ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A FIFTH GRADER?

Blog number 152                                                  February 20, 2008

I was looking at an item about shooting down the space satillite that was falling and I ran into a bunch of "reader's comments"  My favorite is the one below.

sweety5264

if theres "supposedly" no gravity in space .. how is the satellite 'falling'? did anyone think of that? or am I the only one who remembers 5th grade science here ?

Isn't that cute?

FUNNY COUNTRY SONG LYRIC

Blog number 151                                               Feb 13, 2008

We (Teresa and I) were watching a movie the other night and a radio in the movie was playing a country song and one of the lines goes, "How can I love you if you won't lie down?"

Now tell me that isn't pretty funny.

ARRRRRGHHH!

Blog number 150                                               Feb 13, 2008

I saw in the paper this morn that Lake Mead is due to be half full by 2014 and empty by 2020.  The consensus seemed to be that plenty of people were going to have to be concerned about where their water was to come from. 

Since Lake Mead supplies the water that turns the generators at Boulder Dam, shouldn't there be some concern that Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas and surrounding areas will not have any ELECTRICITY?  I mean, Lake Mead doesn't have to be completely empty for that to happen.  I'm pretty sure that a half full lake will do it.

I am not particularly disturbed that that will happen, but I am disturbed that the fourth estate might have its head so far up its rectum that it thinks the lost of Boulder Dam electricity will be a minor glitch and not worth worrying about.  Or worse, that they do not even know that Lake Mead powers Boulder Dam which supplies all of the electricity for several large Western cities.  That they don't even get the connection between no water in Lake Mead and catastrophe in Los Angeles et al.

It's like I see this great disaster coming and nobody with any power sees it.  Could I be that far off base?  Am I missing something?  It doesn't seem likely that a powerless Boulder Dam is no big deal, but then why am I the only one concerned about it?

Even the Google site talks about the greater venue for sightseeing since the water has gone down in Lake Mead. 

I quote, "While the current drought has effected some areas drastically, Lake Mead really has not changed much. It has become even more interesting."

They don't seem concerned either, do they?

I must be missing something.

But I don't see how.

ARRRRRGHHH!

 

PAIN IS ALL IN THE HEAD. IS TOO! UH HUH!

Blog number 149                                               Feb 12, 2008

Remember me telling you about falling off my chair in a restaurant and tearing my rotator cuff and not being able to tell where the pain was coming from, or that I was laying on the floor and people were staring at me?  Well, just today I found out a few things about that from a book by a girl who had a similar pain but was much more aware than I am and was thus able to notice things about it that escaped me.

She had bumped heads with another girl playing dodgeball and the other girls' head bumped her jaw where she unknowingly harbored bone cancer.

She said, "It wasn't the sensation of things happening in slow motion...it was as if time had mysteriously but logically shifted onto another plane."

In my case, it did seem like I lay there for a long, long, time, but without any awareness of how long a time that was.  Or even if it was a long time.

She said, "The pain was deep and untouchable."

Yes.  Yes it was.  In fact, I couldn't even pinpoint the location.  I wasn't even sure it was in my body.

"Because the pain was genuinely unanticipated, there was no residue of anxiety to alter my experience of it.  Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.  This alien ache was probably my first and last experience with unadulterated pain, which perplexed me more than it hurt me."

I don't know about that last part.  I was perplexed and I did ponder on it for a time, but I think I hurt more than I perplexed.

I COULDA FIXED IT

Blog number 148                                               Feb 12, 2008

In blog number 146, I told about my problem with the mysterious Volvo headlight that I couldn't get replaced without using duct tape.  Well, Derek and Kenny came over (with Kiki) last Saturday, so I asked Derek if he wanted to see what I was talking about.  He tried to get it in, but I knew he wouldn't be able to, and sure enough, after a time he gave up and I duct taped the thing back together.

Kenny, during this time, was fixing Teresa's electronic gizmos, and I went to working on my jigsaw puzzle.  Kenny finished with the electronics and was diddling a bit with my puzzle and then asked if I wanted him to look at the headlight problem.  I said, "OK," knowing he wouldn't be able to fix it, so we went out and I showed him the problem and he worked on it while I messed about with the cat's food and then he approached me and said, "Watch this."

He took his finger, wetted it, rubbed the "O" ring on the bulb assembly with the wet finger, and slipped the assembly right into its assigned slot.  Damn!

He also got Teresa's new Dish network to working so now it works like a Tivo - which is awesome.

Kenny is the family's "go to" guy.  Brilliant man.

Remember my asking the Volvo people if there was a trick to it and they said no?  Well, obviously they lied.

Probably not, but what the hell.  They ain't gonna read this.

BABIES BABIES BABIES

Blog number 147                                               Feb 12, 2008

So we're in Trader Joe's and there's this cute little boy in there and I ask him if he's in preschool and he says, "No.  I'm in pre-kindergarten."  His mother repeats, "He's not in preschool - he's in pre-KINDERGARTEN."  Hah!  He's so grownup.

We were in Mimi's the other week and I'm waiting for Teresa so we can leave and way down at the end of the booths I see this baby with black hair hanging down her face. She stood out like a focal point in a painting.  I find out that she was of an American Indian mother and an Oriental (I think Chinese) father.

Leaving the family, I go back to wait by the door for Teresa and when she comes up, I point down toward the baby and I say, "look at that."  I can see she's not as impressed as I think she should be, and then I notice she's looking at another baby closer - a blond.  I say, "No - down there," pointing.  She looks and I can see her "come to attention." 

I have thought about that incident periodically every day since.  There was something about that baby that made her stand out from all other creatures.  It's like there was some kind of an aura she put out that drew people to her.  There was nothing that you could really put your finger on that made her different, but it was there - whatever "it" was.

I ran across this phenomena only once before, in the downtown mall in Sacramento several years ago.  That time it was a girl about ten years old, dressed very grownup in a nice hat and coat.  There was just something about her that made her "different" in a very dramatic way.

Magic, people.  Magic.