Last Blog Post Of The Year

English Is My Second Language, BUT

I seem to have a better comprehension of the language than a lot of people that learned English at their mother's knee, so to speak, and it is their only language. A couple days ago one of the people on my friend list on facebook put up a graphic from a Reich-WingNut site.

So I left a comment:  If the economy works for everyone, everyone that is able will be working!! The way it is now the economy only works for those at the top. But thanks for doing their dirty work for them, they are laughing all the way to the bank because they don't even have to pay you to do it.

I will admit the last part was a bit snarky, but bullshit like this kinda pisses me off. Then someone else commented:  Sorry you feel that way, I have always found work satisfying and while money in the bank is comforting, the labor of your hands and mind is much more so.

Now this made it sound like I was against working or maybe thought working wasn't worth while or some fucking thing. Anywho, it was just fucking stupid. So I commented back with: Whatever gave you the idea I'm against working. I'm only against working against your own interest and others that have to work for a living by spreading the propaganda of the rich elites.

The only thing I can figure is people only see what they want to see that agrees with them. If someone puts up something contradictory, their mind supplies something that coincides with their point of view. Smarter people than I have tried to figure out the minds of those on the right and failed, so I won't overtax my brain with trying to figure this out. 

My cousin who unfriended me a couple years ago also commented on how I only worked when I had no other choice. WTF? Is there any other reason people work for wages? 

It is true my work history has a lot of gaps in it that I call "Quality Time," but that's another story.

My New Favorite Xmas Song

Who cares what color Santa is?

When I was a kid, I had a more confounding question -- was he even human?

Lately there is a big to-do about what color is Santa. When I was a kid, I was told that Christmas presents were delivered by Joulupukki, a Christmas goat. This is a tradition in Finland and Scandinavia. But then at school I would hear different stories about who delivers the presents.

What color Santa is or isn't is small potatoes compared to the confusion in my head when I was a little kid.

Joulupukki is a Finnish Christmas figure. The name "Joulupukki" literally means "Christmas Goat" or "Yule Goat" in Finnish; the word pukki comes from the Teutonic root bock, which is a cognate of the English "buck", "Puck", and means "billy-goat". An old Scandinavian custom, the figure eventually became more or less conflated with Santa Claus.

It was the guy below, Santa. Now Santa was easier to believe in than the goat, but still it was confusing to a kid. The cross-cultural shit can be difficult at times, especially if you are still learning the English language at the time.

In recent years Joulupukki has morphed into more of a Father Christmas figure, but for most in Finland he is still Joulupukki.

An Accurate Weather Alert

This applies here UP on the Tundra also.

Free The Nipple

Why the hell would a movie about nipples and women wanting to go topless like men are allowed get a NC-17 rating when movies with an occasional bare breast can get a PG rating??????? And if it's legal in New York, why are women getting arrested for going topless????

A Dichotomy

There are a lot of people bitching about how they can get a better return on their money then they can with Social Security. They say if only they could invest that money they could get X% return and over X years it would be more than they can get on Social Security. Then some of those same people will turn around and bitch about how some people are getting more from Social Security than they paid in!! Now wouldn't that be getting a good return on your investment????????????

In the United States, Social Security is primarily the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) federal program. The original Social Security Act(1935) and the current version of the Act, as amended, encompass several social welfare and social insurance programs.

Social Security was originally meant to be an Old-Age insurance program. It's like the annuities that insurance companies sell to people. With the insurance annuity you pay a fixed amount every month and then when you reach a certain age the insurance company sends you a check every month. The difference with Social Security is that you pay in a percentage of your wages and then when you reach retirement age the amount you get each month is determined by what your income was when you were working. Where an insurance annuity and Social Security are alike is when you die the checks stop coming. Also if you die before the set age, neither the insurance company or Social Security will pay out anything. What it boils down is that a lot of people think it's fine that they personally get back more than they paid in to the system but they don't anyone else to do the same. 

From what I've seen, the people who bitch about Social Security being taken out of their check are the same people who don't manage to save a dime otherwise. If you ask them if they've got an IRA or even a normal savings account, the answer is usually No. If it wasn't for Social Security, they'd have no retirement income at all. They'd end up working at Walmart until they croaked.

Holy Cow, It's That Time Again

No Memorial Service For Me

Yesterday as I was heading for town in my truck the radio station (Oldies, of course) did the obits. I had a thought about my demise and the aftermath. I decided I don't want any kind of memorial service after my death. If people can't be bothered to visit me when I'm alive, they sure as hell don't have to come see me when I'm dead!!

Going back several decades I can count on one hand the number of people that have visited me at home. I've visited a lot of friends and relatives thru the years, but most never return the favor. So like I said, if they don't want to visit me when I'm alive, they sure as hell don't need to come see me when I'm dead.

The kids may have other ideas about this, but I'd like if they do anything that it be limited to the immediate family. The Old Lady says if I go first she's going to have me toasted and scattered, so if the family gets together to see me released into the wind, that's OK.

The Intratubes Can Be A Good Thing At Times

A while back a friend called and asked if I could help him with a problem he was having with his car. The heater blower motor wasn't working and he wasn't able to find it in his car. Under the hood was a layer of insulation on the firewall and it wasn't under that. I got on my confuser and googled removing the blower motor for his car. While still on the phone I was able to tell him how to go about finding and removing the blower motor. (When we first started using the Intratubes I wouldn't have been able to talk on the phone and look up stuff online as with dial-up it was either/or. Either you used the phone or you surfed the 'net.) Now with DSL I could talk on the phone and look up stuff online. I also looked up how much a new blower motor would cost. I was able to find a price on the Carquest website, but couldn't find a price on the Auto Value site [it doesn't even recognize that the local store exists] because it sucks the big one. (Those two auto parts store are the only ones in the county.)



Anywho, he was able to remove the blower motor and free it up and get it working again. The only problem was it now only had two speeds, high and off. Talking with a parts person he decided he needed a blower motor switch resistor. Then after not being able to remove the heater controls to replace the resistor where he thought it should be, he called again. Even tho he had a repair manual* for his car, it didn't say anything about replacing the resistor. I googled "How to replace blower motor switch" and it suggested "replace blower motor resistor". I clicked on a couple of links and found a forum where a guy was complaining about the insulation getting in the way of removing the screws on the resistor. Then a day or two later I went over and helped him replace the resistor. I looked under the dash and saw the blower motor and behind it looked to be the resistor. I removed the blower motor and started to remove the screws on the resistor. Then I found out what the guy online was talking about. Two of the screws were difficult to get at as the insulation on the firewall was in the way. You had to push the insulation back to get the socket on the head of the screw. With both of us taking turns we got the two back screws loosened enough to pull the resistor out and slide the new one back in. The resistor had a circuit board that stuck up in the heater box. The circuit board looked like someone had bit a big chuck out of one corner, kinda like when you bite into a sandwich. That would explain why it only had the high speed. After replacing the resistor and putting the blower motor back in and hooking up the wires the blower worked on all speeds like it should.

30+ years ago my friend wouldn't have had much trouble figuring out how to fix his car, but he had some blood vessels blow in his head and that fucked him up. He has a field cut in his vision where he can only see things to the left of the focal point with his left eye and a pie shaped area to the left with his right eye. He has problems with short term memory and figuring out the logical progression of things like doing mechanic work. First thing in the morning he can usually read, but as it gets later in the day he gets confused and words become gibberish. It's amazing what he has been able to do since his head blew up, but he's too stubborn to give up and keeps trying. A lot of the time he'll have to redo today what he did yesterday, but he keeps at it.

*I used to think Haynes repair manuals were good, but after getting one for my Jeep pickup and now seeing his manual for his car, I have my doubts. I bought the Jeep manual when I needed to replace the chain for the transfer case. What the manual had to say about transfer cases was they "are complicated and if it needs repair, take it to a transmission shop". If I was going to take it to a transmission shop I wouldn't have bought the fucking manual. On his manual for his car, it didn't say anything about replacing the resistor. The only reference I found about the resistor is it said to remove it to spray cleaner into the heater box to clean fungus from the air conditioning evaporator coil. Even tho it said to remove it, it didn't say how to remove it or where it was located!!

Hostage Takers Again