Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The Rising Tide of Stupidity



The Constitution and Bill of Rights has become a smorgasbord for the credulous. It's been my observation that the person in cuffs being led to a waiting patrol car shouting loudly "I know my rights!" invariably does not. Most people know what they think the constitution means, particularly the Bill of Rights, but what they *know* has most often been spoon fed to them like pablum by people with murky agendas.

Witness the rise of the so called tenthers and ninthers and now the firsters and the arguments they parrot straight out of faux news (deliberately left uncapitalized) and santorum (ditto) hq.

Remember as Major Armstrong always urged "It's not what people know that's dangerous. It's what they know that ain't so."

Now.....in its wisdom our legislature is about to remove the prefix "retard-" from the Code of Iowa because certain people with Down's Syndrome people are having their feelings hurt by people calling each other retards, fucktards, etc etc ad nauseam. It has been proposed to use the term 'intellectually challenged'.

I believe, however, that there is a place for the term 'retard' and 'fucktard'-otherwise, how in the hell is a Democrat supposed to get through this campaign season?

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Grouchy Six Year Old Likely To Get Testy

This marks the sixth year that I've been running this show and as usual we post the picture of the unknown grouchy kid at left.

My interests have changed focus-being creative takes a lot out of you and lately the guitar amp business has presented challenges-the deeper I go into it the more I discover I don't know. Such is the price of tackling something new that you didn't imbibe with your mother's milk, so to speak.

It requires a lot of thought and experimentation. There are a lot of people out there Who Shall Remain Unnamed who seem to think that you cannot be permitted to attempt to repair a guitar amplifier unless you have a PhD in electrical engineering, are on speaking terms with the ghost of Lee DeForest, and have about 200 years of experience. They also posit that unless you understand exactly how and why something works from theory outward you have no business poking around inside one and ought to be publicly flogged with a Tektronix scope for your temerity.

Parenthetically, these are the same people who never seem to be able to advance a cogent and simple explanation of why or how something actually works.

Of course, saying that you don't have to master the minutia of a device to restore it to proper functioning is heresy to these folks. Knowing what doesn't change the parameters of a malfunction is just as important in the repair process because it whittles down the work load to a manageable level.

Well, as my old crew chief Wayne Hawkins used to say, "F**k 'em if they can't take a joke. Get back to work."

Part of my new years' resolutions are to ignore these and a lot of other annoying people. I'm simply not going to deal on any level with people who offend me and I am going to be happy whether they like it or not.

They're not getting any forgiveness from me despite whatever bait they may try and dangle in front of me.

Life, as they say, is far too short. People rarely change on a fundamental level, and a life spent in making other people miserable does not have any attractions for me.