Quote of the Day

Uncle John would tell about the Moro juramentados, how their native Moslem datu would call the single volunteer up before the tribe and anoint him and consecrate him to the heaven he was getting ready to attend and then, practically, bind his balls and pecker with wet rawhide before he ran amok, so that the pain of the contraction of the drying leather would keep him going. That was why, said Uncle John, the Army first adopted the .45. Because six slugs from a .38 special would not knock a juramentado down. And, in his condition, obviously, you had to knock him down to stop him. The .45 was guaranteed to knock any man off his feet, if it only hit the tip of his little finger, or your money back. And the Army, said Uncle John, had been using it effectively ever since.

From Here To Eternity  by James Jones, page 20. Just in case you were wondering why the Army adopted the .45 in the first place.

I had to type this one in myself, no help at all from Google Books. I suppose I could have taken a picture and sent that to the OCR program. I'll have to remember that next time.

Pictures

Hair embedded in fish oil capsule

Sebring intake valves, visible only due to flash

Post Hip World Headquarters

Broken water pump from Sebring

Fiber optic connection to the house

Why the bathroom towel rack fell off it's mounting plate.
Poor design. When the mounting plate was screwed tight to the wall, there wasn't enough lip for the set screw to get a proper grip. With the set screw tightened up, you can see in the picture that the plate is recessed into the bezel. A small chip of wood made an adequate shim to move the plate far enough out from the wall so the set screw could get a proper grip.

Old time safe at Precision Locksmiths

Sebring engine with new water pump and head gaskets

Speed trap in front of my house

 Album cover from Post Hip

Underside of Marshall Amp
The four round things in the center are the bottoms of the sockets for the power amp tubes.
500 Volts. Don't touch.

Change counting machine at the Credit Union. Quite a chunk of metal.

Quote of the Day

Addictions, he thought, turning right, toward Seven Dials’ name-sake obelisk, started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were, his therapist in Basel had said, less intelligent than goldfish.

Zero History by William Gibson, Chapter 10. Addiction is a very strange thing.

Via Google Books, the Print Screen key, MSPaint & finally Free online OCR, though I did have to skim the actual book to locate the passage.

Complaints About Prices

We went to pick up the Marshall Amplifier from Wire Audio today. The bill was just under a hundred dollars. I thought it was a very fair price considering the amount and kind of work that was done. Basically I thought we were lucky to be able to find someone:

• who knew about these kind of amplifiers, 
• was technically competent to perform the required work, and 
• was able to get it done in a timely fashion.

I didn't used to be like that. When I was a kid, it seemed like grousing about prices, especially repair prices was de rigueur. Everyone did it all the time. Or maybe it was just the people I hung out with. Or maybe because I did it, I tended to associate with other people who did the same. Or maybe it's just the nature of kids, or of being broke.

The other day when I went to the dealer to see about new keys for the Mitsubishi, I was shocked that they wanted to $200 for a key. Last time I checked they only wanted $150. Even at $200, if they had been able to produce one on the spot, I would have bought it, just to not have to hassle with it anymore. But I didn't complain about the prices or accuse the dealer of trying to rip me off. They have the part, if I want to buy it from them, I can pay their price. No one if forcing me to buy it.

Sometimes it feels like the repair shop has you over a barrel: you have no choice but to pay what seems like an exhorbitant price for some apparently minor repair. It might be a fair price, given their costs, or they might be making a bundle off of you. You will never know. But that's the way repairs are these days. You buy a complex machine like a car or a computer, and if it breaks, it is going to take someone who understands it and has the technical skill to repair it. If you aren't willing to pony up the big bucks for the occasional repair, don't buy the machine in the first place.

Kelly's Heroes & The Tiger Tank

Watching Kelly's Heroes tonight (Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, 1970) and they have a run in with a Tiger Tank. I remember the sequence well:

• the only way to defeat a Tiger was to shoot it directly in the rear end,
• our heros find themselves directly behind the Tiger,
• the Tiger is in a narrow street and cannot turn around,
• nor can it turn it's turret because it is blocked by a wall on one side and a tree on another.

In my memory, it was from a black and white episode of Combat, and it was a very dire situation. Funny how the memory plays tricks like that.

YouTube clip here.

Debt Crisis

When the stock market took a dive yesterday I had a sudden flash of insight: this whole game is rigged. There are some guys in a room somewhere plotting how to take over the world. Actually, they are just scheming on how to make a whole lot of money. The way to do that is to convert your assets to cash and then get the stock market to take a dive. When prices hit the floor, you buy back in. Everybody who bailed out on the crash loses, and you, being the wily schemer behind the scenes, make out like a bandit. Who are these guys? I have some suspects, like the the Koch brothers and Rupert, or even Slim, but it is more likely people we have never heard of.

I wonder what happened today. Well, no, not really. It was either bad, which I don't want to know about, or it was good, which would make me feel better temporarily, but which would only make me feel worse the next time it falls in a hole.

Wal-Mart

This was in an email I got today, and if it's all true it's pretty amazing. I did check a couple of numbers. The profit works out to about 3.5%, which sounds about right, and the gross sales comes to about a thousand dollars per American per year. If you are spending $100 a month per person for food, then their total sales would feed the entire country. If half the people in the country visited a Wal-Mart once a week, the number of visits would be about right. So it is all plausible. I don't shop at Walmart, but then I still have two nickels I can rub together.

1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart every hour of every day.
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1st to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people, is the world's largest private employer, and most speak English.
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years.
8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approx. 3,900 stores in the USA, of which 2,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago.
11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Wal-Mart stores. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)
12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart.
13. Wal-Mart has gross sales that total more than the total revenue of all the countries in the world, except 6. 

Via Mark.