One year ago today: April 9, 2021, Career Now sucks.
Five years ago today: April 9, 2017, not arrowheads.
Nine years ago today: April 9, 2013, Cher is sort-of okay.
Random years ago today: April 9, 2012, soon after, Lance disappeared.
Here’s the Roman A/C experiment as of today. Six pipes, these are just being fitted so I ca take measurements, so don’t be picky about alignment. The basic plan can be seen. Sunlight heats those pipes on the south side, drawing air up from the six ports that go through the wall to the interior. I’m hoping for a 10°F maximum effect, not the 14°F some websites claim. In the configuration shown here, the unpainted pipes produce a barely perceptible 3°F difference right at the inlets, not in the room. No air flow is evident. My pal, the marine engineer, says it will never work. I say when the power goes out in the summer, just a few degrees is the difference between sweating and a good nights sleep.
Unionizing is always an ugly process. I’m not the one to ask about taking sides, as I see both points of view. We live in an era when most contemporary corporations got there on cheap labor, and not one of them started as a union shop. McDonald’s is a primary example, but as they have said, they never set out to provide high-paying jobs. That is a valid point, you are free to not work any job that doesn’t provide a living wage. But it takes political interference to create an entire nation where those become the bulk of what’s available. I see parallels to the English industrialization, where workers competed with each other for scraps.
That is where we stand with Amazon. They never promised you a rose garden and they never set out to provide much for their contract workers, who are technically their own bosses. But, it is like a stance on tipping. It almost totally depends on what side of the fence you are standing. France has a new boss on the way and she’s upsetting the establishment. I’m in agreement with most of her points, but she enrages the left. The able-bodied on welfare must be studying or training for a job.
Le Pen will take the country by storm, since most of it is common sense. Immigrants should never get welfare until they’ve been taxpayers for a long time. Crime convictions mean deportation, immigrants unemployed after a year get sent back. But I’m not keen on her plan to ban convicts from social assistance. Often they cannot get jobs so cutting them off puts them in a desperate situation. Punishment in western society is never meant to be on-going, they have paid their debt in either fines or prison. I don’t want them living nearby, but there should be some place they can get out of the rain without going back to jail.
Another promise I like is nobody under the age of 30 pays income tax, and you retire after you’ve worked 40 years at minimum age only 60. Trump has another rally, this one in North Carolina this evening. When I predicted Trump would be resurgent, I did not notice his rallies depart from the past in no longer being as series of similar events. Now there appears to be a goal and each rally builds a little on the last, to the point Trump can directly make accusations and swear if he wants. The underlying patriot class of Americans is huge and if I’m right, tonight’s show will be even more direct in who gets hammered.
The topic of RINOs still confuses the dumb and dumber out there. Yes, Trump endorsed some turncoats, but he did not know they were planted there years ago by the left in case of a situation. And this time Trump is endorsing some questionable types, but that is because states like Pennsylvania cannot produce any candidates of quality. The skunks are still there, but this time they will have had to go too far to flip without consequences. And the leftists seem more than worried about that. And I hope you didn’t have a ton of your money in Disney stock. They just did themselves a Salvation Army.
Aroma café dish, Pretoria, South Africa.
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I came to a standstill trying to fix the Dyson vacuum The fan at the bottom is not spinning and the rotor isn’t turning. It’s either a bad electrical connection or a fan belt. Without a tiny star wrench, smaller than what I’ve got, shown here, I can’t get the housing off. Where are those right-to-repair preachers when you need them. Nor do I have any templates to measure or size screws that size. I’ll get it but Dyson can kiss my ass. It’s not that fan belts break, it’s that they still make ones that can.
Oregano, the herb, has taken off as well, given area a faint aroma. I went on-line and the plants don’t look like mine. Thus, is it real oregano? I have not seen Agt. R in a month and nobody else has a clue. It is a vigorous herb, throwing out roots after a few days of sitting in ordinary tap water. Here’s a picture of the plant, with three stems in a 50/50 mix of potting soil and yard dirt. The stems seem too thick, so if these take, I’ll try pinching off anything that tries to get away on me.
Here’s the facts, you decide. Do I have a following? As I walked in, a cheer went up, all these strangers know my name. I was taken aback, since I flat out do not recognize anyone but my memory for faces is terrible. If they’ve seen me before, it was here. I went to the far back and joined Keith, who was off duty and I had not planned on singing.
There were quite a few excellent singers tonight on a standard Karaoke show, you know slow music, stare and the screen, out to impress. Enough people asked if I was singing that I put my name in. Then forgot, it was at least another hour and I was getting ready to leave when I got called. A loud cheer went up as I walked to the stage, I’d guess 90% of the crowd had all stopped and were watching me, including a number of great-looking women, gulp. I was rattled, what is with this? This much attention threw me a bit, but I belted out a known crowd-pleasing sing-a-long number. And I barely got to sing.
The majority of the crowd was right along with me, especially those good-looking women, everybody was bopping and singing. It has to be a combination of little things that creates a good show. I know the lyrics so I don’t stare at the monitor, I have new stage lines every show, and I used to be a dancer. I sing with the audience, not at them. By end of the first chorus, around six women were on stage squeezed around me, what a musical riot. You know me, once you got them going, you are committed to keep up the momentum.
I handed them the microphone, by now the whole place had joined in so I turned back to the stage and pretended I was conducting a choir. When I turned to glance at the crowd, the whole place were on their feet singing and doing the crowd wave. That’s the only tune I did and the applause was, what’s the word, tumultuous? As I returned to my seat, the bar maid, the one who has seen it all, gave me the high-five saying, “Fucking awesome!”
Hey, to any naysayers, I’m fully aware I will be accused of bragging. But as they say on line, if it really happened, it ain’t bragging. To anyone who finds fault with my report, I ask, “How was your Saturday night?”
ADDENDUM
Ha, there was never any chance of management liking WFH (work from home). Unlike Asian factories where they own you, American management likes to think they merely “control” the work environment. It seems 77% of them want the employees back in the offices and a comparable ratio of employees say to hell with that. This reflects my personal experience on both sides of the issue. The closest I experienced to work freedom was when the company was key-entering their masses of records onto computers. I was the ideal employee, as explained elsewhere, but I could type all day long and understood the nature of the data I was inputting.
I became semi-famous for getting an entire exchange into the database six months ahead of schedule, entirely by myself. Other exchanges had entire departments of clerical workers dutifully entering mistakes at 50 wpm. After that project finished, they kept me in the building another four years, where I learned to work at the same pace as the women. This was not that popular in ways, because they could look in the union book and see I was being paid twice as much for what they saw as the “same work”. Except, mine only had to be entered once, but as I said, for what they saw.
Thus, I was often able to finish my day’s quota of work by as early as 10:00AM, but I was not allowed to leave the work area. What a treat it would have been to work from home in those days. That’s why I see the impetus to get those workers back inside, where you could see who was working and who wasn’t. I remain impressed by the coder who was farming his work out to China right under the company noses. With my personal experience being under the glare of supervisors, I side with those who want to work from home. As long as they do the job, it is not management’s concern beyond that. We don't need to regress to the days when management could comment on your "attitude".
