Month: November 2011

Posted on

As Things Go…

…the marble tile backsplash kitchen project has been… interesting. *heh*

Warning: Renov tale. Skip if handymanish stuff gives you a rash. The voices in my head say I must go here…

So, 12″ marble tiles. That was cool, since the backsplash I was working on was just about 12.75″ tall (by almost exactly 15′ in length–4’+11′) with the area under the window over the sink ~8.75″. Worked out the 3/4 inch differential with an oak spacer (which I’ll “pickle” this weekend).

The “interesting” parts?

Cutting the freaking tiles. *sigh* I had made a decision to cover one straight run of just a hair over 11′ with whole times as much as possible (except for the 3′ under the sink window where I’d planned to use my tile cutter to trim 4″ off each tile–I’ll get back to that later). That meant I knew up front I’d be cutting at least one hole in a tile for an outlet (and cutting a notch out of another one for another outlet and notches out of two more for the left and right side of the window). Since the hole for the first outlet was offset only 1/2″ from the edge of the tile, and these tiles fracture pretty easily, I took it very, VERY carefully. Used a Dremel and a cutoff wheel. Yeh, I know, wrong tool. I have the carbide attachment to cut tile with, but I wanted more control, so… slow and tedious.

Still, the tiles got cut accurately. For the outlets and the sides of the window. That’s the good news. Bad news? *sigh* The tile cutter I’ve used successfully on up to 20″ ceramic tile just busted these marble tiles to pieces. *sheesh* I managed to end up with 4-4″ X 12″pieces and one good 8″ X 12″ piece. Oh, three of the 4″ x 12″ were in 2 or more pieces, but… Mr. Ingenuity (that’s me, in case you had any trouble making the connection ;-)) had a solution. Epoxy and marble dust from the Dremel work. *heh* Breaks disappeared; just more veining consonant with the rest of the tile.

And then… pressing the (properly-buttered :-)) 8″X 12″ piece onto the (properly-troweled :-)) adhesive, the tile cracked. *sigh* OK. Pressed a tad harder and brought some of the adhesive through the crack, wipe-down. Another vein, consistent with the rest of the tile. *whew* Oh, the adhesive is sanded so, no grouting! *yipee!*

So, all that’s left is a bit of deail work–pickling the oak (including the custom shoe molding I cut today), a little caulking, etc.

Feels nice to check one more lil honey-do off my list.

Posted on

“…but most of it is dreck”

Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003

Of course, to Schmidt, “information” is just bits ‘n’ bytes of data crunched by Google. But still, our society is awash in information. Most of it, IMO, is misinformation, disinformation and just plain uninteresting or completely trivial.

Take Twitter. Please. The “information” channel for twits*.

Far too many people “know” things that are simply untrue, fallacious, destructive and harmful. They’ve heard these things from “friends” (though few seem to know what a friend is) and acquaintances, seen these things on TV, heard them on the radio or, in rare cases, read them in newspapers or more likely on Farcebook, Twitter or blogs… written by other subliterate, ill-informed, misinformed, DISinformed, or simply self-lobotomized sheeple, dumbasses and liars.

How to sift the wheat from the chaff, separate the meat from the sizzle, refine the gold from the crap?

First, by attempting to become really literate. Seriously. No, not able to laboriously puzzle out those funny squiggles and put words to them or even to (mostly) understand some of those words’ primary meanings, as known to today’s subliterate culture. No, a literate person–or even one who’s made serious efforts to become literate–just automatically performs historical-critical analysis of what he reads and has multiple primary or other relatively reliable sources and resources to draw on in understanding a text.

Start with any of the “100 must-read books” lists that abound. Sure, they’ll all contain multiple instances of propaganda masquerading as history or historical novels like “The Grapes of Wrath” or many of the ancient historians like Thucydides or darned near all modern historians (though the classical histories are less arrogant and sneering than the modern propaganda papers), but they are at least well-written, for the most part, and as close to primary documents for their respective ages as can be found.

BTW, look askance at any “must read” list that doesn’t include The Bible and ALL of Shakespeare’s works. Lists that don’t include those two things are likely to be wanting throughout. In fact, I’d suggest reading the King James Version until you understand the language there at least as well as you understand contemporary English. It will serve you well both in reading many of the classics and in grasping the many, many cultural memes still expressed with biblical expressions.

Add to those lists some books and other resources that are often missing, such as The American State Papers (including The Organic Law of the United States), Ortega’s “Revolt of the Masses” and the modern “classic”, The Founders’ Constitution, and you’d have a good strong base of reasoning ability and knowledge from which to become more literate and able to at least evaluate the masses of infrmation flowing from various media nowadays.

Just sayin’.

*1twit noun \?twit\

Definition of TWIT…

2: a silly annoying person: fool

Continue reading ““…but most of it is dreck””

Posted on

Earthy Common Sense…

…bowdlerized, is actually sometimes more accurate. Smitty, at The Other McCain, opines in a recent post,

Jerry Sandusky Is To Joe Paterno As. . .

. . .Eric Holder is to [analogous parallelism: The Zero–ed.]

They told me that if I voted for John McCain, executive accountability would be for the little people. So far, they’ve been proven quite correct, no thanks whatsoever to that craven sack of a Senator from Nevada.

Nice to see someone making a clear, if elliptical, link between “Senator”–especially that one, and by implication, all his ilk–and “shit”.

Posted on

Just to Be Clear…

Seen here:

As commented at the site where I saw this, “”Just to be clear, Karen Kraushaar is the one on the left.”

That poor gelding. (If he isn’t, I’m sure she can have her lawyer attempt to make him so.)

If Herman Cain did “hit on” Karen Kraushaar, it’d dim my support for him on the basis of evidence of extreme bad taste alone. I’ve seen pics of his wife, and I just can’t find that to be credible.

Posted on

“My client is an intelligent, well-educated woman… “

…who knows how to attempt a shakedown, the lawyer for Cain accuser Karen Kraushaar, should have continued. The Cain event wasn’t her last attempt at a shakedown for special treatment. Will we also discover at a future date it wasn’t her first? Notice that she’s “worked” in “feddle gummint” jobs since she was shuffled off the NRA payroll, where Cain at one time described her as a ‘poor employee”, with a penurious severance package.

Hmmm, even at a “feddle gummint” featherbedding job*, she couldn’t work well with others. Multiple times, she asked to be allowed to work from home, finally filing a complaint including sexual harassment charges when she wasn’t allowed to work from home after a car accident. Sound familiar? She had multiple work-related complaints when she worked at the NRA and limped in accusations against Cain to add some traction to them.

Oh, and what did she want in “compensation” for not being allowed to work from home and having seen an email joke about computers, women and men that we’ve all had a couple of chuckles at? She demanded YOUR tax dollars to pay for “thousands of dollars in payment, a reinstatement of leave she used after the accident earlier in 2002, promotion on the federal pay scale and a one-year fellowship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government…”

Oh, that’s all? In this one case, the “feddle gummint” gorilla worked in our favor. She got bupkis, which was actually less than she deserved. IMO, she deserved firing for being such an ass. (I added the “IMO” because she has shown a propensity for filing lawsuits and her layer has, IMO, no moral fiber whatsoever.) Oh, and her one big “contribution” during her sojourn at INS? Participating in the official INS/INjustice Department kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez. Yep, her one great accomplishment in life was to be a part of this:

This whole process is very illuminating, but these women don’t seem to understand just what they are demonstrating.

*featherbedding job? She “worked” an office (“bureaucrappic”) in the ineffectual and bloated INS.

Posted on

Again With Theft by “Journalistas”

Look, so-called “journalists” who actually, you know, write or edit or publish stuff for a paycheck get paid, in largepart, to be professional wordsmiths. A plumber who can’t solder a pipe joint–or perform similar essential tasks–or en electrician who can’t properly wire and outlet are stealing when they get paid to do those things improperly. Just so “journalists” who don’t even bother to use the language they’re writing in correctly.

Latest example (of many–this is just the one that was this week’s “last straw”–and so early in the week, too *sigh*)? Obscured for obscure reasons, a caption under a photo:

“‘X’ is skeptical about ‘y’ and let’s it be known… ”

WTF?!? “‘X’ is skeptical about ‘y’ and LET US it be known… “?!?

No, “‘X’ is skeptical about ‘y’ and LETS it be known… ”

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that there were more than a few other examples of stupid grammar and word MIS-usage in the same article.

You see similar idiotic misuses of apostrophes all the time, I’m sure. Similar; not same. Prime example (seen too many times to count in the last few days, which is probably what tipped me over the edge when I saw this very different misuse of an apostrophe):

It’s for its. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is” or “it was” etc. Pronoun-verb. “Its” is the possessive form of “it”–just as “hers” is the possessive form of “her” and “his” of “him” and “ours” of “our”. When someone consistently writes “it’s” when intending to indicate a possessive form of “it” you can count on it that they’re not really literate in English. When that person–say a so-called “journalist–is collecting a paycheck for writing something, that person is a thief. Who can trust “reporting” done by someone who collects a paycheck for not doing his job competently–and is willing to prove it by his writing? Not this guy.

Oh, there are worse excrescences, even apostrophe-based offenses (“‘s” to indicate plurals, for example *shudder* the habit of true idiots), but so many people who GET PAID TO WRITE are the next thing to complete illiterates that it just chaps my gizzard.

Posted on

OK, I Barely Felt That One

Sitting here at ~9:45 p.m. or so this evening, just goofing off on my lil Asus P50IJ while my Wonder Woman watched some Hulu something-or-other, I felt a shaking back and forth, in a roughly east-west direction. Turned to her and asked, “Did you feel that?” Nah, of course not. She was watching a show–focused, you know. 🙂

Yeh, 4.7; another OK quake.

It wasn’t anything much here in America’s Third World County. After all, the location noted by the USGS was Prague, OK, some 200 miles away, and it was a magnitude smaller than the one Saturday a.m.. I’ve felt more from a bad taco and more from C-130s doing touch-and-gos not far from our house early in our marriage. LOTS more when artillery barrages were going off. *heh* Was fun living in an Army town.

Still, my first earthquake awake and aware of the event. Had to wait better than six decades for it. Kind of a letdown.

😉