Month: July 2012

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Well, This Sucks

*sigh* I was saddened to hear of Ric Locke’s illness, and sadder still to learn just now of his passing. I had just read Temporary Duty and was spurred to search out more web info on him… and was struck by the poignancy of his circumstances: first published novel doing well; lung cancer. He seemed to be the kind of guy I would have enjoyed meeting. Someone needs to do a Sci-Fi adaptation of W.H. Auden’s lil ditty for cases like this:

“As poets have mournfully sung
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling-in-money,
The screamingly funny,
And those who are very well hung.”

R.I.P, Ric. I never knew you, but after having read your novel, I feel as though I could have known you, at least a bit.

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“…The Age of Knowing How to Do Things”

The post title is the “hook” of a commercial I just saw for some sort of erectile dysfunction drug I’ve forgotten (never even saw) because of the hook and the setting. You see, the premise was that the featured guy in the ad knew how to get his truck out of a mud wallow he’d driven into. Problem was, he didn’t know jack shit about how to drive his truck, hauling the horse trailer, because he drove right into the mud wallow he got stuck in instead of driving on the high spots on the two-track he was on.

Ignorant dumbass. The hook should have been, “The age of not even knowing jack shit.” Knowing how to cause oneself to get stuck in the first place trumps knowing how to get oneself out of a mud wallow once one screws up–out of ignorance and stupidity–and gets oneself stuck.

Anywho… The huge disconnect between the ad’s hook and the circumstances completely destroyed any suspension of disbelief, killed any hope of me actually watching enough of the thing to actually hear the name of the drug.

(Of course, it’s the stupid ad writer who doesn’t know jack shit.)

BTW, if one doesn’t already KNOW to avoid driving a vehicle–especially while pulling a trailer–it helps to not be stupid and to actually think about one’s driving…

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Oh, Yes You Did, Odumbo

[Roofing work takes a brief blog break 🙂 ]

So, Odumbo, The Mighty Zero is now claiming, “I didn’t say that!”

Yes, Odumbo, you did, and, quite apart from all the YouTube hits on the video that proves you did, even your own White House web site says you did:

Mostest brilliant prexydint evah. And his little dog (“Soup”) too.

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Maintenance Mode

TWC will be largely static this week. No, the blog isn’t going to be in maintenance mode: twc central, RW version, is in maintenance mode… all week long. Going to try to beat both the 100-degree+ weather and the rain forecast for later in the week by getting the roof finished during the heat, before the rain. Fun Fun Fun. 🙂

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I Like My Kindle Fire a Lot…

…and I use it daily, but this looks like an interesting device in a similar form factor. Promo video:

Of course, it’d mean more penetration by the Evil Google Empire (I much prefer the not-so-evil, pretty good Amazon Empire, besides, amazons are pretty cool ;-)), but there are ways to fox ’em a wee bit.

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Fun, Fun, Fun (’til My Daddy Takes the T-Bird Away… )

Well, maybe not that kind of fun, but not bad, nonetheless.

The re-roofing of twc central (RW) is progressing. Minor setback. Make a short story long(er):

Installing metal panels over the existing asphalt shingles: use 1″x4″ purlins over the shingles, screwed into the deck and joists below, metal panels installed on the purlins.

OK, no biggie, except… 1x4s at local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard, or even at Lowes: WTF?!? That much?!? Nuh-uh, baby. Further away than local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard store but closer than Lowes “fell off the back of a truck lumber yard”: reasonable, but… The store was way low on 1x4s but had a pot load of 10′ 2x4s for $2 each. Rip ’em down the middle? Nominal 1x4s. Close enough. Bought a passel of ’em; brought ’em home and began ripping ’em up.

Table saw died. *sigh* OK, replaced table saw (much faster than repairing the old one, although I have that in my hip pocket for a later mini-project: repair and sell) and began ripping again. Smooth move. I’m still under the cost of 1x4s at Lowes (let alone the “cat’s back-riding” local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard) and have replaced a slowly-decaying power tool.

Still to go: installing the safety anchors (which I will be leaving on the roof permanently), the purlins and then the steel. Working on the first two on that list today, until the heat drives me off the roof.

The most fun thing in all this, so far, is that I’ve not done anything quite this physically demanding for the better part of two decades, and while I have the typical muscle aches–and my constant “Olde Pharte’s joint aches, etc.–to contend with, so far the pain’s all of the good kind: I can actually feel the good I’m doing myself. Like it.

Most UNfun thing so far: the buckets of sweat. Oh, it’s not all that bad in some ways, but having a puddle literally pour out of my sunglasses onto some work I’m doing is annoying, although at least that clears the puddle of sweat out of my field of vision. *heh* Playing in the attic (to replace a gas vent that needed replacing before the roofing went on) was interesting–like being in a low-ceilinged, stuffy sauna. Temps outside were 106F and in the attic? On fire, man. Going back into the unconditioned, ambient temp, garage from the attic? Felt like air conditioning. Chilly, dude.

As is Tradition for men in my family for carpentry or mechanicking work (going back as far as my paternal great-grandfather, at least), I have already offered a Blood Sacrifice to the Handyman Spirit. Yeh, yeh: I neglected to put my gloves on before moving the steel panels from where they were off-loaded to a better place for beginning to feed them up to the roof. Blood Sacrifice… What does not kill me hurts like the dickens for a while (and then fades into the background of a world of hurt *heh*), then heals… or not (so far all my past “Handyman Spirit Blood Sacrifice” wounds have healed, for various values of “heal” :-)).

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Which Side Are You On?

The Zero–0dumbo, The Great Obamassiah, he who has accomplished nothing but the personal destruction of his rivals on the way to being handed unearned plum after unearned plum, has finally, openly and relentlessly admitted his rabid antipathy to those who work hard and smart, who risk what they have to gain more and make real contributions to their community–jobs, an expanded tax base, goods and services people actually want–and his desire to rob the Makers to give to the Takers (leeches, mooches, layabouts and thieves).

Now, I’m not much of a Maker, but I do try to offer a positive worth to my community. My actual creative/inventive contributions have been small*, but I don’t leech off my neighbors and others who work hard to further their own legitimate interests, and I try diligently to fully pay my taxes, even though most of it is spent on things that have NO constitutional justification whatsoever (no matter how many threadbare lies politicians use as fig leaves). Given the aggressive, unchecked–actively encouraged by the “feddle gummint”!–growth of dubious “disability” claims and food stamp use over the past couple of years, I’m sure I could also get my own illegitimate piece of someone else’s pie, but I don’t hate myself, my family and my neighbors enough to do something like that.

Heck, I don’t even hate rich Dhimmicraps enough to sponge off their dime.

How about you?

Seen at Unexamined Premises:

Indeed.

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See Inigo Montoya

A “professional tech writer” (yeh, she gets paid for this kind of thing) vomited this one:

“Microsoft is continuing to eke out the Windows 8 news.”

That usage is so far “off list” that one would need a fully functioning Hubble telescope to gain a view of its meaning from that sentence. Even in the closest proper use of the phrase “eke out,” that is “to make (a meager supply) last, esp by frugal use,” the sentence misses the mark. One “ekes out” a meager supply to avert complete lack. There’s certainly a wealth of news M$ could release, now, but they choose not to, thus “eking out” a meager supply–the closest one could come to making that sentence work–simply does not apply here.

*sigh*

Literacy is more than just being able to laboriously convert those strange squiggles on a page into words or string some of them together in some sort of nearly sensible order. Understanding the words, having a store of well-written texts one has read and understood, is the next step to literacy. Things like this in text written by someone who makes her living with the written word are both disappointing and disturbing.

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Is This Dumba$$ Serious?!?

The Zero, addressing successful businesses (seeking to establish that they need to be taxed even more) has said, in part,

“Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.”

WTF?!? Business owners aren’t taxed out the wazoo (America’s business taxes are the highest among industrialized nations) first with taxes on their businesses and then on their personal income (“Top 20% pay 94% of income taxes. Bottom 40%? Nada, zilch, zippo”) to pay not only for infrastructure but for “a multitude of New Offices… swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance”?

You do realize that, just in order to make any profit at all in the face of the horrendous expenses imposed by almost endless paperwork and other “compliance” costs businesses are compelled by just the “feddle gummint” alone to incur that businesses must pass on the tax expenses (at the very least) the government imposes, AND that the supply chain hidden taxes are about 22% of every product and service you purchase? What Odumbo is really saying is that because he wants to expand the number of people dependent on government, he wants to TAX YOU MORE.

BTW, as it stands right now, there are only about 1.2 workers for every person either on welfare or in government “employment”. Yes, yes I know some government workers really do exist, workers performing essential tasks. My own back of the envelope guesstimate would place them at about 1/5 of the total of government employees, based on what I’ve observed over the past half century or so. The rest? Just a covert “welfare” program for useless drones or toxic, “Type 2 Bureaucraps”.

As for Odumbo, well, he either knows he’s lying or he’s an idiot. (The two, I realize aren’t really mutually exclusive, and, in fact, in Odumbo’s case, aren’t at all.)

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An “F” for Test Design

Lovely Daughter sent me the photo below (modified to obscure personal information of both student and teacher). If I had been grading the pictured test, the student would have been credited with 100% correct answers and the test designer with a big fat zero for amphibolous (equivocal) wording. Just sayin’.