Ode to Thrifting

Introduction

Sometimes when I’m feeling grateful for something, I am moved to write an ode to it. This is one of those times. (If you would like guidance writing your own sonnet, full instructions are here.) As usual, I provide copious footnotes.

The poem

Ode to Thrifting

A pair of Docs for only forty bucks?
I’ll take ‘em ‘cause they’re only barely used.                   2
Amer’can jeans, with tags still on—what luck!
How can a cheap-ass dude like me refuse?

I always check the housewares section too
Forever seeking out the perfect mug,                               6
And picking up a choice pint glass or two,
And all of it dirt cheap. Who’s feeling smug?

Of course there’s all the stuff you’d never buy.
Such pseudo-brands as George and Charter Club,        10
Godawful art, sad toys … we heave a sigh.
To thrift we have to sift … ay, there’s the rub.

     But when I think of forking out full price?
     No thanks—I’ll opt for thrift and toss the dice.         14

Footnotes & commentary

Title: Thrifting

A linguist once said (or maybe he said it twice, maybe he said it constantly), “There’s almost no word in the English language that can’t be verbed.” (Google’s Gemini A.I. says this was uttered by Jorge Luis Borges; ChatGPT says it was Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, and that the actual wording was “Verbing weirds language.”) I think “thrift” as a verb (begetting thrifting as a gerund) is perfectly legit. It means, of course, to shop at a thrift store. I think the gerund is more common but there’s no reason you couldn’t say, “I thrifted this sweet linen shirt” or, even better, “I hella thrifted this dope linen shirt,” if you don’t mind your kids making fun of you (and I don’t).

On a related note, I am also fine with “gift” as a verb, as in “my brother gifted me a giant pack of Q-tips” (which thankfully is a hypothetical scenario, as my household is overflowing with Q-tips, and why are they called that, anyway?). But “gifting” as a gerund, notably in the 2018 Nordstrom holiday ad campaign “Let’s Go Gifting!” almost makes my stomach turn. (The print ad actually did, so click that link at your peril.)

Should you be concerned about the quantity of commentary thus far, since we’re only three words into this poem? Yes, unless you’re enjoying this. If you’re not, click here immediately. (If you are, click that link later.)

To the uninitiated, “thrifting” might connote only the Salvation Army or Goodwill. But there are all kinds of variations, like consignment stores (pricier but with much better stuff), other charity outfits (e.g., local humane societies and Out of the Closet), and a variety of for-profit used stores ranging from mom and pops’ to big chains. My wife and daughters have become thrifting experts over the years, and I’ve benefited a lot in terms of secondhand thrift. (Get it?)

Line 1: Docs

This is a real-life example! In the past year I’ve scored not just one but two pairs of Doc Martens. One was $40 and the other was like $50 and they were both nearly mint. It’s not like I strictly needed either pair and I’d never have gone shopping specifically for this product, but you gotta have shoes, right? This is the sweet spot of thrifting: you can obviously never go hunting for something specific you need right now, but you never know what deal might jump out at you.

Line 2: barely used

Look how little wear there is on the soles. There was even less when I bought them.

Line 3: Amer’can

Obviously I needed to reduce this word to three syllables to fit the meter of my sonnet, but that’s only half of it. In my experience, people say “Amer’can” to suggest—ironically or not—heartland-style patriotism. Some may try to make patriotism political. I oppose this. Everyone in America should be openly patriotic, and what better way than to choose American-made products when possible? Often it’s not possible (as lamented at length here), so when I have the opportunity I snap it up.

The pair of American jeans isn’t a hypothetical example either. I found a pair of J Brand jeans, really well made right here in California, for like $50. I wasn’t familiar with this brand but quickly learned they typically go for like $200. I’m wearing those bad boys right now in fact.

Line 3: tags still on

Yes, these jeans (aka, this pant, these jean) still had the original tags. It’s amazing to me how often this is the case. Somebody evidently bought them, didn’t wear them, and either waited too long to change his mind (i.e., after the return window had closed) or hadn’t bothered to keep his receipt. So he sold them to a consignment store for something like an eighth of what he paid for them, probably without batting an eye. Obviously this is a scenario that could only happen in an affluent community like Pacific Heights, San Francisco (which is why it’s worth a trip out there to thrift). And thus, even as I’m sparing the environment by buying used stuff, I’m still susceptible to liberal guilt when I consider how much better thrifting is in the privileged Bay Area vs. many other parts of the country. I tried a Goodwill in Medford, Oregon (official city slogan: “There are worse places!”) and though I found a few good things (as I invariably do), I couldn’t believe how many of the garments were Kirkland brand. No thanks!

(By the way, if you are ready for some very heavy philosophy that is also very light humor, check out this video from the standup comedian Sheng Wang on what it means to wear Costco jeans.)

Line 4: refuse

Of course most of what goes on at a thrift store is refusing. Flicking through an endless rack of mostly godawful shirts is probably the original “swipe left” behavior.

But there are also people who refuse to go thrifting to begin with. I don’t just mean the rare sort who has so much money he or she can’t be bothered to shop used. It can also be cultural. A family friend, who emigrated here from China, explained to my wife that buying used clothing isn’t popular in her cohort. The unease has something to do with not wishing to inherit the energy of the previous owner (about whom you know nothing, after all). Used clothing may also have a historical association with poverty.

Of course such cultural reluctance to used clothing isn’t a given among Asians or anyone else. Consider my old UCSB pal we affectionately nicknamed “Sven” because he was Chinese. One day he was rocking this cool football jersey that he was absolutely swimming in, and I asked where he got it. “I found it,” he said, “at a party.” Being well off, he hadn’t snaked it for reasons of economy; he just liked it, apparently without worrying about who’d owned it before. Well, maybe he should have worried: when I saw him a week or two later and asked, “No football jersey today?” he replied, “Oh, man, I was at a party wearing it and this giant dude comes over, super pissed, and says, ‘Hey, that’s my jersey!’ Man, I’ve never taken a shirt off so fast in my life!”

Line 5: housewares

There was a time in my adult life when my wife and I decided we were no longer kids and should really have all matching plates, bowls, etc. And we lived that dream for a while, before we eventually broke everything. (This might have even been before we had kids along to help.) So now we’re over it. Just about every plate, saucer, bowl, and drinking vessel we own is from a thrift store, except for some Corelle salad plates and bowls that somehow soldier on. I don’t know how we got to be so clumsy, but there you have it.

When I was a kid, anything in my family’s household getting broken was a major incident, causing deep shame in the perp and over-the-top indignation in everyone else. It was like you’d crashed a car or something. So now, having mostly used housewares, it’s really nice to just shrug when I break something. After all, at least we got some use out of it, after buying it for like a dollar, and it had already  served some other family, possibly for years. I’m all about fully depreciated assets!

Line 6: perfect mug

I’ve gone through a number of pint-sized Sur La Table mugs, which I buy on sale when the current style of monogramming is being retired. Usually I can get a few with some really unpopular letter on them, like the over-stylized “J” that looks more like a stocking. When these mugs die, usually in a dishwasher accident, I’m kind of stuck because I need the large capacity, so I can’t just use one of our dozen or so tea mugs. I seldom find suitable, pint-size coffee mugs at thrift stores because they usually say something really dippy on them, like “MY PRETTY DAUGHTER THINKS I’M A GUN NUT,” or they commemorate a golf event or something.

My wife, though, has thrifted lots of really awesome diner-style mugs, very thick and so solid “you could bludgeon someone with one” (as she just said to me, making me wondering if that’s a vague threat … have I gotten on her bad side somehow?). Ideally such a mug is cream or off-white and doesn’t have any writing on it, though one of our favorites says “Ancient Mariner” with a picture of a sailing ship. I can just imagine the diner that mug outlived, which would be a mediocre but cozy place with a sea view, where the waitress snaps her gum and calls you “hon” and has a name like Doris or Debra.

Here’s one of our favorite thrift-store mugs.

Note also the nice wood-handled steak knife. We picked up a box of six of those at a little thrift store in Arcata for like $5; they’re West Bend brand, mid-century, made in USA and for sale on eBay for like $50! In the background there’s a recycled cream bottle we’re using as a vase so it’s even cheaper than Goodwill. On the flip side, at a Goodwill in White City, Oregon I saw a used Coke bottle for like $2.50. As if! Whoever priced that must have been sleepy, stoned, or both. But I snagged two perfect pint glasses there for 71 cents each with my senior discount. (Senior discount? Yep, my first! And yet later that day I was carded buying beer. Go figure!)

Line 8: smug

It’s not often I’d admit to feeling smug. But when J. Crew sells a cotton t-shirt for $60, and Sur La Table wants $24 for a chichi Le Creuset mug (in pastel pink or artichoke, ooh!), it feels really good to find a nice linen shirt in perfect condition for $9 and an off-white diner mug for under a buck. It’s like: in your face, retail industrial complex!

Line 9: stuff you’d never buy

A sonnet is too brief a form to even begin cataloguing all the weird stuff thrift stores sell that nobody could possibly want, like VHS cassettes, a grody plastic water bottle with a lipstick-stained straw, Lance Armstrong’s autobiography, cloying inspirational signs or plaques, a t-shirt commemorating a corporate team-building getaway … the possibilities are endless. You’ll probably have noted the strange handlebar-equipped helmet shown atop this post; I guess that was somebody’s attempt at a DIY rack of antlers. (No, my brother did not buy it.) If you have come across something truly strange you’d like to share, email me here or comment below.

There’s also stuff you’d totally buy but only for a Christmas white elephant gift exchange. Click here to learn about a wall hanging that actually functions reasonably as a doodad tray, and a mint bobblehead (still in the original box!) that turned out to be a collector’s item.

Line 10: pseudo-brands

For years I was puzzled to continually see brands in thrift stores that I never saw anywhere else. Finally I did some light research and sorted it out: these aren’t real manufacturer’s brands, they’re house brands contrived by stores I never shop at. No wonder I’d never heard of George … it’s a Walmart brand—like I’d ever buy clothes there! (Full disclosure: before I knew better, I actually did buy a George button-down shirt, and I like it just fine … but let’s keep that on the DL.)

As for Charter Club, it’s a Macy’s house brand, which isn’t exactly downscale, and in fact my wife warned me that by bagging on it in my poem I might be alienating some middle-class readers. Obviously I wouldn’t want to do that, but I’m pretty sure I’m not. After all, thrift shopping is already way cheaper, so who would try to gild the lily choosing down-market brands? I mean, when every button-down shirt is $9 regardless of brand, why settle? Besides, the name “Charter Club” is so transparently affected and puffed-up; it’s clearly intended to connote wealth, like an expensive chartered boat or an elite country club. It’s like the pretend-expensive Stauer wristwatch brand, or having “Estates” or “Acres” in the name of a suburban subdivision … overreach much? “Charter Club” is such a branding misstep by Macy’s, it comes off sounding even cheaper than Walmart.

Other brands I only ever see at thrift stores are Apt. 9 and Sonoma (Kohl’s); Xhilaration and Mossimo (Target); and Messini (which should be called McCheesy).

Line 11: Godawful art

Bad food, such as fast food or cheap pizza, can be a guilty pleasure, but bad art? We wish we could un-see it. It’s just so awful. I’m tempted to make this footnote an open letter to people who have realized how awful their art is, entreating them to actually destroy it instead of donating it. But then, a thrift store isn’t such a bad place to buy framed bad art,  just so you can pitch the canvas and reuse the frame.

Line 11: Sad toys

Some toys really are sad, like filthy or broken ones, or remote-control cars with no remote. But a lot of used toys only seem squalid to my adult eye and are actually perfectly good. When my kids were very young, their grandma bought them a bunch of random used toys which she kept at her house for when we visited. I don’t think she even picked them out—it was like a whole mesh bag of them for a fixed price at Eco-Thrift (which she cleverly calls “echo thrift”). My kids were enchanted (but then, they loved playing with a big pile of her spring-loaded hair clips, too). I think most of the antipathy toward used toys is the suggestion that the parents can’t afford new  ones, and thus aren’t fit to raise kids in these demanding times, blah blah blah. You know, typical parental guilt.

Line 12: have to sift

Having the time to dig through an endless amount of chaff to find the good stuff is another form of privilege. I reckon if I were a laborer, or a single mother working two jobs, I wouldn’t have the time or energy for thrifting. It also takes patience, and I suppose plenty of people just don’t have enough of it. Myself, I get a kick out of the amateur anthropology angle, so I’m always up for a trip to the thrift store. (And thrifting is a taste worth acquiring if your spouse and/or kids enjoy it.)

Line 12: there’s the rub

When writing a sonnet, I find it’s never a bad idea to work in a Shakespeare reference.

Line 13: forking

In 1987 I visited a thrift store in San Luis Obispo with my mom and my brother. I had my eye on this great serving fork that was about halfway between the size of a standard dinner fork and a regular serving fork. I figured it could help me eat even faster. The proprietor approached and asked if we could mind the store while she used the bathroom. In return, she gave me the fork! I used it for all my meals all through college, and it’s enjoying a second life as, well, a regular serving fork. I hope one of my kids continues using it long after I’m gone. (For more on this theme click here.)

Line 14: toss the dice

Have I ever left a thrift store empty-handed? Well, sure. But it’s rare, and generally somebody in my party finds something, and besides … a rare find like Docs for $40 builds up a lot of goodwill. (Get it?)

Postscript: ChatGPT

I’ve blogged before about ChatGPT’s attempts to write poetry. GPT-4-turbo is far better than GPT-3.5 in that it tends to get the meter and rhyme right, but it’s still no substitute for a human, in my opinion. I did, however, use it to research certain things for this post, such as the weird house brands and where they come from. After finishing my poem and footnotes (and rest assured, I’m not the type to have GPT do a “first draft” that I then “polish”), I asked GPT to write a sonnet of its own on this topic. Here it is:

A Thrifted Tale

Upon the racks of thrift, the brands they lie,
Forgotten names that once did softly shine,
Such pseudo-brands as George and Charter Club,
Their faded glory tucked ‘neath vintage line.

An aisle of treasures, old and full of charm,
Where once was grandeur, now lies humble fate,
These things, discarded, lose their worldly harm,
Yet still they wait, for hands to re-create.

The “downtrodden few” in thrift stores find their place,
Each mark and stain, a story left untold,
While “fledgling” dreams aspire to win the race,
Unseen, unsung, but silently grown bold.

     So let us seek the past, both lost and found,
     In secondhands, the future shall resound.

I don’t know about you, but I’m less than impressed. I won’t do a full critique other than to say this poem is lacking in concrete detail, and has a weakness for meaningless filler phrases like “softly shine,” “worldly harm,” and “hands to re-create.” GPT-4-Turbo should stick to its day job, HTML and coding.  You know, the job it stole from STEM grads.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XX

Introduction

This is the twentieth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, and Volume XIX is here. Today’s post holds the distinction of being only the second instance of two palindromic volume numbers in a row (the first instance being II and III). The brain reels. (No it doesn’t. At least mine doesn’t. Maybe yours does?) The different volumes have nothing to do with one another, and can be read in order, out of order, in pecking order, in good order, in court order, or in compliance with a restraining order.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re the little bits of fascinating literary background that my biographer would be thrilled to discover, were I important enough and/or interesting enough to warrant a biography. They’re the types of things magazines like Us or People Weekly would report on, with regard to celebrities, if they used actual text instead of just photos, and if I were good looking. Most of these are snippets from personal correspondence. Others were written indelibly on my wrist or my psyche with a sharpie.

Pay attention to the dates. Some of these dispatches are hella old. Others are just hecka old.

January 10, 2005

[Background: I had sent around my tire chain saga, and my dad responded at length. What follows is from an email to a family friend with whom I’d shared some of my dad’s response.] 

I have indeed come to expect pure oddness from my dad. I wasn’t surprised at his overly complicated chain installation methodology [involving jacking up the car on the side of the road and taking the wheels off], since he seems to seek the hardest route between any two points (metaphorically speaking). This has only gotten worse since he’s been retired. The part of his email that was the strangest to me was the following sentence:

When you are in a nasty cold wet situation and have to install chains, breathe deeply and consider how much better it would have been to have studied Vipassana or other Buddhism, concentrating on equanimity.

This is so confusing. It would have been better than what to have studied Vipassana or other Buddhism? Better to have studied Vipassana then to have driven a car in a snowy place? Better than whatever my dad supposes I have done with my life, such as squandering it in earthly pursuit of pleasure centers, instead of something mindful and Eastern which might have done me some good? Better to have studied Vipassana then to have gotten all pissed off about my tire chains breaking and wrapping around the axle? What is he saying: that I’m a hothead? Well, duh! All the Vipassana or Buddhist study in the world wouldn’t help a lost cause like me. I’d be on the side of the road muttering things like “Suck it, Buddha!”

February 1, 2005

I’m reading a book right now by a former college professor of mine, the writer Maxine Hong Kingston, and was amused to come across a term, “spike” (and elsewhere, “spindle”) that she uses to indicate the thing that a waiter sticks paper orders on. It’s amusing because I remember Maxine asking us students what that thing is called, all the way back in 1992. On the one hand, I have to wonder: did she really work on this book for like twelve years? But then I consider: will I have anything to show for the next twelve years of my work?

November 4, 2009

Man, I can’t believe your little town has its own fight club! West Coast Fight Club, huh? Man. I have to admit, I love a good fistfight. The problem is, the aftermath is just too much hassle. If you don’t beat your opponent literally to death, and then kill all the eyewitnesses, or else create a shroud of fear over them all so that nobody will talk, not even to save his family, well then you have to deal with the authorities, and though it would take a whole SWAT team to bring me down, they would certainly assemble one, and then my kids would have to visit me in prison, and despite my kids’ lifelong fascination with incarceration, I think they’d eventually get bored of it and then E— would have to bribe them with sweets to behave and not fidget during visitation. Shoot, I wish we had a fight club here, instead of just a bunch of cannabis clubs, and of course my book club. Man, where’s a guy have to go to work out his fighting impulses? Maybe next time I bring the family up to visit you (which alas won’t be during Thanksgiving this year), you and I will have to head over to the WCFC. Would you want to fight me? Dude, I’ll do it. I’ll totally do it. Are brothers allowed to fight? Encouraged, even? Dang it, I’m getting all worked up! I have to go punch something! Or maybe I’ll just get a drink of water! Okay then!

November 11, 2009

That was really fun last night. I’m surprised to hear of [your wife] G—’s concern [about keeping us up too late] because I didn’t hear [my wife] E— say anything about [herself] being tired. She thought it was G— who needed to get to bed early the next day. Probably we all would have enjoyed staying out later but for this apparent misunderstanding between the wives. Who knows. Guys are sure simpler creatures. We’re like the needle on a speedometer: simple, reliable, easy to read. Women are like some much finer, more sensitive needle, that upon receiving the smallest chance vibration goes shivering back and forth so fast you have to ignore it until it calms down and you can get a believable reading again.

December 9, 2009

What do you mean, which bike should you ride?? Look, Mount San Bruno isn’t a tour, it isn’t a “fun ride,” and it isn’t a granfondo. It’s a race—so you should ride whichever of your bikes is lightest, stiffest, etc. I will probably ride my Orbea, even though it’s probably broken. I did this race on the Salsa last year and was slower than crap. (I know, it wasn’t the bike’s fault … just sayin’.) Now, I know I implied before that this was really short and easy and just for fun … but that was when I was trying to talk you into doing it at all. Now that you’re committed, I need to be clear: it’s a brutal race. It starts like a gunshot and ends like a crippling disease. But the NoDoz is on me! I’ll bring plenty to share and there is no legal limit!

December 31, 2009

I will keep an eye out for you at the [Mount San Bruno] race [tomorrow] unless it’s raining in which case I’ll assume you made good on your threat to bail on it. As for recognizing my new (to you) car, it is another Volvo wagon, of a very light green/gray color. The color of a weak green curry, I suppose. The styling is très moderne, as if my old 240 wagon melted in the sun. Photo attached.

I have refrained from cleaning my bike, so as not to bait the weather gods. So far, weather.com says 50% chance of rain, and NOAA says 60%. If they both said 100% we’d be home free, because the forecasts are always wrong. As it stands I’d say there’s a 40-50% chance of rain. Anyhow, my kids love to run around under umbrellas and stomp in puddles in their monstrously expensive calf-scrotum boots so I’m going regardless (or, as some idiots say, irregardless).

[Postscript: it did not rain and my pal did show up at the race. You can read all about it here.]

January 1, 2010

For the [team] website: I placed 7th at Mt. San Bruno in the Masters 35+. (I like the trend here: 9th in first stage of the Everest Challenge, 8th in the second stage, and now 7th in this race. Maybe next time I’ll get 6th! Or maybe I should quit now before I spoil anything… ;-)

Four years ago today, famished after this race, I took the family to Denny’s on the way home. This year we figured something a bit more upscale would make a more fitting start to the year. Thus, E—made reservations at Skates on the Bay in the Berkeley marina. As I’d hoped, getting there right at opening time meant sitting next to the giant windows overlooking the bay. A— begged me to let her have a window seat, and amazingly L—, whom we seated at the head of the table, didn’t notice the inequity of this.

Quick aside on our restaurant choice: I’ve been going to Skates, albeit only occasionally, for almost twenty years. Being rather pricey, it has always struck me as a place for grown-up, well-off Cal [Berkeley] alumni to take their student offspring after football games. It’s not quite as good as when I was in college (or was I just an uncultured rube then?). They did a remodel about ten years ago that was a big step down aesthetically. For one thing, the art in the entrance area is lame. Someone needs to tell the management that a football stadium is not an appropriate image for an oil painting, unless it’s abstract or satirical (I’d like to see what Hieronymus Bosch would do with football). And the painting of the Golden Gate Bridge is just awful. The “artist” totally botched the ratio between the span of the bridge and the height of the towers, so it looks amateurish, even cartoonish. Heaven will take note. But the food is still good.

After much deliberation, I ordered the bacon cheeseburger because a) the waitress said it was larger than the king crab Benedict and size does matter; b) the beef was grass-fed and local; and c) hey, bacon cheeseburger! I have to tell you, it was glorious. A half-pound patty, onions, lettuce, tomato, cheddar, lots of perfect, thick, crispy-but-not-hard-and-powdery bacon, and of course grease. My heart, and my blood cholesterol, soared like a hawk.

[The friend who did the race with me] had the king crab Benedict, but I didn’t even really get a look at it, so absorbed was I in my burger. I did get a glimpse of his Bloody Mary because it was about a foot tall. E— had the grilled trout, which I also didn’t take much time investigating, though when I saw something had been scooted to the edge of her plate, silvery like balled-up foil, I assumed it was something unhealthy and snaked it for myself. It was the fish skin: crispy and oily but without scales. In other words, delicious!

Skates has a good kids’ menu. L— had the macaroni and cheese, A— the fettuccine Alfredo. Both came with sides; we ordered one with asparagus, the other with mashed potatoes. Why do restaurants do this double-starch business? My kids had already had focaccia (very tasty and buttery), and then they get pasta and it comes with potatoes. I should have asked for a side of rice and some oyster crackers. Anyway, a few minutes into her meal L— said, “I have to whisper something in your ear.” She whispered that I make better mac ‘n’ cheese than Skates does. Then she whispered it to E—. I’m so glad she didn’t bark it out loud, since we’d already tried our waitress’s patience by knocking over L—’s chair (my fault) and many times almost tipping over her water glass.

Frankly, it’s true about the mac ‘n’ cheese—it was tossed with cream and spattered with cheese instead of having a proper cheese sauce made from a roux. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the sizeable portion I inherited. Then, to further make my day, A— lifted some fettuccine onto my plate and said, “Parental tariff.” That I don’t even have to ask makes me think I’m actually raising these kids right. The fettuccine was overcooked, as though the cook assumes children don’t have teeth, but it was creamy and highly edible. The mashed potatoes were rich and famous.

To sum up, racing Mount San Bruno is a great start to the year if you play your cards right, and even if you don’t. In another couple of years I may make another assault on its lofty summit.

[Postscript: I didn’t get back to racing Mt. San Bruno until 2014; full report is here.]

January 6, 2010

I’ve asked around and nobody has ever seen a cashew in a shell. One person said something about them being tubers, not nuts. I won’t look it up on wikipedia because that’s cheating. Anyway, on top of that mystery, I find cashews preternaturally tasty, just like Cool Ranch Doritos which are definitely made in the lab and taste like nothing that can be found in nature. So why doesn’t Big Cashew come clean? They should just own it: “Cashews, from ConAgra ... better living through science!”

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Old Yarn - The Brash Newb

Introduction

Here is the fourth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” and “The Enemy Coach”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Today’s yarn is a bit of a departure, though. Whereas those others are stories I’ve told a hundred times, thus keeping them alive and well in memory, what I’m about to relate isn’t a tale I’ve often told … perhaps never, in fact, because in this one I don’t come off so well. (Ah, now I’ve got your attention!) Since I haven’t told this a hundred times, some details are missing so I’m having to guess about certain things. But the core of the story is certain, as it’s left an indelible mark on my memory.

The Brash Newb – Fall/Winter, 1989-90

Eric Č— joined our UC Santa Barbara cycling team in the fall of 1989. We were a big team, something like 60 or 70 riders, with a well established pecking order. New riders typically started out as Ds unless they had racing experience, in which case they might start as a C or (less commonly) a B. But that was just for racing categories; of course there was also the social element. Who was popular, who was admired, who would be honored for “Grossest Chamois Award” at the post-season banquet, etc.

Eric presented a bit of a problem, because he was a) hella fast, and b) a former (I would say “recovering”) triathlete. If you are a cyclist, particularly a snobby one, much of the following preamble won’t be necessary; you already get it. For the rest of you, let me just say that, culturally, there has never been any love lost between cyclists and triathletes (or “triathlopes” as we often sneered). Bicycle road racing has its origins in Europe dating back to the 19th century and carries a lot of tradition and mystique, and an aesthetic, cultural code that—while often challenged—has always exerted its force on road cyclists. You can see this codified in The Rules, an over-the-top list of cycling dos and don’ts from a group calling itself the Velominati (that I lightly mock here). Triathlon culture, on the other hand, dates only to the late 1970s and started up in southern California (which, as a NorCal guy, I’m all but required to disdain). Triathlon culture seems much less staid, to say the least, and many of its practices rub us diehard roadies the wrong way.

Let me give you some examples. In the mid to late ‘80s, the restrictions around clothing for bike races were endless. Socks had to be worn, they had to be white, and I think they couldn’t come up higher than a few inches. (I had to loan an older friend my socks once, after having just raced in them, because he’d forgotten his.) Shoes were allowed only one logo, which was unfortunate because nobody, apparently, told the shoe companies. (This rule was actually enforced … I knew several guys who actually had to tape over logos on their shoes.) Sleeveless jerseys were forbidden in races. For juniors, even the top end of the bikes’ gearing was regulated, with assiduous enforcement. And these were just the written rules. The unwritten ones were, and are, endless … no visor on your helmet; no full-finger gloves unless it’s cold out; no big puffy jacket ever; proper cycling socks even on training rides where there’s no referee to hassle you; shaved legs always; shorts that are black and come down to a precise point of the mid-thigh; and on and on. I challenged the Velominati rules in these pages (well, at least 37 of them) because I don’t feel like they should apply to all cyclists and not even to all racers. But UCSB was a unified team, with a cohesive culture, which was decidedly old-school. In fact, two of our A riders didn’t even wear helmets on training rides.

Triathletes, in stark contrast, have all types of wacky departures from tradition. Especially back in the ‘80s, they were known to ride a bicycle while wearing only a Speedo; to write their race number on their arm with a Sharpie; to ride without socks; to wear garishly colored clothing; and to use aerodynamic handlebars, particularly the ridiculous Scott DH model. Here’s what those bars looked like:

It’s worth pointing out that his refusal to use aero bars cost Laurent Fignon the 1989 Tour de France. Only one team in that Tour used aero bars in time trials (the one American team, big surprise), plus Greg LeMond, even though these bars had proven beneficial in triathlons for years. (After LeMond stunned Fignon by taking 58 seconds out of him in the short final time trial, the rest of the peloton followed, but only then.) The fact is, roadies just hated those dorky bars. In fact, when I won a pair of Scott DH aero bars in a bike race (about a month before LeMond’s surprise victory), I was pissed. What would I do with them? I worked at a bike shop and tried to get the owner to let me trade them for shop credit, but he refused. Even though this was a full-service shop catering to cyclists of all kinds, he wouldn’t have them on his shelf. He finally offered to let me trade them for two inner tubes, at which point I balked and offered them up on the shop bulletin board instead. Astonishingly, I sold them immediately to some rando for $80. I just couldn’t believe anybody would want them, but then, they were standard issue for triathletes.

(Even at the collegiate National Championships as late as 1989, all the teams eschewed aero handlebars, this being a couple months before LeMond’s triumph. Here is our team time trial team, old-school to almost every detail except my sideways-turned helmet cover and T—’s cover-less, barbed-wire-stamped helmet.

Yes, we bent the sartorial rules, but within the roadie tradition, never in the direction of triathlon culture. In the photo at the top of this post our team time trial bikes have aero bars, only because LeMond and the rest of the pro peloton had recently made this okay.)

Getting back to Eric, the main thing we couldn’t stand was his attitude. He was proud of having been a triathlete, and far from apologizing and repenting (the least, we felt, he could do), he was totally up front about his glorious tri past, and continued to ride without socks and rock these goofy tri-shoes that were, like, pink and blue. (The adjective “tri” was always used scornfully by us, but proudly by traithletes—including Eric.)

Not only was Eric cocky, he seemed to feel that he could just expect to be accepted by our team—even the A team—right off the bat. It’s like he felt we owed him respect just because he was a phenomenal athlete with a solid work ethic. Looking back, I’m kind of surprised how unwelcoming we actually were, since we should have been thrilled to be gifted with really fast new teammate. I guess I felt like we were a pack of, say, coyotes, and this random hyena had started running around with us like that wasn’t anything unusual.

I suppose it was necessary for us to find some fault with Eric’s riding—something more solid to pin our scorn on—and so a few of us decided he didn’t have clean lines when descending, and thus was a threat to our safety. Somehow it fell to me to call him out on it. So, as we neared the summit of a climb during a group ride, I said to him (diplomatically, I felt), “Hey, how about on this next descent you go behind me, and watch my line, and try to match it as closely as possible.” He looked really offended and retorted, “Look, I’ve descended in triathlons in Nice!” I think I might have actually laughed in his face, or at least snorted. Reports of this exchange immediately swept through the whole team, and “I’ve descended in Nice!” was on everyone’s lips, almost like the slogan of the unofficial campaign that was being waged against this arrogant newb.

Making matters worse was the first practice race (for category selection). It was a time trial, in which riders go off at one-minute intervals to see how fast they can complete the course solo. We always did these out on Cathedral Oaks Road, a long, straight, mostly flat out-and-back course. Stopping the clock in under 16 minutes was considered hella fast, and almost nobody broke 15 minutes (perhaps only T—, our star rider, and not by much). I was stoked to have clocked a 15:02 in what was one of those all-the-planets-lined-up efforts. Eric showed up with—you guessed it—aero bars (though at least something less garish than the Scott DH) and rode a literally unbelievable 14:03. This was so astonishing, in fact, that the guy doing the timing figured he must’ve screwed up, and added a minute. A 15:03 was still a great ride and would guarantee Eric a spot on the A team.

Eric was furious. He knew what time he’d done, and was highly offended that we simply couldn’t believe he was really that fast. But we presented a wall of unified denial to his claim. There’s a tendency for people who agree to assume they’re therefore right, and we held firm. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll do it again. I’ll do it right now. You can all time me.” We were practically laughing at him, so sure were we that he was delusional. But by God, he went right out and clocked another 14:03, smashing the previous record for that course. We were astonished. (Some of Eric’s speed, of course, was the aero bars; in fact, T— proposed that going forward we would maintain separate records for standard vs. aero bars … a nice asterisk on Eric’s achievement.)

I was starting to get concerned about the A-team dynamic. This newbie was apparently even stronger than T—, who was not only our A-team leader and team president but was widely considered the fastest collegiate racer in the state. Team cohesion depends on a well-defined, universally respected pecking order, and when this is contested, the battle of egos is not pretty. (Think LeMond vs. Hinault in the 1986 Tour de France, or Wiggens vs. Froome in 2012.) For this reason, I told myself, something had to be done about Eric.

If you’re crying bullshit on that last paragraph, good for you. Deep down I suppose I always knew that my resolve to “do something about Eric” wasn’t about the team. The fact is, I was a snob, and I didn’t like his lack of socks, I didn’t like his shoes, I didn’t like his bike, and most of all I didn’t like his defiance. I wanted him to kiss the ring, like I had. I wanted him not just to adjust and fit in, but to want to fit in. In fact, I wanted him to need to fit in. His rebellious spirit, which I should have admired, offended me. I admit these things to my shame.

This next part of the story is where memory starts to fail me. I might have intentionally devised a scheme to bring Eric down a notch, to publicly embarrass him, to teach him a lesson and to pile on to the “I descended in Nice!” lampoonery. I hope that I was not so small, even at that age, as to be that deliberate and Machiavellian. And in fairness to myself, it’s also possible I was just being mischievous.

Exhibit A in my “mischievous” defense (not because you care, but because I think it’s funny) is the following side anecdote. In 1988, when I was racing for the Cuesta Community College team (using my brother’s ID because I wasn’t a student), I did a road race that was one long loop. About halfway through I flatted, and had neglected to put spare wheels in the neutral support car. Not knowing this, the driver of the car (a racer’s girlfriend) saw me on the side of the road and pulled over. She jumped out, eager to help, and said, “You’ll have to find your own wheel because they all look the same to me!” I confessed I didn’t have a spare wheel and asked if she could just drive me to the finish line. She said sure, no problem. So I put my bike on the rack and got in the car.

Shortly later, a rider dropped back from the pack and rode alongside us. “It’s my boyfriend!” the driver said. She rolled down her window and he said, “Give me a bottle.” Not even “please.” I hated him immediately. She hurriedly dug through his gear, found a bottle, and handed it up to him. As he rode back up to the pack he took a drink, and then came back to the car. “Dammit, this is water,” he said. “I want Carbo-Plex!” His girlfriend got all flustered, digging through a pile of bottles with of course no idea which contained what. I said to the guy, “No problem, I’ll mix you up a bottle. Come back in a couple minutes.” He rode back to the pack and I got a fresh bottle, filled it about a third full of water, and then put in at least half a cup of Carbo-Plex mix—far more than the requisite scoop or two. I shook it up really hard, then topped it up with water. “Gosh, you really mixed that up thick!” marveled the driver. I assured her that yeah, it takes a lot of mix.

The guy came back again, took the bottle without a word, and started riding back to the pack. I tapped the driver and said, “Watch.” Sure enough, the guy took a big pull of the bottle and then violently spat out the sludgy drink, spraying it from his mouth like a hydrant. His girlfriend and I laughed mirthfully. (In a perfect world she’d have thrown him over for me right after the race, but this isn’t fiction.)

So, yeah, it might have been more in this same spirit of mischief, rather than through actual premeditated sabotage, that I gave Eric some deliberately bad advice regarding our first race of the season. As it happened, I was going to have to miss the race since I would be out of town for a wedding. I can’t remember if Eric came to me for advice, or I sought him out and gave it, but I told him, in confidence if not actual hushed tones, “What I think you should do in this race is just go solo, right from the gun. Like, literally from the very first mile. Nobody knows who you are, they’ll just let you go. Ride all-out the whole time and maybe you can stay away.” This struck him as crazy advice, even in the absence of road racing experience, because this race was like 70 miles. To fight the wind all that time, vs. a pack of 50 or 60 guys … it was insanity. Of course I knew this; that was the whole point. He was going to fail spectacularly and get his comeuppance. But I wore my best poker face and acted completely serious. And who was he to question my advice? We A-team riders were revered on that team, and I was the second most experienced guy after T—. Eric seemed grateful for the strategy and said he’d give it a try.

I didn’t tell anybody about my little scheme, because I regretted it almost immediately. The fake advice had rolled off my tongue easily enough, but who does that to a teammate, even an annoying one? I soon recognized my behavior for what it was: a dick move. But there seemed to way to roll it back. For one thing, Eric didn’t often ride with us, being still new and probably not feeling accepted yet, so I didn’t have much opportunity to talk to him again. Plus, what could I say? That I’d just been screwing with him, so that I could laugh behind his back at his credulity?

And so it seemed the die was cast. I would come back from my trip, hear about his foolish misadventure in his very first bike race, and possibly deal with the blowback should he tell everyone he’d only been following my tactical advice. If our teammates concluded that I’d simply been an idiot and had naively given Eric bad guidance, well, I could handle that. But what if they not only realized I’d been purposely setting him up to fail, but appreciated my ruse and had a good laugh about it? What if my treachery was admired as a much-needed way to secure the comeuppance of this brash, arrogant upstart?

Somehow—and remember, there was no Internet back then, no smartphones—I didn’t hear how the race went until I was at the Monday bike team meeting, and the first person I talked to was Eric himself. As he approached me I really didn’t know exactly what I’d say, only that it would be an apology. But he spoke first. “Dana,” he said, “you’re a genius. Your plan worked perfectly. I went from the gun, soloed the whole thing, and won by eight minutes!”

Holy shit. It absolutely had not occurred to me that my ludicrous tactic could actually work. Such an outcome is virtually unheard-of in cycling. It’d be like a quarterback leading his football team to victory without ever throwing a single pass, or a basketball player outscoring the entire opposing team without passing the ball once. It turns out that as talented as Eric had already proven himself to be, we’d only seen the tip of the iceberg. Sure, there are other possible reasons for his crazy move working: the other racers might simply not have seen him go, or might not have believed it, or thought he was going off ahead to take a piss. Or maybe they intended to reel him in but waited too long. Had there been a breakaway, the speeds would have been too high for any lone rider to stay out alone that long, but perhaps the sprinters’ teams (ours included, T— being hella fast) controlled things all too well. Whatever the case, Eric had won and was on cloud nine. And I had to pretend not to be surprised.

I have a pretty good poker face, and I think I gave an Oscar-worthy performance. “See?” I replied. “I knew you could do it. Great job.” Eric was beaming. He had no idea what a dick I’d been, and actually thought I was not only a good guy, but the first one on the team to do him a solid. I continued, “But here’s the thing. You can never try that again. They all know who you are now. You’re a marked man.”

I was essentially telling him he was a made man. If there’s one surefire way to silence your critics, it’s by proving them wrong, and Eric certainly had. Nobody snickered about him anymore … he was a winner, and he was ours. And something else changed: in light of what he perceived as tactical genius on my part, he now fully respected me and he showed it. Ironically, I now felt unworthy of this respect, built as it was on my undiscovered treachery. Not that I would ever have come clean; that could have served me somewhat, in tempering my guilt, but it certainly wouldn’t do a thing for him. I had to just live with my lie, which actually wasn’t that hard because hey—no harm no foul, right?

Perhaps more unexpectedly, given Eric’s glorious victory, is that it didn’t increase his bravado, and in fact, over the ensuing weeks and months, his tri ways fell away. He started wearing cycling socks, got some basic black shoes, stopped talking about triathlons, and eagerly tapped into our expert knowledge of road racing, asking all kinds of good questions. I suppose he didn’t feel the need to push up against us anymore, because he finally had the simple thing he’d sought all along: respect. And isn’t that what everybody wants, after all?

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albertnet Privacy Policy - For Reals!

Introduction

This post documents my privacy policy for this blog, albertnet.us. I will endeavor to always keep this policy up-to-date and accurate. It probably won’t change much over time but you never know … after all, I had to start from scratch on this after going down a pretty deep rabbit hole recently. My original, necessarily irksome, now obsolete privacy policy is here. My plunge down the rabbit hole, and details of how ChatGPT was involved, are described here. But if all you care about is how I actually manage your privacy on this blog, currently and from now on, just read what follows here.

(A note on the cover art: I’m not sure how to account for it. I generated the above via ChatGPT, giving it a lot of leeway and not specifying what the text, or even the art, should be. With my free version I only get three pictures per day, and the above is the best I was able to get. I like it because the woman looks like both an outlaw and a person who simply wishes to be incognito. Was this A.I.’s intention? Based on the incongruity of the text, I kinda doubt it. I think it just got lucky.)

Use of cookies

I don’t use cookies on this site. The fact of you visiting or not, or anything about your visit (how long you kept the page open, whether you scrolled, whether you clicked on a link, etc.) is not something I am able to track. Of course I’m curious about how much engagement this blog gets from readers, but I have given up trying to extract data about that, and do not want to creep anybody out via tracking cookies. So rest assured, whatever you do on this blog is your own business. Unless somebody is looking over your shoulder or snooping in your web history by commandeering your device, you are completely anonymous and invisible here.

Now, if you do feel like giving me positive or constructive feedback, you can post a comment below, either anonymously or via your Google login if you can figure out how to make that work (though most users, including me, cannot). Or, you can click here to send me a private email nobody else will ever see. Note that if your idea of “constructive feedback” is “Your trying too hard” or “Crickets…” or “Zzzzzzz,” you can keep that to yourself. 

Use of cookie dough

For the purposes of this blog, “cookie dough” refers to the revenue, typically from advertising, that can be configured through the use of cookies. This is not a standard industry term, but it really ought to be. It could be slang for the passive income that people dream of getting through their blogs. If you ever hear the phrase “cookie dough” thrown around in this fashion, you read it here first!

That being said, let me be clear that I will never bother you with ads, nor will I use this blog to promote a product based on some kickback or other benefit accruing to me. I am not an influencer (at least not knowingly or on purpose). When I praise a product such as White Lightning chain lube, Halls cough drops, Oster toasters, or Volvo cars, it’s because I like it, that’s all. These companies didn’t pay me, they didn’t thank me, and above all they didn’t even notice.

The only use of traditional, culinary cookie dough on albertnet is as a beer flavoring, here.

Blogger platform stats

The Blogger platform that hosts albertnet gathers its own data to compile certain stats, such as page views, top referrers (i.e., sites that send readers here), top referring URLs, what browsers are used, what operating systems, and where viewers are located geographically. But don’t worry, Blogger doesn’t know or share anything about you—not your identity, not your specific location, not even whether or not you are a human being. Information about your visit is not only anonymized, but blended with so much other data that your individual identity is akin to a single speck of plankton, or even plankton larva. In fact, you’re not even like a larva in a sea of plankton; you’re like a larva in a sea of both real and fake plankton, since a lot of bots visit this blog.

In fact, so many of the visitors to this blog are bots, even the most general trends I might choose to observe are largely illusory. Thus, I don’t even bother to consider them, with or without a grain of salt. As an example, the Blogger stats tell me that in the past week, albertnet has had about 20,000 page views, about half of which were from Singapore. It also claims there were more visits from Estonia than from the UK during that time. So if you think either Google or I be learning anything about you through these stats, think again. (I used the deliberately incorrect verb “be” in that last sentence because I couldn’t figure out whether the verb should be “is” or “am” and chose to slip between the horns of the dilemma.)

To put this another way, fretting about your use of this blog is like worrying about being at a giant music festival and accidentally wetting your pants. There would so many people packed in around you, many of them doing far worse than just wetting themselves, that there is almost no chance your little accident would be noticed.

Booger platform stats

There are no boogers on this blog. If you see the word “booger” anywhere in this policy, that was a typo.

Google Analytics

I dabbled in Google Analytics last month but I have given it up. Not only do I no longer access the Google Analytics platform, this blog no longer transmits data to it. The tag has been deactivated.

Consent and your rights

By using this site, you consent to nothing. If you do not wish to view my content anymore, simply close the browser tab. You can gratify your reading preferences by navigating the albertnet blog archive tree down the right side of the page and clicking only the posts that interest you, duh! And, if you  don’t want to encourage my more sophomoric impulses by clicking on, say, the link to “From Farting Liberally to Liberal Arts – the Flatulence Files,” you can click the link just above it, to that month’s posts:

That way you can scroll down through the four January posts without indicating which, if any, you read. Thus, the fact of you reading the post about farting won’t even be registered in the Blogger stats. But remember, I don’t look at those anyway. How could I know if you read that post, or some bot scraped it? Trust me, I’m intentionally oblivious.

You have the right to visit albertnet from any device and any browser, even one whose cache you’ve just cleared, without seeing any annoying banner about cookies. There is no banner here because there are no cookies in use here. It’s the same reason you don’t see that yellow police crime scene tape encircling a home where nobody has been murdered. If you do see a cookie banner here, it means I screwed something up and I would really appreciate you clicking here and letting me know so I can remove the banner (again).

You do not have the right to visit this site if you are a bot. Of course, if you are a bot, it’s not really your fault you’re here, because somebody created you and set you loose on the Internet and you’re just doing your job, with no more consciousness, I suppose, than a sperm. Nor can I stop bots like you, obviously. But that doesn’t make it okay and you really have no right.

If you are a human, you do not have the right to deploy bots to this site for purposes of scraping, SEO boosting, link farming, link spamming, or any other purpose. Obviously I’m powerless to stop you, plus you’re not even reading this, but just in case you are, or you know somebody who deploys bots, consider this: if there is anything to the whole karma concept, you/they will be reincarnated as plankton. Maybe even fake plastic plankton.

You do not have the right to post bogus comments to this blog, either manually or through bots. Nobody is buying your awkwardly worded, patently phony praise, and the likelihood of anyone clicking your link to “car locksmith Dallas” is infinitesimal.

If you are manually stealing content from this blog and reposting it in any form beyond a brief quotation and/or a link to my post(s), you are in violation of copyright law. If you scroll to the end of this page you will see that my footer explicitly asserts my copyright to all the content on this blog. Immediately desist this activity. If you want to reprint any of my content with my permission and appropriate citation, please email me here.

How I protect your data

The number one rule in cybersecurity is: if you don’t have the data, nobody can compromise it. This is why (for example) Anthem should have deleted all unnecessary user records instead of leaving them around on a server so that a cybercriminal could steal almost 79 million of them.

To reiterate, I don’t get any of your data, so I have nothing to store. Occasionally I do receive other people’s data by mistake, in the form of US postal service mail that lands in my physical mailbox out on my porch. When this happens, I will walk it over to their place, if it’s not too far away, unless it’s addressed to my late father, in which case I will intend to phone up the charity that mailed it and say, “You know the guy’s dead, don’t you?” but I’ll probably never get around to that. (I am not suggesting any online analogy to that last bit, by the way. I’m not even sure why it’s part of this policy.)

How I protect your sensibilities

I am not generally very crude on this blog but it’s not rated G either. I used to put ratings at the top of any post that wandered into PG-13 or R territory, but I gave that up. I do promise never to blog about politics other than to blog about not discussing politics (and that was only once). Also, I am not interested in being a soldier in a culture war so I will never blog about, say, gender identity or cancel culture. Come here to laugh (I hope), to be informed (sometimes), and to see if what amuses me also amuses you. If it doesn’t, just go about your merry way and forget you ever stumbled across albertnet … no hard feelings, I promise.

I occasionally use ChatGPT or ImageFX to create art for this blog. I will never try to pass this art off as my own work (not that you’d ever believe it was mine anyway). As detailed here, I try to prevent ChatGPT from showing a woman’s bare shoulder and/or bra strap when it generates images, but sometimes the current A.I. refuses to comply. It is my policy to always make fun of A.I. when it does this.

I endeavor to never post distastefully risqué art or photos, or distasteful written content either for that matter. If your taste differs from mine, such that you find any of my content unbecoming, undignified, unseemly, or upsetting, I hereby apologize.

How I protect the privacy of people appearing in my blog

You may have noticed that when I mention in these pages a person who is not a celebrity, I tend to use a single initial rather than a first or last name (e.g., “E—’s handwriting is a bit hard to read”). If I write unflatteringly about a person, the initial I use may have nothing to do with the person’s actual name. If you see an actual name spelled out in these pages, it usually means that either the person gave me explicit permission to use his or her name, or the person has passed away. (In the early years of albertnet I was not quite so disciplined about this. My policy has become more stringent over time.)

I often post photos to this blog, and they often feature a person or persons. Usually these featured persons are either a) celebrities who are either out in public or participating in a broadcast sporting event, b) members of my family who have given blanket permission to be featured, or c) dead. Once in a while a person is shown who is just some rando, perhaps in a bar in Ely, such as the guy in the background of this photo:

In this latter scenario,  the rando cannot generally be identified and isn’t likely, I think, to take offense, because he’s just minding his own business, after all. If you do ever find yourself depicted on this blog in some unflattering way, including but not limited to being drunk and/or disorderly and/or having a bad zit or a receding hairline like mine, please contact me and I will remove or alter the photo.

Have I missed anything?

If you feel this policy is incomplete, or fails to respect your privacy in any way, please email me and/or post a comment below. If the “email me” link in the previous sentence does not work for you, manually type or paste the address feedback@albertnet.us into the “To” field in your email app.

Thank you for taking your privacy seriously and making it through this entire post. Perhaps you can now consider whether other websites you visit are also appropriately respectful of your rights. If they aren’t, maybe you can forsake them forever and just come here instead?

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

What Is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?

Introduction

If you are reading this post long after its March 2025 publication date, you might become puzzled at its many failings until you realize, “Oh, wait, this was written back when Dana wrote his own blog posts instead of assigning them to GPT-28-turbo-XL-prime! The lameness is because he did his own very light research instead of basing his observations on the entire body of knowledge of the Internet, and because it’s a plebian human voice instead of an infinitely exalted and witty A.I.!”

I have now blogged 14 times about A.I. and its evolution. My last ChatGPT check-in was about three months ago. The A.I. version hasn’t changed since then; as of this writing it’s still GPT-4-turbo. But what has changed is the range of tasks I’ve experimented with. I now realize my previous posts failed to appreciate some of the things ChatGPT does really well. This post showcases those, while also providing commentary on what the A.I. still does not excel at (and likely never will). You’ll also learn more about why you may have seen an annoying banner about cookies at the top of this blog.

Caveat

This post is mostly about ChatGPT though it touches on Google Gemini. What it doesn’t cover is the “Visual Look Up” feature on Apple’s iOS platform that leverages “Siri Knowledge.” I don’t currently own any Apple products (except an iPod mini in a drawer somewhere) so all I know about Siri is that it did a comically poor job of identifying the breed of my brother’s cat today, based on this snapshot he sent me:

How an A.I. could think any image looks like both a cougar and a wallaby is beyond me. I’m going to assume Apple is so far behind in the arms race that we can simply ignore it for now.

Real-world problem solving with GPT-4-turbo

Until recently I’d only messed around with GPT-4 for the purpose of evaluating it (and, whenever possible, mocking it). But then I hit upon a real-world use case and dove back in. My motivation, which I’m sure you’ll relate to, was: HOT CASH MONEY. Who wouldn’t want this, other than those tedious killjoys who spout aphorisms like “Money is the root of all evil”?

By way of background, I’d noticed that the albertnet page view count had soared in recent months. It took this blog something like 14 years to reach a million page views, but in the last six months alone I’ve now seen almost 1.4 million more. But then, isn’t this how the Internet works? Moore’s Law? Nielsen’s Law? All that compounding magic? In the whole time I’ve had this blog I never even considered monetizing it through ads, but every man has his price. (I’m not sure exactly what mine is, but I reckon I’ll know it when I see it.)

Driven mad with money-lust like one of the guys in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” I needed answers—fast. So I asked GPT-4-turbo, “My blog, www.albertnet.us, has received 1.2 page views in the last three months and traffic is increasing. If I turned on Adsense, approximately how much money would I earn per month?”

Yes, “1.2 page views” is a typo, but I didn’t make it here … that’s actually what I asked ChatGPT. It replied, “What the hell do you mean 1.2 page views? How do you have 2/10 of a page view? Did some user barely see the screen, like out of his peripheral vision? Or are you just whacked out on coke and smack and typed your query wrong?”

Okay, you got me … that’s not at all how GPT replied, though honestly I think that would be the better answer. What it actually provided was a lengthy essay, full of data points and computations, answering this useless question. My favorite part of the response was, “Number of Page Views (Traffic) – You’ve mentioned you have 1.2 page views in the last three months, which is approximately 400 page views per month (assuming the traffic is consistent).”

Huh? How do you get 400 by dividing 1.2 by 3? I guess the chatbot arbitrarily assumed the figure I provided was in thousands. That’s a pretty big logical leap, and GPT didn’t document the fact of this assumption. It then proceeded to run a bunch of calculations based on 1,200 views, the punch line being that I could make about $2/month. So the more succinct answer would have been, “Dream on, bloggy-boy.”

When I corrected my original query to 1.2 million page views, GPT-4-turbo reran its calculations and informed me that I might expect to earn something in the neighborhood of $2,000/month in passive income. Now we’re talking! It did suggest a number of caveats, such as how my  results might be affected by the geographical location of my readers, the positioning and type of ads, ad targeting, how well ads match my content, user engagement, and so on. I asked it a bunch more questions specific to Adsense, whether GPT’s estimated click-thru rate (CTR) assumption is realistic, etc. While it provided all kinds of useful info, it missed one very important rule of thumb: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I mean, come on … albertnet is a blog about nothing. I’m not going on political rants that cause trolls to leave endless acerbic comments and then forward my post to 90 friends with an exasperated preface like “can you believe this shit?!?!!?!” If all it took to create a nice passive income stream was to blog every single week for 15 years straight so that after more than 3,500 hours of writing you’ve amassed over 750 posts, comprising over 2 million (juicy, searchable) words, then everybody would be getting into this business, obviously. If quality, rather than nudity, attracted people’s attention, every liberal arts grad on the planet would be driving a Benz. (Well, except for me, because regardless of my income—actual, theoretical, or pipe-dreamed—I will always be the world’s cheapest man driving a used Volvo.)

I feel really bad for the earnest blogger who sees all this traffic growth, does a basic ChatGPT query, thinks he can trust the response, and makes a lot of effort adding ads to his blog to harness this new fountain of riches. I hope nobody is that naïve. Since I’m not, my first impulse was to get a second opinion. So I put my query to Google Gemini, without the typo this time, and it gave me a very similar answer: I could make right around $2K a month, just for setting up Adsense and then sitting on my ass!

This seems like the kind of claim I’d get from a spammer. In fact, I’m going to check my spam right now to look for this kind of hoax. Hmm, that’s odd. Though 22 of my 50 spam messages are from recruiters, none is this specific. I do, however, have a message from “Super-size” titled, “Now imagine each night, having 5 or 10 concubines around you, each one craving your masculine essence in them. #632352.” This subject line is interspersed with various emoji including, oddly enough, an avocado. Is avocado a concubine’s favorite food? Let me ask ChatGPT. Okay, it replied in the negative, pointing out that concubines were prominent “in ancient or medieval times, when avocados were not available in their regions.” I think the innuendo of “in their regions” was accidental. (And now I’ve realized how long and pointless a digression this has been. I’m tempted to apologize, except this might end up being my favorite paragraph of this entire post.)

The caveat GPT-4-turbo should have provided is, “My calculated revenue assumes the page views are from actual readers, not bots.” The idea of bots grossly polluting my page view stats was my natural assumption, but not one GPT addressed. I think this is an important object lesson: it doesn’t matter how useful A.I.’s responses are if you don’t know to ask the right question. Perhaps A.I. will advance to the point that it would not only sanity-check my page view stats, but would be the one to keep an eye on my blog traffic to watch out for moneymaking opportunities in my stead. (If and only if it knew albertnet to be an amazing viral sensation for reals.)

Where ChatGPT shines

After feeding me all that false hope, ChatGPT asked if I’d like help setting up Adsense on my blog. I decided instead to enlist its support vetting the quality of the page view stats. Having drilled down a bit on my own (which Blogger doesn’t make super easy, by the way), I discovered that page views from France were 12% of my total over the last six months, 14% over the last three months, and 39% over the last 30 days. I shared this with the chatbot and queried, “Is there A.I.-driven or bot type traffic that would originate in France that could artificially inflate the metrics around my readership?” (I now regret the specificity of this, as I was clearly “leading the witness.”)

ChatGPT responded with a clear and detailed essay about the probable causes, including “Bot Traffic (Most Likely Explanation).” It filled me in about scrapers and SEO crawlers and A.I. training bots, and suggested I use Google Analytics to investigate further. This ended up being an excellent suggestion and led to my most engaged use of GPT ever.

First I quizzed the chatbot about whether Google Analytics has a free version (it does), whether I’m giving up any privacy (basically not), etc. Then I set up Google Analytics (aka GA4), which was pretty straightforward, except I noticed in the Terms of Service that I’m expected to comply with GDPR (the EU General Data Protection Regulation) when gathering this detailed user data. I happen to know what GDPR is, so I asked GPT all about it, in terms of what I’m really expected to do to comply. It turns out that compliance is a royal pain in the arse (my words, not ChatGPT’s). Since I do get readers from Europe (whether it’s 39% of all traffic or not), I need to have a publicly posted privacy policy and a banner announcing my use of cookies (which is how GA4 can track usage). I almost abandoned the whole project, on the mere assumption that my page view stats are so obviously bogus I don’t need to expend all this effort verifying it, but then … what if these traffic stats aren’t bogus? What if I really could just sit back and rake in money? Isn’t it worth spending some time and effort investigating the possibility?

I asked GPT for some nice boilerplate text for the privacy policy, and though much if its response was unusable, some of it was good, and if nothing else this rough draft prevented writer’s block and paved the way for my policy, which you can read here and which I’ve linked to in my blog’s footer. (I’ll need to revise that policy pretty radically, as you shall see, but it’s probably a good thing to have anyway.) The harder task was creating that cookie banner, since it’s not just a static digital placard but an actual functional utility that captures a user’s cookie preferences and turns them into policies that impact the behavior of GA4. That is no small feat, and probably nothing I’d tackle on my own.

Before I pressed on I had a long, rambling discussion with ChatGPT about how to get everything going. I learned a ton, including info about the following:

• The various metrics I’d be able to get from GA4 (i.e., is this truly worth it?)
• What free utilities exist that could be leveraged for setting up the cookie banner and how to choose the best one
• Approximately how long it would take to set up the banner based on the chosen utility
• How to create a Google Tag and write an HTML script for my blog’s template that would invoke it
• How to create the HTML script that would invoke the banner
• How to pause GA4 if I have trouble invoking the banner (spoiler: I did)
• How to back up my blog’s HTML template before messing with it (though GPT didn’t suggest this, which again illustrates the difference between a) being able to describe how to do something, and b) taking the initiative to do that thing)
• How to debug my script and figure out why it’s not working

These weren’t just general instructions it provided that I’d have to suss out on my own. GPT4-turbo provided sample script text that actually worked (eventually). Here’s an example of its suggested script:

 <head>
    <!-- Your other head tags -->
    <script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=YOUR_TRACKING_ID"></script>
    <script>
        window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
        function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
        gtag('js', new Date());
        gtag('config', 'YOUR_TRACKING_ID');
    </script>
</head>

To reiterate, I am not a seasoned HTML jockey and would have struggled with this syntax, to say the least, were it not for the chatbot’s help. And even if I had originally built my blog from scratch (i.e., coding all the HTML myself without a Blogger template), I’d have been rusty enough now that I’d have been wise to leverage GPT for this task anyway. As I went through all this scripting, it dawned on me why a lot of people are worried about A.I. taking our jobs. This is just basic HTML but GPT was hugely helpful; If I were a full-on programmer and suddenly became (say) twice as efficient because I was grabbing blobs of basic code for simple operations instead of creating them from scratch every time, I’d naturally consider how all my colleagues have also become twice as efficient, and I’d start to worry about my employer realizing they could make do with half their programming staff. Scary stuff.

The upshot

Once GA4 was up and running, ChatGPT was very helpful in walking me through understanding all its metrics, not all of which were very intuitive. In a perfect world, I’d have discovered an average engagement time of ten minutes per post, indicating actual human readers. In reality, I learned that—guess what?—average engagement time is under three minutes, and GA4 shows way fewer page views than the Blogger stats. In other words, Blogger most likely is reporting on a lot of bogus visits from bots. If ChatGPT were like a really cool know-it-all big brother, it would have said, in response to my very first inquiry about the growth in traffic, “Dude, don’t trust the Blogger stats. They’re useless.” I wouldn’t have had to do all this research.

After asking ChatGPT a bunch of questions related to the delta in traffic as reported by each platform, I had it recalculate the ad revenue I might hope to get from my blog in light of the better data. It estimated about $0.40/month, and then went on to suggest a whole bunch of ways I could improve user engagement. I then led it on a thought exercise about how much of the real traffic is based on old posts, since a) albertnet posts are not timely, and b) the longer a post is up, the more views it will gradually accrue. GPT agreed with my assessment: that any improvements going forward would only marginally increase traffic and engagement, as they’d only apply to new posts.

Next I asked GPT for its best guess as to how much improvement I could achieve if I implemented all its suggestions … double? triple? tenfold? It replied that “doubling or tripling engagement is probably a reasonable and achievable short-term goal.” (This doesn’t impress me as intelligent … I think the chatbot is just highly suggestible.) I went on to ask, “Do you think it’s worth implementing these strategies with the goal of monetizing my blog through ad revenue?” It provided another long essay that concluded, “Yes, but with realistic expectations … treat ad revenue as a potential bonus or passive income stream, and consider other monetization strategies as well (affiliate marketing, sponsored content, or selling your own products/services).”

And this is where, I think, A.I. is still falling short. It’s great at helping the user with nuts-and-bolts technical tasks, especially those of the type performed countless times by other users (for example, inserting scripts to invoke GA4 and/or a cookie banner). But synthesizing a lot of information and drawing the best conclusion is still beyond its ability. By its own reckoning, my real, human traffic would bring in $0.40/month, and by implementing all its suggestions I might triple user engagement … but it failed to grasp that earning a mere $1.20/month isn’t worth any amount of effort. A.I. was ultimately unable to suggest the right strategy for me to take regarding my blog.

One last thing…

The sad part of this tale of exploration is how useless all my effort has ended up being. If I had any reason to suspect that, after fifteen years, my blog would suddenly go viral, I could keep an eye on Google Analytics to savor my success … but I don’t. I might as well be a frog looking in the mirror every morning to see if I’ve miraculously become a prince. Not that I actually care, mind you … as described here, I’m happy to be a humble frog croaking out my unsung song. But there’s no point bothering new readers with that cookie banner, especially since—as I recently discovered—the damn thing doesn’t even work.

This is another thing ChatGPT overlooked … it failed to suggest that I actually put that banner through its paces, which I’ve now done. Through basic experimentation I’ve discovered that it doesn’t end up mattering what preferences the user selects … his session is duly recorded in GA4. (Only if a user uses a Private or Incognito window are his sessions ignored … even if he allows all cookies.) Meanwhile, site visits from mobile users are not counted at all by GA4, I have just determined. That may be because I never got the banner to work on mobile, and Google can tell this and wants to observe the GDPR rules.

So now I have to go shut the whole thing down, to maintain GDPR compliance. The entire exercise was (to borrow from Shakespeare) “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” (Shakespeare was writing about lust, but I think his sonnet also covers the lust for money quite nicely.)

Check back in a week or so and (with ChatGPT’s help) I’ll have backed out the GA4 scripting and gone back to an unstudied, non-monetized blog with no banner. My privacy and cookie policy will have had a makeover as well. I’m no richer for this little exercise, but a bit wiser, and now you are too.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II

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