September 29, 2008
Monday, September 29th, 2008  |
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| Isn’t it worth $1 a month to you to keep RGQ going? Please click the link and direct your contribution to reallygoodquotes@yahoo.com. |
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| Especially
for Tim The computer in
my high school classroom recently started acting up. After watching
me struggle with it, one of my students came up and took over.
"Your hard
drive crashed," he said. I called the computer
services office and explained, "My computer is down. The hard
drive crashed." "We can’t just
send people down on your say so. How do you know that’s the problem?" "A student
told me," I answered. "We’ll send
someone over right away." |
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“No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.” - Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, English historian (1834-1902) |
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“There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.” - John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, English historian (1834-1902) |
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“Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.” - George Washington Carver, American horticulturist, chemist and educator (1864-1943) |
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| Cat
Burglar |
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On this day in history, September 29, 1954: The European Organization for Nuclear Research is established when their charter is ratified by the 12 founding Member States. Already functioning as a provisional body, they were now globally recognized. After WWII, Europe’s place as a bastion for scientific research was losing ground. In December 1949 the first proposal for a united European scientific community was set forth. French, Italian, and Danish scientists called for a cohesive unit to merge not only findings, but funding. The French name for the group was Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nulcéaire or CERN. The pure physics research of the day concerned the study of the insides of the atom, hence "nuclear." In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee developed a distributed information system for CERN. His boss called the system "vague, but exciting" so work continued on the infant system. Berners-Lee saw his fledgling system as a way for scientists around the globe to share news. By Christmas 1990 a new little idea was blossoming across the planet. The World Wide Web was emerging. Tweaks and debugging, refinement of systems, hardware upgrades and by 1994 there were 10,000 servers and 10 million users on the web. Today, the world’s premiere scientific researchers still hold physics as their fundamental basis for study. They wish only to find out what the Universe is made of and how it works. There are now 20 Member States (all European) with many non-European countries also involved. CERN employs 2,500 people who build and design the accelerators as well as help with the running of scientific experiments. About 8,000 visiting scientists (half the world’s particle physicists), come to CERN for their research. They represent 580 universities and 85 nationalities. CERN is located on the Switzerland-France border – literally. "Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science." - Edwin Powell Hubble "Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope." - Theodore Roszak "If we wish to make a new world we have the material ready. The first one, too, was made out of chaos." - Robert Quillen |
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“We
worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he
is someone today.” |
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I worked hard on Friday. There were two major problems with our new computer system, and I fixed them both. First, some idiot was working on my web server. He was trying to get a default index.html page set up. That’s the page your browser gets when you type http://www.yahoo.com. Unfortunately, this idiot isn’t very familiar with Apache Tomcat, which is the software that publishes my web page. It doesn’t use normal HTML to render the web page, you have to compact the web page into a .war file (kinda like a zip file), and it publishes that. This moron, after firing up both the brain cells in his head, decided to publish a plain HTML file. That was a real success story. The web pages that were already running were fine, but I couldn’t load any new pages or make changes to the ones already running. That wasn’t good, so this idiot decided to delete all the files he created, but I still couldn’t get it to work. I actually had to shut my web page down in the middle of a Friday because of this twit. Anyone using the web page at the time was cut off and had to log in again. Of course, I forwarded my calls to the fax machine before I shut down the page, so I didn’t get any angry death threats. Then there was the moron that thought he should work on something else after lunch. I won’t bore you with the details, but I, umm, I mean *he*, managed to lock everyone out of the new system. I know what he did (I was there when I did it), but I couldn’t reverse it. Boss was called in, and he couldn’t reverse it. It was like we bought a new $1.5 million toy and broke it the first day we had it. But I fixed that too. I’m good at fixing things. The fact that most of the time I’m at least partially responsible
for breaking them is not relevant. Tim a’Musing |
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Bread
will stay fresh longer if a celery rib is stored with it in the package.
- Peggy in Tonawanda, New York |
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That was a tough line. It’s not easy coming up with them! Next
opening line… Hints:
Here’s a great new rhyming/composition tool.
http://www.writerhymes.com/ Submit
Opening Line
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| Re:
Economic Bail Outs I work for a securities regulatory agency on the state level. At least 5 years ago I witnessed my FIRST meeting where the highest ranking staff accountant in that agency (who is just about the most sedate and level headed person you can imagine) literally sprayed spittle in an impassioned attempt to get across just how bizarre and unsound the accounting methods being used by these companies were and just how certain the end result of these ever growing investments in bundled subprime mortgages would be. Just about the only people who listened were the people who were doing the audits but ultimately they had no power to make or change policy. Those that could have done so pooh-poohed the risk, even accusing the accountant and others of being "a bunch of Chicken Littles." This scenario was repeated at least a dozen times in my presence. There were many more when I wasn’t there. It is no exaggeration when I say that I know of at least a hundred letters/reports/analyses of warning that were sent to other state and federal agencies. All of it ultimately to no avail. Not only that, but there were already subprime mortgage companies filing for bankruptcy over two years ago, so there is no excuse for anybody in a position to know to claim that they had no idea that this was coming. - Sign me disgusted. [Thanks. If you have some of that documentation that you want to share anonymously, I’ll run it. This is the kind of thing that I keep hearing from many sources. Well-placed (and not so well placed) people knew this was coming for years, but they were making too much money to even consider sounder measures. Am I wrong when I say that this whole system seems to be about privatizing profit and socializing loss?] Here’s some back up that’s publicly available. Link 1 and Link 2 - disgusted still Hi Bruce, This was sent to me by BrasscheckTV and I think it’s a pretty good explanation of how we got into this mess! - Joe in California Why have this discussion? None of us have a hotline to the White House. Or, even our Congress people or Senators. They aren’t listening to us, and this isn’t fantasy football. The truth is; we’re in deep doo doo, and there isn’t any realistic way out. Even if one of us had a miracle solution, there isn’t any possibility that we would be taken seriously. L&K - herm Well, this all just backs up a point I’ve been making for a number of years - if you’ve got next-to-nothing to begin with, no one can really hurt you more. We don’t have stocks, or savings in a bank (our combined bank accounts maybe have a grand in them), or company-provided health insurance (or any health insurance, for that matter - can’t afford it) . I barely have anything in my 401(k) at work, since I was just able to start buying into it about a year ago. Our savings is in "stuff" - things that go up in value, or did, before all this mess hit, and that we can touch, and that we outright own. We paid our house off in ‘97, but with property taxes continually going up around here (Ohio has GOT to do something about school funding!!!!), it’s almost like paying a mortgage, since we have to set aside a certain amount every month to make sure we have enough when tax time comes around. I feel for everyone who has put their trust in the market, or banks, because y’all are getting royally screwed, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon. We garden, and heat with wood, and drive used cars - we may not make much money, but we actually are doing better than many of our friends who have steady, fairly-well-paying jobs, because they are all in debt up to their eyeballs. I have credit card debt, but that’s it. And in the general scheme of things, while it’s a tidy sum, it’s really not much, compared to what others have going on. Hang on, Folks, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. - OhioKat This whole mess has been explained to me several times. I still don’t understand all of it. In 1999, a new law was passed and signed by the President. It was sponsored by a few hands-off Republicans and signed into law by a Democrat. It is a bi-party fiasco. If everyone were honest, if everyone weren’t so dang greedy, if everyone didn’t need all the limits to keep them within the bounds of decency, the law would have been great. The government is made of us. WE are the government. WE are the people clamoring for more and more from the nanny state. WE are the same in personal lives as in our government incarnation. I am one of the lucky few. I have no mortgage. I have no credit card debt. I now have a car loan, but last year I didn’t even have that. I have more money in the bank than the face value of my loans. I do not live in a fancy house. I do not have a large screen TV. I do not take extravagant vacations on a yearly basis. In fact, I’ve taken two extravagant vacations in my whole life. I don’t wear designer clothes. I cook my own meals. I packed my lunch when I worked. I did not live beyond my means. All the people going into foreclosure are not paying the money back to the banks and causing the banks to have financial issues. They should never have been given the loans in the first place. But that 1999 law loosened credit. And instead of behaving in a reasonable manner, people not only began living beyond their means, they lived WAY beyond their means. Now they can’t afford to pay off their double or triple mortgaged house and no one else can buy it even at a reduced rate because no one is lending money right now. The 15-20 credit cards are maxed out. The new furniture is being repossessed because the time payments aren’t being met. People, I don’t care what the Joneses have. I don’t care what you think you deserve. I don’t care how much you think you should have. If you can’t afford to pay for it in cash (reasonable house and perhaps 1 car on credit) you can’t have it. I know that someone else has jewelry, fancy cars, big houses, nice clothes, and luxurious vacations. And everyone over-spending, taking more than their earned share, are going to make my retirement a living hell. I’ve always lived within my means. Now I have to bail out the banks that can’t tolerate you not paying your bills. WE are the government. What have YOU done to help this economic crisis evolve? - Patti The basis of the financial crisis is that ancient sin, Usury. Compound interest, by definition, must double the money supply every so many years. For money to mean anything, it must represent gold, or land, or, recently, even municipal water systems. Being on a finite planet, we just don’t have anything left to secure another round of money-creation. When the Christians got involved in lending money, the old custom of Jubilee - the forgiving of all loans every fifty years - was abandoned, so wealth could continue to concentrate in a few hands. Technology empowered colonization and then new avenues for profit plus a population explosion, so this money bubble has been growing for generations, appearing normal, but just as limited as any mine in the end. Some people are even trying to move off-planet, following the logic first presented in science fiction. There are also problems with over-leveraged money, wasteful wars, and the peak oil/climate crisis, but what we really need to do is have a grand Jubilee, and get back to a range of under ten to one, between the very richest and poorest people on earth. We also need to adopt one of the new measures of wealth, not the Gross Domestic Product, which includes war and reconstruction, car accidents, and chemotherapy. We don’t need to work for owners; even they have found that hired managers do a better job. When people are economically similar, co-ops are the natural business model. In Mondragon, and now in Argentina, they do everything that private businesses do elsewhere, just as well, except that they refuse to profit by spoiling their own neighborhoods, which distant owners often do. Most of what I know about the history of money is from a film I saw about five years ago, so I don’t have a tidy set of references handy. Sorry, but I’ll just have let folks look it up themselves if they want to disagree with authority. The Mondragon region of Spain was abandoned by the government, and the basques made their own rules. It should be easy to research, even though, most unusually, I got my information on that at the same film festival. - Bob of the North IMHO = The CEOs and Upper managers, who made millions of Dollars creating the Economic Bubble that has since burst should be the ones bailing us out. Seven years ago, when I went house hunting, my mortgage company tried to talk me into taking a loan of 250K, I said, no more than 100K. They tried to talk me into a varying rate, by offering No closing costs etc, I said No, 30 yr fixed. Obviously they talked a lot of others into it, and now *I* will have to pay for them even though I was more careful. It just burns My Ass to pay for the errors and arogance of others, while those who made the suggestions and pushed the poor decisions got filthy rich on it. - Faithy (a fiscally conservative - socially liberal - Independant Voter) Here’s the answer, with documentation and actual news articles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tZc8oH–o and http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=307149667289804&kw=cra - Allen in Grand Rapids, Michigan Re: Patty on Blindness Hi Patty, Robin Williams notes that G.W. Bush waved to Stevie Wonder, but sighted people get some unthinking remarks, too. A friend of mine rode a recumbent (sitting down, feet out front) bicycle on a long tour. Once, two nice ladies saw him at a stop light, and asked if he was handicapped. Straight-faced, he replied " Yes, I’m a paraplegic." As he pedaled away, they were remarking on his bravery for travelling, not his wit. The best of all might have been when he showed another woman a map of the U.S., with a big red line showing his progress. "Oh, that’s wonderful!" she enthused "And where are you now? "It takes considerable mental effort, plus some talent to imagine oneself in another’s situation, and a half-hearted effort yields some strange remarks. My blind friend Mike was out walking one night when he came to a sidewalk excavation. As luck would have it, there was a gap in the flashing barricades, and he walked straight through. After climbing out of a ten-foot hole, he went home and got cleaned up. At 8:00 the next morning, he called the City Works Department to complain. Perhaps the fellow there hadn’t had his morning coffee, because when Mike was about half through his story, he interrupted with "Well, if you’re blind, you shouldn’t be out walking at night!" - Bob of the North Re: Transgender Rights Bruce in Colorado wrote: “If you were going to be president, how secure would you be when you found out that your primary security person butt-f*cks chickens and enjoys the anal probes the aliens give him?” I don’t think the question should be “…how secure would you be …”, but rather “…how secure would you feel… “. Being a Bantam Bum Bumper shouldn’t make the person less capable. As long as it was common knowledge that the person had a predilection for backing into thermometers and broom handles in addition to their foul attraction to fowl fornication, they couldn’t be extorted or blackmailed into compromising security under fear of being outed. Unfortunately, public perception of the “bosses” capability, sanity, or suitability to hold their position would be questioned should such a hiring or job assignment be made. What goes on behind closed barn doors or in orbiting craft shouldn’t be a deciding factor in hiring, but it is. “PCness” rules over common sense in many cases; the potential employee suffers but the employer remains squeaky clean. - sied Okay, now about that guy who is a man and wants to have a sex change because he thinks he’s a lesbian? What kind of doctor would perform such an operation? The doctor has to be nuttier than the patient. I mean this guy doesn’t even think he’s a woman, he thinks he’s a lesbian? What a crock! Now this he/she goes for a job interview as a man, but tells the prospective employer that when he/she reports to work, he/she will be a woman? I’d throw his/her resume in the trash right then and there and say, "so sue me!" How weird do people have to get before we say "enough is enough!" A few years ago, they’d have sent the white coats after someone like that. Yes, the Library of Congress was right! Why the blank do they have to hire just any weirdo off the street just because he’s supposedly qualified? I worked for a small printing company for years and they would go through 50-100 applicants just to find a receptionist. I thought they were a bit picky myself, but apparently 49-99 of them could have sued for some reason or other because they were the ones who weren’t hired. But in this guy’s case, he needs to just get over it. If he’s going to act stupid and weird, then what else can he expect? This world is getting weirder and weirder every day and it seems to be increasing exponentially! This reminds me of when my Mom used to watch KISS on TV late at night. I was totally shocked! Here she was in her 70s watching KISS. She said they were so strange that it fascinated her. The world today is so strange it’s fascinating. Makes one wonder what will happen next! - Noella Re: Milk While people are worrying about the use of breast milk in restaurant dishes, I see different concerns mentioned. But my concern hasn’t been raised yet. I assume that human breast milk is going to be much more costly than the type you get by the gallon from cows. I’m sure there are some women valiantly pumping somewhere trying to make ends meet and this further exploitation is a concern to me. A greater concern is not an ethical question, but a question of greed. I have no idea how much milk it takes to make a large pot of cream soup for a restaurant. But I’m guessing it is more than a cup, which is about how much is expressed by mothers each time (after they get really good at it, less so at the beginning). So this is going to be not only time intensive (there is only so much ?on tap’ and one must wait for the refill to occur and what is happening to the baby in the meantime) but must take milk from several women. I’m not sure of the type of woman who sells breast milk to restaurants, but I’m going to guess that it isn’t your high end society matron. More likely it’s the crack whore who needs a hit and doesn’t care if she starves the baby or not. Or maybe drug addicts who probably hook on the side, further increasing the likelihood of HIV infection. All this is unsavory, to say the least. But I’m betting that restaurants may not be completely honest in their advertising. Maybe they are mixing human milk with cow’s milk at a specific rate. Maybe they are just using cow’s milk. Or maybe the price of their food is so high in order to pay for the ingredients (which will have to be higher than $4 per gallon) that no one can afford the ?delicacies’ they provide. If the price isn’t through the roof high, I’m guessing the quantity of human milk is very low. - Patti [Thanks for answering my question about how much milk a woman produces Patti. I assume that if this catches on the women would be treated like dairy cows. After the baby is put on a bottle the mothers keep producing milk as long as they are regularly milked. I won’t drink the stuff but I might go for owning a dairy! Milking time would be fun.] I can’t stand milk either. Mom said that once she took my bottle away, I refused to drink milk. Early on, I could have it with my cereal, but as I got older, I had to use too much sugar to kill the taste of milk. I looked at it one day and it looked like I was eating cereal with Eagles Brand Milk in it. That’s when I switched to OJ in my cereal. I don’t like shakes or ice milk, though I love malts and ice cream and even milk gravy and puddings. But if I knew that any of that was made with human breast milk, I’d probably upchuck it. And I absolutely could not tell anyone why. It’s just the thought of it. So I suppose I’m conditioned to eat what I don’t know about. I like balogna and sausage and I try not to think about what goes into it. I like chicken and beef, but I could never kill it myself and I could never work at a processing plant. I like scrambled eggs, but I try to not watch too much when they cook. I’ve watched movies and TV shows where people ate bugs, roaches, etc. I’ve never been that hungry that I would eat just anything. And even in the shows I have watched, many people had to physically overcome their disgust and distaste at eating such things just so they could stay alive. I think in the movie Grapes of Wrath, the old guy at the end is being nursed by a lady with a baby and he was probably glad for the nutrition. From what I remember, that was a great movie, it was a shame that they stopped half way through the book. Now even though I don’t like milk does drinking cow’s milk make more sense than drinking human milk? Not really. Cows milk is for baby cows and human milk is for baby humans. - Noella Lucille said, "I sure wouldn’t order yogurt in a restaurant that used human milk in its preparations." Since I don’t like milk I certainly don’t go for spoiled milk in any form. Cheese, yogurt, sour cream, etc. don’t even qualify as food. The only cheese I eat is pizza and cheese cake. But I don’t even want to look at yogurt. - Mike Faithy said, "…believe me, the egg whites comment was tame." Thanks for putting my mind at ease Faithy! - Mike |
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Disclaimer- All quotes printed in this publication are believed to be accurately attributed, but no guarantees are made that some incorrectly attributed, or even outright false quotes won’t get in here from time to time. I assure readers that I will do my best to weed out incorrect quotes, and will print a retraction as soon as I become aware of any errors. |
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