In every group of people, there is somebody blessed with the ability to look at things from a different angle. All too often, they do not get the appreciation they deserve.
Hunting isn't about killing; you could go work at a slaughterhouse if you wanted that. Hunting is about HUNTING. The killing is just how you know you've won.An aside in an essay by the Anarchangel on the subject of snipers. I've seen the same sentiment expressed as "You don't hunt in order to kill; you kill in order to hunt."
Most of the hunters I know are not into it for the sporting challenge. They actually hunt in order to harvest game for the table. I know one couple who never buy meat or fish from the butcher, living year round on venison, rabbit, wildfowl and the fish they catch.
It is popular among hoplophobes to attribute psychological shortcomings to those of us who favor the right to keep and bear arms. Robb found a spectacular example in a comment thread.
Is it because if you were honest with everyone, you'd be forced to admit you all want guns because you're cowardly bullies consumed by crippling sexual inadequacy, and don't think anyone's life is worth more than your inconvenience?How exactly is this supposed to work? If a man feels inadequate will buying a firearm make him more masculine, and if a woman feels inadequate will buying a firearm make her feel more feminine? Can we find deep significance in people's choices? Is Tam's fixation with Smith & Wesson revolvers perhaps the result of some pre-adolescent trauma?
One could make light of the fact that it is a knife story found via a gun blog. One could make heavy of the relevance to a national political debate. What is really important is that she was paying enough attention to her environment that something out of the ordinary led her to adjust her condition so that when trouble did arise she was ready.
The winning link in Dean's open thread last night was to a report on a confrontation between the Ku Klux Klan and a bunch of clowns. I didn't expect to see that the racists were heartily mocked. I was thinking of the people my son has in mind when he threatens to call his circus friends; the guys who juggle sledgehammers.
I didn't actually watch much daytime television as a youngster, but it was more than I watch now. I had an idea of what most of the shows were like but I don't recall how such presenters as Arthur Godfrey or Virginia Graham handled the popular topic of "Who is JanTrell's babydaddy, her husband's best friend or her best friend's husband?"
My older sister claims to be so out of touch with modern technology as to think that global positioning means adjusting her bra straps, but in fact she is computer functional enough to carry on an email correspondence with me. She is, however, a fluffy-bunny leftie, so I refrained from correcting her that global positioning in fact means that Atlas shrugged.
One of the topics on which we correspond is the books we are reading. Again I care more about family affection than raising her consciousness, so I forego explaining to her why I am reading the Victory short story collection edited by Stephen Coonts, Applied Plastic Design in Steel by Robert O. Disque, and several hawkish books published shortly before the US entered World War II. Instead, I simply suggested the following books, which I believe my readers will also find of value:
Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian Soul
Artificial Intelligence for Dummies
Seven Habits of Highly Impulsive People
Xavier has some thoughts on the way people behave in the course of using their mobile communications devices. Sadly, he blames the communications devices for the behavior, much the way the victim disarmament movement blames guns for the behavior of criminals. Vicious and destructive people will be vicious and destructive with or without a gun, and thoughtless self-centered people will be thoughtless and self-centered with or without a cell phone. The only way to address the problem is to address the behavior.
Xavier and some of his commenters describe the pager as being like a "ball and chain". Again, the answer is simple. My son had an employer ten years ago who asked him to obtain a pager. He brought this on himself by being the only employee reliable enough to contact in an emergency. I first saw a pager back in the late '60s. It was larger than a pack of cigarettes and truly was a beeper; it simply notified its carrier to call the service and get a message. Again, he had brought this upon himself, by being a top-flight thoracic surgeon. Don't want the "ball and chain" of a pager? Get a job where nobody gives an airborne activity whether you show up.
James has the same dislike of certain cell phone related behaviors, but he values the phones themselves because of the communication they can provide in an emergency. The cellular industry takes emergency communication seriously. Never have I gotten more attention from the engineers back at the office than when I reported that my non-emergency verification call to 911, always the first call on a new site or service, "could not be completed as dialed". The resultant conference call went all the way to California, lasted two hours, and ended with activation of the entire county being delayed for weeks, despite complaints from the marketing people.
The classic identifier of an evil dictatorship, as seen in spy movies and similar thrillers, is that the authorities can stop you at any time and demand identification. The scary thing about this incident isn't that it happened to a US citizen, but that so many of the commenters are willing to slide down this slippery slope.
A participant on a hobby gunsmithing list to which I subscribe asked for some input. He is thinking of rebarreling a bolt-action rifle in one of the two chamberings reportedly under consideration as the next US military round, and would like opinions on the relative merits of the 6.8SPC and the 6.5 Grendel. One of the first people to respond suggested he might do better to consider the .257 Roberts Ackley Improved.
Note that I joined the list only so as to learn how to replace the extractor on my surplus Mauser. Any serious hobby gunsmithing project will come after I build a track roadster hot rod, complete a few railroad modeling projects, and put up a nick-nack shelf in front of the kitchen window.
My wee wifey posted the recipe, picked up by this week's Carnival, for an old family favorite, but she didn't tell the entire story behind it.
Long ago, when our now 28 year old son was 4, Chicago's then-mayor Jane Byrne had her people organize an ethnic folk fair which was held at the Navy Pier exhibition hall. Upstairs were information and craft booths, and a stage for song and dance performances. Downstairs was a "taste of the world" with booths selling traditional foods from people's homelands.
We were standing by the Nigerian booth, and Emrack, who had been weaned on a jalepe�o pepper, was holding a paper plate of spinach stew up to his face so he could shovel it in. This family who looked like they had come in from a nice suburb in a Volvo station wagon wandered up. The wife said to the husband "He's obviously enjoying it so it can't be that strange. Let's try some." The wee wifey, fearing child abuse charges, panicked and dragged us away before I could see their reaction upon trying it.
When I saw this headline while in a checkout line today, my first thought was "well, that's one more item off her checklist".
There haven't been any major holidays to celebrate in a while. Because of that, some years back, my foster nephew NP decided to declare an arbitrary one for today just to have a special occasion. I called him today in honor of this, which amused him no end even tho he has somewhat outgrown the need for such an event. The call would have been more fun had I known these few hours ago that others have also found reason to mark the day.
Robb has some sharp things to say about the people who show up at the shooting range with a fortune in tactical gear and shooting skills suitable for the broad side of a barn. This approach isn't unique to gun owners. I was reading just this weekend, on a sports car mailing list, about open track day at a road racing course. Fastest time of the day was logged by a hopped up Mazda Miata, followed by a standard Corvette and a Stalker. That third car can be built from my friend Dennis's kit for under 15 grand if you buy your components from the junkyard instead of a dealer. The drivers with the Ferraris and the Lotus Elises lacked either the skill or the aggressiveness to bring out their high dollar cars' potential.
The fixation on equipment isn't a new thing either. My father was a photographer and a writer, and 35-40 years ago people used to pester him to find out what camera and lens he'd used to take some particular picture. His standard answer was "I write my articles on a standard IBM typewriter, but I've got a line on some goose quills exactly like Shakespeare used to use. Just think what I'll be able to write with those."
If it had occurred to anyone 50 years ago, during the summer of 1957, that one could stand in the Central Mall at the Wisconsin State Fair this summer and simultaneously hear two performers both representing Elvis Presley, would anyone have believed them?
Checking my Hotmail, I see at the bottom of the page a link box "More from MSN" containing the headline "Gossip:Kate and Pete - off again?" Is there some reason I should know who these people are?
As of this week, we've been married for 69 solstices. Today, for the first time, my wee wifey expressed a desire for another couple of inches. She figures that if she were five feet tall she'd have been able to get in and out of the truck I rented for moving some of the last of what I'd left at the big house without a struggle.
Update:
That should be equinoxen, not solstices.
We were listening to radio news this morning, and they reported on a case wherein a 78 year old nun had entered a guilty plea in a case wherein she had been charged with having had sex with several high school boys. When they got to the part where they mentioned that the alleged acts had taken place during the 1960s, my wee wifey's immediate comment was, "That's a relief."
You right. Dat be's very unprofessional.Overheard at a retail emporium near my house. Knowing that there is such a thing as professional standards is, at least, a start.
There's an old joke, it probably predates the automobile in some other form, about the motorist who thought that he was being overcharged because all the mechanic did was tap the carburator with a hammer. The mechanic's response was to rewrite the bill, with a seperate charge, bearing most of the expense, for knowing where to hit the carburator (handy hint - stuck float valve, near the fuel inlet). The motorist actually got off easy. Plenty of mechanics would have sold him a rebuild at twenty times the price.
There is a blogosphere discussion going on about people who do not have basic material plane skills, and sometimes even disdain those who do. Getting overcharged for auto repairs is only the beginning of these people's problems. H.G. Wells postulated a future in which mankind has divided into those who produce and those who consume. Altho from my point of view, the Morlocks would have the better of that world, it behooves us to avoid such a future, and it is up to us Morlocks to do that.
This can be done at the most elementary level, as my wee wifey has done by working with Girl Scouts, first as a leader and now as a trainer of leaders. When she took her girls camping, her goal was not to teach them wilderness survival skills. It was simply to show those who had never been as far from home as a heated cabin, and those who had never prepared a meal more complex than cold cereal and milk, that they could do things they'd never done before and have fun doing them. Hopefully they carry this knowledge over into adulthood, and when the time comes to figure out which end of a screwdriver to use, or to survive a disaster, they can draw on what they learned and proceed.
For those who think I am exaggerating the divide, consider how far apart those who think we should be able to arm ourselves for self-defense, decide what substances and risks to expose ourselves to, and arrange for our own health care, and those who believe all of this should be handled on our behalf by the government.
A Polish immigrant went to the DMV to apply for a driver's license.
First, of course, he had to take an eye sight test.
The examiner showed him a card with the letters 'C Z W I X N O S T A C Z.'
"Can you read this?" the optician asked.
"Read it?" the Polish guy replied, "I know the guy."
This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.
It reads like a quote from one of David Weber's science fiction novels. The whole book does. A squadron on patrol finds itself within firing range of a fleet of much larger enemy craft, but achieves a costly victory thru courage, luck and technical superiority. The only difference is that The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, by James D. Hornfischer, is about the U.S. Navy in Leyte Gulf during World War Two, and not the Manticoran Space Navy taking on the Peeps.
It was Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland who made that bold statement to the crew of the Destroyer Escort USS Samuel B. Roberts. They did indeed do damage. They got so close to the Japanese heavy cruiser Chikuma it could not bring its big guns to bear, and poured everything they had into it. The Roberts was eventually sunk, along with other ships from the task force, but they took Japanese cruisers down with them, and disrupted and turned away what proved to be the major thrust of the Japanese effort to stop the retaking of the Phillipines. Over 850 US sailors and airmen died in the Battle of Samar, the main action of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Among them were two brothers who would have been uncles to my wee wifey's foster sister. We remember them, and all the war dead, this Memorial Day.
Lots of people have reported this fact about Rachel Lucas, but I haven't seen it reported about Da Goddess. Some nifty stuff about her Little Dude the musician, which is especially cool. Her posts about him led me to comment about Emrack, which was part of what led me to begin blogging myself.
I can't imagine spending the majority of my life in a situation where everyone assumed I was the smartest person in the room. That sure makes it easy for alot of bad information to accumulate in a person's mind.From a forum discussion of just how wrong a college professor can be. Altho the discussion was not about elitist environmentalism or fluffybunny foriegn policy, the principle clearly carries over.
We've been too caught up in the mundane to take note of the event, but I hope that those who observed it had a wondrous Bicycle Day.
Back about 25 years ago, when I was having multiple car troubles, M. Simon helped me out with the loan of his big brown Chevy. Now, at a time when I am looking forward to my first three days of work for the year, he's the one who could use some help. If anyone reading this has a tip jar hit to spare, his could use it.
Aim at a high mark and you will hit it.
No, not the first time, nor the second and maybe not the third.
But keep on aiming and keep on shooting for only practice will make you perfect.
Finally, you will hit the bullseye of success.The personal motto of Phoebe Ann Mosey Butler, as quoted in The Life and Legacy of Annie Oakley by Glenda Riley. Altho best known as an exhibition shooter, Annie loved target competition, hunting and teaching young people to shoot. We could use more superstars like her today.
So today, 3-14 is Pi Day, if less so than it was back in 1592. I don't geek out much over the ineffable nonrepeatitude of the number. Even during the twenty years before I moved to Milwaukee, during which I used pi in a significant percentage of all the computation I did at work it was just another chunk of information for me. What I was calculating was the amount of steel required to be bent around a forming die. Because this was done hot, with the steel heated to a temperature not much below that of burning jet fuel, the material stretched as it was bent, requiring the introduction of a correction factor into the calculation. After collecting data regarding assorted sizes of alloy and mild steel barstock bent around assorted diameter dies, I came to the conclusion that for my purpose, pi equals three.
If there is one thing I learned in the Girl Scouts, it's never volunteer for anything.Altho I enjoy saying this in order to raise eyebrows, especially those of people who learned this lesson in the organizations it usually references, the truth is I knew what I was letting myself in for. My wee wifey was already a Girl Scout leader when we were dating.
The last few weeks, however, things have been intense. Over the last couple of decades she has focused on training other leaders more than on working directly with the girls, and a week ago Saturday she presented a Craft College with a curriculum of 72 projects for the leaders to pass along. This required me to make many trips to our attic for accumulated supplies plus many shopping trips as further requirements developed. Anyone who works with pony beads will be interested to know that they can be bought for far less at inner city beauty supply stores (where they are called hair beads) than at even the cheapest of craft departments.
Now I get to resume work on tiling the dining room floor. She's already thinking about next year, worrying about how to present a song workshop when the Girl Scout legal department apparently expect to hear from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's intellectual property lawyer if a silly song is presented as being to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star".
I like football and root for my favorite team, yet do not play myself. I also enjoy movies, but really have no right to say whether one is good or bad since I am not in the movie myself.From a comment on this post, froom someone who seems to think that smoking dope would enable him to understand why he is allowed to hold the stated positions but cannot support the war if he is not in the military. This is a common fallacy among commenters at conservative blogs. The correlation between leftardation and drug use is not proof of causation. Consider myself and my two consecutive drivers on my most recent contract. The one who tried what I suspect was ditchweed one time in highschool and didn't like it was the one who thinks Bush is as evil as Hitler. The one who smoked a lot of pot in 'Nam and a little after he got back is a pro-gun centrist. As for myself, I'm a vast right wing conspirator looking forward to a bowlful of White Rhino and a shroom trip as soon as Lent is over.
My wee wifey has finally entered the 21st century, or at least the '90s. Actually, this relates to what she carries; she's quite sophisticated at using her desktop computer. Firstly, late last year she finally got a cell phone, and she now even brings it with her. Last week she finally got an MP3 player so she can listen to her sort of music during slow times at work. This is where she is running into trouble. She doesn't want to mess with bulky conspicuous earphones, but earbuds, even high-end ones, are incompatible with conch, rook, and tragus piercings.
The charge of impersonating a police office covers a range of activities from falling asleep in a doughnut shop to running a forfeiture operation.
"The Prohibitionist must always be a person of no moral character; for he cannot even conceive of the possibility of a man capable of resisting temptation." -Aleister Crowley
Keltie was proud of his role in the air force. He let his children play dress-up with his uniforms, even if he wasn't able to talk about his experiences.
Ross Keltie had plans to ask his dad for more stories.
"You keep putting it off and then it's too late," he said.
Altho it has not been getting much attention, I learned thru an email circulating among my family that mail going into Washington DC is being irradiated. My reaction was that it is a grave injustice that this process is used to protect government employees from anthrax but not to protect spinach eaters from e. coli. Sadly, the reaction from people I know to be generally intelligent and well educated has been to joke about mail, and even congresscritters, starting to glow.
"David Beckham will have a greater impact on soccer in America than any athlete has ever had on a sport globally," according to Tim Leiweke, president of the pro soccer organization which has just signed Beckham to a $250 million contract.
Milwaukee talk radio host Jeff Wagner, a former Federal prosecuting attorney, said that he would like to have some of whatever Leiweke was smoking when he made that evaluation. He would be disappointed. I believe it was isolation in the world of soccer, and not intoxication, which is clouding Leiweke's judgement, as even the top grade Humboldt County kind bud I have enjoyed has not led me into that serious of an error.
He awoke before she did, and gazed upon her. And discovered, as untold millions of men before him, that a wife is even more beautiful than a bride.Eric Flint - 1632
Me - morning of December 22nd, 1971
I posted this one year ago today, and it's still valid, especially since I just read 1632 off the Baen library disk for the umpteenth time whilst ridinng around with a laptop atop my lap.
I have long maintained that nothing and nobody can ever bbe the new anything or anyone else. The assertion that Bruce Springsteen was the new Bob Dylan would have done him more harm than good if anyone payed any attention to it. Here's one which blows that comparison out of the water and leaves it in the dust.
In Dean's review of the latest James Bond flick (I belief that is the correct technical term) he suggested that anyone who hasn't seen any of them must have been living in a cave. When I commented that I must have been living in a cave without noticing it, he freaked.
Thing is, film just isn't my medium. I read fiction, lots of it. I even read most of the original Fleming Bond books when they came out; about the only time I did that with a mainstream bestseller. They didn't do much for me. I've seen almost no recent movies. The last two I saw at the theater first run were Jurassic Park (because the late Ms. Weasel asked me to accompany her) and Sixth Sense (because Emrack convinced his mother we should). Over the same period I've sat thru maybe half a dozen movies on video in their entirety, out of the hundreds the wee wifey has in her collection.
I don't watch television either. The last show I followed consistantly was The Man From U.N.C.L.E. back in the '60s. When Ms. Weasel first got cable I was excited to discover I could catch reruns. Much to my embarassment, the first episode featured a boy's choir assasination team and scenery suitable for a model railroad. I know other episodes were less awful, but I never tried again. The last TV broadcast of any sort I made a point to watch was the Dune mini-series. It sucked differently than the original film version, and again had some good points, but it certainly didn't lure me back.
I don't keep up with the music scene either, but at least what I listen to, ranging from Cujo to Kathy Mattea, isn't as troglodyte as my current driver, who hums along with Peter Frampton. I don't get to take part in some of the water cooler conversation (who shot J.R.? My theory was it was a hired hit-man) or the Galactica threads, but I get by.
I tried to ignore all the news about Britney and whatshisname, but I absorbed enough of it that I have concluded that their breakup is caused by irreconcilable similarities.
A commenter to Dean's Saturday open thread suggests
Gentlemen � I highly recommend it. Tuck away $75-$100 per month to take your lady out � once per month minimum, even if you have to suck it up somewhere else.We would be hard-pressed to spend that much on a dinner, even if we went to La Casa de la Maison House. For one thing we aren't wine drinkers, I won't pay triple to be served a bottle of beer, and if we order mixed drinks it will be no more than one Manhatten for me and two Shirley Temples for her. More importantly, for that kind of money we can go to the Sunday buffet at Scheherazade, a couple of weekday lunch buffets at Thai Lotus, and bring home barbecue from the Speed Queen. I don't believe we'd enjoy one upmarket dinner more than all that.
Update:
Just to clarify things for my out-of-town readers, the restaurants are all little locally owned places here in Milwaukee. The middle-eastern restaurant is not far from the University of Milwaukee, but seems to draw more of an ethnic clientele rather than students. The Thai restaurant is on a business strip in a residential neighborhood not far from Miller Park. The barbecue place is deeper into the 'hood than where we live; that's where you find Southern barbecue in northern cities.
I read an interview in which the M&Ms thing was justified as a test. "If we can't trust you to pick out the brown ones, how can we trust you to tell us the stage will support our equipment?" There is, however, no justification for this sort of behavior.
Various assorted bloggers have seen fit to respond to the foofaraw resulting from the unautherized surveillance of Mark Foley's private electronic communications by identifying themselves as being gay. I won't do that, because of the loaded meaning the word has acquired in recent years. I do however hereby acknowledge myself to be happy, carefree and lighthearted.
I found this while at YouTube verifying the answer to what Dad29 needed to know. I'm sure it must have been deliberately posed, but there is something creepy about it, in a cool science fiction way.
Operation: Take a Soldier to the Movies, which I have posted about before, has been given a gift almost beyond measure. They will be receiving a donation of somewhere between 13 and 15 PALLETS of movies for the project. They were told it could be as many as 10,000 movies. The problem is that they will need to unload the movies themselves when they arrive on the truck.
The person donating them must free up storage space, and they will be receiving them next Thursday October 5th after 4:00 p.m.
They will be trying to implement an old fashioned “Fire Bucket Brigade”, but will need lots of bodies to pull it off. They believe the movies will be in boxes of a very manageable size, but plastic wrapped onto pallets.
They are located at 14775 W National Avenue, New Berlin, WI (western suburb of Milwaukee) and are very accessible from 3 different Highways. They would like to have enough people there that everyone can work for a while and then rest for a while. I'm back on hight shift that week and won't be able to help, but if you can, let them know, and tell 'em I sent you.
As part of his ongoing song lyrics theme, Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy posted a Toby Keith song in which he declares "I'll never smoke weed with Willie again." I've already made light of the facts of Willie Hugh Nelson's recent arrest, but consider this. They had a pound and a half on the bus, for five people. That's close to five ounces per person. With the quality I have access to, I could expect that to last two years even if my only abstention was during Lent, and these days I'm taking other long breaks. With the stuff Willie no doubt gets, which if I had I'd save for Friday nights with nothing major planned for Saturday, it would last me forever. They probably to go thru most of it before the tour was over. I really wouldn't care to get that swacko, but the the fact that he does, and remains a productive, contributing member of society is pretty good evidence that our nation's drug policy is unnecessary.
And in other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
Update:
Here's a nifty new word we can appropriate to describe what Willie and friends were achieving.
If I were ever to go to prison for having hired a hit-man to murder my ex-wife (speaking hypothetically here; I don't have an ex-wife) I really wouldn't want my fellow prisoners to find out that the way I had gotten caught was that said ex-wife had killed the hit-man with her bare hands.
There is reportedly an urban legend going around to the effect that several of the major lefties in the Democratic party mysteriously just happen to have been born nine monthes after the supposed date of the alleged UFO crash at Roswell. Of course a quick check of the facts shows that in fact most of the people on the list were conceived before the crash. This should have been obvious. Hard to do abductions and inseminations when your craft is all bent up.
As I have mentioned before, I do contract field work for mobile phone companies. On my current job (my third since that post) I'm working for a provider with spectrum in both the 850 mHz and 1900 mHz bands. As a result I'm being driven around in a car with a noticeable arrayof antennae on the roof. The other day, while we were sitting in the parking lot of a gas station near the highway, waiting for a sector's neighbor list to be updated, someone curious about the antennas and computer equipment asked if we were in law enforcement.
Here's a tip for you. If someone whose ponytail isn't a cute little ornament but elbow length hair tied back out of the way and whose beard just about hides his adams apple is in law enforcement, he aint gonna tell you.
"She was a compulsive shopper and was one of the most extreme cases I'd ever seen."A woman buying one hundred pairs of shoes is not unknown, and joining when others are grabbing what appears from the report to have been easy money is understandable. Buying sixteen chainsaws you have no intention of using for the gratification of acquiring and possesing them is the sign of a disturbed individual. I suspect they were purchased at a discount off the compare-at price large enough that she believed herself to be saving money.
The Princess looked at her more closely. "Tell me," she resumed, "are you of royal blood?"Actually, this is a quote for yesterday. Emrack called me from Kansas City. His Father's Day present for me was the announcement that he has found someone."Better than that, ma'am," said Dorothy. "I came from Kansas."
He is confident that she is a true soul mate for him. She wants him to accompany her to a Melissa Ethridge concert - wearing a tee-shirt proclaiming "It isn' rape if she blinks twice for yes."
Owen is surveying his readership in reaction to national surveys which suggest that 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed. I could perhaps have claimed 3+ rather than 2 in Owen's survey. When I had Mr Bluebird on my shoulder touched up 15 years ago (when the ink was 18 years old) I had a heart added either side of the wee wifey's name.
My wee wifey and I got our first tatts, at her suggestion, instead of engagement rings. Matching flowers, over our hearts. By Cliff Raven no less. Having run out of earlobe to pierce, she has gone back to collecting tattoos, with a bouquet around one ankle and a Crown of Glory (she drew the flash) on one shoulder. She is now working on the art for a butterfly garland for her other arm.
Altho the article he links speaks of tattooing exploding in popularity in the last few years, we really weren't out on the radical edge of young folk on the North side of Chicago. While we were getting our flowers done there was a sweet young thing in the Chicago Tattooing Company exploring the possibility of getting a small, inconspicuous crescent moon near her navel. She was really being daring.
I didn't think I was near the radical edge when I got my ear pierced 35 years ago. Guys in my high school had been getting an earlobe (always the left one) as early as 1967, as a mark of gang affiliation. Even before that, there had been Mr. Clean and Captain Blood. Nowadays a single pierce is almost square, but for me it is still the sign of a swashbuckler.
I seem to remember mistakenly anticipating it over a year ago in a comment, when a blogosphere-married couple were proclaiming their anniversary. Thought about it on a regular basis since the beginning of the year. Somehow got the notion that it would be in May and missed making the blog announcement. As of the 21st of last month, my wee wifey and I have been married a long playing record. You've heard of them, right? Twelve inch disk, double sided, hold less data than a CD. Carries an actual physical analog representation of the sound vibrations. No encoding; no data recovery from even the slightest damage. Instead of the hundreds or even thousands of revolutions per minute at which a CD can spin, they ran at a single set speed of thirty three and one third revolutions per minute. This speed is part of the format definition, and so thirty three and one third, the number of years we've been married as of our previous monthaversary, is a long long playing record.
Rather than selecting people to tag, Rocket Jones is inviting anyone reading his responses to consider themselves invited to do the Four Responses variant of the Let's All Answer The Same Questions so I reckon as how I might as well do so.
Four Jobs That I've Had:
Collater and stapler of ammonia process bluprints
Machine setup and operator in a marijuana pipe factory
Secondary operations (drilling holes in fittings) in a car wash brush factory
Shovelling mildewed newspaper out of the basement of a packrat's house
Four Movies I can watch over and over again:
Casablanca
Miracle on 34th Street (the original)
Alexander Nevsky
Much of this collection
Four T.V. Shows I love to watch:
Not applicable
Four Website's I read Daily:
My Hotmail Page
Instapundit
Dean's World
Boots & Sabers
Four Places I've Been on Vacation:
Barris Kustom City, when they were doing the bodywork on the XR-6 and the car he made the Batmobile from was rusting in the back lot.
The church where Arlo Guthrie partook of a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat.
The Jackson Mississippi airport back when they had drinking fountains for the "colored" and water coolers for "White Only".
Many of the places I go now around Milwaukee back before we lived here.
Four Favorite Foods:
Just about anything but eggs which haven't been cooked to excess and McDonald's burgers.
Four places I’d rather be:
A hot shower
The other house three blocks from here
Someplace rural enough and large enough that I could set up a serious metalworking shop including a small foundry, but not much over an hour out of Milwaukee or similar city
The purple dimension
Rather than tag anyone in particular I'm going to suggest that anyone scoping out my blog after coming here for the Carnival likewise participate.
My wee wifey works as an aide, third shift, in the psych ward of a nursing home. Absolute crazies are rare, it's mostly those who are somehow challenged and those who are sliding into terminally ditzy. Her favorite patients are in that last cateory, and right now she has among them a former Vegas burley-cue showgirl and a former comedy writer, for Bob Hope among others. Ted found a news report which is extra special when put in this context.
Ayman al- Zawahiri, second-in-command of Al-Qaeda, has issued a statement calling Queen Elizabeth the 2nd an ‘enemy of Islam’.
Perhaps he should take a look at how Elizabeth the 1st treated the secret agents of Catholicism in England during her reign.
NP, my sort of nephew/sort of tenant, is moving out of the you know house. His long-time accomplice Timmay has come up from Chicago and they are finding more formal quarters.
After we finished discussing the move, the subject shifted to gaming. They are weighing the option of passing up the coming XBox360 and waiting for the next Playstation to follow, but they still enjoy more traditional pastimes. We were talking about board games, and Timmay mentioned a Monopoly set he had picked up at an antique store. This game was so old that Mr. Moneybags was young and slim.
Yet another way of dividing people into categories. This one occured to me during a conversation at work. Most people will consider either a gold tooth of Bluetooth, but not both, a status symbol
I don't see the resemblance, but then there are plenty of other things I don't blame Bush for which he is more connected to than Austalia's defeat in international cricket.
Here's another observation from my son's explorations.
You can tell what kind of hippie someone is by the dog they travel with. The bleeding heart tree hugging sprout eating pillow biting pagans aren't the ones with the dingo-rottweiler crosses.
Well, actually, my son says it, based on his own observations. I do not doubt that if someone were to organize a survey and identfy a suitable sample population the result would be similar. People who have only one pair of pants prefer Carhartts or Levis, with Dickies coming in third.
"Just because Momma's happy doesn't mean everyone else is."
No specific story behind this. Just general truth and word play.
Amba, the Ambivablogger, whose sister was a classmate of mine in gradeschool and high school, asks:
So have you met blogfriends, and what was it like? Whether you've met them in the flesh or not, do you feel your blogfriendships have significantly enlarged your circle of true friendships? Come and tell. (Or tell and send the link.)I have found that electronic relationships, whatever the medium, are pretty good predictors of what the relationship will be like in real life. I once had the opportunity, back in my industrial sales days, to entertain two out of town customers with whom I had enjoyed a telephone friendship. It was one of my best nights of partying ever. Back in the days of the 300 baud BBS, I attended two get-togethers. The one for the political forum where debate was always civil but I was one of only two conservative commenters was a pleasant evening but led to no friendships. The one for users of the TRS CoCo was a waste of time; the generation gap outweighed specific geek commonality.
I read Boots and Sabers every day, for fun as well as opinion. I stopped by Owen's place of business once for a brief hello and we hit it off so well that his office manager had to chase me out after what felt like fifteen minutes but was close to an hour. I read The American Mind less regularly. It deals with local issues from a viewpoint more traditionally conservative than my own and lacks the entertainment factor. I've met Sean a couple of times, and like him, but didn't develop anywhere near the same friendship.
I haven't met M.Simon of Power and Control in real life in over twenty years. Back then I enjoyed his company and had many long conversations with him, but once in a while his eccentric fixations would get to be a bit much for me. Same thing with his blog.
I was on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison today, doing pre-rollout testing of a high-speed cellular Internet service. The connection worked, at both of today's sites, but I will have to go back because the computer which stores the forty megabyte test file I needed to download was down. It's been over thirty years since I spent this much time on the campus of a major state university, and it would appear that other than an increased presence of tattoos, nothing has changed.
I saw most of the bumper stickers which I expected, and a few I hadn't seen before. The most noteworthy one was on - hoodathunk - a VW Microbus. It read "Kerry or Canada, eh?" You know what, buster? By now you could have finished whatever you were doing here, relocated, and moved halfway up the waiting list for whatever health care you need.
Best "Daily Sadie" picture yet. Even if your only babies have been cats you are going to get a lift from it.
"You are better off with that fat chick sitting at the end of the bar than with any woman you connect with online as a casual sex partner."
This is from my son. I don't know the whole story, but understand it to be based on experience.
I just happened past a radio carrying Sean Hannity, and he was talking to a high school girl who had dared to speak out against discriminatory scholarships and the recipients who did not appreciate them and had been suspended for doing so. No doubt coverage of the incidient is to be found amongst the edublogs. Claiming to play Devil's Advocate, Hannity asked what had prompted her to voice such an opinion where it would be upsettinng to her fellow students.
Her answer? "Hey, I'm an immature sixteen year old school girl." I like that. She is not complaining that she is being punished; only that the severity is out of proportion to what it would have been had the content been different. Shouldn't happen under zero tolerance.