Month: January 2013

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My Least Favorite Month of the Year

Sure, when I was a wee tad, I occasionally heard strange word pronunciations (strange to my ear because I lived in a somewhat literate family environment and began reading at an early age), like “warsh rag” for “wash cloth” (“warsh” never seemed to be accompanied by “cloth” for some reason) and “drore” for “drawer”. Somehow, though, I was never exposed during my formative years to people who simply could not pronounce the months of the year correctly. Hence my least favorite month of the year, a time of the year nowadays when I have to continually bite my tongue to keep from shouting

least-fav-month

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Memories

Every now and then things long misplaced just pop into focus from long-ago memories. Here’s one from those after school snack times in front of the TV (B&W, of course) before heading out to play for a bit before dinner (well, actually “supper” in our home :-)). Every afternoon about four a brief video of a jet in flight accompanied by music and the reading of “High Flight” would hold me for a very short time:

The poem

“High Flight”

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

–John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Just one more memory, burnished by time, softly glowing. I can still hear it as one of “the voices in my head”.

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Can You Spot the Fake?

can-you-spot-the-fake

Answer: It’s the guy with the bad golf swing who’s also poorly photoshopped to back up the laughable claim that he goes skeet shooting “all the time”.

Note: the photoshopped pic purporting to be of The Zero with his saddle oxfords, golf gloves and a shotgun turned up in a Tweet from New Republic with a link to a fake White House site. TNR, of course, is just anther limb of the Democrat Octopoid Hivemind. Since it was caught out, it’s tried to blame its stupidity on Twitter.

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Apart From Innumeracy and Grammar Failures, Moderately Interesting. . .

What? Oh, this article about the feds making those who unlock their dumb phones criminals. Sure, the info is pretty much useless to Olde Phartes like me who just use a cell phone to make calls (don’t try calling my cell phone, cos I won’t answer), but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Still, how many times can one read something like,

“There’s more than a few ways around this. . . “

. . . without gagging and searching for a way to dopeslap, then tar, feather and hang the author from the highest tree?

There ARE. . . ways, idiot. Count it out. Plural. Got it? (No. He can’t count and can’t parse a simple sentence in English. Typical Hiveminder.)

Continue reading “Apart From Innumeracy and Grammar Failures, Moderately Interesting. . .”

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A Reasonable Analogy

unlicensed-pharmacist

Both the so-called “War on Drugs” and our borders themselves are frauds of monstrous size, each in its own ways. Neither the “feddle gummint” policies on drugs nor its almost complete lack of border enforcement make any sense. . . except when viewed as anarcho-tyranny encouragement of real criminals and criminalizing the personal liberties of citizens.

    1. The fedgov needed a constitutional amendment in order to be able to pass the Volstead Act which prohibited the manufacture, import, distribution or sale of ONE drug, alcohol. The Eighteenth Amendment has since been repealed and the Volstead Act is null and void. Where then does the fedgov get any LEGITIMATE authority for its so-called “War on Drugs”?

    2. The fedgov’s de facto “cheesecloth” border policy (effective policy: open borders) is even more nonsensical, because the effective policy is both contrary to black letter law on the books and defines a country that has already been conquered by anyone who wishes to do so. No borders=no nation.

These two areas pretty well describe the idiocy that is now our national government. It’s completely without legitimate authority in almost all areas in which it exerts power and in areas where it does have legitimate authority it’s either unconcerned with effective enforcement or incompetent.

What we need at this point is for all civilian bureaucraps, all fedgov politicians and the normal inhabitants of the Pentagon, etc., to hold a plenary session in some huge venue–I’d even go with “built for the occasion”–in DC and for God to send a massive flood to wipe ’em all out. The nation could then hold a memorial service honoring the one or two honest and decent politicians or bureaucrats caught up in the flood and a new Independence Day celebrating our freedom from the illegitimate harassment by unconstitutional exercises of power and incompetent (or willful disregard for) enforcement of legitimate areas of authority.

Well, I’d be willing to settle for enough blackmail on enough congresscritters to get another amendment submitted to the states to remove Eighth Amendment protections against “cruel and unusual punishments” for fedgov politicians and bureaucraps (and enough blackmail on enough State legislators to get it so we could then get it ratified) and a follow up law allowing tarring and feathering (hot tar and feathers, at night, flaming torches encouraged *heh*) of fedgov politicians and bureaucraps who abuse their powers to harass citizens.

I’d bring the popcorn to every “torch party” I could attend.

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Can I Get Disability Payments for This?

I have a disability that is a constant burden. In my daily walk of life, it causes me many, many difficulties that weigh me down, reduce my ability to work or even have enjoyment of life. It’s severe and debilitating.

I simply caNOT understand–or many times even remember–that most people LIKE being stupid, ignorant and blind to the world around them.

Most people cannot (solely because they don’t want to take the vanishingly small effort to do so) understand that

x+y=z, therefore z-y=x

. . .or that a basic grasp of such things are, in the very a natural, ordinary and proper human existence, useful in so very many ways that if one were to stop to list them there would likely not be enough (electronic) ink to do so.

And that’s just scratching the surface of things most people do not even take for granted, because they remain obstinately blind to them.

But it’s not just that basic, almost first grade level, algebra’s usefulness in kitchen management, carpentry, shopping and much, much more eludes them (because they are too intellectually lazy to be able to win a game of checkers against a head of cabbage), no, it’s not just that. It’s also that such folks view any use of very simple math extending beyond extremely basic addition and subtraction as magic, only invoke via calculators of some sort. (But then, such folks also do not usually even understand the formulae they must use to input data into a calculator beyond simple multiplication, division, addition and subtraction.)

My disability is that I just do not get that.

Algebra, statistics (and the calculus necessary to understand how statistical formulae work; without that, one is far too easily manipulated by phony statistics. . . just sayin’), gemoetry, etc., are all extremely useful tools–as ways of thinking about our world around us–for anyone wishing to

save money
save time
save effort

. . . that it boggles my mind that so very, very many not only are utterly incapable of even seeing the daily multitudes of applications of simple maths like algebra and geometry but are actually dismissive of such simple maths as non-utilitarian (though few such folks would even understand what I just wrote).

I have tried and tried, but my disability seems to prevent getting my head around that mindset.

So, when a salesman (of construction materials in the case that came to mind) clicks away on a calculator and comes up with something that simply cannot be, given the physical constraints of a job, the materials involved, etc., because he unthinkingly applied the wrong sets of criteria AND improperly applied a wrong formula, pencil and paper proofs might not be enough to demonstrate the flaws. . . and searches at that business for someone who DOES understand what the problems are might go all the way to the top of the food chain (as it did; the owner of the business understood the simple maths involved *sigh*). One out of four persons (two out of five, including me), 25% (or, if I were included in the population count there, 40%) could do the simple math.

That’s pretty typical. When I’m in the room, the number of folks getting simple math goes up. When I leave, the general IQ drops. No, seriously, and I’m not really all that smart or math-or-letters-literate*. Really. About half my extended family, for just one population sample, can better me there. And while the IQ scores I was once a bit ambivalent about (I turned down an invite to a local chapter of MENSA while in college–issued by a psych prof who had a legitimate access to my records–because I just didn’t, and still don’t, feel that smart”) say I should be bright enough to grasp why people choose to be dumb, I just still don’t see it.

Shouldn’t I be getting some sort of disability payment from the nanny state for this painful, disabling disability?

Continue reading “Can I Get Disability Payments for This?”

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Well, That Was Quick

Started a book–a novel. As usual, I read the acknowledgements. It’s a quirk of mine. The guy started off thanking “. . .the most influential English teacher in my life,” who “also happens to be my mother.” So far, so good. When he gets to his father, though, he demonstrates that the most influential English teacher in his life either wasn’t influential enough or was just not a very good teacher with,

“Growing up you thrilled and terrified my friends and I with bedtime stories. . . “

As any literate person knows, “my friends and” in that sentence doesn’t negate proper English usage. Absent, “my friends and” the sentence reads,

“Growing up you thrilled and terrified I with bedtime stories. . . “

Sounds like the statement of a subliterate doofus, right? Well, “my friends and” doesn’t change that.

That’s one strike. I’ll give him two more and a plot or character failure before the book is ashcanned. That’s fair, isn’t it?

And someone, please, report his mother for being an incompetent English teacher, mmmK?