Phonies

Several times on the job I have seen this in schools I visit: a child standing at the school office telephone trying to call home. "Dial 9, honey," the secretary will say. I invariably think, there is no dialing. She should say, "Push 9." We haven't used dial telephones in how many years? The same style telephone that was in my house when I bought it in 1975 is now in antique stores.

Friday night we watched the 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams. Besides the theme of the movie being one of my favorites, total paranoia, some of the plot hinged on technology that has completely changed. When Sutherland, as Dr. Bennell, tries to call the police, they say, "Stay where you are, Dr. Bennell." He yells into the phone, "How did you know my name? I didn't give you my name!" In those days caller ID didn't exist, or if it did it wasn't used widely. We didn't expect anyone to know who we were when we called them.

Sutherland used the telephone several times in the movie, each time dialing. I know the movie is almost 30 years old, but dialing a telephone seems almost quaint.

There are some movies, not even 30 years old, that have plot developments dependent on telephones. There was Midnight Run with Robert DeNiro, where part of the plot hinges on him finding a pay phone. When's the last time you saw a pay phone? I haven't noticed them around much lately.

A coworker had his home phone disconnected, and now depends solely on his cell phone. I don't know…that seems almost, what? Unfathomable? I have always felt my home phone number was what anchored me, as much as my street address. It meant me. It had to mean me; every year my name is in the telephone book, connected to that address, the seven-digit number.

I'm old enough to remember prefixes. My home prefix growing up was CR7. The CR stood for Crestwood. Where did they come up with these names? My girlfriend's number was IN7-0700. The IN was Ingersoll, like the watch. Maybe that's what the telephone people did. "What do we name this prefix?" Looks at watch. "How about Ingersoll?" I remember having a hard time when they changed to all numerical prefixes, having to think 467 instead of IN 7.

Nowadays no matter where I am, driving, mall, store, work, exercise walking, I see people on their cell phones. I can't even imagine what they are all talking about. Having the phone and the ability to answer it no matter where you are must make them feel like my home phone has always made me feel, anchored and connected to those who need to talk to me.

Do I have a choice?

I love the cover of this October, 1950 issue of Male magazine. I found it on eBay.

Those articles sound pretty provocative, and the artist on the cover looks like a work of art herself.

The headline asks, "How Will You Die?" Do I have a choice? I'll choose this. How about I stick my head in that cleavage, then have the boa constrictor wrap around us both, squishing us together? That'd be my choice.

If there's a god, he made this...

I appropriated (i.e., stole) this picture from someone else's blog. I snagged the picture, but forgot to snag the blog. Oh well. The lady with the blog said it's spring in South Africa where she is, and her young friend Cassie (picture) is enjoying the beach.

And I'm sure the boys on the beach are enjoying Cassie.

The blog writer said it's unfair to see this picture, because the writer is battling cellulite. That's what you get from writing. A fat ass.

As we in the Northern Hemisphere head into autumn, then winter, I shall keep this picture of Cassie handy. If only to keep my blood moving, not getting chunks of ice in it from our cold Utah winters.

Does this picture remind you of the 1964 song, "The Girl From Ipanema"?

Oh yeah, and for you people who read my last blog, Cassie wouldn't even be considered for spare wife status in my harem. I don't need anyone so distracting.

Part-time Polygamist Wife Wanted

My wife is pet sitting for her chiropractor. She'll be staying at her house four days.

Last week she came home after an 11-day pet sit for her brother and his wife. I don't take care of myself very well. I need my own pet sitter, and that's why she agreed I need a spare wife. It's not such a bad idea, really. When I announced it she took to it better than I thought, especially when I promised while looking for said spare wife I would emphasize a need to cook and clean, two things I do not do at all well.

So I put out this ad on craigslist: WANTED: Part-time polygamist wife. Must be able to take care of middle-aged husband by cooking and cleaning while Wife #1 is away. Picture a must.

I got some quick responses, but some of the candidates aren't women I'd pick, so I thought I'd put it up to you folks. Do you think any of these gals should be Mrs. Postino #2? You can click on the pictures for full-size images.

When Molene answered my ad she said, "I'm a lot of fun in bed." I thought, "Yeah, tons of fun."Talk about someone who loves her licker! Errrrr, I mean liquor. Jackie Daniels said she loves to cook and has a lot of recipes for cooking with bourbon.HONK! TWEET! WOW! When I got this picture of Vava Varoom I thought, "Call her right away!" But then she sent another picture, saying the first picture was older, and had been taken before she had Botox treatments. The picture on the right is Vava now, who says, "I would like to crank your throttle."Ulp! I was really caught off guard by the picture from Galaxtina, who said, "My cooking is out of this world." As are you, Galaxtina. And maybe you should go back to whatever world it is you come from.The lovely Brutella said to me, "I run a very orderly house. Discipline is important to me. No one must deviate from my rules. No one, including you...or Brutella will punish."
Finally, Zelda said in her reply to my ad, "You and I may have more in common than you think." My response to that would be, "Yeah, like hairy backs and testosterone."
Whew. Some choices, but then, when looking for a polygamist wife, the pool of potential candidates is not large.

Yaarrr!

It's a day when we all get to go around giving our imitations of Robert Newton, "Long John Silver," from Treasure Island. It's September 19, Talk Like A Pirate Day.


Anybody remember the "Mexican Spitfire," Lupe Velez? This is a portrait of her from 1929, done by one of the top pin-up artists of all time, Enoch Bolles. Lupe was quite a saucy lass, and could keep your belayin' pin polished, arrrrrr!

I heard it on the radio!

Both of these ads are from 1946: the Bendix Radio ad from Life Magazine, and the G.E. ad from Look. Click on the pictures for full-size images.

The G.E. ad, for the brand new clock radio, says, "Post-war from tip to toe." In those days things made of plastic were considered modern, which they were. Those were the days before plastic was considered cheap. The Bendix ad even touts their radios as "Perfection In Plastic"!I'd love to own the G.E. clock-radio. Sometimes I need a little buzz in the morning.
These ads were placed just before radio got its first real competition from the new medium, television. In a larger sense, I think radio was one of the greatest inventions of the Twentieth Century. Our family got its first television in 1950, but in our living room we also had a large console radio, a holdover from the 1940s. Before television, families used to sit around looking at the radio. Television was firmly post-war, but radio went back into the 1920s, and while telephones were the great invention for personal communication, radio was the first real invention for mass communication.Despite being mass communication, radio was, and is, personal. I listen to it all day while driving, and 50 or 60 years ago my father listened to it in his car while driving his own route. He was a traveling salesman for Quaker Oats, and his territory included Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Talk about empty spaces and long roads with distant horizons! Especially in those days, where many parts of a state like Montana were still part of the Old West. For Dad, the radio was indispensable. He'd come back from his sales trips telling us what he'd heard, what radio shows he listened to on his long drives. I remember his stories, related from the radio. At night the 50,000 watt stations ruled the airwaves: Dad would listen to stations from all over the country, picked up on his AM car radio. A powerhouse station like WSM beamed the Grand Ole Opry all over the country and Canada, introducing people to music they'd never heard before. KSL in Salt Lake City was also heard by people all over North America.

In urban and rural areas, smaller stations niche-programmed to their listeners, playing country, hillbilly, rhythm and blues, and even country blues. What a great time that would have been, traveling around, listening to all of the local stations.

Nowadays there are a lot of things to compete with radio, but it is still one of the most vital mediums available, and while programming, styles of music and listeners may change, radio will still be vital long after all of us are gone.

The Offenders

I mentioned before that I work with guys who have sons in prison or jail. When you're in an organization that employs 7,000 it's hard not to meet people who either have that in their family, or you meet other criminals. Over a period of years I worked with these four guys who eventually found themselves on the sex offender registry.
D was the first teacher in our district ever arrested out of a classroom, I suppose. After a complaint from a teenage boy that he had been molested as an 11-year-old by his teacher, the police showed up at the school, removed D from his classroom, took him to the office and arrested him. D always maintained his innocence, even though it cost him a lot of extra years behind bars. He was convicted circa 1984 and I was shocked nearly 15 years later when I saw a feature article on how prisoners spend Christmas behind bars, and saw D's picture and story. He's out, now, living in another state, but I wonder if he ever admitted to what he did, or took sex offender treatment, in order to get out.E was our chief accountant. He was retired when he was arrested, but the people who worked for him weren't all that surprised. Stories about E had swirled around the office for years. He often hired young college boys as hourly employees, and would set up their desks right next to his. He would also take long walks with these young men during office hours. One of the young guys told another employee that E, who drove a big Lincoln Town Car, would take him and chauffeur him on his dates. If there was sex in the back seat E would watch in his rear view mirror. He should've stuck to those college-age boys. He went after a real young one and got busted. He's 80-years-old, now. Hell of a way to spend those golden years, on a state's sex offender list.P was a high school teacher who liked 16-year-old girls. He had a teenage wife and divorced her when she was 19. "By then," she told a friend, "I was too old for him." He now lives in another country. That's one way to deal with sex offenders: send them to other countries. One of his young paramours and her parents sued the school district, claiming the principal and vice principal should have known of his activities. It dragged out in court for years, eventually reaching a settlement. It was so long ago that all of the people involved are retired, but P is still on the sex offender list, and will be until he dies.
The last is a guy who was the most obnoxious coworkers it was ever my misfortune to work with. In the late 1970s R was about 21. He was immature, mouthy and crude, but I didn't suspect he'd end up in jail after having sex with a 12-year-old when he was about 40-years-old. When R was arrested I pointed out the newspaper article to my boss. All he could do was shake his head. "Yep, not one of my better hires…" he muttered and then disappeared into his office.

Usually when someone is arrested for this sort of crime it is startling, because the person kept his activities secret. With all of these guys except for D, the elementary school teacher, it was generally known they had something going on. It just took one person or one incident to bring it to the law's attention. It's also true that if a person is a pedophile, he might work where he would find a ready made supply of victims. D was a big surprise, though, because of the naivete of the people around him. His crime blindsided them. Many didn't believe him capable and never believed he had done it. After all, he had been teacher of the year for our school district! And we have 3,500 teachers. Because of that position of trust, not just the age of his victim, of all of the men pictured above, the law came down the hardest on him.

Ciao for now.

Pretty Ballerina

My friend David Miller sent me this digital photo he took over the weekend, somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area. Click on the picture for the full-size image.

I have been sitting…and sitting…and sitting…just looking at this young woman. She is so fresh she appears to be right out of the cellophane wrapper.

I think I love her. I love her face, her body, her green Chuck Taylors.

As I've been looking at her, the lyrics to the song have been running through my head: "I had a date with a pretty ballerina, her hair so brilliant that it hurt my eyes."

Somewhere a mountain is moving, yes indeed.


Ciao.

He's In The Jailhouse Now

Bert works across the hall from my office; I see him occasionally when I go into the lunchroom. Thursday he looked up at me when I walked in. "Brett is in jail. He was sentenced to 150 days."

"Oh?" said I.

Bert's tone was between anger and anguish. He's a big guy with a scruffy beard. He works as a printer, and I think of him as having limitations in the brains department. He's also a dramatic person. He likes to milk a situation for all its Shakespearean qualities.

In this case, he thought the quality of mercy was strained. "The judge ignored the plea bargain. The prosecutor told us he'd only get two weeks but then the judge sentenced him to 180 days, and knocked off 30 days."

"You know," I said in my most noncommittal-sounding voice, "the judge isn't obligated to go by what the prosecutor agrees to if he thinks justice isn't being served."

Bert sputtered a little but continued on with why it wasn't fair. "Brett has gone to the rehab program. He's done everything the court told him to do. But the judge said two felonies didn't get two weeks in jail. They got more time."

Bert left, shaking his head, and I sat at the table with my lunch pail.

Brett, Bert's 22-year-old son, used to work with him in the printing department. I knew the kid when he was a teenager. A couple of years ago he got another job and I hadn't seen him since. Not until I saw him on the news, that is.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Brett and a friend sat down for the game, and during the course of the afternoon and evening Brett claims he drank ten shots of Jägermeister. He was driving home when he got lit up by a cop car. He pulled over and thought, "I don't want to go to jail," so he did the single dumbest thing he'd ever done, even beating out his dumbness at drinking ten shots of Jäger. He ran.

The next morning I was watching Channel 2 News when the story came on. "A local man was arrested after a high speed chase on State Street last night. Speeds reached in excess of 80 miles per hour. The man's car crashed into a pole in a business parking lot in Murray, and 21-year-old Brett **** was taken into custody." Sure enough, there he was, being escorted in handcuffs.

That was nine months ago, and he finally had his day in court. Sentenced to 180 days, with 30 days suspended. It was because of his stupidity, not because a judge had it in for him, as Bert seems to think. I thought about how many charges cops could have filed against Brett: DUI, evading arrest, damage to private property by hitting the pole in somebody's parking lot. The list goes on. Actually, I'm surprised the young man didn't get more time. Somebody could have been killed.

This isn't the first coworker whose son has gone to jail. One coworker's son was in jail for drugs, then in prison for youthful offenders. He's out now and has his own carpet installing business, scared straight. Another guy's son is serving time in a federal penitentiary because he trafficked in drugs. He's been in and out of the justice system since he was a young teenager and his dad and mom are sick of all of it.

On the other hand, my son walks the straight-and-narrow because he's like his old man, me. I know for sure I couldn't spend a night in jail, and neither could he.

When I was a young guy, driving drunk wasn't the big deal it is now. I didn't drink until I was old enough, because there wasn't anyone I knew of legal age who'd buy alcohol for me. Truth be told, I was also a little bit scared of it, and hated it when my buddies bragged up their drinking exploits. But in those days, the early 1960s, if one of my buddies got pulled over, about the worst thing that would happen is they'd spend a night in the drunk tank, or sometimes it was worse when their old man was called to come pick him up. Maybe charges wouldn't even be filed. There was more of a boys will be boys attitude in those days. Nowadays we have Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, and they've lobbied for tougher laws. They want to keep impaired drivers off the road, and some pretty harsh penalties are enacted for breaking drunk driving laws. I wish they'd form Mothers Against Cell Phones, or Mothers Against Putting On Makeup In The Car While Stopped At A Traffic Light. I think the cell phone offense should warrant an automatic death sentence.

Anyway, I liked Brett when he worked with us. The other guys who worked with him told me he was impaired most of the time, hungover, or drunk after lunch, but he held it well because I didn't see it, and I've seen some drunk coworkers in my time. I'm not sorry he's doing time in the Crowbar Hotel, though. Trying to outrun cops when you're dead drunk is a really poor decision to make, but he made it early enough in his life that hopefully he'll learn a lesson and straighten out from here on in.

Ciao.

Doctor, Doctor, gimme the news...

Does anyone ever look at numbers when other people are hollering them out? I've been hearing now for a year or more that there are between 46 and 47 million Americans without health insurance. I also just read that as of today the U.S. population stands at about 303,000,000.

Deducting those 47,000,000 from 303,000,000 would mean that about 256,000,000 Americans have medical insurance. That number sounds high; it just doesn't sound right to me.

Another statistic I just read said there are over 900,000 physicians in the U.S. In Utah, where I live, there are two M.D.'s for every 1000 residents. Two! No wonder it takes me eight weeks to see my doctor for a routine appointment.

My doctor is a woman, but another statistic, less official than anecdotal, says that about half the female physicians in this country aren't currently in practice. They are home raising kids or doing something else, maybe research.

The scariest part is the baby boomer syndrome. As that big bulge in the population starts to really hit the age barrier, say about 65 to 70, doctors offices will swell with us aging boomers. And when we get into our 70s the Alzheimer's and other types of dementia will really run wild. By then we'll have all of the young people pissed off because we'll be on Medicare and costing them major $$$.

Are we baby boomers going to be in hospitals that are run like my high school was run in the 1960s, where 3,000 kids were crammed into a building meant for half that many? My mom told me that when I was born in July, 1947, women were having babies in the hallways of the hospital. Is that what's going to happen at the end of my lifetime, too? Lying in a hallway, along with 999 other patients, waiting to see one of those two doctors?

Another thought that goes back to my first paragraph, and those 47,000,000 Americans without insurance. Where are the doctors going to come from if that many folks suddenly have medical insurance? It takes about 10 years--and a fortune in student loans--to become a doctor. It's not like we can just suddenly start appointing doctors, hiring them all from other countries (god knows we do enough of that), or just let them buy their M.D. degrees over the Internet.

I'm not advocating that anyone go without medical care. I go to a doctor when I need to. I also know what it's like to be uninsured. I grew up in a family that never had medical insurance. When we were injured we had to show a bone sticking out or a head wound with leaking brains to get Mom to take us to the doctor. If we were sick, well, we were just outta luck. We had to be knockin' on heaven's door to get Mom to take us to the clinic. Considering how my mom embarrassed me in those days I would rather have died than have her take me to a doctor, but there were times when I was too ill to resist.

Recently Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said we should have universal health care, and that people should be required to have checkups. If you thought people dodged the draft during the Vietnam War-era, wait'll you tell them they have to see a doctor. We'd all be better off seeing a doctor for preventive care, but like my mom in those past times, most people wait until something is seriously wrong before they call for medical assistance. And that'd be true even if you told them they were required to have checkups.

Just thinking about all this makes me want to pop a Valium. I suggest we have some hard choices to make about health care in this country, but wait until I have my annual doctor visit, please. I need my prescription renewed.

******

From a 1946 Look Magazine. Two-fisted Doc Hunter is just out of the Army and rassling with bad guys. On the top, from the same 1946 magazine, a doctor is always on the go, running from emergency to emergency. But, as this ad for Camels suggests, he can always take a few minutes and relax with a smoke.

The Photophone

I found this old Tom Swift dust jacket on the Internet. It's from 1914, so it predates even World War I.

The technology needed must have seemed impossibly fantastic at the time. After all, television was still just a spark in somebody's brain; radio, "wireless," wasn't being widely used (the Titanic disaster was two years before); even telephones--as shown in the illustration--were hand-cranked devices needing the intercession of a live operator.

Flash forward to the 1960s, and Bell Telephone demonstrations of telephones with visuals of the person on the other end. You all remember Dr. Heywood Floyd talking to his daughter on a television screen in the movie 2001.

The idea just never took hold, because people like telephones as they are, without visuals. I remember the common complaint was, "I wouldn't answer it if I'd just gotten out of the bathtub," or if makeup wasn't in place, etc. In other words, the fact that no one can see you when you answer is a positive for a telephone. It really doesn't need the additional technology attached to it.

But the technology is here, just not being used as Bell Labs and Tom Swift, over 90 years ago, envisioned it. We have web cams, camera cell phones, and so we are connected via pictures. But the idea of plugging a few coins into a payphone, talking to the wife or kids back home and being able to see them, that idea is as antiquated as the scene on the jacket of Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone.

Butch the rooster

Farmer John was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called "pullets", and ten roosters, whose job it was to fertilize the eggs.

The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the soup pot and was then replaced. That took an awful lot of his time, so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters.

Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance which rooster was performing.

Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells. The farmer's favorite rooster was old Butch, and a very fine specimen he was, too.

But on this particular morning John noticed old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all! John went to investigate.

The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover.

But to Farmer John's amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He would sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.

John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result...The judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pullet Surprise as well.

Crouching Tiger, Tattooed Dragon

So how do you feel about tattoos? Are you sporting one? Two? Fifty? Both arms, both legs, your back, up your neck? You're in good company. Lots of people nowadays have tattoos.

I get myself in trouble complaining about tattoos because inevitably when I mention them someone will say, "I have a tattoo," or "my daughter has a tattoo of a battleship on her chest." I'm old school. I know that tattoos don't have the same meaning to younger people as they had to us crusty old codgers. When I was a kid a tattoo was very lowbrow. Sailors got them; Popeye had a couple of them. Guys would have a heart with the word Mom on a scroll underneath, or they'd have their girlfriend's name emblazoned on a forearm.

I have a problem with modern folks who have tattoos up and down both arms. I see people with tattoos registering their little kids for elementary school. Twenty-something moms who look like sailors. Sometimes I'd like to stare. I'd like to say, "Excuse me, young woman, but may I take a really good look at that tattoo of a lizard on your ankle?" "Can I stare at the tattoos on your boobies?"

What I see as the problem is how permanent they are. In a few years tattoos may mean again what they meant to me many years ago: very lowbrow. Some grizzled old geezers, covered in tattoos, will shuffle into the nursing homes of America. They'll be defined by the sagging flesh covered in fading ink. It looked nice when the skin was young and firm, didn't it?

Speaking of young and firm, I found these two ladies on the Damn Cool Pics blog. You can find it by shifting your eyes to the right of this text, and looking at my links. Because of the many, many pictures it can be a slow loader. If you still have dial-up you'll want to pack a lunch. It's worth it, though. You get to see the lengths some people go through to decorate themselves, and also some people you wouldn't want to claim as relatives.Ciao for now.

She'll love you for it

Amour. Le sex hot. "She'll love you for it." The promise of forbidden thrills. Only $9.98. Where do I send my money?
Click on pictures for full-size images.

These ads were in a 1951 detective magazine, aimed at the parents of us baby boomers, now in our sixties. It shows that not only were they making us kids, they were enjoying some sexy bedroom thrills to go along with the baby-making. The lure of the French lingerie ("French" being synonymous with sex), that body-hugging nylon, that shimmering black rayon... Hot damn. Sounds good to me!

I like the offer to "send no money." You could get your jollies and send the negligee back, hopefully unstained, or maybe they just cleaned it up and sent it to the next horny guy. And speaking of that, how many guys ordered this nightie for themselves? In those days people didn't talk about stuff like that.

"…alluring peek-a-book black lace reveals all her charms…clinging sheer black rayon caresses her every curve, and that oo-la-la shoulder strap holds everything!" That copywriter should have been writing dirty books. My glasses are steaming up even as I read it.Ciao for now.

The Watchbird

As if I needed any reminders of the privacy issues from living in the modern world, I found this 1991 issue of Time, which emphasizes that very paranoia. Actually, paranoia is a misnomer. It's a reality, folks. Someone is watching. Someone is listening.

In 1991 the issues of Internet safety and such weren't even being thought of. That all came later. But the seeds have been there ever since marketers and governments found they could keep track of their customers and citizens electronically.

The problems for governments and law enforcement is that people who don't want to be tracked can find ways to keep it from happening, whereas those of us who object to it have it happen constantly. I use the Internet, I use my computer, I write a blog, all things that can get me noticed. I think about it but I do it anyway. It's kind of like putting my head in the lion's mouth, hoping he won't bite me.

There's kind of a perverse thrill to thinking I'm getting away with something, even if I'm not doing anything to "get away with." This week we've all gotten our jollies over Senator Larry Craig's embarrassment, trying to solicit sex in a public men's room, which ended just yesterday with his resignation from the U.S. Senate. Yesterday I was in a huge grocery store using the ATM. A woman was being detained for stealing a $1.99 package of pens. The store security officer said, "Why did you steal these?" The woman replied, "I don't know." It's possible she doesn't know, but we all engage in some sort of risky behavior for the thrill of getting away with something. It reminds me of the old Red Skelton routine, the Bad Widdle Boy: "If I dood it I get a whippin'…" "I dood it!"I also remember my mother reading to me the little cartoon feature, "The Watchbird Is Watching You!" from a woman's magazine back in the early 1950s. It was supposed to keep kids in line to know that there were people watching every move they made.
But…but…you say…despite those Watchbirds, unless they are doing something illegal or admitting to something illegal, people just writing blogs on the Internet shouldn't have anything to worry about, right? Not so fast, said the newspaper article I read recently. Your boss and coworkers could be looking. If you say something about them, wham! You could end up without a job.

Paranoia does strike deep, folks.

*******

Not only are the Watchbirds watching you misbehave, they are looking at your grammar. I've been reading the book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Watch where you put those commas and apostrophes, folks. The grammar police are everywhere, and they are judging you by your spelling and your grammar.

Incidentally, spell checkers are useless if you're using the wrong word with the right spelling. The dictionary is still the best tool ever invented. The Watchbird will want you to use it, and he will be able to tell if you don't.