762nato

10:33 pm: Rabies for control for the win in Delawhere.
I put my dogs out this afternoon and immediately they go over to the side of my yard and start fence fighting with something. I have a 6 foot stockade fence and the neighbors on that side have just been evicted, so there should be no dogs or kids there. I walk down the steps to the yard, yelling at the dogs as I go to get away from the fence. Suddenly the bottom of one of the pickets breaks off and a skunk charges into the yard snarling and spitting. I immediately recognize the danger of a rabid animal and mother nature's chemical warfare unit and retreat to the safety of the porch.

My dogs follow their pack nature, grab the prey and tear, crippling the skunk. It is still in the fight, digging and spraying, but down. One dog obeys my commands and comes to the porch. The skunk wedges itself under one of the bails holding a drainage conduit along the fence and my remaining dog is still at it. I yell at my dog to get off it and advance back on the skunk. My dog backs off and the skunk either collapses or loses consciousness. I get both dogs into house and crate them. They have both caught a dose of skunk spray and I have to deal with the skunk before it recovers and possibly escapes. If it escapes and my dogs are injured it means a 6 month long quarantine at my expense or euthanasia.

I get a .22 revolver out of the gun vault and load it with .22 shorts as quickly as I can.
Now, some may fault me for overkill here, but in the words of Ron White, I don't know how many shots it would take to dispatch a rabid skunk, but I knew how many I was going to use. Overkill, a handy statistic. In a more serious note, for those keyboard commandos who are going to say "You could have just knocked it's brains out with a shovel." No, you most certainly could not. If I had animal control would have automatically assumed the skunk was rabid, because without an undamaged brain and spine to examine they cannot determine if the skunk is rabid. All of my shot were body shots. Used a long handle shovel to pick it up and put it in a trash bag and hang it on the fence to wait for animal control to pick it up.

"Hello? Yes, I'd like to report a rabid animal. How do I know it was rabid? Skunks don't usually attack pit bulls. Yes, after that I had to destroy it." Never did get around to telling them how I had to destroy it.

Nature's Miracle Skunk Off works much better than Tomato Juice at removing skunk smell from dogs. Dog beds are a total loss. Had to go to Tractor Supply to get new ones. Did this about 7pm after waiting 5 hours for Animal Control to show up. Of course Animal Control comes while I am gone. They don't want the skunk to test. They tell my girlfriend to throw it in the trash. Glad our tax dollars are going to good use for rabies control. 45 day home quarantine for the dogs even though the rabies vaccinations are up to date.

Tags: gummint waste

02:43 pm: An ultimate personal betrayal
Murder suicides are something that happens to people on TV dramas. At least they were until last week. Someone I know distantly from an internet board was killed by her husband. More importantly she was someone who had fought publicly to protect your freedoms and mine. She had been thrust into the public spotlight and handled that pressure with graciousness, warmth and humor. But also with a fierce tenaciousness that we are told by her family was the core of her personality.

The greater issue is the betrayal by her husband. The traditional wedding vow is to "Love, honor and cherish." How is what was done any of those things? Call me impossibly old fashioned but one of the responsibilities of a husband is to protect the wife and children. I simply cannot conceive the circumstances that would drive someone to this. It is inexcusable.

Meleanie Hain was murdered exactly 2 months to the day that my niece Kelly Thomas died. They were of an age. Meleanie was 31, Kelly was 35. both were wavy haired strawberry blonds. At the services both had slideshows with eerily similar pictures of them as children. Both had Ozzy Osbourne's "See You On The Other Side" playing. Both of them should have had years more life. For me it was like re-living Kelly's funeral all over again. I hope somewhere in the great hereafter Kelly and Meleanie are able to get acquainted.

http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/243320

Tags: funerals

12:15 pm: Link of the day. Wrath of Khan in 30 seconds.
For Jill.

12:37 am: zombies on the brain
With Zombieland hitting the theaters next week it's time for me to recap the major zombie groups for the uninitiated.

Classic Romero zombie: Slow, non-thinker, non-tool user. Not much of a threat, but in Romero's world, die for any reason and you reanimate unless your brain was destroyed. That's right. Lay down peacefully at night next to your honey and if he or she kicks off due to a heart attack you may wake up 'cause she's noshing on your face. That's okay honey. I'll sleep in the guest bedroom. With the door locked. Oh yeah, and they shamble out of the woods in packs of hundreds. And their bite is an automatic death sentence.

New Dawn of the Dead zombie: Fast, like Olympic sprinter fast. Still a non-tool user and non-thinker. More threat than a Romero zombie, but they've got to bite you to spread their infection. Kick off from a heart attack and you just die. Whew, I hated sleeping in that guest bed anyway. Say, where's you get that bite from?

28 days later "infecteds": Worse than zombies. Olympic sprinter fast and don't need to bite to spread infection. Any body fluid contact will do the job. Blood, vomit, spit, bites, even claws. Simple tool user and problem solvers to boot. Best to shoot first and ask questions later. Bummer that the movie took place in Great Britain. Better yet, just dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

So, everyone ready? Got your food and water stockpiled? Doors and windows secured? Everyone have the sidearms on them? Rifles or shotguns slung? Spare ammo handy? Okay, get upstairs and destroy the staircase behind you. Or saddle up and convoy out to your fortress location. I get the feeling it'll be a bumpy ride before it's over.

10:43 am: Quirks of fate?
8 Years ago today my girlfriend woke me up to tell me that CNN had just reported that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. My first thought was that the building had been designed to withstand an impact by a fully loaded 707, there probably wasn't a whole lot of danger. It was probably a light aircraft and it would be like the B-25 that hit the Empire State Building in the fog. A tragedy, but no real danger. We turned on the bedroom TV just in time to see the second plane hit.

The company I had been doing consulting work for, Martin Progressive, was in 1 World Trade center, about where the plane went in. My client was in 7 World Trade Center and in offices further up Wall Street. I thought that I was watching people I knew die on cable TV.

Even more oddly Jimmy Buffet may have saved my life. We had left early Friday 9/7 for a concert in Virginia on the 8th. A recruiter from Martin had tried to contact me to get me to be in NYC on Monday for some server builds for an upcoming project. Obviously I was not available.

In the end nobody I knew was even injured. Random events seemed to have transpired to keep them out of harm's way. Martin had an "institutional tardiness" problem. They had been in the building during the truck bomb. When the first plane hit, despite assurances from the Port Authority to stay put, they grabbed the backup tapes and hit the stairways. They hit the streets about 5 minutes before the first building came down. One guy fired up his old PC that was missed during an upgrade project. He left his office to get coffee while it booted up and burning debris from the first jet crashed through his window, set his office on fire and demolished his desk and chair. Another guy was late for work and trapped in the subway until they backed the cars up to the prior station to disembark the passengers. He hit the street just as the first tower fell. Another had his headphones fail on his MP3 player. He says he usually had his music cranked to drown out ambient noise and wouldn't have heard the crash and falling debris from the first impact.

Makes you think.

Tags: 9/11

07:02 pm: My political score on this quiz was 125 of 400, which makes me VERY CONSERVATIVE. Please, no throwing of rotten produce.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/03/progressive_quiz.html

The average score is 209.5/400 which means the country is slightly left of center. I wonder what will happen when all the baby boomers start kicking the bucket?

Tags: blather, timewaster

12:09 am: Images from a small town funeral
So, off to Southbridge I went last Wednesday to bury my niece. Even a funeral on a shoestring cost over $10,000. Folks, if you don't have it already, through your employer, pick up some term life insurance. It may not cover everything like your student loans or the mortgage, but at least spare your family the burden or worry over paying your final expenses. Purchased through an institution, like a credit union or AAA, it can be as cheap as $1 per $1,000 per month. Me, I'm being cremated and ashes scattered at sea. Not just because I am cheap, but also so my nutrients, carbon, whatever, returns to the ecosystem. If you want to feel close to me have a bowl of clam chowder. They're filter feeders.

I coined the term "Griefquake" this week. It's a spontaneous outpouring of emotion over the loss of a loved one. You're going about your business trying to do your daily work and whammo! Out of the blue, a crying jag will hit or you will choke up. Depends on the severity of the griefquake.

I also found out that in a big, close, loving family like mine that when many of us are gathered in one emotional mess in the same room we set each other off. I'd see my sister or my niece crying during the wake and I would find my throat tightening up and my eyes would begin to tear. Or one of us would tell a story about Kelly and the laughter would degenerate into tears.

I think about half the town came through the funeral parlor. My niece was a partyer, not a party girl, just the life of the party. She seemed to know everyone and everyone seemed to know her. And everyone seemed to like her and feel her loss deeply.

Of course there were some people that just don't know how to behave. I'm not talking about the folks who came to the wake or the funeral in jeans, t-shirts or flip-flops. It was hot, Southbridge is a working poor town and Kelly would never look down on someone for how they dress. I am talking about the attempted theft of the funeral benefit money, the reception hall being moved by someone outside the family and my niece's phone being taken and the data deleted off it.

Wheel never stops turning, people.

Tags: kelly

09:16 pm: So, Friday, August 7th is my last day at my contacted site. I'm cruising through the day with a nice mellow "give a shit" attitude. Determined to work out my last few hours on site, but aware that unless I catastrophically screw up, I have zero impact. Then while I am off at lunch I get a phone call.

My oldest niece has been found dead.

No details of substance. Just the morning after her 35th birthday the child of the friend's house she was crashing at finds her face down in the back yard. My mind goes into an awful "what if" scenario; playing out all the awful situations that might have happened. With no facts wild conjecture is all I have.

I have to go back to work and finish out the day on this. You cannot possibly imagine how little I care that your password is locked out. The fact that you cannot manipulate a keyboard in the simple patterns required to reset a network password drives my normal nuclear temper past all normal boundaries to force-of-nature levels of rage that is demanding to be vented, Krakatoa-style. I have a red, demonic, fury boiling behind my eyes that wants me to find someone, identify a person who played a part in taking her from my family and tear them apart with my bare hands. I thought I understood the Viking Berserkegang before. The compulsion that sent viking berserkers bare chested into battle. I didn't, but I do now.

The sad truth is that she didn't need heroic response. When whatever happened to her happened she was alone. All she needed was someone there to dial 911.

Tags: kelly

09:00 pm: The Conrad scale
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Tags: conrad scale

03:30 pm: Writer's Block: There Once Was a Girl from Nantucket

Can't take credit for this, got it in an e-mail, but it's still good.

It filled Galileo with mirth
To watch his two balls fall to Earth
He gladly proclaimed
Their rates are the same
And quite independent of girth

Then Newton announced in due course
His own law of gravity's force
It goes, I declare
As the inverted square
Of the distance from the object to source

But remarkably Einstein's equation
Succeeds to describe gravitation
As spacetime that's curved
And it's this that will serve
As the planet's unique motivation

Yet the end of the story's not written
By a new way of thinking we're smitten
We twist and we turn
Attempting to learn
The Superstring Theory of Witten
 

Tags: limericks, writer's block

12:06 pm:   3 minutes, 59 seconds.

http://quizzes-online.com/map/fiftystates.html

Tags: timewaster

09:55 am: Word for the day
Noyade - No`yade"\, n. [F., fr. noyer to drown, L. necare to kill.] A drowning of many persons at once, -- a method of execution practiced at Nantes in France during the Reign of Terror, by Jean Baptiste Carrier. 

09:10 am: Creative lights goes dark
Steve Gerber died on Sunday. He was best known for being the writer of the Howard the Duck comic book for Marvel Comics in the 1970's. (Not the George Lucas produced movie) Gerber was an early influence on me. His writing was funny and sharp while still being subversive. He could poke fun at an entire presidential campaign and make you see how they were all just empty suits who'd sell their own mothers to slavers to get into office. I'll never forget his "Gerber Strained Brains" rant/editorial.

Goodbye Steve, flocks of angels to see thee to thy rest.

http://www.stevegerber.com/sgblog/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_gerber

08:59 pm: Odd conversation
Chalk this one up to incipient fever dream, but my girlfriend and I had an odd conversation that spawned onto our friend Tiffany. Eyeworms everywhere!



K: I just had the damned scariest image burned into my brain and I had to make sure I wasn't the only one suffering….
Ray has another cold and said he was going to bed as soon as we got home. I was planning on making meat loaf for dinner and I asked him if he still wanted to have meatloaf tonight…..

R: "oh yes…..meat loaf in bed"
K: "oooohh…..that sounds kinky…."
R: "damned right it is…..can you imagine two big fat guys rolling around naked in bed? Our bed couldn't take it!"


T: Wow. Thank you for sharing. I am so glad that I am not getting that reference. I am too sick to get it anyway. I am going home at 2 today. Ta… and it is wrong to try to give your friends nightmares…

K: You don't know who Meat Loaf is???? I thought you saw Rocky Horror......


T: OH!!! EWW EWW EWWW! That is SOOOO icky! OMG that is FOUL, Woman!

Current Location: Casa de 762

Current Mood: crappy

Tags: heeheehee

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06:18 pm: Save a penny, piss off your customers
Okay, another entry for things that grind my gears. Self checkouts. Is there anyone that honestly, ingenuously believes that self checkouts are a good idea? I did once. For about 45 seconds. AHA! Said I, at last a place I don't have to deal with slack-jawed mouth breathers both in front of the cash register and standing in line. Now I can scan my items, pay and move on with my life.

But what about my time? I'm now doing the work of the cashier and in the way-distant past, the bagger. what is the omnipotent, octopus-like, all-mergering retail corporation going to compensate me with for doing all the work? It sure doesn't look like they're going to lower prices for folks using the self checkout. I mean when I mail order stuff from Cabela's I don't have to go and pick the stuff up. Sure, I pay for shipping, but otherwise I'd have to pay to drive myself to the store to buy it in person.

Let's just say, hypothetically there's a store. Let's say it is a supermarket. Let's call it, oh, I don't know, how about Screw-Rite. The sales pitch from the self checkout manufacturer probably had the most slicked over, heavily massaged prototypes of the self checkouts, each lovingly maintained and anointed with oils by personal technicians. The CPUs of the prototypes were brimming with overclocked processors and abundant memory. The sales droids showing the self checkouts to Screw-Rite management were perfect Stepford-wife or Stepford-husband types, with gleaming white teeth, faultlessly coiffured and wearing immaculately tailored suits. Across the scanner goes an item. BOOP. Into the bag. Another item goes over the scanner. BOOP. And so on.

Instant sale. The accountant hunched over their abaci and mechanical calculators cackle with glee. Why, we can screw over, err, right-size our staffing by reducing 6 positions of poor schlubs making $8 an hour working a maximum of 32 hours per week so we don't have to pay benefits. Instead we can let one person manage a whole battery of self checkouts. Of course for our needs we don't need the state of the art computers backing up the self checkouts. Let's just substitute the Cray supercomputer running each workstation for a 286 clone. A 286 clone made in Godforsakistan. And we'll have one technician to service every ten Screw-Rites with ten self checkouts at each store. Our supply chain will deliver parts as needed overnight by express yak from Godforsakistan.

So, this hypothetical Screw-Rite has a store that is located on Concorde Pike in North Wilmington. On a national holiday 762 stops in top pick up a few things. Some fresh veggies and fruit. Now this Screw-Rite has a battery of self checkouts. These have no personal technicians. These are worked over and slightly abused by customers. But blissfully unaware, 762 chooses them over the 2 open registers with long lines. First item across scanner. Wait. BOOP. Into the bag. Second item, bagged vegetables. Place on scale, press "look up item". Wait. Wait. Wait some more. Screen updates. Now, are Green Beans files under G for green or B for bean? Let's try G. Wha-wha! Sorry, try again. Okay, B. Alphabetical filing of items? No, sorry. That's so 20th century. Ah, here at the end. Beans, Green. BOOP. Wait. Screen flashes bag item. Remove item to bag. Wait. Wait. Wait some more. Wait some more. Still waiting.

After several painful minutes of this 762 and lovely 762squeeze have managed to fill the bag up with the vegetables. 762squeeze removes the bag to put it in the cart. Screen changes instantly WARNING! WARNING! Item removed from bagging area! This bastard is trying to armpit express something out of the store! 762squeeze puts the bag back on the bagging area and the self checkout goes into panic mode. UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA! CALL ATTENDANT FOR ASSISTANCE! Okay, bag comes out of bagging area and goes into cart. Screen stays locked in panic mode. Little red light at the top of the self checkout starts flashing red. Unfortunately the celing of this particular Screw-Rite is so festooned with signs hanging from the ceiling that there is no way anyone further away than 5 feet from the self checkout can see it. 762 looks for attendant. No attendant. Wait. Wait. Wait some more. Still waiting. 762 stalks over to the customer disservice desk. No shit, as he walks up to the desk the sole attendant there walks away. Wait. Wait. Wait some more.

Finally attendant comes back. 762 patiently asks her if she is involved at all with the checkout are or if she only works for the pharmacy. She says she's the front end manager. 762 asks her if there is a self checkout attendant. She looks over, craning her neck, can't see her and asks if there is a problem. 762 explains that his register has been flashing red for 5 minutes ( an acknowledged exaggeration ). She looks and says she doesn't see it. 762 explains that the flashing light is artfully concealed behind their merdevertising.

Not waiting for an answer 762 stalks back to self torture device disguised as self checkout. 762 squeeze has managed to get the thing scanning again. ( The female really is the deadlier, the self checkout recognizes this ) 762squeeze scans the last item and steps out of the way so 762 can gently press the "finish and pay" icon with the knuckles of his fist. Rest of transaction finishes with analog controls of pin pad.

Now, those accountants and middle managers at Screw-Rite's corporate headquarters probably justified a fat raise by implementing this garbage idea. After all, the technical support costs and capital outlay will probably reach a return on investment over the reduced payroll costs exactly never. And the reduced customer satisfaction with having to do all the work and the dehumanizing environment created by never having to interact with a human will only increase our bottom line.

No wonder why corporations fail. I'd rather spend my money at a mom and pop grocer than anyplace that thinks a self checkout is a good idea.

Tags: totally pissed

10:32 pm: Do they have a name for what is wrong with this place?
Probably the biggest thing that is annoying me right now is traffic. I have never lived in a place with such wretched traffic. That includes Chicago, where you risk your life driving on the Dan Ryan 500 or the Eisenhower Distressway.

Two night a week I have to go from my job, to Chateau 762, on to Tai Chi class. Probably 25 miles and I cannot accomplish this in 1 1/2 hours. HORRIBLE! There is something seriously wrong with this place. Am I wrong?

In the grand scheme of things, this means nothing. I mean, nobody is being dragged out of their car for bad driving. Nobody is being publicly executed for the horrible roads. (Not that I think they shouldn't be)

Tags: grrr.