Month: September 2015

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Finally, the Trash Takes Itself Out

Goodbye John Boehner. Don’t let the door hit you where the Lord split you. Or do. I DGARA.

To the K-Street insiders and Beltway Brigands bemoaning the demise of John Boehner’s reign as Speaker as a rebellion against common sense and political expediency (though in more or less loaded terms), I have the same word I said to Tom Eagleton’s face in 1980: There is a vast chasm between what is right and political expediency, and those who try to straddle it _always_ fail. Boehner’s political expediencies always led him to “compromise” in a manner designed to fail whatever was right, just, for the benefit of the Republic in favor of temporary political benefit for himself and other lackeys of the Left.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

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Yeh, It Seems I’ve Always Been This Way

There I was, seven years old, sitting in Dr. Job’s examination room, after a visit following up on some minor hand “surgery.” The lecture Dr. Job was delivering (at my mom’s behest, I had little doubt) was on not chewing my fingernails (which I only did to trim them, instead of using the implements my mom wanted me to use). Dr. Job, a family friend and our personal care physician, lectured me at length on harmful bacteria that could be lodged under my fingernails, making a point of the grime that was under them at the time and very authoritatively (I had GREAT appreciation for his authority) stressing what a fine habitat for bacteria that grime was.

I listened very attentively and heeded his words. Thereafter, before “trimming” my nails with my teeth, I scrubbed under them very, very well.

*heh* I don’t think that was the lesson my mom wanted me to learn. . .

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Yet Another Head-Scratcher

I take one prescription med. I buy one year’s supply all at once. Keep it in the fridge. Pharmacist was aghast that I did so. Why? Because of the “moist environment” in that cold, dehumidifier. . . Oh, and the med comes packaged in foil-sealed blister pack dosages. *sigh* What do they teach in “pharmacy school” nowadays?

Oh, and in further conversation my tinnitus entered the picture don’t ask how–long evolution). He mispronounced it “tin-EYE-tis (AFTER I had already pronounced it correctly). I gave him the “kinder, gentler” correction: “I’m a bit nerdy about things that I’m interested in. The ‘itis’ suffix refers to inflammatory conditions like arthritis and is spelled differently, pronounced differently, and has entirely different etymology and meaning than the the ‘itus’ that is part of ‘tinnitus,’ since tinnitus is NOT an inflammatory condition.”

“Oh.”

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Cats Are Strange

Two cats in the house. One is often a lap cat. The other? A “side cat.” Crowds in next to me (usually), wherever I sit. No lap–nuh-uh. “Side-crowding”? Yep.

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Enough Already!

I found yet another writer to avoid. This one was too easy. Taught for taut, then for than, site for sight: enough! Now, such things are NOT “spelling errors.” No, they are word misuses caused by vocabularies that are too weak for any writer to have. I’ll not name and shame, here. That’s reserved for a future Amazon review (after my dizziness from all the head-shaking abates *heh*) titled, “Enough already! For the love of all that is decent, just stop writing!”

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It’s The Little Things #5682

I bought my first pair of Skechers Shape-Ups five years ago after trying a pair on and experiencing an absence of pain from an ACL injury. Seriously. Tossed the cane. Really. I’ve been through more pairs since then, but my most recent purchase of another pair of Shape-ups brought me a couple of little surprises, one REALLY good one and one “WTF?!?” that was easily remedied.

Really good? Memory foam insoles. Oh, my heavens! I have become used to the great joint cushioning the Shape-ups provide, but now, my feet seem to ride on air! I want to purchase enough pairs of these shoes to last me the rest of my life. *heh*

OK, the “surprise” that needed remedying: The shoes came laced wrong. There’s a tongue-retention device on each shoe’s tongue, but the shoes came without the laces run through those provisions. Why? It’s there for a reason (a Good Reason, IMO–because it’s very useful!). Quick delacing to the point where the laces coule be run properly and it was fixed. NOT a problem.

Wonderful shoes.

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Why Did I Not Realize This Before Now?

Somewhere around 50 years late? *sigh*

OK, I was a fairly bright (never so-called “genius” level bright, but not intellectually dim, either) teenager. Oh, I was completely clueless, ignorant and could almost be classed as a zombie in all regards except for intellectual curiosity. A genuine nerd before such things were so labeled. An Odd, if ever there were one. I did have friends, but that’s ALL due to their friendliness (well, perhaps save for another Odd I connected with due to his parents’ long-standing friendship with my parents, and their awareness of our similar Odd-ness *heh*).

So, there I was at fourteen pitching the idea that my parents spend some of “my” money (long story involving an insurance settlement for injuries directly and completely caused by a neighbor’s stupidity and paid for by their car insurance) to buy a set of The Great Books of the Western World. Sold it. They bought the set. It thereafter “lived” by my bed until I got married, its authors works my constant companions.

Slide ahead a year from the purchase. I had just about completed a recovery and rehabilitation from the damage done me by “New Math”–said rehabilitation at the hands of a great math teacher (thank you, Mrs. Heinz, wherever you are!) via a year of high school geometry. Maths became enjoyable again. And then. . . Newton’s Principia Mathematica, though not in Latin (a language I still have no real facility with). Why not? It was really just an extension of geometry, since ALL Newton’s development of calculus in it were geometrically-inspired, driven, and derived. Oh, I won’t say I mastered Newton’s developments as an autodidact at the age of fifteen. No, I certainly did not, but. . .

Fast forward to my first year of calculus class. The teacher drew me apart after the first exam and required me to retest on the material, using different test problems, because I had scored 100% without writing in any of the intermediate steps between problem and answer, and I could offer nothing except, “Well, it seems obvious.”

So, retest. Same results. Puzzled him, and even I was puzzled as time went on and I saw other students I knew were brighter than I was have to work through the steps.

Just this evening, prompted by a mention of Newton’s approach to calculus in a novel, I recalled how much fin working through Principia had been a couple of years before that calculus class and the light dawned: I wasn’t just “seeing the answer” through some sort of intuitive insight. No, it was just the echo of having played around with Newton a couple of years before.

Now, I’m not as mentally sharp in intellectual pursuits as I was when I was a teenager, but I still enjoy working through concepts, and yes, even maths, to arrive at new and interesting ideas or learn new things about, well, just about anything. I’m still curious and enjoy poking the bear of my ignorance, prodding it into learning something new, so at least I still have that. No, I don’t learn languages as easily as I once did, and yes new concepts take a wee tad more effort to work out than I recall once being the case, but such things are still fun.

Still, why the heck did it take something like 50 years for me to make the connection between playing with Principia and the way calculus seemed so easy? Cluelessness. *heh* I still got it!

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Sometimes, Basic Skepticism Isn’t Enough

When I was first exposed to the Internet, I had already had exposure to BBSes, mailing lists, and more. Those ARCHIE, VERONICA and GOPHER searches offered me amazing tools to dig into academic and other resources for information and just knocked my socks off.

So, I’ve always viewed the Internet primarily as a research tool. When doing research on any academic topic, the general procedure, back in those long ago days of yore when colleges and universities were repositories of knowledge and literacy, and training grounds for critical thinking, involved a LOT of sifting and winnowing, comparison of purported facts, sources and documentation, and the eventual selection of most reliable sources and facts.

I guess I just unconsciously and tenaciously hung onto the misconception that most–or at least many–folks treated presentations of information on the Internet that way for some time, but slowly I began to realize that–by far–most folks just turn to “information” received from Internet organs for confirmation of their biases, not for real information.

And then I woke up, looked around me and realized that the relationship between most folks and (most) information has been that way all along, and getting even more so as time has passed.

Sad. Real stories are much more powerful than fiction, but ready acceptance of lies by lazy, bigoted, ignorant folks seems to be more powerful still.

Discouraging.

Along with the Internet being used as a disinformation organ by so many, in similar manner to the way the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind uses TV, radio, movies, newspapers and magazines to spread propaganda and plain bald-faced lies, the schools have been churning out both illiterates and a-literates at an alarming rate, “products” who lack even the basic tools to see that they are willing, even complicit, victims of the Dunning-Kruger Effect who think they are competent to discern truth from lies, fact from fiction, etc. . . but are not.

Tired of all the stupidity passing itself off as punditry (and being lapped up by the sheeple). Tired of social media devolving, as such things do, into nothing but stupid repetitions of the latest fantasies or silly “memes” that are little but propaganda for the a-literate.

Just tired, period, I guess.

Maybe I’ll take a nap.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to trust Internet sources to be untrustworthy until they demonstrate their material is reliable.