Prices in the Keys, in general, are still outrageous. A half-million for a plywood condo in an evacuation zone? Most of today’s blog is general interest material, since I’ve nothing else to write about. No wild parties to report, is what I’m sayin’.I see my article on sailing ships was popular. Let’s look closer at that. Those blocks, or pullies, used to hoist the sails were once made by hand. The Royal Navy around 1800 needed 100,000 of them per year. This blog has detailed Kingdom Isambard Brunel, but who remembers his father, Marc? Yes, that’s the French spelling. Good old Marc invented the first assembly line a hundred years before Ford came along.
He developed a series of 43, some say 45, machines to make these blocks at a rate of 160,000 per year. Too bad Marc never developed a way to get the British Parliament to pay him for all his effort. Once they saw it worked, they nationalized. He finally got something out of them, but is best known for being bribed later by the same government not to immigrate to Russia.
While learning all this, I came across a description of a helix drive. This is propulsion using a spiral, like some organisms known as flagellates, maybe bacteria, I don’t know. But neither higher orders or mechanics have used the helix much. The only popular examples are the airplane propeller (less than 1/10th of a helix) and the ship propeller (maximum ½ of a helix). Apparently, the ship propeller blades can be made greater than half, but this requires more power without any increase in speed.
It’s goodbye Twinkies, though the stock that’s left on the shelves is probably has the same half-life as the carbon-14 it is made from. The company, Hostess, raided the union pension funds and bankruptcy means they don’t have to pay it back. Most of the money went to a steady string of crooked CEOs over the past decade. Now the workers lost not only their jobs but their pensions.
I’m not taking sides. I can’t say arrest the CEOs for being smart unless you arrest the workers for being stupid. I saw the similar situation going on at the phone company and cleared out in 1996, some eight years before my co-workers got canned and left empty-handed. And empty-headed. In the end, I was the only one of 15,000 who used the reimbursement plan to get a full college degree. Let me spell that out for you, my friends, “fifteen thousand”. In the entire 125 year history of that company.
When I was in that union, I watched the pension dollars like a hawk. Today, it is the ONLY major pension left in the world that is both fully-funded and insured. True, it could still fail, but by then there will be nobody left standing to laugh or say they told me so. And, my funds are guaranteed to my estate should I die. I prefer the phrase “forward thinking” to terms like “smart” or “brains”. But all are acceptable.
Have you seen the Iron Dome anti-missile system the Israelis are deploying at Gaza? It is claimed to shoot down artillery shells. How do they manage that, hitting a shell I mean? The US military might also ask how they manage to keep the cost below $40,000 per missile. Dome works by calculating the trajectory, which makes you wonder why they don’t launch a second missile back at the launching pad. Automatically, kind of like one bird with two stones.
Speaking of automatically, there is the fiscal cliff now approaching. December 31, for example, the amount doctors bill Medicare drops 30%, the so-called “doc fix”. And just when all my specialists are going to be needing new BMW transplants. The aftermath will be interesting but as long as the nation has money to waste on idiotic departments (agriculture, DMV, embassies), don’t expect any sympathy from me. The average personal income of 2011 (per person, not per household) is still less than I ever worked for—and that statistic includes doctors.
Name that band, see photograph. Forget the baby pictures, here is the real stage pose from the Key’s last day. This is how you show the non-tippers your true appreciation. Hint, it's the bassist. And a minute later the drummer went over and played a drum roll on them tom-toms. Was the bass player doing it on purpose? The jury isn’t merely out on this one; it is as far away as possible.Trivia. The character “Shipwreck” from the GI Joe doll series was reputedly said to be designed after George Harrison, the ex-Beatle. That’s an unlikely match, between gronk SEAL and a pacifist who left $100 million in his estate. Pardon me, these are not doll series, but “action figures”. What the hell is wrong with me I keep mixing those two up? Don't I appreciate SEALS? Yes, but I don't appreciate those who get us into situations where we even need them. Did you know I am such an isolationist that when I first saw "giJoe" in the Sears catalog when I was nine, I thought it was pronounced “gehj-oh”?
ADDENDUM
One of my clients called to report that BellSouth had shut off her email. This is done only when they suspect the email is being used for something illegal, and that is not the case here. It turns out her email list has been hijacked. I advised her to call AT&T and remain on the line until they restore her service or give her access to her address book. Too bad, you know, because I have repeatedly told her to back up that information for years, but who ever does?
I also walked her through the phases the phone people will put her through, including the three transfers, the repeating of information they already have, and the need to tell the same story to all three people virtually word for word. How to keep reminding them they advertise their system as immune from virus attacks, that it is their system and not hers that has been compromised, and the internal term the phone company hates when customers know it, “We’ll have to ESCALATE this.”
If not, I kept all my passwords when I left the company in 1996, as coincidentally mentioned here and they all still worked when I tested them four months ago. Plus, I know every “intel” code (nothing to do with Intel) and in most cases even who to call for a favor. Those who stick their noses into my business should also be aware of this grim fact. Because they’ll have a much harder time learning it after their luck goes bad.
