NUKE ‘EM ALL!!! Just Nuke Them All.

I bought a new microwave before work today. I must say that my old one wasn’t completely dead. It was having issues though. After each use it would shut itself off. And lose it’s settings and not restart until it had cooled off. Even so, I really can’t complain about that unit. I bought it 8-8-88. I remember the date quite clearly. There were stories about how it was supposed to be a really really lucky day. It was for me. I bought a microwave, a refrigerator, my first CD player, and my first color TV that same day. I got a thank you note from the store manager. The CD player and the refrigerator are still working. The TV crapped out after 2 weeks and I had to take it back. At least I didn’t go back to living in a B&W world.

It was also the anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown. I was in the Army back then. 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are the three nuke accidents you hear about. I’m sure there have been others. If nothing else I’m sure nuclear ships or subs have sank. There were 2 H-bombs lost in the ocean off Spain too. And then there was that Polonium 210 that ended up in that guy’s tea. That might not count as an accident though.

The number 88 is used by white supremacist groups. The eighth letter is H so 88 is supposed to indicate Heil Hitler. Leave it to them to ruin a good year. There was a rally in Georgia recently.

https://news.vice.com/article/anti-racist-protesters-outnumbered-white-supremacists-10-to-1-at-a-racist-rally-in-georgia

I don’t know about the source, but I like the headline.

Wild

Fighting Fire With Fire, or at least a really big hose

Sometimes I get a little tired of people grandstanding on supposedly moral issues. So I’ll do the grandstanding myself.

What bathroom should you use?

Well what are you going to do in there?

When someone complains about transgender folks using the wrong bathroom they always use the example of a anatomically male person using the ladies room. Fine. We can designate ALL restrooms as men’s rooms and the only issue will be females using the wrong restroom.

Why do the most vocal critics always use the example of a male in the ladies room? That’s rather sexist and paternalistic if you ask me. I think it is based in the opinion that gender ambiguity isn’t real. They seem to doubt that one can have a set of genitals that are different from one’s gender identity. Therefore people who want to use the “Wrong” restroom just want to perv in there.

I disagree.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/118/2/753?sso=1&sso_redirect_count=1&nfstatus=401&nftoken=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&nfstatusdescription=ERROR%3a+No+local+token

Sometimes a babies’ gender is not apparent. The parents or the doctors decide what to make it. Sometimes they are wrong. This person thinks mistakes get made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Holmes

Now, if you have a child with a definite gender and that gender is different from your own, where do you take the kid to potty when you’re not home?

Just increase the number of single occupancy restrooms. Make better, bigger partitions if that’s the only way. Just don’t assume anybody different from you must be evil.

Wild

Grasshopper, Do Not Be a Dragonfly

We had a fire at work yesterday.

But I don’t work at Fawlty Towers. I did have a bit of an adrenaline rush when I realized that there actually was a fire. And when that wore off I was really tired. And I still had most of my shift to get through, and the fire created more work for me. When I heard the alarm I went to check the alarm control panel. I saw that a pull station in an employee area had been pulled on the southeast part of the building. I was in the northwest part. I did a quick check of my area of the building to make sure everybody was out then I went outside and did a headcount at the NW collection point. There were three supervisors at the SE collection point. It took an unusually long time for the fire truck to arrive. We’re two blocks from the fire station. I found out later that we had had a false alarm fault in the system earlier in the day. We had fixed it, but the fire department didn’t know that it was fixed. What a time for the alarm to malfunction. No one was hurt. A bale of cardboard next to the building had caught on fire, but it was outside of the building. A coworker posted pictures on Facebook.

Only one bale caught on fire. I ended up rearranging about 20 further away from the building. I guess I needed some practice driving the pallet movers.

People do have a habit of not thinking about what they’re doing when they get curious. That’s why I chose the title. A coworker, since retired, once told me that it was really easy to shoot dragonflies with a BB gun. The BB moves slow enough that the dragonfly sees it and goes to see what it is, but then can’t get out of the way fast enough.

And now for politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus

The fire departments in Rome were privately owned. If your house caught on fire Crassus would send over his fire department. They would make offers to buy before they would put the fire out. If the owner wouldn’t sell they would watch it burn.

Wild

And The High Horse Climbs the Soapbox Again.

Does equine hygiene suffer during marijuana consumption?

No

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/high%20horse

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/soapbox

Now, on to politics. I admit my liberal bias. Can we afford to pay for college for those that can handle the academics? Can we afford to pay for high school? Can we afford to pay for any school? How much school is necessary. That is the question. Post secondary school shouldn’t cost orders of magnitude more than secondary school. I completed a BA in 1984. I paid off my debt by 1990. I couldn’t do that now. I don’t have a good answer as to why it costs so much more now. Perhaps grade inflation has caused tuition inflation. I think society benefits from a well educated populace. If that takes longer now, then it should be available. Compulsory education laws have been around for a long time BECAUSE society benefits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education

Minimum wage laws, should there be a minimum wage and what should it be? That depends. It depends on what your goal is. It ties into a bunch of different questions. Are child labor laws bad? If you own a small business you might want you kid to help out at a young age and begin learning the family business. That is not always a bad thing. Hiring 10 year old kids to work in mines or in factory machines because they’re small is not considered a good idea by most. Ironically, the first wage laws were not minimum wages but maximum wages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labor_laws_in_the_United_States

A modern solution to maximum wages would be taxes. Or it would have been a solution before taxes became a dirty word. The minimum wage laws kind of went hand in hand with child labor laws and compulsory education. Workplace safety came in about that time too. Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” in the hopes of promoting socialism. Instead it helped push along the creation of the FDA. With no regulations neither food nor drugs were particularly safe. http://www.gmptrainingsystems.com/files/u1/pdf/TR_and_Pure_Food.pdf

Jerome K. Jerome wrote around the turn of the century. At times he was hilarious. Other times he was dead somber, kind of depressing. Maybe I’ll be funny next time. A lot of the observations JKJ makes are not dated and fit well today too. People haven’t changed. I think James Thurber must have been influenced by him. The style is similar.

Welcome

Wild

Lulu’s Gone Away

Some of my coworkers retired at the end of March.

Everybody makes the workplace happy. Some when they arrive, some when they leave.

Some are real lulus. I had that song stuck in my brain too. I remember it as a cutesy “Adult” song from back in the day of euphemisms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang_Bang_Lulu

http://www.kristinhall.org/songbook/SeaAndPub/BangBangLulu.html

Is there a euphemistic way of referring to euphemisms?

What synonyms are there for synonym?

And what about Dennis Rader?

Sometimes my mind doesn’t simply wander, my train of thought derails and careens wildly through non sequiturs. And according to Merriam Webster I spelled that correctly, but the spellcheck running in the background didn’t like it. It’s been in the English language since the 1500s. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/non%20sequitur

Dennis Rader was the BTK killer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader

In some documentaries they talk about serial killers feeling like they have no control over their life. So they take control by killing people. BTK exemplifies this in that he stopped killing after he became a code enforcement officer. When he could be a real asshole to people and they didn’t really have any recourse, he didn’t feel the need to kill.

It makes me wonder how many “Little Hitlers” would turn into serial killers if they didn’t have their own little realm to rule over.

Then I wonder if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that they have those little realms. How many people do they make miserable through “Legitimate” outlets compared to how many people do they make miserable by being a serial killer?

On the bright side, whichever they do they don’t live forever. All reigns end sometime. Into all lives a little reign must fall.

One coworker I will miss, the other is a joy to not see any more.