08:30 – Science kit sales continue to be strong, at least for this time of year. We’re running low on both biology and forensics kits, so over the next couple of days I’ll build new batches of each. We’re currently shipping kits at a rate of about 30/month, and increasing. We expect that rate to peak at about 300 kits/month in August, so for now we’re building just enough finished kits to keep reasonable stock levels while we focus the rest of our attention on building subassemblies for the summer rush.
12:02 – I’ve spent the morning doing miscellany. I managed to get 30 of the regulated chemical bags for the biology kits assembled. Then I filed the annual report for our LLC and wrote a $200 check to the Secretary of State for the protection money it demands. Since I had the corporate checkbook out, I paid an invoice on some stuff that arrived Monday. Which made me think: remember when invoices used to say something like “2% 10, net 30”? Remember when the accounting department used to hold off paying invoices until the last moment so the company would get the benefit of the float? You seldom see discounts for quick payment nowadays. Every invoice I get just says “Net 30”. With interest rates where they are, discounts and slow paying are pretty pointless. I simply pay invoices as soon as the shipment has arrived and been checked in.
When I returned the corporate checkbook to Barbara’s office, I happened to look in the bedroom door. The bed pillows were all pillaged, which is usual. All of our Border Collies have arranged the pillows to their liking, so they can lie on the bed and look out the window while having a comfortable place to rest their heads. But today Colin had done more than rearrange the pillows; he’d shredded the corner of one and pulled out some of the stuffing. I chastised him and he slunk away.
Then I went out on the front porch to put the new mail on the mailbox. There was already a note on the front of the mailbox to let the mailman know there were boxes awaiting pickup inside. That note was held on the mailbox with two clothespins, the tops of which held the lid of the mailbox up. The entire mailbox was full to overflowing with small sticks, grass, leaves, moss, and other assorted biomass. Obviously, spring has arrived early and a bird had decided this would be a good place to build her nest. So I cleared out the nesting materials, reclamped the note and envelopes to keep the lid of the box down, and came back inside. Colin was standing there watching me the whole time. When I came back in, Colin claimed that he’d shredded the pillow and removed stuffing to help the bird gather good nesting materials. Yeah, right.
This description of today down there sounds suspiciously like my own days when the spouse is gone for long periods and I end up talking with, and notice I said “with,” not “to”, the cats and the dog. Also caught myself talking to birds out in the shrubbery beside our kitchen window. We also tend to notice a lotta tiny objects and events that otherwise would go by the board, you more than me, probably. Although I may come close due to the years of mil-spec and cop training and experience.
Here at work I am often long periods with only machines and I catch myself talking to them, too.
Cue up that 60’s novelty song…they’re coming to take me away, ha, ha…
Colin claimed that he’d shredded the pillow and removed stuffing to help the bird gather good nesting materials. Yeah, right.
Colin, like most dogs, has a good heart for all God’s creatures.
BTW, my senior range instructor, while giving us instructions on how to clear a house of a potential intruder, recommended that we get a dog instead. Dogs will go immediately to any intruder in the house. Failing that, call and wait for the cops unless a loved one is screaming inside the house.
The other way that SRI said to tell if you have a home invasion going on is to leave two window shades up all the time. The first thing all burglars do is lower the window shades to get privacy. If you drive up to the home and your window shades are down, voila, you have an intruder. Call the cops and wait.
Which is why I love seeing movies and tee-vee shows where someone comes back to their house or apartment and sees the door ajar and clearly someone might still be in there, but they go on in anyway to check it out.
Yeah, for shit like that; call the local huckleberries and let them earn their pay. Unless you’re John Fucking Wayne and armed to the teeth and have practiced and worked building-clearing stuff for years. Let them get shivved or shot. And from what I’ve seen of their tactics, that is an all-too-likely scenario.
And the dog doesn’t even have to be a Rotty or German Shepherd or pit bull, either; just a noisy barker mutt, a poodle or dachsund will do nicely.
Yep, pull shades up and put lights and radios, tee-vee, whatever, on random timers. Get sorta tight with neighbors for stuff like this; team up.
Hire MacCaulay Culkin as an advisor.
If he’s outta rehab or jail or whatever. Busted for bullshit narc charges and then they tried to get him to dime out the King of Pop, but that was a bust.
I’m not sure I think much of your range instructor’s advice. Lesson One in the Funhouse at Gunsite was that if you move, you die. If you hear an intruder in the house, lie in wait for him and shoot him from cover or at least concealment. I’ve told Barbara that if she’s ever alone in the house and hears what she thinks is an intruder to close the bedroom door, get behind the bed, and call 911 and let them know she’s armed and they’d better arrive with lights and siren going and announce themselves. Then she waits, with a shotgun pointed at the bedroom door. Any intruder who opens that door is going to meet five rounds of buckshot and three slugs going the opposite direction.
We probably need to distinguish here between coming up on your residence and suspecting or knowing someone unauthorized is inside it, or you’re already inside it yourself and now someone unauthorized is invading. Two different scenarios.
Yeah, but if you suspect or know that someone unauthorized is in your residence, you’re crazy if you enter it. Call 911.
There are many, many scenarios for a home invasion. The most prevalent, according to the SRI, is that no one is home and you drive up to the home. Call the police and wait.
If you have loved ones in the house, send in a dog first. If you do not have a dog then you can send in yourself but you will probably die as you go through a doorway.
My former USMC son says that the adrenaline while clearing a house goes down after first 60 homes or so. A little. He also advises using a platoon of Marines and that it is an incredibly noisy task with everyone yelling “clear” at the top of their lungs. He also advises using a M4 rather than a M249. Something about a M249 has a open bolt feeder and when you drop it, it tends to empty the 200 round drum. I’m sure that he has no experience in this.
Napoleon XIV
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyXCkjMBK70
Being at a college radio station at the time, we were the only station in the area that would play the song. Everyone else felt it was insensitive to people with real mental problems—even though it climbed the charts to #3. Even the big gun stations in NYC at the time, WABC and WMCA, banned the record, and teen protestors had no effect on the ban. The record charts of those stations continued to show that record on them, even though it was never played.
Few people can understand that the float is a red herring. The gain for the month you start is cancelled by the loss in the month you end it (assuming the average figures do not change dramatically). Not many businesses (or people) have an interest-bearing account for eternity.
Waiting to the last minute to cover an account is a game that sometimes does not pay off. I remember one day when I arrived at BASF, the people in cash management did not show up for class. Turns out they had lost the Internet overnight, and were literally going bonkers, because they could not transfer cash to accounts to cover their positions at the last second. Internet was not restored until after the close of business hours. They lost a lot of money in fees and penalties that day.
Forgot to mention that my former USMC was usually the second guy in the front door of a house that they were clearing. The first guy knocked the door down with a pipe tool. My son carried a M249 and for some reason no one wanted to be in front of him. Something about a 200 round drum and an 800 round/min fire rate with an open bolt feeder.
My son also says that an M4 pressing in your back sappy plate was an incredible incentive to move forward through the door.
Napoleon XIV
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyXCkjMBK70
Being at a college radio station at the time, we were the only station in the area that would play the song. Everyone else felt it was insensitive to people with real mental problems—even though it climbed the charts to #3. Even the big gun stations in NYC at the time, WABC and WMCA, banned the record, and teen protestors had no effect on the ban. The record charts of those stations continued to show that record on them, even though it was never played.
I first heard that song on the Dr. Demento show. Of which I was not allowed to listen to but did it anyway with a little transistor radio. http://www.drdemento.com/
“I end up talking with, and notice I said “with,” not “to”, the cats and the dog.”
Yeah, I wonder if this is part of encroaching geezerhood. If there’s any critter around, I tend to talk to it. If there’s no critter around, I talk to myself. So does my wife. What drives me nuts is when she talks to herself and I’m in the room, because I never know whether to listen or not…
Could you tell if Colin had eaten any of the stuffing? During some research I was doing I found that the stuffing in some pillows and toys is treated with a fire-retardant or anti-fungal/anti-bacterial chemical, and when that hits stomach acids it converts the stuffing into a gel that clogs up the instestines or otherwise causes the intestines to die.
http://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/stuffedtoys.asp
Some truth, at least. Not sure how much to worry.
He’s always been a shredder, but he doesn’t eat any of the stuffing. He just scatters it around the bed or the floor.
“…did it anyway with a little transistor radio.”
Same here; crappy little radio but able to pick up the Boston stations clear as a bell, and in the summuh I could get, due to that atmospheric bounce effect, stations in West Virginia and Chicago, plus Toronto and Montreal. Dr. Demento, WBCN with Peter Wolf and others, and back when WBZ in Boston at night rocked, Dick Summer, Carl DeSuze, and Bruce Bradley’s Beach Blanket Bingo Bonanza.
“…What drives me nuts is when she talks to herself and I’m in the room, because I never know whether to listen or not…”
I don’t know how long you’ve been married and it’s none of my biz, but my sad truth is that you should always listen, even though you really don’t wanna most of the time. My other sad little informational tidbit is that they are human tape recorders and have all your talk, including during sleep and other mumbling, backed up to their internal hard drives. Forever.
I have never talked to myself before, but since my son moved back to IU-town, I live by myself in Tiny House, and most days I MUST talk to myself. Recording the weather for the radio project each day, I found that if I don’t talk, it takes a good 10 minutes of warming up to get the voice working properly. So I just talk to myself from the time I get up until I finish the recording. That does the job.
The geezer problems start when we talk to ourselves, argue with ourselves, and then lose the arguments.
New Pope is a Jesuit.
Speaking of geezers pope from Argentina age 76
Jorge Mario Bergoglio
now Francis I
Yeah, but is it a 76-year-old *male* jesuit or a 76-year-old *female* jesuit. Come to think of it, what race? This is the black pope, right?
He’s actually Italian. Parents emigrated to Argentina where he was born.
Once again, Al Jazeera has the best coverage.
From Wikipedia (at least at the moment I looked)…
He is another homophobic bastard indeed.
Yes, gone now.
…back when WBZ in Boston at night rocked, Dick Summer, Carl DeSuze, and Bruce Bradley’s Beach Blanket Bingo Bonanza.
Wow–somebody else who remembers Bruce Bradley’s Beach Blanket Bingo Bonanza! Here is Bruce doing his nightly show from that era in a studio with 4 x 16-inch turntables—pretty extravagant. The most I ever worked with was 3, and there were only 2 in most. All broadcast turntables had 16-inch platters in that day, instead of the 12-inchers you probably had/have at home.
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2010/03/14/wbz-newsradio-1030-history-%E2%80%93-1960%E2%80%B2s/
Dick Summer spent a lot of years in Indianapolis before taking over nights at WBZ. He did evenings at WIBC from a drive-in restaurant called Merrill’s Hi-Decker, where he started a nightly ‘make-it or break-it’ with headlights in the ‘car hop’ area as the voting tool. Actually, when it was break-it, he did not really break the record that had lost, as the first few times he did that, the record later became a hit. Very unreliable music tastes in that Merrill’s Hi-Decker audience.
Summer then moved over to the radio side of the TV station I worked at in Indy—WISH (where, during my tenure, announcers were never allowed to say the word “wish” but had to spell out the letters, always). At WISH, Summer began the obligatory dance party program all TV stations had in that era. Engineers I worked with, said he sent an aircheck of his daily radio show once every week to WBZ for 2 years before getting the overnight gig that made his name a household word in the US East.
When WBZ moved to all-talk, Summer went to New York and WNBC, which was still music at that time, but he now resides in Philly.
And don’t forget WBZ newsman Streeter Stuart. Best name for a news guy I ever heard. Except for Wally Ballou.
Well, I called it in several places online that they’d pick either the Austrian Cardinal Schonborn or they’d pick another Italian, seeing as how the vast majority of the cardinals are Italian, so I consider myself vindicated even if he’s from Argentina. At 76 he is clearly a placeholder until they get who they really want for the big events coming up.
I’ll check out that link, Chuck in Tiny Town, later, when I can crank the sound. Thanks!
“He’s always been a shredder, but he doesn’t eat any of the stuffing. He just scatters it around the bed or the floor.”
Have you ever asked him how he’d like sleeping out on the porch?
dkreck wrote:
“now Francis I”
Actually, Francis. The next Francis will be Francis II.
“Remember when the accounting department used to hold off paying invoices until the last moment so the company would get the benefit of the float?”
One of my pals was CFO of a small Adelaide company in the mid Eighties, and one of his tricks was to pay 1/10th of an account on time. The entity that was owed money would chase it up after a while, and after a while my friend would pay the debt in full, claiming that he’d misplaced the decimal point. Some of the debts were in the tens of thousands so I suppose it was worth doing.
Just saw that WBZ link from Chuck in Tiny Town; brought back memories galore; yeah; I mos def recall the big blackout; we were sitting around the supper table. Later, yep, only I had a transistor radio and could hear stuff. I’d forgotten about Gary LaPierre; but also remember weatherman Don Kent, and now that hootenanny show, too. By ’69 I was sixteen and very much out and about between Framingham and Boston; saw Led Zep only three miles from our house at the old Carousel Tent Theater. Dropped lotsa acid. Saw the nightly KIA counts on the six o’clock nooz with Cronkite, and also the Huntley-Brinkley Report.
Where did the years all go….
And Greg’s redhead gf has made the nooz down in Oz:
“Julia Gillard has proposed an overhaul of Australia’s media laws, including a watchdog to oversee complaints against journalists and new rules to prevent a further concentration of media ownership.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/9924871/Julia-Gillard-proposes-Australian-media-laws-overhaul.html
@Bob. “This is the black pope, right?”
Nope. It is actually extremely unlikely for there to be a black Argentinean. There was very little need to “import” cheap labour in most of the South American countries except Brazil. The Spaniards and Italians liked to commingle with local natives a lot and that generated the “mestizos” which did the hard and menial work. Slavery was abolished early on and any blacks would have been washed-out entirely by today.
@Lynn re Win8
I bought an HP laptop recently with Win8. It was very frustrating at the beginning but I actually like it now. My other laptops are mainly Win7 and I think Win8 is a bit faster. I hate full screen applications but you can pretty much work and play on the desktop all day without going to the “metro” side of things. I use the Windows key and D at the beginning to start the desktop and mostly forget about the metro side of things except for when I play the occasional Solitaire. You can easily jump between the two modes using the left side of the screen. Finding system things is a bit awkward since you have to go thru Metro but I don’t spend all my time doing system tunning so I’m OK with it. As usual, it is a matter of familiarisation with were things are now “hidden”. We’ve been there before with most previous version of Win. It is a bit less fun this time because there is a new simultaneous UI you have to get used to as well.
Well Marcelo, don’t read Wikipedia, no indians where here when we had mass immigration, my parents as example in 1950.
Before that, 1900 to 1930, give or take a couple of years.
Also, surely Andrew Jackson was not American, isn’t it? He was Irish if Bergoglio is Italian, give me a break
I was referring to the earlier comment that pope Frank is a jesuit. The leader of the SJ has been called the “black pope” because of his black vestments and because at times he’s had power equal to or greater than the official “white pope”.
It is actually extremely unlikely for there to be a black Argentinean.
Argentina had few native tribes when the Spanish moved in. They pride themselves on being the most “European” of the South Americans. They are, however, perceived by the rest of Latin America as being somewhat arrogant.
I was on a cruse that stopped in Buenos Aires, and the areas we drove through looked like Continental cities. They still worship Evita. They still covet the Falklands. They still have a currency crisis every little bit. (One is on right now.)
One irritating note from the Papal Conclave coverage. They kept saying that the College of Cardinals would elect one of them as Pope. That was about 99.999999999% probable. However, any Roman Catholic male is eligible, even if married. They would have to become celibate if married. IIRC, the practice was to send your wife to a nunnery to live.
My other laptops are mainly Win7 and I think Win8 is a bit faster.
Win8 should be faster than Win7 since MS dropped the Aero interface from win7. Aero requires a huge amount of GPU and a certain amount of CPU.
OFD wrote:
“Julia Gillard has proposed an overhaul of Australia’s media laws, including a watchdog to oversee complaints against journalists and new rules to prevent a further concentration of media ownership.”
Yeah. The gist of it is “Say and write nice things about me or I’ll put you over my knee and give you a good spanking.” Makes me think about starting my own newspaper… 🙂
This just shows how dangerous smart atheists are.
ech said:
“However, any Roman Catholic male is eligible, even if married. They would have to become celibate if married. IIRC, the practice was to send your wife to a nunnery to live.”
Hm, how did the Borgias do it?
“I was referring to the earlier comment that pope Frank is a jesuit. The leader of the SJ has been called the “black pope” because of his black vestments and because at times he’s had power equal to or greater than the official “white pope”.”
Your statement was: …Come to think of it, what race? This is the black pope, right?
I am quite linear in thinking. My IQ must be disastrous. I did consider your use of “black” as quite unusual but then, I really do not know what the current politically correct term is in the US to address that part of your population.
I knew he didn’t mean black, literally. Apart from that I didn’t get it either.
The end is nigh…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-14/bankers-winning-the-battle-losing-the-war/4573260
Would a married lay person have to become celibate if elected Pope? Marriage is a sacrament in the Roman Rite. Married Episcopal priests who convert to Catholicism are allowed to remain married, but they cannot remarry if their wife dies.
Of course, it’s moot for a while…
I was kind of hoping they’d elect, say, a 32-year-old lesbian.
Speaking of electing, why shouldn’t every member of the church get a vote?
Actually, they should have elected me as pope. I wouldn’t even have to have left Winston-Salem. In a month, I’d have defrocked all the priests and bishops, sold off the entire assets of the church, and disestablished it.
As my pope name, I’d have taken Robert Bruce Thompson the Last.
Actually, they should have elected me as pope.
Nah, you’d look silly in a robe.
“… they should have elected me as pope. ”
Sorry, Bob; ya gotta be a Catholic. If you staht now, you can check out the local RCIA* classes in your area and get confirmed/received into the Church; this new guy can’t last forever.
*Roman Catholic Initiation for Adults
“I’d have defrocked all the priests and bishops…”
And the nuns? 🙂
I wonder if the guys wearing the more elaborate robes have mini air conditioners, like the astronauts…
Thanks for the disgusting image of the morning.
No, I’d insist that they keep their frocks on.
I hope you didn’t lose your breakfast…
Since you’ve suggested in the past that we all fly in the nude as a security precaution I thought you’d have a tougher constitution.
I remember “The Flying Nun” ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnhgpVb-u5s ). I would fly with her anytime.
I never could stand Sally Field. She’s a whining, nasty … What’s the word?
I suffered through Brothers & Sisters with Barbara despite Field’s presence, because Emily was in it. But now I can watch Emily in Reven8e. I adore Emily, and have since her teenage role in Everwood. But it’s interesting to watch her as a grown woman, too.