Tag: miscellaneous

For Breda

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…everyone’s favorite research librarian.

I’m currently reading The End is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome:  How Going Broke will Leave America Richer, Happier and More Secure by Kevin D. Williamson.  I’m about halfway through it, and so far it’s been written in pretty pure libertarian win.  Lots of Quote of the Day fodder, but I get the sinking impression that the last third is going to largely be of “and then a MIRACLE will occur!” variety, because, by George, we’re AMERICANS and that’s what we DO!

Time will tell.

But for today, I ran across a section that just had me saying to myself “Gotta post this for Breda.”  It’s in the chapter on “What Government is For.”:

Privately funded and volunteer-staffed public libraries were the norm for many years, from magnificent ones such as the New York Public Library―the main branch of which was the largest marble building in the world at the time of its opening―to modest ones throughout suburbs and small towns across the country.  At the apogee of WASP society-lady culture, volunteering at the local library was practically a rite of passage, an entrée into more prestigious charitable work.  (It was a perfection of mid-twentieth-century American upper-class culture that the vanity of ambitious social climbers was exceedingly well aligned with genuine civic virtue, and that conspicuous consumption had not yet displaced conspicuous civil service.  The WASP establishment had its shortcomings, to be sure, but its absence is today keenly felt from the Main Line to Orange County.)  To be sure, in many of these cases there was some entanglement with politics from the beginning, and in a great many more an eventual entanglement with politics, which has been especially harmful in the case of the public libraries: Somehow, as library budgets ballooned and volunteer society ladies were displaced by graduate-schooled, credentialed professionals in the faintly ridiculous field of “library science,” our libraries were transformed from quiet places to read a book into psychiatric wards in which homeless men masturbate to Internet pornography.  The San Francisco public libraries recently installed barriers to increase the level of privacy for this activity.

Coming to a library near you?

Vigilantes!!

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Pennsylvania teens chase down kidnapper’s car on their BIKES and save five-year-old girl

Two Pennsylvania teens are being hailed as heroes after they chased down a man in a car who had snatched a five-year-old girl from her grandmother’s front yard – on their bikes.

Jocelyn Rojas, five, was missing for two hours yesterday when Temar Boggs and a friend saw the child in a car near Lancaster Township and gave chase.

After Boggs, 15, and his friend had been tailing the vehicle for 15 minutes, the driver let the little girl out of the car and sped off.


Now that the little girl is safely back with her family, police are focusing on finding the suspect.

Jocelyn Rojas was playing in the front yard of her grandmother’s home on the 100 block of Jennings Drive in Lancaster Township when she disappeared at about 4:35pm Thursday.

The family notified police and officers sprang into action, blocking off streets and scouring the area with canine units. Police showed Jocelyn’s picture around the neighborhood and Boggs and his friend joined more than 100 first responders searching for the girl.

Boggs spottted the girl in the abductor’s car and he and his friend began to follow the car.

The high school student said the little girl ran towards him when she got out of the car.

‘If he wasn’t going to stop, I was probably going to like, jump on the car,’ Boggs told ABC6.

Boggs said the suspect would turn around to see if they were still following him after they began to give chase.

‘As soon as the guy started noticing that we were chasing him, he stopped at the end of the hill and let her out, and she ran to me and said that she needed her mom,’ he said.

Boggs took the little girl to the police and they contacted her frantic mother and family.

Good on ya, kid young man sir!  (Edited due to some excellent comments.) Here is someone who instinctively understands Robert Peel’s Seventh Principle:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

I Push ELECTRONS for a Living

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I am most definitely not a plumber.

Had a major garbage disposal failure Sunday morning. I knew the unit was failing and had bought a replacement previously, but I just hadn’t gotten around to swapping them out. The new one is longer than the old, and the discharge port is located at a different elevation than previously, so the undersink drain piping doesn’t line up.

Two days later, it STILL doesn’t line up. I’m tired of fv%$ing with it. Got a pro coming tomorrow. (Anything worth doing is worth paying a professional to do.) All I want is for it to drain and not to leak when it’s finished.

I may actually start posting things to the blog again afterward….

THIS is Charity

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Eva Mickelthwaite, is a competitive IPSC/USPSA shooter here in Arizona.  Some friends of hers live in Yarnell, the area recently devastated by wildfire:

As you all may know the Yarnell Fire has burned more than 8000 acres in Arizona.  It has devastated the town of Yarnell and abruptly took the lives of 19 brave men, a loss that will be felt for a very long time to come.

Unfortunately, as many of you may already know, it has also taken the home of Steve & Debi Keehner.  Due to the age of the home, it was un-insurable, so it is a complete loss for them.

Annette Williamson and I have received an enormous amount of feedback from the shooting community asking what we can do to help.  At this time, we think the best way we can help is in the form of a monetary donation.  We have set up a Paypal link on my website that accepts many forms of payments.  We have also set up an account at Wells Fargo under “Keehner Rebuild Fund” in case you prefer to handle it the old fashioned way.  You will need to reference the zip code 85226 if you plan to go to the bank.

Please take the time to make a donation, no matter how small.  We received our first $10 donation from the Wells Fargo account specialist  who set up the account. She contributed out of her personal pocket for a couple she doesn’t know.  It all adds up folks, and I’m sure they will appreciate whatever we are able to do. (BTW…they have only just been told about this account. We’re not sure they are aware of the amount of support they have behind them, but are about to see so).

Thanks to all of you who have contacted us to ask what can be done.  It was your overwhelming response that motivated us to make this happen.

If you have any questions or problems with the link, please feel free to email me at [email protected].

Thanks,

Eva L. Micklethwaite

Damn…

KevinLeave a comment

photo halfmast-1.gif

It’s a tragic night for families in the small Arizona community of Yarnell.

 Nineteen firefighters have been killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire in the Town of Yarnell, said Wade Ward, the Incident Command Post said.

 Eighteen of those killed were from the Prescott Granite Mountain Hotshots, fire officials said. It’s not known where the other victim was based.

Damn. Just… damn.

Edited to add:

photo yarnellfirefighters.jpg

Game of Thrones

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Yeah, I’m a fan.  Don’t get HBO, but I caught an episode during the first season when I was on the road.  I’d read the first book in the series several years ago and really enjoyed it, but when I bought the second one I was put off by the “23 characters in search of a plot” storyline.  I didn’t pick up the third.  But having watched one of the shows, I thought it very well done, as a lot of HBO productions are.  It was available on Netflix, so I put it in my queue.  Watched the first disc, then the second, then went to Amazon and bought the whole thing.  My wife and I were hooked.

I pre-ordered Season 2.  Waited the better part of a year for it to ship, and we blew through it the weekend after it arrived.

Season 3 is on pre-order now.

I discovered that I could order the five available books as a set in eBook format, and I had some Barnes & Noble gift cards (and the Nook app on my iPod Touch), so I did.  I just finished reading A Feast for Crows, and I’ve come to a conclusion:

George R.R. Martin is a sadist.

Four thousand or so pages into this, and not one character has had anything good happen to them (at least that didn’t later turn to sh!t).  Major sympathetic characters have been slain horribly.  Major evil characters have been slain horribly.  Major characters have been maimed.  (And there are a LOT of Major Characters.)

And it.  Keeps.  Dragging.  On.  And.  On.  And.  ON.

HBO has done, as far as I can tell, the almost unheard-of:  It has turned the movie version of a book or books into a BETTER product than the text version.  Granted, this is because the live-performance version FORCES the screenwriters to prune viciously and excerpt only those parts that will make good cinema, but in general this editing process destroys the story being told by the book.  Not in this case.

I appreciate the grand, sweeping vision – the breadth of the world that Martin has built and the characters he has filled (FILLED!) it with, but I have the uneasy feeling that at the end of this series (assuming Martin finishes it before he shuffles off this mortal coil) the Others will rule that world, and everyone we’ve come to love and hate will be horribly, horribly dead.

Hodor.

UPDATE:  Joke from the comments – G.R.R. Martin’s Twitter account has been closed.  He killed all 140 characters!

…And Now We’re Down to Three

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When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery

— Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Well, we can scratch “high-speed pizza delivery” off the list:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on4DRTUvst0?rel=0]
Yeah, it’s Domino’s, but it’s in the UK, not Silicon Valley.