Saturday Report

We got off to a later start than I wanted but made it to the Columbus Hamfest before it was all gone. One guy had a very nice Deluxe model "Blue Racer" Vibroplex key, an older one (I haven't run the serial number yet) in a "custom carrying case:" a dark-painted cheesebox! We managed to find a price we both liked and it's mine now.

Spent time chatting with my friend Don, who maintains some very interesting radio equipment in even more interesting places.

Afterwards, Tam and I visited the Exit 76 Antique Mall. "Vast" is the only word that fits. A couple of hours in, we came around a corner to the main desk and I was thinking, "Whew! Made it before my legs gave out!" ...Um, no, we were just short of halfway through. There were several booths of old tools, a lot of interesting furniture and more dishware than you could ever hope to parse in a day -- then on the second half, Tam found all manner of militaria, from WW I lead soldiers to bayonets to Civil War arms; I even picked up a little folding tripod for my camera. And books...! A remarkable place. Visit if you dare. Bring money. Allow for extra time. Take frequent rest breaks; we did not and ended up regretting it as we limped out to my car.

By then we were fair starving; there was discussion of holding out until we got to the Chick-fil-A near Indy but hunger won out and we hit a nearby "Montana Mike" steak joint. Much better than I expected. They seem to have found a good balance -- you'd pay a lot more get any better steak. Service was fast, professional and friendly, an uncommon combination these days. and the place was packed! As we were leaving, a bunch of what appeared to be SASS shooters showed up -- ahh, Indiana!

Not too bad a way to spend a Saturday!

Saturday Miscellany

I'm off to the Columbus (Indiana) Hamfest -- an amateur-radio swapmeet.

In the meantime, there's a link at Retrotechnologist to an interesting collection of workshop tips and tricks. Enjoy!

Linguistic Patrol: The Acronymicon

See, here's the scene: y'drive your SUV vehicle up to the ATM machine; when you enter your PIN number while looking at the LED-diode illuminated LCD display,* it groans and clanks and spits out an ATM, where you punch in your PIN and get a big glob of cash that you stuff in your briefcase -- and then, I suppose, you put that little valise into a briefcase case, right?

::sigh::

I guess I'd better be just glad I was able to get home to my house without being chased by the IRS service or the IMPD department, 'cos it's not gonna get any better. Next thing you know, people will be writing in slang!
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* Many thanks to Dave H for pointing out this necessity in comments!

Presidential Choices

Not the dreadful menu of "one from Column A (again!) or one of four from Column C," or even the various a la cart improbables, the choice you make about 'em.

Tam, this morning, "It's to the point where you want Romney to win just so Teh Won doesn't -- but not quite enough to vote for him."

Me, I'd be happy if we never had another second-term President in my lifetime. They get up to too much mischief.

Good Food

And I didn't have to cook it! Last night, Tam and I went to Pei Wei Asian Diner, a fairly recent addition at Glendale shopping center. It's a chain restaurant, but don't hold that against them.

The food was plentiful, nicely presented and tasty. Tam ordered their Pei Wei chicken and I had sesame beef. We'd started with appetizers, hot & sour soup for Tam and a couple of very good pork egg rolls, which we split. When the food arrived, big oval bowls piled high, we realized we were outmatched: it was enough for four!

Tam's chicken was accompanied by carrots and pea pods, the beef had onion and red bell pepper, nicely prepared with the appropriate sauces, spicy for mine and sweet and sour for hers. She went with white rice -- traditional "sticky" rice; I had the brown rice, which was more of a challenge to eat with chopsticks. But the sauce was thick enough to compensate. (And yes, they do provide knives, forks and spoons if you prefer.)

Interior decor is, well, "Asian diner," verging on "space-age Japan," appropriate without being pretentious. The drinks machines were pure outer space, touchscreen controlled, with drilldown menues (selecting "Dr Pepper" calls up a submenu of plain, cherry and cherry-vanilla, for instance) and a freeform front panel.

The place was clean and comfortable. The food was good. They have beer. We will be back. It's got tables enough for a blogmeet; there was a party of 8 or 10 near our booth last night.

National Brotherhood Week!

Yeah, why not? Hooded sweatshirts have been politicized, tennis shoes/trainers were long, long ago and a whole generation of Americans took denim dungarees as their flag.

There is no damn thing you can be, do or wear that some other of your fellow nekkid apes won't take as an affront. --And it just gets worse from there.


Yep.

N.B.

In order to be a Good Samaritan, somebody's got to already be layin' in the ditch beat half to death when you happen by.

The Samaritan had better sense than to go following potential or possible beaters. Guys who do that are more akin to the folks in Matthew 6:5, prayin' on streetcorners, hopin' their Good Acts will be noticed.

Gibberish! Or, Roberta X Rants In Traffic

A bunch of dinosaur farmers, bulldoggers and recent claimers of hagship, with their hagseed yammering in the rear seat like performing polar bears on acid, vehicles inert as flies in frozen snot -- makes me feel like I've got a free lunch about to come up and for two pins, I'd lean over and heave it right through the nearest open car window! By jimbo, your distantest ancestors did not bother to invent the wheel so that you -- and you, too over there, Doctor Witling (somewhere Sherlock, having drained the tantalus and shot his needle's bolt, is trying to beat his brains out with a good briar pipe) -- could sit gawking at a green light until they went square! Wheels are to rrrrrroll. See the light? It's green! Grrrrrrreeeen!

I switched to the motorscooter to go fetch my prescription. At least on it, I already expect every driver to be an idiot. If I didn't have to carry a company laptop and a fancy digital-vid decoder tomorrow, I'd ride it to work. Why do the greater worries of a tiny two-wheeler add up to less stress?

The Victim Industry

Trayvon Martin's mother has trademarked the two most-used catchphrases that use her son's name.

Really don't know quite how to take that. It reminds me of a traffic-signal control box I pass on my way to work, which until recently had featured a tagger's symbol and a naughty word: They've been carefully painted out and "STAY CLASSY" has been scrawled across the thing in a contrasting hue.

Yeah, if only anyone bothered.

Fire Frank Straub: Update

It appears the City-County Council is considering climbing aboard the Fire Frank Straub bandwagon; he was initially approved by a 16-13 vote and he's up for reappointment with dim prospects of receiving a majority of approval votes.

It may not matter; our Mayor appoints the Public Safety Director and it is unclear what a disapproval vote from the Council even means -- and, loyal as a faithful dog, Mayor Ballard is reappointing Dr. Straub.

Let's see, the Public Safety department is $15 million in the hole, administrative salaries have more the doubled* and the number of actual policemen out there, you know, policing, has declined. Yeah, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie! Er, Frank.
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* Hey, did I tell you we got a 3% raise in my department? And darned happy to get it, too. Our first increase of any kind since 2007. Guess if I wanted to keep up with inflation, I should've gone to work for the government -- as an administrator.

Too Much Drama

I watch the news and look at the ijits all around me and I think, "Life is too short for this nonsense." And it is. It's all a bunch of noise and we have to go to sleep with it and wake up with it and fall to our knees and thank Fate or Heaven that we can go to a job with it, every damn day until we're too old to do it any more, at which point there's no distraction from the din at all.

And for the life of me, I don't know why.

Some Thoughts On the Martin/Zimmerman Mess

I tried to keep my fool mouth shut -- what do I know that those closer to the scene do not?

Anyone who tells you the outcome was anything but tragic is a fool or a villain.

Cries for lex talionis turn out, on closer inspection, to be calls for lex populii. Not a good idea and never has been; and yet the irony passes uncommented.

I find accusations of racism in Zimmerman's suspicion of Martin a bit overblown -- in my experience, the usual self-selected Neighborhood Watchman is suspicious of any unknown teenage male. And only slightly less so of everyone else.

On the other hand, had Zimmerman been black and Martin white, Zimmerman would probably be in jail right now. ...And if they'd both been African-American, would this have even made the news?

It is entirely normal, in a conflict between an adult and a teenager, to hold the adult to a higher standard -- and that is happening. In jail or out of it (there's a price on his head; where's he gonna run?), he'll be facing at least one grand jury and it will happen if there are marches and protests or not.

As for what happened, there's only one man who knows for sure; me, I am leaning towards "mutual and escalating panic." You know, at one time in most of the U.S., a busybody adult could ask a child or teen wandering by, "Do you live around here?" and the situation wasn't fraught with tension. We'd be better off looking for a way to bring that back, instead of letting loud voices mob everyone up into mutually-suspicious demographic subdivisions of our common humanity.