I was on the stationary bike in the gym yesterday, and a guy came in and sat on the bike next to me. "Let's race," I offered, which is rare because in general nobody in the gym talks to each other. But then we fell into conversation and it turned out that we were both from Gage Park. He was five years younger than me and lived at 52nd and Sacramento which is about a mile from where I grew up so it didn't seem like we'd have much in common, but then I remembered Bednar's butcher shop.
Maybe the shop was gone by then because he didn't remember it, but he did remember Old Man Bednar who had a big old house and kept chickens and other animals. He was wondering when Central Steel and Wire bought up the place. His name was Dory if that means anything.
What struck me about the paper jam article, was on the one hand you had the sure digital stuff, the circuit boards with their little programs and the metal stuff, and on the other hand you had the analog organic stuff, the paper, which had once been alive, or at any rate was made of something that once was alive, so no two sheets of paper, like snowflakes, were alike.
I don't know if Beagles or Old Dawg ever worked in an office but copy machines are big fucking deals. The smooth running of, in my case the state, depended on the smooth running of those little rollers and a paper jam put an immediate stop to that. The machine was pretty helpful, there were all kinds of codes that led to different parts of the machine you could open up to see where paper residue might be residing. And the article was right about it being a torture chamber for paper, what was left of the paper wasn't pretty, like a mad dog had had its way with it.
Polls and studies one of my pet peeves. There are rules for these things you know, ways to make them more or less accurate. But nobody pays any attention to that. They just grab the polls and studies that back up their viewpoint and sweep the others into their bottom drawers. If you had a little rudimentary knowledge of how the poll or study was conducted you would be able to gauge how accurate that might be. I once wrote to a couple of columnists who had different sides of an issue, both buttressing their arguments with study results but no details, about how important the details were they both responded that they didn't want to bore their readers.
As far as I know everybody still thinks that a reduction in the birth rate is a good thing, who now thinks it is a bad thing?
I don't think explaining to me what tanks the army is going to buy would make me any more eager to give the army more money, and I don't think me explaining the good work of social programs would make the republicans any more eager to fund them. The republicans get all pious when they are out of power about the deficit, but what they really mean is that they want to cut government social programs and the taxes that rich people pay to fund them, but they love to throw money at the army. They are also big on privatizing army services so maybe the best thing to do is consider the whole rest of the country a support system for the army,
Generally the people who join the army come from the lower classes which get the most of the social services that the republicans hate funding, but if they looked at it as providing cannon and parade fodder maybe they'd be more eager to fund them.
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