One year ago today: May 16, 2018 at the Pinecrest Library.
Five years ago today: May 16, 2014, crybaby casinos.
Nine years ago today: May 16, 2010, once the tree dies . . .
Random years ago today: May 16, 2007, the brain, use it or lose it.
If you are reading this, I am on the road again. Get your atlas, the planned route is from Plant City north to I-75 near Brooksville, then Valdosta, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Hermitage. Generally, the trip is measured as Brooksville to Nashville, lopping off the last few miles at the north end since it is freeway almost to the doorstep. But the south part, as normal for Florida, there are few direct roads and those are usually clogged. And clear sailing through or around Atlanta is rare. I’ll try to get you the usual hourly reports.
Nor is there any AM station for traffic advisory. If you have time, consult an atlas. You will see that there is no way to skirt this city without going a hundred miles out of your way down obscure two-lane roads that are worse than Florida for not going directly to any destination. But I’m wondering if the scenery alone might make that an option, because I’ve had it with Atlanta. This road sign tells of a major accident 1.5 miles ahead. Wrong, it as more like 15 miles.
When you say major, to me that means at least an eight car pile-up with no less than two dead. Instead, and I could not get a picture, it was two semi-trailers. A Publix grocery truck back-ended a Wal*mart. Both were buckled at the hitching point, but it was a one-lane accident. The authorities sealed off the entire freeway and sent me down the road to Burmingham before I spotted my old motorcyle shortcut and got into Chattanooga by nightfall. Ruined my whole trip and my whole day. Otherwise, I would have been in Nashville by supper time. Instead, everybody was asleep by the time I crept in.
I estimate 90 of the people in the line were on welfare or disability. Who else has wait-in-line gear? The taxpayers that make the country tick are all away at work. The trolls use freebies to supplement their welfare, and that is so wrong. In America, the tax system contributes to this bad behavior.
Tax assumes everybody is operating at a surplus, so they start to nibble away at people’s incomes. It’s just a bit here and there, like the 1.5% bus tax on your electricity bill, or the half-cent tax on pet food. Pretty soon, this add up and nobody has any spare cash. Despite all the blah-blah about the war on cash, you still need the stuff to do anything anonymously. So this free $40 bag of food frees up that much money for them to support their habits.
My position is straightforward. Either tax the churches or let the churches feed the non-workers of society. And no, I don’t buy that bunk about old people. If you wind up old with no house, or car, or food, you, my friend, have been partying too long and it’s time you had a nice long rest under a bridge, say, to reflect on what you’ve done with your life, and serve as a bad example. But welfare. No, I am against state-imposed welfare.
Yes, I can hear the uproar about the poor, poor people affected by a welfare ban, but all I’m doing is kicking out the bums. For those who legitimately need temporary social assistance, I have a very generous compensation plan that trains them for work, using the hundreds of billions of dollars saved. What about singles who have babies while on welfare? That’s the height of irresponsibility and is to be dealt with accordingly.
And I don’t know about the Reb’s contention that Wal*Mart in French means “land fill”. But I tend to agree with things like that. The words, I mean. Whether the Reb and I agree or disagree is on a need-to-know basis. And you don’t need to know. See, that was easy.
And what’s this? A new word entering the English language. “Zuccing” is when some enemy gains access to a Facebook group they don’t like, post banned material (usually porn), and report that porn to have the group suspended. Hmmm, I propose another verb formed. Being “Zuckered” is for people, who we can presume were not reading this blog, who posted their life history on Facebook vainly thinking it a shortcut to fame, and now regretting it for the rest of their lives. They have not yet begun to suffer.
Hand drawn.
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The picture of the Georgia welcome sign is from y’day, and there’s no place else to put it. ‘Sides, it looks kind of neat here. You even know something most people don’t. The governor’s name.
Time and again this blog has warned the world about the MicroSoft practice of making computer code unreadable. It’s the whole C+ coding fiasco come back to haunt those who didn’t listen. Funny-ware is being found everywhere from CIA chips, to wristwatches, cellphones, anti-spyware, and the backs of airplane seats. It’s sweet how the hardest hit are those who declared they cared the least and heaped suspicion on others who did care. There’s justice as the punishment includes those with nothing to hide, who live in some fantasy world that they are not being manipulated. I don’t like them because their complacency allows systems into being that were applied against the minority who saw the danger.
The tie here being the Chinese Huawei, which means “China is able” (but can also mean “the Chinese are perfect”) is under the scope for embedding all kinds of unknown lines of code. I’ve always held such code to be latent, awaiting some future circumstance to kick in. Hence, my distrust of IOT, the “Internet of Things”. Do you really want a refrigerator, or for that matter, a shotgun, in your house that could be controlled by somebody else? There are simpletons who say they don’t care, but even if it happens, do you want some government to be the party doing the controlling?
ADDENDUM
In other news, it’s not a mutual hobby, but the Reb & I are super-fast at solving cryptograms. I use the methodical letter frequency approach where if I suggest a letter she can almost intuitive at spotting the likely positions. This makes it easy for me to eliminate conflicts. I’ll watch for three-letter words and any longer words that begin with the same arrangment, where she can tell what letter a word ends long before I’ve looked. Today we cracked the Friday cryptogram in the Tennessean in nine minutes while eating brunch.
I’ll help you get started. Arranged from most to least common in appearance, the letters are: etaoinshrdlcumwfgypbvkjxqz. Rules of thumb: Pick out your two-letter words because one of the letters is a vowel. Three letter words are next, use start and end positions to eliminate false starts. A four letter word which starts and ends with the same character is probably “that”. That’s all.
