Personal Musings category archive

When Ohio’s Kent State University offered custodial staff the option of working four days a week instead of five to cut commuting costs, most jumped at the chance, part of a U.S. trend aimed at combating soaring gasoline prices.

“We offered it to 94 employees and 78 have taken us up on it,” said university spokesman Scott Rainone.

Interestingly enough, in the technical writing course I’ve just wrapped up for a local medical manufacturing outfit, I gave the class a writing assignment in which they could choose their own topic, as long as it was something they would like to see changed in their organization.

More than 10% of the class (two persons) picked exactly that topic: allow persons to work four 10s so they could save gas and commuting time.

Yeah, the Cream were singing about draft cards.

(I still have mine somewhere. Did you ever have one? Do you know what it means to carry one in your wallet?)

I’m singing about telephones.

Take Brendan’s away before he makes more calls like this and this.

Protect politicians from being challenged to actually, you know, like, live in the real world and face the issues.

A house down the street just sold after being on the market for about five months. The owners, who were old, had already moved.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the sales on the street on the county website (remember, a real estate transaction is a Public Record–I was surprised what you can find on the county website, including the really bad year when I was late on my sewer tax. “Honey,” said the lady with the county, “Don’t worry. They ain’t gonna turn off your sewer.”).

A few notes:

• The street was built in the mid-50s and has fewer than 30 houses. Some–a dwindling number–of the houses are still occupied by persons who bought them when the street was first opened.
• Most of the other houses have been occupied by the same families for 15 or 20 years. There’s not a lot of turnover.
• Even given normal changes and alterations (garages turned into family rooms, partition walls removed or moved, porches and patios added or changed), most of the houses would pretty much fall into the same price range.
• The house that sold on September 25, 1992, had been neglected because owners had become physically unable to keep up with it. The new owners have fixed it up nicely.
• The sales in June 1996; November 2002; and June 2007 were sales on the same house. In 1996, it had a number of unfinished renovations, including an expanded second floor. The “unfinished” part, though, kept the price slightly lower than market. By 2002, when it sold for $189,900, all those renovations were complete and it was–and is–probably the nicest house on the street right. In 2007, when it sold for $345,000, it was pretty much the same house as at the previous sale. It was, nevertheless, hardly almost twice the house it had been five years before.

The most recent sale probably reflects the current ballpark value of houses on the street much more realistically.

The new owners of the nicest house on the street house got a nice house in a quiet, safe neighborhood. But they clearly got bubbled on the price.

Earlier today I heard this from the Current Federal Administrator:

“Today, we gather to honor those who gave everything to preserve our way of life. The men and women we honor here served for liberty. They sacrificed for liberty. And in countless acts of courage, they died for liberty. From faraway lands, they were returned to cemeteries like this one, where broken hearts received their broken bodies — they found peace beneath the white headstones in the land they fought to defend.”

They died for liberty.

Except for those who have died–are still dying–for a lie.

Does the man have any concept of the contrast between his words and his deeds?

Those who think there is somehow virtue and justice in pursuing an unjust war based on a lie might want to listen to the Fresh Air interview with officers whose job is to deliver the news of soldiers’ deaths to the soldiers’ next of kin and ask, “Why must they do this job for a lie?”

Go to the website and click “Listen Now.”

Bring handkerchiefs.

Duncan looks at the Walk Score of his neighborhood.

My address got a 35, but the calculation doesn’t seem to include the bus stop at the end of the street.

I was not a big fan of Bobby Kennedy.

As far as I was concerned at the time, he pretty much stabbed Gene McCarthy in the back. Senator McCarthy had the courage to get in front of the crowd on the issue of the Viet Namese War and, when Kennedy saw McCarthy’s success, Kennedy jumped right in.

Nevertheless, Bobby Kennedy did seem to have a true concern for justice and for the little guy.

Therefore, all I can say is that this is just pathetic:

Hillary Clinton cited the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy in justifying her decision to keep campaigning for president in videotape released today.

It’s like Britney Spears doing something in honor of Benny Goodman.

The Booman, in contrast, thinks it is just massively stupid.

Addendum, the Day After:

I am so naive and trusting, so unwilling to think the worst of someone until I have been shown that they deserve it, that I did not even conceive of the most sinister implications of this remark until I heard Daniel Schorr’s commentary this morning.

Guess I need to work on being more cynical.

In certain areas of Left Blogistan, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth that Senator Clinton has not, as the Senator expected to do, waltzed uninterrupted to the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

In those quarters, her failure to march triumphantly to the convention is being interpreted as a result of prejudice against women.

It is also giving rise to conspiracy theories as screwy as Republican policies. Phillybits has been doing a pretty good job keeping track of them here and here and here and here.

Senator Clinton’s supporters have also claimed that she has been mistreated by the press. When pressed, they offer up the same two or three culprits, most notably Chris Matthews. Yet, as Suzanne Smalley pointed out on today’s Radio Times, half the reporters on the campaign bus are women (go to the website and search for today’s date or listen to the show in Real Audio format here).

A couple of days ago, Howard Fineman, shilling his new book on that same show, said that he thought that there perhaps had been some coverage that betrayed sexism on the part of the reporter, but not a significant amount. He also pointed out that there’s a reason 75% of the word news is n e w, and Senator Obama is new. (Listen to the show in Real Audio here.)

(Aside: These generalizations do not apply to political blogs. Look not far to find enough racism and sexism to keep you gagging for a week.)

Senator Clinton’s double-x chromosomes do not make her more virtuous than Senator Obama’s x and y make him, despite what some seem to believe. Nor does it make her less virtuous.

Senator Clinton entered the campaign expecting, not a nomination, but a coronation. She unexpectedly found herself facing a competent and energetic challenger. Then she started to, well, behave badly.

Senator Clinton’s failures are her own failures. They don’t belong to anyone else. They are failures of strategy, such as running an incompetent campaign in Iowa (and elsewhere). It is her conduct and her behavior, not her sex, that has backed her against a wall.

It is her vote in favor of the fraudulent War in Iraq, in contrast to the vision of an opponent who recognized from the git-go that it was a fraud.

It is her lame claim that everything she has done since she got her law degree is somehow “experience in governance,” when most of it was experience in corporate law.

(And, as I have demonstrated, experience in governance is irrelevant to effectiveness as President. Hell, look at all those in the Current Federal Administration who have spent almost their whole working lives in the government, the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, the Ashcrofts–based on their performance, one can argue that experience in governance should actually disqualify persons from high office).

During the campaign, it has been her choice to pander to the worst American instincts, rather than to search for the best, that has seen her sink. And, at this point, she has shown that she can attract voters in the Appalachian states, whereas Senator Obama has shown that he can attract voters everywhere else (and don’t talk to me about Indiana and Ohio; anyone who has spent significant amounts of time there, as I have, knows that their south and central areas are pretty much nothing more than northern Kentucky).

And, as her prospects have become dimmer, her conduct has become–er–screwier.

Now, do not mistake me. If, through some combination of luck and political muscle and skulduggery, she gets the nomination, I will certainly support her.

The Current Federal Administration has proven to me that any Democrat is superior to every Republican. The political discourse can continue from that point.

Nevertheless, it’s not because Senator Clinton is a woman that she looks to be a sure number two in the race for the nomination.

It’s because she has shown herself to be a jerk.

And, sadly, some of her most fervent supporters over here in Left Blogistan have followed her lead.

Hillary Clinton gives me the willies.

kos:

Bottom line, McCain thinks if we offer our troops college education, they won’t want to stay in the Iraqi killing fields. So the best way to “protect our freedoms” is to keep our troops stupid and uneducated.

McCain’s pathetic alternate would’ve boosted the current $1,200 in monthly educational benefits to $2,000, but only after 12 years of service. Those given 3-6 years of their life in service to their nation deserved nothing, according to McCain.

In trying to identify a tree for Karen, I found a really neat website.

It asks a series of diagnostic questions to help identify US trees. In about five mouse clicks, I had the answer. Sure beats leafing (as it were) through a book of pictures.

Here’s the URL.

It was an ash. Now Chris can make bats. Or at least, holy homerun, Batman, bat pens.

From Phillybits:

used with permission

At the time, I was working at 20th and Market on the south side of Market, right across the street. (There was a big fuss about the buildings before construction started.)

I remember particularly when the construction firm had one tower crane up and was assembling another one.

For the second crane, the tower was up and the first half of the boom was in place. A workman was waiting on the end of the half-finished boom of crane number two, about ten stories above the street.

The operator of the first crane picked up the second part of the boom for crane number two from a truck on Market and, in one smooth motion, lifted it up and swung it into position and stopped. It stopped without a wiggle.

The gentleman on the end of the half-finished boom of the crane number two reached out about a foot, grabbed the second half of the boom, pulled into place, and started bolting it fast.

It was poetry in motion.

Gosh, I love to watch people work when they know what they are doing. (Maybe that’s why the Current Federal Administration gives me such heartburn.)

Another thing I learned when I was working on the 7th floor at 20th and Market.

It is better to do your girl-watching from the 7th floor. From the 7th floor, they all look cute.

Summarized by Delaware Liberal.

Balloon Juice has a different but related perspective.

Coincidence?

Or tradition?

The Democratic and Republic Parties are pretty much tied in terms of administrations that are remembered for ineptitude. Indeed, many historians believe that a Democrat, James Buchanan, is the current leader in ineptitude for his failure to do anything to avert the civil war, despite his having one of the most impressive resumes of anyone to serve in the office. (Interestingly enough, his successor, who had almost no experience in public service, is generally considered to have been one of the two or three best, if not the best, President.)

But why is that all the administrations that are remembered primarily for their corruption:

• Grant
• Harding
• Nixon
• Reagan (remember, more Reagan functionaries went to jail than did Nixon functionaries), and, in years to come,
• Bush the Minor

have been Republican?

Coincidence?

Or Tradition?

Or the inherent outcome of a bankrupt ideology?

McClatchy:

Whoever wins the presidency this November, it’s all but a slam dunk they’ll be working with a Democratic Congress. And it probably will be a stronger Democratic majority with more votes than it has today.

(snip)

“A large segment of the American public doesn’t have confidence in the Republican Party,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., the party’s chief political operative for House races.

Golly gosh gee, Mr. Cole, I wonder why “A large segment of the American public doesn’t have confidence in the Republican Party.”

Could it have something to to with its being dedicated to making the rich richer and the poor poorer, with sending our young to die for a lie, with undermining the Constitution of the United States of America, with selling out the nation to the highest bidder, and with having a deficit of moral principles that would have embarrassed Little Nicky Scarfo?

Hmmmmm.

Ya think?

NRA bans guns at their convention:

A small but startling sign welcomed the gun lovers who arrived at the National Rifle Association’s annual gathering Friday.

“Firearms WILL NOT be allowed in Hall A during the Celebration of American Values Leadership Forum.”

So what if St. John McCrap was there? He’s already proclaimed himself as gun lover.

After all, guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Just ask all the dead folks. They will tell you that they are just as dead as if someone rapped them in the head with a sap.

What’s a few AK-47s between friends, anyway?

Now, personally, I got no problems with guns.

Apparently, though, the Secret Service doesn’t really buy the whole NRA gun nut “guns don’t kill people” propaganda line.

Hmmmmm. Wonder why that is? Maybe, could be, that they realize that a person with a gun is somewhat more dangerous than a person with a bow and arrow?

I just have a problem, a big problem, with

Hypocrites.

The whole damned lot of them, McCrap included.

ASZ links to Terry Gross’s interview with John Hagee (no, I am not going to link to his place). NPR’s Fresh Air replayed the interview yesterday because so many MSM outlets have been playing excerpts of it during the past couple of weeks.

Prior to the 2006 congressional elections, radical right wing mullah John Hagee sat down for an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. While there was some immediate reaction to the interview two years ago (particularly from the Jewish community and those of us who were horrified by the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina), the outrage quickly faded. And when snakeoil salesman Hagee slithered back into the spotlight earlier this year to flex his political clout, I figured that John McCain would disavow Hagee’s support and that any controversy would fade into obscurity due to the legacy media’s blackout of anything remotely anti-McCain. Of course, that’s before Barack Obama’s preacher problem reared its ugly head.

My girlfriend couldn’t believe that he said what he said, that he would attribute the destruction of New Orleans, and the wasting of the lives of so many innocent persons, to the plans of a small number of persons to have a gay pride parade.

Frankly, nothing he said surprised me.

But she had never been exposed to this type of self-righteous Pharisaical Protestant nutcase before.

She couldn’t believe the hatred, the vengefulness, the vindictiveness that he somehow managed to find in what is supposed to be a Gospel of Love, and was able to express in the dulcet, gentle tones of a nurse singing a baby to sleep.

I don’t know how he finds hatred in love either. Perhaps he’s read too much Leviticus and not enough John.

Oh, yeah, and has deep-seated psychological needs I’m not qualified to diagnose, but that’s just a guess

It’s just that I’ve met his sort before.

So I wasn’t surprised.

Just disgusted.

Free audio books.

A while ago, I posted a link to a site offering free audio-books. Opie worried that they might be computer generated and his worries were right on target. I tried one out, and it had all the life of last year’s cornstalk.

Today, I was nosing around Project Gutenberg and discovered that they have added audio-books to their choices. Some of them are computer-generated, but almost 500 were done by people.

Even better, their Advanced Search feature allows you to specify which type you are interested in (as well as a number of other criteria). The couple that I looked at were available in Ogg Vorbis, Apple iTunes, mp3, and speex (whatever that is) formats.

Much of the work for Project Gutenberg is done by volunteers, so it is probably unreasonable to expect professional-quality narration.

I downloaded several Project Gutenberg text files and ran out (cyberly speaking) to get myself a reader for my cell phone.

A note about Project Gutenberg:

It rocks. But remember that every book there is in the public domain, that is, the copyright has expired. Don’t look there for the latest John Grisham thriller; you’ll have to find some other place to infringe on that copyright (try newsgroups). Nevertheless, it has thousands of titles, ranging from Mark Twain to Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud to Edward Hobbes to even Victor Appleton (pen name of the author of the Tom Swift books).

Follow the link, listen to the story, then ponder the empty heads and hearts who think that pasting magnetic yellow ribbons on the back of their vehicles or wearing flag pins is what patriotism or what supporting the troops, who serve honorably, even when serving dishonorable leaders, is all about.

Fair weather patriots, who care not that good men and women are asked to die for a lie, then cast off upon their return, like the little green army men I sometimes find left over from my sons’ youth in the back yard.

It’s less than 10 minutes. Not much for you to give when they give their health, their sanity, and their lives.

Go listen to it.

Tammie LeCompte is among (military wives fighting to get justice and treatment for their husbands–ed.). When her husband, Army Spc. Ryan LeCompte, came back to Fort Carson, Colo., after two tours in Iraq, he was a different man — angry, withdrawn and isolated. In 2007, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and he eventually became so depressed and unable to function that doctors feared he might die.

So when Tammie LeCompte saw that the Army was not giving her husband intensive treatment — and, worse, his commanders were punishing him for not doing his job — she launched a campaign against the Army that eventually caught the ear of Congress. Today, doctors say that Tammie LeCompte’s battle may have saved her husband’s life.

Addendum, Later that Same Evening:

Senator Barack Obama involved himself in the VA email situation today by sending a letter to VA Secretary James Peake demanding an investigation into whether or not the Department of Veterans Affairs is under-diagnosing combat-related PTSD as a cost-cutting measure. Obama then requested hearings on the matter and, within hours, those requests were granted by the chairmen of the House and Senate Veterans Affairs Committees.

I had to run out to a local shopping center today to make a deposit for my church.

I noticed that the space vacated by the independent dollar store had been filled.

By the Brandywine Republicans.

(For those of you not from these parts, this area of Delaware is known as Brandywine Hundred. It’s named after the Brandywine Creek, notable for having given is name to yet another battle that George Washington lost during the Revolutionary War–he only won two battles, the Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Yorktown, and he wouldn’t have won the latter without the help of the French, but that’s another story).

Here’s the funky part.

When I followed the link to the Brandywine Republican website, there was nothing there but a splash page. Sort of a metaphor for the Republicanism, ain’t it.

Guess I have to start looking for a new shopping center. This one has lost its cachet.

St. John “Hundred Years War” McCain seems to have figured out that a hundred years of war may not be a good plank for his campaign.

So now he has scaled it down to five.

Like most predictions emanating from the Republican Party, this one appears also to have been snatched directly from thin air. Concomitantly (I’ve waited years to work that into a post), he has shown that he has truly turned into McBush:

“He laid out what his dream was … without offering one single solitary concrete way explaining how he’d do the things he stated,” said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Having studied the Iraq situation probably as much as anyone who also has to, like, you know, work for a living, my personal opinion is that, if we leave tomorrow, the damn place will go up in flames; if we leave in five years, the damn place will go up in flames; if we leave in 20 years, the damn place will go up in flames.

Why? Because we never should hadda oughta been there in the first place, and, by going there, we’ve opened a can of worms that will wiggle for generations. It wasn’t our can, it’s not our worms, but it sure as heck was our can opener.

This column offers a trenchant analysis of St. John of the Hundred Years’s new way of counting the days, as well as his full conversion to Bushieness (emphasis added):

If he believes what he is saying, then McCain is again showing only a passing understanding of the conflict in the Middle East. Even by the most generous assessments, it would take at least sixteen months to withdraw our troops from Iraq. To have the bulk of our troops home by January of 2013, with his preconditions having been met, would require that McCain somehow achieve this functioning democracy and dramatic decrease in violence within two years of taking office. From where does he imagine he will find political reconciliation? In what sense can he expect a reduction in violence, given no evidence that a long-term reduction is sustainable? It is simply not feasible to assume that our exit from Iraq, if it were to coincide with the happy ending McCain portends, could possibly happen in either 100 years or on his new shortened timeline.

It is far more likely, however, that McCain does not believe what he is saying, that he has not in fact, had a genuine change of heart. The conditions on the ground in Iraq have not changed. But the political conditions for this election have. This is not an honest assessment from the self-appointed king of straight talk. It is rather yet another false promise, uttered with a straight face, as an attempt to survive an election, and with no intent to follow through.

With comments that break with himself and the GOP, McCain is showing yet again that he has a willingness to lie that truly makes him a Bush Republican.

(This does not apply to anyone who resides in the same domicile as I.)

“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”

Boing Boing,

Via Mithras.