The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Remember Michael Winslow, the guy from the Police Academy movies that did all the sound effects with his mouth? Apparently he’s gotten nothing but better – much better – since then. From Grouchy Old Cripple, here’s Michael doing Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. It will leave your mouth hanging open:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxcCC2g1Ke0?rel=0]
I’m going to spend a few hours loading 300 rounds of .45LC and prepping .308 brass while listening to the last couple of episodes of Vicious Circle.
Carry on.
UPDATE: Plan failure. Other stuff got done instead. Maybe after work this week….
All the cool kids are doing it, so here’s mine.
For Father’s Day, 1996 my wife bought me a Ruger 10/22 – the standard carbine with the pencil barrel and the youth-sized stock. “Oh my love,” I told her, “you don’t know what you’ve started.”
Within three weeks I had converted it to this:
I don’t even want to know how much money I’ve got tied up in that thing. The only original parts are the receiver and the bolt assembly.
This time from Ian Banks’ Matter:
“Perhaps it is different for humans, dear prince,” she said, sounding sad, “but we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lesson that way – albeit all the harder for their parents’ earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time.”
“To do nothing is always easy.” Ferbin did not try to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
“To do nothing when you are so tempted to do something and entirely have the means to do so, is harder. It grows easier only when you know you do nothing for the active betterment of others.”
I was reminded by this passage of a quote from an earlier piece, I Guess I’m Not… HUMAN. Former Representative Adam Putnam has said,
Government does only two things well: nothing, and overreact.
In current times government has been likened to a parent to the people, with the Republicans being the “daddy party” and the Democrats being the “mommy party,” but as someone else said:
This guy is our uncle and that’s as close as I want the fucker.
I don’t need the government to be my big brother, my parent, my nanny, or my caretaker. It needs to maintain public services (roads, etc.), maintain foreign relations and the military, keep the states from squabbling, and stay the fuck out of my life.
Perhaps someday our putative “leaders” will learn enough to do nothing, rather than overreact.
(Who am I kidding?)
I’m watching TLC’s replay of the CBS show Undercover Boss. This week’s episode follows the CEO of the Baja Fresh restaurant chain as he goes to several stores as a prospective management candidate. The stores he goes to are ones performing exceptionally well, and he wants to find out what makes these stores different from the average franchise.
At the first, the manager is a young Mexican immigrant, only in the country for two years, who is busting his ass. At the second, a young man from the Phillipines – ditto. The third, a young man recently immigrated from Jordan with his parents. At the fourth, a young woman who is not a recent immigrant, but she has a two year-old daughter. Her husband works nights, and she works days. All of them are busting their asses and running their stores with dedication and enthusiasm.
At two of the stores the managers said outright that they were living the American Dream, working hard to create a better future for themselves and their families. All of them understand the American work ethic, and are doing what it takes to make their stores the successes that have drawn the attention of corporate management.
It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.
An ex-coworker emailed me this morning with one of those “pass it around the internet” emails and this note: “For some reason, this reminded us of you.”
So, I’m getting moved into my new office. The furniture was installed last week, but as of Friday, no chairs. Installation of cable broadband was going on Friday evening when I left, but when I dropped by Saturday to leave some boxes of stuff, still nothing to sit on but the desks.
Bright and early this morning, though…
However, I’m afraid my authority might have been overstepped:
This is the box it came in:
Still, I’ve escaped the fabric-covered box paradigm!
Found on the “Occupy a Job” facebook page:
Click to embiggen
My favorite is “I can’t hear the TV while I’m eating crunchy snacks.”
The current rage on the intarweb blogs is the “What was your first car?” meme.
Well, nobody asked me, but I’ll answer anyway. I’ve done this post before, but here it is again:
My first car at age 16 was my dad’s hand-me-down. He’d bought it for something like $700 in 1974, put another couple-hundred in parts into it so it would run, and drove it until 1978 when he went down to the Ford dealership and placed an order for his very first brand-new automobile, an F-150 pickup truck.
That was the year I turned 16. Our insurance agent told him, “Don, you have a new driver in the house. The insurance company sees ‘new driver’ and ‘new vehicle’ and they put two-and-two together and come up with a 60% increase in your insurance premium. Put the old car in your son’s name and insure it for the minimum you can.” So he did. Which is how I, out of three children, was the only one who got a car from my parents.
Pissed my brother off.
But the car in question was no particular prize. It was a 1969 Simca 1118:
Only mine didn’t look that good. It was originally silver, but the sun had faded that right through to the gray primer underneath. The interior was sun-rotted so the front seatbacks got reupholstered with T-shirts stretched over them. I got some scrap carpet from a friend – brown shag, no less – and carpeted the floor with that. Door panels, too. No radio, so my dad had mounted a 12V-powered AM-FM under the dash and wired it into the harness.
Rear-engine, rear-wheel drive, 1118cc, water-cooled, 56Hp. Zero-to-sixty? Take a lunch and eat it when you get there.
But it was a car, and it took me anywhere I wanted to go.
I always wondered what that car would be like with an engine transplant out of a Honda CBX.
