Sawzall

It is big. Heavy. In the basement.  Just your average Hide-A-Bed.

It's gotta go. Next stop: the dump.

Getting it down there involved removing the door at the stop of the stairs and - if memory serves - a lot of energetic shoving down a narrow stair case.

Not looking forward to this.

Inspiration: courtesy of a dear friend, I have use of a Sawzall.

Funnest thing I've done all day.  I gotta get me one of those.

Also: with the metal bits sawed loose of the frame, I've got a nice chunk of metal for the salvage yard.

Changes

Opportunity knocks once let's reach out and grab it, 
Together we'll nab it, 
We'll hitchhike, bus or yellow cab it!

Movin' Right Along (YouTube)

We're moving!  New home, state, new company.

Gonna be fun.

More, later.

GO HOME CAR YOU ARE DRUNK

or
Smells like rolling probable cause
or
Your Ma's gonna know what you been doin'

Visited Mom, back at the home place.  Brought a bottle of wine as a gift because I was raised right.

Was violently reminded of the perils of 'sun' [1] mixed with 'June' combined with 'Oklahoma' when I left the wine in the wagon for a few hours after arrival, and the predictable happened.

Messy, but not impossible to clean.  And the car now has a 'winey' smell that is faint, and not-unpleasing.


[1] That damned luminous orb.

Robert E. Lee Was Not A Good General

From the Twitter:

A Guy: Robert E. Lee was excellent.
Me: Oh boy: there is a long ranty post about Lee's short comings, but not written. Yet.

And I sat down to write it tonight and thought 'Hey, I have written that.  And so I have and here it is;

Robert E. Lee was not a good general. He fiddle-fracked around on campaigns of no possible benefit, wasted the only resource he could not afford to waste - his manpower. He was a fool, unable to adapt to the changing times.

LAMENT FOR THE THIRD SACK

Gold was the light that shone in the towers of Ethras,

Green was the mountain where Protas stood, alone with his thoughts,

White were the clouds that cast shade on the nourishing plain.

Black is the sky this day.

The plain flashes red.

Red sparks as numerous as stars honed edges gleaming

The color of hills that are clothed in murmuring flame,

The color of blood washing the threshold of the library.

Say the ravagers: this is the wrath of the over-God

Of whom we are the instrument in this world of things.

Things that we are. Things that you are.

Things that you have made with the work of clever hands

Things that by right share a common doom.

No Mynster, no crypt, no labyrinth can shelter us this day, but only the wastes that stretch beyond the ken of even the most abject slines.

From Lament For the Third Sack

No wonder 90% of TrekContent is lame and stupid: it's built on a foundation of finger-wagging

As early as 1964, Gene Roddenberry drafted a proposal for the science fiction series that would become Star Trek. Although he publicly marketed it as a Western in outer space—a so-called "Wagon Train to the Stars" (like the popular Western TV series)[2]—he privately told friends that he was modeling it on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, intending each episode to act on two levels: as a suspenseful adventure story and as a morality tale. 

Suddenly a light dawns: Roddenberry was lecturing without the intelligence of a Rod Serling or the wit of a Jonathan Swift.

Don't Marry a Soldier

48. If you train a soldier to shoot a five year old without batting an eye, on the grounds the child might be concealing a grenade, you have to expect him to be somewhat callous when he returns to family life. He will think nothing of dashing his infant son against a wall or threatening his wife with a handgun if she fails to do the dishes. 

Man. I cannot tell you the number of times after a tense night with an ear cracked for incoming and then I rise at 0530 for my early-morning PT and there is a dirty dish in the sink and CHARLIE IN THE WIRE FIRE FOR EFFECT DANGER CLOSE DANGER-CLOSE SMOKEY THIS IS NOT 'NAM, THIS IS BOWLING THERE ARE RULES and suddenly I'm waving my handgun around like a nitwad's wet dream.

On the one hand, having to deal with social services and the kids crying and the cops and all is a bummer.  On the other, a good flashback really gets the ol' blood moving.

Semper Fi.

M1 Garand

I do not, not, not, like firearms for their own sake. They're tools, is all. Tools with a singular purpose, granted. But: tools.

 But I got to hold an M1 Garand last weekend, ran through the manual of arms ... 

• That is a well-made, solid, machine, brother. 
• I want one. 
• The difference between my M16 (7 pounds unloaded) and an M1 ( 9 1/2 pounds unloaded ) was surprising. As in 'whoa, that sucker is heavy'. 
• I get the Baby Boom, now. 

After lugging an M1 all over the damned world, over beaches, up the hilly willies and down the hilly willies ... GI Joe was a buff mother-f*cker.

Mary Jane from back on the block just couldn't help herself.

All Dogs All The Time - I'd Watch It

In the last two days we've been told there were three bombs, a fire, one unexploded bomb, cell phones were cut off, there were only two bombs, and no fire, a guy was under arrest, cell phone coverage was not cut off, a guy wasn't under arrest, another guy was arrested, except now he isn't but any minute now someone could be. Stay tuned!  Eleventy!

If CNN and company care to get actual, factual, news published they might as well take a deep breath, research their stories, put out an hourly news cast, once a day, fill the rest of the time with Puppy Channel.

Ratings would go through the roof, I bet.

Dream

A man exits a diner, trying to be inconspicuous.  A string of balloons and a flying saucer crash next to him.

Then things get weird.

The US Navy circa 1930 fights off an alien armada in New York harbor.  Iowa launches a nuclear shell right _up_ the spout of a _HUGE_ alien battleship's cannon, detonating _INSIDE_ the dreadnaught and it was beautiful.  I had an aerial view for that one.

There are close-ups of plucky resistance fighters potting individual alien soldiers with wee little nukes, at a marina. Most of the aliens die, but almost none of the resistance fighters do, and then we're all on a bus high-fiving.

We have met the enemy and he is us

He [Obama] said that such worries would just feed “into fears about government. You hear some of these folks: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government. We can’t do background checks because the government’s going to come take my guns away.’ The government’s us. These officials are elected by you … I am constrained as they are constrained by the system that our founders put in place.”

This would be the same guy that executes American citizens without a trial.

Related: 'Stop hitting yourself!  Stop hitting yourself!' said every grade school bully, ever.

Lent

I forgot to write, and forgot to observe, the annual giving up of something for Lent.

Buy-bye social media.  See you in April.

Life imitates art

I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff. Got me a $300 pair of socks. Got a fur sink. An electric dog polisher. A gasoline powered turtleneck sweater. And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.

- Steve Martin

I love money. I love everything about it. I bought some pretty good stuff.  Got me a gold rolex.  Bruce Lee memorabilia.  An Eddie Van Halen guitar.  A hat that Michael Jackson wore.  And, of course, I bought some dumb stuff, too.

- Jesse Jackson, Jr

Hypothetical bicycle

I have a bicycle. 

It is worth $20.

I want to sell it.

My state has a law that says all bicycles must be sold for no less than $40.

I am not going to sell my bicycle.

Related (youtube): Edgar the Exploiter is going to be all right.  Simon is screwed six ways to Sunday.

Cape!

He's two.  Glides into the room.  Draped in Nonna's bathrobe.

Oh ... scary!  Are you a ghost?

Pause.  "I ... BAT-man ... cape!"

Exit, giggling.

Tab Clearing

Make your own soap, make your own bread.  Ammunition?  Ammunition.


Free, open, secure and convenient communications: Can we finally replace Skype, Viber, Twitter and Facebook?


Stross is some kind of Communist? And he finally has woken up to the consequences of his foolishness. Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship.


ssh-ident Wrapper around ssh to prepare ssh-agent and load identities.

Mr. Snake, why did you do that? Now I will surely die!

About that Kill List Business ..

I am told that there are now righteous citizens who are now all het up about the Executive extra-judicially killing American citizens.  Straw-man summary ..

'I voted for Obama and this makes me mad.'

Suckers. 

They knew before voting for that jack-wagon he was murdering citizens.  There were viable choices.  They voted knowing what he was, they don't get to be all remorseful about letting that snake back in the hen house after the fact.

I read this and wish I had not

Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer.

A complete waste of time.  A fascinating premise, which is wasted by the author. Cardboard characters. The world building is tone deaf and implausible.

Some guys can get away with this. This fella ain't one of them, at least not with this novel.

Joe Bob says he wants his time back.

If it looks good it is good

All said and done, this

VAR=$(openssl rand -base64 8)

looks better than this

VAR=`openssl rand -base64 8`


Something-something good design looks right something-something.

Restated: F*ck backticks.

Also: Obama still has a kill list.  But hey, bangs, and economic minutia, and skeet shooting at Camp David.

Now I have that off my chest

Re: It is all Lee's fault

Rick C: *cough* So you don't refer to it as "the war of Northern aggression," I assume.

I don't even know anyone who was killed in the American Civil War and the subject irks me.  Bothers me to visit quiet country graveyards, and see so many markers of young men under the sod.  Pisses me off, thinking of the waste, and ruin that follow armies like a plague.

The Confederacy was led by evil, stupid, men, founded on an evil, loathsome, institution.  They were wrong to hold slaves, stupid and wrong to secede.

The Union was wrong, wrong, wrong, to distort the constitution out of true to force the Secessionists back into the Union.

The only, only, good that came out of that war was ending the wicked practice of slavery. 

And, perhaps, making this country, in the long run, a more sane, humane, and civilized place to live.