Welcome
- December 5, 2017
- Repeal Day
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In my younger days I consumed alcohol. In the Navy I began hanging out at the enlisted men's club and there I could drink long and hard very cheaply. This behavior pretty much continued through my hitch and came to a slowdown sometime afterwards.
After that I would drink socially or go off on a bender like consuming half a bottle of tequila only to regret it severely afterwards.
Nowadays, I can't remember when I last had a drink of liquor, beer, or any other alcoholic beverage — not that I wouldn't imbibe ... I just have not experienced any occasions where the prospects were relevant to me personally.
I'm just a little TOO old to be hanging out at the club anymore. Besides, bar flies tend to annoy me when they start yapping.
Today is Repeal Day, marking the December 5th, 1933 end of Prohibition and the resumption of the legal consuming of alcohol.
I have never been prohibited from drinking. I know of people in my family who probably wouldn't make it without at least a snootful each day.
As for me, I am content to let it all alone until such time as I view having a drink as socially relevant. I know I'll never just "need" a drink.
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- December 4, 2017
- Daddy Passed 16 Years Ago
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Dad chose a difficult road for a career path, one that required all of his attention at their whim and this didn't leave much outside what was approved for servicemen in their daily lives or those of their family.
Still, he endured it and went on to have a second career afterwards and his projection of that stalwart and stoic superman remains with me to this day.
You never think you will lose those pillars of strength which represent themselves so clearly in your past ... but lo and behold time changes all things and those frailties which consist of humanity ultimately unfold themselves upon us regardless of appearances ...
The years have flown since my Dad passed on December 4, 2001. It was a very difficult time and I don't think you ever really get totally past it all; but the ensuing years have brought me to a point that I don't think of it every minute of each day as I did early on ...
We're all headed down the same path, age, change, entropy, and ultimately death but sometimes the heart ignores what it cannot tolerate leaving us to crash and burn in our own grief after reality has come on down.
Carrying on does get to happen, however fleeting that is in and of itself and those memories though sweet will never replace that reality we once knew and enjoyed so much.
All a person can really do is await their own reward and rejoin our loved ones in spirit when it is our time to go to them.
It's sad but those choices which remain grow few on that path which is life and family. All we can do is abide and that is precisely what we're continuing to do.
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- December 3, 2017
- The Morons of Columbia
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I live in a metropolitan area in the Deep South. One of the issues I have with the place is the number of drivers on the road texting while endangering me and everyone else in their midst.
Case in point: yesterday I was turning left onto Assembly Street from Richland Street behind a vehicle which was all over the road and driving at a speed below half the posted limit.
Upon overtaking this vehicle in the left lane I noticed it was a woman behind the wheel texting with her phone while attempting to steer and it wasn't going well.
Naturally, there were no public safety officers present and this is only one of a great many incidents I have encountered within the city limits where state law has plainly stated that texting while driving is unsafe and ILLEGAL.
My connundrum surrounds the personal problems I would incur should I take these morons out as a public service.
It would have been a simple matter had I not wanted to become some bad man's boyfriend while awaiting lethal injection.
The moral of the story is texting while driving is stupid, unsafe, and illegal. We need some better method of detecting these menaces to society without forcing the law abiding tax payer to become a vigilante and pursue them all to the death.
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- December 2, 2017
- Jim Neighbors RIP
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When I was a young child a staple of my television viewing was the Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, USMC.
James Thurston Nabors
June 12, 1930 – November 30, 2017
American actor, comedian, and singer
Both programs featured a character named Gomer Pyle portrayed by Jim Neighbors. My attraction to the programs began with the 'down home' easy going humor and it was something I could (and did) watch. I suppose the child in me drove that habit to watch the two programs.
The character Gomer Pyle was a country man involved in various aspects of those activities which comprise daily living. In the Andy Griffith franchise he was a mechanic and in the spin off he was a PFC in the Marine Corps.
Each iteration was that same enthusiastic good natured fellow regardless of the backdrop and he held my interest until I became older and "thought" I was too sophisticated for such viewing.
Later, I heard Jim Neighbors sing in his baritone and was amazed at that new facet of his entertainment to which I was introduced. Though I never really became a big fan of the musical Jim Neighbors I would indeed engage a few numbers on the teevee as they presented themselves over the years. I was sorry to hear of the passing of Jim Neighbors day before yesterday. The fact that the announcement came from his "husband" was not surprising ... but I recall having second thoughts when I first knew he was gay — having heard ancedotal evidence years prior to that time.
All-in-all we have to accept people as they are and I feel that my world in particular was better for having Jim Neighbors as a part of it. So gay or not I'm sorry his run is over and I wish his family and friends peace in their time of grief.
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- December 1, 2017
- Sexual Misconduct R Us
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So the news is simply hopping with new claims of sexual misconduct every day. Some of these are certainly projecting veracity while others ring questionable through and through.
The problem is that each case appears to be "guilty until proven innocent" and I find that to be pretty bass-ackwards to the way justice goes down in this jurisdiction.
The clouds of suspicion are being largely ignored ... like a number of democrat women making all manner of claims against a Republican candidate and just where was all this hubbub when we had a serial rapist in the White House ? Now I don't profess to know whose guilty nor innocent and I certainly feel that time is an issue with 30 years being a bit long to wait to complain about "misconduct".
Kind of makes it sound like mutual consent type behavior to me. Be all of this as it may the accused have rights I feel are being stomped on and this sad state is what we have become as a nation due to the idiot democrats and their penchant for the money of George Soros.
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- November 30, 2017
- Cities for Life Day
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The death penalty is execution imposed on someone who has convicted a capital crime in the jurisdiction passing sentence. I am more ambivalent toward it's implementation than I was a decade ago — when I was pro to the nth degree.
The extreme nature of execution as a judicial punishment juxtaposed to the botched executions which sometimes occur have lent credence to it's abolition by many on the Earth.
However, it remains in various forms as that ultimate price to be paid for what are supposed to be the most heinous of crimes. Some places list drug trafficking right on up there with mass murder and it is carried out for nonviolent as well as violent crimes on the books of those nations which impose it upon their citizens and others who happen to be apprehended there.
Today is Cities for Life Day. It is a worldwide observance supporting the abolition of the death penalty. It is celebrated on November 30 each year and is one of those things countries like to point out as being on the "civilized" end of a scale listing countries having the death penalty viz a viz those which have abolished it.
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- November 29, 2017
- Google Home Mini ...
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The new electronic gagetry is progressing at a geometric rate. There are new ways to provide the content of your casual conversations to those servers on the so-called cloud designed to contain them for further processing by marketing people, law enforcement, the NSA ... just anyone with whom the owner of that information wishes to share !
So google wants to be your virtual assistant with a new model of google Home designed for every room of the house. They tout a "sleek" minimalist design loaded with "more features than ever".
Now then, I'm sure it appears quite Japanese but my issue is not so much it's presence but what it's doing while it monitors all conversations in it's purview.
I'm already suspicious of Alexa and everything else designed to be your "mouth of the South" with wifi access to the internet all ready to capture and store whatever is encountered for the benefit of whomever decides what personal recognizance is relevant to their marketing and / or regular transmissions to the NSA.
Anyway, call me paranoid but there will be no such devices availing themselves to any nice spying on me while they tend to my every personal assistant whim. The thought of the innumerable suckers who will place these "assistants" on their networks with full access is one compelling lesson in naivete.
I'll bet the sales will be peppy among the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Soon google will own the bulk of that wretched refuse of our teeming shores.
Pigeon of the electronic snoop and stool pigeon.
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- November 28, 2017
- the rise of the digisexuals
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Well ... I should have, but did not see this coming. The advent of sex robots with diverse and numerous capabilities is giving rise to humans who prefer them over human partners.
what are we becoming ?
I attribute this largely to the ridiculous feminist movement which is so intent on removing men from their existence to the point of lesbianizing woman kind and this ridiculous view of white males as being privileged so that such migration to manufacturerd sexual partners I suppose was inevitable.
The idiot generation which gave rise to the millenials — you know, that generation of burger flippers which arose from the 1980s post hippie big hair punk apocolypse where free love no longer mattered and the only thing which got universally shared were STDs.
So a high tech partner which can speak and interact and even fake orgasms better than a human female is bound to displace those icebergs into which too many women are evolving.
Luckily none of this affects my sexual proclivities which are nil for so many years now and perhaps that indeed was a true benefit of being fat, bald, ugly and and therefore shunned in my life. No hard feelings; but I really thought interpersonal relations would improve over time and this is a digression from anything I might view as progress. Hell, I can do better and have done MUCH better than this.
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- November 27, 2017
- The origin of the CARE package
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How many times I have sent a "care package" to someone?
Much too numerous to count. Early on I thought the term referred to a feeling of concern or interest in someone or something, i.e., resulting in the attachment of importance.
Later I learned of the organization CARE as it arose from the consequences of World War II. On this day in 1945 CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe) was founded to a send CARE Packages of food relief to Europe. Now the title is an acronym for Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere ... a modernization of that initial mission in the context of the provision of help internationally.
It is a coalition of 14 member nations with a goal of providing humanitarian and emergency relief as well as the provision of long-term development projects internationally.
So the "care packages" of my earlier existence were actually symbolic of a much larger entity and my "care" as it were a minute example of local inclusivity.
CARE has been around for 72 years. Longer than even me.
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- November 26, 2017
- Intel announces vulnerability in firmware
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A late development in the hardware security arena revolves around the security alert issued by Intel regarding management firmware on a number of recent workstation, server, and Internet-of-Things processor platforms being vulnerable to remote attack.
Luckily, remote management of processors isn't really something I value on a workstation so while at work this is more of an ominous announcement I ran a few tests on networked standalones at the crib which all test as not vulnerable.
I'll be checking my server boxes along and along but I really don't envision those being problematic either as they likewise do not contain the remote management features.
I'm more of a manual hands on type of guy and simply didn't feel the need for any integrated lights out management or integrated management modules behind the firewall.
There are another of these embedded systems on the Oracle boxes at work and I feel a good testing rolling on out next week.
Sometimes the simpler place in time renders more inherent security because you have to "go there" to do something.
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- November 25, 2017
- That Persistence which was Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
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Of all those leaders of countries considered to be "less than modernized" and on that cusp of fascism called "dictatorship" few were more enduring than Fidel Castro.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
August 13, 1926 – November 25, 2016
When I was a child in Key West Florida I recall watching him on the fuzzy broadcast television signal and he was instantly recognizable going off on a rant regarding some political communist rhetoric in Spanish and I was constantly amazed at his persistence upon the world stage given how the odds were stacked against him with some very formidable enemies of state.
My memories of him were sporadic but always left me in awe of a man who could pretty much speak his mind with little in the way of consequences — and maintain rule in the presence of that retro culture which was (and is by and large) Cuba today.
Then we have that nepotism which is the continued regime under his brother, Raul Castro. It makes me think this is one of those 'cult of personality' things such as that which goes on in the former Soviet Union with decidedly clique elements playing out power on the world stage.
His Marxist–Leninist model and anti imperialist political bent was decidedly to the left. That single communist party he used to nationalize business and industry and socialist reforms remain today.
In the end, he was not so much a threat to the United States but a gadfly out to banty rooster his way in the fickleness which is public opinion. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis where he was confronted in no uncertain terms. Lessons of history regarding The Bay of Pigs Invasion however make me think that some things should have been omitted from the equation of politics and diplomacy between Cuba and the United States.
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- November 24, 2017
- Evolution Day
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Today we celebrate Evolution Day, commemorating the anniversary of the November 24, 1859 first publication of On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin.
I have it on fairly good authority that it is one of the secularizations of the world which has transpired by the atheistic movement and while I don't begrudge any particular belief system (or lack thereof) those tenets which arise secondary to that conflict of secular versus sacred ideology become somewhat tedious in my mind. Suffice it to say that the secularlists seek to disprove religion while theology prefers to include evolution in that list of tools wielded by The Almighty.
Me, I tend to embrace multiple aspects of both schools of thought. As the song goes, I can swear there is no Heaven but I pray that there's no Hell.
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- November 23, 2017
- Happy Thanksgiving
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This Thanksgiving is going to be very low key for me. I have a little illness going on and have opted to rest and relax given the very tumultuous past several weeks it has caused ... and I'm afraid that the celebrations are something which don't fit this year.
Regardless, I hope your Thanksgiving is everything for which you can hope and that like me you will not forget to GIVE THANKS.
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- November 22, 2017
- Remembering Shemp Howard
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When I was a child I was a fantasy case through and through. My imagination took off on various tangents throughout my existence lasting well into my 28th year when I came to the realization that the world was no longer amused with me and I needed to fire those retros and reenter reality.
Samuel Horwitz, aka
Shemp Howard
American Commedian and Actor
March 11, 1895 – November 22, 1955
The Three Stooges was a comedy team which predominated the television habits of my childhood in their syndication reruns. I even suffered those accusations of "being retarded" when I persisted in my emulations of Curly because that was who I was.
Shemp Howard was in that mix along with Moe and Curly who were his younger brothers along with Larry Fine. I still have flashbacks of various routines involving these guys and by and large I keep those to myself lest I revisit that intolerance of my childhood due to my choice of figurative idols.
Shemp was that third stooge and he was a successful comedian and actor during those spates between that time he portrayed one of the Stooges.
He died on this day in 1955. I was a scant six months old at that time.
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