February 2011 Random Thoughts

Once a month or so, I clear out some of the content on my Running Commentary, Random Thoughts, and 12 Notes pages and place them here on the main page to make room for fresh content on those pages.  This is the content from February’s 2011 Random Thoughts.  Enjoy!

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It seems that Cairo’s Tahrir square, the scene of Anti-Mubarak riots over the past week, has turned into a giant mosh pit, with rocks thrown, knives and the like used, and molotov cocktails thrown.  Seems that the interior ministry people/Police/pro-Mubarak citizenry have decided to stand together to try and beat the crap out of the anti-Mubarak forces.  Can’t tell if the military is moving in quite yet, but one presumes if things get too hairy they will. (2/2)

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Anagram:  Hosni Mubarak/ Ask a Bum, Rhino/ Oh, I Snub Karma/ Has Run Akimbo/ Ambush Our Mink/ Honk As I Rumba/ Hunk Ambrosia (2/2)

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Staten Island Chuck, the New York groundhog, predicts that winter will end early, according to Mayor Bloomberg.  I predict winter will end when Spring begins, and not a moment sooner.  Snow and ice every week in New York until then. :)  (2/2)

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I begin training at the part time job tomorrow.  $15 an hour to do actual work, when I’ve been sitting on my ass since mid november sounds pretty good to me.  Wondering whether this is the right thing to do though, part time work I mean, but I’ll find out soon enough if that is the right way to go.  Not to mention how well I handle working printers and machines for the first time in nearly 2 years, when I walked away from it, and was happy to leave all the crap it dealt me for 2 decades.  Wish me luck! (2/2)

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Awake at 5:40 am, after having a few months of staying awake until 3 am.  Went to sleep early last night, didn’t sleep all that well.  Still feel good though, I go to earn money today, and it’ll be more than Unemployment would make me.  THAT feels good, THAT makes it worth it.  (2/3)

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If I knew what I was going to write, I would not have written this.  But I knew I was going to write this at some point, so even though I didn’t know I was going to write this, I knew I was going to write this.  (2/4)

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Anagram: Super Bowl Forty Five/ Overpower By Fistful/ Few Bury Profits, Love…/… Or Buy Twelve Ripoffs/ Low Poverty Is Buffer/ Liberty Offers Up Vow (2/5)

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I sent out a number of resumes yesterday, about 7 or 8.  I went to work today, I was there from 8 til 4:30.  Kinda slow today at the office, so on my new phone, I went through some job listings there.  If they’re gonna work me part time once I finish training , I’m gonna use free time there looking for work elsewhere.  I’m not going to sit on my ass and do nothing for myself, and I’m not going to be obvious and make it easy for them to get rid of me by looking for work on their computers.  This is me being subtle.  Nice.  (2/7)

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I’m looking at taking some free writing courses.  Not sure which ones to take, and which ones are the best, and which are absolute crap.  If ya know any good ones, clue me in, drop me a line, let me know. (2/7)

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I looked behind me.  And smiled.  It’s February 8th, and my Christmas tree is still up!  Nice!  Gotta take it down soon though, the damned thing takes up space that could be used for other purposes, like, oh… I dunno… furniture.  Novel concept.    (2/8)

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The New York Rangers lost their fifth in a row.  Guess it’s that time of year, the Rangers Annual February Swoon is underway.  Henrik Lundqvist lost three games in a row, no blowouts, tight losses, and John Tortorella, genius that he is, not realizing the storm that is blowing in, decided to bench one of the best goalies in the league, with the team suffering from a lack of scoring (which is what causes the annual swoon)  and guess what?  Two more losses with the backup Biron starting! NEVER SAW THAT ONE COMING, DID WE, JOHNNY ROCKET?  The man is a Jackass. He made the swoon worse by putting the #2 in where the #1 would have gotten at least 1 victory, and probably two.  Moron.  (2/8)

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I got enough sleep, I have coffee in my system, so why do I feel like I’m not ready to go today?  Today’s no different from any other day, but it feels like it is for some reason.  Dammit.  Probably has to do with me being a lethargic non working out, non runner.  That I am hoping to fix soon.  (2/9)

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Joe Scarborough is an idiot.  (2/10)

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Sitting here drinking coffee at 7:45 in the morning, getting ready to go food shopping and then do laundry. Feh.  I went out last night, had a few beers with one of the guys from 814.  I was hoping to get some kind of update on the e-mail I sent to a union recruiter (who I wont name because he doesn’t know I’m writing about him here) but he wasn’t there.  So I hung out, drank beer, caught up with the one guy (who goes unnamed as well for the same reason as given before) on the things that are going on at Sotheby’s.  Had fun.  (2/12)

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Last nights beer was also the reason I didn’t write last night.  Even though I only had a few, it would have affected the writing, negatively, and I don’t want that.  I can write shitty on my own, without the help of any alcohol.    (2/12)

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 Tits, Tits, Tits, Tits,Tits . (2/13)

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It’s valentines day, and I have that damn bankruptcy thing running through my skull.  Came back from there a while ago, and found out that I need still more stuff, pay stubs from my last job, and 6 months of my wifes earnings, for the means test.  The woman I am working with on this says I can’t file if I don’t have them. 

I don’t have them.  Dammit.

I’ll find them, I just hope it doesn’t take too long.  (2/14)

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I’m not gonna let it get me down though, not on Valentine’s day.  Love my wife, love her very much, and i’m not going to let this crap get me down, don’t want this raining on our parade.  Oh HELL no.  We gonna have us some FUN tonight!    (2/14)

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6:15 am: Been listening to Joe Scarborough for the last 10 minute pontificate on a subject of which he knows nothing, aka the budget.  I tried to focus very hard on playing games on the computer before I go to work, but the stupid worked its way to my ears.  I’ll keep saying it until it stops being true; Joe Scarborough is an idiot.  (2/16)

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8:50 pm:  I’m currently listening to Bach’s’ Brandenburg concerto #1, mostly for the joy of the music itself, but with headphones on, it allows me to drown out the crap on the TV that my wife is watching behind me.  Some stupid crap with unhealthy looking people cursing at each other.  Something about things being repossessed.  The epitome of crap tv, and my wife loves it… argh!  (2/16)

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Loving the left right war going on in Wisconsin.  Best bit?  The right has to bus people in to make their arguments.  Not enough locals on the right to make their voice heard.  One wonders where all the people who voted for that union busting prick Walker went.  One wonders. (2/19)

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Took my wife to the hospital a little while ago.  She’s thought something was wrong, but it seems she’s OK.  That’s all I’m saying, and I’m happy to say it as well. (2/19)

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Sore.  Tired.  Beat. Right ankle stiff, right elbow stiff, left calf sore.  One of my toenails wants to fall the hell off.  All this and I just woke up.  Ooof is a good way to put that.  Sleep 7 hours and wake up feeling like you got hit by a train.  Lucky for me I was sleeping, had I been doing anything else, that shit might have killed me!   (2/20)

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Mind you the ankle, elbow, and toenail thing are ongoing issues… but C’mon.  This is why drugs were invented.  Maybe I need to go do some. (2/20)

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Anagram:  President’s Day/ Sparsity Ended/ Sidestep Randy/ Daisy Pretends/ Ed’s Tardy Penis/ Sainted Red Spy/ Pay Deist Nerds/  I’d Pet Nerdy Ass/ Yep, Sadist Nerd (2/21)

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Been playing games a lot with the spare time I’ve had over the last two days.  On-line games.  Pogo games, facebook games.  Ya know, bullshit.   (2/25)

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Woke up too damn early today, but I have coffee in me now, so I’m ready and …tired as hell.  I was going to say raring to go, but I couldn’t be that full of shit at this point in my day.  Not yet, anyway…  OK, I could, but I choose not to be.  We’ll that is a bunch of bullshit to, guess I could’ve just lied to begin with and saved myself the trouble.    (2/25)

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Gotta pay some bills and hope I have enough in the bank to pay the rent afterwards.  Love the dread that accompanies that. 

THIS is a reason some poor people question capitalism, not because they are philosophically opposed to it or anything, it just sucks for the people on the short end of the stick, and they look elsewhere for relief.  The people on the other end of the stick, not seeing a reason to complain, come up with handy-dandy rationales to explain away the issues those who aren’t doing well, like they don’t work hard enough, or they complain too much, or are on drugs, or some such idiocy.

And thus are created social rifts that cannot be breached.  Maybe if the rich idiots tried to help rather than talk while we work in vain to meet our goals, we’d all get someplace better.  Rich people can be such pretentious assholes.  (2/26)

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Anagram:  Baseball Season/ Label As Ass Bone/ Asses Blab Alone/ Babes All Season/ No Saleable Bass/ Anal Babe Losses (2/27)

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I haven’t spoken to the people over at the place where I’m part-time working at since Wednesday.  So I am back to the full-time job search.  I am using a slightly different method this time. 

First; look at jobs I do on Careerbuilder.com. 

Second;  pick one job, apply.  After that it gives a list of similar jobs, and offers you the chance to quick apply to them. 

Third; apply to just about everything on that list.  I used to be picky, or pickier anyway.  Using this method, in the last 2 days doing this, I have applied for 68 jobs. 

What the hell, why not?

Next step is to go to craigslist and look there.  That is where I found the part-time gig after all, maybe they have something permanent for me.  After that I’m going to hit Hotjobs, and USAjobs. Then I’ll cross my fingers and hope I get a callback, and begin the search anew tomorrow.  (2/28)

Life Is…

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

John Lennon

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Viddy of the day: Tahrir Sq reacts to resignation.

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A happy time for the Egyptian people.  The people who stood firm in their defiance of the government, who stood for liberty, and against injustice, and who were just looking for a better life have gotten what they asked for.  And happily it didn’t turn into a major bloodbath.  Many people thought it would, myself included.  Twice happy.

It remains to be seen if they will get what they actually want, which is freedom, liberty, and the help they need to make sure that their society and nation become stronger, both in terms of  freedoms and in terms of economic opportunities.  Most people, both here and there, just want  a job so they can earn their daily bread, and build some kind of life for themselves and their families.  The government in Egypt failed to do that for them, and for years gave not a damn about anything but themselves.

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Life is a four letter word.

Lenny Bruce

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A happy time for the Egyptian people.  But it begs a question.  If all you have to do to get rid of a sitting government is show the resolve to take anything that government throws at you for 3 little old weeks, including the occasional ass kicking, why didn’t we do this when George Bush was being a prick, destroying our economy and sending us to war under false pretenses in Iraq?

And it was Bush that damaged the economy.  Lots of people blame president Obama for the economic mess we’re in, but if he didn’t inherit a boatload of shit from Dubya, he wouldn’t have had to spend like he did to pull the sorry excuse of a business community out of the shitter.  Life would have been much easier for everyone without Bush’s stupid economic policies. It was under his watch, for example, that the net capital rule was relaxed by his SEC chair, which led directly to the economic collapse of 2008, whose effects, including massive unemployment (THANKS FOR THAT, REPUBLICANS) we are still living through. 

You always get the right answer AFTER you need the damn thing.

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Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.

Samuel Johnson

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A happy time for the economy recently.  Looks like all the work of the last two years is beginning to pay dividends.  Consumer sentiment is higher than it has been since may of last year, when numbers were higher than any time since the Bush economic collapse of 2008. The trade gap increased, which sucks, but the main reason for that is oil imports.  All other portions of our international trade are looking good.  We imported over  $3,000,000,000  less in all other commodities in January than we had the month before.  That’s impressive. 

The lowest total in new jobless claims in two and a half years came out last week.  Wholesalers are building up their inventories.  Sales are up, as indicated by both last weeks red book numbers and the ICSC Goldman store sales numbers.  The DJIA is up over 12000 points, the S&P is sitting over 1300 points. 

49,000 manufacturing jobs created in January.  28,000 retail trade jobs created in January.  1,000,000 jobs added to the economy during 2010. 

Nice.

Life is good.

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Just One Fix

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A happy time for me.  I’m back to running again.  I’m playing guitar everyday.  I have a job, even if it is part-time, and I hate the work (went a bit overboard writing about that yesterday)  it’ll pay the bills tho, and that’s what it’s there for.  I’m getting the bankruptcy proceeding in gear.  Getting a few bucks back from the IRS.  The future looks somewhat brighter than it has in a long time.  It isn’t a bright sunny future just yet, but it isn’t the bleak, dark thing that it has been for most of the last 2 years.

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That is all for me for now, America.  I’ll write to you later.

Impending Civil War?

Impending Civil War? One wonders…

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Viddy of the day: Should US Aid Egyptian Protestors?  Zbigneiw Brzezinski makes some valid points here.  But there are other points, other viewpoints.

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We the people have legitimate demands and we would like to tell the government what to do. Our freedom is not up for negotiation. Secondly how can you negotiate with a regime that is killing its people? When the regime tries to counter a peaceful demonstration by using thugs, some of whom are police officers in plain clothes – we’ve seen their IDs – there are few words that do justice to this villainy and I think it can only hasten that regime’s departure.

Mohamed El Baradei

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Hosni Mubarak is not going to step down.  He will hand some power to V.P. Suleiman,  and alter the Constitution, but he refuses to step down. I watched the reaction of this by the crowds at Tahrir square.  They were angry.  Angry as hell.  The crowd went from cheering Mubarak’s leaving, which is what was expected, to barking at him in unbridled anger. 

Part of the reason Mubarak didn’t step down was because he did not want to be seen as hearing ”foreign dictations“.  For all the talk that the United States has said nothing here, they are presumably talking enough to the Egyptian power putting in O.T. working the phones and all the people they can to get things worked out smoothly that President Mubarak felt the need to call them out publicly for it.

Or do you think he was talking about Burkina-Faso? Upper Mongolia maybe?

There will be massive demonstrations tomorrow. Count on it.   The news reports also say that there may be a crackdown by the army if things don’t quiet down.  The expectation is that there’s gonna be war, and it’s gonna be a bloody mess.  There was word from AlJazeera TV that some number of the protesters actually went to an army base to make sure they knew exactly how the people felt.  No word on how that went. The commentator didn’t make any additional comment beyond that.  Dammit. 

All a freedom loving American can do is wish the protestors luck, and make one simple statement to the Mubarak regime. 

The whole world is watching.

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More later, perhaps.  I’m thinking of adding a new page, might, might not.  We’ll see.

News From Egypt

You hear a lot about the people in the Islamic brotherhood as far as the revolution in Egypt is concerned.  An awful lot of it, over 20,000 stories on google that mention them.  Perhaps too many, seeing how the Islamic Brotherhood have only a small presence in Egypt and are something of a fringe group their.  Not that they have no effect, but they were not the ones calling for the protests, they didn’t call for a general strike, and they were not the ones calling for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. 

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There are a number of groups that have done all of this, the most prominent of them, at least the one that has gotten the most face time is a group called the April 6 movement.  They are the ones that called for the initial protest this January 25th, and they have gotten more people out than other protests that have happened in Egypt under Mubarak.  And they are now calling for another general strike, only this one will last, they say, until President Mubarak resigns. 

The protesters have doubled down, they know they have no other way to go, and are now willing to stand until this is done, no matter how it ends.

Former international atomic energy agency head Mohamad El Baradei initially headed up the protests in the city of Giza, but after Friday headed to Cairo to lead there, and he has called for President Mubarak to step down, and is very much speaking like the man who would be President. He has spoken with force, saying he is the man to lead the nation into Democracy, and is in talks to form an interim government with what is called a shadow parliament.

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There have been many reports of looters running rampant in the streets of Cairo and other cities.  A great many stories are out that have the looters pegged as a combination of interior ministry agents, policemen, and prisoners, who were released with the express mission of causing havoc in the streets with the police and the Interior ministry members, to stir fear in the hearts of the people. 

The people have responded with neighborhood patrols armed with whatever they can get their hands on, knives, clubs, guns if they can get them.  They have improvised defenses against the looters, and communications between neighborhoods, using everything they can, including megaphones that are normally used during prayers.

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The Military seems to have worked peacefully with the protesters, at least so far.  But that doesn’t mean the Military is going to play nice with the protesters.  Word is, that the Military are moving barricades into positions, moving tanks into positions, to try to limit access to the main meeting place in Cairo, Tahrir square, where protesters have been congregating as their central meeting point since the police day protests began last week. 

The police, on the other hand, who were beaten back by the protesters over the last few days, are only now beginning to come back. 

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 Those who want news straight from the source, straight from Egypt, would do well to go to either AlJazeera english, or the website of the Egyptian Newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. 

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That’s it from here, America.  I’ll write to you tomorrow