Worms and other low life

Blogging was put on an involuntary hold when I checked my email a few days ago and found a full basket of error messages. In my wandering through the internet I had picked of a computer worm that hijacked my system and started sending spam in my name.

Words can’t express my feelings, but the neighbors tell me the atmosphere around the house was colored a deep blue. Finding the culprit and correcting the problem took more time, energy, and money than I wanted to spend. But it looks like the issue has been resolved.

If I can ever find the scalawag that did this (and I doubt that I ever will) they will find that the 7 levels of Muslim Hell are not deep enough to hide in. Regular blogging will resume shortly.

Unintended Consequences

I’ve had several opportunities to visit the Corning Glass Museum and have enjoyed and learned every time I visited. Of course the highlight of the tour is the walkthrough of the Steuben glass production line where you can see high quality, and very expensive, objects of art being hand blown and engraved. On one occasion I was startled to watch an engraver finishing up an elaborate bowl when he stopped, called a supervisor over to talk about the bowl. After a short discussion the boss took the bow, walked over to a barrel and smashed the piece. I later found out that the bowl was a special design and would have cost (in 1950’s dollars) over $10,000. But art overcame finances and they started over again because of a slight flaw in the glass.

Most people don’t think of Corning as being in the ranks of crime fighting companies, but when it sold its Pyrex brand of glass cookware to World Kitchen in 1999 the company accidentally made the manufacture of crack cocaine a poster child for the law of unintended consequences.

Ordinary glass shatters when it’s heated too quickly. If you pour something hot in a standard glass the inside expands faster than the outside and the resulting stress cracks the glass. Pyrex, which was made of borosilicate glass solved this problem by altering the atomic structure of the glass. Because of the boron the structure of the glass remains the same size regardless of the temperature. 

When World Kitchen took over the Pyrex brand, it started making more products out of pre-stressed soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate. With pre-stressed, or tempered, glass, the surface is under compression from forces inside the glass. It is stronger than borosilicate glass, but when it’s heated, it still expands as much as ordinary glass does. It doesn’t shatter immediately, because the expansion first acts only to release some of the built-in stress.

The lowlifes that cook crack cocaine found out the hard way that Pyrex shatters when they try to produce their product and now they have to make do with metal utensils (that rust and contaminate) or break into the local high school and steal the lab equipment. I don’t know if this has cut down on the manufacture of crack, but anything that makes it more difficult to produce is ok by me.

Something is wrong with this picture

Every year I grumble and pay my taxes. For the past few years the taxes our family owed have exceeded our tax withholding but we, however unenthusiastically, make our contribution for retaining the form government we think is worthy of our trust and taxes. All this time I’ve known that a large segment of the population pays little or no tax but I can accept that there are people who just don’t have a large income and I agree that they shouldn’t be taxed heavily.

But this year I think I reached my breaking point when the IRS announced that 51% of American households did not pay any tax at all. To make matters worse they also said that 30% of the non tax paying household qualified for an “earned income tax credit”. In other words 15.3% of American households will get money for not paying any taxes, and I’m expected to work harder and become a “more wealthy American” in order to pay more taxes and help support those who cannot motivate themselves to earn a reasonable living.

I think it’s about time we took a serious look at some of the flat tax proposals that have been talked about. At least that we would know that each contributed equally to the national burden.

Thanks Mom

While the calendar gives us only one day a year to honor our mother I know that the unending care these ladies gave to us youngsters are what made us what we are today.

I owe Clarinda,  mother of My Lady (who is otherwise known as "my lovely lady") for accepting me as a suitable part of the family.

And for Lucy, my mother who taught me the skills and ability to to find the lady who now is the central part of my life.

Abbie

In the fall of 2003 I flew from the North West to North Carolina to pick up a Rescued Papillion dog that we were planning to adopt. When I got there I was introduced to a very frightened, very small dog whose entire body had been shaved because of a skin condition from being kept in a filthy environment for the first eight years of her life. She had been used as a breeding dog and was in poor shape; in fact the biggest part of her that day was probably her large eyes that begged for acceptance. A couple of days later she flew home with me and became part of a family that included other dogs, cats and humans that were there to help her recover and discover that being a dog wasn’t all that bad.

She came to us without a name but finally selected “Abbie” as a sound she could respond to. In the past eight years she slowly grew back her hair and became a full fledged dog. She did have her moments of confusion, at first not knowing that outside was ok to run around in and that food could be made to taste good and that humans were there to scratch ears and provide comfort when the thunder storms rolled through.

But finally the terrible conditions she endured the first half of her life have caught up with her and her liver has started to fail. We started to fear the worst when she stopped eating and developed a hepatic breath. The lab report came back today and the vet gives her only a few short days to be with us.

There are some who cannot see, or understand the attachment other humans have for their four legged friends, but we find as much comfort from the animals in our life as we hope they get from us. Abbies trip across the rainbow bridge will leave a hole in our hearts, but her memory will keep her alive in our hearts.

Fading Away (Not) Gracefully

1 May 2011

Some people can’t seem to grow old with dignity. Back in the old days when I was still working for the federal government one of the presidents I worked under was Jimmy Carter. As president he made some notably bad decisions that even today have an impact on the country.

As a manager he was, from the perspective of an employee, a disaster. He couldn’t get past the mind set of a peanut farmer and had no skill when it came to running a large enterprise. Faced with an economic downturn one of his solutions was to turn off the hot water in all government facilities and limit the heating and cooling systems. Depending on the season the employees were either wearing coats in the office or sweating heavily.

It was good theater and certainly made for positive newspaper articles except his order also stated that political appointees were not to be impacted by this “cost saving program”. The amount of money expended in providing separate utilities for political appointees far exceeded the “savings” gained by making the working troops uncomfortable.

About two years ago the government of North Korea told all the foreign assistance workers who were trying to help the country recover from decades of bad crops and subsequent starvation that their help was no longer needed. The U.S. pulled its aid workers out, as demanded, and left some 20,000 metric tons of food behind. Since then the North Korean government has overseen more food production failure and wide spread starvation of its people.

Now comes Mr. Carter, fresh from a recent visit to the People’s Republic with a press conference where he accused the United States of committing human rights abuses by withholding food aid from North Korea. I was pleased to see that the State Department didn’t waste any time refuting Mr. Carter and letting the world know the true series of events that have resulted in North Korea deliberately creating a disaster for their own people. I think it’s about time we encouraged him to return to his peanut farm and stop trying to play with the big boys.