The typewriter turned out to be broken; the carriage does NOT advance when a key is struck – you have to keep hand pressure on the thing to move it with each key.  Everything else is in good shape.

Anyone who has a good idea of where in the Chicago area I might get this thing look at / fixed and back into service?

More in a later post.  She’s still fascinated with the typer and using it constantly – WITH the hand work, but jeeze, I don’t want her to be stuck doing that.

Christmas Eve is usually the day we spend with Susan’s aunt and mom at Susan’s aunt’s house in the  northwestern suburbs of Chicago; dinner is followed by passing out the presents (a small child is usually too excited to sit through dinner in any sort of relaxed fashion, and is the elf who supervises the distribution and opening of the presents).  This is the first year that we pretty much dispensed with Santa as a gift giver, and so there were only a couple of presents to distribute under the tree at home the next morning…

Usually, Connie (my MIL) would stay overnight at her sister’s house and leave there in the morning to go see Susan’s brother Doug and his family over the Christmas-New Year’s period, but there’s a terrible blizzard in South Dakota this year – high winds and over two feet of snow – so she’s staying here until the weather clears up, probably till Monday.

The big presents had already been handed out for the household earlier in the month; the house got a new HD TV setup in the living room.   Susan had needed a new pair of boots early, so the Ugg boots I bought for her went out a few days earlier – it was a necessity, but I didn’t like passing out presents early.  (She also got a very nice pair of lambskin mittens, via her mom, and a couple of other things from me.)

As some of you may have sussed out, since November of 2007, I’ve been working 99% of the time out of my basement office…with a huge long line of doctor’s excuses, bases on either my non-healing foot wound, or my weak response to infections casing raging problems on and off.  The office finally said that they couldn’t do this as a temporary thing any more, and that I’d have to file for a ‘reasonable accommodation’ – i.e, a permanent excuse to work from home, giving me the right to get work to supply certain work-related things that I would need to do this.

The first step was the gathering of enough medical stuff to prove my case, which ended with me almost sending them around 300 pages of medical results from the last ten years.

The second step was in defining what I would need to work from home that the office would provide, and I was told to ask for whatever I legitimately needed.  This resulted in me asking for a work PC, with all the necesary web-crafting software, a color laser, various office supplies, and an office chair.

I haven’t had a proper office chair down here for a while.  Part of the problem is my weight, part my height and width and so on.  The office chair I had at the office was around $900, and I can’t justify that – but when you spend a LOT of time in it, as I do, you need something that is comfortable and works.   (Right now, I have a sturdy chair from the dining room, but it’s not built for the use levels.)

The problem now is getting all this stuff to actually get here, and that’s turning into more of a mess than I dreamed, as various people are doing a it’s-their-deal thing of tossing around the responsibilities of getting these items going.   Amazing bureaucratic nonsense, and I’ve been a bureaucrat for 26 years as of today and seen a lot of silliness in my time.

Another tricky element is the PC; since there were a flurry of situations a few years ago about government workers who were being schmucks leaving laptops around with a lot of personal staff info or patient info – the federal government has been on a bender on security issues.

Bruce Schneier can speak more to this than I can, but the powers that be seem to be going to considerable lengths on internal security issues, from the apparent concept of There’s No Such Thing As Going Overboard.   A lot of it seems to be more ways of getting things checked off of a checklist and getting gold stars from the Powers That Be that they were diligent than whether the measures taken are worthwhile or work.

So I have to get a mountain of paperwork and approvals for anything that goes on that machine, including software that the agency bought for me three years ago – and that’s just the start of it all.   At this rate, I’ll be lucky to get it here and working by March.

Guy is away, and his friends troupe in and wrap his entire apartment for Christmas.  Including stuff in the freezer, towels on the rack, you name it. (video)

Michael Jackson commissioned fantasy art about himself that defies description; one of the pieces resembles a Communist Chinese propaganda poster with Comrade Michael leading the oppressed children of the world…just check out the pieces and imagine how much he spent on this stuff.

I’m thinking of a Botticelli-like painting like that first one with Bernie Madoff surrounded with cherubs….gaaaah.

Screwups at Arlington National Cemetery have misplaced cremated ashes re-buried as ‘unknown soldier’ because they scooped out the urn when digging a hole at a gravesite. dumped the dirt in their landfill, and only later found out the dirt contained an urn with ashes….

http://bit.ly/6bT2Os  (from the Newseum, possibly not good after tonight – front page of today’s Daily Herald)

IL_DH (pdf of the page – big center layout of photos of the girls)
Click twice on the graphic to get it full sixzed
 

The local suburban daily newspaper, the Daily Herald, is reprinting the Newsweek story on the twins with different photos:

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=342760

http://www.newsweek.com/id/225492/page/1
The Power of Two:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/225098
Photo gallery of the kids, etc.  The Intro picture is particularly stunning.

This has been in the works since spring.  Newsweek came in with a Pulitzer-award winning photographer who was fresh from covering the White House and Obama and Bush to do the shots.  The interviews mostly were around Duckcon.

There are errors.  They goofed on the date Meredith Grace was found (a year earlier), and a few little things.  (For instance, a photo that was supposed to be of our house in the Chicago suburbs is really of the other family’s home in suburban Birmingham.  Our house is not nearly as new, etc.)

But it’s written beautifully, and we are very happy with it.   That’s it for twin stories in the news until they’re grown up and can talk on their own…if that ever happens!  Enjoy the article and the photos!

Nurrrrrrrrr.

Just the thing for your Thanksgiving feast: White Castle Hamburger stuffing to go with your turkey.  Mange! Vite, vite!

Yes, I’d use it for fun if we were having a weird-food-party this New Years Eve.  Which, unfortunately, we won’t.  (Mere and I like White Castle; its one of the odd tastes that I got from my Dad.)

• Rampaging red squirrels in France
• Kashmiri militants, meet bear.  Bear, eat militants.
• Dead bison stink really bad: South Dakota meat producer abandons meat storage locker full of 44 tons of kosher bison, and the power gets cut for nonpayment.
  ( Read the rest of this entry » )

(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend)

Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist.  Really.

Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I’ve never heard of Czar Brezhnev.

…also, there’s no ‘czars’ in the US federal government, except in the pens and imaginations of press writers who deemed some person a ‘czar’, just like there was no ‘Star Wars’ DOD program by that name – headline writers thought that the namess were cool.

I will admit that a ‘abstinence czar’ is indeed a funky title, and I don’t know what the punishments would be for breaking his rules.   (Though the one that Dubya appointed resigned over his hookers…dude, just say no, OK?)

Lesson #3: Inflating the numbers of a rally by a factor of 25-30 (making 50-60 thousand marchers become 2 million) and lying about the source of the information is right up there with declaring to the ladies that your tallywhacker is 53 inches long, and that Obama wants to kill your grandma.  Wait…

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.

Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning – look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on.  There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.

They fought immigration from ‘those people’ – first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on.  They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls.  Not to mention non-Christians.  And letting people who aren’t our kind into office?  Oh!

They fought taxation of any kind.  They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety.  They fought public schools.  They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress.    They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.

They fought medicine and science and public health.  They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.

They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders.  And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.

They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.

They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge.  They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests.  And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over.  They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.

They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense.  They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner – or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.

Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach.  I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.

I have no problem with political debate.  I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming.  And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.

I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life.   I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this.   I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.

And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds – whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to  care about anything but trying to destroy Obama  as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base.  That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.

When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.

Stupid thief of the day: Dayton, Ohio cops catch man outside barbeque joint, reeking of grease while the burglar alarm was going off (yes, I know the newspaper’s writers say wreaking; I can’t help the fall of journalistic standards) – he claimed he was dumpster diving for leftovers, but the cops found that he’d broken in through the roof and chimney to get at the cash register inside.

Dirty little secret #1: Not everyone who gets through law school with a diploma gets a law job. Not guaranteed, though it’s a common misconception – by non-lawyers – that law school graduates are not automatically given cushy jobs, that all law jobs pay astronomically well, and job security is everything.  Oh, yeah, and that anyone who *does* have a law degree will never be happy with a non-law job, so don’t give them one.

Dirty little secret #2: when there’s fewer jobs in law practices available, the state bar associations play hanky-pank with the pass rates on the bar exams.  Suddenly, a score that would get you a pass last year is way below what you need this year.

Imagine that.

And yes, it’s been 26 years since I graduated from law school, and I’ve never really worked as a lawyer, and I’m just as happy.

I am frequently dismayed by various Truthers out there who insist on a Grand Conspiracy theory of the universe; stories about how the moon landing was faked, the world is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job and how Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate smuggled into the country as a very small baby with the connivance of Moo-slims, Africans and atheists to bring our nation to socialism, that Hillary murdered Vince Foster, or how the Queen of England is a drug dealer just get me to a point of saying: you guys are passing over the real conspiracies for this crap?

It’s Calvinball, folks, where the rules change with a whim.   If you argue with the flat-earthers, they just call you part of the conspiracy, or deluded fools, or slaves of the Megatron, and screw on their aluminum foil hats all the tighter.  When is someone going to deliver an original Moon rock to my door so that I can verify it with my home chemical test kit?

And it’s usually motivated by ignorance and fear.   People who are afraid of the idea of the moon landing and the notion of space travel as such will hop on the ‘it’s all made up’ bandwagon.  People who can’t openly say that the notion of a African-American president  is alien and horrifying to them will look to Birther stuff because they feel in their guts that he *can’t* be a legitimate President; he’s the wrong color.

Not to mention that Democrats could not have legitimately won any election without trickery and fraud, etc.   Any concept otherwise would have to accept the fact that somone in the GOP messed up bad enough that they lost an election on the basis of policy issues, and that’s not acceptable in the place where the sky is paisley-colored.

Of course, this also feeds things racial and cultural on the Republican side of a similar nature with their own people: Bobby Jindal’s South Asian ethnicity and citizenship and Romney’s Mormon faith seen as cultism.   My own connection to Unity would be seen as some whacko cult, I’m sure, let alone that I’m a race traitor and Mere is a hanjian.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that they should put in an Amendment to the Constitution that says something like: …and naturalized citizens who have been resident in the USA for 30 years can be President or VP. That way, Meredith can be President and you all can face her mighty wrath.  Bwahahaha.

One blog commenter wrote:

These people didn’t need a black president to make them crazy, they were crazy when he got here. They’ve been told for almost thirty years now that God’s plan for America is a permanent Republican majority, for the last fifteen years that Democrats are “congenital liars” dragging the country into the depths of degradation through [Clinton], and for the last seven that we are now locked in a multi-planar existential conflict and our only hope is a strong Godly deciderer who will protect us all from our enemies. The birthers picked up with Obama pretty much where they left off with a Bubba from Arkansas. Remember, Clinton was accused of rape and serial murder because it was politically convenient to accuse him.

Or this one:

I’m still waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of Hawaii. Until I’ve seen something more reliable than the evidence at hand, I’m not accepting it. I won’t accept Hawaii’s existence unless and until I’m personally flown out there and accommodated in a sumptuous hotel for the rest of my life, at taxpayer expense.I’m still waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of Hawaii. Until I’ve seen something more reliable than the evidence at hand, I’m not accepting it. I won’t accept Hawaii’s existence unless and until I’m personally flown out there and accommodated in a sumptuous hotel for the rest of my life, at taxpayer expense.

Being that the only two states that I have never been in are Hawaii and Arizona, I can get behind that notion completely. 

• I had to look up the meaning of hoon for this one (wild, stupid and reckless driver in a criminal sense) – 79 year old man doing 160 k in a 100k zone
• Best man claims he was raped by a stripper as part of the show at the bachelor party.

Coming Anarchy also highlights multiple historical places with the same name; Albania, Iberia, Alexandria,  various African nations, and Guinea.  They don’t have one for Galicia, but they ought to.