Land of Oz

Paranoid? With Good Reason

If you’re one of the few and the proud who read this, you may remember that not too long I happened to read on The Smoking Gun that the FBI has decided that if you read an almanac and are curious about your surroundings, you’re a good possibility for being a terrorist.

Well, now law enforcement has come up with new ways to find drug dealers. Not too long a warrant was made out to search a suspected drug dealer’s house. The suspect in question was a manager of 21 gas stations, his wife, and their three kids. The main clue the police had is that the family made the horrendous affront of using more electricity than other families in the neighborhood. There were a couple other telltale signs that the family in question must have been dealers. It seems they were observed taking their trash out in the morning instead of the night like other families did. This is a known characteristic of drug dealers to keep the police from rummaging through their rubbish. One other sign was that the owner of the house had the audacity of being observed parking his red Dodge Caravan on his driveway on several occasions.

The conclusion of this is that if you use more electricity than your neighbors, take your trash out in the mornings, and park your vehicle in your driveway, you’re probably a rabid, gun toting drug growing dealer. On the other hand, you may have three kids who use electronics while waiting to be driven places in your van while you take your trash out in the morning so the neighborhood dogs don’t strew trash all over the yard.

2fers: The Smoking Gun and The Patriot Act

Laying low

I haven't had much to say lately. Work is getting to be a bit of a hassle and it has been getting me down.

I decided to delete the rest of this text to protect myself -- sigh...

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't after you!

2fers: They are watching and Not just the USA

Rank Rank

No, I didn’t stutter. Read it as ranking stinks. Every year the local paper puts out a special about high school graduates. Have you noticed over the last couple of year that a lot of kids have over 4.0 averages? 4.1s and 4.2 and even higher. What happened to 4.0 being perfect. How, when grades go from 4=A, to 1=D, can you get over 4.0. Are they using some new Phoenician alphabet in high school now – one that starts before A? I know when you add extra letters during a drunk test, it’s considered a sign of intoxication. What’s it called in high school.

Which brings me along to grading. Why is average so bad? After all, the vast majority of people are average – hence the term, average. There’s something called a bell curve. It’s what appears when ever you plot the values of a large group. Say you grab a handful of beans and weigh them. The result will be a bell curve. There will be a small number of very light beans, and an equally small number of very heavy beans. The rest of beans will fall towards a middle value – kind of the average size bean. People will plot the same way. Plot their weight and you will find some extremely heavy folks, some extremely light folks and the rest will be someplace in the middle. So why should we expect all students to be A students – or A and then some as the case may be.

Most people should be average – and a C is average. But get a C and you’re food for the fishes. I don’t understand why that is. If the majority of the class is getting Bs and As, then obviously the class isn’t hard enough. Theoretically you should have just as many flunking out as getting As with the majority getting Cs and dribbling over into Bs and Ds.

Job evaluations are the same way. Heaven forbid you rate as average. You have to be better than average – as if the company has only hired the smartest people in the world. And if they have, there still has to be a bell curve of performance. Even if you have an office full of Nobel Prize winners, some of the winners are going to score at the extremely smart end and some at the very smart end, with the majority someplace in the middle – or average. That bell curve isn’t going away. Let’s face it, all men are NOT created equal (and neither are women for that matter).

2fers: Bell Curves and Why Not?

Openings in the Olden Days

I mentioned a removable ring top pop top beer can to one of my fellow workers yesterday. Sigh… she had never heard of them. Remember when a pop top actually came off? Did you used to fold them in half and slip them back into the hole in the can because you didn’t want to throw it on the ground? The little buggers were sharp weren’t they? Nothing like stepping on one when roaming around a sandy beach. I guess the non-detachable pop top came out in 1974.

OK, next question. How many remember having to use a “church key” to open your can of beer? Or how about remembering the problems opening up a bottle of beer when you didn’t have a church key handy? Were you lucky enough that the seat belt clip in your car fit a bottle top? Or maybe you had a P-38 attached to your key ring. You know -- the kind you needed to open a can of C-rats? I was always amazed at how well something so small and simple worked so well.

Do any of you carry a scar from winding up that long strip of steel when opening a can? Not only was the strip sharp, but so was the edge around the lid. And how many of you tried to use that goofy can opener with the pointy end that looked like a miniature halberd? I don’t think I ever mastered the use of that.

2fers: Pop top beer cans and Church Key

Life, Death, Whatever

One of the things that has amazed me for quite some time is the arrogance of people who feel that humanity is special enough that there has to be something after death. Let’s face it, not too many expect there to be a heaven for anchovies or night crawlers or pigeons. I’d guess that some believe there to be one for things like favorite puppies and cats and probably even the stray horse or two, but for the most part heaven isn’t for animals.

So if there’s nothing for animals, what sets us apart with the need, reward, punishment or whatever of heaven? I mean why should I go to heaven but my pet gecko doesn’t? Did my gecko commit some sin someplace by being born other than human? Or do, in fact, all critters end up in heaven.

And by heaven, by the way, you can fill in whatever afterlife existence you prefer – heaven, hell, purgatory, limbo, nirvana, whatever. I’m of course referring mostly to Christian based religions here. Some other religions, and you have to applaud them for that, put as much importance on other critters and even things as we in the west tend to put in ourselves. Why shouldn’t that oak dwelling in the park, or the eagle soaring above it, be denied the rewards of a good life?

Me? The more I think about it, the more I think there’s nothing there. You’re dead and that’s it. No pearly gates, no harp playing - white winged denizens leading you on, finito. End of story. It’s not like we’re so much better than animals. After all, how many mice have you met lately that want to kill all the innocents within their reach for some lofty political or religious belief?

2fers: Pagans and Athiests

good times

Believe it or not, not everything in my life has sucked. There have been some really cool times. I wouldn’t think a lot, but some.

• 1976 – Plowing snow at Cape Romanzof in Alaska. Probably one of the neatest times of my life was a couple of weeks up there when I was the entire evening snow plowing shift. I’d work from 8pm to 8am all by myself running a ‘dozer plowing the road that led from the main camp to the weather station down at the shore. One night, this was probably May or so, there were two white snow fox playing in the snow. They were playing hide and seek among the big piles of snow I’d shoved off the side of the road into the valley. They were having such fun – just like a couple of kids.


• 1980 – It was a Halloween and I was at RAF Upper Heyford in the UK. That night I went off and spent the night near Stonehenge and Avebury out in the Salisbury plain. I remember a nearly or full moon and slight clouds scudding across the sky. There was even patches of ground fog that blew across the grass and roads. I was drinking from a thermos of tea listening to the BBC watching and listening to the stones in the village of Avebury.


• 1987 – Eating at the Weekender restaurant in Rimini Italy. This was a summer only restaurant near the beach. I’d go there most every weekend and sometimes during the week to eat. I’d usually have a salad, spaghetti olio pepperocini (as I recall), some pannini and a quarter liter of red wine. Nothing fancy. The owner and the waitress would stop by and try out there English on me which was much better than the Italian I used to order. A nice place to just sit, eat and relax.


• 1976 – Sand Town in Delaware. My roommate and I would go out there and shoot. We must have shot several thousands rounds off there. A couple of times we went to visit some friends in West Virginia and do more shooting. One weekend the four of use probably went through thousands of rounds each that weekend with Ruger 10/22s and Single Six revolvers.


• 1977 – Hamburgers and fries at Chuck’s BBQ in Missouri. I was going to AIT at Ft. Leonard Wood and on weekends would usually eat here. A real plain-jane bar and grill, but great hamburgers with fat greasy fries washed down with a couple of bottles of beer.


• 1982 – The NCO dorm in RAF Croughton. Sitting around the TV (telly) room on Thursday nights listening to the Top of the Pops on the Beeb with the girls from upstairs and us guys from downstairs.

Real fancy times – huh?

2fers: Cape Romanzof and 7401 MUNSS, Italy

World's Worst Car Dealer

Thelen Motors of Bay City Michigan. I drive a New Beetle and I also have the misfortune of having to deal with what is probably the world's worst service department. I'm not beating around the bush here, they suck. I don't think their service department could align a marble in a funnel. The latest was this last oil change and tire rotation. I did check the oil before I left the lot to make sure they put some in. They did. What I forgot to check was the tires.

I made the mistake of not marking the tires so I really don't know if they rotated them or not. I will admit that the car runs smooth with no tire vibrations -- a major relief and surprise. However, yesterday I finally remembered to check the tire pressure. That ranged from 32 to 40 psi measure cold. The manufacturers suggestion is 28 psi. Does anyone see a slight discrepancy here? Granted this is fairly minor but representative of the lack of quality this dealer offers.

I've had nothing but problems with these idiots. It took my two tries to get a stuck hood fixed and about 5 tries to get my car fixed so that it wouldn't stall at intersections. Every time you go in for a routine check, they come back out to see you with another couple of hundred dollars of "suggested repairs." Meanwhile the problem you came in with never gets fixed. They use their own suggested maintenance schedule that is very different from the official VW schedule. I'd guess that the Thelen schedule probably adds a few hundred additional dollars to their pockets that VW says isn't needed.

One thing I needed recently was rear brakes. Rather than let the mechanics from hell touch it I went to a dealer in Toronto (300 miles away) my fiance's home to have it worked on. Basically I wasted a vacation day to get my car fixed in another country rather than have the thugs from Thelen butcher it. I've dealt about three times with the Canadian dealer and they have been very helpful and have been able to actually fix broken things - even broken things that Thelen said weren't broke.

Volkswagon is a pretty nice car, but not if you have to deal with Thelen Motors.

2fers: Good VW - Toronto and Bad VW - Michigan

Movies - B²

I'm not quite sure what has me going on about movies, but here's another one. I rented a B movie yesterday - Slaves of the Realm - don't bother by the way. I wasn't going to say much about it, but I had a couple of really neat quotes to say about it so I had to. It contains the usual bunch of virgins meant for the king who's been tossed in the dungeon by his sadistic evil sister who is now acting queen who of course wants the virgins for herself.

This is full of the usual clichés. All the bad women are dressed in pure black dominatrix leather -- which is a plus. All the poor virgins are dressed (more or less) in, well, virginal white. The heroine is the woman rassler Sable, who being a rassler, you would think would know how to act a bit better. One drawback is that even though the extra feature notes say she's been in Playboy practically every month, she's never nude or even near nude in this flick.

Speaking of nudity, for a low budget B movie, this doesn't have much of it. There's a brief side flash of a breast about 10 minutes in and a few more shots here and there while the virgins are moving tiny rocks one or two at a time (why, I have no idea by the way) in a mine. It isn't until after an hour of bad acting that the producers must have decided that this movie really sucks and if we don't have some gratuitous boobs flashing around, no one will watch it. So they do. There's some time spent in a grotto hot tub where several of the babes bob around topless, and carefully bottomless. They also toss in a bit where the evil queen gets to view new babe captives as her dominatrix guards paw at and disrobe them. This scene was obviously tossed in to try and keep a viewers attention diverted from just what a bad movie this really is.

2fers: one and half stars is really generous and More than the movie shows

Movies - B

By the B, I mean type of movies, not part B following my earlier entry. I tend to enjoy watching a lot of B movies. I’ve heard that B stands for babes, blondes. boobs and blood. I love the first three, and try to stay away from the last. It’s not only B movies. There’s a fine line in B movies that are bad and those that are really bad. A B movie can be so bad, it’s good, which can be the best ones to watch. What really ruins a B movie is when the makers of it don’t realize they’re making a B movie and they’re producing a real film. Those can be pretty pathetic. I don’t care for the gross slasher type flicks. I usually won’t even bother watching one of those. I also don’t like the B movies that think they’re still making a X movie. I like nudity, but not the crotch-spreading blatant stuff. Some of them have really good titles as well. One of my favorites is Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama - how can you help but not like a movie with that name?

Don’t get the idea that I only like trashy B stuff though. Right now I’m going through a Chinese Kung Fu movie phase. I love the period pieces that take place pre—20th century. Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, Chingmy Yau, Bridgette Lin, Andy Leoh and Donnnie Yen are a few of my favorites. By the way, because these movies are done in Mandarin and Cantonese and then translated to English, not only the movie titles, but the cast names can vary wildly. I just finished Wing Chun with Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen – one of my very favorites.

U.S. movies from the 1930s and early 40s rank among some of the best. The gangster films with Cagney and Robinson, the Thin Man series with Myrna Loy and William Powell (at least until the censors sobered them up). Try My Man Godfrey or Arsenic and Old Lace for enduring comedy. One the other hand, I have yet to watch Gone With The Wind.

2fers: The Public Enemy and Michelle Bauer