%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
I talked with an old friend last week and we reminisced about our college days in the late 1970's. We shared some typical stories and then Dave reminded me of the time I wished we had cable TV. We'd been drinking beers while watching some stupid sitcom and I was bored. There were only a couple of channels available over the air in Bozeman, Montana, so it took about 30 seconds to channel surf our options. And that was mostly because we didn't have a remote control. "There's got to be something better than this," I complained. 'No problem,' Dave replied. "You got a ladder?" "Sure, there's one lying next to the garage." My wife, Debbie, and I were renting a basement apartment at the time, and our elderly landlord lived upstairs with his wife. I'd seen a ladder that looked as old as the landlord while going in and out of our private entrance. We had to park on the street and walk up the narrow driveway so as not to block access to their detached single-car garage. There was already a cable outlet in the wall behind the television, but as starving students we couldn't afford the monthly fee. And Dave had made cable hook-ups back in his hometown, so what followed was almost inevitable. I'd like to say that we weren't drunk, but our judgment may have been slightly impaired. I know I was a little wobbly as we carried the ladder to the utility pole in the alley. We weren't exactly stealthy, but luckily for us, the landlord went to bed early and was kind of deaf besides. So, we soon had the ladder propped up against the pole and Dave commenced to climb. "Hold it steady!" "You bet!' Easier said than done. The ladder was a bit short, but Dave is pretty tall. He could just reach the cable box by standing on the top rung while hugging the pole with one arm (kids, don't try this at home). I held onto the rickety ladder as much to steady myself as to steady Dave. Somehow, he managed to open the box on the utility pole one-handed and hook up the cable wire that went to our apartment. Dave's foot almost pushed the ladder away from the pole once or twice, but he grabbed on with both arms, and I just managed to keep it from falling out from under him. We may not have equaled the comic genius of the three stooges, but it was still a funny performance. Afterward, Dave managed to climb down without falling and we went back inside to try out the cable. We even put the ladder back against the garage first, leaving no evidence of our midnight mission. Other than the raw scrapes on the inside of Dave's arms where he'd clung desperately to the utility pole. Debbie shook her head at our lack of good sense and made Dave sit down at the kitchen table. She tweezed out a few splinters and cleaned off the oozing blood with a wet washcloth. Meanwhile, I was hooking up the TV to the cable outlet. "Hey, Dave, it worked! You're a genius, man!" Debbie looked at his arms and rolled her eyes. Dave just grinned with the satisfaction of a job well done. So, we grabbed a couple more beers and sat down to enjoy the luxury of a full ten channels of clean, clear television. This time it took almost 3 minutes to channel surf through all the shows. "There's got to be something better than this," I complained. |
"You don't have to be a genius to lie about your IQ." - The Gospel of Trump How do you get to be the smartest person in the room? Being born with a Mensa-level IQ is one way, but it's tough to arrange after the fact. Another way, perhaps even better, is through hard work and extensive study. We may not be fully successful, but making the effort is within our control and definitely improves the odds. The MAGA approach is to pack the room with idiots. Even a freakin' moron looks intelligent among the incompetents and fools nominated for the second Trump administration. And Pete Hegseth appears to be the poster child for the idiocracy. His lack of qualifications for heading the military have been laid bare and his distasteful personal history has been exposed for all the world to see. It matters not to the MAGAnaughts. One senator used Hegseth's confirmation hearing as an opportunity to curry favor with the president elect. He suggested that the unqualified Hegseth might be just as successful as a certain unqualified presidential candidate in 2016. Talk about damning someone with faint praise! Then Senator Markwayne Mullin defended Hegseth with an observation that all congressmen are drunken incompetents who cheat on their wives. He insisted that it would be the height of hypocrisy to disqualify a Trump nominee just because he wasn't smart enough or decent enough to deserve the post. Mullin finished his self-referential exercise in stupidity by declaring "Give me a joke!" Hegseth accommodated him by squawking "meritocracy, meritocracy" like a deranged parrot. I don't know if they rehearsed this routine, but it could hardly be any more comical if they had. It seems obvious that Mullin meant to say 'give me a break' but tripped up on that old Freudian Slip thing. And Hegseth himself displayed a woeful lack of intelligence when cornered by Senator Tammy Duckworth. He wouldn't answer a direct question of whether he would be loyal to his country or to his president. He couldn't bring himself to say that he would refuse an illegal order from Donald Trump. Did he learn nothing from the nominees of the first Trump administration? Just tell the damned lie, Pete! MAGAworld doesn't care about the truth, and no one will ever hold you accountable. And therein lies the tragedy that only emphasizes the comedy. "Give me a joke!" |
| Reposted from Real Fake News: Canada to annex Alaska in 2026 by staff reporter Landon Fisch “Canada is stepping up,” announced Prime Minister Ootin N. Boot. “We’ve worked out an agreement with President Trump to solve more than half of the U.S. border problem. Making Alaska the eleventh Canadian province will eliminate 2500 km of border entirely. And we’ll take over the responsibility of guarding more than 10,000 km of the Alaskan coast. Current Alaskan residents will be allowed to apply for Canadian citizenship or they can go back where they came from. Law enforcement and municipal workers will be welcome to stay on after completing upgraded courtesy training. And the costs of the transfer process will be covered by reciprocal tariffs on all goods imported or exported between our two great nations. That way, nobody has to pay.” When asked about the actual price tag, the Prime Minister had this to say, “President Trump is doing a fantastic job and we certainly appreciate this opportunity to work together on border security. In return, Canada will cede ownership of Greenland to the U.S. and acknowledge it as the eighth continent. We will also recognize its new name, Trumpland. There is no mention of money at this time, no quid pro quo. So, any subsequent monetary payment to our favorite president will be merely a tip, a gratuity for a job well done. It would in no way be a bribe because there is no upfront agreement. Everything will be open and aboveboard as per the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Snyder vs United States. “GREAT DEAL FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!” the U.S. President posted on X. “HORDES OF ILLEGALS POUR ACROSS NORTHERNMOST BORDER EVERY DAY! IMAGINE THEIR DISAPPOINTMENT WHEN THEY FIND OUT THEY’RE STILL IN CANADA!” |
When I was with Summit Engineering, way back in 1980, I worked on a project to retrofit an H. W. Ward turret lathe with a Bandit CNC. Ward was a venerable British machine tool company founded in 1889, and Summit was an American startup barely ten years old. The Bandit was one of the first machine tool controllers to incorporate a microprocessor, and H. W. Ward wanted to make their entry into the 20th century. For reasons that were never clear to me, the Ward lathe project began in rented space at an industrial park in suburban Chicago. It seemed that the decision to embrace computers and automation wasn’t popular with everyone at the company. The man in charge of the project told me at different times that it was being kept secret from competitors or that it had to be protected from the old-school naysayers who wanted to see it fail. Either way, I wound up spending two weeks at that industrial park helping the Ward technicians adapt our control to their machine. There were two things that bothered me in Chicago, the bitter February cold and converting between metric and english units. Great Britain converted most of their measurement systems to metric units in the 1970’s. When I traveled to England in the 1980's, I found currency based on 100 new pence per pound and petrol sold by liters instead of gas sold by gallons. Britain also changed their standard for nuts and bolts from British Standard Whitworth (BSW) to Metric SI units. BSW fasteners are defined in fractions of an inch and metric fasteners use millimeters. The thread shape and pitch of the two systems are not compatible, and neither are the wrenches used to work with them. A third standard for nuts and bolts is used in the U.S. The UNC standard defines coarse threads and UNF is for fine threads. The UNC/UNF standards are based on BSW but differ enough that those two systems are also incompatible. Today, BSW is rarely used but it’s still common to distinguish fasteners as being either english or metric. Even though it’s the U. S. that uses english units and the English actually use metric now. Confused? Well then, you’re up to speed on what we faced with that lathe. The lathe project began with an existing H. W. Ward machine that was designed in feet and inches with BSW fasteners. The big cast iron parts for the machine slides and the headstock were shown on drawings with english units. Newer bits, such as ball screws and motor mounts, were designed with metric dimensions and metric fasteners. And the newest parts that were sourced in the U.S., like our Bandit CNC, used english units and UNC/UNF fasteners. That created a comical situation with 3 sets of drawings, 3 toolboxes full of wrenches and 3 shelving units with bins of incompatible nuts and bolts. There was constant swearing as the technicians tried to remember which parts used which units and needed which wrenches. Stripping a thread by jamming a fastener into the wrong type of threaded hole wasn’t unusual. And it was often necessary to search for missing wrenches that had migrated to the wrong toolbox. Despite the compatibility challenges, we got the machine up and running. The H. W. Ward people boxed up all those different parts and shipped them back to their factory in Droitwich. I went home for a couple of weeks, but I wasn't finished. The next phase of the project was to prep the lathe for the big Birmingham machine tool show in April. So, I went to England in March and continued to play my supporting role. It was my first transatlantic trip, and I found it difficult to adjust to the time zone change. I arrived at The Raven Hotel on a Saturday, crashed too early, and found myself wide-awake at 4 am. I had to wait a couple of hours for the hotel restaurant to open. After breakfast, I wandered around Droitwich for a few hours and then crashed again. So, it turned out that the hotel bar was my only option to get something to eat at 9 pm on a Sunday. The menu was limited, but there was a beef stew sort of thing that sounded okay, so ordering food was easy. But what to drink? Just about the only place in Britain that successfully resisted metrification was the pub. Their traditional beer glasses were sized for the classic British pint, and they still are today. I'd seen this scene on TV, so when the bartender asked what I’d have to drink, I knew just what to say. “A pint of beer, please.” “Bitter or stout?” Hmm, bitter doesn’t sound very tasty, I thought, but what the hell is stout? I had no idea what the guy was talking about. Neither of those choices sounded like beer to me, but I didn’t want to admit my ignorance. “I’ll have the stout,” I declared as though I knew what I was doing. I don’t remember the brewery name, but their stout was like mud compared to the American lagers I was used to. I tried not to make a face as I slowly chewed my way through that glass of syrup. One pint of English stout has more alcohol than two American beers and one was enough for me. From then on, I ordered bitter beer and liked it. But what about the turret lathe? We got it prettied up for the show and it generated a bit of interest, but the naysayers prevailed in the end. I have to admit that it was more 'proof of concept' than finished product. At any rate, it never went into production, we never sold them any more controls, and a few years later the H. W. Ward company passed into history. |
You can vote a dictator in, but you can't vote him out. - The Gospel of Trump  |
My wife woke me just after midnight on a Tuesday. No, it was actually Wednesday morning. My brain is always a bit foggy on one hour of sleep. "There's something going on in the yard!" "Wait, what?" I was half asleep, but I had a vague sense of a low, rumbling roar jumbled up with some high-pitched beeps. Was that real or just fragments of a dream? The bright light seeping in around the blackout shade on our bedroom window was real enough. That window provides a pleasant view of a small hillside greenbelt. There shouldn't be a light out there. What the hell? Where is that light coming from? Is this an alien abduction?! Two weeks earlier: The TV weather guys called our big Tuesday night storm a bomb cyclone. A huge, spinning vortex that flanked the usual weather pattern and made a sneak attack from the east. Our trees are all braced to resist the prevailing westerlies. They were taken by surprise from behind and four of them fell victim to the slashing wind and driving rain. One took out a power pole as it crashed through the front yard and into the street. On Wednesday morning, our yard really did look like a bomb had exploded. The power pole took our cable TV and internet connection with it when it fell. The main wire was still attached to the pole, and even though it was lying in the street, our neighbors were still online. I tried to report an outage using the Xfinity app on my cellphone, but the app didn't believe me. It assured me that there was no outage in my area and suggested that I restart my router. I doubted that turning the router off and on would fix the problem, but their app wouldn't let me explain that the real issue was a broken wire. Eventually, I gave up and put some more wood in the fireplace. Staying warm was more important and I could still get internet on my phone. I knew that our cable wouldn't be repaired until the power company replaced their pole, so I waited a few days before calling the local Xfinity store. I navigated the phone menu to a real person and described the situation outside. The representative was friendly enough, but her script didn't include a wire on the ground. She suggested that I restart my router, but I declined. It took thirty-five minutes to confirm my identity, assign a ticket number and schedule a service appointment. And I had to understand that the storm had impacted service in my area so the tech wouldn't get there until next week. While I waited, Xfinity sent several helpful texts to inform me that service had been restored in my area, and I should try restarting my router. Yeah, thanks for that. An Xfinity van made its way up the street the following Tuesday. It drove over their wire and pulled into our driveway. The power was back on by then, so the tech rang the doorbell and introduced himself. He gave me an apologetic smile and told me that the real problem was that the wire to my house was broken. I had to agree that he'd nailed the diagnosis. He went on to say that a different crew would have to come out to rehang the cable line on the new power pole. I wasn't surprised. The tech did, however, run an orange wire to temporarily connect our house to the cable line that was still lying in the street. I thanked him with genuine gratitude, and he went on his way. And, of course, once the cable line was reconnected to the house, the router restarted by itself. Back to the present: Fully awake, my mind cleared a bit, and I nervously raised the bedroom shade to check out our back yard. It was fully illuminated in brilliant white light. The rumbling roar of an engine was still clearly audible. That hadn't been a dream at all. The reverberating noise and the angle of the shadows in the yard made it obvious that the light was actually coming from the front of the house. I made my way to a front window and cautiously peeked through the curtain. There was an Xfinity boom truck backed up to the power pole and they had a zillion-watt work light mounted above the guy in the bucket. It was more than high enough to shine over our roof and into the back yard. For a moment, this 'working in the dark of night' scene looked like an X-Files episode. Then it all became clear. The rumbling truck engine was running to provide power to the boom and the work light. And the beeps that had penetrated my dream were from the truck backing up to the pole. I don't why they chose to rehang the cable line at midnight with no warning for us homeowners. I was just glad that it wasn't a UFO. After my experience with Xfinity, I was in no mood to be probed. Again. Author's note: ▼ |
| If you're not abusing power, then you don't really have any. - The Gospel of Trump Actions speak louder than words. Joe Biden’s pardon of his son is a more eloquent concession speech than any losing candidate has ever made. Yes, Kamala Harris lost the battle, but Joe Biden lost the war. The choice in the 2024 election was clearly between the down-home appeal of Joe Biden and the elitism of Donald Trump. Joe Biden is the faithful husband and loving father that Donald Trump has never been. Biden is the competent and accomplished politician that Donald Trump will never be. Joe has been a model of decency and public service for his entire life, concepts that 'The Donald’ can’t even comprehend. Kamala Harris offered a vision of hard work and self-sacrifice, asking that all Americans join together to make our nation good again. Donald Trump offered the big lie, a me-first vision of greatness declared rather than earned. Now, the election is over. The people have spoken. America has gone all-in on corruption and the abuse of power. On January 25th, 2025, the most prolific liar in American history will be sworn in for a second term as U. S. President. He will stand up in front of dozens of cameras and publicly perjure himself by taking an oath that he has promised to break on his first day in office. The world is full of suckers and losers. Suckers believe in getting something for nothing. Losers believe in loyalty and hard work. Smart guys con the suckers and fleece the losers. - The Gospel of Trump The American people have made their choice. They've given Donald Trump a mandate to dismantle democracy and roll back civil rights. And, for greater emphasis, they put his MAGA co-conspirators in charge of both the house and the senate. America rejected Harris's challenge to love their neighbor and work together for the greater good. They’ve endorsed the big lie, government corruption, and the abuse of presidential power. There will be mid-term elections in 2026, but the results may not matter. If the voters don't 'choose' correctly, then their candidates may simply be 'repealed and replaced' with more reliable legislators. And there is no legal recourse. The Trump majority on the supreme court is ready and willing to rule in his favor. There is no longer any check on his unbalanced power. Everyone who voted for Donald Trump should be cheering the pardon of Hunter Biden. And they should take great pleasure in the fact that Joe broke his promise about not granting it. There could be no more definitive acknowledgment that we're now living in Donald Trump’s America. Joe’s action doesn’t need to be explained or excused. The will of the people is that neither law nor ethics apply to the presidency. Trump’s base fought hard to be ruled by dictatorial whim, and Hunter's pardon is a first small taste. Instead of criticizing, MAGA nation should be celebrating. And beyond that, every MAGA voter should be sending Joe Biden flowers and thanking him for sparing Donald Trump’s life. Joe is the sitting president until January 25th. The Trump legal team argued before the supreme court that a sitting president may 'officially' execute his political enemies. The Trump majority agreed and issued a ruling that President Trump has immunity from prosecution for any and all crimes committed while in office. So, for the next two months, Donald Trump lives or dies at Joe Biden’s pleasure. I’m not calling for Joe to go all ‘Dirty Harry’ on Trump. I’m merely pointing out that he can. And Joe has that power because our soon-to-be dictator rigged the court. It would be poetic justice if Donald Trump became a tragic victim of his own scam. |
A friend and I were lamenting the decline and fall of Sears Roebuck the other day. We agreed that they were once a mainstay of the middle-class lifestyle. I suggested that they were the Amazon of the 20th century. My wife and I shopped regularly at the big Sears in the Overlake Shopping Center in Redmond, Washington. You could get your 10,000 steps in just one circuit of that huge, two-story department store. They had everything from appliances to underwear. And though you might not find a really unusual item in stock, you could order almost anything from their catalog and get it delivered in a week or two. It's a shame that their management couldn't understand and adapt to internet shopping. They already had the warehouses, a huge catalog, and a good reputation for customer service. My friend wistfully recalled the Craftsman brand hand tools and their iron-clad guarantee. And that reminded me of a story. When I was in high school, my then brother-in-law, Greg Conner, bought a 1950 Ford F5 truck with a dump bed. He got it from a guy who lived near my family in Round Butte. Greg and my sister Linda were living in Camas Prairie at the time, about thirty miles away. Greg was a hard-working logger who didn't like to sit still. For him, The 20 year-old truck was a fun side project that occupied his weekends for a few months. The running gear was mostly sound, but the interior was worn, and the paint was peeling. Greg tuned up the engine and spruced up the exterior. He never got around to the upholstery, but the outside looked pretty good when he was done. Then he realized that he didn't really need a big truck. My dad didn't need a big truck either, but Greg's impulse buy soon became dad's impulse buy. And the 1.5-ton dump capacity came in handy on our small ranch. Dad joked that he'd brought the truck back 'home' to Round Butte, so we named it Homer. Homer had a flathead V8 that made only 100 HP, but the transmission had a compound low gear that would allow us to pull stumps if we could get enough traction. A friend of a friend once talked my dad into using it to move a small house early one Sunday morning. We didn't have permits or flashing lights, just a pace car with a red rag on a stick waving out the side window. The 700 square-foot building had been jacked up and put on axles the previous day so that we could start at first light. I rode in the cab with Dad, and it took about four hours to make the 25-mile trip over gravel roads. A few early risers were justifiably annoyed by having the road blocked, but nobody called the cops and the house arrived safely at its new location. Homer pulled that house along without complaint, and we were home in time for lunch. Homer didn't get a lot of road miles, so his tires tended to age out rather than wear out. Either way, a flat is a flat, and one afternoon dad had to deal with a flat on the right rear. And those big dual wheels had split rims that could make tire changing dangerous. Dad had experience as an auto mechanic, so he knew better than to work on a split rim with hand tools. Instead, he decided to take the whole wheel off and have a garage change the flat tire for him. But Homer's wheels hadn't been removed for many years and the giant lug nuts were rusted solidly in place. Dad had a 3/4-inch drive flex handle attached to a 2-inch socket but couldn't get enough leverage to break the nut loose. So, he grabbed a 3-foot length of steel pipe from the junk pile and slid it onto the end of the flex handle. But even with a 'cheater', the lug nut wouldn't budge. At the end, Dad was hanging off the sidewall of the dump bed, swearing and bouncing his full weight up and down on the cheater. Oddly enough, the flex handle broke off at the pivot point behind the socket. That derailed our plan to get the flat tire fixed, so we went to town to look for a new flex handle. But remember what I said earlier about the Craftsman guarantee? Dad took that broken tool into our local Sears store and showed it to the clerk. The guy didn't bat an eye, he just handed Dad a brand-new flex handle. On the way home, Dad laughed and told me that he'd actually bought the 3/4-inch socket set at a second-hand store. Sears replaced the broken tool with a new one and didn't even ask to see a receipt. Now that was service! p.s. Dad could be very resourceful when brute strength failed. He used a propane torch to get that lug nut smoking hot. And once it had expanded a bit, it popped loose easily. |
Ill Wind An easterly, like wicked wolf, howls ill through shredded wood. Its gusting swirl runs widdershins, brings no one any good. Our Pacific Northwest storm has been more adventure than anyone would ever want. The weatherman called it a bomb cyclone and that's what our yard looks like. We were without electricity from Tuesday afternoon through Sunday evening. We lost two mature firs, a small fir and a small maple tree. One of the big firs smashed through a large maple and another fir on its way to the street. It landed on the power line and snapped off the pole in front of our house. Our driveway was completely blocked with the debris from those three trees and the power lines were underneath. The weather turned nice for the next two days and I got the roof cleaned off and cleared a sort-of path through the debris to get the car out. It was probably a bad idea, but other cars were driving over the electric wires, so I did too. Our house has minimal damage, but others weren’t so lucky. Our other big fir fell onto the next-door neighbor’s roof. They had a large fir that smashed through the roof of the next house, and the third house over also has a tree completely through the roof. A house on the street below us has its entire front smashed up and their car is under the tree in front of the garage doors. Several houses in our area are currently condemned and uninhabitable, but thankfully, no one we know of got hurt. I bought a small generator a few years ago, so we had power for the fridge, a lamp, and a TV (with rabbit ears) in the kitchen. I also kept a fire going in the fireplace and put a personal space heater under the kitchen table. The front room stayed near 60 degrees, but the bedrooms dropped to 50, so we slept in our recliners at night. Heroic power company crews came from Oregon, western Washington, and British Columbia. They replaced our pole and hooked us up again on Sunday. The cable line went down with the power pole, but cell phones are keeping us online. I’m using the hotspot feature to connect my laptop. Comcast won’t be here until next week. My biggest issue was that I had to run an extension cord to my powered recliner. First world problems, I guess.  |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
