10:32 – Bonnie couldn’t make it yesterday. The battery in her truck died. So I guess we’ll just have that multi-year accumulation of leaves/compost cluttering up the place until next weekend.
As Barbara and I were dry-packing sugar yesterday, I noticed Colin watching. Later, he asked me how we would store his year’s supply of dog food. I told him we weren’t going to bother storing any extra dog food, and his ears went down flat. They stood right up again when I told him he’d just have to eat human food the whole time, the same as the rest of us. After all, for the first 30,000+ years of their partnership with humans, dogs ate what their people ate. Dog treats were invented around the Civil War, but it’s only since the 1930’s that the familiar dry meat/meal dog food has even existed. Colin is now looking forward to the Zombie Apocalypse.
In my experience they clearly prefer to eat our human food anyway.
Overcast and very windy again today. Temps look like they’re gonna be in the fotties all week with some rain on Wednesday. Very mild autumn so fah. Kinda strange. Makes me suspect we’re gonna get slammed this wintuh.
So I’m continuing to winterize, as is my next-door neighbor, who tells me that IBM did in fact cut a deal with Global Foundry to keep the approximately 4,000 current employees on board but they’re all going over to GF at some point, except for the server group, which will stay with IBM; that was the group I was in, natch, so we’ll see if I ever get a response to my paperwork.
Meanwhile I’m going ahead with ramping up an alternative way of making a living here; the more I think about it, the less enthused I am about slaving again for ass-hats and PHB manglers and being bounced around from temp job to contractor gig to prolecube nightmare. Life’s too short. And getting shorter.
I guess zombie meat is an acquired taste but Colin might get to like it. Probably softer and easier to catch than cats.
Hey Mr. OFD. How about “fashion blogger” as a career path?
Or a positive outlook motivational speaker.
“fashion blogger”?
You mean inherit the mantle that once adorned the late Joan Rivers? Would that mean I’d have to hang around the Academy Awards event every year? Or horror of horrors, actually move out there?
Or could I just continue my hateful and spiteful diatribes against the current Murkan and Euro fashions? Would that mean regular trips to the local Wall-Mutt Superstore?
Say, on a totally unrelated note; anyone else here experiencing wicked allergy stuff about now (and for the past several weeks)? We’ve had some very windy days and most of the leaves have fallen, along with some intermittent rain. My nose and eyes have been a mess every day this week.
Or maybe I’m just coming down with Ebola…just for laughs I might answer “yes” next time I’m down to the VA and they ask me if I’ve had recent contact with any west Africans; what would they do? Throw my ass out? Call security?
Come on, guys. The situation Dave finds himself in isn’t a joking matter. I still think his best bet for immediate income is to start writing custom term-paper/thesis backgrounders.
Dave, if you decide to register a domain name–for term papers or for whatever–let me know. I’ll be happy to get you set up for email, web, and (if you want it) WordPress on my server. No charge. Let me know if you want me to set up an account for you.
Thanks, Bob; I’m working on a related possibility that also involves writing, and that doesn’t tend to offend my wiffy-sensitive moral qualms, LOL. I may take you up on that offer at some point or may attempt to try to do it myself on this end. Something to be said, though, for already-established tech. I’m hoping to get it cranking before the end of the year whether or not I manage to hustle up yet another dumb-ass IT drone job, just to get us over the holiday/winter hump.
The guys are actually a help; as the old Readers Digest column said/says? “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” Gotta keep a sense of hew-muh.
Dave, go back to the Anglicans and I’m sure you could get a job as a priest.
Nope. Gotta be a woman or gay. Or a gay woman. Yeah, that’s it. A gay woman. Then I can be a bishop, why settle for priest? Hooker and Cranmer must be spinning in their graves.
But if I was seriously considering doing that, I’d go to a parish in Africa or south Asia, where they take their Anglicanism seriously. It’s on the way out in Anglo-American regions; gone by 2026 here, through sheer demographics alone. What a shame.
Come on, guys. The situation Dave finds himself in isn’t a joking matter. I still think his best bet for immediate income is to start writing custom term-paper/thesis backgrounders.
Just some humor Dr. Bob. But you knew that.
Seriously Mr. OFD, I think the IT gig is dead. Based on the last gig, why hire a solid old fart when you can got three young whippersnappers who will kiss ass and back stab each other. Unless you want to commute and hour each way to a job you hate.
How about upping your teaching credential and do Ye Old English at a nearby community college. Part time even. I’m sure there are plenty of night school students who need language skills, also. Even teach IT stuff at a tech school.
“How about upping your teaching credential…”
Already thought of that; the way it works now is you gotta jump through a whole buncha hoops for quite a while, take the necessary courses (which are not about your particular subject area; more on the lines of neo-Marxist pedagogical methods and being a productive and enthusiastic member of the matriarchal commune which has the kids being sensitive about their feelz, politically correct at all times, and being pencil-whipped through the warehouse/baby-sitting system until they are fit for the usual prole-cube jobs at best, Mickey-D’s, or Our Nay-Shun’s heroic warrior armed forces.)
I’ve known a couple of guys who went this route and it was horrifying what they were put through. Plus, nowadays God forbid you ever make the mistake of talking with a kid, male or female, alone in that classroom or hallway or parking lot. Better have a reliable witness standing by. One of my wife’s cousins teaches middle or high skool history down in Fairfax County, VA, and you can bet he toes the line nonstop to keep his job there. He’s a quick-witted and nimble young fellow with three kids at home so he better mind his P’s and Q’s. Hair’s already gone gray, though.
Also, it doesn’t pay very well. Even if I’d finished that PhD long ago, that’s about the level of teaching job I’d be lucky enough to find: part-time gypsy prof commuting a lot further than 40 miles each way to the various and tenuous gigs at community and junior colleges out in East Bumfuck. How does maybe $3,000 a semester sound to ya? Figure on four of those per year. And you gotta hustle like a madman to round up those gigs if and when they become available. Plus, rub one matriarch or metrosexual administrator or fellow teacher the wrong way and you’re gone.
I can make way more dough writing those term papers or the other thing I’m working on; I’ll know more in another six weeks of ginning it up.
I can no longer in good faith recommend a job in IT to anyone, unless they’re already in a fabulous position. For me, IT was wonderful in the Eighties, okay in the Nineties and the job from hell in the Naughties.
Teaching may be the go. Over here my sister has been doing it for about 45 years, my elder niece (and her husband, who gave up being a cop) and younger nephew (and his wife, who took up teaching because her pay as a lawyer was rs.)
IT for me was very interesting in the 80s, OK in the 90s mainly due to working with a good team, and has sucked in the Noughts except for the first of my two years at IBM, after which it began to suck a lot, saved only, one again, by being on a good team with a decent boss. Two next younger brothers have experienced pretty much the same deals.
Teaching is out, for the reasons I posted above, except, possibly, for doing one-on-one tutoring with paying customers, and I daresay there is little enough market for my specialties of English and history.
Back to IT for sec; I just got an email from one of my Linked-In groups and a guy had just posted the ‘six most critical certs to have in 2015;’ I was gonna post a reply but thought better of it. The certs were all top of the line stuff that would require many years of slogging through the trenches and earning the preliminary certs, two of his examples being Red Hat and Cisco architect. Very few people have those, and if one were to go through the training on top of working full-time in the field the courses and exams would cost several tens of thousands of Murkan fiat dollars.
That’s pretty much it: you gotta already be a senior drone who’s never lost a job and been progressing through the levels and certs; a fresh-outta-college or high skool kid who’s willing to do endless Windows help desk crap; or maybe a programmer who can pick and choose individual projects after doing the corporate rat-race thing for a while. If you hit my age, or my brothers’ ages, and haven’t gone much beyond sys and net admin stuff, your’re worthless. Is it because we were lazy sumbitches who weren’t willing to go home after work and spend another 4-6 hours on cert study to the neglect of house and family? Partly. And partly because organizations stopped paying for training about the time I left EDS in ’98. Since then it’s on your dime and your time and you better do it and like it, too. So you can work in a prolecube and take crap from PHB manglers and be dragooned into endless bullshit meetings and bullied by the socialization-enforcing matriarchy and the upper manglers who are afraid to say no to them.
I will also note that my romance with IT is on the rocks partly due to my last gig and the last several interviews I went to, where I felt I was being laughed at. You’re old if you’re over 35 or so, even if you don’t feel old at all and other than a few aches and pains and lost hair, think you can do pretty much anything the damn kids can do. And was going it before…etc., etc.
In 1990 I was sent on 55 days training, all at my employer’s expense, often interstate (Sydney or Melbourne) with travel, accommodation and meal allowances. For the 10 years before I left there was virtually no money for training for anyone, except for all the politically correct crap which was both worthless and compulsory. But there was plenty of moolah for hiring more higher level management to manage all the monitoring software.
OFD wrote:
“Gotta be a woman or gay. Or a gay woman. Yeah, that’s it. A gay woman. Then I can be a bishop, why settle for priest?”
Have a cut and tuck job, then you can become a lesbian (you’d still be a guy, right?) That opens so many doors, and the Anglos would welcome you with open arms.
President, VP May Differ on Immigration Strategy: ‘Obama Angrily Cut Biden Off’: Jeez, if you’ve lost Joe Biden ….
Seen on FB: “Have you noticed how spammers don’t speak English? “Our courier could not to deliver at you at November 7″ is not likely to really be the United States Postal Service.”
Tongue-in-cheek career suggestion for OFD: Become a language consultant to the spammer community. Convince them that Middle English is actually the way the language is spoken today. The intended targets won’t be fooled for a minute, and you’ll rake in some bucks before the spammers catch wise! 😉
“Have a cut and tuck job, then you can become a lesbian (you’d still be a guy, right?) That opens so many doors, and the Anglos would welcome you with open arms.”
I dunno if they make chainsaws that big that could stand the strain without burning out.
“Jeez, if you’ve lost Joe Biden ….”
Joe probably didn’t get the meeting memo. Or he forgot it. Or he chose to ignore it. Hey Joe…where ya goin’ with that gun in ya hand…”
“Convince them that Middle English is actually the way the language is spoken today.”
That’s a better idea than teaching them Old English, which will sound like Germanic grunts after said Germanic types have hoisted a few flagons of mead and then gotten angry for no reason at all.
Interestingly, my little proposed writing gig will be a sort of language consultant thing. But in contemporary, bland Murkan English.
Local papers here in Nova Anglia are busily pushing out their Veterans Day special sections and restaurants are offering 10% discount on meals (with ID, natch). In various pieces we learn that younger vets coming back from the Sandbox and the Suck are more open to discussing their experiences while them nasty ol’ ‘Nam vets are only now, forty years later, beginning to cut loose. Buncha bitter old bastids. We also learn that guys are still getting fucked over and lied to by the VA, which is a stunner. And that we oughta wear our medals on Veterans Day. Count me out.
Back to it tomorrow with winterizing the porch, stacking firewood, and cutting boards for the raised beds we’ll start up in the spring.
I dunno if they make chainsaws that big that could stand the strain without burning out.
Yeh, they do. But that is like swatting a gnat with an Atlas 5.
Photographed a wedding this weekend with some of the most restrictive photography policies that I have even encountered. No photographs once the wedding starts with the entrance of the grandparents. Nothing allowed except from a balcony all the way in the back. Church was dimly lit requiring ISO 3200 with the resulting grain and digital noise. Even then I was forced to use f2.0 at 1/60th shutter speed. Incandescent lights, of course.
Restaging was not an option as the people in the church wanted us out as quickly as possible many times making comments we were taking too long for post ceremony formals with the bride and groom.
Ugh, what a mess. Not proud of the images but you do what you have to do.
Fashion blogger OFD caught these two fashion observation bon mots from Mr. James Howard Kunstler’s blog today:
“A day later, I was in Stockholm, being forcefully reminded what an actual city is like, one designed for human activity, not just some abstract political notion of “mobility.” People live in the center of Stockholm, lots of them, in five and six story buildings that display great variety and conscious artistry within strong orders of architectural unity. The motifs are a northern folkish classicism. The effect is both reassuring and powerfully coherent. You feel civilized. Your neurology is constantly nourished as you walk. Unlike Americans, the Swedes don’t go about in their pajamas. Also absent were cholo caps, team sports toggery, and clown sneakers. How refreshing to see young people aspire to act like grownups instead of the other way around. And, of course, almost no one is supersized over there.”
“Newark compares to Stockholm as an Ebola victim in the gutter compares to a supermodel at poolside. The scene in the Newark train station was like the barroom from Star Wars, a creature-feature extravaganza, intergalactic Mutt Central, wookies in hoodies with burning coals for eyes, ladies with pierced cheeks, crack-heads, winos, missing body part people, lopsided head people, and the scrofulous physical condition of the station is proof positive that Chris Christie is unqualified to be president. This is a gateway to New York, America’s greatest city, you understand, and it looks like the veritable checkpoint to the rectum of the universe. You know what occurred to me: maybe it is?”
Do any of these creatures have any conception based in reality as to what they look like? Do they somehow think it’s cool? WTF???
I never have understood American ‘fashion’. Even today, as that article quoted above notes, Americans dress like clowns. I am not kidding. Women today wear make-up so heavy, that it looks tattooed on. Women’s make-up and clothes, — especially pants and men’s shoes, — look like they belong in a circus. I am not kidding. It baffles me how people’s self-image seems oblivious to that.
A friend who blogs, wrote an article the other day about how ridiculous American males look, with ‘shorts’ that are so baggy they look like skirts. He was immediately challenged by young people who told him that men’s thighs were never meant to be seen in public — nor were the outline of their bums in tight pants.
This guy is only slightly younger than me, but that prompted him to post still pics of what he wore for shorts in high school and college, along with stills from the movie “Breaking Away”, which confirmed that most males under 30 at that time, wore what everyone seems to call “short-shorts” these days. People were aghast.
That is still what they wear in Europe; baggy never made it there. Neither did the ridiculous-looking Nissan Cube. My motto is, if you’re going to wear shorts, wear shorts. You males want to wear a dress, wear a kilt. Get some fashion sense. Oscar de la Rente may have been the last remaining American with any of that, and now he is gone.
Teaching high school or under requires teaching credentials, which – even if brain-dead easy to get – take time and money. Community college might be the way to go, because they will take someone who is qualified even in the absence of a pedagogical education. However, from what I’ve heard, the pay and conditions for adjunct lecturers have gone to pot in the past 20 years. Might be better in technical fields than in liberal arts, but likely only worth it if you can find a place right around the corner.
There may also be private tech. schools that train people – at least here there are such schools. Not college, but practical places that do all sorts of stuff, from how to string Cat-6 cables to certs to programming.
– – – – –
Fashion…you do see baggy stuff here, jeans with the crotch literally at the knees, but it’s pretty much restricted to just a few inner-city types.
The usual men’s shorts are not baggy, but they do come down to just above the knee. Fortunately, I still have some short-shorts from 20-30 years ago; I will sorely miss them when they wear out.
Kilt – I think I am finally going to give in and get one, in Swiss Red, of course. With my wife’s whisky business, there are plenty of events where it would be appropriate. I’d likely wear it more often that I wear a suit…
I really hate the baggy look, especially on the basketball court. Ever seen the movie Pleasantville? The guys playing basketball wore fairly tight short shorts (portraying the Fifties) whereas now they wear these knee length baggy shorts that look horrible. And the girls do to. Revolting. Back when I played basketball in the early Eighties in Canberra the girls just wore oversize knickers, like in women’s beach volleyball (may peace and blessings be upon it) today. It was certainly easier on the eye. And their tunics were TIGHT. Now they’re baggy. One would think they’re trying not to show off the goods… 🙁
Well, it’s nearly summer here and the women at uni (and in the Adelaide CBD) are wearing much more interesting clothes.
In Plesantville brother and sister are transported back in time to the Fifties, and Reece Witherspoon wears this wonderful tight sweater with what looks like a couple of large ice cream cones jutting out underneath, like they were in zero gravity. That must have been *some* push-up bra she was wearing… 🙂
Here’s a good summary of Pleasantville, including Reece in her balconette bra and the basketball team in their short shorts. Colour gets introduced to the town and suddenly guys start missing their shots at the basketball ring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrEAfkY9ods
OFD, on a more serious note, are there any people around who could benefit from someone of your educational background. People who would home school, but their child has better language skills than they do? Or help college students by tutoring them in how to improve their term papers. Tutoring kids in English before they go off to college. Tutoring kids in how to do better in the verbal portions of the SAT and/or ACT.
Or you could always write the next great dystopian novel and sell it for Kindle.
@Dave B.;
I’m looking into that, a home-schooling or one-on-one tutoring situation would be good, and I certainly know how to handle the college board tests.
On the Murkan fashion scene, I saw a couple more denizens yesterday and it struck me how much it looks like underwear; they’re wearing their baggy boxer shorts underwear. I’ve also seen people walking around outside or at the stores in their jammies and bathrobes.
Someone coming here in a time machine from 1950s Pleasantville, where I sorta lived as a young kid, would be shocked and outraged. And people from now would, of course, be outraged at their outrage.
Civil war. Stay tuned.
Hey OFD, can you write as good as Angery American?
http://www.amazon.com/Going-Home-Novel-Survivalist-American/dp/0142181277/
That there is a 4.3 stars out of five stars (1058 reviews) dystopian book about an EMP event happening in the USA. The dude is on his fifth book now and quit his day job so he can write more.
Well, if the excerpt at that link is any indication, we already know that OFD can write better prose.
Well, if the excerpt at that link is any indication, we already know that OFD can write better prose.
A. American’s writing gets better over his books. But the key point there is that he pulls off an EMP shutdown of the USA for me. The story flows well with without too many ninety degree changes. BTW, I have no idea what the relationship of sales to reviews on Amazon is but I would not be surprised if it is at least 100 to 1. With 1,058 reviews, that means sales of over 100,000 of this book.