hazleton gets purdy

Wanna chew some aspirin? Let’s go …

This is a story, albeit bereft of links to substantiate only because I am too lazy to find them, of how sausage is made. If you know that warm, cozy feeling of sitting at the table with your Jimmy Dean and a few aborted chickens over-easy, then here is the final sausage, all grilled up purty.

The link is a pretty legal brief in support of a town local to me. The town, Hazleton, passed an ordinance some time ago requiring landlords and businesses to get proof of citizenship prior to renting to or hiring employees. The brief looks so official and makes a sound constitutional argument. I am sure the local political hacks feel smart when they read it.

Here’s the reality.

Hazleton is a dirty little town with closed storefronts and aged buildings. There’s a junk yard just off main street that houses enough rats to serve everyone in Asia a three-course meal for a week. Go just one block from the main drag, and the market becomes a mercado. Every sign changes to Spanish. Nothing wrong with that.

The claim, and I listen but neither believe or disbelieve, is that “these people” are sucking the town’s resources dry with their welfare draws including, most discussed, showing up the hospital emergency room. In Pennsylvania, maybe everywhere, every county has to have one hospital designated for providing care regardless of ability to pay. In my county (not the same as Hazletons) that designated hospital just so happens to be the one closest to me. I have gone to the ER a couple of times, just once for myself, and when I check in and offer my insurance card they tell me, “We cannot ask for or process anything on insurance until the emergency services have been completed.”

The purported illegals in this area are largely migrant workers, or were when they originally came. I had some overlap with the societal structure when I represented a runner in federal court. These folks are here for years and years. They routinely send money home. They come and go between countries not often but regularly. Getting IDs, including Social Security cards, was merely a matter of paying the price – with the money, access was not an issue.

My guy told me that he could be back in the US at will. He was going to be deported as a result of the charges against him. I said to him, “So how long will it take you to get back here?” He said, “I haven’t spent much time with my family lately, so I’ll probably stay there two weeks.”

So with all the illegals so plain to Hazleton’s ruling elite, they pass the law to push them out of their backyard. Of course, Hazleton would be a great location to shot a 1950s film of a poverty-stricken town, but that’s another issue. Of course, without the illegals shopping in the mercados and elsewhere the commerce in Hazleton would dry up like a thin puddle in Arizona, but that’s another issue.

“Push ‘em out,” says Jim-Bob.

“You tell ‘em!” echoes Mike-Bob.

“Burn the witch! Take her shoes! Let’s go eat!” says Dave-Bob.

All the other –Bobs join in. Sausage is made.

I am certain the federal Court of Appeals will overturn the local decision. There is precedent for the law. Afterward, Hazleton will be able to resume its downward slope into non-existence unimpeded by the financial impact of those nasty illegals.

How do we solve the illegal-population situation? How the hell do I know? But I will suggest that the very question subsumes the direction: It is a “situation.” It is not some hypothetical situation with Tommy Jefferson shooing away little red-headed black kids by saying, “I told you never to visit me at work!” “OK, daddy …”

The borders were porous; illegals poured through. Now they are here and have been for decades. Our economy has conformed to their presence. Play too heavy a hand and there will be nasty economic consequences both here and in Mexico. It is not different that Iraq: We are there; pull out and leave a vacuum, then it will collapse. Something measured needs to be done. There is also recognition that we cannot reward illegal behavior. You figure it out.

Onward.

Are you high? Here you go. Welcome.

Meghan doesn’t document her findings on origins of phrases, but I have no reason to disbelief her. I am not a group-hug-let’s-sing-Kum-Bai-Ah kind of guy, but I have just removed the phrase “rule of thumb” from my lexicon. Meghan: No, this phrase is definitely NOT "P.C"! Who knew? "Rule of thumb" derived from the days when woman were sometimes beaten with a switch. To be "kind" the switch could not be thicker than a thumb's width. This was made law in 1782 when an English judge stated that men were allowed to beat their wives but that the stick could not be thicker than one's thumb.

This is interesting. You need to drop the page just a little until you see the spinning girl. It is described in the text – but look at the pic first. I am right-brained, and if I put the image into my peripheral vision, I could make it change direction, and hold that changed direction when I looked directly at it.

Is you pet suicidal? Give it anti-depressants. Really. How utterly pathetic.

I’ve had those confirmation links you have to hit in an e to activate some account. I like the idea of a 15 minute e-mail address. It dies quickly, as does the ability to clog your spam folder.

Later …

eat till you die

Does work block certain websites? Use this link to override the blocks. But then again, maybe they blocked them for a reason? Like decreased productivity? Just a thought.

Here’s a hit-and-miss set of laws, with more categories on the left. The laws for tech include, Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.

This is a well-done post of pics from around the world of families and the food they consume during one week. Notice how both the food bill and the shit increases as the locale comes to America.

I’m getting a little pissed off at all the mentions of fractals I see on the net. I haven’t a clue what a fractal is. Looks like a creative Spirograph thing. I prefer the gear-shaped wheels and colored pencils. Maybe that’s because I am simple. If you like fractals, here’s some free source code. Have fun, whatever the hell you are doing.

So Obama and Tubby Thighs. Think it isn’t over? They split the vote damn near even. The delegates are about even. But think about the broader structure. She had such a large lead – now they are even. That means that she is tanking and he is rising. Also, he brought in twice what she did in cash last month and is on pace to do another $30 million this month. She had to lend her campaign $5 million, presumably out of her futures trading account. His polls are rising as well as his bank account. The next 5 or 6 states are his territory – more good press. She’s not OK until late March and April with states that lean her way. Too long to kill the burden of the press on her bank account. She had to can Bubba after the South Carolina fiasco - openly negative politics won't work, and there'll be a helluva price to pay if behind-the-scenes bullshit surfaces. She pulled the fucking tears thing again? If they are real, good lord, what will happen if she were in office? Her voice is going. Not made for the long haul. She’s toast. I love it when bad things happen to bad people.

You just have to love passive-aggressive people. You have to. So full of anger, moxey, vermin, but utterly lacking the balls to say it to your face. And when they do, it is always in this closed sense like a canned speech thought out from beginning to end – they can’t thrust and parry in real time! How depressing! I love a good fight. I especially love changing positions in a fight. Confuse the enemy. It has nothing to do with what is right or wrong, it is the thrill of the argument. Then the climax arrives and you can see they have built themselves to either spontaneous combustion or actually scoring a good verbal point. What to do? Turn your head slightly away – just the effect of dismissal, but not to obscure your lowered voice, and grovel out, “You’re a fucking idiot. And you wonder sometimes. Amazing.” Then walk away. Yes! Be sure to know your opponent though – that is the perfect set up to get something large tossed at your head. This site has some nice P-A stuff on it, but is broader and a fun read – he posts pics of things he finds.

Not sure what to make of this video. Couple of yahoos shooting a tennis ball at unfortunately speeds.



These people have too much time on their hands. Kinda pisses me off. But they did create a pretty cool spice rack. Look at the pics, and read only if you feel swarmy. Yeah, OK, they seem like nice people. Fine. I am sure they are. Shall we have a flight of Chards at the dinner party tonight? I’ll put little oak barrels on the table. Oh, we could plank the salmon! Let me think … something fresh and open tasting to start with, to balance the smokey main course … help me, Pookey, what do you think?

So Albert Einstein has a website, and I thought it would be cool to read some of his hand-written papers. Took me 5 or 6 layers to see an actual doc – very poor design. Cute programming, but utterly lacks flatness. It’s like roaming hallways. Anyway, so I finally get to one, and it’s in German! Man, that guy was smart! Reminded me of something my dad said once. He had a house in Mexico. The locals were typical poor rural Mexican. A local has a dog, and the guy says something to it. The dog responds. Whatever “sit” or “get me a beer” or “scratch my balls” is in Mexican. Anyway, my dad says, “that’s amazing. I have a hard enough time getting my dog to learn simple things like ‘stay’ and here your dog has learned a second language! That’s one smart dog.” The guy just looked at my dad like he had a third eye. My dad never explained himself in such situations. Would have taken away the charm.

In case you were wondering where you are going after you die, here’s a map. Click on it to see it bigger. More charts here.



Bye …

random observations about my dogs

I have two border collies. One is bred as a working dog – sleek, fast, smart. The other seems to have been cross-bred with a pig – fat, clumsy, stupid. I call the latter, “Olaf, the pig dog.”

I stayed in the large backyard with my dogs the other day. You can tell when a dog is going to dump – they sniff around for something. A toilet? They both assumed the position, which I always thought was totally random. On this day, they not only took a dump at the same time, they both had their asses pointed at me.

It’s winter here. I had them on the deck with me. I broke up some ice. They eat it like it’s candy.

I have a small strawberry patch. Stupid cats occasionally use it as a litter box. The dogs treat it like a buffet. They eat cat shit.

When I take them outside through the basement, as soon as the door opens, Olaf goes bounding down. My smart dog stays on next to me until I say it is ok to go down the stairs.

When I open the basement door to the yard, my smart dog rips into the backyard to clear it of any intruders such as birds. Olaf stays close until he sees that I am going out, too.

When I put them out the front door, it is on a long chain. Olaf always gets wrapped around a bush or rocker or anything available, and then he barks to be helped. IF my smart dog gets wrapped, which is rare, I can point to the way free and she does it herself.

When they play in the backyard, Olaf runs like a madman. My smart dog cuts him off at every corner.

My smart dog is name Ceiligh. It’s Gaelic for “festive,” or “party,” or “that’s your sister? Um, ok, she dating anyone?”

When I give Cei a treat, she scurries away and chomps down. Olaf looks at me: “This it? Any more?” When he realizes nothing more is coming, then he scurries away with his treasure.

I have two food bowls with identical food. Both dogs will eat from the one on the right, and then push it around noisily when it is empty – ignoring the full one just nine inches away.

Olaf had his nuts drilled. He still humps Cei upon occasion. When I tell him to stop, he looks at me like a teenager caught yanking it. He gets the same look when he takes a dump and looks over his shoulder at me.

When Cei pisses, Olaf gets in there and sniffs so closely he must get splashed.

The dogs sit on the couch sometimes and lick each other’s tongues.

When Olaf lies next to me, the important thing is to rest his head on me. Cei wants her back resting against my leg.

Cei understands “no.” Olaf is like telling Sam Donaldson to not ask a question.

That’s about it for now …

evolving dogs and offspring

My Moment of Zen turned rapidly from calming to something different. I was watching my dog lazily walk along the fence, sniffing for remnants of summer, when he humped up and grunted out a dump. Now, another person might find such an act to utterly lack inspiration. Instead, I wonder … if we humans are so evolved, how come we need to wipe our ass? The dog doesn’t. If I don’t, it gets personal real quick, both for me and most around me (except for the olfactory challenged). The chaffing can last for days. Do people with hairy asses chaff less? Is there research out there? How much hair is enough to significantly alter chaffing? Can we derive a formula and use hair plugs?

But wait, it can’t be just the presence of hair, it has to be the make-up of the material being passed, too. There’s a real evolution v. creation argument here. Did our ancestors develop a colon that required Charmin because it knew we would invent it, and bunny rabbits do these little pellets because its colon knew Charmin would never be? That is clearly a creationist view. If cavemen had to wipe to their ass else they got chaffed, one would think the body would evolve into a non-chaff producing form, but it did not. In fact, if cavemen had the intensely hairy asses that the pictures claim, then as the hair evolved away, so the dump material should have become less chaff producing. There is a huge disconnect in the evolutionary theory here. Do monkeys wipe there ass?

OK, back to my dogs. It’s odd – I got used to my female dog, then the male dog showed up. The female is so, well, female. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her rip one. She must leave the room or do some seat shift so she can defuse the sound wave. The male dog could not care less. Scared me, actually, the first time he let loose. The hair on the back of my head stood straight. My dad’s been dead five years or so – I really thought I was going to hear, “get any on you?” in that voice and facial expression he reserved for such statements. The dog burps, too. I don’t get it.

I can’t get this evolutionary contradiction out of my mind. What else is out there? How come I have to pick my nose and produce ear wax like I’m constructing honeycombs for the winter supply of food? Did Cro-Magnon Clyde say, “Q-Tips and Kleenex on the horizon – just another couple million years. Let’s focus on standing erect and developing speech?” It all seems so implausible. At this stage of development, I should be dumping out sand or something, with the rest being recycled somehow. My ears should be pretty, not some mess of yellow-orange gook with hairs growing in all different directions. Snot should not be so gross – or so salty when you eat it. That could be sand, too – you could sneeze and say, “get any on you?”

Just think, if everything we expelled from out of our body were like sand, we could have beaches instead of landfills. You could save not just your kid’s first teeth – but there first excrement, too. You could make family sand castles. Isn’t glass made from sand?

Evolution is stupid. Not very well thought through.

Here’s another google hack to find mp3’s … {-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "hank williams"}. In the last quotes, where I have hank williams, you put in the target of your search. Works good. Remember, right click – Save Target As – and be sure it comes back as an mp3. If it does, save it and enjoy.

One more hack, seems more simple, but what would I know. I did get more hits with it … -inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "hank williams"

I don’t actually use these google hacks to download music, mind you. I think that would be infringing on someone’s copyright somewhere. That would not be good. I just use them to remind myself of how open the net is, and sometimes I think about trying to figure out how to write the site owners to tell them that their stuff is not secure. Sometimes, too, I go into the parent directory and down into another subdirectory and explore the … I, um, I … nevermind.

I didn’t know Hank Jr. had a box collection out. Very cool. I wonder if it’s the Bocephus Box. $35 on Amazon. Hunh. That’s a lot of money. Hunh.

I grew up listening to his dad. Listened all the time. When Jr. came along, I accepted his music without question. He did have to prove himself, however, which he did from the start. Quite unlike Sean Lennon. I’ve got two CDs by Sean. Listened to one of them one time; the second has never been opened.

Jr. is good. You have to like the solid country foundation. I don’t know much about that MNF bit he sings – that is just commercial crap made for the manufacturers of happy. But listen to All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down or Family Tradition or A Country Boy Can Survive. Just classics both in lyrics and music. There not too many videos released by him on you tube, but some, plus some decent concert footage.

I’m gonna do something else. Later.

corpses

I was thinking about the sun as I sat outside with my dogs. Its surface is about 11 million degrees. We’re about 93 million miles away (mean distance because, duh, we are an elliptical orbit). Absolute zero is about 459 degrees F. Electromagnetic waves toss energy under our tropopause. Gravity holds us through the curvature of space in this pocket. All that stuff – heat loss traveling through space, the troposphere holding what gets here, gravity making sure we maintain a livable distance – all lead to a narrow band of temperatures that means my dogs don’t fry like two really large corndogs. I hoped they enjoyed chasing butterflies and pissing on my yard.

Had Stouffer’s Mac & Cheese tonight. One of those big frozen ones that is dubbed “family size.” I think “impacted colon” and “enough sodium to stroke out three otherwise healthy adults” are more accurate labels. If I wasn’t about to go hypo I would have thrown up the first bite and thrown away both the remaining portion and the bowl that held it. Just the thought of it processing through my intestines is enough to make my hands shake. Good thing I work at home – tomorrow morning’s movement will rival the worst of the Baroque period, something akin to Peter Paul Rubens on bad mushrooms.

Have you ever been to one of those living museums? Where people dress up and make brooms? I often wonder if there is someone there that everyone stays away from because he is “too into it.” Like he’s a Nazi about the people that use Charmin, insisting that only leaves and newspaper (post-Gutenberg) could be used to wipe your ass. If you hung along long enough, I bet you could smell him in a crowd. See how he walked funny from perpetual Pimple Ass.

One thing I enjoy about visiting old settlements is how low the doors are. I am 5’10” (or used to be – 5’9” now?). I would have been a giant. I could have walked around and … well, I would never have walked around. My childhood disease would not have been cured. I would have been a footnote in one of those families – 17 kids, 8 died before maturity, 1 of which died in infancy.

I sat in a restaurant in Chicago this past Wednesday night. My coworker stayed at some dumb hotel that messed up their shuttle so he was late. I waited an hour, but that was fine. For a while, I sat on a bench just inside the door. It was interesting to watch people come and go. This woman walked out of the eating area. A man was several feet behind her. She left the restaurant, and did not hold the door open for him. There was a vestibule, and she blew through those doors as well. They went to the same SUV, and she got behind the wheel. He was whipped; she was just a bitch. All sorts of people ignored old people approaching the doors. Not everyone, of course, but just an incredible amount of people was absorbed in their own worlds. Does not play well with others: Check. Needs to be more aware of those around him: Check. Needs to be less of an asshole: Check.

I shaved for the first time today in almost two weeks. Took my first shower since Thursday. Did I say that out loud? Damn.

Did you ever wonder who was the first person to think about frying an egg and eating it? I suspect one fell on a rock in some god-forsaken furnace of a locale. Sounds logical. But then who thought about using uncooked egg whites and oil to make mayonnaise? And then to take that white slime and put it on bread with decaying animal flesh? And people wonder why they have loose stools – go figure. The colon is just saying, “I’m not even going to bother firming this stuff up, just – get – it – out – of – me – now!”

I’ll be driving to Virginia this week. I hope the weather is a few degrees warmer than it is here. We have frosts just north of us. I wore sweatpants and sweatshirt today. Undershirt for the first time in months. Last time I went, I had two dozen raw oysters for dinner. Will probably do the same this time. I actually dislike eating in restaurants. I am much more comfortable with my pots and pans, my spice rack, and groceries that I bought. I was out once and ordered some soup that would up having dead pig in it – couldn’t believe it. Talk about truth in advertising. It was a personal dinner, not business. I vaguely remember being yelled at for making my point to the waitress that not everyone eats corpses. Even more vague to me was when I was reminded that I ordered the same thing at the same restaurant and made the same complaint. I have learned, I do believe, to just eat what I order and always smile. It is so hard for me to learn manners.

I need to do some things …