HyNY2U!

I may not mak it to midnight, so I'll just say

Happy New Year To You!

now.

As mentioned over on FaceBook:

I just got done removing about 10" of global warming from my driveway. Thankfully the global-warming-blower I bought at a yard sale last summer works and works well! What we need to do is invent a kind of global warming that only lands on things that don't need to be shoveled...

BTW: My driveway is now about three feet longer than it was thanks to the big global-warming-mover not getting anywhere near the actual edge of the road. Thanks! I think...

More of this, please…

Group offers weapons training for Utah teachers 

And RacerX seems to have hit upon a telling point in the comments:

It seems that the vast majority of comments are slanted in favor of gun rights... yet the media reports that the majority are in favor of more controls. Makes you wonder what's going on here. 

With (as of this writing) 92 Likes and 4 Dislikes I'd say he's on to something. 

A couple of items written for elsewhere

This one was written as a comment on a friend’s wall timeline over on Facebook.  He was saying how he was waiting for the snow to start:

We're waiting on it here now. Since Galileo is 'under the weather,' this afternoon we put a set of studded snows on the flea van that I'm driving full time now. On the ride home Mum and I agreed that the old summer tires are NOT going back on the van come spring. What a difference! My Vanagon Westy had under-rated car tires on it when we first bought it. That set up was actually white-knuckle driving dangerous! This van just felt a bit "squishy." With the right tires it feels like a different van! Stay warm Al! And Happy Boxing Day!

I think I wrote about the Westy’s tires at length at the time.  But I’ll be dinged if I can find it now…  Aha!  Not a blog post but rather a in a thread over at The Samba!

This one was written as a comment for JayG in a post about a botched oil delivery:

I look for disconnected fill pipes when viewing a property. That's one thing on my list that the home owner needs to fix before we have a signed P&S.

I'm having problems with my propane supplier. (To the point that I keep wanting to spell it ProPain...)

About three weeks ago we scheduled a delivery of 50gal. to tide us over since both tanks were about out and at the same time we arranged for the replacement of one of our tanks that was at the end of it's service life. When I got home from work the day of the delivery I found that both tanks were full to the gills.

I called to cancel the tank swap, but they decided to proceed anyway even though the full tanks would make it much more of a hassle for the technician. That was done two weeks ago. I'm still waiting for the credit for the fuel that went away with the tank.

Monday I watched the delivery guy out my back window fill the tanks at my neighbors house. He was also supposed to fill mine. Apparently he decided that he didn't need to follow that order either since he'd just filled both of my tanks three weeks ago.

I'll be calling the office to complain tomorrow. I didn't today because I was busy cooling my heals at Sears for three and a half hours getting snow tires. But that's a story for another day...

And just a moment ago I wrote this for another friend I’m chatting with at FB who mentioned all the craziness in the media about wanting new gun laws:

I've been following it.  I even yelled at the radio this morning when the news pointed out that the nutbag that killed the firefighters "had the same Bushmaster rifle as" the Connecticut shooter.  When they mentioned that he was a convicted felon and "shouldn't have had the guns" I couldn't help pointing out (at some volume) that adding more laws won't stop guys like him so leave us the <expletive deleted> alone!

On the Newtown massacre

Originally written as a comment for this post over at Tam’s:

1. Because the problem isn’t going away (and the media has only been encouraging copycat behavior) the first thing we need to do is to treat the infection with an effective antibiotic (anti-psychotic?):

Institute the Israeli model of allowing the school staff to actually protect our kids instead of hiding under their desks!  That would be an effective deterrent for some and would stop those not deterred in their tracks.

2. To prevent re-infection I would prescribe the following:

As has been said by others, if more in the media would follow Paul Harvey's lead in not giving the killer the (in)fame they crave there might be fewer seeking their (in)fame this way.

Hmm…  Are they misunderstanding infamy as a contraction of instant fame?

As to the root cause:

I can only surmise that a lot of it has to do with lack of respect.

– For authority (parents, teachers, employers or any others /deserving/ of respect (IMHO: respect has to be earned.  I generally give a measure as a matter of course when first meeting someone.  Then it depends on the individual if that measure increases or decreases.  In some cases it can be extinguished entirely.  Even then that would not be an excuse for the kind of behavior we’re talking about here.  But that’s me.  YMMV…))

– For property (It seems that I can’t have reflectors at the end of my driveway without someone stealing and/or smashing them, and one of the homes down the street was ‘tagged’ with graffiti the other day)

– For self (have you seen the way these kids dress these days?!? [/curmudgeon voice]).  Seriously, though, it seems to me that so many people, not just kids, these days really do not respect themselves.  Many see their own lives as more of a PITA than they want to bother with and a select few choose the permanent solution to the temporary problem.  Thankfully only a very few of those chose to take others along on their way out. 

Clinical depression can be an overwhelming soul-crushing burden.  It can make it seem as if there is no other way out and that one’s own life has no value.  If one’s own live is without value how much less that of someone else?  Based on what the media presents it would seem that much of our society is based on fame as a source of value.  Some may believe the primary source of value.  With the media giving instant fame to deceased mass killers with 24/7 coverage in the first days after a ‘suicide-by-major-press-event’ some may believe they can (pardon the phrase) kill two birds with one stone.  They end their own lives as the culmination of the event or have it ended for them through suicide-by-cop if they can’t do the deed themselves and they posthumously get the fame they mistakenly believe will give their life meaning.  By taking away the fame it eliminates a large part of the incentive.  By actually defending our public places and especially our schools even if they still opt for suicide by cop or by armed citizen the number of innocents harmed will almost certainly be greatly reduced.

Or we, as a society, can go on doing what we’ve been doing for the past several decades and hope for different results…

Why I love the internet:

Winter Wonderland: A Neo Paleolithic Christmas?

Still here.

Not much more to say.  Of course there's over two and a half hours left to the day...

T-30 minutes...

T minus thirty minutes to the end of the world.

Or not...

'Nite y'all.  I'll (probably) let you know at some point if i wake up in the morning.  And greet you to the new Epoch.

I'm baa-aack...

Though I'm not so sure I want to be!

My intertubes have been down since Friday with modem/connectivity problems that I've only sorted out this fine evening.  While I was 'away' the whole damn world has gone stark raving mad!

Oleg suggests the rabid calls for gun control in the wake of the tragic shooting on Friday is the .gov's versin of "Oh look - a squirrel..." to get people's mind off the so-called fiscal cliff we're about to jump off head first.

Others are asking if this wasn't possibly a false flag operation in the manor of Fast & Furious.

Maybe the new age doom sayers aren't too far off with their twisted version of the Mayan long count calender supposedly 'running out' this Friday after all.  Things do seem to be falling apart all around us these past few days, don't they?

BTW: In the Gregorian calendar we don't get all worked up over the world coming to an end every December 31.  The Mayan long count just rolls over to the next 'age' on a longer time scale than ours.  Mayhaps that's why it's called the long count...  So knock it off with all the freaking out already!


Edited to add: I really hope Oleg is right.

Nope!

Well well.  Dave’s off Storage Wars and is suing.  He says the show is rigged, a lot of the good stuff is planted by A&E to spice up the show and they canned him for pointing out that their activities may be illegal.

If it seems too good to be true – it’s probably a “reality show.”

How it’s supposed to work!

It is refreshing to know that this insight is not totally lost from the world.  I had been getting a little down because so often it seems that those holding the reigns of power truly have no clue.  But to my great relief Weer’d links us to a video of the Mayor of Tulsa, who has me wondering if that might not be a good place to be – if you have any entrepreneurial spirit left given the state of the rest of the country…

Got a weird one in the comments

On a post from about a year ago in which I was sharing a photograph of my home built submersible ROV with someone on the phone (I now can’t remember who…) I received the strangest comment:

Прежде чем жениться обязательно посмотрите на поведение вашей избранницы вне себя это совсем другой человек
!!!

Bing translator translates that from Russian as follows:

Before you marry must see the behavior of your chosen one out yourself is a completely different person
!!!

The odd thing is that here were no links.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Question Mark!

What next? Blipverts?

Are you watching Edison Carter and the rest of the Live & Direct news crew on Network 23?  Or are you watching the latest ZikZak ad over on Network 66?  Your cable company already knows.  And once this new technology is deployed they will also know if you’re making out with your boyfriend or having a fight with your wife.  And they’ll be running apropos ads on your TV based on what you are saying and doing.

Welcome to the dystopian world of Max Headroom.

New DVR will use camera and microphone to target advertisements based on recordings of users

I think it’s a bad-bad-bad idea.

Of course they’ll never share any of that with DHS…

The last Donette in captivity

I went to the grocery store as soon as I got off work the night I read about the baker’s union supporting their members by putting their employer out of business.  I wanted one last cupcake before they were all gone.  But sadly it was too late.  I had to settle for the last bag of donettes on the shelf.

And here it is: the last donette in the last bag.  Mum ate it for breakfast this morning.

Well, truth be told, Mum and I split the last handful this morning for desert after finishing our actual breakfast.  Since Mum doesn’t eat as fast as me she had the one last donette left.  When I commented on that being the last of the last Mum asked if I wanted to take a picture of it.

How could I not?