Emptying my notebook of Warriors, chicken sandwiches, 'extraordinary'

Sports, television, word definitions and more are here as I conduct my semiannual cleaning out of my metaphorical reporter's notebook.

(Bonus points for including semiannual and metaphorical in the same sentence.)

On to the topics du jour . . .

• The Golden State Warriors were historically great from 2015 through 2019 – winning three championships and posting the greatest five-year record in NBA history.

This year, they're historically bad.

The combination is (no surprise) historic.

If you're not a sports fan, you only need to know this: the Bay Area's NBA team is doing something that has never been done in the history of major professional American sports.

The Warriors are morphing from the greatest team of their era to the worst team in the league – with no time between the eras. Nobody's done that so quickly.

If you're familiar with the Warriors' season, it's reasonable. They lost one of their greatest players (Kevin Durant) to free agency and then suffered an unbelievable run of injuries to all their top players. By the sixth game of the season, they were reduced to playing whomever was available – a patchwork of rejects, journeymen and rookies. They are terrible, but they're still the Warriors.

This is like if the Beatles didn't break up, but merely lost John Lennon – and then put out an album that included covers of "Billy Don't Be a Hero," "The Night Chicago Died" and "Honey," with studio musicians filling in.

This is unprecedented.

• Mrs. Brad and I have special powers while watching TV shows or movies: I can tell when someone is left-handed and she can tell when someone is lifting something that is empty.

We'll be watching a show and I'll blurt out "lefty!" as someone eats or signs something. She'll say "there's nothing in that box" or "that cup is empty" when an actor lifts something.

If someone were listening in, our discussions would make no sense. Our special powers don't really help the world, but they are gifts nonetheless.

• Speaking of TV, I'm irrationally irritated by the commercial (for Amazon Echo?) where the man is driving to work at a hospital and speaking into a device to get his home ready for his wife.

It shows that he much he cares and how he uses technology to give her a warm welcome. All I see is a guy setting the home thermostat at 71 degrees. Does anyone set their temperature at 71 degrees. Don't we all choose even numbers for temperatures?

Maybe not. Maybe I am obsessive-compulsive about this and have rules that no one else knows exists. All I know is that I've never heard anyone say they want it to be 71 degrees.

• I'm no food snob, but I still can't understand why people have lost their minds about the chicken sandwiches from Popeye's. It's a fast-food chicken sandwich.

If and when we find out the outcry for the sandwiches was just a prank pulled by Popeye's marketing folks, I'll be unsurprised.

The other possibility, of course, is that we are all really dumb.

• My friend Mark makes a good point about the word "extraordinary." Shouldn't it mean that something is extremely ordinary? Should extraordinary be a word you use to explain that something was very bland and everything went as expected? "My day was extraordinary. Nothing surprising happened."

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

A plea for the life of germs, our smallest pets

Today I speak for those who can't. Because they have no mouths and are one-cell creatures.

And they're gross.

I speak for germs – bacteria, viruses, fungi or protozoa. Their lives matter and we treat them badly, compared to other living things.

When  historians look back at this era in the world, there will be plenty of trends: climate change, population growth and the explosion of technology. But they'll also see that many of us – and I'm speaking to you, person who rubs their hands with Purell five times a day – participated in an annihilation of our smallest allies, the germs.

Our homes are filled with germ- and bacteria-killing products, from counter wipes to hand sanitizer to fabric sanitizer to germ-killing lights. It's on our minds constantly: When I use the restroom in my office building, I routinely see young men use paper towels to avoid touching the door as to avoid germs. I only presume those same men use all kinds of germ-killing agents.

Are we killing our tiny allies?

Let's first address the value of germs. Germs make our digestive system work, prevent infections, break down trash and make up antibiotics. (I'm not a scientist, so some of these "facts" may be wrong.)

When you need garbage to break down, germs step and and do the work. When you need to digest food, germs take the lead.

Yet germs are shunned. They do important work, but nobody appreciates them until they see something bad. Germs are the offensive linemen of the natural world.

But should we save germs regardless of their value? Why are they singled out for death?

Consider dogs and cats. How would you feel if someone began selling a product that claimed it killed 100 percent of dogs? You'd be outraged. Of cats? You'd be flummoxed.

But our stores are filled with products that promise to kill germs.

What are germs if not our smallest pets? The difference between a germ and a dog is only several trillion cells. (Plus the ability to bark, the need for food and a loyalty that's better than any person.) Like a dog, germs protect us and can turn on us.

The sad thing is that germs can't speak to defend themselves because they lack a brain, mouth and the platform from which to do it. And they're too busy doing their job, which is making the Earth habitable for us.

Two generations ago, the idea of animal rights and of bringing a dog to a restaurant were outrageous, but now they're normal. Consider how history will judge you if you consider this slaughter of germs. What will you say when your great-great grandchild asks you what you were doing while germs were being slaughtered routinely?

Germs aren't our enemies, they're our smallest allies.

And I'm writing this while preparing to wash my hands and go to the doctor's office, hoping my cold is just a virus.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

The secret war between paper napkins, paper towels

I  am killing an industry. So, maybe, are you.

And millennials? They are definitely responsible. Because of course they are.

It's paper napkins.

The industry is in a decades-long decline, dropping from a  solid 60 percent of American homes that used paper napkins daily two decades ago to barely 40 percent that do so now.

What's behind the decline? A love for the environment? A return of the cloth napkin industry? Sloppiness?

Nope. It's the versatile paper towel. And millennials, of course.

Since we blame them for everything that's dying (department stores, bar soap, golf, handshakes, movies, baseball), let's add paper napkins to the list.

According to a report from a company that studies such things, only 37 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds use paper napkins daily, compared to 61 percent of those 65 and older.

These kids and their social media and rideshare services and streaming videos and paper towels!

The challenge is to recapture the youth market. Time to make paper napkins cool again . . . assuming they were cool at some point.

An article on the paper napkin crisis in Vox reveals that paper napkins haven't always been popular.

There was, of course, initial resistance to paper napkins around 1900 because people were used to reusable, cloth napkins (although I presume coal miners and dirt farmers didn't use cloth napkins daily). Within the century, though, paper napkins revolutionized the world – particularly as fast food restaurants evolved. Soon, we were all using them. We bought big packages of them. We grabbed extras at McDonald's to use at our homes.

Twenty years ago, times changed. Reports emerged of the environmental dangers of paper napkins (which seems weird. They're paper, which is recyclable, right?), but the biggest challenge was the rise of paper towels.

Paper towels: The secret rival of napkins, because paper towels are the Swiss Army knife of kitchen cleaning products. You can use a paper towel to clean up a mess on the floor, wipe the counter top, function as a napkin and even serve as an emergency recipient of a nose blow. Paper towels are the rival to paper napkins.

This is like finding out that the ultra soft and ultra strong toilet paper types are rivals, not partners. Right? I thought paper napkins and paper towels were friends!

The market share for paper napkins declined as paper towels increased. Manufacturers of paper napkins attacked it the only way it could, by emphasizing that you can use their products as paper towels, too. Some products began to be advertised as napkins that are also paper towels.

It's the equivalent of McDonald's addressing a challenge by Taco Bell by launching a line of tacos and chalupas.

The paper towel response? To emphasize its napkin-like utility. This is war!

Except . . .

Except . . .

What we thought at the start is true. What seems like competition among brands is really competition among companies owned by the same corporate masters. Most napkin companies are owned by companies that own paper towel outlets. And vice versa.

So while the paper napkin continues to lose market share, it's losing market share to a cousin company in its massive conglomerate. Turns out the death of paper napkins will just result in the transfer of all the folks in the paper napkin division over to the paper towel division.

It's a mess, but not one big enough that you need super-absorbent paper towels to clean. Or a napkin that doubles as a paper towel.

I still blame millennials.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Life lessons from wildfires, power outages

Aldous Huxley, the British philosopher and author who wrote "Brave New World," once wrote, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”

There are lessons to be learned from everything – including the recent wildfires and power outages.

So set aside your anger, anxiety and frustration with PG&E to consider lessons from the past few weeks of uncertainty. To be clear, these lessons aren't necessarily for those who lost their homes or who genuinely suffered during the power outages, although they still apply. This is for the rest of us, who lived with the irritation of threatened power outages and watched as our Northern California neighbors endured wildfires.

Three life lessons.

1. The waiting is the hardest part.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were right when they sang that ode in 1981.

First, think about this:  How stressful is a power outage? For those of us 40 or older, power outages were part of our childhood. Somebody would drive into a power pole and the power went out. A wind or rain storm hit and the power went out. A transformer blow up and the power went out.

We would wait a few hours, it came back on and we were fine.

Of course, we didn't have mobile phones and eight streaming services to watch, but still, compare that to the reaction to PG&E's planned outages.

An announcement would be made and there would be serious anxiety, bordering on panic. The power will go out at 7 p.m.! Wait, it's moved back to 9 p.m.! Wait, it didn't go out, but now it may go out in three days!

And we hyperventilate.

The anxiety isn't caused by the outages, it's caused by us waiting for the outages. We've become like Florida, where they are warned of hurricanes several days ahead, allowing the anxiety to build before the path changes and the state is spared. Until it's not.

Life lesson: Most things we worry about don't happen. And if they happen, worrying probably made it worse.

2. Weather happens as "events."

Remember when we used to have rainy days and windy days? Now we have"atmospheric rivers" that cause "rain events." Windy days are "wind events."

PG&E created a whole new vocabulary, describing weather systems with anticipated 40 mph winds as "wind events." By that standard, Fairfield-Suisun City has nonstop "wind events" every spring and early summer. (Marketing idea: Fairfield-Suisun City should begin to advertise itself as the "wind event capital of the West Coast" and sell tickets to see the windy days, since they're now events.)

Life lesson: Just when you think language is dumb, it gets worse.

3. Don't defer maintenance.

This is the most important lesson, because if there's  a common reaction to the PG&E outages, it's outrage over the fact that the company allowed utility lines to reach such a poor state that massive power outages are the only way to prevent equally massive wildfires.

We rail against it: "It's ridiculous! PG&E knew that it needed to maintain its lines, but didn't do anything!" we shout, while driving cars that are 2,000 miles past when the oil should be changed, eating fast food and planning to start exercising in a year or two, right after we finally make that appointment to finally see the dentist. "How stupid are they to ignore basic maintenance?" Then we return to jobs where we don't save for retirement and buy things on Amazon with money we don't have.

Life lesson: Don't be PG&E. Do the hard stuff now that will pay off later – even if the "payoff" is merely the avoidance of disaster.

Learn from Huxley: Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.