Amish Heaters

Leo's Amish Heater
Leo’s Amish Heater

Our neighbor, Leo, came to our door the other morning wondering if our electricity was working. I flicked on a few lights and told him it was. He said half of his lights were out so I told him I would come over and see if I could help. I had tried to help with an electrical problem before but neither of us could find the sub panel with the fuses. Leo has lived in this house for sixty years. An electrician eventually straightened him out then and he he found the sub panel. He figured Leo had blown the fuse when he fired up his old space heater and his new Amish heater at the same time. Only old people read the newspaper anymore and those Amish heaters are featured daily in full page ads. They are essentially a basic electric space heater with a lightbulb-powered display of fake burning logs. I can’t believe Leo fell for this.

He told me they save 15 per cent on your heating bill. I told him they were dangerous but he said they say a child can sit on the with getting burnt. I asked if he had both heaters on at once again and he admitted that he did. Consumer Reports says the $500 heaters are not made by the Amish but in China. It’s going to take longer than Leo has for him to start saving his fifteen per cent.

People sort of trust the Amish, their old fashioned values and all and it’s hard to believe they’re in cahoots with the Chinese on these things.

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Soul Power

Muhammad Ali in Soul Power
Muhammad Ali in Soul Power

Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was. ” And he is even a bigger star than James Brown. We watched “Soul Power” at the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theater over the weekend. It’s really the outtakes from “When We Were Kings” which Peggi and I saw at the Little Theater with my father a few years back. But these outtakes are all music scenes from the 1974 concert and championship fight in Zaire, Africa. And it just when you think it couldn’t get any better than James Brown at his peak performing in Africa Muhammad Ali steals the scene.

Why didn’t we go hear Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings when they were in town last week because we are spoiled. We saw the Godfather of Soul (GFOS) a few times (Red Creek and the Auditorium Theater). In this movie James wore a wide scarf-like garment wrapped around his waist with “GFOS” printed on it and Peggi and I kept thinking of of Rochester’s “AKOS”, Mike Allen. But Mike could never get away with performing “I’m Black and I’m Proud” like James does here. I loved that song when it came out but that was easy. Duane went to a mostly black high school on Rochester’s west side and he said it was too much. James Brown even stopped performing the song because the song cost him a lot of my crossover audience. I noticed in the credits that Rochester’s Pee Wee Ellis gets co-writing credits for “I’m Black and I’m Proud”.

We finished our MySQL job and succesfully linked the first column of this page to a drawing with specs that come from the data base. Amazing. Of course we had help from Bill Jones and the flute player.

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