Washing your neck while signing on
Tiptoeing through Facebook the other day, I was directed to the online marketplace, whereon was being sold the modern accessory: “iPad Mount Clear Shower Curtain Liner Tablet or Phone Holder.” This is available for a variety of prices, most around $20.
The product is a clear curtain with 17 pockets on one side to hold tablets and phones away from the water. The pockets are arranged at varying heights, and allow the user to use a touch-device from the other side of the curtain. “Even use your camera,” says one vendor, assuring customers that sound can be heard. “Touch interaction from the inside of the shower or bath,” says the recommendation, “change songs, play games, scroll through the news.”
I couldn’t resist a deeper dive, to the online reviews:
“Now I don’t have to choose between the hockey game and a shower,” wrote Rebecca.
“This thing is awesome!” wrote Gregory. “I feel very safe knowing my electronics aren’t in the shower with me. Plus I can fit my panini maker in it!”
“I think my dog probably knows far more about me than he should,” wrote Sheri, “but unless he learns to talk, I feel pretty comfortable that I’m safe.”
“Works great,” said Matthew. “Now all I need is to find a way to use my devices in my sleep.”
“This product prevents the transitory silence in my brain that terrifies my entire existence,” wrote Jonathon. “I wish this company made something that let me attach my cell phone to my head so I could have that noise in my brain while I slept! Someday, maybe.”
Spurred by the item last week about a Google search for clogging classes that directed the searcher to the House of Prime Rib, Mark Kapner searched for “clogging classes near me.” First up, he says, was Studio Blu Acne Clinic. I’m guessing this was described as a cure for clogged pores. And I’m expecting that someone will report that their similar search turned up a studio that administers colonics.
Email subject line of the month: “Sfchronicle — Gynecology 2018.”
Dan Rosenheim, news director of KPIX for the past 18 years and a journalist for the past 40, retired a few weeks ago. Rosenheim was managing editor of The Chronicle before he left for KRON, the job that preceded his long tenure at KPIX.
By phone the other day, he talked about transitioning from newspapers to TV, “not knowing a voice-over from a satellite truck. It was the most frightening year of my life. So I kept my mouth shut” and learned. He was awestruck by the teamwork implicit in presenting live news, and also by the power of the medium. He’ll miss the people and the news, he said, but leaving “comes with some opportunities,” and his plans include working on a book about three years in Paris starting in tumultuous 1968. When Rosenheim was a reporter here, we were neighbors, and I reminded him about conversations we’d had about his early jobs. He said he’d worked in the packing department of the Brach Candy Co., worked on a warehouse dock of a supermarket, driven a cab, “was a bread wrapper’s helper on an assembly line. ... For six years through college, I did blue-collar work.” His first journalism job was on the South Side of Chicago for a tiny newspaper that was also a community organizing tool.
Another of the freedoms of retirement he’ll enjoy is the “opportunity to be politically active,” he said. “I was a child of the ’60s ... I don’t know that the values” of the ’60s “ever went away fundamentally,” he said. “But I think you subordinate them to the demands of the job. So there wasn’t freedom to express or participate in political activities . ... After The Election — spell that with a capital T and capital E — I am sure I would have gone to the Women’s March.”
He stressed that he wasn’t retiring “so I can go back to being a radical . ... My politics are much more moderate now than they were when I was a 26 years old.”
With apologies to Trevor Noah ,a moment of Zen: Driving past an electronic sign near Shoreline in Mill Valley, Eileen Alexander noticed its one-word message: “Expect.”
(What I’m expecting is that I’ll be out of here for about a week. See ya later.)
“We don’t hang out with him anymore. He gets too many haircuts.” Young man to young man, overheard at Menlo Park Summerfest by Sheryl Nonnenberg