Daily Archives: 7/28/2018

History

More history…

4 Comments

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

1 Comment

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.