Monthly Archives: July 2018

Current events - global, Current events - national, Politics

Donald and the Swamp

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This picture’s out there and it’s making liberal heads explode:

Click on this and look closely. That boat’s crewed up! The painting shows Trump at the helm, and Vice President Pence carrying the flag by his side.

Painter Jon McNaughton identifies the rest as: U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson; Attorney General Jeff Sessions; first lady Melania Trump; Secretary of State Pompeo; White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders; the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump; National Security Adviser Bolton; Kellyanne Conway; and Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Beats the hell out of those ‘Obama the Light Bringer’ things we suffered through for eight years.

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. 2016 – Oil money isn’t enough to keep the socialist government afloat any more.

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.

1945 – Pierre Laval, the fugitive former leader of Vichy France, surrenders to Allied soldiers in Austria.

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!

Blogging, Weather, Wheels of Industry

How it works…

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From XKCD:

Summertime.  It’s stinkin’ HOT! Get used to it, learn to temper your exposure.  I’ve had jobs where there were limits to balance – what needed to be done versus how to do it without getting killed by the heat.

I worked in a lot of refineries.  Somebody got the bright idea that flame-retardant clothing would cut down o injuries from fires.  That’s a valid thought.  Somewhat less valid is the idea that if people working in the proximity to places with HIGH risk of fire should wear full-coverage, long-sleeved flame-retardant clothes, the EVERYBODY should wear them, even in areas that had been drained and cleared of flammables for maintenance work.

Nope.  That requires thought.  ‘One size fits all’ is easier to implement, so in the summer there are multiple incidents of heat-related incidents, some of which are carefully ‘classified’ to hide the obvious – if you wear full-body coverage in hundred degree heat and then do strenuous physical activity, you’re gonna have ‘incidents’.

I worked in those conditions.  In the business I was in – electrical power – there’s a term:  Metal-clad outdoor switchgear.  That’s little steel buildings housing high voltage power equipment.  Since electricity and moisture don’t mix (there ARE exceptions) we had a method to prevent Louisiana’s humidity from deteriorating the insulation – we ran space heaters.  Those are electrical devices that produce heat. The idea is that you keep your equipment above the dewpoint at all times, because a little dew and a little dust can make a BIG explosion.

So it wasn’t unusual in July and August to walk up to one of these things, a steel box ten feet tall, sixteen feet wide, forty feet long, open the door, and find temperatures in excess of a hundred forty (I KNOW – I measured) degrees, roll six hundred pound circuit breakers out in to the floor, and work on them.

Physical work.  In long-sleeved coveralls.  Hundred forty degrees.  In July.

Fortunately for me, I was assisted by an electrical contractor’s guys, and they’d bring an Igloo water jug – five gallons of ice water.  During the course of the day, I never passed that jug without getting a cup.

I had a little industrial fan to move air inside the building.  It helped.

Still, at the end of the day when I got home, two liters of lemonade were first on the agenda.

I learned that MY sign of ‘Dude, you’re heading for heat stroke’ was the feeling of muscles in my back starting to cramp up.  Time to grab some water, go crank up the van and work on reports in the air conditioning until things normalized.

We learned to survive.

 

History

Today in History – July 30

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1619 – In Jamestown, Virginia, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convenes for the first time. Being all white, they’re under investigation by the Holder ‘Justice Department’.

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.

1898 – Will Kellogg invents Corn Flakes.

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.

1956 – A joint resolution of the U.S. Congress is signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, authorizing In God We Trust as the U.S. national motto. Then in 1965 US President Lyndon B. (Lyin’ B*stard) Johnson says, “Why fret over all that “god” stuff? We’re the government and WE’LL take care of you”, and he 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, Falcon, land with first Lunar Rover on the moon, adding tire tracks to the American footprints.

1974 – Six Royal Canadian Army Cadets killed and fifty-four injured in an accidental grenade blast at CFB Valcartier Cadet Camp. Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is NOT your friend.

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 have looked inside Chrissy’s purse. His body could be in there and nobody’d ever know…

1984 – Alvenus, a British tanker at Cameron La, spills 2.8 million gallons of oil. This, then the BP thing, that’s the Brits trying to get even for that Battle of New Orleans thing.

2003 – In Mexico, the last ‘old style’ Volkswagen Beetle rolls off the assembly line. Ferdinand Porsche’s pre-WW II design was quite successful as the first foreign compact car to gain wide acceptance in America. I owned a couple myself.

2012 – A power grid failure in Delhi leaves more than 300 million people without power in northern India.

The Name Game

The Name Game #517

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Barely made eighty by eight AM this Sunday.  A late afternoon thunderstorm yesterday was welcomed by the vegetation but to us who have to live in this heat, the added humidity ads insult to injury.

Opened the paper over a breakfast of raisin bran, got to the birth announcements and found that the big hospital across the river reports thirty-six new babies from between July 13 and July 23.  Of those, sixteen are to unwed parents, and in one of those little statistical anomalies, we had no daddyless babies this week.

Let’s see what the list looks like:

Kyle B. & Abby H. get innovative and triple up on a daughter, little Idhalia Rose-Marie.

Esteban H. & Yara C. do a son as Greyson Allan.  Whose son?

Demetrius(!) G. &Tamaro’z W. perpetuate the travesties by tagging a son with Demetrius John.

First punctuation shows up as Blade(!) & Chelsea H. do their daughter with Liv Jolie’.

Ramron(!) G. & Alexis W. get all botanic on their daughter Aspen Primrose.

Erick & Cassie R. give their son a career pat, tagging him with Sawyer Gordan.

Fraidy(!) Jr. & Mariah L. do a daughter with a random wor, giving us little Harmony Jean, to be followed by bratty little brother Discordant.

Joshua & Kelsey L. get innovative with their daughter Maddyn Kate, changing the spelling because they didn’t want to pay TOO much homage to daddy’s favorite video game.

Mister (!) C. & Beatrice W. do a daughter with Maliah Breisis.

Anthony & Carrie A.grab a daughter’s name from the perfume counter at the mall, giving us little Armani Rose.

Joshua & Lauren C. did the same thing, except sporting goods, showing us little Remington Todd.  I’m just glad he ain’t named ‘Hi-Point’.

Je’Tycen(!!) & Andriel(!) M. tag a daughter with Camilla Joy.  Baby’s name is kind of ‘meh’ but I couldn’t pass up ‘Je’Tycen’.

Another apostrophe finds a forever home as Alexander H. & Jamacia(!) G. name thier daughter Sade’ Ayanna.  The apostrophe instructs the cognoscenti among their friends and relatives that her name does not rhyme with ‘payed’.

Rance M. & Shavey(!) F. get all exotic on their son, little Xayn Ahmad Tamir.

Nathaniel & Daniela S. apostrophicate their son Ha’keem Nehemiah.

And that’s the list for this hot July day.  Have a good week.

History

Today in History – July 29

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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. or for other foreign armies to look at when they rescue France from the Germans. This picture is of an 1871 parade of the Prussian Army celebrating a French “triomphe”.

And another in 1940:

The next likely example appears to be a string of Japanese pickup trucks flying Arabic flags.

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 toothless featherbed front 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. Dimmocrat L.B. (Lyin’ B*stard) Johnson is in the White House.

1980 – Iran adopts a new “holy” flag after the Islamic Revolution. It’s ‘holy’ because it has the writings of a desert moon god on it.

1981 – A worldwide television audience of over 700 million people watch the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Today a large number of American girls still use this as a pattern for their own ‘princess for a day’ weddings. Daddy’s still paying the bills from it two years after the divorce and the little princess is on her third tattooed rapper since the breakup.

History

More history…

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On this day in 1978, National Lampoon’s Animal House, a movie spoof about 1960s college fraternities starring John Belushi, opens in U.S. theaters. Produced with an estimated budget of $3 million, Animal House became a huge, multi-million-dollar box-office hit, spawned a slew of cinematic imitations and became part of pop-culture history with such memorable lines as “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

Forty years ago. John Belushi was a year older than me. He’s gone. I’m still here.

Blogging, Domestic Bliss, Wheels of Industry

Saturday Morning

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The blast furnace that is the summer sun is streaming through the window. It’s already mid-eighties, heading for mid-nineties, a little cooler (TWO whole degrees) since yesterday, and the prospects of afternoon thunderstorms return.

Healthwise, I’ve continued to improve. Got out yesterday and slapped a battery charger on the company car. It’s deader’n HIllary Clinton’s conscience. However, unlike Hillary Clinton, divine intervention’s not needed for the car battery.

The cats have decided that having me around full-time is a good thing. There’s seldom a moment when I don’t have one or another of the six on the arm of the chair beside me, or stretched across my chest, demanding attention. They’d decided that kitty head-butts are a viable means of conversation if mere presence is into enough to elicit scritches. They’ll miss me when I return to work.

Work’s waiting on me. Some of my controls and electrical guys have transferred or promoted out of their positions, putting us in need of a bit of checking out and training. Two of the openings are at stations that picked up oil pumping stations when Mean Ol’ Trump turned the spigot on the DAPL line, and those stations, unlike most of our natural gas horsepower, are electric. When you start asking for a couple of six thousand horsepower pumps, you start dealing with decent amounts (my opinion – a lot of people think 480 volts is OMG! HIGH VOLTAGE!) of electricity. We have 4160 inside the building, much higher 69 – 138 THOUSAND outside. While 480 is safe if you exercise reasonable caution, 4160 and up are not good places to learn things. Many lessons, you don’t want the ‘fail’ side of a pass-fail test. I need to get up there and do some training.

And Lord only knows what else remains for me.

So I’ll just enjoy the weekend.

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 “head” jokes that decorum prevents me from making.

1794 – Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just are executed by guillotine in Paris, France during the French Revolution, victims of the bloodbath they helped bring about. Today’s Left will happily to this to the ‘moderate’ dimmocrats, given the chance.

1896 – The city of Miami, Florida is incorporated with a population of 300. Coincidentally, that’s the total number of real Floridians there today.

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. “Lyin’ B*stard” 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…

1978 – Price of gold tops $200-an-oz level for 1st time. It’s at $1200+ right now.

1984 – The 1984 Summer Olympics officially known as the Games of the XXIII Olympiad were opened in Los Angeles USA. three words – Mary Lou Retton.

1993 – Andorra joins the United Nations. Despite not being involved in any fighting, Andorra was technically the longest combatant in the first World War, as the country was left out of the Versailles Peace Conference and technically remained at war with Germany from 1914 until 1939.