09:25 – Barbara’s been gone 48 hours. Surprisingly, Colin seems to be doing pretty well. He’s not pestering any more than usual, nor demanding that I Do Something about Barbara being missing. Like most Border Collies, Duncan and Malcolm were one-person dogs, and that person was Barbara. They tolerated me. When Barbara and I were both out of the house and I came home alone, Duncan and Malcolm would bark like crazy to celebrate Barbara’s return. When they saw it was just me, they’d say, “Oh, it’s just you” and go back to watching/listening for Barbara’s return. Colin seems to be a two-person Border Collie, and he’s happy as long as at least one of us is with him.
I ran myself flat out of the CK01B chemistry kits this morning. Fortunately, I have everything I need for a dozen more sitting on the shelf, so it’s just a matter of boxing them up. We’re also down to four of the BK01 biology kits as of this morning, so I’ll get another dozen or two built over the next couple of days. Come to think of it, I’m out of the iodine solution, so I’ll have to make up another two liters of that and fill bottles before I can build more kits.
Our thoughts are with the flooding victims in Colorado. I just read an article that mentioned that evacuations were voluntary, but those who decide not to evacuate their homes are being warned that they could be without water and power for weeks to months. Given that many roads and bridges have been utterly destroyed and will require months to years to be rebuilt, those folks may literally have to hike out if they change their minds. And, of course, emergency medical care will be unavailable or at least very slow in arriving.
Yes, the situation is Colorado is horrible. Never live in a ravine, they are there for a reason. I suspect that the death count will go way up.
If you want to read a story of absolute desperation, try “Isaac’s storm”. It is about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas that killed over 6,000 people:
http://www.amazon.com/Isaacs-Storm-Deadliest-Hurricane-History/dp/0375708278/
Looks like the internet sales tax is back on track:
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/322243-house-gop-takes-step-toward-internet-sales-tax-legislation
I predict an utter disaster here. I live in 77479 but outside of Sugar Land but none of the retailers can figure this out. They all, including Amazon, charge me 8.75% instead of the 6.75% sales tax.
If they are going to mandate charging sales tax across state lines then it should be only the state base sales tax. And the new incoming federal sales tax.
A lesson there for us all; alternative power of some sort; access to water; and food storage, plus a means of heating and cooking. Enough for months. We’re working on it.
And the taxes; more and more coming our way, plus ObummerCare. The regime, like other slowly collapsing regimes and empires before it in history, is determined to squeeze out of us as much as possible before it finally goes under. We are seeing examples of that in Cyprus and Greece. While the rulers stage wag-the-dog scenarios and bang the war drums to distract their populations from the burgeoning disasters at home.
53 here todayand mostly cloudy, a nice breeze; starting to feel more like fall.
I’ve been following the Navy Yard shooting. Douche libs are already screeching for all guns to be collected. They can’t even show a little sympathy for the lives lost. I’m sure the shooter(s) will turn out to be lefty demo Mooslim types:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/16/police-responding-report-shots-washington-navy-yar/?1
Once again, this is what happens when armed wolves have free run among unarmed sheep. The news reports have at least made a point of saying that very, very few people in the building were armed.
Tweets are that the deceased shooter is ID’d as Aaron Alexis, ex-Navy, age 34, with previous firearms violations in TX. How reliable this is we don’t know yet. There had been reports of one to two other shooters; the cops and military have to comb a rabbit warren of buildings over some acreage down there; I don’t envy them. As we all know, DC, Detroit, Chicago, MA, etc., all have terribly restrictive firearms laws, regs, and ordinances and this is where the violent shit happens nonstop. Same deal over in the UK and down in Oz. Disarm the sheep and let the wolves run free and pretend that the sheepdogs, not border collies but poodles and beagles, can and will do the job of protecting them.
They’re saying 13 dead so far; dunno how many wounded.
This is just what the regime ordered; another mass shooting incident to fan the anti-gun crap again. Makes ya wonder….
Makes ya wonder….
Better check the sales of “The Catcher in the Rye” in DC.
How is it that in these shootouts in military installations, nobody is ever armed? Every person in uniform should have a firearm and then some. They think no enemy will ever penetrate one of those places on US soil?
The government AND the military brass are incompetent when 13 people can be taken out with no resistance.
I was just talking about this with our mailman, who used to be in the service. He said that when they were on guard duty they were armed but were not issued ammunition for their weapons.
So when the mailman and his colleagues were on duty, they were NOT actually armed, unless any of them was smart enough to bring his or her own ammo. Jesus wept.
Chuck’s question is a good one; WTF? Reports are that only a tiny handful of people on the site are armed. WTF? And I agree wholeheartedly with him; this is a bad joke when that many folks can be killed with little or no resistance, AGAIN, on a military installation. Either that or it’s a “false-flag” operation designed for some other purpose.
The usual suspects are already howling about our violent gun culture and blah, blah, blah. Feeding off corpses, like the demented vultures they are. As one of my long-time e-correspondents has said: you will never see one of these capers go down in a Hells Angels clubhouse.
How ridiculously insane can life in this country get? We don’t educate kids to even read and write, 140 million employed people support 175 million unemployed, no one possesses privacy anymore–except people who never use the Internet or cell phones,–cops and TSA knowingly use excessive force on grandma and grandpa, and the damned military doesn’t even have guns to stop invaders. Perfect! But we can go bug Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria until their friends the Saudi’s are motivated to fly jetloads of people into skyscrapers. Gawd how dumb ARE the people in Washington? We need family farmers and mom and pop business owners representing us in DC, instead of lawyers! At least they possess common sense that the lawyers seem to have had lobotomized.
How ridiculously insane can life in this country get? We don’t educate kids to even read and write, 140 million employed people support 175 million unemployed, no one possesses privacy anymore–except people who never use the Internet or cell phones,–cops and TSA knowingly use excessive force on grandma and grandpa, and the damned military doesn’t even have guns with ammo to stop invaders. Perfect! But we can go bug Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria until their friends the Saudi’s are motivated to fly jetloads of people into skyscrapers. Gawd how dumb ARE the people in Washington? We need family farmers and mom and pop business owners representing us in DC, instead of idiot lawyers! At least they possess common sense that the lawyers seem to have had lobotomized.
Just had one of those disappearing posts. It was a rant that basically agrees with OFD.
Lemme try once more.
“Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!”
If I did—where is it?
Lemme quote myself and see if that works.
“How ridiculously insane can life in this country get? We don’t educate kids to even read and write, 140 million employed people support 175 million unemployed, no one possesses privacy anymore–except people who never use the Internet or cell phones,–cops and TSA knowingly use excessive force on grandma and grandpa, and the damned military doesn’t even have guns with ammo to stop invaders. Perfect! But we can go bug Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria until their friends the Saudi’s are motivated to fly jetloads of people into skyscrapers. Gawd how dumb ARE the people in Washington? We need family farmers and mom and pop business owners representing us in DC, instead of idiot lawyers! At least they possess common sense that the lawyers seem to have had lobotomized.”
Nope. It refuses to let me say what I want. Must be some kind of censorship going on. I put my comment in quotes and italicized it. It still refuses to appear, although it goes through the motions of accepting it. It just never displays.
This has really got me intrigued. Let me divide it into multiple posts and see what it is that it won’t let through.
“How ridiculously insane can life in this country get? We don’t educate kids to even read and write, 140 million employed people support 175 million unemployed, no one possesses privacy anymore–except people who never use the Internet or cell phones,–cops and TSA knowingly use excessive force on grandma and grandpa, and the damned military doesn’t even have guns with ammo to stop invaders. Perfect!”
“But we can go bug Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria until their friends the Saudi’s are motivated to fly jetloads of people into skyscrapers.”
We will just stipulate that you and everyone else here always agrees with OFD.
Gawd how dumb ARE the people in Washington? We need family farmers and mom and pop business owners representing us in DC, instead of idiot lawyers! At least they possess common sense that the lawyers seem to have had lobotomized.
Okay, it’s down to the last 3 sentences. This is next:
“Gawd how dumb ARE the people in Washington?”
We need family farmers and mom and pop business owners representing us in DC, instead of idiot lawyers!
It’s in this sentence. Let’s see if I can screw it up so you can still see what I wrote and make sense of it.
“We need family farmers and mom and pop business owners representing us in DC, instead of toidi lawyers!”
Reverse that word before “lawyers”.
I AGREE, with Mr. OFD!!!!!!!!!
Okay, let’s go words at a time:
“We need family farmers and mom and pop business owners representing us in DC…”
Okay, I have tried this PART of the sentence several times. It won’t let it through.
“We need
“family farmers and mom and pop business owners
“representing us in DC,
“instead of idiot lawyers!
Any way I try to re-organize the last 2 sentences, it will not let it pass. Won’t even let me paraphrase it.
Something really scary going on there.
I call lawyers in DC idiots.
It let that paraphrase of the sentence through. But it won’t let me say that ‘farmers and mom and pop business owners should represent us, instead of lobotomized lawyers’ using my own original wording.
That is beyond scary. Everything here, after the first paragraph is an edit to this post. It took it over a minute of transaction time to post that first paragraph of this specific post. I just continued re-ordering words, but clearly it is stopping me from saying certain things. That appears to be things related to the legislature in Washington. I used the words ‘government in DC’.
Wow!
We need to amend the USA Constitution so that lawyers cannot hold public office. Except the lawyer who shot Liberty Valence.
Let me try it:
The government in D.C. are a gang of criminal thieves and parasites who run an imperial Bolshevik enterprise worldwide and who have nothing but contempt and loathing for the masses of people they purport to govern.
OK, it let me put my inflammatory rant in there; they must be hovering over Chuck out there in Tiny Town. Go outside and look up, Chuck; see any drones?
My heart goes out to the families of those murdered in DC. Why can’t these morons just off themselves instead of wanting to take a bunch of others with them? I do not understand the motivation of these murderers.
So is Obummer going to issue an executive order tomorrow to turn in all the guns due to the current emergency?
That is beyond scary.
All internet posts now go through the NSA servers and are monitored for improper thinking.
And some joker thought it would be a grand idea to throw firecrackers over the WH fence just now. He is being led away, natch, by the hordes of law enforcement and security types every three feet down there.
Improper thinking: Swing the dead perp up by his feet outside the Navy Yard and leave him there for a couple of weeks. Have firecracker boy stand guard and sweep up rubbish and suchlike. Put Bob and me and SteveF, for starters, anyway, on a fact-finding investigation at the Navy Yard with full and total Fed authority to execute negligent manglers and slackers on the spot, with an eye to beefing up their cartoon-level security.
Actually, there WAS a helicopter out there this afternoon, but I did not check to see if it was black. We have some pipelines that go through here, in addition to those big honking high voltage grid interconnects, and they are always checking those via helicopter, so I just assumed.
Got Uncle Sam’s third quarter check off to him via USPS mail today. They say it only takes 3 months for people to forget what they were fired up about and lose all interest in taking action. Those IRS people ain’t dumb. First they overcharge you, so you always get money back—which, for a lot of people, feels good, I guess. They only remember that they got money back, and they can tell you exactly how much that was. But just try and ask somebody how much total tax they paid, and hardly anyone has even the remotest clue. Then they time filing your tax to be a far away from election time as nearly as possible. There is a lot more devious planning to all this than meets the eye.
So who are the richest people in America and what do they do? Here’s an interesting article that identifies who the richest 0.1% are.
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/who-are-the-1-and-what-do-they-do-for-a-living/#comment-27793
The article and statistics are a couple years old, but as the article points out, it hasn’t changed much since the industrial revolution began; just that the amount that 0.1% is earning relative to the rest of us is accelerating to the stratosphere much more rapidly nowadays than our income is.
At the top, are industry executives, then doctors. It drops off dramatically there, where people in finance follow doctors, and lawyers follow them. Sports figures are way down the list, but still in the 0.1%. At the very bottom are farmers and pilots.
Interesting stats.
Same families basically run the country that have run it for a very long time now; the mystery is why they think it’s good for them that they let a Bolshevik coup d’etat take place.
In other wonderful nooz:
The buggers ran me through all kinds of hoops in the background investigation for a job I am not gonna get now over three months. This piece of shit gets in no problem. With a long history of violence.
“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Aaron Alexis, the 34-year-old suspect in Monday’s shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard, had “secret” clearance and was assigned to start working there as a civilian contractor with a military-issued ID card, his firm’s CEO told Reuters.”
“He did have a secret clearance. And he did have a CAC (common access card),” said Thomas Hoshko, CEO of “The Experts,” which was helping service the Navy, Marine Corps intranet as a subcontractor for a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services contract.
Asked when he was supposed to start work, Hoshko said in a telephone interview: “That’s what I got to find out, if he was supposed to start today … It’s not clear to me.”
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by David Brunnstrom)”
I have mentioned this group as outstanding before. I am always on the lookout for good stuff to add to my collection, a lot of which is also used at the radio project. Emitt (note that is not Emmitt) Rhodes was in a group during high school in the mid-60’s, known as The Palace Guard, which later morphed into The Merry-Go-Round. Rhodes composed most of their songs and had a large hand in producing their A&M recordings. This one he wrote at 14 and recorded at 16—“You’re a Very Lovely Woman”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfMS4cUuLDY
Imagine a 14 year-old writing those lyrics. Here’s another with wonderfully-turned lyrics—“She Laughed Loud” (sorry the lyrics don’t stand out too well on this particular video file)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avTjMIFWvL8
And those were not their songs that made the biggest splash. Outside of southern California where these guys lived, and this part of the Midwest (Indy, Louisville, Cleveland) The Merry-Go-Round were really unknown.
So a collection of both The Merry-Go-Round’s output and also of Emitt’s solo work just came back on the market after being cut-outs for years. I bought both and am in the process of ripping them and prepping them for play on the radio station. As you can hear, the high hat on the latter song is cut off before the end—it is that way on the CD, so I have to extend it with some reverb and fade it out, so it is smoother.
I do not know where this kind of talent went; Emitt was clearly a capable composer and performer. So many of the artists and composers I grew up with, came from places like Julliard; where the heck do today’s urban and rap composers come from? Definitely not places like Julliard. I was just reading that Bert Berns, a pudgy white Jewish guy who—similar to tall, skinny white guy Johnny Otis before him—was the composing and producing force behind quite a few soul artists, including Solomon Burke (Berns wrote and produced Burke’s song “Cry to Me” which was the most memorable track from the movie “Dirty Dancing”—the sex scene), The Exciters (“Tell Him”), Wilson Picket (“Everybody Needs Somebody To Love”), The Drifters (“Up on the Roof”), Edwin Starr (“Twenty Five Miles”), The Isley Brothers (“Twist and Shout”), and a host of white artists doing rhythm and blues, including those teens from Winchester—about 10 miles from Tiny Town—The McCoys (“Hang On Sloopy”), a bunch of songs for Lulu, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and still more. Berns was a Julliard graduate. Booker T. Jones of Booker T. and the MG’s, was graduated from the music school at Indiana University (known as the Julliard of the Midwest). Jones was travelling regularly back to his hometown of Memphis to record things like his “Green Onions”; we were playing his songs on the campus radio station and never knew he was right among us.
If you liked the transition-era Beatles—from Rubber Soul to Sgt. Pepper,—then you will like both Emitt and The Merry-Go-Round. They have the reputation of sounding more like the Beatles than the Beatles.
Another really good track: The Merry-Go-Round – Had To Run Around
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0d5vaTNbEM
Oh my goodness, did you see Saturday’s Dilbert?
http://dilbert.com/2013-09-14/
Ok Chuck, I have a stumper for you. What 60s or 70s group sang a song with “and we are on our way” in the chorus? I heard it today whilest eating lunch at Freebirds and could not identify it. I could not google the group. The song had a fairly heavy electronic keyboard. I was actually thinking the Cowsills! It was preceded by Joan Jett singing “I hate myself for loving you” and followed by Ozzy Osbourne singing his train song.
Gentlemen (in general) and RBT in particular, I refer you to the site http://learn.montpelier.org/
It’s the Montpelier centre, former home of James Madison. They present home-study courses on your Bill of Rights, and Constitution. So far as I can see, it’s free (unless a teacher wants to update their in-service education qualifications, in which case the charge to document their study results is still nominal).
Bob, I wonder whether the courses are of such quality that you might think it worthwhile to mention their existence to home-schooling educators, in an inclusion with your kits, or on your home-schooling web site?
How is it that in these shootouts in military installations, nobody is ever armed?
The Washington Navy Yard is a command center, so I’d guess that a majority of the workers are not military. Civilians that are not guards are not allowed to have firearms on federal facilities. (A contractor at JSC was selected for a random car search on a Monday a couple of years ago and an unloaded shotgun was found in his trunk. He was suspended for a couple of weeks.) This came up after the Fort Hood shooting, where Nidal was taken down by a cop, not a GI.
The Navy Yard is also is a major intelligence analysis center for DoD and other TLAs, but that’s not talked about much.
I don’t need to. This and other similar organizations are already well-known among the homeschool community.
Ah, mystery solved. Chuck’s comments were caught by the spam filter. I’m not sure why, especially since he’s pre-approved to post.
Glad to know I’m not on a hit list. There was definitely something in the content they were trying to keep out, which my sentence by sentence testing proved.
Not sure about Lynn’s song. Sounds like something from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and sometimes Young, but I am not coming up with anything at the moment. I can’t imagine the Cowsills between Joan Jett and Ozzy Osbourne, but stranger things happen. Actually, music in businesses (long known as storecasting) can be pretty creative these days—a lot better than the radio, which is particularly uninspired for the last decade as conglomerates gobble up all the diversity, and programmers cut their playlists down to about 150 songs. Three companies own about 80% of all radio stations in the US now. That has put a LOT of people out-of-work (there’s a regular Friday lunch in Indy, where many congregate, and the restaurant says it is the biggest group they cater to), put programming decisions in unlikely places, and made just about every station sound like the next one. It has also increased the number of commercials dramatically. I heard 12 minutes of straight commercials on the way to work the other day. Broadcast owners clearly know they are killing the medium, but they do not know how to prevent that and service the unserviceable debt they took on to become empires, so in the meantime, they are dedicating themselves to raping the stations for all they are worth.
A lot of protest songs of the ’60’s had that theme ‘we’re on our way’. You sure it wasn’t ’80’s? Synthesizers really came into their own then. Even now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRWYaOkyrlA
A Swedish outfit manufactures a 30 pound keyboard that will perfectly duplicate a Hammond B-3 plugged into a Leslie box, or a piano (and it changes the feeling of the key characteristics to match the instrument); or it will perfectly fake a Continental Vox (The Doors), a Farsifa, a Rhodes, and a bunch of others. Because the sounds are all software generated, they are adding other instruments all the time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJt55ir7rjE#t=98
Don’t get bored until you see all 3 performers.
The song did sound very doors-y but the singer was definitely not Jim Morrison. That is why I thought of the Cowsills since they covered a lot of groups back then. Oh well.
There’s a guy out there right now that sounds a lot like Morrison, but I forget his name. I don’t pay too much attention to new releases, but cannot always escape them, because our radio project is on the same frequency as a high school station about 15 miles south of me, and our transmitter is 65 miles from my rooftop yagi. Most of the time I get the radio project, but occasionally the high schoolers drown it out.
There was also a late ’60’s group from Houston called Fever Tree whose lead singer sounded more like Morrison than Morrison himself did. I have all their stuff. I’ll see if that lyric is in there. They are pretty obscure, however. But where better to hear them than in/near Houston?
Nothing in the Fever Tree catalog with that chorus, and I have everything they ever released. The best recording of “Hey Joe” ever made was by Fever Tree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkijnWhOFz8
I am re-ripping my entire CD collection and most of the radio project’s, due to the fact we will eventually switch to playing WAV files, instead of MP3’s. Most of my rips were made during the period when LAME had a very serious flaw, which went undetected until around 2005. I never kept my WAV files at the beginning because of drive limitations, but started doing that while we were in Germany. Nor did those doing rips for the radio station use anything but 192kb MP3’s. At the radio station’s start, our studio to transmitter link was a system using a 192kb MP3 codec. We have since upgraded to a device that uses a codec whose quality is equivalent to a 24-bit WAV file.
Another reason for doing this re-ripping, is to get the composer information into a database, because the handwriting is on the wall that we will one day be required to report composers played, in addition to performing artists. Quite a few countries are now requiring that of radio stations. If you look, you will see that CD’s with copyright dates before about 2000, do not usually have composer listings. However, anything since then has meticulous information on composers, or else a “copyright control” notice—so even if they do not know who wrote it, there is still a composer royalty collected.
I have been doing about 2 CD’s a day for several weeks now. It is interesting to note that it is the British and Germans who are doing the preservation of American rock by digitizing old master tapes for archive to CD’s. Almost everything I am ripping from the ’60’s and ’70’s is an import, even though the original release was on an American label. Ace Records in the UK has undertaken a project to release almost the entire A&M catalog. They just put out everything ever recorded by Evie Sands. Many producers have called Evie the best female vocalist ever to live, but her records never went anywhere. Evie was one of those people whose songs were covered almost immediately by somebody else whose record did better. Phil Spector was famous for grabbing songs he knew had been recorded by somebody else, then rushing the song to market with his own artists, and beating them to the punch. He even called in Darlene Love to sing “He’s a Rebel” as The Crystals, while the girls were out on the road performing, so he could beat Vikki Carr in releasing the Gene Pitney penned song.
Poor Evie suffered at the industry’s hand from that kind of repeated activity.