The future of smart meters for dummies

A recent New York Times story detailed how two English villages have cut their energy consumption by half in five years since the installation of “smart meters” that let homeowners know when energy usage is redlining.

When Jeffrey Marchant and his wife, Brenda, power up their computer, turn on a light or put the kettle on to boil, they can just about watch their electric bill rise. Turn on a computer and the device — a type of so-called smart meter — goes from 300 watts to 400 watts. Turn off a light and it goes from 299 to 215. At 500, the meter is set to sound an alarm.

“I’ve become like one of Pavlov’s dogs,” Mrs. Marchant said. “Every time it bleeps I think I’m going to take one of those pans off the stove. I’d do anything to make it stop. It helps you change your habits.”



Normally, my in-home strategies for conserving energy are confined to pretending to be asleep when my wife asks me to get up and feed the cat, but I’m already looking into getting my own smart meter to torture my family every time someone snaps on a hairdryer or a blender.

I’ll get a whistle, a nightstick, an energy police badge and storm into the kitchen whenever the slightest burp in usage sends the smart meter higher than, say, 50.

“What the hell’s going on in here?” I’ll demand. “The smart meter’s ringing like there’s a prison break.”

“Why, I just wanted to make some toast to feed the baby.”

“You’re wasting electricity! Use a candle!”

“But I’m already using a candle because you’ve removed all the light bulbs.”

“Not to see! Use the candle to make toast! Just hold the bread over the flame. And use it for the soup, too. Heat it as ya eat it, one spoonful at a time.”

But more than that callous fun, I’m romantic about what these meters will mean to the future. I envision a day when meters will inform every aspect of our lives.

Computers of the future may be able to determine down to the mile just how long a vehicle will last. Instead of odometers starting at zero, they’ll start at 250,000 and count down. After a year or so you might dip to 225,000, but you could actually add life miles if you get an oil change or new tires. Truly safe drivers may be able to maintain their life miles at virtually static numbers.

People everywhere will be much more conscious of waste. Meters attached to TVs will show how you’re draining the life of your big screen by leaving it on when you’re not in the room. Refrigerators will tick, tick, tick away their potency as you stand their dawdling over whether to snack on the turkey or the leftover Chinese.

The greatest benefit will, of course, be when each of us gets our very own smart meter. Smoke a cigarette and your life meter will inform you you’ve just scissored 15 minutes off your longevity. Go on a long bender with your buddies and you’d better hope it was damn well worth it. Your life meter will show all that wanton revelry just cost you four days. Eat a spinach salad and you’re just earned another day with the grandkids.

It’ll make every day seem as precious as those given to terminal patients who've just been told they have just six months to live. They draw up their bucket lists and squeeze more zestful fun into two months than they’d done in the previous decades.

Of course, the real breakthrough will be when they develop meters that will be able to determine if we're bound for heaven or hell. Help an old lady across the street and your meter swings toward the heaven. Mistreat your mom and, gadzooks, your meter will tell you may have made an eternally fatal mistake.

We just have to hope the meters won’t make any miscalculations that’ll fool some of us into thinking we’re coasting to heaven when, in fact, we’re bound for a cruise on the lake of fire.

End up there and you're toast.

Bob Dylan, multiple marrieds and me

I’ve long maintained that nobody -- and I mean nobody -- should be allowed to get married without checking with me first.

I’d spend about 15 minutes with every prospective bride and groom. If they fail to convince me they’re going to make a worthy couple, then that’s it. They’re done. “You guys had some swell times together, but it’s over. Time to move on. Good luck to you both.”

And that would be that.

(I believe the same procedure should be in place for every driver before he or she gets a license renewal, but let’s not get off track.)

This would be extremely time-consuming for me, but in the end it would result in a lot less emotional anguish for everyone.

Especially me.

Case in point: Back in June it was announced that Bob Dylan would be headlining an August 9 street festival on the South Side of Pittsburgh. I’ve seen him 43 times before, but this clearly was going to be special. The South Side of Pittsburgh is my favorite neighborhood. It teems with lively ethnic bars, great restaurants and smoke shops. If it was any cooler they could store frozen foods on Carson Street.

I said to my wife, “This is incredible. We’ll drop the kids off with my Mom. Go to the show. If a band stinks, we’ll split and have some drinks and then come back at twilight to hear the great master play. It’ll be the greatest weekend of the year.”

Then, one week later, it all came crashing down. Val told me her sister was getting married. For the third time. It was on the sandy shores at Virginia Beach, an eight hour drive from Latrobe. It was August 9, of course, and then to jab the stick into my eye even further, her sister decided to forbid alcohol.

The only thing that would have made it worse was if she’d have told me that I had to be the groom.

Dry! Under normal circumstances, I might perish under such cruel conditions. And, yes, I’m aware of the stunning incongruity of having a dry wedding yards from the world’s second largest body of water.

On top of all that, I’m actually in the midst of an incredibly busy time. Two misguided publishers have given me advances to work on books. Now, I’m having to weigh whether I should blow off my family on the long drive and stay home looking like a heel. Or go to something I’ll have no chance of enjoying and won’t improve a bit by being there.

“The only difference between in-laws and outlaws is that outlaws are at least wanted by someone.” That’s what my brother said and it’s absolutely true. Her family’s disdain for me is palpable and perfectly understandable, of course. Me, I always take the high road and would never betray my feelings for her whack-job family.

See, if she’d have had to check with me first, she’d never be in this situation and I’d be spending my time dreaming up potential playlists for the Dylan show. I’ve been happily married since 1996 following a sensible three-year shack-up. But what’s good for me isn’t necessarily good for the weak-minded.

Even my 7-year-old daughter understands that. She asked: “How come Aunt Laurie’s getting married for the third time and she’s not even famous?”

I told her that, in my eyes, she’s becoming famous. Really, for the past six weeks or so, she’s all I’ve talked about.

I knew her second husband and disliked him instantly with an intense kind of dislike sovereign people used to reserve for invading Mongols. He was there making microscopic small talk at my favorite holidays. Two or three times I actually had to take him golfing with me and I’d line up for multiple lobotomies if I could get those memories erased from my tender mind.

I never met her first husband, but I’m confident I would have despised him, too.

The third husband-to-be? Seems like a nice enough guy. But there’s no way I’d let him get married to her. Not on August 9.

I’ve long nursed a theory that marriage decay is the fault our excessive longevity. Really, back 200 years ago when our life expectancy topped out at 40 -- you can check it out -- people would get married at age 18 or so and say, “By God, I’m going to love this gal for the rest of my life. There’s no one else for me! ‘til death do us part!”

Then when they were about 38 and their marriage was a stale mess, he’d say, “I am sick and tired of this old crab and her constant nagging. But, what the hell, I’ll be dead in a year or two, so might as well stick it out.”

So I’ll spend the next few days trying to decide whether I should torture myself and her family by taking my own darling loved ones eight hours to something that’ll only provoke the worst in me. The only saving grace about attending such a booze-free yawnfest will be that it’ll keep me from blurting out myriads of hurtful truths.

It’s truly a lose-lose for me. Because if I stay home, then I’ll only be confirming the worst things Val’s family says about me: “Lazy, good-for-nothing, drinks too much, etc.”

And they’d be right. That’s exactly what I’d revel in for three days without my family under our roof. It would be splendid. I’ll never understand how how three people I love so much can make me so happy by not being here.

Plus I’d get to spend about three hours basking in the genius of the twice-married, now single Bob Dylan. You might wonder how I square my admiration for Dylan with his questionable married history.

Well, there’s still a chance he’ll ask me when and if he ever gets married again. And, guaranteed, he’s not getting married August 9.

Death to boring dinner deaths!

I put a moratorium on boring dinner deaths the other night after yet another old neighbor lady passed away in her sleep.

It’s not that I’m opposed to morbid death talk at dinner. On the contrary, I’ve always considered myself a death connoisseur. I enjoy lively talks about death and dying.

As a young newspaper reporter, I was daily immersed in the grisly ends of strangers. I’ve seen with my own eyes the mangled bodies of gunshot victims, sidewalk suicide splatters, and hapless casualties of no-win confrontations with runaway trucks.

Their scarred corpses haunt my dreams. I wonder about the searing pain, the fateful recognition that death was imminent. And I invariably put myself in their doomed shoes, hands raised in futile defense the instant before the pin hits the shell.

It’s not death I mind, it’s boredom.

And our daughter, Josie, 7, shares those impulses. So when Val said the other night about the neighbor lady dying in her sleep, Josie was naturally curious. How’d she die? What happened?

“She was old,” Val said. “She died in her sleep. Very peaceful.”

It was maybe the eighth old lady who’d died in her sleep this year. If you’re looking for a tidy, peaceful death, become an old lady in my neighborhood and just bide your time.

I could sense Josie was disappointed. I set my fork down and wiped my mouth with my napkin. “Look, I’m tired of all these old ladies dying in their sleep,” I said to Val. “The next time some old lady passes away, you make damn sure you have a good story to tell us. It’s not going to make her any less dead if she was eaten by a bear or struck by lightning. And we’ll all enjoy our dinners a little bit more.”

So recently we’ve had wonderful dinner conversations about Mrs. Miller who was struck by a meteor when she was gardening; Mrs. Peterson, who died heroically trying to save her kidnapped husband from Colombian rebels, and poor old Mrs. Benson who was killed trying to retrieve her wedding ring from the cranky wood chipper in the back yard.

I have absolutely no fear of death as long as it doesn’t have to hurt.

I probably spend a lot of time thinking about dying because I spend so much time thinking about living. I really enjoy my life and know it’s so finite. We’re all born the same way, but death’s a real crap shoot. Even mean, rich people can die grisly, untimely deaths and we all feel a little bit better about ourselves when something like that happens.

It’s one of the most fair things about this confoundingly unfair life.

Ideally, I’d like to live to be about 90, stumble drunk out of a friendly tavern and get hit by a bus. I want the bus to be traveling so fast that bystanders will swear they saw my soul shoot out of my body bound straight for heaven. And that my soul wasn’t wearing any pants.

But I’m guessing it’s most likely to happen in a movie theater where I’ll be gunned down by some rude, yapping kids who don’t like being shushed by an old man who feels it’s his duty to police the audience so every one can hear the witty dialogue animating what I guess will be Shrek 19.

No matter what happens, I’ve started a family tradition that when I do go, it’ll be something that’ll entertain my darling daughters.

Val: “Kids, I’ve got bad news. Your father was killed today. He was struck by a meteor while fighting Colombian rebels with a wood chipper. His body fell off the mountain he was climbing and landed in shark-infested waters just as the nearby volcanic island erupted . . .”

Sure, some of that might hurt, but it ought to give me bragging rights when I run into all those old neighbor ladies who, yawn, died in their sleep.

Stickin' it to flag pin patriots: a really rockin' anthem

It was the seventh inning of a perfectly wonderful day at PNC Park to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates play the San Diego Padres when it was again time to show the world what a great American I am.

Yes, it was time to sing our second anthem of the day, “God Bless America.” As is historic custom, me and more than 17,500 other strangers had already done our part to mumble through “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Now, and ever since 9/11, Major League Baseball has instructed every ballpark in America to hold an amplified performance of “God Bless America” after the away team bats in the seventh inning of every MLB Sunday game.

Of course, it’s all an effort to appease the flag pin patriots who are more comfortable showing off magnetic “Support the Troops” bumper stickers than seriously debating just how much we’ve all failed them over the past seven years.

Me, I might be the only guy in the entire stadium who actually sings both anthems with the same clarity and gusto that the rest of the ball fans reserve for “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

That comes from my late father. He was a real patriot. He loved his country without reserve, but wasn’t a gaudy showoff about it. He’d belt out the national anthem so loudly and off-key that I was surprised Three Rivers Stadium officials didn’t offer him a job as one of those nerve-rattling beer vendors.

I’m always mystified that people don’t sing the national anthem. Many don’t even mumble it. They just sort of shift their weight from one foot to the other and awkwardly wait for the last line when we can all raise our $7 beers in patriotic salute to kickoffs and curveballs.

I think that’s because they don’t appreciate the song’s history. It’s a great story and was written in response to one of the first terrorist attacks in our nation’s history, the shelling of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry by British warships bent on extinguishing the 38-year-old American experiment.

Plus, I like to try and generate interest in the song by pointing out it’s the only national anthem in the world that ends with an unanswered question. Read carefully:

"Oh, say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

It’s a question history will eventually answer. But none of that seems to matter to the guys that sit around me at Pirate and Steeler games I frequently attend. I can’t get anyone fired up about any of the great patriotic songs and their origins that fascinate me.

For instance, “God Bless America” was written in 1938 by Irving Berlin, a professional songwriter who found inspiration primarily the same way clock-punching assembly line workers do: It was a job that paid the bills. He wrote “White Christmas” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and died an unloved recluse who’d spent his final years pestering his business manager by phone 10 times a day about the state of his finances.

The motives behind “America the Beautiful” from 1893 are less suspect. It was written by poet Katherine Lee Bates after she visited the 14,110-foot summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado. Bates was an ardent feminist who created a sensational scandal in her day by enjoying a deep 25-year “romantic friendship” with another female professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The author of one of America’s most patriotic songs was an unabashed member of a constituency some of today’s flag pin patriots in Congress still shun 90 years after her death.

But no one cares when I bring any of this up. That’s why for the last six years I have argued that we need a new national anthem. One that perfectly captured that national mood under George W. Bush, one that was easy to sing, and one that really rocks.

Of course, the new national anthem should be, “We Will Rock You!” by the English band, Queen.

Can you imagine the competitive jolt our athletes would get if they were to play “We Will Rock You!” as they entered the Beijing arena the night of the Olympic opening ceremonies? Can you imagine the adrenaline rush it would give our brave warriors overseas as they prepared to go to battle?

Can you imagine how much fun I’ll have telling conservative flag pin patriots that this muscular, kick-ass song was made famous by an Indian-born English homosexual who died of AIDS in 1991?

Park rangers bust the wrong guys

We’d finished setting up our tent about two hours previous, the kids were zonked, and I was settling into a robust cigar and my sixth beer. It was a perfectly peaceful night of family camping at scenic Ohiopyle State Park in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Then three cars full of early 20-somethings pulled up and I was immediately disappointed to realize it was going to remain perfectly peaceful.

Out of the cars piled a mixed bag of fresh-faced kids, boys and girls, who looked like they’d showed up for a wholesome weekend of co-ed whitewater rafting. The handsome boys were strong and tan, the pretty girls were supple and exuding charm. I could tell instantly they were going to be considerate, friendly and, as a whole, would have absolutely nothing in common with the guy I was when I was their age.

It all looked so alien to me. When I was their age, I never did anything with groups of my peers, I was rarely sober and I never did buddy-buddy stuff with girls my age. Heck, I rarely got to do the only thing I really liked to do with girls my age.

I spent vast swaths of my 20s in dark taverns and bright ballparks with colorful guys who liked to drink as much as I, and that was a lot. The best part of those years was when me and another guy worked in small town newspaper bureau with just the two of us. The office was right next door to a friendly tavern and if the doors in both buildings were open, we could hear the Bat Phone ring from our barstools.

It was a classic guy bar with a cranky and filthy-mouthed 70-year-old bartender who’d come by and knock on the window every day at 1 p.m. to let us know our beers were ready. It was all great, dissolute fun.

Back then, my life was so guy-centered that it wasn’t until I was 33 that I said my first complete sentence to a female. And with mighty consequences, those words were, “So, ya wanna get married?”

I was sitting at the campfire next to the woman who’d answered, “Yeah, what the hell,” to that question. I told her about how when I was that age I never could have imagined mingling for purely social reasons -- no ulterior motives -- with women. Or being in the woods. Sober. And how the 20-something Chris would have nothing to say to the 40-something Chris he was destined to become.

We watched in fascination as one-by-one they came up, said hello, and assured us they wouldn’t be any trouble.

And they weren’t. They were drinking beers, but without the adolescent drive toward raucous results. They were just good honest kids. And it was about cost them.

A park ranger came up with his flashlight and told them it was illegal to drink beers in a state park. Who knew? They were all adults. They weren’t causing trouble. It’s yet another sign that the purity police have gotten out of hand.

Then he walks over to our camp. “Evenin’ sir,” he says, real respectful (our beers were discretely tucked beneath our seats). “These kids giving you any trouble?”

No, they’re real polite. Good kids.

“You let us know if things get out of hand.”

That would likely have been self-incriminating, but I assured him I would.

Four or five beers later, our campfire sputtered down and Val and I packed it in. I was up early the next morning to the sounds of neighboring tents being dismantled.

I asked why the unexpected vamoose.

“The police officer snuck back up and busted me with a beer. He fined me $125 for open container and said we’d all have to be gone by 8 a.m. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do out here if we can’t enjoy a couple of beers by the campfire.”

I suggested several convenient narcotics and pharmaceuticals. They all laughed like I was kidding.

I pulled aside one of the guys who’d been nervy enough to have another beer. I asked him, hey, did you ever think of making a run for it?

“What? And let them take the fall for me? It was my mistake. I had to take responsibility.”

That’s another difference. I would have run like hell.

And I mean from my family.

There’s still some things the 40-something Chris has in common with the 20-something Chris.

Cell phone cancer scare? Don't sweat it

I’m not concerned that cell phones might cause cancer because I believe in three years cell phones will be able to cure cancer.

That will be the first useful application for a device over which I’ve had an uneasy relationship since its noisy introduction about ten years ago.

I used to maintain that the only words that should ever be spoken in public into a cell phone are, “No! No! No! Make the incision behind the left ear! The left ear!”

Now, I’m as guilty as the next guy. I make so few meaningful calls on my cell phone that I often wonder if I even need it at all. It’s still too complicated and clunky to carry around for so much pointless yapping.

But extrapolating that thought leads me down a dangerous path. Because I say so few meaningful things in general that if I get rid of the cell phone for that reason then the logical conclusion is I just ought to shut up all together, and despite the rising chorus of “Amens!” I’m not going to just shut up.

So I continue to use my cell phone mostly for ordering pizzas, arranging tee times and killing time with old buddies by repeating things like our favorite Homer Simpson lines back and forth to one another when we should be working.

And all the while the cell phone keeps becoming more and more remarkable.

I remember about 10 years ago Maxim asked me to do a story about “The Next Big Things.” The roster included Segway scooters, hydro-oceanic energy harvesting modules, and self-healing plastics that will eliminate catastrophic damage on things like airplane wings.

And it included a nifty little MIT-produced prototype they were calling the “Handy 21.”

Here’s what I wrote: “In just 10 years, the geniuses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are convinced the only e-device you’ll ever need will be the Handy 21, a voice-driven, wireless wonder that will be your cell phone, camcorder, radio, TV and Internet gateway all rolled into one. It’s being called a ‘communication chameleon’ for its Capt. James T. Kirk tricorder-like efficiency.”

But the geniuses at Maxim ditched the Handy 21 because they said it was too far-fetched. Of course, those are the same geniuses that thought they’d all have jobs at Maxim through 2010 before we all learned in unison that they hire fresh geniuses to run Maxim every six months or so.

But lo and behold, such technology is now ubiquitous. Soon they say we’ll be able to point our cell phones at foreign language signs and newspapers and, will wonders never cease, they’ll translate them.

Seems a small price to pay for all those malignant growths behind our left ears.

Coincidentally, I’ve found what in my darkest thoughts is probably a malignant growth. It’s either that or there’s a little man inside my head who’s trying to get out and is starting by poking a tiny finger through the inside of my left eyebrow.

But I’m not worried. If it does turn out to be cancer, I’m sure that in a few years I’ll just need to adjust my monthly plan to allow for cancer cures along with unlimited text messages and connectivity.

I’ll just hold the phone up to my right ear until I hear it scold me, “No! No! No! I need to make the incision behind the left ear! The left ear!”

Then, fully cancer free, I’ll use the remarkable little cell phone to do what it does best. And within 30 minutes -- voila! -- I’ll be enjoying a big greasy pepperoni and anchovy pizza and a cold six pack of Yuengling.

And trying to figure out what buttons I need to push to get the cell phone to perform liposuction on my gigantic butt.

Industry-saving idea: edible newspapers!

I’ve tried in vain for the past two years to singlehandedly save an industry I love. But the newspaper industry, that unforgiving and often cruel mistress, continues to turn its back on me more times than did all the high school cheerleaders when prom time rolled around.

It ridicules me. Calls me stupid. It pretends it didn’t get my phone calls. For all I know, it’s running around with a guy from the football team who drives his own car.

See, the solution to an industry plagued with job losses, vanishing readers and generations who don’t even know it exists is a simple meat ‘n’ potatoes issue.

Newspapers need to become edible.

I have seen the future and it is covered in ketchup.

Many of our most urgent problems could be solved if more everyday manufactured items could be consumed after they’ve been used instead of being trucked to a landfill.

Think how much waste would be eliminated if, say, after you’ve eaten a bag of potato chips you could chew up the bag and digest it. Make it mint flavored and heart-healthy and the busy bodies at the American Medical Association would probably recommend it for kids.

Same with those ubiquitous plastic bottles. Why can’t they make those out of some pretzel-like substance that would be safe to consume without spilling as the liquid got lower?

And, sure, go ahead and make the vending machines out of jerky that’ll only become edible after it’s deemed obsolete.

But let’s start with newspapers. While vending machines constructed from jerky may take some time, we could start printing edible newspapers with the very next editions. That technology’s been available since November 3, 2003, when a baked goods savant named Douglas Stewart was issued U.S. patent #6,652,897.

The patent, with the full backing of the U.S. government -- and that means W.! -- said it was safe to consume certain papers and colored inks.

Hogwash, you say? Well, you’ve probably already eaten your share of ink and paper and it may have had your Aunt Minnie’s picture on it.

Yes, Stewart’s the genius who devised a way to print pictures and lacquer them atop birthday cakes. Stewart’s inspiration was that the paper he made was firm enough to be printed on in a standard printer, yet dissolves quickly when brought in contact with moist frosting. It’s perfectly safe. And on a cake, just plain cool.

There’s no better or more practical application than having the same technology devoted to newspapers, a dirty, tree-devouring business if there ever was one.

Think of the mountains of waste that would be eliminated. Think how it would help busy executives if the could read a page of the Wall Street Journal and gobble it down like a fresh salad.

Newspaper consumers would become consumers of newspapers.

With edible newspapers, the food editor would enjoy a much more elevated position in the newsroom. Instead of being the butt of jokes from hard news guys, the food editor would be the one who’d daily decide what it meant for a family newspaper to be truly tasteful.

“All right, there’s a big doubleheader at the ballpark today so flavor the sports pages with hot dogs and mustard. The front page story about salmonella should taste like salsa because readers aren’t going to be getting any of that for a while. And we’re running a blowhard opinion piece from Stan, the business editor, about how he correctly predicted the current troubles when everyone said he was nuts. Have that taste like crow.”

It’s as simple as that.

The newspaper industry, mired in the deepest slump since Guttenberg invented the printing press, can take it or leave it.

They can call me a kook. I don’t mind. I’ve offered a perfectly sensible solution to save their jobs. If they choose to ignore it, well, let them eat cake.

If I'm wrong, I'll eat my words. And if I'm right, everyone else will.