To Beauty queens and those who wish to compete, as well as to all gullible health nuts.

All around the globe there is talk about medications that will reduce wrinkles, one of the major concerns with people who wish to "remain young". Some of these treatments are truly effective. They use compounds that relax facial muscles which, in this example, cause one to raise one's eye brows which leads to wrinkles in the forehead. The treatment, of course, work on the flow of the appropriate signals to and from the brain. A study conducted in Zurich - my hometown! - indicated that in the test case not only the targeted muscles were affected. It turns out that very near the area of the brain that controls the facial muscles associated with forehead wrinkles lies the area that controls sensitivity and reflectivity in the hands! It should not come as a surprise that the study revealed a change in dexterity / sensitivity in the hands as a byproduct of the 'treatment to reduce wrinkles on the forehead'. The point is that chemicals (more approvingly known also and pharmaceuticals or medicines) introduced into our bio-system do not necessarily restrict their influence to the areas targeted by the designer. Of course there was no time lost to object by the various national and international health authorities and the manufacturer of the medication in question. One said the treatment in question has been proven safe and the other insists that the medication had been approved and the test sample was too small to be significant.

I have the feeling that the pharmaceutical world and the producers of iPhone and smart phone apps have the same problem: they must be out on the market before the competition, or they lose practically all the investment made in the preparation for the 'coming out'. In the case of an app, that investment is small. In the case of the pharmaceuticals it is often mind boggling huge. While the apps creators simply harass you with a never ending stream of 'updates' which simply address mistakes that could have been prevented if proper diligence had been exercised earlier in the game, there is also no time for the pharmaceutical industry to exercise proper diligence, so, once out on the market with a product, they keep their fingers crossed and wait for the complaints to come in. Then, they first take cover behind the  'authorities' who approved the product in the first place, and only next will they go to work on remediation.

So, my thought an my advise are: be aware of the snake oil salesman. His actions not only concern forehead wrinkles, but everything from anemia to zits.

Boccalino

A boccalino is a small ceramic vessel shaped like a little jug. Whatever its origin, it is used as a drinking vessel in the areas around the Veltlin. It is for the enjoyment of red wine, like the Veltliner, of course. We have twenty-four of then, one set in blue and another in a red pattern on white base. The pattern is  a sort of folkish design, like fern leaves wrapping themselves around the vessel. I'm telling you all this because I do not expect you to know about it. This is not part of a standard liberal arts education hereabouts, nor is it what one would seek out when traveling Europe. Guide books and booked tours don't get you there. I had the advantage to have lived thereabouts for almost thirty years, so it is part of my mother's milk.

The way we got two dozen of those is common. One day, coming home from work in NJ, I was received at the door by Tiiu, my beloved, then my wife of about four years. She wore a puzzled look on her face which noticeably contrasted with the usual glee she displayed on my return home in those days. She also began to hum and haw during the early stages of our reunion that evening, until I finally received my prompts and asked "what's the matter" perhaps even adding 'my love' or something to that effect but I do not remember things that clearly after forty five years. She led me into the family room where she pointed to a shipping box, open, with wrapping materials flowing about and said "Look!" As I looked and searched the packaging I came across a boccalino and, holding it up, exclaimed, "A boccalino, how nice! Mims (my mother's nick name) must have sent us these. Did she? How lovely! Let's open a bottle of Chianti (the closest thing to Veltliner one could find then and there) and try them. Tiiu's puzzled look increased. "Why," she asked, "would your mother send us twelve of those little creamers? And how do you relate this to opening a bottle of wine?"

Some years later, we were living in Switzerland then, Lulu came visiting and we took a trip up to Bivio on the Julier Pass. We stayed in the Post Hotel there, which I "knew" from the years before the war, when our family used to travel south for Easter to visit my dad's lather in Desenzano, Italy, on the south end of the Lago di Garda. Our plan then was for Lulu and me to hike across the mountains, south to the shores of the Silvaplana Lake, where Tiiu would pick us up, having driven the car over the pass into the Veltlin, bringing Iivo and Kaarin along. Bivio is a small place on the way up the pass when you come from the north. It is on a sort of a large shelf just before you get into the serpentine that leads up to the the mountain ridge and back down the south slope to St. Moritz. We always used split our trips south at that point. The owner of the hotel had a son of our age, that is just between Lulu and me, and we always had a memorable time playing outside at the back of the hotel. There was a little brook babbling down the rock-strewn pastures and it made a beautiful place to build dams and cause floods and get all wet and dirty. One visit we constructed a little waterwheel from twigs and scrap wood and mounted it of small rocks in the course of the brook and watched it turn in the bubbling flow of the clear water that we would unhesitatingly drink while playing, dipping our faces right down into the chill.

During this visit that I am talking about, some thirty years after the events I just related, Iivo and Kaarin were asleep in their beds upstairs, the three of us sat in the dining room of that hotel after a wonderful dinner of Bündnerfleish (the air-dried beef of the Grisons), dark, crusty bread, sweet, fresh butter, and Veltliner, which we drew from a large barrel set into the wall of the dining room, into our boccalini. It was an honor system maintained by the hotel management  and we kept tabs with a ballpoint pen on a coaster so we would not short the house. We saw our host come in and greet his guests and eventually he made his way to our table, introduced himself, and said to me, "I noticed your name in the registration book and it looks familiar. Can you give me some help in finding if we have met before?" Well, making the story short, he was the son of the owner who had hosted us before the war, the same boy we had had so much fun with some thirty years ago.

You see, life is full of discovery, and if you keep your eyes closed, you miss a lot of good stuff. So, sitting down in the dining room, I explained 'boccalino vs. creamer', opened a bottle of Chianti and reminisced with Tiiu, and we spent yet another a delightfully memorable evening together.

Later, Mims sent us another dozen, having forgotten that we already had a fair share of those treasures, and they all became part of our household, traveled with us from NJ to Switzerland and down to VA and up to VT and over to MA and back down to NC where they are now, with hardly ever any use for them except stirring memories.

Today, I prepared my dinner and decided to have my wine from one of those boccalini. Yesterday I used a red one. Today it is a blue one. The wine I have is neither Veltliner nor is it Chianti. There was a bottle of Rex Goliath Pinot Noir in the rack and it serves well. After cooking and dinner and all this reminiscing and writing, it is still more than half full. Who cares it is a 1.5 liter bottle? Memories - that's all.

Technology

There is the 'big Mac', and then there is the iPad and also the iPhone. I should be allowed to think that this is enough to keep me going.

But no!

There is also the HP air printer down here in NC and the one up there in VT and together they amount to a heap of trouble.

I just had an encounter with one great business I am dealing with. They had put completed forms relating to transactions I had initiate on my web account and I was expected to print them out, sign them and return them to their address. The law, apparently, does not allow electronic signatures in the present case, so we were locked in with USPS or Messenger Service.

Well, in anticipation of this important and time sensitive event I checked out my systems and found everything working just fine. The log-on worked and the site opened up and the place where the forms were going to be were accessible and a trial print with a document from another file worked very well to expectations.

D-day came and there was a conference call and the various steps were discussed and explained and the web site was opened and the forms were displayed and the print button was found and activated and - nothing. The printer that was supposed to spring into action and shake, rattle and roll before starting to produce an orderly print issued not even a faint hick-up.

It was decided to abandon the high tech path of action and engage a messenger service for overnight delivery of the documents to my door and I would receive, sign, repacka nod return by fax. This thing is time sensitive, you know, and if things don't happen, the law has means to transfer slices of the object to undeserving recipients.

So, to give greater assurance to eventual success, I started to trace the problems. First, I found out that my the 'big Mac' could not find the printer! Hear, hear, where did you find it yesterday? Well, today it was not there. I went to the HP hep site and was told to check for software updates. I did. Turned out that my Mac wanted to receive Mavericks X so the air printer would operate properly, and I spent about two hours to get that downloaded over the super fast network connection. Then, back to HP we went and I was asked to look for more software updates. There were five of them. Attempting to get them all, I hit the bitten 'Update all' and things really got rolling. Two of them started right away and spent some time calculating the length of time to complete the transfer of the updates. The first one reported in with a frowning lay accepted 4 hours and 20 minutes, the second one wanted one day, seven hours, and 45 minutes.

Forget the time sensitivity. I have sensitivities also. Mine come first. If I had not in time remembered the price tag attached to this communication system, it would have gone out through the window. But let's give it another chance.

Sometime day after tomorrow I should be back in business again, in the meantime, I expect that Mac to work without breaks, without water, without sleep . . . Which reminds me - my settings allow it to go to sleep after about thirty minutes without keyboard activity. If I go now to settings to eliminate this contract clause between and the Mac! Will I have to start this process from scratch?

I was around at the beginning of the computer age. I worked with the old, early IBM Machines that were programmed to perform their specified tasks, using peg boards. Do you remember peg boards? If you watch very old movies, sometimes you catch a glimpse of a maid operating the party line on the local telephone net. She manually establishes connections between phone partners using long wires with plugs on each end that were pushed into hole on a large board in front of the operator and so connected the calling party with the called party. That's how early IBM business computers worked. I wish we could go back to those simple days and get on with what really matters.