Monthly Archives: July 2009

Cajun culture, Humor

Payday’s on Friday

Boudreaux got him a job piloting a crew boat in the marsh for an oil company. he was real happy. He got to run his boat through the marsh every day and he could pick out good hunting and fishing spots while he was at work. And he got paid every Friday.

But when he got his second paycheck, dere was a problem. He was short a hundred bucks. He went to de boss. “Mais, look here,” said Boudreaux, “Ya’ll short me a hunnert dollar.”

De boss, him, he look at de check. “Yep. You’re right. But you didn’t say anything last week when I paid a yo a hundred dollars too much.”

Boudreaux said, “Well, yeah, I saw dat. Everybody makes a mistake ever now an’ den. But when it gets to be a habit, I t’ink you should know about it.”

Battle of the Sexes, Cajun culture, Humor

Boudreaux gets lost

Boudreaux, him, one night he went out to de bar to drink wit’ his frinds. He didn’t come home dat night. An’ not de nex’ night either. Finally, his wife Clotile tole her friend Marie.

“Clotile,” says Marie, ” you need to call de sheriff an’ file a missing person report on Boudreaux.”

So Clotile called the sheriff’s department. They asked for a description.

“Mais,” says Clotile, “he’s 6’2″, muscular, blonde, blue eyes, an’ he treats me like a queen.”

After Clotile hung up de phone, Marie says, “Clotile! why you said dat? You know Boudreaux is a little ol’ fat bald brown-eyed coonass wit’ a bad temper.”

“Yeah,” says Clotile, “but if dey bring me de guy I tole dem about, Boudreaux, him, he can STAY gone.”

Cajun culture, Gun Stuff

Boudreaux goes fishing

Boudreaux and Thibodeaux, dey went fishing. Dey was standin’ on de bank of a rice canal enjoying life when de game warden walked up behind dem.

“I wanna see you fishin’ license,” he said.

Boudreaux took off running as fast as he could across the rice field. The game warden was right behind him, but Boudreaux, he could run good for a little ol’ coonass, so when de game warden caught him, dey was clean ‘way across the rice field.

“You cooyon,” said de game warden, “I got you now.”

Boudreaux said, “Yeah, you got me,” and whipped out a current fishing license.

De game warden looked at it careful. “Why you runned from me? You got a fishin’ license.”

“Yeah,” said Boudreaux. “But dat udder guy, he didn’t.”

History

Today in History – July 31

1703 – Daniel Defoe is placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel after publishing a politically satirical pamphlet, but is pelted with flowers.

1774 – Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen. Before this, people just breathed any old thing that blew in…

1914 – Oil discovered in Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela.

1919 – German national assembly adopts the Weimar constitution (which comes into force on August 14). It’s a pretty good Constitution, too. For example, Germans are entitled to free expression of opinion in word, writing, print, image, etc. This right cannot be obstructed by job contract, nor can exercise of this right create a disadvantage. Censorship is prohibited. And we all know how this turned out when people started following a charismatic, smooth-talking leader with radical ideas.

1941 – Holocaust: under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann Göring, orders SS General Reinhard Heydrich to “submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.” This is a lesson in incrementalism, among other things.

1970 – Black Tot Day: The last day of the officially sanctioned rum ration in the Royal Navy. 1945 in Tokyo Bay, HMS King George V had rum. The US Navy had ice cream. The Brits wanted ice cream. Dad helped make the exchange possible with the landing craft he ran as a taxi around the bay.

1971 – Apollo program: Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover.

1981 – 42-day strike of Major League Baseball ends in the United States. Yawwwnnnnn!

Current events - national

Dear dumba**

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Somebody got a practical lesson in basic chemistry:

Florida Man Treated at Hospital After Combining Bathroom Cleaners, Causing Gas Cloud

Thursday, July 30, 2009

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — A St. Petersburg man is being treated at a hospital after falling ill from a chlorine gas cloud that formed when he mixed bleach and household products to make a stronger bathroom cleaner.

Let’s see… Household bleach. That’s a solution of sodium hypochlorite. Contains chlorine, it does. And when you mix it with, say, ammonia?

Fire officials say 44-year-old Michael Newton was taken to Bayfront Medical Center in stable condition Thursday morning. He was complaining of shortness of breath and irritation to his lungs and eyes.

Newtom told firefighters he combined bleach and a household cleaner that contained ammonia for a stronger cleaner. He was overcome by the gas and called 911.

Firefighters used fans to air out the house and washed the bathroom walls for 30 minutes with fresh water.

The fire department says mixing any product that has ammonia with bleach creates chlorine gas that can cause illness and even be fatal.

Yep! It sure does. I worked nine years in a plant that manufactured chlorine, hundreds of tons a day. I’ve actually waded into green clouds of the stuff, although I had a pressure-feed fresh air mask on. I’ve been caught in invisible clouds of the stuff, too, I can vouch for the effects even after you return to fresh air: uncontrollable coughing for hours afterward. But we knew that. We were trained.

And then there’s that high school chemistry class under the careful tutelage of a teacher who thought that we should all get a little whiff of the stuff so we’d know what it was.

And I knew all about the bleach and Drano, or bleach and ammonia, or bleach and a bunch of other things. I came home one day to find wife number one coughing from her own experiment with “I need something stronger to clean this toilet”. I explained the lesson to her, too. I didn’t even laugh very much.

It’s a good trick to know. One never knows when the easy generation of a cloud of chlorine might help a situation. I suppose it would serve well to rid an outbuilding of insects, although the neighbors might call in a complaint and one might find oneself explaining this to multiple representatives of various government agencies.

I won’t even go into the fun and games to be had with pool chemicals and brake fluid.

History

Today in History – July 30

1619 – In Jamestown, Virginia, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convenes for the first time.

1866 – New Orleans’s Democratic government orders police to raid an integrated Republican Party meeting, killing 40 people and injuring 150. REpublicans in New Orleans today wouldn’t fare much better.

1916 – Black Tom Island explosion in Jersey City, NJ was an act of sabotage on American ammunition supplies by German agents to prevent the materials from being used by the Allies in World War I. Today we have the anti-American Left happy to thwart war efforts on our enemies’ behalf.

1945 – World War II: Japanese submarine I-58 sinks the USS Indianapolis (CA-35), killing 883 seamen. Sharks play a major role, as recounted in Jaws.

1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Social Security Act of 1965 into law, establishing Medicare and Medicaid, giving us a taste of how well the government can handle health care.

1971 – Apollo program: Apollo 15 Mission – David Scott and James Irwin on Apollo Lunar Module module, Falcon, land with first Lunar Rover on the moon, adding tire tracks to the American footprints.

1975 – Jimmy Hoffa disappears from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He is never seen or heard from again. I looked inside Chrissy’s purse. His body could be in there and nobody’d ever know…

2003 – In Mexico, the last ‘old style’ Volkswagen Beetle rolls off the assembly line. Ferdinand Porsche’s pre-WW II design was quite successful. I owned a couple myself.

Wheels of Industry

Hitting the ground running…

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So, how did YOUR day start?

Diddy-bopping down the road on the way to work this morning, I’m just past the half-way point on my eighteen mile drive and the cellphone rings. I recognize that it’s a call from a work number, but I don’t recognize whose number it is.

Me: “Hi! This is me! what’s going on?

Him: “This is Fred (not really, but you know…). You know that if I call you this early, it’s not anything good.

The guy on the other end is the operations director for our little plant. He’s not one of my “I just called to shoot the bull” buddies, so he’s right. It’s probably something bad.

Him: “Are you in town today?”

Me: “Yeah. I can give you about an eight-minute ETA to the office. Why? Is there a problem?”

Him: “Yeah. There was a fire in the big utility company substation.”

Okay. That substation is there for one reason only: US. It has four transformers. We use all of them. Now I’m concerned.

Me: “What kind of fire?”

I know the substation. Nothing in there burns EXCEPT the thousands of gallons of oil filling those transformers. This isn’t sounding good at all. But he did say “was a fire” instead of “is a fire”.

Me: “Do we know what burned?”

Him: “The transformer farthest to the east.”

Me; “That one feeds the expansion project.”

Him: “Drive by there and see if you can get a look.”

Me: “I’ll do better than that. I’ll walk in and see what’s going on. I used to work with those people.”

And so that’s what I did. The substation is directly across the road from my office. I pulled up off the driveway into the substation, grabbed my hard hat, and got out. I immediately recognized several of the utility company people already there, former co-workers. The firefighters were still hosing down the failed transformer, but they stopped and started rolling up hoses.

I walked around the scene surveying damage and looking for the precipitating event. Here’s the overview:

south sideClickus for biggus.

And another. Continue reading Hitting the ground running… →

History

Today in History – July 29

1588 – Anglo-Spanish War: Battle of Gravelines – English naval forces under command of Lord Charles Howard and Sir Francis Drake defeat the “invincible” Spanish Armada off the coast of Gravelines, France.

1836 – Inauguration of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Gives the Germans something to march under when they conquer the country…

1901 – The Socialist Party of America founded. Its positions have since been co-opted by the dimmocrat party.

1907 – Sir Robert Baden-Powell sets up the Brownsea Island Scout camp in Poole Harbour on the south coast of England. The camp ran from August 1-9, 1907, and is regarded as the founding of the Scouting movement.

1957 – The International Atomic Energy Agency is established, providing yet another featherbed for international bureaucrats at the UN.

1958 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which creates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). And it’s eleven years to the moon.

1965 – Vietnam War: the first 4,000 101st Airborne Division paratroopers arrive in Vietnam, landing at Cam Ranh Bay.

Humor

Making your wish come true

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Two men are driving through Georgia when they get pulled over by a State Trooper.

The cop walks up and taps on the window with his nightstick. The driver rolls down the window and WHACK! The cop smacks him in the head with the stick.

“What the hell was that for,” the driver asks.

“You’re in Georgia, Boy,” the trooper answers. “When we pull you over, you better have your license ready when we get to your car.”

“I’m sorry, Officer,” the driver says, “I’m not from around here.”

The trooper runs a check on the guy’s license–he’s clean–and gives the guy his license back.

The trooper THEN walks around to the passenger side and taps on the window.

The passenger rolls down the window and WHACK! The trooper smacks HIM on the head with the nightstick.

“What’d you do that for,” the passenger asks.

“Just making your wish come true,” replies the trooper.

“Making WHAT wish come true,” the passenger asks.

“Because I know that two miles down the road you’re gonna turn to your buddy and say, ‘I wish that asshole would’ve tried that shit with me!'”

History

Today in History – July 28

1540 – Thomas Cromwell is beheaded at the order of Henry VIII of England on charges of treason. Henry marries his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, on the same day. There are some obvious jokes that decorum prevents me from making.

1896 – The city of Miami, Florida is incorporated with a population of 300.

1942 – World War II: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin issues Order No. 227 in response to alarming German advances into the Soviet Union. Under the order all those who retreat or otherwise leave their positions without orders to do so will be immediately executed. “The shootings will continue until morale improves.”

1965 – Vietnam War: Dimmocrat U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson announces his order to increase the number of United States troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000. Nothing like an inept, crooked dimmocrat playing with a real army…

History

Today in History – July 27

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1586 – Sir Walter Raleigh brings first tobacco to England from Virginia.

1794 – French Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre is arrested after encouraging the execution of more than 17,000 “enemies of the Revolution.” Guess who’s got the next ride on “Mr. Guillotine”.

1866 – The Atlantic Cable is successfully completed, allowing transatlantic telegraph communication for the first time.

1940 – The animated short A Wild Hare is released, introducing the character of Bugs Bunny. Mickey Mouse is a wimp!

1944 – First British jet fighter used in combat (Gloster Meteor). It isn’t allowed over German-held territory because of secrecy. Of course, the Germans had beat the Brits into jet combat with the Me-262 already.

1945 – US Communist Party forms. In 2009, with the inauguration of Barack HUSSEIN Obama, they are rendered superfluous.

1949 – Initial flight of the de Havilland Comet, the first jet-powered airliner.

1953 – Korean War ends: The United States, People’s Republic of China, and North Korea, sign an armistice agreement. Syngman Rhee, president of South Korea, refuses to sign but pledges to observe the armistice. To this day, that’s all we ahve with North Korea: an armistice. Like they honor any written agreement anyway…

1964 – Vietnam War: 5,000 more American military advisers are sent to South Vietnam bringing the total number of United States forces in Vietnam to 21,000. Curse those war-mongering Republican presidents. Wait! What? That was Lyndon Baines “Lyin’ my ass off!” Johnson, a DIMMOCRAT?!?!?!