October 2009

Blue Light Special

You have probably seen those super-bright, blue headlights on cars. Those are high intensity arc lamps, and they are way brighter than they need to be to allow folks to see well enough to drive around. One of those cars found me this morning.

It is dark out when I drive down to the train station in the morning to catch my train to work. That is because I leave the house a six a.m. The streets are pretty empty at that time because most people are still in bed. Well, this morning on the way to the station, one of those Yuppie cars with the blue lights found me, and drove right up behind me and let me have it with both beams.

I had to lean over toward the middle of the car to avoid the Klieg lights reflecting off the side mirror and blinding me. It was annoying.

So, here is a philosophical question. Does the use of those lights turn people into morons, or do you have to be a moron in the first place to buy them and put them on your car?

Driving Safety Spike

Well I have been sick the last few days, so I have not been blogging. I did, however, find an interesting patent and post it on my humor page. Take a look. Here is the link:

Driving Safety Spike 

Plain Brown Envelope

Do you get those? Do you get the plain brown envelopes with advertisements in them for money managers? I have been getting a lot of those lately.

These advertisements come in a plain, brown envelope that looks like something from the government... very official looking. Sometimes the envelope has an Urgent stamp on it or a notice to deliver only to the addressed recipient. Then, when you open it, what is inside is an advertisement for a money manager who is trying to convince you to hand over your life savings, and who promises to secure your retirement or make you rich.

This seems to be the most demented marketing logic ever invented.

Here I have received an unsolicited mailing from a company, and my very first experience with that company is being tricked by them into opening the envelope.

So, my very first communication with the company.... is a lie.

Then, I am supposed to hand over my life savings to those guys and trust them with it.

Who thinks up this stuff?

Banjo Salute

The finger is healing nicely, but it isn't done yet.

The slice on the tip of the middle finger of my right hand is playing havoc with my playing banjo. Just the thought of plucking a taut, steel string with that finger makes me cringe, so I have not played my banjos for a week and a half.

Yesterday I went into the room where I keep the banjos and found that four of them had cut loose all of their strings, which were hanging slack as noodles. Since those four banjos have wooden friction pegs for tuning, I suppose I could assume that the recent change in humidity had caused the pegs to dry out and let go. However, I would prefer to believe that my banjos had simply staged a salute to my injured digit, which is preventing us from enjoying our mutual avocation. Banjos are meant to be played, and they become testy when they are abandoned for long periods of time.

On the other hand, it could also be a protest.

I did take the time to tune them all back up to pitch, so I think we have reconciled our differences for now.

Kiss the Devil

Sometimes you have to kiss the Devil that bit you.

I have changed my mind about revealing the gruesome details which resulted in my previous entry about the pain of peeling oranges. Here is a photo of the Devil that bit me last weekend.

That is a rabbet plane, and that is the plane iron sticking out from the bottom of the plane. And yes, it was sticking out like that as it sat in the bottom of the drawer that I was reaching into. If you don't know what a rabbet plane is, you know how to use Google.... or ... perish the thought... fnBing.

I had just finished doing a maintenance chore here at the house (installing a new doorknob) and I was putting away one of the tools in a drawer when, as I pulled my hand out of the drawer, my finger scraped across the corner of that iron, causing some deep damage to the finger. The plane iron was not damaged.

Plane irons are sharp tools, and I always pull them back entirely into the body of the plane before storing them. That protects the irons from chipping and the fingers from slitting. This iron appears to have worked its way out of the body by an inch or so, probably by being jostled in the bottom of the drawer. I have been looking for this tool for a couple of years, and it seems to have been bumped around as I put things into and out of the drawer. The blade is only wedged into the body, after all, by that piece of wood on the top.

So, Kiss the Devil? What does that mean?

My fix for the problem was to sharpen the blade.

You see, upon inspection I found that, although the blade was sharp, it was not razor sharp, as it must be if it is going to be useful. So I sharpened the blade that nicked me, and it is now razor sharp. Then, I pulled the blade all the way back into the plane body and put the plane on a shelf in full view so as not to find it crouched in a hiding place again, ready to strike.

This Devil will have to be a bit more creative next time if it wants to bite me again.

Peeling Oranges

Last weekend I slashed open the middle finger of my right hand after doing a simple maintenance chore around the house. The cut is deep and it is therefore taking a while to heal. I will not go into the details of how I incurred the injury in an effort to avoid revealing the full measure of my stupidity. That is not the point of this story anyway.

The point of the story is this:

I enjoy eating an orange at work every day. It keeps my plumbing working and it tastes good at the same time. Unfortunately, modern, off-season oranges can be difficult to peel, especially when you are trying to do it with one and a half hands. Getting orange juice into that deep cut, which happened not so very long ago, provides and interesting lesson in pain management (shout and pout and jump about).

So I struggle with the orange while making an obscene gesture with my right hand and hope that the thing doesn't squirt a jet of juice into the wound. I have found that a right hand grip without using the opposable thumb allows me to point the one finger off in a different direction and avoid the pain, even while doing a fairly decent job of peeling the orange.

Which, in short, means that if I go about my business as though I were an ape, things work out OK ... a behavior which got me into this mess in the first place.

Welcome To My New Blog

Welcome to my new blog. I have called it "Nothing Happens At Ten".

Remember way back when your Mother, Father, Teacher... whatever... said to you, "You had better <go to bed> <eat your peas> <get in here> before I count to ten!"?

Well, that threat had me hopping for quite a number of years. I got stuff done PDQ, before anybody could count to ten. It wasn't until years later that I asked the question:

"What happens at ten?"

Let's assume that I had not done the demanded action by the time they got to ten. Then what? What happens? And that was when it came to me, and I finally realized that nothing happens at ten.

Dang!

Just think of all the things I could have gotten away with if I had only realized earlier that nothing happens at ten!

So now I have named my blog after that fundamental principle of life. I am hoping to be able to inject some humor and insight into the World Wide Web by blogging on just about anything that pops into my head. I may be successful; I may fail. But I will always be assured that, whatever the outcome, Nothing Happens At Ten.