I’m Back from Hell

Posted on April 29, 2006 by Alaska

also known as Florida, and I have yet another reason to hate that State: in Fort Lauderdale, the public drinking/bathing water is the color of diluted pee.

I first discovered this in my hotel room, after taking a redeye Wednesday night and putting in way too long a day Thursday. By 11pm (2am my time), I needed a drink and a long hot soaking bath, preferably both at the same time.

So I filled the tub, and noticed the pale yellow color of the water. “That’s some pretty crappy fluorescent lights they’ve got in this bathroom,” thought I, as I stepped in for a soak.

The next day, I asked to use the restroom at the place we were working, and noticed that the person before me evidently hadn’t flushed. “Damn filthy Floridians,” I grumbled under my breath. So I flushed, and the fresh water was the same color. Did it again, with the same result. The lighting was incandescent. Started to feel really queasy about my bath.

Our genial host was gracious enough not to ROTFL at my all-too-casual question about the color of the water. Seems that it’s just chock-full of chlorine and other chemicals to make it safe to bathe in, but that also make it unwise to drink.

Of course, I was stupid enough to preface my question with the story of my bath the previous night, so she may have just been being kind about it being safe for bathing. Needless to say, now that I’m home I just took a scalding twenty-minute shower and scrubbed my skin raw.

The only positive thing for me about Lauderdamndale would have been visiting Travis McGee’s famous slip F-18 at Bahia Mar, but I knew before we departed that we wouldn’t have time for that sort of thing. So between that and missing Boomershoot, I was in a foul mood to begin with. Bathing in piss-water just made it that much worse. Why anybody lives in Florida is beyond me. The place just sucks.

Posted in Order of the imperial upraised middle finger. | 8 Comments

Jammin’ Jihad Johnny

Posted on April 28, 2006 by Phil Kadath

As you’ve probably guessed, I couldn’t wait for the DNS attack from the land of the house of saud to stop before I went to bed for the day.

Sorry about that.

I’ll be back with everything I was going to post up today, tomorrow, including The Soundboard, and we’ll try this all over again. But for now, I’m off to work.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Pre-Day of Reckoning

Posted on April 28, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Almost two weeks ago, on Easter Sunday afternoon, I last posted abotu the possibility of a strike by the Teamsters who drive the trucks where I work. At that time, they had gotten a verbal proposal that sounded good and they voted for another two week extension to negotiations so that our employer could put it in writing. They are supposed to vote on it tomorrow afternoon at 1400pst.

The trouble is, our employer has gone all chickenshit and hasn’t handed them their copy or the new contract proposal yet. The shop stewards are supposed to be picking it up this morning and going over it and then giving the union members the low-down on it.

From what I’ve heard of the verbal proposal, they’d be fools not to take it: A 75% cut in healthcare costs AND an increase to their hourly wage AND and increase into their pensions. If the paperwork reads anything liek the verbal proposal, the threat of a strike will be over and I can quit worrying about that BS.

There are no guards or high-powered mobile lights in the parking lot this time around, and there hasn’t been any monkey business from the drivers since my last post on it, but for some reason I’m just a bit on edge.

Part of the reason I’m so antsy right now is that if they, for some unknown reason, decide to strike, my vacation for next week is cancelled. And even though I’m not able to go to Boomershoot, I really do need a week off. Worse than a crackhead needs a hit. The office politics are just getting too damn nasty and I’ll have to make someone or a group of someone’s deaths look like random copier accidents if I don’t get out of there for a bit. I get six weeks a year, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to turn down a week that has already been approved.

So if’n you’re still interested about this, swing by on Sunday. I’ve been invited to a BBQ being held right after the vote on Saturday at the home of one of the drivers. I guess we’ll see if I’m being sacrificed or if the guys are offering the olive branch for the shenanigans a couple weeks back. If I survive I’ll be posting up the results that morning.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Too Smart For Their Own Good

Posted on April 27, 2006 by Phil Kadath

I get about one of these a month, but I want to share last night’s with you because it is just so damn Typically Seattle.

The customer is a coffee shop, actually a chain, probably one you’ve heard of. The customer is remodelling and needs to throw out a large and very solid table top, but their trash container is only 6ft wide by 3ft deep at the opening and is then about 4ft tall.

The customer decides that their best course of action is to use a circular saw to cut the top in a 6ft by 3ft rectalngle and then pile the rest of the top, along with the legs, on top if it.

Here is where the Typically Seattle problem starts: remember when I gave the dimensions fo the box? I only said that the opening is 6×3, the box immediately tapers down to about 2 1/2ft by 5 1/2 at its base. It has been designed like this so that stuff will slide out of it more easily and it is quite obvious to anyone who looks at the box itself.

Well, apparently the customer did NOT notice this because they not only piled heavy stuff on top of the table top, but they seem to have climbed up onto the table top and mashed it down into the box so as to get the rest of the week’s actual coffee shop trash into it.

The driver shows up last night to dump the box and, lo and behold, the table top is now wedged into the box and will not shake out.

The box normally holds about 2 cubic yards of trash, but with the table top in it, it barely holds a half a yard. And the yard or so that is under the table top is composed of paper cups and coffee grounds that is, in no way, heavy enough to push the table top out of the box.

I almost wish I could listen in on that phone call when the customer service person tells them that it will cost them $65 an hour for us to come out and ‘unstick’ the table top (the box is our property, but they are renting it and are responsible for all repairs/damage). Whereupon, the store manager will send two of his PoliSci/English major employees out to ‘unstick’ the table top (and probably injure themselves in the process).

The Moral to this Story: Just because you can read a tape measure, doesn’t mean you know what the hell you’re doing.

Alternate Moral: Measure Twice, Cut Once is not the only rule. Sometimes cutting twice and making the tossable piece smaller by converting it into two or three smaller pieces is the better idea.

Posted in Too Stupid to Live | 1 Comment

Give Until It Hurts

Posted on April 27, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Lucifer called my house this morning asking if I had any spare parkas I would like to donate. It seems the demons are freezing their cheeks off.

And it’s all because GreenPeace actually got one right.

Head on over to Insignificant Thoughts and watch the Greenies take ‘Splash’ Kennedy’s owner to taks.

Posted in Color me confused | 4 Comments

Remember ‘The Count’

Posted on April 27, 2006 by Phil Kadath

From Sesame Street? I am going channel him as I write this and we’ll see how many left wing talking points Nancy Pelosi can squeeze into a single speech.

Ready? Here we go…

If you want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and therefore improve our national security situation, you can’t do it if you’re a Republican because you are too wedded to the oil companies (1). We have two oilmen in the white house (2). The logical follow-up from that is $3 a gallon gasoline. There is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect. How dare the President of the United States make a speech today in April, many, many, many months after the american people have had to undergo the cost of home heating oil. A woman told me she almost fainted when she received her home heating bill over this Winter (3) . And when so many people making the minimum wage (4), which hasn’t been raised in eight years (5), which has a very low purchasing power have to go out and buy gasoline at these prices? Where have you been, Mr. president (6)?

Six!Six! Six Talking Points 

The middle class squeeze is on (7), competition in our country is affected by the price of energy and of oil and all of a sudden you take a trip outside of Washington (8) , see the fact that the public is outraged about this, come home and make a speech, let’s see that matched in your budget, let’s see that matched in your policy, let’s see that matched in and you’re separating yourselves yourself from your patron, big oil (9), cut yourself off from that anvil holding your party down and this country down, instead of coming to Washington and throwing your Republican colleagues under the wheels of the train, which they mightily deserve for being a rubber stamp (10) for your obscene, corrupt policy (11) of ripping off the american people (12).

Twelve! Twelve Leftist Talking Points!

Seriously though, Pelosi shows that she doesn’t even get it in her first sentence. If she really wanted to lower our dependence on foregin oil, she’d vote for domestic drilling, and not just in ANWR. The east coast, the west coast, the Gulf all have capped off wells. Our National Parks have known sources of both oil and natural gas. If we tapped those, while it may not knock our dependence down to zero, it would make one helluva dent.

But she is beholden to the environmentalist lobby, who demand that she vote against anything that would lower our dependence. The same goes for refineries. The same goes for new nuclear plants. The same goes for hydro plants. The same even goes for converting old coal fired plants into ultra-clean trash incinerators.

So who exactly is causing $3 a gallon gas? It ain’t Bush and it ain’t the oil companies.

Posted in The Left is Never Right, Useful Idiots | 5 Comments

His disappointment is painfully obvious

Posted on April 27, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Yesterday Drudge did a write up about how the sales of the book from the leader of the Klueless Kos Kids aren’t exactly what you’d expect from a guy who claims to get 100K hits a day.

A book hyped by major media as documenting a progressive revolution of “blogs” and political power, DAILY KOS ‘CRASHING THE GATE,’ has sold only 3,630 copies since its release last month, according to NIELSEN’s BOOKSCAN.

[NIELSEN claims only 2,062 copies of DAILY KOS have been purchased at the retail level; the rest coming through ‘discount’ outlets.]

Sounds pretty bad, huh? Well, it is actually a little bit better than that, but I’m guessing that it still isn’t was Kos was hoping for, because he goes on for six paragraphs about his calculations of his book sales for the three weeks the book has been out.

In his calculations, Kos figures he has sold nearly 10,000 copies what with adding up the numbers Drudge reported and from the book tour that takes up all of his time (he hasn’t posted regularly for at least a couple weeks) and indie book stores. He says that the book is listed as #25 on the Amazon top seller list and that his publisher has stated that they’ve got orders for 50,000 more copies.

I wonder just how much knowledge Kos has of the book industry? In the mid-90’s I worked at a mid-size book wholesaler here in the Seattle area. While there, it wasn’t uncommon for me and my co-workers to offload 10,000 copies of the same book off a single semi-trailer. They were logged into the company’s computer system, broken down off the pallets and separated into 10-box or 20-box groups, labelled and shipped out to the the chain book retailers that same day.

These were the hard-bound editions that sell for $25 a pop, not the $6 paperback editions. And these individual stores would get another shipment of the same book, in the same quantity, the very next week.

Granted, Kos isn’t Tom Clancy and his book is probably nowhere nearly as entertaining, but seeing as how the guy claims these huge unique hit numbers whenever they are brought into question and he is supposed to have an ungodly number of daily readers, you’d figure at least 1 in every 10 of his readers would have pre-ordered, but three weeks in, he can barely count 1% of his weekly hits as a buyer.

The guy should have sold 500 copies during his two-store signing here in Seattle alone. But no. Heck, he even admits that the link to the book that sits atop his mainpage next to accolades from ‘those who should know’ has only garnered 700 purchases.

The truly telling sign that the sales aren’t up to his expectations though, is that he even bothered to respond to Drudge’s post.

Posted in Freaks, Mutants, and Morons | Leave a comment

I’m not feeling so lazy anymore

Posted on April 27, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Aaron at the FreeWillBlog notes that Volkswagon is planning on working it’s employees to the bone.

As part of its reorganization plans, Volkswagen is considering increasing its employees’ work hours. Reuters reports that management has requested the VW work council to consider gradually phasing back the 35-hour work week among its members. Currently employees work a standard 28.8-hour work week.

I recently got my hours cut back to the 45-50 hours per week mark from an average of 60 hours per. I was glad I got the raise I got a few weeks back because those first few checks seemed dinky.

If those employees bitch about VW taking away some of their lederhosen-wearin’ time away I may just have to come up with some choice words for them.

And I’d really like to see the productivity numbers of German assembly plants versus the ones in the US.

Posted in Life in the Atomic Age | 1 Comment

It’s His Fault

Posted on April 26, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Yesterday, The Baron du Toit posted up one of his hypothetical questions. This go around though, it wasn’t about firearms, it was about cars.

Let’s say your rich old Uncle Cedric, who was a car collector, passed away. In his will, he handed out his car collection, to be given out one car at a time, in strict order according to a list of heirs, who could each make their choice until the last guy gets whatever’s left.

Your turn comes up (you’re second-last on the list), and there are two cars left: a 1956 Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing, and a 1972 Ferrari Dino 246 GT, both in silver, and both in showroom condition.

If you cannot picture those two vehicles in your head, click the link for pics.

I refrained from putting in an answer into his comments section because I think it may have caused him to cancel my commenting privileges there.

In short, I would have chosen the MB and then sold it and bought some real estate with most of the dividends. On this real estate I would have a very large garage in which to store a couple of other automobiles.

Just like buying a firearm that I’ll never shoot, I cannot buy a car that I will rarely, if ever, drive. Both of the cars that the Baron offered up are worth more sitting somewhere than they are with miles on them. They are investments. And hence, I would sell them to someone who is willing to pay cash money to look at them in their garage and snatch myself up a residence.

Now, if I were to pose a question such as the one he did and I wanted to make it as difficult as possible for myself, these are the two cars I would have put into the question.

A 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500E

eleanor.jpg

Or, a 1996 Toyota Supra TT

IMG_0620.jpg

Muscle car affectionados will recognize the Shelby 500E as the infamous ‘Eleanor’ (that’s what the ‘E’ stands for, silly) most famously known as the car from the ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ movies.

Eleanor is powered by a 427ci / 525hp mill, backed by a Tremec 5 speed and will walk most, if not all, of the muscle cars of it’s era and the majority of cars being put out today in both the quarter mile and right on up to the 170mph mark.

A very fine piece of work, indeed!

The Supra TT (standing for ‘Turbo Targa’, of course) is a 3 liter inline six with a decent amount of forced air boost off the showroom floor. Your Uncle Cedric however, was smart enough to swing this by my workshop back when I hobbied under a different moniker. We did a number of things to it (Garrett GT42 spinbox, Swissed-Out the head, giganto ICey-box, AC’d the intake, etc)  that brought the engine to life and ended up making the dynamometer give a read-out of 610hp at the rear pair.

While not a drag racer, it’s 12.42 ET is quick enough to please just about anyone, though it truly shines out on the open road, where it’ll follow a Lamborghini Diablo right on past the 190mph mark.

For most of y’all out there, you will pick one or the other rather easily.

Not so for me. If I had to choose one of the two, someone would have to put a time limit on how long I was allowed to think on it or I’d be scratching my head for weeks if not months.

The Analog Wife, on the other hand, would have a the same difficult decision if she was made to choose between an 2005 Dodge Magnum (non-hemi) or a 1966 Vista Cruiser.

Posted in Kewel! | 8 Comments

Nailed It

Posted on April 26, 2006 by Phil Kadath

The DANE wraps up Christiane Amanpour in a nice little bow

First, what she said:

When people ask: “Why did the Palestinian people elect a terrorist group?” The answer is because they see them as a lifeline.

Each time I go to the Palestinian territory of Gaza, I am shocked by the reality on the ground. On a recent visit, I passed through a short tunnel from the First World in Israel and emerged into the Third World that is Gaza. The poverty there is among the worst in the world.

Hamas officials told me they did not expect to win the election as overwhelmingly as they did. They say their main priority now is to meet the demands of the people for a better life.

But that may be impossible, because Israel and the United States refuse to deal with Hamas and have already cut funding to the new Palestinian government.
…
Hamas is not a terrorist orgnization. Terrorists don’t run hospitals, schools and welfare schemes. It was wrong to label Hamas as such. Hope the US govt. corrects itself soon and help the palestinians in their quest for independence.

And now The DANE:

Corrects itself?

It’s the Jews fault that Gaza is a ghetto? Because the USA and Israel won’t GIVE… money to support a terror/welfare state? A terror state with a 70 year legacy of violence against Jes that predates the creation of Israel?

This from a woman who ranted during coverage of the Pope’s funeral about all the changes the Catholic Church needed to make…

Does Hamas allow women in the clergy?

Does Hamas need to loosen restrictions on birth control or would that cut down on human-untition?

Does Hamas need to change it’s views on abortion or are 50th trimester “honor killings” considered “choice”?

Does the Catholic Church’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy show tolerace toward Gays in contrast to Hamas’ lynch-them-in-the-public-square policy?

Maybe if the Catholic Church spent 100% of their time targeting Jewish civilians for slaughter, Christiane Amanpour would celebrate their… “hospitals, schools and welfare schemes”?

So I forgot to mention that the bow he tied was around her neck?

Posted in Order of the imperial upraised middle finger. | Leave a comment