08:31 – We were running low on chemistry kits, so this weekend we’re doing final assembly on a batch of two dozen more, along with making up subassemblies for yet another five dozen. Barbara also made up a bunch of biology kit small parts bags, which is the last subassembly we needed to assemble another batch of biology kits.
Sunday, 15 July 2012
60 Comments and discussion on "Sunday, 15 July 2012"
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Bet no one ever told you in college that you’d be working on an assembly line in your late 50s… đ
Hey, small business owners do what need to be done. Ask any of them.
I’m the chief scientist and bottle washer for our company, literally. As a matter of fact, I need to head down to the lab and wash some bottles now.
I remember my Year 9 maths teacher yelling at me: “If anyone ever gives you a job I want you to write to me and tell me about it!” She retired a few years later and I never did write to her but I had no hard feelings, she was a kindly old battle-axe.
Re doing what needs to be done: Absolutely. And it’s not just the owners. Employees of very small businesses also usually have very flexible job descriptions. Those who can’t handle that tend not to do well in small businesses.
Re “give you a job”: That attitude pisses me off every time I encounter it. Except for nepotism, union-mandated featherbedding, and the like, businesses don’t give employees jobs. It’s just as appropriate to say that a person gives his time and skill to a business. Of course, if your teacher was anything like the typical unionized, minimally-competent, time-server in the typical American public school, the concepts of free enterprise, exchange of value, and at-will employment are utterly foreign and she regarded a job as a gift for which no real return on value was required.
IMO, it still is the case that most employees do not see a connection between selling the goods and their own wallet. That has to be the fault of business. In fact, even when employees seem overly nice and supplicating, I think that is often because management has gotten the whip out, and not because of any employee-understood need to satisfy the customer and make a sale that keeps the business going.
My encounters with AT&T are proof. They will say, âIâm sorryâ 100 times during a customer service call, but absolutely, positively, and unequivocally will NOT solve the problem at hand.
“…Employees of very small businesses also usually have very flexible job descriptions.”
Ditto “netslaves,” or, as more commonly known; systems, network, database and security admins. Be ready to pack and ship stuff via whatever means is best; pull floor and ceiling tiles and snake cable and fiber all over the place; dismantle racks and building them somewhere else with all the connections to networks and power grids and electrical conduit; yank various components from the racks and the systems themselves and replace them; apply apps and o.s. security patches almost daily now; care and feeding of lusers constantly; lying and misrepresenting information to PHB manglers who do the same to us, thus giving as good as we get; dealing with vendors and irate customers; building vast clusters from scratch and then taking them apart; the list goes on forever. Gotta be ready to jump for whatever at a second’s notice and every day is different.
Independence and occasional slack time are rewards; but long, long hours and weekend and holiday on-call and responses are pretty common, and also zero respect from aforementioned PHB manglers and other denizens of the organization.
SteveF wrote:
“Of course, if your teacher was anything like the typical unionized, minimally-competent, time-server in the typical American public school…”
She wasn’t. I think most South Australian school teachers then and now were/are in the union but that old girl was anything but a time server. Obviously, that story was more about me than her. I was a fairly smart lazy good for nothing who did the absolute minimum to get through. I could just as easily have translated her comment as “if anyone ever thinks you hard working and smart enough to consider risking taking you on as an employe…”. Steve, you’re just reading stuff into the situation. We needed more teachers like her. At least she had good control of her class.
I was restocking the bathrooms with toilet paper and paper towels in my office building Friday afternoon. We had plenty of hand soap though. Someones got to do it. I just glad we can afford a cleaning service otherwise the summer intern would have another job he did not like…
“I was a fairly smart lazy good for nothing who did the absolute minimum to get through.”
Ditto, and would only add that I did well and worked at the subjects I liked, which were history and English. The rest I did jack for, just enough to get by. And my math and science teachers basically pretty much sucked and were so boring as to induce tears.
Whereas my freshman (first-year of high school for you Brit colony types) English teacher, Jack Donovan, was a lush and a sarcastic son of a bitch, especially when he got on my case, by jeezum, I learned English grammar until it became embedded in my bones, DNA and soul. RIP, Jack, you old drunk SOB. (years later I bet I could have drunk his ass under the table in nothing flat.)
He might have been union, I have no idea, about him or any of the other teachers; were they in unions back then, does anybody know? 50s and 60s Maffachufetts???
And my previous year’s English teacher took us to see Shakespeare in Boston, ran the Zefferelli “Romeo and Juliet” for us when it came out, and showed us the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a look into the Italian Renaissance and great art masters, BEFORE those rat bastard sons-of-bitches stole the Rembrandt and other great works, probably rotting now in some industrial park warehouse. I pray, at least weekly, for ten minutes in a room with those pieces of shit.
The Gardner is truly amazing, and it blew my 13-year-old mind at the time; took my wife there on one of our first dates and it blew her mind, too, and she is an artist.
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/resources/theft/
I just figured out that AT&T has fiber pulled to my office building. They have a fiber to copper converter in my equipment area to give us local phone lines (we have 5 of them). Yet they want thousands of dollars per month to give us fiber internet. Instead, we have a AT&T DSL 10/1 Mbps line for $60/month.
I am willing to pay a couple of hundred dollars per month for fiber internet but they cannot even talk with me intelligently about it. I spent 90 minutes one day talking with a rep but he was all about quality of service, etc and wanted to talk about frame relay and T1 lines, etc. When I finally got torqued and said just give me a DSL line, he said that he had to send me to a different business unit and ended up hanging up on me. The DSL people were barely coherent but managed to get me signed up. Not AT&T’s finest hour.
Gotta say; AT & T’s rep among IT cognoscenti in these parts, i.e., northern New England, is the pits. And they also handle the network (as it connects to outside) where I work (we ourselves do the internal stuff) and getting new IP’s or drops activated is an exercise in Eastern Bloc stonewalling and endless paperwork. Our son used to work for Verizon and he has tons of horror stories about their competitors.
Chuck writes: it still is the case that most employees do not see a connection between selling the goods and their own wallet
Some employees are also just incapable of grasping anything more that “do what the boss tells me”.
My wife has an employee like that; she is apparently utterly incapable of actually thinking for herself, and prioritizing her work. She does what she’s told, and any attempts to get her to even keep a checklist of regular tasks (so she doesn’t have to be reminded) have simply failed. The idea that actually doing her job is what brings in her paycheck? Forget it, money just appears in her bank account, and in return she shows up and does what she’s told.
What she does, she does well enough – which is why she still has a job – but it’s still frustrating to watch. I’m glad I’m not her boss, I’d have fired her long since…
… she is apparently utterly incapable of actually thinking for herself, and prioritizing her work.
Not everyone is on the right side of the Bell curve. What to do with them is a major problem for the near future as more and more of their jobs are turned over to robots and computers. And some of the top end jobs are subject to being automated out of existence, in particular legal work on wills and the like are pretty much jobs of assembling boilerplate blocks of text based on the answers to a few questions.
“…Not everyone is on the right side of the Bell curve. What to do with them is a major problem for the near future…”
Yep. While not getting into the why’s and the historical reasons they’re gonna be in this fix; the worst-case scenario, if things really fall apart, esp. w/regard to large cities and the ‘burbs, is mass die-off. Without Happy Motoring gas and oil and serviceable roads, bridges and superhighways; without power and lights and internet; and as the just-in-time food and goods distro systems go belly-up after, at best, a week; what would all these millions of people do, really? Factor in, sooner or later, disease pandemics/epidemics and the collapse of the emergency response and medical care systems; maybe factor in massive civil unrest and the breakdown of law and order, which is already the case in sections of our largest cities and along our southern border. In the worst case, we’re looking at millions of dead and dying, and that’s not counting a possible terror attack or other act of war from somewhere.
But say we stop short of the worst-case scenario and merely break down to say, the period here or in Europe between the wars, or even the year 1900: those masses of people are gonna have to work if they wanna eat and have a roof over their heads. What kind of work will there be? Probably light industrial, infrastructure repair and maintenance, and we will be returning to more involvement with agriculture and animal husbandry likewise. Folks like Brad’s wife’s employee will be hoeing, tilling, sowing and doing laundry. See “Little House on the Prairie” or the Foxfire series. And most likely men will be doing what has traditionally been regarded as men’s work and women their work. Religion, like always in this country, and like it or not, will be a mighty force. Guys like Bob and others here will be tolerated because they have useful skillz and knowledge, but they will be watched closely and hectored to get in line with Jesus; they will see that much more from Protestant denominations and sects and cults than Roman Catholic people.
And in any scenario, we will be looking, along with the breakdown in law and order, despite draconian violence and punishments meted out by forces paid for by our lords temporal, at gangs, brigands, thieves, and organized criminals in far higher numbers than we see presently. Among them will be previously imprisoned violent cons and the hundreds of thousands we imprisoned who were no threat to anyone and in jail because of minor bullshit drug offenses. They will be hardened, bitter and pissed off. Likewise hundreds of thousands of combat veterans from the Sandbox, trained and experienced. And the billion or so firearms we have concluded here are probably out there now.
People like the co-founder of FaceBook and Denise Rich and a slew of corporate executives and banksters have already flown the coop with their money and renounced the citizenship they didn’t give a blind rat’s syphilitic ass about. We know about the confiscatory and punitive taxation that was their alleged main motive, but what else do they know that we don’t???
When did car batteries get so expensive ? I paid $76 for a E51R battery at Sam’s Club this afternoon for my daughters 07 honda civic. She has not driven it in a year due to complications with her Lyme disease. She has been cured enough that she wants to try driving again. I found that the brake light switch had broken on the brake pedal and turned the brake lights on forever which fried the old battery each time that I charged it up. The car amazingly started after 10-15 seconds of cranking. Fixed that brake pedal and she is good to go. The wife is working on the ants embedded in the car frame (yes, ants).
I swear the last time I bought a battery for that car, it was $38 plus $5 tax. Of course, the EPA closed the 100 year battery plant north of Dallas last year which is now a Superfund site. Those idiots north of Dallas think that they are going to build houses on the site in the next couple of years – Hah ! The lawyers will be suing everyone in site connected to the old battery company for decades.
BTW, her new car battery says that it was made in Wisconsin. That is a LONG way to be trucked to Sugar Land, Texas.
Lynn wrote:
“The wife is working on the ants embedded in the car frame (yes, ants). ”
Be thankful it was just ants. Many years ago I took my bicycle to be repaired after a couple of years of non-use, exposed to the elements. When I went to collect it the repairman said jokingly that he wanted danger money for repairing my bike, as the frame had been loaded with redbacks. (A very nasty Australian spider whose bite won’t kill a health adult but will make them wish very very much that they hadn’t got out of bed that morning.)
The bugs, especially ones like those, and the giant orange cockroaches in Napoli, Italia, will inherit the earth.
Also coyotes, corvids, and rats.
Long after we’re gone. Which will be 2022.
Just kiddin’ y’all!
72 here now but so muggy I can wring out my t-shirt; the drizzle I can hear outside will render everything soaking wet again and even more muggy tomorrow. We need a colossal boomer to break this up.
Mrs. OFD was just now driving along the Columbia River in Washington and we will both hit our respective salt mines in the AM; mine has uber-a-c to the point I can leave my sandwiches in the RF for the day like it was a fridge.
Hi OFD,
Your doom and gloom reminds me of an old saying: “No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition”.
I fully expect Mr. Romney to right the ship should he be elected along with Ms. Rice. If Mr. Obama is re-elected, I see a large iceberg ahead and our ship is already leaking everywhere across the port bow and those compartments are NOT water tight.
However, if Mr. Romney is elected, I still see much doom and gloom as someone has to pay for the party for the last 5 years. The federal government is going to go on a severe belt tightening. I do see employment increasing as employers will not have Obamacare over their heads. I have employee number 14 starting work tomorrow so I am not really worried a lot about the employee healthcare penalty. If I had 50 employees though, I can guarantee that we would be down to 49 employees before the end of 2012.
They are and were Fire Ants.
Sigh. s/07 honda civic/97 honda civic/. We bought that car brand new and it has been rode hard and put up wet.
BTW, I have a gripe about Windows 7 and all previous windows releases. Why does the stupid Windows 7 x64 create a hiberfil.sys of 12 GB and pagefile.sys of 16 GB when I have 16 GB of ram ? That is really an incredible waste of space on a 160 GB SSD drive.
Stop whining! I had Win 7 Pro on a 56 GB SSD. It was a nightmare.
Lynn, I really hope you are right. A serious belt-tightening, battening down the hatches, austerity to pay the piper, whatever you want to call it. Unfortunately, I don’t believe it: Romney is just another big-government politician, not a reformer, and he is seriously beholden to all the usual suspects who fund Republican election campaigns.
Yesterday is the first time I had read about Condoleeza Rice as a potential VP candidate. Assuming she wants the position, is she actually a good choice? I recall her as a largely ineffectual Secretary of State. I had the impression that she is very smart, but not at all “savvy”, if you understand what I mean. Do I do her an injustice? Or is she being picked for gender and skin color?
Also @Lynn: You can get rid of hiberfil.sys by disabling hibernation, otherwise it must be the same size as your RAM. You can also tell Windows to put it on some other disk drive, if you have a second (normal) hard drive. The swap space can also be manually set, and also put onto other disk drives – Windows defaults to setting this somewhat larger than the amount of RAM you have, for whatever reason. I’m currently under Linux, so I can’t tell you exactly where to find these things – if you don’t find them, let me know and I’ll look the next time I’m under Windows.
Now here’s an odd one. Many years ago, a schoolgirl was abducted in Austria. She was kept prisoner in the guy’s basement and only escaped many years later. The girl (now woman) seems to have her act together, has gone back and finished her high school degree, and seems remarkably normal and together. Kudos to her.
Now the FBI is going to investigate. Huh? First, it seems just a wee bit out of their jurisdiction. Second, the abductor has killed himself. Third, but most importantly: Ms. Kampusch has asked people to stop cooking up weird conspiracy theories and let her get on with her life (even more kudos to her).
Brad, knowing nothing about the case, I can answer: The FBI as an organization is a bunch of grandstanding scumbags. Not all the agents as individuals, but groupthink is strong in them.* The Feebs swoop in and grab high-profile cases from locals not infrequently, or announce an investigation of something that has caught public attention even if it’s not clear that any crime was committed.
(The New York State Police are much the same. My mom, a retired deputy sheriff, told me the very funny story about how the staties came in and stole the investigation and the spotlight, annoying the locals. Then the feebs came in and stole it from the staties, annoying them.)
* They also think very highly of themselves and in my experience have very little sense of humor even off the job. “Well look at you” as a rejoinder to “We’re with the FBI” was so effective in pissing them off that it’s become my stock reply. Alas, so far as I know I haven’t even bumped into a feeb in the almost ten years since I used that.
“First, it seems just a wee bit out of their jurisdiction.”
No place is out of their jurisdiction, apparently. They established that precedent a long time ago and will stick their noses in anywhere now. Amazing, really. The plethora of “law enforcement” and “intelligence” agencies and quasi-official organizations, etc., has to go. There are many overlapping jurisdictions and constant sniping and internecine struggles, and meanwhile their effectiveness across the board generally sucks rocks.
The Feebies have been a problem since the days of grandstanding J. Edgar Hoover, a really damaged individual.
Re: “Now the FBI is going to investigate. Huh?”
Let’s keep this in perspective. The Austrian government has requested the FBI’s help, as well as help from the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA). Neither agency is “sticking their noses in” unwanted. I would guess that Austrian officials want to know if their processes and procedures were in line with the best forensic and investigative techniques. The FBI and the BKA know a bit about this stuff. That’s all there is to it. No grandstanding involved.
Larry, haven’t you been warned before of bringing reason, logic and especially, perspective, to the party? If not, my apologies, and consider yourself duly warned!
Not to let the Feebs off the hook, however, they DO have a tendency to grab cases.
Speaking of sex, Indiana is no slouch—and wow: the UK newspapers have better coverage of Indiana events than the Indianapolis media.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2163394/Megan-Crafton-Photos-cheerleading-coach-relationship-high-school-basketball-player.html
Story is back in the local news as preliminary court proceedings move toward a September trial and lawyers are positioning by making public statements.
Shelbyville is a rural community about the same distance south from Indy as Tiny Town is east. I was just in Shelbyville a couple weeks ago for a video job. It is a town almost identical in size to Tiny Town, except it knows how to adapt to the times. Lots of thriving industry there and several new-construction strip malls, along with a busy and occupied downtown. And apparently filled with people who also have busy sex lives.
Strange that the boy appears to have initiated the whole thing by contacting police. His testimony should be completely discounted, because—as an athlete—he could easily have stopped her any darned time he wanted. No fair getting into her car, then going to police and complaining after getting um, uh, fully relieved.
Well, that blows, or sucks, depending on your preference. I sure wish women would have forced me to “submit” to fellatio when I was 17! What is wrong with this guy?
I live about an hour away from Shelbyville. I’m with Bill, what kind of idiot complains to authorities about this? If you complain, it means she stops doing it. I think it’s overkill to prosecute her for this, she was just an assistant cheerleading coach, and the boy wasn’t a cheerleader.
Not everybody wants to have sex with everybody… and, depending on the circumstances, she could have coerced him into it.
You’re talking about a 17-year-old boy. By definition, he wanted to have sex with her. Boys of that age want to have sex with anything.
Thanks! I found a good article on drastically reducing the pagefile size and getting rid of the hibernation file at:
http://techgage.com/article/disabling_windows_pagefile_hibernation_to_reclaim_ssd_space/
I now have 84 GB free on my 180 GB SSD drive. I am using the Intel 180 GB 520 SSD drive which got reduced to almost 1 $/GB over the weekend ($210):
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Series-2-5-Inch-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B006VCP8L2/
The Intel 480 GB SSD is now $520. Amazing.
That’s not true for all 17-year-old boys, RBT. People can be strongly motivated by sex, but still hold scruples.
And preliminary research suggests something like ~1% of people just don’t care for sex — a similar percentage to that seen in studies of sheep and other nonhuman animals.
Anecdotes abound. I’ve met a couple of people who identify as asexual. There’s a tonne of them online. I don’t really like to use the word for humans, but I guess I’m one of them: I’ve never felt sexual attraction to anyone, male or female. Not when I was 17, nor now, at the age of 20.
As is so often the case, behaviour falls into a spectrum, more or less normally distributed.
A couple of possibilities come to mind:
– He was perfectly happy with the event, couldn’t get the smirk off his face, and got busted by his parents, who dragged him to the sty to make a complaint.
– He was happy enough with it at the time but then regretted it, on moral/religious grounds or for some other reason.
On the face of it, the criminal charges seem to be bullshit. I could see firing her, though I’d say that was bullshit as well, for violation of contract terms or whatever. But criminal charges? Smells like bullshit from here, and that’s six hundred miles away.
“What is wrong with this guy?”
He’s probably gay.
The time for scruples was when she started, not after she finished. There is more to the story than someone “abusing their authority”.
In circumstances like this I’d sack her on the spot if I had the authority but I don’t think there should be any criminal sanctions against her. Not when the other party is 17. If he’d been 14 or 15 I’d say put her away for 20 years.
Yeah, I get annoyed with people who bitch *after* they’ve had a good time. The time to complain is when it starts, or not at all.
Chuck wrote:
“Shelbyville is a rural community about the same distance south from Indy as Tiny Town is east.”
Okay, what is the real name of Tiny Town? I worked it out once but have forgotten. Any hints?
Hi OFD,
Is your server room good, bad, or UGLY :
http://systembash.com/content/server-room-cabling-the-best-and-the-worst/
Hi, Lynn;
Our server rooms are GOOD. If no other reason than self-defense. We have to do stuff in the backs of the racks and under the floor and above the ceiling often enough (like almost daily) to try to keep it all orderly. We still kick ourselves for not labeling the cables and fiber all the time but OTOH, the next week we might pull them and connect them somewhere else anyway. I’ve seen many examples of the BAD but never anything like the UGLY.
As for blow jobs being received by 17-year-old males from a 22-year-old blonde chick like that? When I was 17 I would have killed for that, especially that being the year I enlisted. Criminal charges in this case are utter bullshit and the authorities should be ashamed of themselves. The boy should be bitch-slapped and sent to Paris Island forthwith. I might suspend the girl for a while, but that’s about it. (yeah, suspend her above me in the bedroom for the Indian Basket Trick).
Oh, and those who thought I was all doom and gloom recently (or most of the time, actually); here is another ex-cop who, like OFD, still has contacts in the police and the military:
http://www.crimefilenews.com/2012/07/american-economy-and-way-of-life-is-as.html
First of all, HE got into the car with HER, not the other way around. According to other reports, there had been a buzz in the school about these 2 even before this happened. She did not accost him out of the blue, as the school statements imply.
Indiana is one of those places where it just might turn out that something sensible happens, what with the recent ruling that you can shoot a cop who enters your house making you think your life is threatened. (Although the end result of that is no cop will enter alone, and the inhabitant will be shot dead before he can raise a gun.)
I know a couple of male teachers who cringe at todayâs situation. If a girl accuses a male teacher of anything, he loses his job in ignominy, regardless of the truth. Both of my teacher friends are scared out of their wits that something like that might happen. One even quit coaching a girls basketball team because he thought it was becoming too much of a risk in this day and age. This is in a rural school system where there are no women coaches available. Budget concerns led to abandonment of the girls basketball team when he quit, as there was no woman to take over—and not surprisingly, there was no other man willing to take on the risk.
This issue is not going away, and there are going to be continuing cases all over the country. This stuff of âsigning up to no sex by taking a jobâ is just pure crap, the same as one-way licensing contracts by software providers are. That is NOT the way contracts worked when I was messing around at law school back in the early â70âs. Contracts were 2-way streets. Initiating automatic felony charges when anything like this happens is just irresponsible. As I mentioned before, one of my younger science teachers married a student in my class not long after we graduated—and they are still married after raising 4 boys (imagine that).
OFD wrote:
“I might suspend the girl for a while, but thatâs about it. (yeah, suspend her above me in the bedroom for the Indian Basket Trick).”
I do hope either that Mrs OFD is very liberal minded or she doesn’t read this blog.
If I was a teacher I’d have to be mentally deranged to coach a girls’ basketball team (or even a boy’s team). I might, just possibly, allow myself to be persuaded to coach the chess team, but that would be it. I’m just not interested in that sort of risk. A few years ago there was a case involving a male teacher at a school in rural Queensland. Some boys made accusations against him, he was put on trial, the boys’ testimony was torn to shreds, they then admitted they’d made it up out of malice. Last time I heard the (entirely innocent) teacher was washing cars for a living in a city 200 km away.
“I do hope either that Mrs OFD is very liberal minded or she doesnât read this blog.”
She is mainly an old-school liberal Irish-American Democrat and no, she does not read this blog.
How did she end up with the likes of me? Still pondering that…must be SOME kind of heinous sins for which she is now paying….otherwise she was a good little Catholic girl growing up in lovely Glens Falls, NY and is still pretty much the same. I, OTOH, am one of Satan’s minions.
“If I was a teacher Iâd have to be mentally deranged…”
Stop right there, sir; that’s as far as we need go. In this current educational system? Forget it. And I doubt they even have chess teams anymore. (a Don Juan type back in the late 70s saw my high school yearbook pic and in front of his adoring groupies said I must have been captain of the chess team, haw, haw.) Not really. Far from it, actually.
I’m going to speculate that the 17 year old boy is a Catholic, and had a case of Catholic guilt, and made the mistake of confessing his misdeeds to the police instead of the local Catholic priest. At least a mistake from the young woman’s perspective.
Wow, you figured out Chuck’s hints? I didn’t have any problem figuring out the town he was talking about, but my dad was born there, and one of my uncles retired from the Chrysler plant in Tiny Town.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other readers figured it out, but someone from Australia?
Chuck never mentioned his town (outer suburb of Berlin really) until he left for good. I once asked him about it and he gave me enough hints to work it out.
And I thought that *I* was paranoid.
(I actually know a fair bit about the US, having studied American History for two years and collected a number of maps of the place. (When I was there in 2003 the presents I bought for myself were a Greater Washington DC street directory and a driving atlas of the US. I studied both pretty hard when I got home.))
Hint: Chuck is referring to a town with the same name (different state) as the town I was born and grew up in.
Ahh yes, now I know.
Mwhahahahaha Chuck. Men In Black are on their way… đ
As a fan of the movie “Breaking Away” I knew where Chuck lived a long time ago.
DaveB wrote: “I wouldnât be surprised if other readers figured it out, but someone from Australia?”
It helps to use short words and lots of arm and hand gestures. They eventually figure it out! đ
I don’t remember any references to Tiny Town in Breaking Away. I thought Breaking Away was set in Bloomington. I live closer to Bloomington than Chuck does.
Besides if Chuck were in Bloomington, he wouldn’t even think of selling Tiny House. He’d just rent it out.
Yeah, I’d become a slum lord. I was in Bloomington for a couple years at the finest playskool in the nation—usually #1 on Playboy’s list—Indiana University. That is not Tiny Town. I do give hints about everything, but worked in the media too long and was around people who had real-life run-ins to do it otherwise. There are some real kooks out there and they sometimes get psychotic obsessions—just ask Dave Letterman. Famous people have bodyguards for a reason. When my name was actively in credit lists, our phone was under my wife’s initials. Now, it is under my initials, although very few people are seeing my credits these days. Anybody important knew how to get in touch with me through work.
RBT is right. One of my ancestors fled England, supposedly because—as the Queen’s accountant—this very young fellow messed around with her in ways her husband did not approve. The story goes that, with her help, he escaped with his life to New Castle, Pennsylvania, leaving a wife and kid behind, which he never saw again. That’s alright, I guess, as he was married twice again over here, and had 6 more children. Apparently not an asexual guy.
After a few years in Pennsylvania, he went west—still a young man,—to found Tiny Town, which he named after that city in Pennsylvania. He also gave the land where the Tiny Town courthouse stands, and even more land where the city’s hospital was built. When I was much younger, my relatives were quite active in a founder’s day here, which celebrated his good deeds for the city. However, we have so goll-darn many people from Kentucky here, who believe that state was blessed by a magic superpower, but won’t go home, now that the Chrysler has closed, and they are revising history. They claim they founded Tiny Town and named it after New Castle, Kentucky. Even the local library now takes that view. Problem is, that city in Kentucky was not even settled until after Tiny Town became incorporated. Meanwhile, the cemetery where my ancestor lays—along with a monument to his founding of the city,—is now closed to the public, because it is next to a military firing range and training ground. I tried to get my remaining relatives to mount an effort to move the grave and monument to the city cemetery—right down the street from Tiny House,—but no one seems to care.
This is how history gets changed.
Regarding Daveâs law enforcement friendâs website predictions, the decline of civilization is a slow process, and will be made slower by the growing globalization. I donât agree with the premise that the world is going to collapse so quickly. Look at Europe: 3 years and still counting. The US may no longer be world #1, but it is not going to disintegrate into barbarism.
Actually, I think people are generally learning to cope with the outrageousness of the media and phony Internet sources—but slowly. Fewer people than ever are falling for virus scams, because they are just becoming more savvy and immune to ridiculous claims. Everybody but people over 70 seem to question quotes coming from email âfriendsâ. (What is it about people over 70 who NEVER think to check Snopes before forwarding? I was never on Andy Rooneyâs mailing list, like so many older folks seem to have thought they were.)
There is a link on that cop guyâs web page about a tour of Germany to show how citizens there just plain lost civil rights and liberties. That would be a very enlightening journey for Americans with an interest in legal protections. For me, it would be a depressing trip, because I heard enough stories, saw pictures of relatives struck down in their youth by the Naziâs, and was exposed to the place where the first incineration trials were conducted at Oranienburg in the early â30âs. I learned about family who were turned in by neighbors, and never seen again—ever. Even today, Germans are obsessively possessed to turn in neighbors for the smallest of transgressions. We were turned in several times to the Ordnungsamt for not daily raking up the fallen leaves in a 12 foot strip that ran between the front property fence and the road. I mean, really; we raked every weekend, but for somebody that is not enough? You can ignore most of those rules violations, because once given the citation, you have 10 days to act before being fined. The weekend always came before the 10 days. But you can see how this nosy buttinski bullshit could be a real problem when the Nazis investigated every report of wrongdoing. Imagine being beheaded 4 days after distributing anti-Nazi propaganda leaflets. Such was the case for Munich college students Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl_%E2%80%93_The_Final_Days
I get really, really angry with my US relatives, who know absolutely zero about life in Germany—either now or then—but who claim that the German population was overwhelmingly behind Hitler and the Nazis. The overwhelming bulk of the population was shaking in their boots, and knew they had no control over their lives with a mean-assed psychotic dictator in charge, sending their boy children off to certain death. Yeah, if you knew you would âdisappearâ should you openly resisted the Nazis, you would go out and do that? or would you keep your damned mouth shut and show Hitler respect when out in public among the massive numbers of military everywhere? Give me a break. My will to live is a helluva lot stronger than my will to pick a fight that, like Sophie, I would most definitely lose. I know what I would have done. Same as my German family: pray fervently that the Americans would defeat Germany.
There’s a certain amount of truth to what you’re saying, but the level of satisfaction with Hitler and the Nazis among the German general public varied with how things were going. Early on, say around the time of the occupation of the Rhineland, the German public were in fact very much behind Hitler and the Nazis. The same with Hitler’s early military successes in France and the low countries. As Hitler’s fortunes waned and the British and American bombing campaign ramped up, popular support dwindled quickly, although as you say everyone was too afraid to say anything at that point. By the end of the war, it was almost impossible to find anyone who’d admit to having supported the Nazis.
In this, as in many things, there’s a great deal of revisionist history going on.
100°F by the backyard thermometer in the shade at Tiny House. 75% humidity. No significant rain in sight to help the farmers. Jetstream maps show the dividing line almost at the North Pole for the foreseeable future.
Two people in my neighborhood have no air-conditioning at all: 2 doors down the alley outside my back door; and next door neighbor in the house my grandfather and his brother built for their sister. I really don’t know how they live through this weather. Local lows were in the upper 70’s last night, and my central air was running periodically throughout the night—even though it is set on 76.