These videos speak for themselves. My only quibble is the waste of perfectly good bacon. After all, mere contact with the toxic waste that is the Koran would make otherwise perfectly good bacon useless for anything but feeding to “good” Muslims.
and
It’s Probably Just Me…
…But, has anyone else noticed a growth of “life incompetence” in the population in general here in these (Dys*)United States? OK, time to back up and expand on my understanding of “competence”. I’ll let Robert Heinlein’s words stand in place of my very likely less competent *heh* attempt to do so:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Well, I’ve not butchered a hog (though I’ve butchered other animals), conned a ship or died gallantly, yet, but the rest of the list isn’t really all that hard, and I’d want to add a few things to it, were I to be its author. But Heinlein gives the flavor of my attitude toward “life competence” with the idea behind the list, ending with, “Specialization is for insects.”
A couple of simple examples should suffice.
The Sears Auto Hammer. Now, confession time: I own one of these. I’ve never used it, but I bought it to loan to some folks who just could not get the basic idea of using a hammer. Nothing against them; they’d not had anyone teach them how when they were tadpoles, nor had they had any life experience swinging a hammer, and they had a time-constraint they were working with that pretty much disallowed time to practice with a hammer to get their skills up to snuff (and so avoid ruining a bunch of trim on their house). So, a “Hammer for Dummies” approach was my assessment of the quickest, easiest solution for the situation, used by some really bright folks who are anything BUT “dummies” but were simply cursed with a decidedly narrowed skill set.
But the very fact that there is such a thing as an “auto hammer” speaks to a widespread incompetence with one of the most basic of hand tools. Anyone should be able to master the use of a weighted object attached to the end of a stick. And darned near everyone (save for the idle rich who can afford to pay folks to swing such weighted sticks for them) ought to at least master such things before moving on to power tools. (The idle rich probably should move right on to power tools… complete with not reading the directions or taking proper safety precautions. They can afford the multiple surgeries that would likely result.)
(BTW, I believe those folks have since mostly repaired their skill set, so the $100 auto hammer sits unused in one of my tool boxes, now. Anyone want? It’s going cheap. ;-))
And then there’s “righty-tighty/lefty-loosey”. (*huh*?!?)
Yeh, it’s almost universally standardized that turning whole classes of things to the right (clockwise) tightens and turning those same classes of things left (counter or anti-clockwise) loosens them. Light bulbs, screws and nuts, almost all kinds of threaded devices (save for threaded comments *heh*) with very, very few exceptions follow this rule.
And yet… *sigh* About every third loaf of bread I buy has the twist tie tightened on backwards. Once in a while I am called on by some cultural illiterate to help open a bottle or jar, because the cultural illiterate is tightening the lid by twisting the wrong way.
This doesn’t take literacy, folks, just basic functional competence.
The list can go on and on: folks who can’t solve simple problems because they have no concept of relationships between various weights and measures, people who are NOT tone deaf who nevertheless think they are reproducing pitches in their abominable attempts to “sing,” people who write letters to editors proving they didn’t understand the editorial they read and cannot write coherent sentences in English, etc., etc.
The new normal seems to be subliterate, incompetent, highly specialized morons.
BTW, apropos of nothing in particular *heh*, my collection of hammers (which includes four slightly different framing hammers–two of them “heirlooms”–a 2# machinist’s hammer, a small selection of ball peens, etc.) doesn’t see as much use as in days of yore, but a small range of differently purposed hammers should be among the first things acquired and mastered by anyone who owns a home. Screw that new big screen: get some hand tools and learn how to use them well! This is especially important nowadays as our political masters seem intent on creating an inflation/depression situation where fewer resources will be available to the average citizen and what resources there are will be much more expensive. Knowing how to use basic hand tools to effect home repairs could well be one of the things that lets you keep the wolf from the door in these growing-ever-darker days…
*(Dys)United States: bad, abnormal, ill.