Monthly Archives: May 2009

Humor

Importance of Walking

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Walking 20 minutes can add to your life.
This enables you at 85 years old to spend an additional 5 months in a nursing home at $7000 per month..

My grandpa started walking five miles a day when he was 60. Now he’s 97 years old and we don’t know where he is.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

The only reason I would take up walking is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

I have to walk early in the morning, before my brain figures out what I’m doing.

I joined a health club last year, spent about 400 bucks. Haven’t lost a pound. Apparently you have to go there occasionally.

Every time I hear the dirty word ‘exercise’, I wash my mouth out with food.

I do have flabby thighs, but fortunately my stomach covers them.

The advantage of exercising every day is so when you die, they’ll say, ‘Well, he looks good doesn’t he?’

If you are going to try cross-country skiing, start with a small country.

I know I got a lot of exercise the last few years … just getting over the hill.

We all get heavier as we get older, because there’s a lot more information in our heads. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

AND
Every time I start thinking too much about how I look, I just find a Happy Hour and by the time I leave, I look just fine.

General, The Name Game

The Name Game #198

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Waking to a beautiful summer morning in southwest Louisiana. WE got down into the mid-60’s last night and we’re headed for ninety this afternoon. It was already at eighty when I walked out to get the paper.

As I finished up a ham and cheese omelet for breakfast, I found the “New Arrivals” entry in the local paper. One hospital reports twenty-nine births between April 3 and May 20. Fifteen of them are what folks a generation ago called “illegitimate” and five new mommies didn’t bother to post a daddy’s name at all.

We have one child whose mommy decided that giving the kid an extra name was compensation for leaving the father’s name off the birth registration:

Miss Wendra B. presents her new son, Jahiem Karsene Paden. Do you reckon that middle name to be a goofy spelling of “Carson” or was she trying to spell “kerosene”?

Next we have a few people who make their kids unique just like everyone else by spelling things funny:

Chris & Holley B. didn’t want to name their new son as somebody else’s son, but they liked the sound of the name, so they named him Dawsen Patrick.

Cassandra D. & Leonard R. didn’t want you to think they were geography freaks, so they named their daughter Londynn Sorina because “London” and “Londynn” are soooo different, yaknow…

Miss Kandace W. didn’t want her daughter to have the same tryndee name as everyone else and didn’t want you to remember the little town wiped out by two different hurricanes in five years, “Cameron”, so she tagged the little girl with Kamryn Hope.

Rhonda S. & Gershom A. tagged their daughter after a tree, but that’s okay because they changed the spelling, Akacia Gianna.

Carl & Lindale L. have a new son. They could have named him “Carlson”, but noooo, they give us Karson Allen, because everyone recognizes the sophistication of swapping a “C” for a “K” and vice versa.

WE have a few of the “Where’d you get that?” names:

Ericka M. & Jeremy L. present their baby girl, little Nevaeh Jade. “Yeah, it’s “heaven” spelled backward.” “oh really? Why didn’t you go with “Diputs” or “Elohssa” instead?”Hey! “Elohssa” ain’t bad at all…

Chris & Strawberry (what herbs were HER parents doing?) L. decided to bypass that whole “give the kid a nickname” stage by starting off with two nicknames: Abby Beth. They could have named her Abigail Elizabeth and let things take their natural course, but that was too risky, especially if you’ve gone through life as “strawberry”.

Brittney T. & Jacob A. sort through dog dropping for the remains of the Scrabble set and find aname for their new son, Jeaven. and a manly single-syllable name for the middle. Gage. Jeaven Gage.

Marvin & Zendra G. present their daughter, little Nylah Joelle.

Miss Latonya W. celebrates her Celtic heritage by naming her new son Khairan McKenzie. She didn’t name a baby daddy, but it appears she found out what was under the kilt.

Michael & Latasha J. bring their son, little Damarcus Anthony.

And we have a few folks who just know that a mere twenty-six letters cannot convey the harmony of their child’s existence, so a few bits of punctuation are thrown in to to help:

Miss Karen K. tags her daughter with A’miyah Tyjai. She didn’t get to tag the baby daddy, who apparently did a bit of tagging on his own.

Keisha B. & Jonathan T. have a new daughter, little Ja’Lanna Allenah.

Jasmine S. & Carlos M. present their baby girl, little Harmoni (with an “i”, giving her a lifetime of decding to dot it with a heart or a star or a little circle or, for business purposes, a plain ol’ dot) Mo’Naye, as in “Show me da Mo’Naye.”

And if ind it intersting that we’ve made it four months into the term of the first black (or half-black, or half-Kenyan, or whatever) president and we haven’t seen any little Baracks or Obamas or derivatives thereof.

History

Today in History – May 31

1884 – Dr. John Harvey Kellogg patents “flaked cereal”

1889 – Johnstown Flood: Over 2,200 people die after a dam break sends a 60-foot (18-meter) wall of water over the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. FEMA slow to respond. Bush widely blamed.

1911 – R.M.S. Titanic launched. This will end well.

1916 – World War I: Battle of Jutland – The British Grand Fleet under the command of Sir John Jellicoe & Sir David Beatty engage the Kaiserliche Marine under the command of Reinhard Scheer & Franz von Hipper in the largest naval battle of the war, which proves indecisive.

1927 – The last Ford Model T rolls off the assembly line after a production run of 15,007,003 vehicles. The VW Beetle (Type 111) finally beat that production number, topping out at 21,529,464, 15,444,858 in Germany.

General, War Stories

don’t have to be that smart…

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Just smarter than the rest…

Sit in the “Way-Back Machine” and zip back to 1969. I was young tanker in the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, learning all the things that a good tank commander should know. Days were filled with classes on tactics, ammunition, vehicle maintenance, land navigation (map reading) gunnery, and a dozen other skills that the knowledgeable tank commander should know.

One of the classes we had was “bridge classification”. My tank, an M60A1, was “Class 54”. Class relates roughly to the weight in tons. Official bridges had weight classification signs. This allowed us to pull up to a bridge, note that the number was greater than the “54” on the front of our tank, and thereby know the bridge was safe to drive across. However, it was very possible that we might, in some operations, come across a bridge that had not previously been surveyed by engineers as to its load-bearing capability. Therefore, we needed to know how to perform these calculations ourselves.

The process wasn’t too difficult if you had the little training aid, a card that took you set by set through the procedure of measuring the elements of the bridge, determining what it was built of, and then applying some pretty basic math. The math was adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Stuff you learned in high school. This was 1969. Personal pocket calculators were a dream. You did the math with pencil and paper.

Except me. I was a licensed private pilot. One of the things you needed to know was how to use a navigation computer that was essentially a circular slide rule.

The slide rule, for you youngsters, is an analog graphic computer. You can easily multiply, divide and perform “scientific” functions such as dealing with roots, logs and trig. it didn’t add and subtract, but it gave me such a leg up on the pencil and paper herd that it wasn’t even funny. Anything pertaining to math and I was so far ahead of the competition it was like stomping on baby chickens. I had a little pocket slide rule, and when we’d go out to do bridge classifications, I was finished and sitting under a tree twenty minutes before the rest of the class. When an instructor sees you sitting under a tree with a completed and correct worksheet in your hand while the remainder of your “peers” were still making marks on notepads, you get a reputation. Fast.

So what brought this little flashback up? Son found an old slide rule and I showed him how it works for simple functions. I have one in my desk at work. I still get it out every now and then to show to the young engineers. It’s an elegant solution, technology by which we waltzed right up to the moon.

Handheld calculators and Excel spreadsheets can do the same jobs, but the clarity of thought that it took to get a good answer out of a slide rule sharpened thinking and understanding.

Current events - national, Politics

Food for Thought

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A national survey…

He gradually built up a picture of a people being systematically and thoroughly enslaved, a picture of a nation as helpless as a man completely paralyzed, its defenses destroyed, its communications entirely in the hands of the invaders.

Everywhere he found boiling resentment, a fierce willingness to fight against the tyranny, but it was undirected, uncoordinated, and, in any modern sense, unarmed. Sporadic rebellion was a futile as the scurrying of ants whose hill had been violated. PanAsians could be killed, yes, and there were men willing to shoot on sight, even in the face of the certainty of their own deaths. but their hands were bound by the greater certainty of brutal multiple retaliation against their own kind. As with the Jews in Germany before the final blackout in Europe, bravery was not enough, for one act of violence against the tyrants would be paid for by other men, women and children at unspeakable compound interest.

Almost prophetic, isn’t it?

It’s from the frontispiece to a novel written before Pearl Harbor and published in 1949 by Robert Heinlein, “Sixth Column“. Unfortunately it’s out of print. I got my copy used, through Alibris.

Computers and technology

The geek-fu is strong with this one…

Son’s computer is a five-year-old compaq desktop. Between him and his sister, they managed over a period of time visiting gamer and teen social sites to virus the thing up to the point that we should have just formatted the hard drive and re-installed the factory set-up, except as is likely when involving teens and moving, the recovery disks were lost.

So I had a Linux CD I’d been playing around with, Ubuntu 8.10, yeah, it’s a bit old, since Ubuntu is up to 9.04 as of today. I sent him home last week with the CD with explicit instruction to run Linux off the CD to see if he liked it, otherwise I could jump through a few small hoops and get a replacement Windows recovery disk from HP/Compaq in a week or so.

I get a tearful phone call in the middle of the week: “Daaaaad! Linux is soooo slow. My computer is jerky. How do you run WINE? (WINE is a program within Linux that allows you to run many windows-based programs. He was wanting World of Warcraft) I can’t make it work. I need a new computer.” I counseled that he should relax and that Linux should be faster than his old Windows XP, but that you had to actually READ instructions.

Yesterday when I pick him up to spend the weekend with me, he brought his computer. Booting up, Linux comes up FAST. And everything seems to work. We plugged in an EtherNet cable and were on line in seconds, and at the WINE site shortly after that. Installing WINE really WAS a matter of reading the instructions and making a few entries from the Linux command line.

Once we had WINE loaded up it was time to get World of Warcraft onto the machine. Unfortunately he’d wiped a several gigabyte set of WoW files when he did away with with the Windows installation, so for the last fifteen hours we’ve been downloading a complete World of Warcraft install. But the installer that’s doing this is a Windows program. And it’s running under WINE. On a Linux machine. And it’s doing quite well, thank you.

And son and I had a good little father-son episode about the need to read instructions and the need to step back out of panic mode and and restart logical thinking, a key skillset for the technician/engineer/troubleshooter. And he doesn’t need a new computer.

Gun Stuff

Some running room–

Big Brown Truck stopped at the house yesterday and left me 3000 large rifle primers. That gives me three thousand potential rounds of ammo. I’ve got powder. I’ve got cases, .30-06 and .308 (7.62x51mm) out eh kazoo, product of several years of high power and military rifle competition. I have a thousand match bullets. I have sixteen pounds, more or less, of 4895 powder. In effect, I have another several hundred rounds of ammunition, being a handloader and all. Primers have been hard to come by. Sinclair had some Sellier & Bellot a week or so ago and I placed an order.

There’s five or six hundred pounds of lead in storage, too, so casting my own bullets is on the table. It’s a lot of fun shooting cast bullet loads at a military rifle match. Most folks are shooting full loads at 200 yards, an act akin to swatting flies with a hammer, so when I’m doing cast bullets, the firing line sounds like BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM pop BOOM and people turn around and look at me while I’m watching my target come back up with a hole in the black. And my cast bullet load is eighteen grains of powder as apposed to forty-something, so it’s economical on powder as well as a cast bullet is a nickle instead of (now) thirty cents. That means practicing with my sixty-five year old rifle costs a dime a round instead of fifty cents. Of course, that means that I practice with a bolt-action rifle because that cast bullet load won’t operate my Garand or my M1A. Still, putting a steel and wood rifle against my shoulder and squeezing the trigger is a transferable skill.

I guess all this means that this afternoon is a range day… I don’t feel bad about burning up ammo I can replace.

History

Today in History – May 30

1783 – Benjamin Tower of Philadelphia publishes first daily newspaper in US.

1848 – Mexico ratifies treaty giving the Unites States most of New Mexico, all of California & parts of Nevada, Utah, Arizona & Colorado in return for $15 million. We paid for it.

1868 – Decoration Day (the predecessor of the modern “Memorial Day”) is observed in the United States for the first time (By “Commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic” John A. Logan’s proclamation on May 5)when two women in Columbus Mississippi placed flowers on both Confederate & Union graves.

1896 – First recorded car accident occurs as Henry Wells hit a bicyclist in New York City. Three lawyers are injured in a scuffle over who gives the victim a business card first.

1958 – Memorial Day: the remains of two unidentified American servicemen, killed in action during World War II and the Korean War respectively, are buried at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.

1971 – 36 hospitalized during Grateful Dead concert after drinking LSD-laced apple juice. Drugs? At a Grateful Dead concert? Shocked, I tell you. Shocked!

1972 – In Tel Aviv members of the Japanese Red Army carry out the Lod Airport Massacre, killing 24 people and injuring 78 others.

History

Today in History – May 29

1780 – Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton massacres Colonel Abraham Buford’s continentals allegedly after the continentals surrender. 113 Americans are killed. Nothing like a good massacre to show how you really feel.

1849 – Lincoln says “You can fool some of the people all of the time, & all of people some of time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of time”. The dimmocrat party says “all you gotta do is fool enough to get yourself elected, the screw the rest…”

1864 – Emperor Maximilian of Mexico arrives in Mexico for the first time. He has the full backing of the French government which naturally means he’s a despot, later executed by his own rebellious people.

1886 – Chemist John Pemberton places his first advertisement for Coca-Cola, the ad appearing in the Atlanta Journal.

1942 – Bing Crosby, the Ken Darby Singers and the John Scott Trotter Orchestra record Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”, the best-selling Christmas album in history, for Decca Records in Los Angeles. It’s either this, or “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”.

1953 – Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay are the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay’s (adopted) 39th birthday. Hillary Clinton, born in 1947, is, by her own words, named after him.

1977 – Janet Guthrie becomes first woman to drive in Indy 500, completes first ten laps while applying mascara.

1987 – Michael Jackson attempts to buy Elephant Man’s remains, offering a slightly used Cub Scout troop and an undisclosed amount of cash.

Weather

It’s that time again…

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Monday is June 1. It’s just a day on the calendar for a lot of folks, but for us down here on the coast, June 1 marks the official start of the 2009 hurricane season. The long-range forecast calls for an “average” season. That’s all well and good, unless you happen to be in the cross-hairs of one, then it’s like getting hit with an “average” truck.

We get a sort of a leg up on the situation by announcing Tropical Disturbance One, way up there south of the New England coast.

td1

Time to recheck the bug-out bag, bone up on the corporate evacuation plans and double check the emergency action SOP’s for my stations.

History

Today in History – May 28

1588 – The Spanish Armada, with 130 ships and 30,000 men, sets sail from Lisbon heading for the English Channel. (It will take until May 30 for all ships to leave port). In a big hurry to get a butt-kicking…

1754 – French and Indian War: in the first engagement of the war, Virginia militia under 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington defeat a French reconnaissance party in the Battle of Jumonville Glen in what is now Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania.

1863 – American Civil War: the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first African American regiment, leaves Boston, Massachusetts, to fight for the Union.

1905 – Russo-Japanese War: the Battle of Tsushima ends with the destruction of the Russian Baltic Fleet by Admiral Togo Heihachiro and the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Japanese Navy grows fiercely overconfident from this victory, and the overconfidence contributes to their losses in WW II.

1937 – Neville Chamberlain becomes British Prime Minister. The Neville Chamberlaine School of Diplomacy is highly regarded by the Left. “Peace in our time”, my a**!

1964 – The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is formed, because hating Jews needs a new letterhead.

1987 – 19-year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust evades Soviet Union air defenses and lands a private plane ( stealth Cessna 172) in Red Square in Moscow. He is immediately detained and is not released until August 3, 1988. Several high (and low, no doubt) ranking officers are ‘disciplined’ in the Soviet military.

1996 – U.S. President Bill Clinton’s former business partners in the Whitewater land deal, James McDougal and Susan McDougal, and Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, are convicted of fraud. Bill and Hillary, however, are as pure as the driven snow (or some other four-letter word beginning with “s”)

Current events - national, Politics

Cracks in the monolith

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It is the nature of some, especially the Left, to categorize people.  It seems easier to put people in groups and deal with the group as a homogenous entity.  That’s not the way it is, though.

Those of us with a technical bent know that if you get down far enough on all but the most pure substances, you’ll begin to see that what appears to be a well-distributed mixture actually has pockets of inconsistency.

Like this Sotomayor lady.  The One has brought her out and right off the bat he runs down the roster of the different categories she covers in the moonbat galaxy.

Hispanic.  What a wonderful word is “Hispanic”.  Tag a person Hispanic and you’ve just said that you’re grouping all the people who come from backgrounds that speak a particular language are the same.  They’re not, no more than tagging the rest of us as “English”.  Ms. Sotomayor ‘s background is American.  Yeah, tell me about “Puerto Rican”, bud.  Puerto Rico has been an American possession since 1898.  Just as well call her “Texan” like it means something.  She was born in New York City.

Some of the most hilarious memories I have of my military career involved frictions between members of that homogenous group of “Hispanics”.  In Fort Hood I had a platoon sergeant who was Puerto Rican Hispanic and a first sergeant who was a Mexican-American Hispanic.  Their verbal altercations were the stuff of legend.  They’d get pi**ed and start cussing one another, sliding easily between Spanish (two versions.  Ask any Spanish speaker) and English and running down the list of reasons why one origin was better than the other.  I got some of my best ethnic insights (and insults) from these discussions.  Suffice to say, “Hispanic” though they both were, they were NOT homogenous.  And this isn’t an isolated case.  There was often cause for friction between those two branches of the Hispanic tree.

So don’t run off thinking that the community of Mexican origin is going to be all ga-ga over the appointment of Ms. Sotomayor.  The leftists among them certainly will celebrate.  But then they would celebrate if The One nominated a goat.

Ms. Sotomayor fills a couple more groups in on the Supreme Court, too.  She’s female.  To the Left this makes a difference.  And while not exactly a cripple, she does have a medical condition, diabetes.

Us older Americans will remember when James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, got in hot water for commenting “I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple” about his staff.  Apparently it is insensitive to say such a thing openly, but when the Left trots out their latest foray into ‘diversity’, it is okay for them to point out much the same.

Will this make any difference in how this lady fits into the Supreme Court?  Probably not.  The One wants a leftist, activist judge on the bench.  He’s appointed one.  And then he’s couched her in terms that will have the Republican senators wetting their pants rather than say anything against her because they’re totally afraid to be portrayed as anti-feminist or anti-Hispanic., and they know that the mainstream media will gloss over two days of discussion of her legal opinions to talk about how she rose up out of poverty against all odds and now these horrible old white men are trying to keep her down.

And we’ll see the door close even more on hopes that our nation can be made to adhere to the Constitution on which its government is based.

Current events - national, Politics

Linking for Thinking…

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From Four Right Wing Whackos comes this link to an article in “American Thinker“. It’s not a “ha-ha” article. It is thoughtful, measured and well written and it discusses what’s happened to our country. Here’s a teaser quote:

Put all this together, and what we have in our country today isn’t a democracy and it isn’t a free-market economy. Reader, what we have now is a revolution.

This revolution won’t be stopped, and our country won’t be rescued, by the Republicans in Washington. This isn’t because they lack the votes. It’s because most of them are careerist hacks who’ve been playing footsie with the Democrats for too long(emphasis mine. MC); with very few exceptions they lack the intellectual firepower to articulate the present danger, and the political courage to stand up to this Administration and really fight. But for the absence of frock coats and pince-nez glasses, these Republicans in Washington remind me of those bumbling Weimar Republic politicians in Berlin who never grasped where Hitler and the Nazis were going until it was too late to stop them, or of those hapless Mensheviks in Moscow’s Duma who let themselves be tossed into history’s dustbin by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. (Yes, of course I realize it’s explosive to keep bringing up the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in an essay about the Democrats. I’m not doing this to be incendiary; I’m doing this to be accurate.)

A saying I use all too often is “When all is said and done, much will be said, but little done.” That’s exactly what we’ve been getting from what passes for “leadership in the Republican Party. We get the kind of speech one expects from amoral polticians, i.e., “I’m going to Washington to FIGHT for your rights.” when what they’re actually doing is going to Washington to TALK and make deals, and stand in the halls and smile and pat the backs of ENEMIES of freedom who sit on the other side of the aisle.

We’re past the point of mere differences of opinion about a little pork here and there. We’re looking past the point of “the enemy at the gates” We’re at the point where the wall has been breached and the hordes are pouring through into the city, pillaging and destroying our shining city on a hill.

And we get talk.