Wednesday - February 01, 2012
No, It Takes One Person Willing To Push
An observation on life in a communist microcosm.
We live in a condo park. On the ten or so roads in this little village there are 438 housing units in 55 buildings of about 8 units each, with parking everywhere in between. Everyone pays a fat monthly fee to the condo association, and they in turn supply the water, hire people to mow the lawn, plow the snow, collect the garbage, run the pool, maintain the buildings and generally keep the place neat and tidy. Sure, we have a bunch of silly rules (eg these units are all electric, yet everyone must have a CO detector, and the state comes around every couple years to inspect it), but most of the time it’s pretty cool.
We don’t have individual garbage cans. Instead, every other building has a nicely finished wood corral with a 5 yard dumpster inside, and the truck comes around twice a week.
We don’t have individual recycling either. We have commingle, and every other other building has one of those wooden corrals just for recycling. The problem is, down at our end of the village, that 5 buildings share this 1 corral, and inside are just 3 giant garbage can bins and a shelf for newspapers and cardboard. Which are supposed to be cut to size and bundled with string. Sure. In theory. In theory the recycling guys come by every week. In theory. Every Friday.
It’s only Wednesday and the recycling corral is an overflowing disaster. All 3 bins are overflowing, several plastic bags of commingle are on the ground, there is cardboard in willy-nilly heaps all over the place, and loose newspaper everywhere.
We’re all supposed to take care of the corrals, and not make a mess for our neighbors to deal with. Riiiiight.
The truth is that when more than 3 people are responsible for anything, no one is actually responsible for it at all. When it takes a village, or even a good part of a neighborhood, and nobody is watching, it never gets done. One person either has to do the work, or crack the whip.
So when I took our recycling over there this afternoon, I spent a few minutes trying to neaten the place up. Again. There really wasn’t too much I could do; that corral gets too much traffic and needs more carrying capacity. So I took 5 big boxes that hadn’t been broken down or tied up, and set them up on top of the bins to hold even more recycling. I hope that will be enough until Friday. Then I went back inside and called the office, and requested - again - that we get at least 2 more bins for that corral. I don’t see what else I can do.
Come Saturday, I’ll go back out there with a knife, some twine, and a snow shovel to scoop up some of the mess. Again. Seems I do this about every other month. It’s not my job.
On top of one of the heaps of waste paper was a 2011 calendar someone was getting rid of. It was a whole year of piggy pictures, done by Eide and Flynn, who have made a good career out of animal photography. So I took it, and I’m thinking of making up a sign. I can use one of the piggies, which really are adorable. Make it cute, make it funny, and maybe people won’t be insulted. Too much. In theory.
Now, all I have to figure out is how to say “Clean up your effing mess you lame-ass shite-crusted crotch weasel, we’re sick of it!” in a charming and humorous diplomatic manner.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/01/2012 at 03:46 PM
Filed Under: • Commies • Daily Life •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • TooDaze Big News From England
Couple still has wedding present toaster from 60 years ago.
And it still works just fine.
And it was made in England.
They believe their toaster is the oldest in Britain.
And Fred and Joan Horley have no problem remembering just how old their appliance is.
The Morphy Richards device was a gift for their wedding which took place on May 23, 1953, and has been going strong ever since.
Delighted with his kitchen appliance, Fred, 80, from Glenholt, Devon said: ‘We have gone through a dozen electric kettles in that time but the toaster is as good as new.
‘I have never had to touch it. The chrome is still in perfect condition except a few marks on the top.’ ‘I don’t think they make them in such good quality any more.’ ‘We are very proud of it. It really is the best thing since sliced bread.’
‘We didn’t consciously keep it, it is just that we never had any reason to replace it. The only other thing I’ve still got from my wedding day is my wife.’
I think congratulations are in order, both for them and for their well built little appliance.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/01/2012 at 01:11 PM
Filed Under: • Humor • UK •
• Comments (3)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Just shut up already
"Seriously”, I think “unexpected” ought to be purged from the lexicon.
January: Unexpected Lack Of Job Creation!
The pace of job creation by private employers slowed more than expected in January after a sharp gain the month before, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.
The private sector added 170,000 jobs last month, the ADP National Employment Report showed, shy of economists’ expectations for a gain of 185,000 jobs.
The ADP figures come ahead of the government’s more comprehensive labor market report on Friday, which includes both public and private sector employment.
That report is expected to show the economy created 150,000 jobs, and a gain in private payrolls of 170,000.
ADP also revised down December’s private payrolls to an increase of 292,000 from the previously reported 325,000.
Obama’s policies hard at work: the best economy in the world continues to flatline.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/01/2012 at 01:05 PM
Filed Under: • Economics •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • A Simple Solution
It’s February!
It’s going to hit 60°F here today. Unreal.
Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. If that little fatso sees his shadow, we get 6 more weeks of winter, even though we haven’t had any yet. I think not Phil. I think you need to move on ...
The standard .22-250 is a bona fide 700-800 yard varmint cartridge, which means it’s accurate enough to hit critters the size of a bottle of shampoo at those distances and turn them into mincemeat. A long standardized wildcat version called the .22-250 Ackley Improved takes a lot of the body taper out of the round and gives it a steeper shoulder angle. This gives the reloader a bit more room for more gun powder, which in turn gives slightly higher velocities. But this is a custom made rifle, so you would be smart to also get a top quality barrel with a faster than normal rifling twist and a slightly longer, tight and parallel throat built in. That lets you seat big (for the caliber; eg 80-90 grains) a bit further out for even more powder capacity and thus velocity, and it all adds up to make the Ackley version a 1000 yard squirrel gun. Also suitable for eliminating pesky groundhogs, even in the “dead of winter”. In some parts of Texas, I hear they use the .22-250 to hunt deer with. Wisconsin too? I hope those that do so are good enough hunters to go for the head shot on still deer at close ranges; I’m not positive that even the heavier non-frangible bullets (60gr Nosler Partition)are enough for a body shot but they might be.
For just about everything you’d ever want to know about this cartridge, go here. And here is a “white mist” .22-250 video that’s safe for tender stomachs.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/01/2012 at 12:27 PM
Filed Under: • Animals • Guns and Gun Control •
• Comments (1)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • political America’s wholesale retreat from the great fantasy of global warming.
OK so as long as I was on the subject of Obama .....
Take a look at this. Yes, I know. I’m a bit late posting it but hey. Does not make it less worthwhile a post. Besides, I want our American readers to see some of what’s being written here on the subject.
Soon as I get up the nerve and I think my weak stomach can handle it, I might start posting a few things from the libtard press. Maybe. But not today.
Maybe not tomorrow either. Maybe next week.
I read Booker a lot, but I am not so sure he is correct with regard to the headline I have that leads this story. I do not think the USA political or otherwise has retreated wholesale from the fairy tale as preached by the new religion of things green.
How I woke up to the untruths of Barack ObamaThe President’s State of the Union address was as weaselly as any politician’s could be.
By Christopher Booker
When I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last Wednesday and caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, two passages had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief.
The first came when, to applause, the President spoke about the banking crash which coincided with his barnstorming 2008 election campaign. “The house of cards collapsed,” he recalled. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” He excoriated the banks which had “made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money”, while “regulators looked the other way and didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour”. This, said Obama, “was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work.”
I recalled a piece I wrote in this column on January 29, 2009, just after Obama took office. It was headlined: “This is the sub-prime house that Barack Obama built”. As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, far beyond the point where it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of homeowners would be likely to default. Yet, in 2005, no one more actively opposed moves to halt these reckless guarantees than Senator Obama, who received more donations from Fannie Mae than any other US politician (although Senator Hillary Clinton ran him close).
A later passage in Obama’s speech, when he hailed the way his country’s energy future has been transformed by the miracle of shale gas, met with a storm of applause. Not only would this give the US energy security for decades, creating 600,000 jobs, but it could now go all out to exploit its gas and oil reserves (more applause). Yet this was the man who in 2008 couldn’t stop talking about the threat of global warming, and was elected on a pledge to make the US only the second country in the world, after Britain, to commit to cutting its CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by 80 per cent within 40 years.
Even more telling than his audience’s response to this, however, was what happened when Obama referred briefly to the need to develop “clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes”. But no mention now of vast numbers of wind turbines – those props beside which he constantly chose to be filmed back in 2008. No harking back to his boast that “renewable energy” would create “four million jobs”. And even to this sole fleeting reminder of what, four years ago, was his flagship policy the response of Congress was a deafening silence.
A few months after Obama entered the White House, I suggested here that the slogan on which he was elected – “Yes we can” – seemed to have changed to “No we can’t”. It was already obvious that, having won election as an ideal Hollywood version of what “the first black President” should look and sound like, he was in reality no more than a vacuum. His speech last week was as weaselly as any politician’s performance could be, not least in its references to the sub-prime scandal.
But on no issue has this been more obvious than political America’s wholesale retreat from the great fantasy of global warming – which leaves Britain as the only country committed to the insanity of cutting “carbon emissions” by four-fifths in less than four decades. President Obama and the rest of the world have moved on.
Posted by peiper
on 02/01/2012 at 11:51 AM
Filed Under: • Obama, The One •
• Comments (0)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • myths about republicans and can we actually win come november.
I happen to catch Janet Daley on the radio last night for the first time. Hope it won’t the last cos she can wipe the floor with any lib. they put against her.
Oh how I wish she could take the time to answer each of her critics on this article. Of course, there may an honest point or two made by those who oppose her comments here. I’m not posting the comments cos while interesting, they are also anger inducing. So you read them if you want to, at the link.
Three myths about the Republican primary contestExplaining the more arcane procedures of the American presidential primary system to my British friends is difficult enough. The distinction between a caucus and a primary ballot, and the various forms of the latter – those that are open to everyone in the state, as opposed to those that are restricted to registered voters of a particular party; those that are winner-takes-all as opposed to those in which the delegates are distributed in proportion to the votes won, etc - can take up half a lunch time by itself. But once these technical matters have been mastered, there are more serious political misconceptions that must be dispelled. So in the interests of international understanding, let me take on three prevailing confusions about the current Republican primary season.
Myth 1:
There is so much acrimony and bile being expended between the candidates that irrevocable harm is likely to be done to all of them in the eyes of the electorate. The mudslinging – all the negative ads and personal malice – will leave a permanently unsavoury impression of the party, whoever wins in the end.
Refutation: no, it won’t. Primary contests are always bloody and bitter. In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gouged lumps out of one another for months. She accused him of being hopelessly callow and inexperienced – and worse, her husband unforgivably dismissed Obama’s campaign as being similar to Jesse Jackson’s ie just another futile attempt from an over-ambitious black politician to leapfrog over the legitimate candidate. Obama in turn, implied that Mrs Clinton had no legitimate political credentials at all: that she seemed to think that having lived in the White House as a First Lady was sufficient qualification to be president. All of this nastiness was forgotten once Obama got the nomination whereupon the entire Democratic machine got behind him and propelled him to victory. What the melodramatic vitriol had served to do was make the Democrats seem like the centre of the political universe, providing a setting in which its rising star could establish a national reputation.Myth 2:
The longer this ugly race goes on, the worse it will be for the Republicans who will end up looking like vindictive children, and damage each other so much that they will be crippled when it comes to the actual election. It would be better if everybody except the obvious front-runner pulled out now.
Refutation: The longer the race goes on, the more the mettle and personal courage of the candidates will be tested. There is always something of the OK Corral shoot-out in American elections: behaving like a gentleman is fine for a president once he is in office but a candidate needs to be able to remain standing in a long and bruising fight to prove his fitness. And, as I noted above, the longer the national drama is centred on the Republicans, the longer voters will pay attention to them. As soon as the nomination is seen to be a done deal, the public gaze will move away.
Myth 3:
Gingrich is now a dead duck. Defeat in Florida has finished him.
Refutation: This is likely to be true but not necessarily so. In 2008, Hillary’s campaign came back from the dead repeatedly. She was written off – only to recover again – so frequently that it became the received wisdom that Obama had failed “to seal the deal” until virtually the last moment. The outcome which seems in retrospect to have been inevitable was very much touch-and-go during the primaries – and the dramatic suspense of that uncertainty almost certainly helped the Democrats in the presidential election.
Moral of the story? American politics is very, very different from our own. US voters are not so repulsed by “unpleasantness” as the British, and they really, really do not like being second-guessed by the media.
Hope I don’t P.O. my friends here but .........
I am not feeling very confident about the election. People who voted for Obama and are now unhappy, are not necessarily Republican friendly. But they might vote for him again if only because of ill feelings about our side. And to be frank, while I like Gingrich, and I think he’s far and away smarter then any of his opponents, I don’t think he can win. And that leaves who as a choice?
When I was in Ca. a few months ago, I watched one of the debates and was thoroughly put off by the bad behavior of Santorum. If some didn’t spot it, and I was surprised hardly anything was made of it, then some just weren’t listening and watching as closely as they might have.
I’m not crazy about Mitt either and I heard him singing on the radio last night. Good grief how embarrassing. I thought he appeared desperate. Some may not see it that way. I don’t feel too good about this. The prospect of another term for Obama is genuinely a very scary thought. So I suppose I’ll either have to pass on voting, which is not an option, or vote for whoever wins the Republican nomination, which is the only option open to me that I can see. And it’s far too late to run for office myself and anyway, even I wouldn’t vote for me. Depressing thought here. We may not have anyone on our side who will be able to defeat Obama.
I am not feeling very well at that thought. In fact, I am increasingly sick over it.
Posted by peiper
on 02/01/2012 at 11:08 AM
Filed Under: • Politics • Republicans • USA •
• Comments (6)
•
Trackbacks(0)
Permalink • Five Most Recent Trackbacks:
Once Again, The One And Only Post
(4 total trackbacks)
Tracked at iHaan.org
Thｅ advantage to having a guide with you is thɑt an expert will haѵe very first hand experience dealing and navigating the river with гegional wildlife. Tһomas, there are great…
On: 07/28/23 10:37
The Brownshirts: Partie Deux; These aare the Muscle We've Been Waiting For
(3 total trackbacks)
Tracked at head to the Momarms site
The Brownshirts: Partie Deux; These aare the Muscle We’ve Been Waiting For
On: 03/14/23 11:20
Vietnam Homecoming
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at 广告专题配音 专业从事中文配音跟外文配音制造，北京名传天下配音公司
专业从事中文配音和外文配音制作，北京名传天下配音公司 北京名传天下专业配音公司成破于2006年12月，是专业从事中 中文配音 文配音跟外文配音的音频制造公司，幻想飞腾配音网领 配音制作 有海内外优良专业配音职员已达500多位，可供给一流的外语配音，长年服务于国内中心级各大媒体、各省市电台电视台，能满意不同客户的各种需要。电话：010-83265555 北京名传天下专业配音公司…
On: 03/20/21 07:00
meaningless marching orders for a thousand travellers ... strife ahead ..
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at Casual Blog
[...] RTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEBSITE IS CONSTRUED AS BEING CONTRARY TO THE LAWS APPL [...]
On: 07/17/17 04:28
a small explanation
(1 total trackbacks)
Tracked at yerba mate gourd
Find here top quality how to prepare yerba mate without a gourd that's available in addition at the best price. Get it now!
On: 07/09/17 03:07
DISCLAIMER
THE SERVICES AND MATERIALS ON THIS WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE HOSTS OF THIS SITE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OR ANY MATERIALS.
Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:
It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.
- Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
- Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
- Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
- Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere
THE INFORMATION AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS WEBSITE ARE DESIGNED TO COMPLY WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS WEBSITE SHALL BE GOVERNED BY AND CONSTRUED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND ALL PARTIES IRREVOCABLY SUBMIT TO THE JURISDICTION OF THE AMERICAN COURTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEBSITE IS CONSTRUED AS BEING CONTRARY TO THE LAWS APPLICABLE IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, THEN THIS WEBSITE IS NOT INTENDED TO BE ACCESSED BY PERSONS FROM THAT COUNTRY AND ANY PERSONS WHO ARE SUBJECT TO SUCH LAWS SHALL NOT BE ENTITLED TO USE OUR SERVICES UNLESS THEY CAN SATISFY US THAT SUCH USE WOULD BE LAWFUL.
Copyright © 2004-2015 Domain Owner
Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
RSS 2.0 
Atom 
