Teaching the children well

I was at dinner with the kid and it was time to pay. When I was pulling out my credit card she asked if she could see it for a minute.  I handed it to her so that she could get a good look at it.

“You’re not going to memorize those numbers are you?” I joked.

“No,” she said, either missing the joke or just pressing on. “Why is there a bird on it?”               

It was the holographic bird that started appearing on Visa cards years ago. I told her about how they were first put on the cards as a countermeasure to help show salespeople in stores that the card was not counterfeit. The holograph was only of limited usefulness because most clerks didn’t care.

I then told her about how the magnetic stripe could also easily be reprogrammed with someone else’s number so that you could buy anything you wanted, and the other person would get charged for it.*

She got a gleam in her eye and said: “That would be a good thing to do to Elon Musk.”

That surprised me, mostly because she’s 8. But I thought about it and agreed that provided he doesn’t pay too much attention to his bill when it come in that a person could probably skim a couple hundred dollars a month. You just can’t get greedy.

*Of course I would never endorse stealing from individuals. Not only is it illegal, the risks and consequences outweigh any temporary benefit. Plus there’s been enough technological advancement over the years that the methods I told her about would no longer work the majority of the time.

Gallery Memories

I was at a small art gallery that featured the work of 1-2 artists at a time. Just a single, large room with the different pieces hanging on the wall, or maybe a couple stands in the middle of the room for ceramics or other pieces.

This particular artist had a series that was basically just a bunch of checkerboard patterns of heavy, heavy graphite. Each square ran perpendicular to the ones beside it so it would catch the light, but probably would have been impossible to photograph well.

I was going off about how I could have done it when I was a kid because I ALWAYS pressed down too hard with the pencils and got the “lead” all over my hands. And no freaking way was it worth $800, even if it did include the frame. It was kind of rude the amount of crap I was dishing out, but I was pretty unimpressed.

Turns out the dude was standing like two people away. He was chatting with some hipster friend, but deep down I know he heard me.

I just hope his main takeaway from the experience was that he needed to draw better. And maybe something less concretely abstract as a checkerboard pattern.

Epiphany I

When you think about it, everything that you buy is technically secondhand.

So here we go…

It’s a Sunday afternoon. No rain, and I can hear birds outside.

They’re plotting again, those birds.

They do it to mock the lizard that lives in the bush by my living room window. And he (or she) just climbs up by the window to mock my cat.

Who lives for biting my hands while I’m sleeping.

Being a jerk is not only limited to people.