Thursday, June 26, 2014

Faster Than Metamucil




And if you don't get the caption at the bottom of the photo, look in the background.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Endlessly Entertaining

I'm not able to ask the founders and builders of Washington, D.C., personally, but I'm willing to bet that they didn't intend for the nation's capital to be an endless source of entertainment in the "Gawd you people are stupid" way.  Yet so it has been for decades.  Of course the high point was Mayor Marion "The bit*ch set me up!" Barry's little bust as he was toking crack with a prostitute.


He's still in office.  Any office he can get.  And D.C. residents vote for him no matter what office he runs for.

Now he's got a book out, and it appears that he's just as capable of dumb statements during book interviews as Hillary Clinton is.  Seems he was asked about a tax that's being considered - a surcharge of some sort on health clubs.  It's being called the "yoga tax."  Barry is against it - yogurt is healthy and we shouldn't discourage people from eating it.

D.C.'s leadership.  And now you know why it doesn't get to play with real states.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Wait. Rewind that.

"Washington—Sunni extremists in Iraq have occupied what was once Saddam Hussein's premier chemical-weapons production facility, a complex that still contains a stockpile of old weapons, State Department and other U.S. government officials said."

But I thought Saddam didn't have any chemical weapons?

Of course, we do have satellite photos of trucks swarming and leaving those weapons factories in the months before the U.S. invaded.  So these old ones are just the ones that got left behind as they moved them out of the country.


h/t Wall Street Journal

Friday, June 20, 2014

If One Has To, They All Do


So the gummit has smacked at the Washington Redskins because of their "offensive" name.

Huh.

"

The name comes from the Choctaw "Okla" and "humma", which translates to "Red people".  Oklahoma is second only to Alaska in percentage population that is Native American.

And looky here at the home page for Red Mesa High School, which is located on a Navajo reservation in Arizona.



Bet a whole bunch of other examples can be found with a web search, as well.  Seems to me that if Dan Snyder has to change his team's name then there's a whole bunch of other changes will have to be done, as well. I mean, it would only be fair, and we're all about fairness, aren't we?




h/t Jeffrey Kuhner over at WRKO

Thursday, June 19, 2014

The War

So, now it comes out that a prominent Republican candidate once defended a man who was accused of raping a 12 year old girl.  That's not such a big deal - people need defense lawyers and we do try to presume innocent until proven guilty.

The big deal is that the candidate was not only sure that the man was guilty, that he HAD raped the girl, but got him off with the type of shenanigans that make people loathe defense lawyers.  Including attacking the 12 year old victim.  Which apparently the lawyer found quite funny when speaking of it in an interview.

Once more the Republican disdain for women is on display.  Once more their war on women is highlighted.  Once more the Republicans...

Oh.  Wait.




Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Nine Thoughts to Ponder

   
  9
  Death is the number 1 killer in the world.
 
  8
  Life is sexually transmitted.
 
  7
  Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
 
  6
  Men have two emotions: hungry and horny, and they can't tell them
  apart. If you see a gleam in his eyes, make him a sandwich.
 
  5
  Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to
  use the internet and they won't bother you for weeks, months, maybe
  years.
 
  4
  Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in the hospital,
  dying of nothing.
 
  3
  All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention
  to criticism.
 
  2
  In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world
  is weird, and people take Prozac to make it normal.
 
  1
  Life is like a jar of jalapeno peppers. What you do today might burn
  your ass tomorrow..........
 
  ...and as someone recently said to me:
  Don't worry about old age, it doesn't last long.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Time With Daddy

Weasel Zippers posted some tweets today that pretty much confirmed my opinion that feminists are some of the most miserable people in the world.

This is my response to them - art night with Daddy.


Father's Day


Saturday, June 14, 2014

Well, Yes, I Guess That's True


Courtesy of James Woods and snagged by Weasel Zippers, who grabbed some more of Woods' spot on tweets here.

And, personally, I'm glad I now longer live as close as I did to D.C.  The victory handed to Al-Qaida  by Obama has given them the ability to create a rich petro-state from which to launch attacks.  They killed +3,000 Americans from bases in an impoverished stone-age arm pit of a country.  What will they do to us now with so much more available to them?

Friday, June 13, 2014

A Couple More

My favorite, although it was taken with an antique digital camera so it's not as clear. It was taken at the point where the Potomac and the Shenandoah Rivers meet in Harpers Ferry, WV.  At the time Roy took it, I was set up at Antietam Battlefield and had nearly as beautiful a view.


And this one came in from Connecticut last year.


And although GPS now lets crews get in and out much faster, once upon a time you just kept on going, as this pic from 1916 Alaska shows.  The crew are measuring a distance with invar tape.


Thursday, June 12, 2014

Sometimes...

...something nice comes in.

I go through a lot of field work in my work and digital photos have become a required part of that.  And once in a while someone sends in one that is just really nice.  This one came in from Alaska yesterday.


Monday, June 9, 2014

Quickies

Reviews, that is.

I'm a voracious reader.  I read when I'm eating, I read when I get up, I read at night, I read on the ... well, never mind.  And I read fast.  So my little blurbs on the side bar are often behind, sometimes by several books.

I stare at a computer screen all day, every day for work.  I'm computer screened out by the end of the day, which is one reason I don't watch TV very much.  And why I have no interest in Nooks and such.  I want print on paper, I want to hold a book in my hands.  Fortunately, I've discovered the book shelf at the local Goodwill.  $1 for paperbacks, $2 for hardback.  I'm in heaven.  You don't get that lovely new book smell, and there isn't as much variety as a book store, but, still.  Given the cost of books these days, I'm much more likely to take a risk at $1 than I would be at the $17 publishing price.  And I'm finding some really good books there, the latest being:


Yowza!  There's a scene in a disaster/adventure movie where astronauts sent up to save the world find a rickety space station and a half-cracked cosmonaut.  That's a pretty accurate picture of the Russian space station MIR towards the end of its life.  The cosmonauts weren't crazy, though.  They were just overworked, exhausted, buried under stress, and had a totally different space philosophy than ours.  And we started sending astronauts up to MIR in the '90s.  Aging and cluttered, MIR wasn't great anyway.  Extra oxygen was generated from chemical oxygen canisters - and one of them sparked during replacement.  Yeah boy, an acetylene torch in space, right in a spot that blocked evacuation with the Soyez emergency ship.  Even more fun was when a docking supply ship hit a solar array and put a 3 centimeter hole through the wall of one of the modules.  Decompression, destabilization, and drift that moved the solar arrays so that they could no longer get enough sunlight to generate power.  There's a point in this book where I think I stopped breathing and had to remind myself that I know enough history to know everybody got out alive.  But you start thinking "What else could go wrong?"  And then you find out because it does.

Mostly it's fiction on the shelves, but a good variety of that.


Lyrical.  It won't get cycled back as a donation.  It's mid-60's and Grandma is dying.  As the family waits, stories of their small mountain community during her days are woven through the narration.  I think I respond to this because this could be the Whetzell Settlement, and the stories are the stories I wish I had recorded.  But I didn't stop to listen before the time machines were gone.

I hope kids are reading.  Obviously good books are still being published for them:


Buxton was a community of former slaves who had escaped to Canada through the Underground Railroad.  It's located about 75 miles east of Detroit, and there's a museum there that I'd like to visit.  Elijah is 12, the first of the community to be born into freedom.  All he knows is a neat and comfortable farming community built by people who, for the first time in their lives, have been able to keep the profits of their labors and build lives without fear of their families being taken from them.  There is a scene where Elijah refers to himself as "nigger" and receives a backhand slap that sets him on his heels and a lecture that makes it clear it's not to happen again.

The book made me angry.  Not the book, per se - it's very good.  It made me angry to compare these people to so much that goes on today.  When freedom came, the roads were full of men searching for the families sold away from them.  For decades, blacks who tried to be a part of the governing process in the South were caricatured as clowns who would run rampant, misuse their positions, profit from corruption.  And what do we have now?  A whole industry of corrupt race-baiters like like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who have proved the point of those who caricatured blacks 100 years ago.  We have baby-daddies with multiple children that they don't really care about and leave for someone else to take care of.   They are a disgrace to their ancestors, to people who suffered and fought for freedom, family, respect and lives of their own.

And once in a while there's a classic.


Some time in the dim past I read The Old Man and The Sea.  He always looks like Spencer Tracy in my mind's eye.  This book is a series of vignettes, pictures of Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s.  It's interesting - so many familiar names:  Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald.  Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.  A community of artists and authors all together as "The Lost Generation".  Despite the names I recognized, I wasn't sure I liked his style until I hit the first chapter with F. Scott Fitzgerald.  When Hemingway first met the Fitzgeralds, he didn't know the Scott was a raging alcoholic.  He let himself get talked into a trip with him, and it's hilarious as confusion and annoyance moves to "Oh crud!  How do I get this guy home?"  Unfortunately, a check of the local library shows that I don't have a local resource for other Hemingway writings - I'd like to read some that were based on his war experiences.

I've gone through a bunch of others, some good, some excellent.  Most will go back as donations, but some are keepers, and I've got a shelf full of others waiting on me - I do a sweep now and again when I'm over on that side of town.  I just have to be in the mood for the genre or subject.    Recently I snagged this one for $1, definitely a "Score!":


Just waiting for the right time to dive into it.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Oh, Well

I had hoped to post this as a victory song, but it was not to be.  It's still a great song, though, so crank up the speakers and enjoy.


Written by John Stewart as a tribute to Secretariat in 1973.

Oh the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home
On my old Kentucky home far away

Oh the sun shines bright over old Kentucky
Over old Kentucky on the derby day
They let him run, they let the big horse run
Please Mrs Tweedy
I saw him on the T.V.
Send him out to run in the California sun

And let him run, let him run
Let me see the big horse run
Let him run, let him run
Let him run, let him run

Swaps, Citation, Man O'War
Never saw a horse like that before
Let him run, let the big horse run
Running is an itch
He's got to scratch
No offence to old Dan Patch

But let him run, let him run
Let me see the big horse run
Let him run, let him run
Let him run, let him run

Spending his time in the field with the ladies
In the field with the ladies he can't complain
But let him run, oh let the big horse run
One more time
Out on the track
Saddle the wind and get up on his back

And let him run, let him run
Let me see the big horse run
Let him run, let him run
Let him run, let him run

Friday, June 6, 2014

Remember


 



And to those with "War is not the answer" bumper stickers:  Sometimes war is the ONLY answer in the face of evil. 

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Trojan Horse

So.  Who...

...has left Iran as strong and as capable of having nuclear weapons as ever?
...is really in charge in Iraq?
...is involved in training and arming al-Qaeda in Syria?
...waged an illegal war In Libya, helping to overthrew Qaddafi and empower islamists and al-Qaeda there?
...supported putting the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt?
....is going to win the war for the Taliban in Afghanistan -- having tied the hands of our military and now released top Taliban leaders back to the battlefield?

I have though the last few years that the problem was just that we have a hard core Marxist/socialist in the White House.

But maybe that's not it at all.  If the radical Islamic intent is to destroy American culture, Marxism is an excellent tool to use. 

And a president is in an excellent position to attack America from many different directions.

I'm thinking a lot of things about our president right now that do not include the words "he's a patriotic American".  I'm thinking that he may well be a cleverly presented jihadi.


Because it's getting harder and harder to believe that he's really that stupid.