09:50 – I’ll spend some time today closing out the business year. 2014 turned out to be a decent year, better than 2013, although not as much better as I’d hoped early in the year. 2015 should be better still, if the crick don’t rise.
Work on the prepping book continues. I’m not where I’d hoped to be as of now, although there’s nothing unusual about that. I know that I’ll never be completely happy with the book, and at some point I’ll just have to declare it finished and publish it. Nothing new there. My editor at O’Reilly/MAKE has had to drag every book I’ve ever written from me as I kicked and screamed and begged for just a little more time to work on it. The only difference with this one is that I’ll have to make that call myself.
My Chinese restaurateur friend tells me that this is the day more Americans eat Chinese food than any other day of the year — by many multiples. He does not know why New Year’s Eve has that effect, but he is very happy about it. They are staffed to the hilt today and will get more take out orders tonight than for the whole of an average month.
I change all the batteries in everything today. Whether they need it or not.
My brother hosted a Chinese banquet for the family at one of Adelaide’s best restaurants: The House of Chow on 30/12. He’s retiring in a month, our younger nephew and his wife are going to teach in Malaysia for 18 months, my elder niece is about to pop child number two, my sister is about to turn 65, and our elder nephew’s girlfriend from Norway is visiting. Since he’s got plenty of dough he paid the bill, and the food was wonderful. I haven’t found many really good Chinese restaurants in Adelaide yet, but they abound in Canberra.
I think I’ll have to think of an excuse to take the family back there – it’s a bit pricey but not insano, and the tucker was magic.
If I ran in to this lady I’d be on my best behaviour:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-31/old-gun-catalogue/5993426
I change batteries when the gadget stops working.
“… our younger nephew and his wife are going to teach in Malaysia for 18 months…”
I’d avoid air travel in that region if I was them.
Princess just split for Montreal’s new year festivities, driven up by Mommy again, but she’ll take the bus back later this week, supposedly. Then I gotta drive her and her harp back up some afternoon, whatever. Gives me a chance to recon the border security again. I may take pics and vids and save them for posting on one of my web sites later.
Sunny with blue skies and 17 degrees, no wind. Out to stack firewood later.
They’re flying Malaysian Airlines. Not my first choice.
Any other airline involves a stopover somewhere.
Man, I’d spring for the stopovers; the air travel stats in that area are abysmal now. Or take a boat. Geez.
Boats aren’t entirely safe either.
BTW, happy new year you guys. 0605 am 1/1/2015.
“Boats aren’t entirely safe either.”
Pirates? Weather down around there apparently wilder than up here?
And a most happy and blessed new year to our friends in Oz. Some of us will never forget how y’all were with us in both world wars, Korea and ‘Nam. Ditto youse up in O Kanada.
Common sense on the NYC situation:
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/12/daniel-zimmerman/nypd-virtual-work-stoppage-citizens-still-disarmed/#more-344735
I’d even go so far as to say screw messing with the violent crimes, too. Their solution record ain’t that great in the first place, and in the second place, why not let us take care of these situations. Eyewitness-guilty to a capital crime? Whack the bugger on the spot.
That goes without saying, of course, for any positively identified lawyers, politicians, and financial speculators. Also media talking heads and NY Times staffers and editors.
Achtung, MrAtoz!
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/cold-snow-to-invade-the-desert/39714926
Yikes!
I am cancelling my trip out there this weekend; brrrrrr….!
Darwin at work but sad…
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/30/us/idaho-walmart-shooting-accident-mother-toddler/index.html?c=homepage-t
what kind of idiot has one in the barrel and the safety off? Always ready.
Did they say if the gun had a safety? Revolver? Semi-auto with squeeze safety?
Dat story done gone viral all over the net now; the pathos, the bloody shirt waving, etc., that the anti’s love to play with.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/12/robert-farago/two-year-old-shoots-mother-idaho-walmart/
“Did they say if the gun had a safety? Revolver? Semi-auto with squeeze safety?”
Who would give us this information? The police? The nooz media? We know how that works by now; they either don’t bother telling us or they have no clue on firearms nomenclature anyway. We’ll probably never know but I doubt it was a revolver, unless the hammer was already cocked somehow or got cocked when the kid pulled it out. I’m guessing semi-auto with safety/s off and one in the chamber and somehow the hammer came down on it.
Dat story done gone viral all over the net now; the pathos, the bloody shirt waving, etc., that the anti’s love to play with.
Yeah, it had to be the nasty ol’ gun’s fault. Couldn’t possibly be that the mother was stupid enough to let the lil’ tyke play around inside a purse where she carried a loaded gun just to keep the kid quiet.
I think we have a female Darwin award winner that made it just under the wire for 2014.
Study: Men are just more likely to be idiots
Obviously not a Darwin award winner if it was her kid who shot her.
You have to feel sorry for the kid. Once he’s old enough to understand he’ll probably never get over the guilt even though it was her fault.
“Study: Men are just more likely to be idiots”
Well, it’s true. In terms of IQ, women cluster closer to the mean than do men. (That is, sigma for women is smaller.) That means that nearly all of the super bright are male, as are nearly all of the super-stupid. Of course, there’s a lower cut-off but not an upper one.
“Once he’s old enough to understand he’ll probably never get over the guilt even though it was her fault.”
It struck me that there was zero mention of a dad anywhere in the stories I’ve seen so fah. What a dumbass way to go, and of all places to go, too.
In any case, the usual media and political suspects are waving that flag around a lot, as was to be expected. The main group bitching about the guns complains about being shut out of the NRA’s tweet circle or sumfin while they block dissidents from their FaceCrack page. Typical libtard lefty ass-hats. As the title of one of Nat Hentoff’s books was a while back: “Free Speech for Me But Not For Thee.” They’re notorious for that and it was constant throughout all the years of AO-Hell, CompuServe, and UseNet forums yea unto the present day.
In pushing radio buttons during the drive home this evening, I got a few seconds of Joeshit the Progtard on NPR “news” interrogating someone about firearms ownership in the US. “Doesn’t this tragedy show that personal ownership of firearms is a public concern and not just a personal rights concern? After all, there are public social effects.” (paraphrased) And then I found another channel. I’ve heard this played out before: the progtard gun grabber by choice picks an “opposing viewpoint spokesman” with very little interview experience, who can be pushed around on the air, but if the victim is unexpectedly well-spoken the progtard cuts him off.
Well if we just had strict gun control like the Canadians then this sort of thing….
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-30627630
never mind.
We all look forward to the coming of the new year when at 12:00 tonight we shall step out front to hoot and holler and blow horns. We’ll listen to like antics around the neighborhood and hear the sounds of firearms being responsibly discharged into the air, mostly in the barrios south of us. As usual I’ll remain on the porch just under the roof of the house.
I’ll be asleep.
I’ll be staying up. My wife, daughter, and mother-in-law are out for a First Night to-do about 25 miles away. Probably my wife will be able to get back home without incident, but she’s a terrible driver under the best circumstances. I’ll be waiting for either the front door to open at whatever hour or for her to call and say she had an(other) accident and needs me to go get them.
“We’ll listen to like antics around the neighborhood and hear the sounds of firearms being responsibly discharged into the air, mostly in the barrios south of us.”
Very nice. Not much happens around here. We don’t expect to hear jack. “Responsibly discharged into the air,” you say? Santa mierda, amigo, quédate bajo ese techo!
On va faire la même chose ici, juste au cas où.
“…but if the victim is unexpectedly well-spoken the progtard cuts him off.”
Reminds me of the countless talking-head political shows during the 80s, 90s, etc. when a lone “conservative” sacrificial goat would be outnumbered by three or more libtards, Dems, progs, whatever and would still routinely kick their asses. The late Bob Novak and Patrick Buchanan were/are greatly skilled at this. They basically laughed at their interlocutors throughout.
“…never mind.”
The anti’s don’t get it, no matter what. Strict gun control just makes things worse. They have that in CT and yet we had that horrible atrocity at the school. There’s always gonna be a lone nutball or somebody who just suddenly goes off the deep end. These get the viral nooz treatment but they’re gnat’s farts in populations of several hundred millions, where more peeps die in highway wrecks or accidents at home; IIRC, falling is the most frequent cause of death and injury in the latter. When are we gonna regulate and/or ban Happy Motoring vehicles and ladders?
“I’ll be waiting for either the front door to open at whatever hour or for her to call and say she had an(other) accident and needs me to go get them.”
That sucks, hombre. I suppose we gotta fret a little over our daughter up in Montreal but she’s 22, six feet tall and over 200 pounds. And with friends. We assume our son and DIL and grandkids are at home, but who knows? They gave the five-year-old a $400 Lego set and an iPad for Xmas and I just saw on FaceCrack, where DIL posts EVERYTHING, that she pierced the three-year-old girl’s ears today. WTF? Let me inform Grandma of this right now…almost forgot…see what her reaction is…OK…it’s “a little too weird” for her and “we’re not talking the same class here…” Whatever that means. I told her it’s fucked up. Both cases.
I must be living in a different dimension of sumfin.
“Hell”, I think it is known as. Who knew it is in fact, the here and now, as total oblivion is the only thing awaiting us after this journey through it.
In my reading of trade news, was the story of a guy at Tribune in Chicago who left a few days ago. There was no exit interview, so he wrote his own and posted it.
http://www.designhawg.com/next/
Lots of thank-you’s to wade through, but a few of his parting shots are worth the read (if you are into media).
His criticisms are not, I believe, applicable only to media, because his complaints are the same stuff we hear here from Dave and SteveF’s daily slavery. And I have been around long enough — before this short-term focus stuff was firmly established by the courts — to know that he is not altogether correct in his assessment that it is the focus on short-term which causes all of our ills. Decades before the short-term became King, guys at the top were running the organizations I worked for, into the ground and insuring a dismal future. More to blame IMO, is top-down management, — which has been around far, far longer, — instead of letting people do their jobs, and watching their cream rise to the top.
He speaks no truer words about the media than this:
”And any plan created in 2014 that is has print as the core profit center is not a plan at all. It’s an obituary.”
How anyone in media management can miss the fact that, just as consolidation is sex to the 1%, so combining print, broadcast, and all things digital together into a new critical mass is the only way for the old media to survive, thrive, and reproduce; it would benefit new media greatly as digital still continues growing.
But yet Tribune itself, Scripps, and others are separating their old media efforts from the new, trying to jettison declining old media as they are blind and still think in terms of only ONE profit center, one product, one source of revenue. In an age of multitasking, the guys at the top these days certainly cannot multitask. It is the combining of all of them that would breathe new life into each of them.
As this guy says: workers know this. However, top management cannot even conceive of it, let alone permit it to happen.
Happy New Year to all.
Eh, it’s not that bad. Probably. Most times she drives the car she doesn’t have an accident. Even when driving at night.
Mrs. OFD has been in three minor accidents over the years, fender-benders, sliding off the downhill driveway at our earlier house on ice, etc. No injuries.
I’ve had an operator’s license for 45 years with only one accident with me as the driver, not my fault by a long shot; hit by a carload of drunks, their car wrecked and just a few scratches on my gf’s car. I managed to sideswipe them rather than pile straight into them as they ran a red light right in front of me in the wee hours on a Boston highway.
In other nooz, Ima gon go ahead with online study of CSS3/HTML5, WordPress, and PHP/MySQL, plus InDesign. If I can learn dead medieval languages I can learn this stuff and hopefully make a few bucks. No more workin’ fo da Man; too old to eat shit.
Happy New Year to us all! And best wishes and regahds to all here.
Happy New Year from the Land of Sugar!
We passed into 2015 with the sounds of hundred of kids shooting off mortars and whatnot into our high rent neighborhood. What a country! No fires thank goodness.
Happy New Year from the Pacific time zone. May the new year treat all of us well.
Happy New Year to y’all!
One of the few family traditions we have that still survives into the late teenage years. Everybody (including the kids, who aren’t bad cooks for teenage boys) plans one course to cook. The courses are staggered out over the evening, with big breaks between, when we all play good old-fashioned board games. Lots of (loud) music, to drown out the early fireworks, because one of the dogs hates fireworks. All in front of a roaring fireplace. A pleasant evening for all, even the younglings. Even the youngest (17) enjoyed himself, despite being in the depths of the “sullen teenager” phase. Heck, he even conversed with his parents, which is as rare as hen’s teeth these days.
Well, we got three flakes in south Vegas on NYE. A blizzard for here.