09:21 – I have those 30 kits boxed up and ready to ship. I started with filled and labeled chemical bottles, but otherwise I built those kits from scratch in two busy days. That tells me that without additional labor we can build at least 30 kits a week every week if we need to, or about 1,500 kits per year. That’ll do for now.
That leaves storage as the only issue. Barbara nixed the idea of parking my Trooper outside. She doesn’t want it sitting out in the weather. As an alternative, she suggested expanding our storage area into the finished area downstairs. That’s fine with me. That means I can get most of the stuff out of the work/storage room upstairs and use it mostly for finished goods inventory and partially as a staging area for building kits. Bulk stuff like cases of bottles, beakers, tubes, etc. can go into the finished area downstairs. Problem solved, at least for the next year or two.
It is amazing how much having a car in a garage preserves it over leaving it outside. I had my first car for 18 years, and it was outside 100% for the first 10. Aged quite a bit during that time and had to have lots of body work done to keep it from looking like a junker. It was garaged for the last 8, and there was no noticeable wear from that point on, and no body work necessary during the garaged period, even though 4 of those years were in bad winters Minnesota.
My in-laws (he’s a doctor and she’s a hospital executive) used to live in a snotty neighborhood in upstate New York. Your garage door could only be up for the amount of time it took to get your vehicle in or out. Vehicles could not be parked on the driveway or street unless they were visitors and even then there were limits. Toys had to be cleaned up from the front and back yard before dark every day. Etc. I’m amazed that the more people spend on their real estate the less freedom they seem to have on it. I guess that’s just the price you pay to not have to live next door to “riff-raff.” I have a brother whose yard looks like a scrap metal facility, so I understand the inclination for strict covenants, but still, I’ll do what I want on my own property and if you don’t like it then you can kindly fuck off. 🙂
Don’t fuck with the USDA!
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General,” seeks “Body Armor [that] is gender specific, lightweight, [having] trauma plate/pad (hard or soft), [and] concealable carrier.” The order includes “tactical vest, undergarment (white), identification patches, accessories (6 pouches), body armor carry bag, and professional measurements.”
“All responsible and/or interested sources may submit their company name, point of contact, and telephone number.” The solicitation says those sources received in a “timely” manner “shall be considered by the agency for contact.”
On May 15th Breitbart News reported on a Dept. of Agriculture solicitation for “the commercial acquisition of submachine guns” with 30-round magazines.
That must be for their plans to ratchet up busting on farmers and organic growers and suchlike, stamp out that raw milk terror. Uppity farmer types might come hustling to the front door with a pitchfork or ancient scattergun and would thus need to be obliterated instantly with machine-gun fire as the rest of the family is tased, beaten and sent to prison. Then the property is confiscated by the Holy State and left to rot.
Meanwhile they’ll step up the chopper patrols overhead looking for pot growers, in order to stamp out the holocaust of marijuana abuse, and they’ll have door gunners; say, maybe I can get my old job back! A couple of weeks ago the choppers were flying above here back and forth for hours. I doubt they were concerned about little ol’ OFD scribbling his rants on the internet, though…meanwhile the drug problem here in small-town Vermont is mainly pills, crystal and smack. Not pot.
I doubt they were concerned about little ol’ OFD scribbling his rants on the internet
Don’t be too sure. I have reported you multiple times. Maybe I got the address wrong. Some poor 89 year old smuck has probably now been terrorized by a swat team with 18 vehicles, six of them armored. Busted down his door, ransacked the place, busted holes in the walls, shot the dog and ate all the Dorritos (a high crime in my opinion), then said “Oops, have a good day.”
Well, I have dimed you out, along with such miscreants/felons as MrAtoz, SteveF and our illustrious host. Gee…now I wonder…with so many SWAT mistaken address busts, how many innocent peeps have been messed over by now…?
And this address here is apparently easy to get wrong; mail gets delivered to the larger town and the “city” up the road, but not here in the bay village; we all have P.O. boxes at the P.O. about a hundred yahds from our front door. But we also have our street address, and this incredibly complex scenario just baffles the shit out of a lotta people and organizations, evidently. The blonde cougar postmistress informs me to always just use the box address unless otherwise instructed by whichever of our correspondent organizations. So the upshot is that we have seen large packages delivered there to her and flimsy little envelopes sent here. Only recently have BOTH FedEx and the USPS and UPS all got on the same damn page.
Overcast again today, and the wind had died down in the wee hours somewhat but is now back full force and the weather liars are telling us we’re getting rain through Saturday and dropping temps. Whatevuh.
Well, I have dimed you out
I would expect nothing less. May explain that extra cable I found running from the pole to my house along with the clicking on my phone. Can’t be too careful with us radicals.
Dumkopfen! I told those idiots not to make it so obvious! Must be more of the retired Watergate surviving burglars or sumthin. Just cain’t git good help these days.
and they’ll have door gunners; say, maybe I can get my old job back!
I’ll join you Mr. OFD! Shouldn’t take to long to get my Blackhawk qualification up to snuff. I say gun down those raw milkers! No M60, though. We’ll use this little baby(I’m now sporting wood). Nothing but the best for those damn milkers! If selling raw milk isn’t a crime against humanity I don’t know what is! No punishment for them, just killin’! I’m surprised Obummer hasn’t made this a top priority with an executive order. Can’t have raw milk out there! Weed is OK with OchoomA, though. Just don’t drink raw milk when you get the munchies.
My rides were on Hueys and a few times on Jolly Greens; second tour saw me on AC-130s, where we did have the miniguns and some jokers had a howitzer mounted. Green Berets asked them to hit a building where they were taking fire and the air crew smartypants said “What window you want it in?” Would love to see inside a Blackhawk, though, but long after my time; you must be a young whippersnapper!
If weed is OK with Barry why don’t he call off his dawgs? They’re still worrying about pot growers and raw milk; bunch of total ass-hats and commie bastids.
No prob! Also qualified in Hueys and Little Birds. We have to use choppers, though. Gotta be up close and personal for those damn milkers.
True, dat!
Imagine: the spray of raw milk all over the landscape as the miniguns obliterate the cans! Also gotta keep an eye peeled for the weed patches; streaming incendiaries will work real good there.
Raw milk is a no-no? What’s a baby to do?
While you’re at it, make sure to machine-gun the herds. Not only do cows produce milk — which comes out of the cow unprocessed! — but they produce methane, which contributes to Global Warming, which is why Chuck had to turn his heat back on. Go and kill a cow for Chuck!
Only been in a chopper once, to do some shooting around Branson, MO when I was getting paid to listen to country-western music. Pilot was Nam trained, and that guy was good! Scared the pants off the cameraman, who hangs outside the cockpit on a thing called a Tyler mount — and the cameraman had hundreds of hours logged on Tyler mounts. Scared me when the pilot said, “I’m not proud. If you see wires, tell me. I want to make sure I don’t miss any.”
Exhilarating ride for me!
Pilot was Nam trained, and that guy was good!
Some of the best! Many could out fly me drunk! Functional drunk Nam pilots lol.
My wife served 20. About 5 years ago (retired by now) I talked her into a helicopter tour of Kauai. She’s not a fan of choppers (go figure being Army and all). The pilot was a Nam graduate. I asked him to scare us and BOY DID HE!
Pilot was Nam trained, and that guy was good!
Some of the best! Many could out fly me drunk! Functional drunk Nam pilots lol.
My wife served 20. About 5 years ago (retired by now) I talked her into a helicopter tour of Kauai. She’s not a fan of choppers (go figure being Army and all). The pilot was a Nam graduate. I asked him to scare us and BOY DID HE! I haven’t been forgiven for that one as of yet.
*sorry double post in my excitement*
“Raw milk is a no-no? What’s a baby to do?”
No prob. Just as there will be Death Panels for our end-of-life scenarios, there will also be Birth Panels, composed of soulless grey bureaucrats in the style of Himmler, say, who will decree the origins and biochemical make-up of the “milk product” dispensed to infants, those infants allowed to survive, that is, based on no discernible “defects” and the “parents” are satisfied with hair and eye color. The others will be compacted and used as heating fuel for State buildings.
“Go and kill a cow for Chuck!”
Roger that; and some hawgs, too; zillions of them running all over Texas. This gon be a blast!
“Scared me when the pilot said,…”
Yeah, I noticed that about pilots when I was in; great sense of humor! One time they somehow thought I was a FNG and that it would be boffo laffs to suddenly turn the chopper on its side while I hung out over the trees. I disabused them of this notion when I turned the 60 on them and told them to do it again. (my second tour and thus not a FNG, silly buggers)
“Many could out fly me drunk!”
And roger that, too; they were acclimated to take-offs and landings in minimal conditions while also taking fire, and to me they were all legit heroes; they’d hang in there while the machine was getting hosed like a Swiss cheese to get people on board. More than one didn’t make it out because of stuff like that. It was also an Army chopper pilot and his crew chief and gunner who stopped the My Lai mess from going any further. That took some serious ballage.
On the Spectre gunships I was mos def the FNG, a baby sergeant next to master-, senior- and chief-master sergeants on their third or fourth tour and even that after Korea and in several cases, the Good War. I did what I was told and otherwise STFU.
Two full days to transfer the 140gb via wireless LAN. Ah well, I wasn’t in a hurry, and it’s better than hauling external drives around, disconnecting, mounting, unmounting and such. I should not have let the HP micro NAS go, but it was for a good cause.
It’s about 35,000 songs that I will now import into what will hopefully be new automation for the radio project. Have to import it in such a way that the original file is exterminated after import, as the drive is not big enough to hold both. Gotta read up on how to do that. Files are 160kbps MP3’s, some of which are pretty crappy, but it was donated by a big radio conglomerate that I thought did better work. Oh well. Beggars can’t be choosers. There are some pretty obscure tracks, but all from Billboard’s Hot 100, so we’ll make it work. Sounds very decent with processing, but not stellar.
Two full days to transfer the 140gb via wireless LAN
Woof! Router upgrade in your future? I keep my important chit on a 6TB Drobo box. I keep it hooked to my Mac Mini server, but occasionally unhook it to move to another Mac. It has USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt and is rather peppy.
WTF? Fires all over the US and the World and this is what Obummer is focused on. Geez.
Statement by the President on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia
The Mooch on segregation:
“So today, by some measures, our schools are as segregated as they were back when Dr. King gave his final speech. As a result, many young people in America are going to school largely with kids who look just like them.”
This is from a turd who sends her kids to private school. Public school is for us scum. It’s never good enough for the libturd utopia. The HS my kids go to is highly mixed with whites, blacks, asians and all ethnicity’s. Way to keep racism alive Mrs. Obummer. Talk about living in a bubble. Food deserts anyone?
Wow, I had no idea this day has been going on for ten years! What a benighted old bigoted fart I am! And I love how Barry conflates this with Brown v. Board of Education and the holy and sainted “civil rights struggle.” Hey, at least he referred to the Stonewall incident as a riot, which it sure as hell was. Of course he’ll say it was a police riot, like Chicago in ’68, LOL.
But yeah, we have severely critical domestic issues and there are brush fires in various parts of the world, esp. in oil-producing regions, LOL, that may necessitate our mounting a “humanitarian mission” to save those poor kidnapped girls, and gee, incidentally, the Nigerian regime doesn’t seem to have adequate control of the refineries….hmmm….Marine boots on the ground, baby! Hopefully someone somewhere has lurched into some version of reality and now knows how utterly stupid we’d be to get involved in the boiling cauldron of shit that is Ukraine. Or Syria.
Instead, the President of the United States and arguably the most powerful person in the Milky Way Galaxy is all torn up over alleged “homophobia” and a new word I just learned today, why am I not surprised…”transphobia.” Give me a break. I’m as hardcore right-wing as they get and I do not hate or fear homosexuals and transvestites and their opposite numbers out there; I couldn’t possibly care less, but would they please just STFU about it?
The people who do bother me, though, are those carnival freaks who do such freakish things to their heads and faces, with giant holes, and pieces of metal and outlandish tattoos. They’re fucked up.
“This is from a turd who sends her kids to private school. Public school is for us scum. It’s never good enough for the libturd utopia.”
Same old, same old. This crap went on back in the early 70s in Boston; one of my former IT colleagues grew up smack in the middle of it all and has chapter and verse and knows all the players. Another former cop colleague of mine had an uncle on the Fed marshals guarding the judges’ houses and the school buses. The rich entitled libtard assholes sent their precious children to private schools or moved out to the lily-white ‘burbs and ordinary working families had to eat shit, on BOTH sides, and their kids went through hell because of it.
Yeah, the Mooch and her ilk love to stir the pot, again and again; God forbid any progress should have been made or even acknowledged by these people. And it’s always “Dr. King,” yeah, the guy who is well known and proved to have plagiarized his dissertation at B.U. Sort of like Rev. Dr. Ian Paisley over in Northern Ireland. Hey, me, too; I’m Dr. OFD, ABD (all-but-dissertation).
Dr. OFD sez the Mooch is not only full of baloney, or in her case a triple-bacon Big Mac while she pushes celery and carrot juice on the rest of us, but is actively creating problems where there are none. If she was serious about helping, she’d be working to that effect in the inner cities, which are now basically total war zones; the cops go in armored vehicles when they go in at all, in numbers, and with automatic weapons, safeties off.
I’m a doctor, too! Not only that but a preacher! The doctorate cost me, IIRC, $20, and I got a nice fake parchment diploma. Only 8-1/2 by 11, but what do you want for $20? And the preachin’ certificate came from Universal Life Church, back before the fancy-schmancy internet. We had to pay money to get our certificates in the mail, not just download them from the internet and print them ourselves. And we had to walk uphill both ways to the mailbox, too. And we were grateful!
If I remember correctly, I got the ULC certificate partly as a joke and partly in furtherance of my goal of mocking the hucksters who call themselves preachers. The doctorate was also a joke, but the specific reason I got it was to go with my t-shirt that said “This man is a doctor. Please take off your clothes and do everything the nice doctor tells you.” Except a girlfriend
stoleborrowed my shirt* before I got the certificate and then we broke up and I never got the shirt back. Sometimes there just ain’t no justice.* I’ve worn XL shirts for 30 years now. XL t-shirts are apparently the perfect size for girlfriends to sleep in. Doesn’t matter how tall or how short the girlfriend is, the shirt is the perfect size.
Please address me as DrAtoz in the future ’cause I’ve got a PhD in life, bizatch’s.
“…XL t-shirts are apparently the perfect size for girlfriends to sleep in. Doesn’t matter how tall or how short the girlfriend is, the shirt is the perfect size.”
Tell me about it. Also 2X-T shirts. Which come down to her knees. And she’s 5’10”.
I’ve lost more damn t-shirts in this marriage…
And what’s the solution to segregation? Hint: bussing kids an hour to some school way outside their neighborhood isn’t it.
The problem Ms. Michelle so daintily tap dances around is that black culture in the USA has failed. Be sure to read the article linked to at the link – the whole read is worth it – even if he completely fails to diagnose the cause.
If the government cared at all about blacks in the inner city (where those segregated schools are found), they would completely revamp the aid programs. So subsidize whole families, subsidize education and holding steady jobs, and penalize criminal records. The segregation problem will take care of itself within a generation.
Instead, the President of the United States and arguably the most powerful person in the Milky Way Galaxy is all torn up over alleged “homophobia” and a new word I just learned today, why am I not surprised…”transphobia.” Give me a break. I’m as hardcore right-wing as they get and I do not hate or fear homosexuals and transvestites and their opposite numbers out there; I couldn’t possibly care less, but would they please just STFU about it?
Well… no. Of course they shouldn’t be quiet about it. Think of times you’ve complained about people treating you badly because you’re Catholic. Then remember that, in most parts of the US, queer people are treated a lot worse than that. The murder rate for transgender people is obscenely high. Gay people are routinely assaulted, abused by their parents and thrown out of jobs. A huge number of transgender people work in prostitution — and not by choice.
Such people are some of the most mistreated in society, and they have every right to be angry.
Hey, me too! I’ve been an ordained minister since long before Barbara and I got married. Back in those days, one actually had to send a $10 check to the ULC.
You got ripped on your doctorate, though. When I got mine, it was $15 for one Ph.D. or $20 for two, so I went ahead and bought two.
Ayup.
It is not possible to make EVERYBODY want to be integrated — especially when the numbers are totally against the minority. When I worked in Minnesota, at that time we had one — count her, — one black person working in the whole organization. And that was when the affirmative action and FCC were breathing down everyone’s backs, forcing quotas, or fining people. Not sure the situation now, but there just were no blacks in any kind of significant numbers living in that cold land. This girl was great at her job, but one day she announced that she was moving back ‘home’ (DC area) because she just had to be around black people. (She later progressed to executive positions in national shows you would have seen coming from DC.)
Another weird development during my life was the area around my high school. Shortly after I graduated, there was the worst case of ‘white flight’ I have ever seen. Within about 5 years, the whole area turned from lily white to 99% black. (At least my high school then started winning basketball and football games; we whities had abysmal won/lost records.)
But where did all those white people go? Why up to Fishers, a huge development of farm land turned into a massive sprawling city (recently got their first mayor) that is the most integrated place I know on planet Earth. Everywhere you go, 50% black/50% white. Customers in every store, workers in Walmart and everywhere, schools, you name it. One of the weirdest movements I have ever witnessed. More recently, I have met people who live in my old neighborhood. They are have good jobs and are well off enough to move to Fishers, should they want. But they don’t want. They are quite happy living in my old neighborhood, which is still 99% black.
There was just a discussion on Linked-In with IT people and a woman IT person kicked off an inflammatory NIGYYSOB post about the paucity of women in IT and how it’s the fault of sexist pig men, except she was semi-clever about that and posed it as an open discussion question about how can we all change this and worship the Goddess Diversity in IT?
When guys, including me, pointed out that very few women seem to have been, and are, interested in IT jobs, and this over decades, and that the few we’ve seen all tend to go into management as soon as they can, she blew a gasket and jumped dead in our shit. As was predictable. I also pointed out that over the decades, despite the herculean efforts to make it so, very few women went into cop work, the fire departments or special ops in the military. She didn’t wanna hear that; we must make it so, even if we have to instill the Diversity worship into infants and toddlers, and to hell with biology and anthropology, I guess. About half the guys caved in and promised to do better; the other half realized it was a chump’s game and bailed.
And here I merely point out a couple of local facts: there are apparently two or three black families living about two or three miles up the road toward the “city” and downtown; the women and girls are rarely seen. One young guy, who was featured in the paper, natch, goes over to the b-ball courts every day and waits for other guys to show up to play with, kinda sad. Others have also been featured in the paper; but for drug deals gone bad, knife attacks, robberies, etc. What are we to conclude from this?In a state that trades places every year with Iowa, Wyoming and Maine for whitest state in the country? Whose people bend over backwards to accommodate Somali and Bosnian muslim refugees and whose War Between the States deployments and KIA’s were the highest among the Union states? Dumb question; we are to conclude nothing. We, like most, simply ignore it all and go on about our business.
“…in most parts of the US, queer people are treated a lot worse than that. The murder rate for transgender people is obscenely high. Gay people are routinely assaulted, abused by their parents and thrown out of jobs. A huge number of transgender people work in prostitution — and not by choice.”
Where does this information come from? “a lot worse,” “obscenely high,” “routinely assaulted,” “a huge number,” etc.? In a tiny percentage of the population? Where is all this happening? Where are the numbers? From what I can see, the State and corporations have bent over backwards to not only accommodate people but to celebrate them and exhort the rest of us to do likewise. To do otherwise is to court being thrown out of work yourself and abused.
You got ripped on your doctorate, though. When I got mine, it was $15 for one Ph.D. or $20 for two, so I went ahead and bought two.
I hope they were degrees in liberal arts. What you paid is about what an eight year degree in physiology from a big name university is worth.
No, they were hard science. I wouldn’t pay $20 for a Ph.D. in liberal arts. I wouldn’t even pay that much for a Ph.D. in a soft science like anthropology or archaeology.
I don’t really remember what my
sheepskinthick piece of paper with fancy printed writing was in. Unspecified “Doctor of Philosophy”, I think. Not worth the paper it was printed on, of course, except as a joke.As for the general non-STEM degree, I’ve held for years that they have negative worth, from an employer’s point of view. The holder of the degree is likely to have a sense of self-worth well above his (or more likely her) worth as a worker and is very likely to have been inculcated with ideas about the destructive poison that is capitalism, the white patriarchy’s oppression of everybody else in the world, and so on. No, if I were looking to fill the typical office or retail job, I think that I’d take a high school grad with no additional education over someone with a PhD in Comparative Cultural Crotchsniffing.
Oh, sure, there is actual need for people with advanced education in English Lit and maybe even Sociology. I’d guess that the supply exceeds the demand by about 100:1 and, per Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of them are crap.
It just so happens, pilgrim, that I have an advanced education in English Lit, though not by older generations’ standards, and by that I mean both, say, the 1950s, or the age of Pope and Johnson. And I did not drink the lefty kool-aid during my time of studies. That said, the only use I can find for it now is my own enjoyment and the possibility of passing it on to like-minded folks, who currently seem to be in very short supply, but with the demise of industrial “civilization” there may be an interest once again someday.
Sorta like them Irish monks in the “Dark Ages.”
Understood, OFD. That’s why I mentioned English Lit rather than Byzantine History or whatever. And I can easily believe you’re on the skinny side of Sturgeon’s Law. And it’s plausible that if the number of graduates of English Lit were anything like in line with the employment needs for such graduates, you’d have been in that number. As it is, however, even if it weren’t for the socialistic lockstep of academe, there are a hundred “qualified” grads seeking every position, and it’s not always obvious who’s a fraud and who would actually be a credit to the institution. (This problem is not unique to English Lit teaching positions, of course. Sturgeon’s Law.)
Oh, agreed, totally. I did it because I love/loved the subject and only thought there was an off chance I might become gainfully employed at it. You know, “do what you love and the money will follow;” (actual book title a few years ago). And I’m wicked slow, so it was a while before it dawned on me that the game warn’t worth the candle to light it.
No problem, though; I’m good with doing IT drone work when it becomes available, or messing with firearms and explosives; I can read whatever I want without having to write a tedious paper on it that no one will ever read and if I wanna study Latin and Old Norse, who is to say me nay? It’s funny; once in a blue moon our daughter or somebody will ask me about something in my “field,” and I have all I can do not to jump all over it with chapter-and-verse in my fanatic enthusiasm and scare them.
Having done a BSc in computer science I eventually set out to do a BA in medieval history and Latin. Initially I wasn’t given time off work for this – I just did it because I love that stuff – but after a few years the boss gave me time off because he thought it would help my research and writing skills.
Those days are long gone. If it ain’t job-related, forget it. And I mean real specifically related. And do it on your own time and your own dime and LIKE IT.
Back in my cop days there was a pretty slick racket going on with cop jobs and college degrees down there in Massachusetts; they had something called the Quinn Bill (note the surname) and for each degree you as a “law enforcement officer” got, under MA Civil Service, you got more money in your pay. So all of a sudden there were a dozen colleges offering various degrees in “criminal justice” and guys were signing up left and right and getting pencil-whipped through the courses by sympathetic faculty a lot of the time. You’d see patrolmen with twenty years on the street working on a master’s in CJ and raking in the dough from that and the daytime pay jobs on road details and suchlike.
Quite often, and to this day, there are low-ranking cop drones with lots of seniority (how they get those pay jobs) who make far more than a big-city chief or commish, easily way over six figures. If I’d played my cards right, I’d be long retired by now and just raking in the dough for the rest of my life, maybe living in a cottage down the Cape or the Islands or up in Maine. And married to some Woostuh Italian or Irish chick and with half a dozen kids and a dozen grandkids.
Things did not pan out that way, except for the Irish chick.
Where does this information come from?
It’s out there, but you have to dig, because a LOT of it is covered up. I am not up to date on anything these days, but back when I worked on coop ventures with the NYC public station, I heard a lot of the stories related to the people I worked with there. A lot of incidents happened on Fire Island, but never got reported in the NY press. Second week I worked there, a tech guy who ran our tape machines was killed on Fire Island. Lot of LBG’s in my work (no T’s that I knew of, but my son got a degree with one). In general, MSM does not report the crime against gays. When I was on campus, we in the TV area, worked really closely with the PR office. One of their main duties was to keep a lid on the fact that there were 2 or 3 rapes every week on the campus of 35,000. Most of those rapes were not date rapes, but guys grabbing girls by surprise and forcefully having their way with them. I know of 2 guys in my dorm who were gay and beaten pretty severely. One of them left school right after that.
Not only that, but a gay guy I worked with at one of my jobs was beaten half to death in a bar that a lot of the guys went to after work. My impression is that about half these incidents are by people who hate gays with a passion, and the other half is by love relationships gone sour. Not sure which it was for that guy. He was off work for a couple months, and was a wreck when he returned to work. He recovered enough to seem normal to me — eventually.
But that is not all. Another very mild-mannered guy who was with the group of maintenance guys who came out of the woodwork when something broke, was found sitting in the drivers seat of his car, pulled off the side of the road not far from his house, engine still running, shot dead. Nobody knew until after the incident, but it turned out he was bi, and was headed for a meet-up when this happened. His wife never knew, but the cops uncovered it. Never found the shooter, though.
There was yet another incident with an L woman being jumped and raped by a guy near the station as she was walking home. Another young woman assistant in my department was raped on a night out with friends. Those are just the ones I found out about. I suspect there were other incidents that were kept 100% quiet.
Having worked in newsrooms for most of my career, and places where the LBG community had lots of representatives, my impression is that crimes against LBG’s are more frequent and much more severe than hetero abuse cases.