Really Good Quotes

Greetings, Quotaholics:

My wife says I have a “potty mouth”. She’s not referring to my breath, she’s talking about my language.

It’s not like I just walk around swearing all the time. Although the older I get the worse I seem to be. It’s just that the older I get the more things bug me and when I get bugged, or something doesn’t work like it should, I tend to let off a little steam.

I mean Edward G. Robinson might have been able to face a bad guy and say “You dirty rat!”. Me, I’m going to say something a lot worse!

And when the toilet breaks, I’m probably going to tell it what it’s full of. Little did I know that you could get arrested for that.

That’s right, a woman in Scranton, Pennsylvania was arrested for swearing at her overflowing toilet.

It seems her next door neighbor was an off-duty policeman. He heard her swearing through an open window and arrested her for disorderly conduct.

I would think that what you say in your own house is your business and apparently the judge in this case agrees. According to an article at Pennlive.com, the judge “…later found her not guilty, saying her language was constitutionally protected free speech.

She then filed suit and the city recently settled the suit for $19,000 (€15,065) and her legal fees.

So for once I agree with a judge. Not something you’re accustomed to me saying. But of course I always have to second guess myself. Was this a case of free speech? A person should be able to talk any way they want to in their own home, but does free speech end at the open window? What if children were in the area and heard her?

How about you? Do you watch the way you speak if there is a possibility that your neighbors could hear? Do you ever lose your temper and just not care if anyone else hears? Do you think this woman should have just been satisfied with being found not guilty? Does the lawsuit sound like an attempt to get some easy cash from the city?

&^$*@^%-ly,

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"Flying the airplane is more important than radioing your plight to a person on the ground incapable of understanding or doing anything about it." - Anonymous pilot

"The Piper Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you." - Attributed to Max Stanley (Northrop test pilot)

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything." - Alexander Hamilton

"The scars you acquire while exercising courage will never make you feel inferior." - D. A. Battista

"No emotional crisis is wholly the product of outward circumstances. These may precipitate it. But what turns an objective situation into a subjectively critical one is the interpretation the individual puts upon it–the meaning it has in his emotional economy; the way it affects his image." - Bonaro Overstreet

E-Mail the Imp

There’s little doubt that humans are getting bigger. Two hundred years ago a man who stood six feet tall was a big man, these days he’s merely average. Two hundred years ago a man who weighed two hundred pounds was heavy, these days he’s merely average. At least most of us describing a six foot, two hundred pound suspect to the police would say “he’s average height and weight.”

Much of our infrastructure, ranging from stadium seats to ambulances, is designed based on the “average” male or female size of fifty years ago or more. We’re simply much bigger now. Not only are we physically larger, there are many, many, more who are overweight for their larger body size.

I fall into that “too big for my body” group and I notice it when I go shopping for clothes. Twenty years ago the medium and large sizes were the first ones to be sold out. These days it’s the large and extra large sizes that fly off the rack the quickest.

This has lead to, and is leading to, accommodating bigger people with bigger things beyond clothing sizes. Doctors are using syringes with longer needles to make sure they get through the larger fat layers when giving butt shots.

Arenas and stadiums are being built with larger seats. Busses, planes, and trains are being designed with larger seats. Rides at amusement parks are being designed with larger seats. Ovens at crematoriums are being retrofitted with larger doors to handle the larger caskets made for bigger people. Fatter kids are even forcing school desks to be made larger.

In Germany, health chiefs are using cattle trucks to carry people weighing over 300 lbs. Existing ambulances fall apart too quickly hauling “fat folks” and specially widened and strengthened ambulances are just too expensive to buy merely to replace otherwise serviceable vehicles. To save money, health authorities in Munich are using open livestock transporters to save money. Patients are simply loaded on a flatbed truck and a tarpaulin thrown over them.

We know that there have been a few cases where walls have had to be demolished to get overweight people out of buildings so they could be transported to a care facility. In other cases, cranes have been called to lower patients out of buildings after knocking out windows. Others had to be laid on tarpaulins and dragged down stairs since they wouldn’t fit on gurneys.

We can’t expect all older buildings with narrow doorways, narrow stairwells, and no elevators to be retrofitted or replaced. Therefore the equipment to transport the overweight needs to be made available and methods to employ the equipment need to be standardized.

That means we’ll be seeing some new EMT skill training in the near future being made available at community Technical Schools. Crane operation and CPR training could be a new skill set. Forklift operation and EEG monitoring could be another. Wall demolition and door widening would be an invaluable skill set also, when combined with tarpaulin transportation of patients.

New equipment will appear in the future along with ambulances. These items will all be tricked out with lights and sirens just like ambulances. Flatbed trucks with nested forklifts and sliding canopies, all equipped with standard ambulance monitoring equipment. (Equipment would include heavy duty, and probably motorized gurneys. [Smaller versions of commercial power lifts]) Cranes with heavy duty slings instead of hooks. Auxiliary equipment vehicles with air compressors to operate, saws, drills, and power hammers as standard equipment to widen doors and knock down walls.

The Bad Sied 

Speak right up!

Kristen was unable to write today.  She’ll be back Wednesday.

At the last bakery where I worked we had an absolute beast of a ‘floor scrubber’ which nearly everyone was scared to use. It ripped up any loose floor tiles and flung them around like shrapnel. The torque reaction when you switched it on spun the unprepared user around in a circle, usually tangling them in the cable, with their hand still locked around the operating trigger in a death grip as they tried to wrestle it to a standstill. It was hilarious to watch until some poor unsuspecting idiot knocked his shoulder against a corner of the table as he went down and was off work for three weeks. If it had been his head he’d probably have been fine.

I coped with it okay on the few occasions I used it, but only because I did the terribly unmanly thing of reading the the safety sticker that told you to ’start it leaning back and progressively bring the scrubbing disc into contact with the floor’. But, as the Boss said, “I’m not paying you a craftsman’s wages to clean floors. That’s what I hire a ‘grunt’ for.”

The fellow who became a maestro with it was the ‘Saturday Lad’, a skinny little 14 year old who probably weighed less than the machine. After picking himself up following the initial ‘fling of death’ he quickly learned to work with it instead of trying to wrestle it into submission. He’d let the torque pull it across the floor and just gently direct it. The little showoff could even use it one handed He would have made a great advert for the product.

We also had a superb bit of Norwegian machinery which would suck water and ‘gloop’ from the floors. Like an Aqua-Vac on steroids If you put the nozzle against your palm it required serious effort to pull it free and would leave a circular welt that lasted an hour or more.

I sometimes used it - against orders - to help unbung the drain in my ‘veg shed’ where I peeled tons of spuds for pasty fillings. The dirt and fine spud peelings from the ‘rumbler’ would eventually form an impenetrable barrier in the drain, causing the floor to flood.. The Norwegian ’sucker’, nicknamed Sonya for some reason, was invaluable. It certainly beat putting on the big rubber gloves and digging the mess out by hand. There you go, a glimpse into the ‘Darker Side’ of Food Trades.

Gyppo

Now doesn’t that make you want to sit by the fireplace and curl up with a book of “Gyppo stories?” I own most of his books (we’re in negotiations over his latest one), and I have to say, the time his stories take off your mind is priceless. I don’t think about work when I’m reading about his life battles. It’s the perfect getaway if you can’t afford to actually get away.

I’d give you the link to his site or the one to where you can buy his books, but that would make this a commercial advertisement and might put RGQ in violation of the CAN-SPAM act. That would be a pity.

Wait, that means I get time off. Bruce, sorry, I’m going with it.

Tim a’Musing
Having a Ball with Gyppo’s Yarns

Funny stuff here, and the make-ups gave us a bunch.

Next opening line…
The Halloween goblins do scare…

Hints:  Here’s a great new rhyming/composition tool.  http://www.writerhymes.com/
There’s also a great rhyming dictionary at http://www.rhymezone.com/
Limerick rules.  http://freespace.virgin.net/merrick.sheldon/limerickrules.htm 

Submit Opening Line
Submit Limerick

Mike, You had me up to the point you said: But doesn’t it seem, to you, that anyone who would treat a dead patient like this might be capable of abusing a live patient?

Yes, Mike, and it is true that someone who appears to be a perfect neighbor might be a serial killer. I have one next door to me, a perfect neighbor that is. Doesn’t it seem to you that he might be a serial killer? - Mike from Florida
[I suppose it’s possible.  Does he talk about fava beans a lot?]

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