My father’s voice; amusing bumper sticker

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Well I don’t really have a lot on my mind today, so there will likely not be much here worth reading. That could be argued for just about every day that I do take the time to write something though, so I guess this will be just about the same as usual. Only I have only a couple of random musings in mind and nothing to totally rant on.

• Shortly after waking up this morning, while in the half asleep/half awake strange dreamworld kind of thing, I had a realization; I can no longer remember what my Father’s voice sounded like. If that sounds a bit strange I do apologize. I am pretty sure that everyone can remember voices, you know you sort of replay the phrases through your head and are able to hear exactly what it sounded like. Much like the way that you can play an old favorite song in your mind, you can hear every vocal and instrument as if the song was actually playing. I can no longer do that with any phrase that my Father spoke to me. I can clearly see his face, remember the situation where the event from memory was taking place and the such, but the words that play through my mind are no longer in his voice, they are in my own voice.

I am not really sure if there is any significance at all to this. The only thing that sticks out in my mind is that it means that I have lost a bit more of him. I am left to wonder, now fourteen years since his death, if I would still remember what he looked like were it not for the single picture that I have of him hanging in the guest bedroom (I mean the picture of him is hanging in the guest bedroom, not that I have a photo of him hanging, which happens to be in the guest bedroom).

After all, once you die the only part of you that remains is your memory, when even that begins to go away then it is more like you never existed at all. Kind of a frightening prospect, yet each day I realize more and more that the growing older thing, which I thought would never happen to me, is happening to me. It turns out that you don’t just turn 70 and all of a sudden lose all of your memories, no no, it is like you lose older memories as you gain newer ones, at least I hope I am going to remember the new memories. I suppose that it goes pretty much the same for everyone and I am only focused on it since I am so introspective, who knows. Hell now that everyone (virtually) has a video camera of some sort I may be in the last generation of people that actually try to use their mind to preserve memories of loved ones. As I read the last line, though, I realize that it isn’t true in the least. There seems to be a much deeper emotion involved with actual memories than there is to a photo or even a home video, that is why they are memories isn’t it?

Memories, as I see them, all seem to have a deep emotional tie to an event, be it good or bad, that both happened and played a role in shaping you into who you are today. Yet it seems that the memories somehow etch theirselves into you moral consciousness to the point that it is a part of your being. The memory may fade, but the ideals that the memory built into you remain. Who knows, maybe the memories themselves have a time stamp on them and can go away when they are no longer necessary.

It may be true that I can no longer remember the stern, disapproving voice of my Father when he scolded me. Nor can I hear the calm, sympathetic voice of my Father when I was injured, be it physically or emotionally. I do not believe that his soul has moved to ‘heaven’ or some ‘higher plane of existance’ , no, he is dead. I find it unfortunate that I can no longer hear the tones and nuances of his voice when I see him in dreams, but I am not going to think about that too much. Through his discipline and love (as well as my Mother) I have become who I am today.

It may not be much, but what I have was earned through hard work. Work done by my own hands (with the wife’s assistance, of course). My Father may have been a lot of things, an alcoholic, unfaithful to his wife, unfaithful to his girlfriends, but he worked for everything that he owned. I know that he took pride in that, and I know that he would take pride in my following in his footsteps as far as working for what I have. He might even have taken pride in my being able to ‘keep it in my pants’, who knows.

What I do know is that the only thing left of my Father is his legacy. Not much on that front. He was horribly in debt at the time that he died, had way more cars than he could afford, at least four or five girlfriends that regularly shared his company on the weekends. Hell, his memorial service was a “who’s who” of sluts in the county. I have taken a more subdued approach to women (monogamy, no, it is not a type of wood), which has resulted in a marriage that has lasted several years so far, I think that this would also have made him proud.

It is (or should be) every parent’s dream that their offspring will better them. It doesn’t really have to be about the size of the house or the number of toys, or any of that material crap. Happiness should really factor in. I may hate my job more than my father ever did, I may hate a lot of things more than my father ever did, but, when you come home to someone that you love, someone that also loves you, isn’t that better than a thousand one-night-stands?

Okay, so that went all over the place, hope you’re still with me.

• I am sure that you have seen this photo on tons of cars everywhere. They do change what is getting pissed on though. I have seen the kid pissing on everything from a chevy logo to GOD. I have always found it pretty humorous, in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, when they show him pissing on certain things. I have seen that little kid peeing on “My Ex”, “Bush”, “Censorship”, seems he will pose to piss on anything.

What my wife and I saw today just went a bit too far. The little ‘Calvin looking character’ was pissing on P.E.T.A. I certainly don’t count myself as an activist for animal rights, but come on. Sure the PETA people take it a bit too far sometimes, but the piss on PETA sticker looks pretty bad. The car that the sticker was on kind of explained it all though, it was one of those huge SUV’s. The wife thinks that it was a Ford Expedition. I barely saw the nameplate on the back of it, but it looks about the right size/shape to be the one we saw with that bumper sticker.

Anyone who is driving a vehicle that they pay in excess of 30,000 dollars for, with a fuel economy of 15mpg, is not likely to give a hoot about the fact that they are destroying the earth with their excess, especially since there was only one person in that huge SUV. Perhaps they should consider a smaller, more fuel-efficient ride for the ten-second run to the local grocery store, but no, this particular vehicle had a “Piss on PETA” sticker on it. I suppose that the logic is: there will still be an environment, we will adapt to it.”

I did say that I do not support PETA, yet, in this case, I may be right behind them in executing whoever was in that huge SUV.

PC issues; Yeti sports

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A screwy work schedule and some other miscellaneous personal stuff has kept me from wrting anything here for the last few days. A quick look at my site statistics shows that both of my readers already know that, so let us assume that I added this last bit of information for later reference, like when I am an extremely successful professional selling my system for a “low, low, price” on obscure tv channels in the dead of the night/morning. At which point someone might want to buzz through the old archives to see what I had said in the past. However unlikely, I am going to go with that, so sue me.

• Work sucks, as usual. Life sucks, as usual. Possibly the reason that I have not felt compelled to type about it here is that it is all the norm. Were I in a position where work on your average day was enjoyable, you know the type of job that you actually look forward to going to, hell, even the type of job that you don’t contemplate slitting your wrists every morning before you go, maybe if I had that type of a job I would be able to write a lot of good anecdotes on some days, then bitch on others. Problem is I never have a good day, EVER.

The day in question, that being today, had this as my problem:
The PC in the back-room will no longer communicate with the cash register. A quick search of cables and other such paraphernalia that make this happen revealed that there was one of the connectors that was totally fucked. The particular item that was fucked is this guy right here. Note that this particular connector got really fucked a couple of years ago in a lightning storm that burnt out both the PC and the master cash register. I told the bosses at the time that the part needed to be replaced, but, after replacing the cable itself the problem seemed to be fixed. I told them that using the part could result in further damage, as the pins no longer had anything to insulate between them, and I didn’t have any idea how many of the wires had power going through them and how many didn’t.

The boss then said, “Does it work right now?” A question to which I had to answer YES, since it was working at that moment. He then said, “it is fixed then.” That was the end of the discussion. No matter how many times I tried to bring up the possibility of future problems he would not listen. It was working, therefore nothing was wrong.

Fast forward a couple of years. The part that is in question did completely short out. According to the guy who built a duplicate of the part, some of the wires had gotten so hot that they had fused together. Now it is possible that either the communications port in the PC is also burnt out (which really isn’t that big a deal) or the rs232 port into the cash register is burnt out, that would be a pretty big deal, they don’t use your average pc components on these type of cash registers, and they certainly don’t sell just the parts. You have to pay for the part and the installation as a package deal. If it is just a simple PC com port problem I can probably fix it in two minutes for a cost of about a dollar. If it is a problem in the register itself, the tech can likely fix it in two minutes, for a cost of about 500 dollars. One must keep in mind that these techs are getting paid an hourly wage for the time that they spend in the car on the way over, as well as charging a trip fee, then charging (way too much) for the replacement part and installation. It is practically extortion.

There still is the possibility that only the data cable got fried in the process so I will reserve judgement for a later date. I will just bring up the key points once again. 1) I told them that this part needed to be replaced or there might be future problems. 2) Once the thing was working again, even though a part was broken, I was told it was fixed, not to waste my time on it. 3) Now that it has come to be that something did definitely go wrong with the system, and all signs point to a short in the device that I told them to replace a couple of years ago. 4) It is all my fault for not fixing it in the first place.

• So I have been playing a lot more of the damn Yeti Game of late. The major reason for this was the addition of the Yeti Pentathalon. Yes, you have to do all five of the Yeti sports in succession. I assumed that this would make it so that one runaway high score wouldn’t lead the world, since that score would have to be factored in with the scores of the four other events. This has held mostly true so far, though there are a couple of scores that just seem a bit too high to have been achieved in a single session by a single person. Still I must assume that it is all legit.

The problem is that I never really thought about the possibility that the opposite would be true. That is, I never have a good game in all five events. On the occasions when I really kick ass in one event I will invariably bomb in another. Thus I am just as likely to make it to the leaderboard if I try to play one and hope for a great game as I am if I try to do all the events and pray for pretty good games. Which all amounts to a hill of 1’s and 0’s when you think about it. I am not going to get an award if I reach the leaderboard, well, unless you count the fact that I will think that wasting fifty or more hours of my life to see my initials on a leaderboard is an award. My god, now I remember why I gave up Asteroids.

Olympic basketball; My friend George

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Well the good news is that I saw George in the store today buying a bottle of Port wine. He was pretty drunk when I saw him, which is good since alcohol may be a depressant, but that seems to be the only way to deal with pain. I will cite my neck injury as proof of this; The ibuprofin didn’t really help, the muscle relaxers didn’t really help, the alcohol made it possible to sleep. That is not to say that the pain killers don’t work, just that they may not work in the same way. It is a known fact that alcohol pretty much numbs your brain, whether the pain killers can do that as effectively is probably based on the person and not some formula. I will say that when I was taking the Flexoril (muscle relaxant) it did make the pain subside, yet, if I actually moved the pain would come back. With alcohol it works acrosss the board. Maybe your head is on fire, you don’t care, you can’t feel it, good stuff, liquor, maybe they should use it more often for medicinal purposes. I know I do, and on a daily basis.

• So I have not been paying any attention to the Olympics this year. You may ask yourself why, but likely you don’t care that I am not following them, since you are not following them either. I must admit, though, that I found it pretty humorous that our basketball team got their ass handed to them. Not unexpected, mind you, just humorous. The USA may have some of the best athletes in the world, but when you think about it they are only the best athletes because the conditions allow it. Why is it that the runners from Kenya seem to win every marathon ever? They spend all of their lives running from damn near everything you can think of. They have certainly earned their place as the fastest nation on the planet. I am sure that they do toil and train to get better, but I am equally as sure that if you were to grab a random guy in Kenya, and a random guy in New York, and make them race 26 miles, the guy from Kenya would certainly win. The guy from New York might not even finish, what with his heart exploding about six miles in…

That was a bit off topic, but still, people who happen to live in the USA always get a hand up when it comes to athletic competitions. Well, I suppose it is possible that the jocks that can’t put a noun and a verb together could possibly make it through an average high school English course, but once they are in college (on scholarship) they are getting a lot of preferential treatment. Free passes on exams and the such, just based on the millions of dollars that a college can make on a T.V. deal if they put a good team on the floor. The colleges do sometimes expose the little leaches, usually when the media gets wind of what’s going on, then the NCAA will go ahead and place sanctions against the team for a couple of years. No one really believes that the corruption is going away, but we take the sanctions as an act to show that cheating is not tolerated…However misguided…

The net result of all of the preferential treatment is that we get some more athletes through college and onto professional sporting fields. The fact that they can not read or write seems to take a backseat to the fact that they CAN run, jump, throw, or just be really big for the sake of being big. Hell, ask probably half of the professional athletes in the USA to define a ‘metaphor’ and they would say that they don’t know what a ‘meta’ is for.

This is the crap These are the people that we send to represent our country in the Olympic games, a bunch of whining babies that were the star of the team back when they were playing high school sports in Alaska, then got babied through college since they were the “next big thing”. Then they end up on profesional teams (now I am talking about basketball exclusively) where they are treated in a different way than the rest of the guys who are on the same ‘team’.

You end up with a ton of over-paid, un-educated fools that think they are better than Jesus. Sure the dunk might look great on a poster, but there has to be someone there to pass you the ball to make the dunk. Since the Olympic team we send over now is comprised of a bunch of guys that already think they are better than Jesus, they never really pass. The U.S. basketball team got their ass handed to them, the most likely reason for that is ego. The U.S. has a team that is made up of a bunch of people expecting the other guys to wipe their ass after they shit. The rest of the world is using teams that play as a ‘TEAM’, and they will hand the U.S. its ass over and over again until the U.S. team realizes that it is not a dunk show, it is a game, the team with the most points when time runs out will be the winner. The U.S. guys need to start asking themselves whether they want to be the winner, or the team with the best ‘poster dunk’.

The only reason that I even mentioned the U.S. basketball at the Olympics was because I saw a quote, from Allen Iverson, of all people, that said;

“They play the game the way it’s supposed to be played,” Iverson said. “It’s not about athletics. That’s the game the way Karl Malone and John Stockton play it. It’s good for kids to see how the game is supposed to be played.”

Okay, so even Iverson understands that they need to play as a team. Why didn’t he mention that prior to the game? My best guess is that it would have required him to pull his head out of his ass. Playing the game in the Olympics is not the same as playing it at home; You have to guard everybody, as these are the best five guys that a nation can put on the floor. Every other nation’s team seems to understand that, yet, our athletes think it is going to be a highlight reel. The USA “Dream Team” has won every overall competition since they started to allow professional athletes, don’t you think that is some sort of hype that everyone has on their blackboard?

I really hope that we fall short of the medal in the basketball competition, I hope that only because it will make the athletes try a bit harder next time around. Sure it may be something to write in your diary when you kick the ass of the highest played player in the world, but how do you feel when you lose to a team that doesn’t get paid at all, and therefore plays for thd love of the game? When you can kick the ass of a team that plays for heart., not money., You will be about equal to where I was in grade school, where our team could take all comers. No one ever made a poster out of it, none of us went on to the NBA, but I will guarantee you that we played better, as a team, than the hacks players that we sent to Athens this year.

Audio equipment; Phimosis

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Well as my legion of fan (no those weren’t supposed to be plural) might have noticed, I did take a couple of days off from typing this page up. No reason why really. I didn’t feel like typing, no one ever reads it anyway, kind of like farting in the wind… there is just no payoff. Though I have no plans to close down the site, as It is very theraputic for me to write something down that is annoying me, I don’t think I am likely to try to keep making a new post every day. I am not going to set to stone a schedule whereby I will make new posts, as that loses the point of bitching about stuff that is irritating me, what I will do is say that I am likely only going to have, at most, five posts a week. The days that they might occur are going to be a surprise even to me, so I guess it will actually be 100% true that I am typing this for my own benefit from this point forward.

• Something that I want to mention today, as it may be too late tomorrow, is a brief conversation that I had with a regular customer where I work.

The man’s name is George, I consider him a friend even though I do not know him all that well. We have been talking, at length, about all sorts of weird shit ever since I started working at the store. He is quite a friendly, helpful man, but he has a lot of medical problems. I have visited his home several times, even knocked back a cocktail or two while there, and I suppose that, by definition, that would make us friends, though had that never have happened I would still think of him as a friend.

George loaned me his little truck (chevy s10? maybe) a few times to do errands that needed doing. Much like with the local “cat lady”, his only reward was for me to sit with him in his home and talk. Mind you, he is a bit of an Audiophile, and that took a bit away from my apprehensions about visiting his home. The guy has every album you could ever think of on vinyl, 8-track, cassette and CD. There is no place in his house that you can stand without hearing the song that is playing coming from multiple speakers, and sounding totally awesome. That being said, his audio system cost probably in excess of $20,000 U.S. dollars. That system is also installed in a house that likely cost him a lot less than that when he bought it twenty-five years ago. I don’t know why audio is his passion, but it is.

I really started trying to fuck with him with the stuff that I brought over (cd’s I mean). As far as the retail cd’s go, he could tell me every time that they were a retail cd, while he could tell me every time that one was an mp3. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. Just for fun, I brought over an old garage recording that I had made back when I was in a band. He instantly knew that it was not only a “garage effort”, but a very poor one at that. Being pissed off at that point, I ripped “Metallica’s” song “one” to mp3 to see if he could hear the difference between the two. What really shocked me was that, on his system, I could tell the difference between the two. I think that the studio recordings have a lot more sound on them than you can hear on your average, cheap-ass media player. If nothing else, George proved that point to me.

This guy, George, has had a lot of shit happen to him over his life. Possibly the worst thing (at least in my mind) was the Phimosis.

The thing about “phimosis” is that if you are circumcised you never have to fear it. If, however, you are not circumcised, it will be a constant threat to the penis. George had the phimosis problem as a child, but it was never discovered. By the time he was in his late 30’s/early 40’s, he had to have his penis amputated as it was so covered in virus that it could not be saved. I suppose I should note that phimosis, in and of itself, is not life-threatening. When, however, it is let to stay on a body for thirty years, infections can occur. The phimosis kept him from being able to clear up some, I can’t remember the story all that clearly, but it was genital warts, I think. Without the ability for the glans of the penis to be free of disease, the infection spread into his testicles. He had, at that point, two options; 1) Die. 2) Amputate your penis and testicles.

But wait, it gets worse. The guy then had a couple of strokes, which have left his back and legs in constant pain, the kind of pain that even the best drugs can not sate. He said to me today that, “If you (that being me) could take away the pain, I would be forever in your debt.” After that, it got spooky.

George said to me, and I will quote, “You are a very kind and loving man. Not just a man, but a kind and loving human being. When they find me tomorrow, please make sure that the note on my chest still says ‘too much pain’.”

He did go on to say that he figured his children would simply bury him in the back yard so that they would be able to continue collecting his disability and retirement checks from where he worked. So is that human nature? If it is I want right the hell out of this “race”.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole story is that I will likely be the first person to enter his home after he dies. I really don’t think that he was joking today, I think this might be it for him. I don’t know what I could do to stop him from it: he already has every drug in the hospital in his system.

Here’s to hoping that George wakes up again tomorrow.

Kobe lawsuit

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I am going to start off with the thick of it, if I get to any random thoughts I might post them below. Time will tell.

The news item in question today is Bryant Accuser Sues, Seeks Monetary Damages

I spent a hell of a long time going through my old posts looking for my mention of this case (which is all my fault, since my archives are about four months out of date.) and I did find it. I must say that it kind of tickled my little, tickly parts when I found that it was saying basically the same thing that I thought it had said. I will quote just one paragraph on this update, if you want to see the whole thing I wrote (which was all about Richard Simmons getting sued for slapping a burly Harley salesman), you can read it Here.

The part from this particular rant that I wanted you to see is the following paragraph, indented for ease of view;

The sad truth is that so many of the cases involving celebrities are utter bull-shit that it is hard to pick through them and find the one in a hundred that is real. Take the trial of Kobe Bryant for instance. Did he have sex with that girl, yes. Was it consentual sex? There are only two people in the entire world that know the truth. I personally believe that it was consentual when it happened, then the girl realized that if it was not consentual she would be able to file a civil suit against him and get a boat- load of money. I feel a little bit more strongly about this case (though I am not actively following it) than I do about others because the woman in question turned in the panties that she had been wearing that night, and they had sperm from three separate persons in them. I am not sure if that was allowed to be entered into evidence in the case, also I guess it would be possible to rape a slut, but that really seems to take away from the credibility when she is screaming rape.

That almost seems prophetic, considering this line in the news today that;

The case took a serious turn against the prosecution when the judge in the criminal case ruled last month that the woman’s sexual history just before and hours after she said Bryant raped her could be presented at the trial. The defense’s theory is that she had consensual sex just hours after she said Bryant raped her, which could explain injuries the prosecution said she sustained. The woman has denied the defense claim.

Well, I have only known one woman that was raped ( I mean actually raped, not like a “date-rape”, which is just a bad a crime, but often never spoken of ). The woman, that I personally knew, who was raped didn’t run out and have consensual sex with the next half-a-dozen guys that she saw. Instead, she cried into my arms for a good six hours afterwards, that was when her friends and myself persuaded her to go to the police. There might be a woman out there who is gonna go fuck anything that moves after she has been raped, but that is going to be a tough position to defend.

The girl in this case is going to have to fight a really uphill battle both in the criminal and civil courts. She is going to have to explain how she has the semen from 3 different men in her underwear. Now, I am certainly not a pundit when it comes to court proceedings, but when you have to sift through your own panties to find DNA from the guy that raped you I think your case is pretty feeble. How did the other semen get there? Was it consensual sex with everyone except Kobe? Why did she have sex with a couple of other guys on the way to the police to report rape?

Don’t get me wrong, if he raped her he should be prosecuted. The thing is that the accuser can’t even keep her story straight about the rape, while the accused knows just how it went down.

The most damning piece of evidence in the whole story is this:

Usually, crime victims wait until the end of a criminal trial before suing in civil court, unless the statute of limitations is running out. “That’s not the case here,” attorney and former Denver prosecutor Craig Silverman said.
The civil lawsuit could be used by the defense to buttress an argument that she was only interested in getting money from the multimillionaire basketball player.

That is totally what happened. If you want to sue someone for rape you should keep it in your pants for a day or two on either side of the accusation.

it’s electric

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Well I took a few days off and went on a wilderness retreat to the barren lands of Africa. That is, I spent so damn much time playing the little game on the sidebar that I just never got around to posting. Being as the particular game is supposedly based in Africa I assume that that means I was doing some of that wildnerness therapy crap that all of the rich, SUV driving Metrosexuals get into. It is probably healthier than most other reality escapes but seems a bit less theraputic. Hell, without the aid of any foreign substances the creatures in the game just look rather plain, and not once did I feel the urge to get naked and play the bongos. I guess that is what I get when I try to take the easy way out.

• There was a pretty terrible lightning storm here in town a couple of days ago. It happened pretty early in the morning, which is unusual as we are in monsoon season and that tends to bring lightning storms in the late evening, not at 6 or 7a.m., yet that was when it happened this time. It must have been directly overhead, as this was the loudest thunder I have ever heard in my life; It sounded as though there were gunshots coming from inside my own house all morning. We lost electricity at about 8a.m. as a result of it, but had it restored by shortly before 10a.m., which isn’t a bad turn-around on that sort of thing. When I went in to work, though, everything went straight to hell.

Neither of the two coolers on the roof were working, at all, no power whatsoever. I did a quick test for continuity on each of the 30amp fuses that run to the coolers. Out of a total of six fuses, five were blown. I am not an electrician but I do know a good bit about electrical circuits, when I saw that five of the fuses were blown it did not bode well. The particular circuits that run the coolers are 240volt, that means that you have two power wires and one common wire (the common is often linked to the ground wire in residential applications). When a huge spike of electricity hits, say the store is struck by lightning for instance, it would be pretty likely to blow the fuses on the power wires but not on the common wire. One of the coolers had blown the common wire fuse as well, and I knew even before I replaced the fuses that the motor was burnt out.

As stated, I am not an electrician, I just know from experience that when you blow the fuse for the power and the common that it usually means that a hell of a lot of power went through the common. The most likely reason for this (especially in an electrical motor) is that the power wire had touched (or arced) electricity to the common wire. This would instantly burn all of the fuses in the circuit while at the same time burning a lot of the copper windings in the motor. If you were to ask me to give you a detailed explanation of why this happens, I got nothing. If you were to ask me why the surge burnt out the motor of one of the coolers on the roof while only blowing the fuses on the power wires on the other cooler, that I think I could answer.

When a bolt of lightning strikes it looks for the quickest path to the ground. Anything that is high in the air and made of metal is a really good choice. Both of the coolers on the roof fit that bill perfectly, the one that burnt out is actually a couple of inches higher than the one that didn’t, but I am pretty sure that is coincidence. These are the two highest pieces of metal for at least a good four square blocks, so it was kind of inevitable that one of them would be struck if the ligtning chose to discharge near there. The cooler that survived the ordeal had been rebuilt the previous year and I installed it personally. I mentioned to the owner that there was not a ground on the cooler and he said to just wire it up anyway, which I did, but as a precaution I went ahead and grounded the motor to a piece of metal conduit which ran across the roof and into a breaker box that is securely grounded. I did that for my safety, as I am usually the only one on the roof working on the things and if it is not grounded and gets a power surge it could easily kill me. I truly believe that grounding that cooler through the conduit was what saved it (although the conduit is NOT a good ground and should never be used as such).

When I opened up the other cooler to check on it, I found that it was indeed not grounded. Not only that but whoever installed it didn’t even bother to connect the ground wire to the body of the cooler (which in itself is absolutely wrong, but if you are going to go with no ground on a 240volt circuit you should at least connect the ground to the casing; it could save the life of someone touching it in the case of a surge). With nowhere for the electricity to go, I assume that it traveled down both of the actual power wires as well as the commone wire, which would have instantly turned the motor into a molten metal lump had all of the fuses not blown simultaneously. It is probably lucky that there was not a fire as a result of this whole ordeal.

The even more unfortunate part of the story is that I was so involved with making the cooling system for the store work, and the meat case, which had gone out a few days before for unrelated reasons, that I didn’t bother to check the other cooling systems in the store. The power had been back on for a couple of hours by the time I got to work, I assumed that someone must have checked them. ASS U ME, enough said. Thankfully, the cashier informed me that the wall freezer seemed a bit warm, a quick check of thermometers showed that it was about 30 degrees too warm (but still below freezing) so I went to have a look at that system. It also had a blown fuse, but only a 15amp (not that the amperage matters), which I immediately replaced to get that system back on-line. The only other system that operates on the same (I am going to say ‘Master circuit’ since I don’t know if there is a word for it) circuit as the cooler that burnt is the dairy walk-in, which was operating just fine. Job done, or so I thought.

The second I got home, I mean literally, since I had stopped at the circle K for a hot dog on the way, I got a call from work. It seemed that the large ice cream freezer was a bit warm also. Back to work I went. I found, once I got there, that the light bulb in the continuity tester I had been using all day had burned out. It took me a few minutes to come up with an idea but I did eventually improvise a temporary replacement bulb by using one out of a small flashlight on the shelf. None of the fuses running to that compressor were blown though, so I lifted up the service panel to see if there were more fuses inside, there weren’t, but there was a breaker. Flipped it down, then back up and the compressor started running again. I went home again, for the day this time, thinking that all was well.

Next day (yesterday) I spent my first hour of work moving ice cream to various other freezers around the store. The freezer was working, but for some reason it was not able to go below about five degrees, which is not cold enough for ice cream. A quick look through the sight glass shows that there is no air in the freon lines so I am still not quite sure why that freezer isn’t working. I did notice that as the day went on the case was getting colder and colder each time I checked the temperature, but really how many days should it take to get back to operating temperature? Of course it is about ten time larger than your average home’s chest freezer, and likely fifty times the size of the freezer connected to your refrigerator, so I certainly don’t know. Anyway, it was a bad day or two.


Bush Vs. Bono?

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I really strive to avoid ever putting anything political on this site. The main reason for that is that I feel I am well enough informed to make my own decision on issues, yet not so informed that I would want anyone to read this and take my opinion as a truth. I know that everyone who reads a blog-type-thing with any objectivity will take the opinions with a grain of salt, but I am not even sure my personal opinion is worth that grain.

There are, of course, times when even my small-minded understanding of politics can be dead-on and unarguable. One of those times happened today as I was doing a cursory search of the Yahoo news.

Just for fun, here is the news story that I found on Yahoo news:

Bush, Kerry Converge on Iowa Battleground

The first paragraph, which is usually listed along with the headline, said;

DAVENPORT, Iowa – President Bush (news – web sites) and Sen. John Kerry (news – web sites) clashed at close quarters along the banks of the Mississippi River on Wednesday, the Republican incumbent pledging to “spread ownership and opportunity” if re-elected while his Democratic challenger campaigned as a fiscal conservative able and eager to fix the economy.

That is all well and good. I only clicked through to the article because of the photo that was shown beside the headline (which I will get to in a moment). After reading the headline and the first paragraph, I would think that if they were going to show two photos in the story it would be one photo each of Kerry and Bush, right? Nope. Below are the two photos that were accompanying that article, in no particular order. See if you can guess who is who! (both photos are from the Associated Press, by the way, though I am not going to waste my time looking for the names of the actual photographers.)

If you guessed that this first photograph was George W. Bush holding a baby, you would be correct!

If you guessed that this photograph was of the other candidate, whats-his-name, you would be wrong. No, see, this is BONO. He is a member of the band U2 I think, and certainly not John Kerry. How did it happen that a prominent site like Yahoo accidentally put a picture of Dubya holding a baby right next to a picture of BONO? This could have been a simple mistake, of course, but for the next hour and a half the pictures remained the same. Though as I checked just now, there is a photo of Kerry on the top with the photo of BONO still the second photo.

Now, please look again at that photo of Bush. Doesn’t it look a little bit like Dubya is giving the evil-eye to a baby who has slapped his hand to his(Bush’s) forehead, possibly in the hopes of slapping the Devil out of him? I don’t know. What I do know is that putting the picture of Bush holding a baby up as the Republican point photo, then following it with a photo of BONO (regardless of how democratic he happens to be) is going to swing to the advantage of the Republicans…Unless, of course, people see that even the baby hates Bush and is trying to push him away.

There are people on the Republican side (damn near all of them) that express that the problem with the “war on terror” is all based on the fact that the media is very liberal (slang for democrat). Anyone with a single shred of intelligence understands that it is completely the opposite, but that myth still persists. That has led all of us in the ‘lunatic fringe’ (Republican slang for Democrat) to find our news from sources that are not owned and operated by corporations that are spending millions of dollars a year to keep Bush in office. Every national station has interest in either Bush himself or the interests that Bush & Co. are kicking back money to. I really used to think that the news I read on the internet was not biased…I guess I better rethink that one…

Rental repairs; Amusing news

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There has been nothing at all that I felt like bitching about for the last few days, not that my life doesn’t suck every bit as badly as it always has, just that I am tired of talking about it. Life sucks, I’m used to it.

I have been doing a bit of work on one of the Owner’s rental houses over the last couple of days as well. Just hanging blinds and some general maintenance kind of stuff, but it has been taking a hell of a lot longer than it had ever taken me in the past. The reasons for this are multiple, depending on the particular window. Some of them have old screws and such that have been painted and plastered over, thus requiring me to find new ways of making window dressings be centered when there is no way to hang them in a central location. Don’t get me wrong, I did hang eleven blinds in this house, with the help of my brother-in-law on the first five, two of them were vertical, tall blinds, the other nine were simple, horizontal(venetian) blinds. Of all of the blinds that I did install there is only one blind that I has to install totally off from center, and that blind is less than a half of an inch off from center, i.e. if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t find it.

The most annoying part of this project has been that I have not ever actually had a key to unlock the door of this rental house. That meant that I had to actually “break in” to the house, which was a very simple task, I mean it doesn’t have a lock on the majority of the windows, and the ones that do have locks just have simple pins that can be pushed out with an ink pen. It is not a lot of fun to have to actually “break in” to a house that you are working on though. It seems kind of shady, but that was my only option, that or drive all the way back to get another key (which I found out later also didn’t work anyway). I need now only to put up a couple of replacement pieces of glass over the light fixtures in a couple of the rooms and that will be that. At least as far as what I am being paid for.

I suppose that I should let him know that none of the electrical outlets in the kitchen work, that all of the outlets througout the house are not secured to the walls, that there is no way an electrical inspector (or a building inspector for that matter) would let a house be rented or sold without ground fault circuit interruptors in the bathroom and near the kitchen sink. I might mention this all if the opportunity presents itself, but chances are the opportunity will never be there.

Enough about that though.

I read the news over there at yahoo today and found a story that I just loved. The headline is, “Priest, Nun Convicted After ‘Sex Act’ in Car”.

My first thought was ‘since when are priests attracted to women?’ My second thought was ‘Since when are women attracted to priests?’ I guess that I should be concerned that the sanctity of the priesthood is being challenged, but, come on, he is a guy. I bet when GOD ‘calls’ people to the priesthood he doesn’t mention that there will be certain things that you will feel inside your pants that you can only alleviate in one way, that way is forbidden. I suppose that it is no wonder the priests start looking at young boys as…well…warm spots really. I suppose there comes a point where even a priest will have desires. Why he can’t take care of that desire with a local prostitute is unknown to me.

I guess that the nuns are attracted to the money, the power, all of the stuff that goes along with being a priest, but then I saw this particular quote in that news artical:

Passers by alerted police at Lilongwe International Airport after the parked Toyota Corolla, which had tinted windows, began shaking in what police described as “a funny manner.”

Damn, it only takes a Toyota Corolla to land a NUN? I am at least one step up from there with my car, still I doubt I could land a NUN! Of course, I am not going to have the Papal authority to land a NUN in the first place, but neither does your average priest. As I previously stated, I find this surprising ONLY because there was a woman involved. Had it been another priest raping pre-teen males I would have just thought it was the status quo. When that priest starts treading on my turf (you know, hetrosexual women) that is the point where the Church has overstepped their boundaries! To be fair, I guess both Priests and Nuns aren’t allowed to have sex, so to put it in simpler terms, it is like Fucking your sister if you happen to be religious.

The problem then becomes that no rational man or woman would ever sign up to be involved in a religious cult if they knew that it would cost them the freedom to use their body as they see fit. I understand that there are those that would say that any sexual temptation that a new priest feels is “the devil’s try” but, that is every priest who has ever lived! Now they have taken to having sex with anything that wiggles. Is that really how you want your little priest to grow up? No! you want him to be molesting children for the next fifty years, right? That is the only advantage of the Priesthood after all.

Bleh. Done for now.

Blue Moon; the Cubs

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Well I had no intention of writing anything today. I decided that in the spirit of getting off my ass “once in a blue moon” I would go ahead and do it even though I really didn’t want to. Speaking of blue moons, I was googling a bit earlier to see if I could find some really great definition of the term; for instance, had I found that the first recorded occurance of what people called a “blue moon” happened to be the second full moon in a month, and there happened to be a catastrophic event (volcanic eruption for instance) that actually blocked the reflection so much that the moon appeared to be a subdued color, possibly blue, through volcanic ash, that would have been something that I could have really understood and expected. Unfortunately, if that information exists on the internet it is not in me to find it. There have been so many songs written with the words “blue moon” in them that a search results in only the top few items for the day followed by a ton of old song lyrics. I would probably take the time to sift through all of the riff-raff to try to find the ultimate answer were I not crutched by a 56k modem. Even at that, when most of the things that I am able to find regarding the “blue moon” are coming from sites like Slashdot, the self-proclaimed “News for Nerds” website, I suppose that I really shouldn’t find it surprising that the discussion over there is about how the blue moon is Not all that rare, considering that they do occur about once every three years, which is about the same as the frequency of sexual encounters for the people who post at Slashdot (autoeroticism and Real Dolls being excluded).

• I have been a pretty faithful Chicago Cubs fan for most of my life. It was not like I really wanted to be a Cubs fan, it was more like it was forced onto me. When I was growing up in Oregon we didn’t have a baseball team, what we did have was a WGN station on our local cable. Any baseball that I watched was always the Cubs against someone else, and the commentary was always leaning towards the Cubs. Hell, it was Harry Caray doing the play-by-play, if you don’t know what he sounded like, or his passion for the Cubs, you simply need to watch any Saturday Night Live show from the last two decades, he (Harry Caray) is likely the most impersonated person who ever lived, except, possibly ELVIS.

I grew up watching the Cubs, and I likely will die with a Cubs jersey in my closet. I do root fot the Diamondbacks now that I am in Arizona, but I don’t seem to have the same passion for the D’backs that I have always had for the Cubs. When Harry Caray died several years ago, I thought it was akin to Blasphome that they were going to have someone else sing the song in the seventh inning stretch. I know that we must move on when someone dies, but come on…That was what Harry Caray did so horribly that none of us will ever forget him. I just googled “ozzy take me out to the ballgame” and got a lot of results for it. You could hear his rendition of that song, even see the video, if you happened to be registered through some of the sites. Of course the registration turn-around time seems to take well over an hour and I don’t have it in me to sign up and then try to follow this train of thought on another day. If you do happen to get the audio of Ozzy singing the song just keep in mind that it is the most realistic cover of Harry’s singing ever. Neither of them seem to know the words, they both seem to be really drunk while singing, they get great crowd response. I think Ozzy really nailed it!

While still on the subject of the Cubs, I guess I should mention that they acquired Nomar Garciaparra today. I don’t really have a solid opinion on Nomar, mostly because he doesn’t play for the Cubs, wait, he does now. I know that the Boston faithful are pretty pissed off at the loss of him, that alone should make me think that he is going to be “the one” to turn the Cubs around…Yet, I can still remember the Cubs trading away all of their good players over the years in the hope to get better hitting, when the hitting was great the pitching sucked. It works vice-versa as well. The Cubs, evidently, haven’t put a really good team on the field since 1907, that is a damn long time. Will the addition of Nomar be enough to push them to the top? NO.

The five year plan for the Cubs, in my mind, runs as such: They currently have pretty solid pitching, but no hitting, so they get a gold-glover who can hit. They finish just out of the wildcard this year. Next year they bolster their hitting with another guy, maybe second base, and still finish just a bit behind. The next year they will trade one of their dominant pitchers for a quality guy to play third base. The following year they finish last in the division, one of the marquee pitchers is injured and gets traded, the aging in/outfield is pretty pissed that the team has all but given up on them, so they don’t really even try. No one really wants to play for the Cubs (the ‘lovable losers’) so they aren’t able to sign their draft picks for a couple of years. Then, in about 2007, they are going to have a few really good pitchers, they will nurse them for a year or two, you know, until they are really good, then they will trade them for aged, has-been position players. This will be the cycle for the next, well, eternity really, for my Cubs if someone doesn’t step in and say NO. Although I do hope that they prove me wrong, I have a bet going that the Cubs will be the first team to ever win the world series exactly 100 years after their last title…That is a bet that you can’t make in most western sports, and I want my damn dollar!

oddities in lexicon

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Not only have I missed several riveting installments of this page in a row, I have also forgotten to update the little sidebar additions on the last few posts. If I didn’t know any better I would think that I am really starting to do a really half-assed job with this whole webpage thing. I did spend a little bit of time trying to makes sense of some of the stuff that I do not yet have indexed in the archive page over the last couple of days. I didn’t make enough headway that I really felt like uploading the additions though, My page, my rules.

The reason that I haven’t put anything new up here in the last few days is pretty simple, I didn’t have anything on my mind worth bitching about. Usually I can look at the Yahoo news to get some bitching fodder, but with the Democratic National Covention going on I have not been able to find anything that I really cared about. No point in discussing the Democratic convention here when 1) I just don’t care, and 2) you could find a lot better coverage and opinions anywhere else but here. I know my limitations.

I usually don’t go into writing these with any idea what I am going to say at all. When I do get the occasional email, whether agreeing or disagreeing with what I said, it makes me smile. The funny thing is that I usually get emails regarding the little anecdotes from my childhood, while I rarely ever get one if I voice a strong opinion on any item that can be found in the news. Even when I went on a rant about mandatory birth control for women on government assistance (which I can’t find right now since some jack-ass is lazy about archiving) I didn’t get a single email about it. I know that my readership could easily be counted on one hand, but still, why do people feel the urge to send the email when I share a story from my past, yet not when I voice a strong opinion about a pretty controversial issue? That’s people for you.

• In a random, out of the blue, thought that I had today (which I can not take full credit for, since it was initially brought to my attention by a girl named Tina that I used to work with), why is it that people always substitute O for 0 when speaking? I don’t know how to do the special characters to make the phonetic o sound on a keyboard, but follow me. Most people will say their phone number like five, five, five, O, three, two, two. So that is six numbers and one letter? I know that it is simply a force of habit for us lazy Americans to cut any corners that we can, but come on ‘zero’ has only one more syllable than ‘o’, if you are in that much of a hurry you might have other issues. The reason that this came back to mind today is that we have a money transfer service thing where I work, it is strictly for sending money to Mexico and overseas, while the operators that run it are all bilingual, they get confused when you use the letter o instead of the number 0. While I was on the phone with one of the operators today I caught myself doing that very thing (which I have myself pretty well trained against) and she asked me to repeat myself. I said, “seven, o, four, o, one”. When she again asked me to repeat myself I realized that I had made that mistake, and when I said it again, but as seven, zero, four, zero, one, she immediately was able to access the information.

The reason that I bring this up is that it made me think about yet another thing, Pig-Latin. When I was growing up we used to use it all the time and thought that it was pretty funny, especially so in the movies where there is some dumb crook who doesn’t understand it. Until today I had never thought of the possibility that someone who has a different first language might also not be able to understand it. Think about it. If you learn all of the words in the English language from a book, but don’t hear a lot of people speaking the language, then someone throws out the word “ishway”, for instance, it probably wouldn’t pop immediately into your mind that the word was “wish”. I am certainly not meaning to imply that this is a really complex code or anything of that nature, but imagine if you were using a similar or even different method of talking to friends around someone who wasn’t “in the loop” on the method.

There was this really weird thing that my friends started doing, just for fun, back in the late eighties. They called it “op talk” which is pretty self explanatory when I make the following example “mop e top a lop lop i cop a”, of course all of the vowels sound like someone saying uhh. I don’t know where the whole thing originated but it sure was fun to screw with my parents using this method. This sort of thing continues, varying by generation, to the point that if you don’t take in enough television or popular music you might just get lost in the whole thing. Sort of like the Rap moguls now using terms like “shiznit” which is a pretty obvious one, but branching out into using only the first letter of the word like they do with heazy heezy, forget that example…How about “hizouse”, I hope I spelled that one right…

Boy do I ever rop a mop bop lop e.