What Are these Creatures?
Here’s your quiz of the day: what are these five things?
Answer tomorrow. (Please refrain from posting spoilers in the comments - wry hints and jabs thoroughly encouraged.)
New Stove and More
Recently, my friend Virginia O informed me that her sister Elizabeth was demolishing her house and had some last items for sale. Well, this sounded like a good opportunity, and I had some time, so I checked it out.
Particularly Virginia had mentioned a stove/oven. I have been needing a new one for a long time. I had wanted a gas stove, but the current connection was for an electric, and that seemed to be the easiest road to take.
So, I took the stove , it fit in the back of my Subaru no problem. When I got home, moved the old beast onto the back porch, did a 10-year cleaning of the area, and pushed the new oven into place, I found out that 220 volt plugs have changed in the last (insert correct number) decades.
I had to return to the house to pick up an entertainment center, so when I returned, I extricated the plug that was previously in use for the stove, and later installed it at my house.
It works great, and I first tested it out baking a store pizza on my long-unused pizza stone. Trés magnifique!
As mentioned, I also picked up an entertainment center. Mine works fine, but I’ve been using it for eight or so years, and it leads a bit to visual clutter, and also allowed a full cover of dust because of its openness.
The new entertainment center is actually a wardrobe from Mexico. Given that I live in an old house with a limited amount of closet space, it could actually be put to that use, if I wanted to. But, It works well as an entertainment center.
If my television was an inch less deep it would be perfect; as it is, it touches the TV when closed and doesn’t close perfectly.
I didn’t appreciate the full heft of the piece until I got Kevin and Conn over to the house to pick it up. It’s an extremely solid piece. We ran it into several things, with only colored markings to indicate what they might have been. The marks only add to its rustic charm.
Apparently the piece was hauled back from Mexico on the top of an Isuzu with great drama. I’m glad it made it and happy to have the piece now.
Heavy Trash - I’ll Be Here All Week
I made a point to drag all my heavy trash out to the curb on Sunday so that I would not have to keep it for another month. I also cut down some limbs with my new tree pruner, but not as many as were on the list.
The trashed stove/oven/microwave, the fallen ancient television antenna, and the water heater with a giant rusted hole in the bottom all disappeared from the front curb in about an hour.
The limbs on the other hand are still there this evening.
A little sleuthing leads me find out that they’ve changed the heavy trash days in my neighborhood.
Looks like I’ll have a pile of limbs for another week. Perhaps I’ll cut them up a bit; perhaps I’ll add to it.
Who is Bill Shirley?
Some people think that Shirley is an uncommon name. It’s not. You come across many more less common names when you’re going about your life. It’s more common than less (being in the 43rd percentile of last names in the US - it’s a bit more common in Texas)
Last time I checked the Houston phone book (which was admittedly a while ago), there were nearly thirty Shirleys and I didn’t know any of them.
Of course, William is a very common name (fifth most common in the 1990 US census).
Almost twenty years ago I met via the internet a guy named Shirley, and then his brother Will. They lived outside of London, were a few years younger than me, and were both in computer work for a living. I always hoped to visit them, but never did. I’ve lost track of them.
Bill Shirley (1921 - 1989) was an actor and singer and singing voice of Prince Philip in Sleeping Beauty (1959).
To Be Free Requires Diligence
The Declaration of Independence is one of the most profound documents in human history. Today is the anniversary of it’s adoption by the American states.
Despite it’s prominence in our history, it has no hold in our law.
Everyone knows the the main phrase from the Declaration
All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And yet we, as a country, claim rights for our citizenry that we deny to others. We make excuses for how we allow ourselves to treat humans being we hold in our custody.
The only right an American should have over any other human on American soil is to stay on American soil.
Whether it’s extreme rendition, or lack of habeus corpus rights of foreign nationals we detain, our freedom has become one of the King citizens, by the King citizens, and for the King citizens.
Not unlike the King whose shackles we sought to throw off, we have long forgotten that we used to believe of all men. We used to “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”.
If we want all men to be equal, we should treat them all equally.
Edit: If you missed the news this week, and I did, it was revealed that our “coercive management techniques” chart used at Guantánamo Bay (and presumably elsewhere) came verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Communist Chinese torture techniques used to illicit mostly false confessions. Are we outraged yet?
Donna
So, when you receive a MySpace friend request from “Donna” who doesn’t have a picture, and lives in another state, and who’s only friend is “Tom”, what do you do?
Yes. And I was just about to delete the invitation, but I noticed some oddities. She wasn’t 18 or 21 or 26, like most MySpace spam, but 41.
And she’s in Geismar, Louisiana. That sounded vaguely familiar, so I looked it up. Suburb of Baton Rouge.
Hmm, I actually know a Donna of that age that lives in the suburbs of the Red Stick. I guess I’ll give her a day or two to put any identifying information onto her account.
But Donna, MySpace is so 2004. Where’s your FaceBook account?
