It may be a little late (years, misuse) to start caring about punctuation–but why now? Because…I found this: to begin with. I just want to make a point, period, like this one.
Ha, that turned out to be a pretty lame attempt. Read the link and you’ll see what I was trying to do. I guess what impressed me was the craft and thought behind the punctuation these writers employed. And that it was totally lost on me until now.
The stuff of nightmares…
…and your misfortune. I mean being stranded on a desert island is one thing, but having your rescue message found by the Big Hominid means you’re screwed for sure…
Sorry, Kevin. I couldn’t resist.
My journey through the annals of Life continues apace. The magazine that is. I’ve now reached August 1955, the month and year of my birth. What keeps it interesting I suppose is finding tidbits of long forgotten stories and then trying to discern what happened next. Okay, so I’m easily entertained. But let me share a sad tale from the August 15 issue.
Life did a short feature on a group of American airmen who were shot down over China during the Korean war and had been imprisoned as spies ever since. They were finally released after years of negotiations between two hostile governments . One of these was Airman 2/c Daniel Schmidt.
An unlucky flyer, but things could be always be worse. And then they were.
While sad sack Schmidt was enduring years of Chinese torture, his lovely redheaded bride Una, who was also the mother of the child Schmidt had never seen, had remarried to a local lumberjack by the name of Alford Fine. Schmidt was understandably distraught to learn this news upon his return to the U.S. and promptly filed for divorce.
Things then got rather messy as local news accounts of the time portrayed. Una moved out of Alford’s trailer home and desperately sought reconciliation with Schmidt. Schmidt, however, was not in a forgiving mood. Meanwhile, the local sheriff pursued an investigation into whether Una was guilty of bigamy. The Air Force insisted it had notified Una that her husband was still alive in China prior to her remarriage, but Una denied it. It appeared the woman with two husbands might soon wind up with none.
Finally, Schmidt’s mother intervened and arranged a meeting between the two star crossed lovers. And when Schmidt saw Una, he fell in love all over again.
The newly reunited family makes an appearance on the Art Linkletter show.
It was a tale worthy of Hollywood, except for the happy ending part. As this outstanding blog post recounts, Una and Schmidt divorced in 1960 and Daniel died in 1962 of a broken heart. Well, during open heart surgery anyway. He was 31.
Came across this mind boggling and thought provoking article that claims we are moving closer to having the capability to map a human brain to the extent that a person could live on in a “virtual” world after the mortal body has turned to dust.
Imagine a future in which your mind never dies. When your body begins to fail, a machine scans your brain in enough detail to capture its unique wiring. A computer system uses that data to simulate your brain. It won’t need to replicate every last detail. Like the phonograph, it will strip away the irrelevant physical structures, leaving only the essence of the patterns. And then there is a second you, with your memories, your emotions, your way of thinking and making decisions, translated onto computer hardware as easily as we copy a text file these days.
That second version of you could live in a simulated world and hardly know the difference. You could walk around a simulated city street, feel a cool breeze, eat at a café, talk to other simulated people, play games, watch movies, enjoy yourself. Pain and disease would be programmed out of existence. If you’re still interested in the world outside your simulated playground, you could Skype yourself into board meetings or family Christmas dinners.
The author goes on to make the case that actual creation of this technology is not necessarily a good thing, noting that the moral and societal implications of implementation will “transform humanity in ways that are more disturbing than helpful.” I guess I can see the downsides, but given my lack of faith in any form of afterlife, I’d probably be inclined to accept immortality wherever I might find it. Of course, that might be it’s own kind of hell. I’m reminded of a story I read back in the 1970s entitled “I have eternal life and it’s killing me”.
Speaking of virtual worlds, of late I’ve been crafting a rather detailed fantasy life in my mind. Yeah, I’ve got too much time on my hands I suppose. But really, I just use these fantasies as a sleep aid. A detailed version of counting sheep if you will. I won’t bore you with the details of that world, although I’m young, handsome, and have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. So yeah, I avoid all the mistakes I’ve made along the way in my real life and do things like invest in start-up companies with odd names like Microsoft and Apple. Anyway, I imagine novelists go through similar exercises as they craft their stories and create fictional characters to populate those worlds. Which is to say I don’t think I’ve gone totally off the rails.
So that’s how I kind of imagine what a virtual afterlife might look like. What do you think? Do you prefer the great unknown of death or would you rather have a computerized version of yourself live on through infinity?
The midpoint of my life’s journey leads to this bridge in Saratoga, WY.
Well, I guess gravity has nothing to do with it. But finding your geographic center is pretty cool and fun to do (linked fixed, sorry!). Turns out the midpoint of everywhere I lived is tiny Saratoga, Wyoming. Population 1,690 proud souls and home of the annual Steinly Cup microbrew competition. Gonna have to pay those punny folks a visit one of these days I suppose.
Westminster, CA (23 years), Prescott, AZ (5 years), Fort Smith, AR (3 years), Columbia, SC (12 years and counting), Stafford, VA (8 years) and Seoul, ROK (6 years) winds up looking like this.
And where pray tell is your center?
UPDATE: I changed the headline for this post after a commenter graciously pointed out that I had invented a new word for stupid…
In this exciting episode of The Adventures of LTG we go grocery shopping!
Finding the larder at the Little House on the McCrarey was in a seriously depleted mode, the wife and I took to the highway for some hunting and gathering. First stop was the Korean market.
Jee Yeun’s home away from home.
It seemed we needed just about everything they sold.
One hundred fifty dollars later we loaded our burden up and carted it out.
Although two large jars of Kimchi may seem excessive, that’s only a one month supply for Jee Yeun. One radish, one cabbage.
We also scored us a nice thick slab of samgyapsal.
Bringing home the bacon!
Having taken care of the Korean specialty foods, it was off to the American supermarket for the rest of our necessities. Now, I’m a Publix kind of guy, but Jee Yeun wanted to score some galbi and Bi-Lo is the only store in town that slices short ribs in a proper Korean fashion.
In addition to our standard grocery list, I picked up the ingredients for my Aunt Pat’s recipe fruit salad, my contribution to the family Thanksgiving feast next week.
Having loaded the shopping cart to near capacity, it was time to check out. Now, I’m not going to rant about it (much) but one thing that I find irksome about the American shopping experience is that stores are going big on this “self checkout” system. As a matter of principle I refuse to ring up my own groceries. But the bastards make you suffer for your insolence by only manning the bare minimum of cashier operated checkouts. Today they had two lanes open and one of those was for fifteen items or less. One person was in the 15 item line, and there were several in the regular lane. So, a manager walks by and observes my frustration and directs me to the short line, despite the fact that I was several times over the stated maximum for items.
I sensed there would be trouble, but I followed the manager’s instructions. The customer in front of me was an older (than me) woman with two items that had already been rung up. So, we proceeded to load the conveyer belt to overflowing with our 100+ items. And waited. And waited. I’m not sure what was going on, but the woman was fumbling around in her purse for what seemed like an entirety. I guess she was looking for her Bi-Lo discount card. Finally, the cashier tried to look her up in the system without success. And then a discussion ensued as to whether the purchased items were even eligible for a discount. The woman finally decided that she would pay, and proceeded to count out the correct amount at a pace that seemed to make my head want to explode. And I’m talking about the bills. When she went rummaging for her change purse and then started counting out each individual coin I was reduced to reciting the serenity prayer repeatedly. To no apparent effect. Meanwhile, customers with 15 or fewer items were coming up, looking at our pile, and giving me the evil eye. I know what they were thinking, because lord knows, I’ve had those same thoughts when I was on the wrong side of a misbehaving customers. When you don’t follow the rules established for the grocery checkout the very fabric that binds society together begins to unravel. Yeah, there was definitely murder in the hearts of some Bi-Lo customers today.
But here’s the kicker. When the old woman was finally done with her transaction, she turned to me and said “I thought this line was for 15 items or less!” Now, I might have just ignored the comment, but then the checker said “yeah, I know.” So I remained relatively calm but gruffly pointed out that I had been directed to this line by the store manager. They both then professed to have only been “joking”. Yeah. Ha ha. Good one.
Anyway, as my purchases were rang up I had to do my own bagging (another downside of the 15 item line). I had bought two bottles of wine on sale and the cashier said if I buy four I get another 10% off, plus a nifty little carry sack. So, I sent Jee Yeun running for two more. As she placed the wine in the nifty little carry sack the cashier asked “now will you smile?” So, I mustered up my best fake smile ever and rolled on out of there.
And to think that some people believe retired life must be boring!
…wishes you a happy Halloween!
From the gallery of Trevor King.
Amongst my admittedly small social circle are several folks whose career path has led them to join the ranks of academia as university professors. I’m sorry to admit I know little of their individual journeys and the challenges they faced and overcame along the way. So I really appreciated this post written by Dr. Colby King, recently ensconced at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. I’ve always had a great deal of respect for Colby, especially because he is one of my few left-of-center friends who is willing to actually engage in a serious discussion of some of the issues facing our nation. We rarely reach agreement but we do find on occasion some common ground or at least mutual understanding of our respective viewpoints. Most importantly, I always learn something new and for that he earns my gratitude. My respect and understanding were greatly enhanced after learning more about his personal story. I encourage you to give it a read.
Being the selfish bastard that I am, Colby’s story set me to thinking of my own. I grew up in an upper middle class area of Orange County, California. But our family was definitely working class. My father was managing a fast food restaurant when I was born. After a McDonald’s opened across the street from his store, “The Rite Spot”, there was a futile burger war (it’s hard to undercut a 15 cent hamburger) and my father moved on to driving a truck in route sales. My mother supplemented the family income first as a carhop and later working the night shift in a factory.
We always had food on the table (lots of fried chicken and ground beef). We had a roof over our heads (a rented roof of a 1940s era house surrounded by fancy new subdivisions). And we had clothes on our backs (in my case usually hand-me-downs). So we weren’t “poor” in the classic sense of the word, but comparatively speaking we were amongst the poorest people in our community.
Kids can be cruel, and they were at times. I recall classmates mocking “the shack” in which we lived. And since my clothes were functional but not fashionable (and cleaned at the local laundromat) I took some heat for that too. One painful memory from sixth grade was the day I wore some shoes my uncle brought home from the store where he worked. They were a little too large for me, but they were new. And I guess maybe they didn’t really go that well with the blue jeans I invariably wore to school. Anyway, we were lining up for class and all the other kids pointed at my shoes and started laughing uproariously. The teacher came out to see what all the commotion was, took a look at my shoes, and laughed too. Needless to say, that was the first and last time I wore those shoes. They looked something like this:
A painful memory. Looking back on it now, maybe I would have laughed too.
Then there was the 7th grade math teacher (Mr. Peter Boothroyd the bastard) who found it appropriate to discipline misbehavior in his class by announcing “keep it up McCrarey and you’ll wind up like your father–selling Jello out of a truck.” Suffice to say, by the time I finished high school I had developed a pretty healthy inferiority complex. Which I self-medicated with copious amounts of pot smoking.
I floundered around some after graduation, taking a few classes at the community college but mostly just getting high and doing whatever minimum wage gigs I could find. My daughter was born one week after I turned 20 and that kicked in a new found sense of responsibility. So, I found a job in route sales (fuck you Boothroyd!) and actually did pretty well at it. I took the Postal Service entrance exam and after a couple of years was hired as a letter carrier. I was finally on my way!
I subsequently added a son to my family, transferred to Prescott, Arizona, and bought my first house. I was living the American dream and was content to spend the rest of my life carrying mail and enjoying what for me was the best life I had known. Then the marriage fell apart and I wound up with custody of both kids. I started dating a grad student (I wrote about her in some detail here) and hanging out with her college professor friends at Northern Arizona University. And probably for the first time in my life I started to realize that these people I admired were not better, or necessarily smarter, than me–just more educated. So, it was back to the local community college for me!
The grad student relationship ended badly and left me pretty much emotionally devastated. Being a single father was more than I could handle, so I transferred to Oklahoma (technically Fort Smith, Arkansas) so my mom could lend me a hand with the kids. I was still delivering mail, but now I was doing it in stifling summer humidity and winter ice. Made the job a lot less appealing! Worst of all it was not mentally engaging. As I carried my mail route I’d imagine doing things that I’d actually like to be doing. And suddenly, I’d have completed my rounds and not recalled actually having done so. I was just in automatic mode, mental masturbation if you will. So, I realized that I needed to make a change in my life, but had no idea what exactly to do.
One perk of being a mailman (especially a single mailman) is that you tend to meet a lot of women along the route. One of these was Iris Breed, the Director of the Fort Smith Girls Club. One of the smartest people I’ve had the good fortune to meet on this road we call life. We began dating and I shared with her my general dissatisfaction with the malaise of my career. She said why don’t you take a management job? Well. I mean, who’d want a guy like me on the management team? Besides, I was the union steward. Working in management was against everything I stood for! But she continued to encourage me and pointed out that the only thing I truly lacked in life was the confidence to pursue my goals. So, when a job came open to manage the safety program I applied. I knew nothing about safety management, but at least I felt like I could continue to support the rank and file from inside the beast.
Bobbie McLane was the Human Resources director and I had met her often when I dealt with her on union issues. I guess she liked how I handled myself in those meetings because she took a leap and actually hired me. And sent to the USPS Management Academy in Potomac, MD for several weeks so I could actually learn how to do the job. I’m forever grateful to her for giving me that chance to be more than what I had been. But the rest was up to me.
And I did alright I guess. I was promoted to a labor relations position in Columbia, SC. I went back to school (at an actual university–Go ‘Cocks!) and finally earned my bachelor’s degree in 1991 (at the tender age of 35). After that, more promotions found me in D.C. where I took advantage of a management development program and graduate degree studies. Thirty-four years after first putting on that letter carrier uniform I retired as GS-15 Director of Human Resources for the United States Forces Korea.
What a ride it was! I had some luck along the way. And help and encouragement from people that saw in me things I didn’t see in myself. But ultimately, it was up to me to overcome my self-imposed limitations and find a way to achieve my potential. Being from a working class background made that more of a challenge I suppose, but I’d argue that it wasn’t really society that put me in the box. It just took some time to understand that no one can define who you are or what you can be, unless you give them that power. Which sounds pretty simple when I write it now. But learning that proved to be my life’s greatest achievement.
Doing the treadmill can get a little boring. But through the power of imagination aided by the wonder of the internet, I can almost see myself hiking here. While shitting my pants.
I like the pictures at the link, but here’s a little video as well.
Of course, I combine bad writing with poor grammar, and I’m sure that makes at least one person I know suffer…
I guess I can relate to this couple somewhat. After all, I’m pretty sure I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body…
Where have all the comfort girls gone? Long time passing Where have the comfort girls gone? Long time ago Where have all the comfort girls gone? Gone to Syria everyone When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
I suppose it’s an inapt comparison to the Korean comfort women of WWII since there is no indication these Tunisian lasses are being forced to fuck the Syrian terrorists rebels freedom fighters. The folks back home are none to pleased that their women folk are returning preggers. But as they say, terrorist babies don’t grow on trees.
What I find interesting is that apparently in Islam everything goes–murder, torture, sexual intercourse–provided you announce that you are doing it for the purpose of jihad. Hey, it worked for the Prophet!
http://youtu.be/IvC9sbK725M
In the news:
This guy apparently didn’t have the balls to just “speak now or forever hold your peace”.
And no one better tell them redskins Indians Native Americans that they should be offended.
Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.
–Lee Harris
This is a test to see if I’ve managed to figure out how to post documents from Word and Excel on a WordPress blog.
Hmm, I was hoping to actually display those pages as opposed to creating hyperlinks. Now, the only way I’ve been able view them is to right click and open them in a new window. At least it works that way on my computer, but then, I have the documents saved to my hard drive.
Will some lucky reader try the links above and advise if they can access the documents? Thanks in advance.
UPDATE: Interesting. Once I actually published the post, those hyperlinks turned into sweet little document-like looking things. Again, they work when I click them, do they work for you?
I’ve installed another WordPress plugin, let’s see how (if) it works.
Yesterday I was waiting in the car while Jee Yeun had her physical therapy session. I was fooling around with the smartphone and when I tried to do a Google search for LTG, this website popped up.
Imagine my surprise and delight at discovering that out of 30 million domains, mccrarey.com is sitting pretty at 12,296,726! That’s practically the big time. Even better, according to webstatsdomain.net LTG is worth an astonishing $1364.00! Not bad for just under nine years of work.
I should have left well enough alone I suppose. Instead I went and checked out johnmccrarey.com. That was my original domain, but through some miscommunication with my host the registration expired and some spammer puke in Poland purchased my name. My former domain, which only publishes spam (currently an ad for payday loans) is ranked 2,630,595 and is valued at $2820.00.
It’s all good, a deflated ego never killed anyone.
Via Drudge comes this story about Mexico displacing the United States as the world’s most obese nation. Damn. I reckon if the immigration bill passes we can reclaim our fat crown.
Sorry if I’ve let my country down. This week I broke the 240 barrier, weighing in at 239.5. That’s a sweet 39 pounds lost since February.
Onward and downward!
She’s certainly nothing like the centenarian I encountered recently.
http://youtu.be/YdxD1uhmvxQ
Via Althouse