute mile barrier.  If successful, she’d be the first women in history to do so.

Nike decked her out with all sorts of high-tech gear.  And she followed a bunch of men acting as pacers and shielding her from the wind. 

Faith didn’t hit her goal.  She fell six seconds short.  Which is still pretty good.  Just not quite good enough.

But that isn’t the story.  Or at least it shouldn’t be.

Silent Agreement

The real story is that Nike is slightly less Woke than it was.  Or that it’s claiming to be.

You see, it doesn’t take a world-class male athlete to run a sub-four-minute mile.  Lots of high school boys have done it. 

If the people running Nike really believed in all this “trans” bullshit, they’d have just found a man pretending to be a woman, or a boy pretending to be a girl, put a “Just Do It” tee-shirt on him, have him run a four-minute mile, and then celebrate his accomplishment.

But Nike didn’t do that.  Instead, they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars researching how to make to make the human female body perform better.  Because the folks at Nike know that there’s a huge difference between being a female and merely pretending to be one.

So yeah, Nike supports real women and realizes that there’s more to being a woman than long hair and makeup.  They just won’t admit it.

Just Leave Well Enough Alone

My dad was in his 80’s when he got his first smartphone.  It was an Android because that’s what I have, and I was the one helping him with his tech.  The only thing he used it for was to make and receive phone calls.  And he could barely do that.

Eventually, I got things set up brain-dead-simple enough so that he could make it work.  When he wanted to make a call, he just pushed the microphone button and told the phone who to call.  When he wanted to answer a call, he clicked a button on the left side of the screen. 

If you’d asked him to describe the button, he wouldn’t have been able to do it.  But he could tell you where the button was located.

Then Google pushed out an update. 

Now, for most people, the update wasn’t a big deal.  But it was for my dad and, I suspect, a lot of people like him.  The update changed the position of some of the icons on the screen.  More specifically, it swapped the locations of the answer and end call buttons. 

So, when he went to answer the phone, he clicked on the button that was in the place that he always clicked.  And, instead of answering the call, he’d disconnect it.

He lived for several more years after that.  But I don’t think he ever really got comfortable with the new button locations.

A Pattern of Ageism?

I have a friend who is going through a similar situation.  She’s in her 80’s (I think) and has an iPhone.  And, like my dad, she can’t make her phone work anymore.  Because things don’t work like they used to.  Buttons have been moved and things reorganized to make things “better”.  And because of that, she’s missing phone calls from her doctor.

All because Apple, like Google, has a habit of changing things that are, and have been, working just fine. 

This isn’t limited to just Apple and Google.  I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve seen an app “improved” and those “improvements” have rendered things almost unusable. 

I have a theory about that.

A lot of big companies have an entire organization dedicated to improving the user experience.  And those people have to do something to earn their keep.  Which means they need to change things. 

Now, they can’t look at their app and say, “everything is working fine and there’s no reason to change anything.”  Because then there’d be no need to keep them around.  So, they come to work each day and create updates that make their product worse. 

There’s a term for that.  The term is “enshittification”.  And no, I’m not making that up.  It’s a real thing. 

Enshittification refers to a company initially launching a great product that then gets worse over time as the company focuses more on profits and less on the end-user experience.

In the instances I’m describing, a great product becomes worse not because of a company’s focus on profits, but because of employees needing to appear useful.  They get paid to change things.  The changes don’t have to be improvements, they just have to be.

And that’s why, over time, things that were working perfectly well, end up turning to shit.

Animal Cruelty

A couple of weeks ago, I was working in our backyard when my wife informed me that we had a raccoon on our sidewalk.  I took a look at the raccoon and quickly determined that there was something really wrong with the animal. 

How do I know?  Because, as it turns out, I know quite a lot about raccoons. 

When I was about 12 years old, my brothers and I had a pet raccoon named “Bandit” (named for obvious reasons). 

We had Bandit for a year or two.  Once he got old enough so he could defend himself from our cats, we let him come and go as he pleased.  Mostly he stayed around our yard, but his evening forays got longer and longer until one morning he just didn’t come back.

After Bandit, we had another raccoon named “Monster” (named for less than obvious reasons).  The same thing happened with Monster.  He stayed with us for a bit longer than Bandit because he was strangely fond of our dog.  But, eventually, one morning he just wasn’t there.

So, I know a thing or two about raccoons.  In fact, it’s highly likely that I know more about raccoons than anyone else in the county and surrounding areas.  And I could tell that this one wasn’t going to make it. 

But it wouldn’t have taken my expertise to know that this was one seriously damaged animal.  Mostly because his back legs didn’t seem to work and he was having trouble breathing.  I suspect that someone driving a car ran him over and he had some massive internal damage.

I say “he”, but I didn’t get close enough to check.  It’s quite possible that it was a female raccoon, or a male raccoon that identifies as female.  In any case, I’m going to continue to refer to him as “he”.

My first thought was to just put him out of his misery.  I could have put a round through his brain and ended his pain.  But that would be illegal because I’m not supposed to fire a gun inside city limits.

Then I thought about just grabbing a hammer and whacking it on the head a few times.  It’s not quite as quick or clean as a gun but it would get the job done and end his suffering. 

Camera Shy

Then I remembered that everyone and their grandmother is walking around with a camera, eager to record something they can post on their social media feed.  All it would take is for someone to post a video of me killing the animal and I’d be heading to jail.  Regardless of the circumstances.

There are clearly other options than a gun or a hammer, but most of them risked me getting too close to an injured wild animal and all of them came with the risk of someone recording me.

So, I did the only thing I could do.  I called Animal Control.  They informed me that they only deal with domesticated animals and gave me a different number to call.  I tried that number and was given the number of a “hotline” set up for this very purpose.

I called the “hotline” and got a recording to leave my contact information and that someone would get back to me.  I was warned that this “hotline” was staffed by volunteers so it might take a while to get a call back.

I left a message along with my contact info and waited for them to call.  They never did.

Throughout the rest of the morning, I checked on the raccoon every so often. Eventually, four hours later, it was dead.  Every one of those hours must have been agonizingly painful for it.

I didn’t want to kill the raccoon.  But I would have done it.  Because it was the right thing to do.  It was the humane thing to do.

But I couldn’t.

I realize that there needs to be laws prohibiting cruelty against animals to protect them from idiots.  But what’s crueler, to quickly put an animal out of its misery, or to let it suffer for hours before it eventually dies on its own?