Cough Syrup

Many years ago a friend of mine told me about a time when he went to buy a bottle of cough syrup from a pharmacy in New Mexico. At the time he had a bit of a habit and the law said you had to sign your name if you wanted a bottle of the good stuff, that is cough syrup with codeine. So he's standing in line at the pharmacy and he's wondering what name to sign on the ledger. Don't want to use your own name, after all you don't want anybody else pointing at you and calling you a drug addict, and the pharmacy doesn't ask for identification, so any name will do, but you need to decide just what name you are going to use. He finally settles on George Washington as a perfectly reasonable name and then he gets to the counter and the clerk opens the ledger and he goes to sign his name and he happens to glance at the name on the line above, and - wait for it - it's George Washington.

I'm reading A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block and it is a fine story about a recovering alcoholic private eye, Matt. Matt and another character have just dumped a bourbon soaked mattress out of a hotel window and are discussing the event:

"That dude at the desk. Jacob? He was pretty cool about the whole thing. He high on something?"
"He has a fondness for cough syrup," I said.
"Well, shit," Mark said. "Who doesn't?"

I howled.

Update April 2016 added Amazon link.

Little Free Libraries

 

Dustbury's Local Library

Dustbury put up a post about his local library, which led to this page, where I found these two items:

• Andrew Carnegie’s support of 2,509 free public libraries around the turn of the 19^th to 20^th century.
• The heroic achievements of Miss Lutie Stearns, a librarian who brought books to nearly 1400 locations in Wisconsin through “traveling little libraries” between 1895 and 1914.

Andrew Carnegie stands out in my mind as one of the robber barons who made his fortune trampling on his fellow Americans. I think that's mostly due to me socialist upbringing. Sometimes I remember the libraries. I've never heard of Miss Lutie Stearns before, but then I haven't spent much time in Wisconsin.

Select Narcotics

Noticed this sign in the pharmacy today. I think I know what they are trying to say, but I'm not sure. "Select" is often used to mean special, as in extra nice, better than average. Does this mean that some narcotics are not good enough to rate being locked up? Or is their selection criteria something different, like retail price, or street value? And in any case, what if I am getting narcotics and they try and foist some of the un-select narcotics on me? Should I be offended?

New Roof

K.E. Harn is replacing the shingles on my 19 year old house. The old ones were supposed to be good for 25 years, but they got kind of beat up looking from someone crawling around up there putting up Christmas lights. My neighbor got his replaced a couple of months ago, and you know how life in suburbia goes: gotta keep up with the neighbors. Fortunately he's a fairly practical guy so I didn't have to shop around, I just used the same company he did. The job is going to cost around $11K. Good thing I've got a couple of bucks stashed away.
    Talking to the truck driver, he tells me he's been driving this same truck for the last 15 years. I didn't think we made anything to last that long anymore. The driver brought his own helper to unload the crane and stack the materials on the roof. Not exactly a fair division of labor, work-wise, but you do want someone who is familiar with the behavior of the crane doing the unloading. Besides, there might not be anyone else there.

Girls with Guns

Col. Jeannie Leavitt, 4th Fighter Wing commander, pilots an F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft during a flight over North Carolina. During her career as the first female fighter pilot, Leavitt recorded more than 2,600 flying hours in the F-15E Strike Eagle. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman John Nieves Camacho) Photo from May 2014.

Big Idea for a Source Code Editor

How about an editor that color codes the age of particular lines of source code? You have a piece of source that has been around for a while, either it's under development or it needs some changes. Wouldn't it be nice if the older lines, lines of code that have proven themselves to be useful and correct were given a dark gray background, newer lines could be given a white background, and lines that have been changed umpteen zillion times a red background? That's my big idea of the moment. I will leave implementation as an exercise for the student.

Russian RC A-10

Russian RC A-10 with Onboard Cam
Is this thing a model airplane or a drone? All it would take to make this model entirely realistic would be to equip it with a gun, but maybe I shouldn't mention such an idea. It's one thing to defend yourself against a man armed with a gun. It's another to defend yourself from an attack by a crazed RC operator. Via Posthip Scott.

Update September 2015. Corrected typo.
Update February 2017 replace missing LiveLeak video with same one from YouTube.