08:29 – Happy Birthday to Barbara, who turned 20:40 yesterday. I didn’t mention it yesterday, because I thought she was concerned about hitting the big Six-Oh. As it turns out, she’s not.
Sad news in the paper this morning. A 17-year-old senior from a local high school is in critical condition after her car collided near the high school with an SUV driven by a 68-year-old guy. No word on who was at fault. One such accident is bad enough, but this one is just the latest in a recent slew of car accidents locally that have killed and critically injured numerous kids.
I’m writing now about water purification in the “First Year” section. There are numerous gravity-fed micro-filtration systems available, but the two I’m going to recommend are the LifeStraw Family and the Sawyer Point ZeroTwo. Both filter down to 0.02 microns, which is sufficient to provide a Log 4 reduction even for viruses. Both have very long filter life, assuming periodic back-flushing. (The Sawyer unit is rated at one million gallons.) Both are widely used in third-world countries. Both are reasonably inexpensive, with the LifeStraw Family about $85 and the Sawyer Point ZeroTwo at about $120.
We won’t be recommending the Berkey, despite its popularity among preppers, mainly because I’m concerned about its design/engineering. The LifeStraw and Sawyer units use tubing from the source container to the destination container with in-line microfilter cartridges, which inherently fail safe. Water cannot get from the source container to the destination without passing through the filter. The Berkey, on the other hand, immerses the filter in a container of questionable water and then allows water that passes through the filter to exit from the center of the filter to the output. That’s inherently a riskier design, and I’ve seen numerous reports of that filter coming loose and allowing questionable water to pass directly into the destination container without passing through the filter.
Speaking of Xmas, which places in the US do you suppose have the most holiday spirit, as measured by how many people tune into streams playing Xmas music?
According to the AccuRadio folks, it is: Washington, D.C. Guess they need Xmas cheer the worst. Number 2 is Pennsylvania and 3 is Tennessee. The places with the least Xmas in their hearts? Wyoming, New Hampshire, and New Jersey.
http://www.accuradio.com/blog/which-states-have-the-most-holiday-spirit/
As if Xmas spirit can be accurately measured by listening to songs…
My favorite Xmas song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jbdgZidu8
Featuring the talented and tragic Kristy MacColl.
“…streams playing Xmas music?”
What kinda Xmas music? Good stuff or the usual schmaltz and pop rubbish?
As if Xmas spirit can be accurately measured by listening to songs…
Oh, I can already tell that you are one of those people who wouldn’t be caught dead demonstrating in Ferguson, either.
Speaking of songs, this is where the new format that is sweeping the US, “Boom” started — in Houston:
http://boom92houston.com/listen-live/
Age group 18 to 34 is flocking in humongous numbers to this format. Would you trust this country being run by people who listen to this music?
From the 1955 makers of bicycles and lawn mowers:
http://dialyourride.wordpress.com/page-3-1955-huffy-radiobike/
And it was not transistor. Actual tubes in that thar bike. Wonder how long that lasted.
Those boys have my haircut back then, too. Butch wax to make the front hairs stand up, which always caused a rash on my forehead.
Finally! The Feds are cutting Medicare funding of penis pumps. About time that $500 billion Obummer claims for savings on fraud, waste and abuse kicks in.
Found a great post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie on Netflix last night, _Las Ultimos Dias_ or, _The Last Days_. http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70307846
Not your typical Hollywood fare: no zombies. no whizz-bang, flash-cut editing, no extreme CGI. It’s thematic and a bit of a morality play.
It’s in Spanish w/ subtitles, so if that turns you off don’t bother.
“Would you trust this country being run by people who listen to this music?”
A question asked, no doubt, by our own parents and grandparents about us.
” Butch wax to make the front hairs stand up…”
Yeah, I remember that stuff, came in a stick, like chapstick, and my dad would have us with basically shaved heads except for that wall of stiff waxed hair in front. I hated it. And I’ve seen old b&w pics of me and my siblings as kids; we look like we were being systematically starved by prison guards or sumthin; skinny as rails. I am twice or three times the height of the rest of them and usually wearing sunglasses. What a creep.
“The Feds are cutting Medicare funding of penis pumps.”
Dam. Now what am I gonna do?
I’ll check out that flick, Mr. Jim`, next time we have Netflix running; wasn’t too impressed with selections the last time and this looks interesting.
Here is my favorite Christmas song, Vince Vance & the Valiants – “All I Want For Christmas Is You”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1VkMBi9vvw
My favorite Saturnalia music is the roar of my Anti-Santa Gun and the tinkling sound of empty brass between bursts.
And Rudolph snickering all the way back to the ‘Pole. Don’t drink coffee before this ‘Eve Dr. Bob. Steady hands, steady hands.
” Butch wax to make the front hairs stand up…”
Yeah, I remember that stuff, came in a stick, like chapstick, and my dad would have us with basically shaved heads except for that wall of stiff waxed hair in front.
I remember it coming in a jar and it was pink and sticky. Sixth grade I had a burlap, flat on top and fenders on the side.
http://s2.hubimg.com/u/10940461_f260.jpg
http://www.mikanet.com/museum/images/butch_wax.jpg
Wow, you looked “butch.”
Someone had to say it 🙂
The dude in that picture has a coat and tie on, like a high skool grad or yearbook pic. I remember those guys that age dressed in black jeans with white tee-shirts; one sleeve would be rolled up to contain a pack of Marlboros.
Yeah I actually had that haircut when I was 11-12, that was just the easiest pic I could find. When I was that age I was one of the biggest kids in the class but only because I hit puberty then. In seventh grade I changed to the surfer look with longish blond hair, but all my surfing was on a skateboard. When I graduated high school I was 5’8 and weighed 132# (and my pic had a coat and tie with short normal combed over hair). In 1965, my freshman year, the high school PE coaches would harass any long hairs.
Wow, the Sawyer Zero Point Two is not cheap:
http://www.amazon.com/Sawyer-Products-SP191-Purifier-Assembly/dp/B0051HHNJ8/
In my high school senior year, 1977-78, one of the assistant principals would walk past me in the hallway and reach out and slap me upside the head, “McGuire, I told you to cut that hair above your collar”. I had my hair down on my shoulders, who cared?
I never could could figure out, with 6,800 kids in my high school, how he could remember my name so well. And several of my friends had their hair way longer than mine.
“When I graduated high school I was 5’8 and weighed 132# (and my pic had a coat and tie with short normal combed over hair). In 1965, my freshman year, the high school PE coaches would harass any long hairs.”
I graduated at 6’4″ and 165 and also had shoulder-length hair by then; big mistake keeping it, as when I got down to boot camp in east Texas the DI’s had a very dim view of it and I caught hell. Add to that the Maffachufetts Yankee accent and wise-ass attitude; lucky I didn’t get sent to the “Motivation Flight,” which was like the Marine Corps brig. Gained 20 pounds during basic and then Air Police/Security Police training, having just turned 18. And by then looking like a cue ball.
OFD, if you’re not currently subscribing to Netflix but like the genre, it’s worth hunting down at Redbox (?) or your local video store, of which I’m sure you have many in your neck of the woods.
I rarely “suggest” movies, but this was excellent IMO (9/10).
Also want to thank ChuckW for the link yesterday to “words for concepts not found in English”.
As you predicted, I *did* waste a good ½ hour on that, but only because I skipped the African and Oriental words. Passed it along to a friend with whom I shared a neat new word I learned yesterday: diastema.
I knew there was danger for you and OFD.
There was more than one kind of butch wax; some were creams and some were sticks. Back in that day, nobody had thought of trademarking a generic name like ‘butch wax’. Some of my friends with sisters just used their Dippity-Do. I had no sisters, so no Dippity-Do in our house, but my friend Mark used his sister’s Dippity-Do and I tried it, finding it did not cause a rash on me. My folks would not buy it, though. Not sure why I did not take matters into my own hands when I was a kid, because I could have easily just bought some myself and solved the problem. But I didn’t.
Hair was not a big deal in my high school because all guys wore it short, but girls wearing culottes sure had problems. Culottes, of course, were the work of a sex devil and were absolutely, positively verboten in my high school. It took an act of Student Council girls taking things to the School Board to get approval to wear culottes to after-school functions and play rehearsals, but they finally did get that done. No pants, culottes, or shorts on girls during school hours — period! No sandals on girls or boys.
Long hair on boys did not happen around here until the Beatles, and that was fall of ’64 and I graduated the next spring, before anybody had time to grow their hair out that long. Uni had no control over things like hair, culottes, bare feet, and such, and I never had trouble with any of that — except hair at work in the TV station, where I could not let it go longer than whatever the Beatles had, without losing my job. When I transferred to the big state school, the TV folks that I worked for there, couldn’t care less about that stuff, because we were not selling to advertisers that might drop by.
I was a giant in grade school, but reached nearly my full height by 7th grade, by which time I was 70 inches. Grew another inch at the state uni, and stayed forever one inch short of 6’0″. I was 145 at high school graduation.
And I see that I cannot give access to our high school class yearbook pictures, so that’s that. The movie “Breaking Away” was shot at the state uni about 9 years after I graduated, and things had not changed much, so a look at that movie will show pretty much exactly what it was like while I was there, except guys’ hair was more commonly shoulder length. These days, anything and everything is game there.
I notice, by the way, that middle school males around here now have almost universally got what our elders called ‘mop heads’ of the Beatles era, in contrast to the shaved and skin heads that have preceded these current kids.
“…OFD, if you’re not currently subscribing to Netflix…”
Yep, we’ve had Netflix for a couple of years now. And I’ve had Amazon Prime almost as long as they’ve had it.
We had a “dress code” that was sorta enforced during my first three years of high skool and then it was gone in our senior year. Nobody cared a fig about it and none of the kids really wore anything outrageous anyway. Girls all had short skirts and several of us boys had long hair.
I also had long hair while I worked at EDS (until 1998) and then again during my two years at IBM (2011-13). Still got it. Comes down to my elbows. None of it has turned gray yet, so I figure if you’ve got it why not flaunt it.
Arrrgh! Net Video Hunter has stopped downloading music from YouTube. This is the prelude to charging us $9.99/mo to watch music videos. Was trying to get this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxUkp3CFONY
Wanted the audio, because the 2007 CD of remastered Soul Brothers Six stuff is a cut-out and over $40. Nevermind, I just selected the HD version of the video and recorded it with Audacity as it played. That will do for my needs. No piece of music ought to cost more than 50¢. Anything above that goes directly into EMI’s CEO’s pocket, and so far, nobody is stopping that. No worry. China will put a stop to it when they knock us off as King of Empires.
Wonderful shots of German dancing girls there. You can tell — especially with the overalls girls, who have those famous German tiny TT’s. Nice butts though. I sure do miss Hullabaloo, Shindig, and all the other shows with caged girls moving their stuff.
There are 2 “Some Kind of Wonderful” songs, the one written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and this one written by John Ellison and performed by him here in his 1967 #91 version. Turns out that Ellison turned Canadian and lives there now. Grand Funk took Ellison’s song to #3, but I always preferred Ellison’s version with his Rochester, NY buddies, the Soul Brothers Five, who became Six when Ellison joined.
This YouTube stuff is utter bullshit. Just like Gracenote, which started out as a free service, to which zillions of people contributed info to their song-info database, then Gracenote went private and started charging for that info they got for free (now owned by Chicago-headquartered media group Tribune), YouTube’s audience contributed all but a very few of these music videos, and now they are going to charge us for them, and prevent downloading. Capitalist Bastards! Where is Karl Marx when you need him?
By the way, I finally got to Amazon’s rape-me method of pricing my CD’s. A month or so ago, I just stopped choosing Amazon as the source of my purchase and always bought from the resellers. Bingo! No more of the rape-me prices. Almost always $11.95 or lower now.
No matter, I still buy from the resellers, because I assume they are more likely to be mom and pop operations, and I will just continue to support them.
I also had long hair while I worked at EDS (until 1998)
When I was with EDS under the Perot regime we were not allowed to have long at all. No sideburns beyond the ear opening, no hair on the collar, no mustaches beyond the edge of the mouth, beards were forbidden. I left December 1980.
An article about American preppers is Australian MSM:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/the-moderate-minds-of-the-prepper-movement/5936208
“When I was with EDS under the Perot regime we were not allowed to have long at all.”
That was how they operated in places like Plano, TX, their HQ, and other sites in the South. In Maffachufetts nobody cared and there was no dress code, other than the ubiquitous “business casual.” Some hot dog execs came up from Plano in ’98 for a visit and I made sure to wear my hair down, with shit-kicker cowboy boots and a string tie (manglers told us to wear ties for that day). Also my Wild Bill Hickock mustache and goatee. (see what kind of dick I used to be?) So the manglers made sure I had busy work to do inside the data center, LOL. I still slipped out as they were leaving and said “Y’all come back now, y’hear?”
I was a tad pissed ’cause we’d get boner, I mean bonus checks, and they’d be for a grand but they’d take out at least half for the taxes before we got them. While the manglers would get the full amounts, $2,500-10,000 because they’d taken care of the taxes for them ahead of issuing the checks.
Now none of these places gives out bonus checks to low-on-the-totem-pole drones like us and none of them send us to training, either, which EDS used to do, and did for me several times, like for OpenVMS Performance Tuning and Windows NT.
Dint know how well off I was, I reckon. And then I remarried and moved up here to Vermont. Helped to raise two kids, and now they’re doing better and are better off than either of us ever was.
He moves in mysterious ways indeed.
Chuck wrote:
“Arrrgh! Net Video Hunter has stopped downloading music from YouTube.”
I used to use Download Helper, but suddenly that stopped working for most Youtube stuff. I tried Net Video Hunter but could never make it work. Oh well. No way will I pay $9.99 a month.
The chicks in that video are pretty cute. Nice skirts, didn’t like their tops that much – too baggy.
They’re all probably grannies and great-grannies by now.
Even the lovely Tina Charles is probably a grannie by now. I sure adored her 35 years ago… 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1hEl4hciSA
Just downloaded Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” (from 1968) on FF using NetVideoHunter w/no problem. I sign in to the Tube via my gmail login and since we got Comcast, the downloads take almost no time at all.
If I downloaded a ton of stuff every month, I’d have no problem paying the ten bucks.
I can hear the wind starting to howl again; drizzled rain here most of the day.
We have a Google Biz Apps account. Does that mean I get free Youtube downloads as long as I’m signed in?
I read Holderbama is now going to investigate the cop in NYC to see if there are any “civil rights” violations. Again, after no indictment. Odooshbag won’t stop till Whitely goes down. Not saying the cop was in the right, but using race to get him no matter what is wrong.
“We have a Google Biz Apps account. Does that mean I get free Youtube downloads as long as I’m signed in?”
I don’t know; it sure seems like you can. But you need some kind of download helper app in FF, as Chrome doesn’t seem to have any and I haven’t used IE in quite a while. NetVideoHunter works OK for me. I should try downloading without signing in…hang on a sec…yep…didn’t even have to sign in with google. Got a 1982 live “Locomotive Breath;” what a bunch of crazy bastards those guys were/are. Never saw them live, though.
I’ve also downloaded a bunch of Eli the Computer Guy vids on IT stuff; he’s pretty good; operates outta Baltimore.
“Feds balk at releasing docs showing IRS sharing tax returns with White House”
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/feds-balk-at-releasing-docs-showing-irs-sharing-tax-returns-with-white-house/article/2556890
Obola should be impeached today! He and his staff are the scum of the earth.
And then several IRS officials should be indicted.
“What did the President know and when did he know it?” by Howard Baker.
I think $120 is a pretty good price for a microfiltration system that filters down to 0.02 microns and is rated to filter 1,000,000 gallons of raw water at 7+ gallons/hour or 170 gallons/day. It’s rated at a log 5.5 reduction for viruses and much higher for bacteria and protists/cysts.
At $0.12 per 1,000 gallons treated, it blows away the alternatives, most of which are two or more orders of magnitude more expensive. I have one arriving today, which will go in our long-term preps, along with a couple of 5-gallon buckets to build the system.
That was how they operated in places like Plano, TX, their HQ, and other sites in the South
I started with EDS on December 1979, left November 1980. I worked at the office in San Antonio which was badly mismanaged. A couple of months after I left Ross came down, fired the manager and told the rest of the staff they had 60 days to move to Dallas or be laid off. All got laid off as no one wanted Dallas.
That was back in the days of IBM big Iron, VTAM, CICS, big hulking boxes with screens with lots of green, blue and red characters.
I was a tad pissed ’cause we’d get boner, I mean bonus checks,
Never got a bonus checks. Project I worked on went way over budget. The marketing guy considered the first sale, which was driving the project, a loss leader. Yeh, right. The manager, assistant manager, marketing chap and a couple of others were all buddies in the USAF at Randolph Brooks AFB working on the massive personnel system. They all retired within a few months of each other. The officer manager was first and quickly hired his buddies when they mustered out. The people were incompetent in the service and it carried over into the private sector.
There were some other people in the office working on something for Saint Joseph Hospital which was located in Dallas. At one point they claimed the project was done and was done under budget. Since EDS made a lot of money coming in under budget some of that excess was spent on the employees. The entire group got sent on a fully paid trip to the Bahamas for a week.
Two days after they all left the system crashed horribly. Massive data corruption from some errors in some of the programs. Myself and the other minions on the other project were then tasked to fix the hospital problem. Difficulty was that we had not ever used CICS, VTAM, RACF and all other manner of IBM acronyms. It was COBOL in which I was very fluent so I was able to find and fix some of the problems. Worked my ass off. When the members of the other team got back myself and the others were never thanked for our efforts and did not get any bonus for basically saving the contract.
I made several day trips to Dallas on Southwest. Had a ticket book. Just went to the airport, ripped out a ticket, spoke my name into a tape recorder and got on the plane. Grabbed a rental car and drove to Plano HQ. Nice place. Swimming pool, gym, free cafeteria, 18 hole golf course, running track, place was well maintained.
A couple of those trips back to SA I sat next to Ross himself. In the short time I talked with him I determined him to be an asshole that knew everything about everything.
Thus when a job with Burroughs came up I jumped at the opportunity. I had used Burroughs while in the USAF and was one of the “propeller heads” on the system. I knew the OS, compilers and utilities intimately and could write machine code. Became a support rep for Burroughs and supported several clients in the San Antonio area. One of those clients, a large commercial bank holding company (National Bancshares Corporation) [yes the spelling is correct], hired me. The account was where I spent most of my time anyway. Really enjoyed that job until the oil collapse in the late 80’s caused a lot of banks to fail resulting in mergers. NBC was one of the victims but I departed before the collapse as I saw the handwriting.
Some of my favorite secular Xmas songs:
“Merry Christmas from the Family” by Robert Earl Keen. He was a year behind me at good old Sharpstown High in Houston. He wrote this because growing up in Houston, he couldn’t relate to all the Christmas songs about snow, etc. There is a book based on the song available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P37xPiRz1sg
“Christmas in Hollis” by Run-DMC. Christmas in the ‘hood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR07r0ZMFb8
“Christmastime for the Jews” from Saturday Night Live.
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/christmastime-for-the-jews-song/n12006
For the more traditional, the two Christmas albums by Pentatonix, the a capella group are outstanding. For instrumental music, Laurence Juber’s “Winter Guitar” has some amazing arrangements by one of the premiere fingerstyle acoustic guitarists around.
Well, then not. I clicked the button to donate to Wikipedia. On the page where you enter your email address there was no option “don’t bombard me with spam”, but there was one to “accept our privacy policies”. I read them briefly, and they explicitly state that they will use my address to inform me of future fund raising activities as well as other activities of Wikimedia.
So…no donation…
Exactly the same with me. Separately, I unthinkingly got talked into signing up for Hilton rewards last time I was there, and I am bombarded with daily spam. I even called their telephone number but they said they could not remove me from their emails if I am an “Honors” member. I said to cancel the Honors memberhip. Nope. Can’t do that, either.
She basically hinted that since I cannot turn off junk mail that comes in the door, they are not going to turn off the email on the same grounds. We cry to be relieved of the burdens, and Congress skates.
I donated to Wikipedia two years ago, and have since received a entire two emails from them asking for more money. That’s one per year, well within my tolerance.
Same for me. I don’t remember the privacy policy thing. It just asked me for amount, one-time or ongoing, my email address, and how I wanted to pay. (I chose Amazon.) I’ve been donating in December for several years now, and don’t remember ever getting more than one email per year from them.
And I meant to say “first donated”. I send them $20 per year, and I by far get the better deal. I must reference them a dozen or more times per day.
Ok, if y’all say they don’t abuse the privilege, I’ll reconsider. I still dislike the fact that you cannot just opt out of their email list…
I’ve donated to Wikipedia for 3-4 years now and don’t get harassed. I get a thankyou and a begging e-mail about once a year. I’ll probably give them another $20 this week.
I get one or two thank-yous right after donating to Wikipedia. Don’t recall ever getting begging email, though I suppose it might have been flagged as spam.