The Suit

 Working at the House of Chin I thought I had it made.  The hours were convenient, I got a meal of good Chinese food with every shift.  I could drink on the job and off the job my fellow bartenders would only charge me for a beer if the owner was in the bar.  Tending bar was not that much different from just hanging with my friends.  People would ask are you going to do this the rest of  your life, and I would say sure why not?

But then one day I looked in the mirror and the answer was, no, I don't want to.  I went to the local junior college and got a junior degree in data processing because everybody was hiring computer programmers.  A few days after I graduated I wrote my first resume (what was with that?) and bought a suit.  I went out to a fancy store and there was some salesman helping me out and I came out of the store wearing this.

Pretty swift hey?  I thought so.  But none of those bosses I had heard would grab up programmers like banana bunches thought so despite my snappy resume and way cool three piece suit.

My younger sister lived in San Francisco and I thought sure they would snap me up there and I spent a week there going to offices and handing out that snappy resume to bored teenage girls who were courteous enough to wait for me to leave the room before they tossed it into the wastebasket and went home defeated.

But wait a week after I got back, a phone call came from a headhunter, evil, evil, Tamara Baum.  She had just the job that was the perfect fit for me and she knew they would hire me and, and all I had to do was get over to their office in that cool blue three piece suit and I would have that job as quick as a cat can wink her eye.

I had spent half my savings to make that first trip and now I spent the other half to go out to the golden state again.  I remember, I remember, walking those fancy downtown San Francisco sidewalks surrounded by people who were wearing suits just like me.  Was I like one of them?  Could they tell that I was just a beer guzzling ex hippie, just a sow's ear trying to pass for a silk purse?

I girded my loins, so to speak and walked into some glassy skyscraper and was walking out again in about half an hour.  The job was nothing like evil Tamara Baum had said it would be, and they had never had any intention of hiring me.  

Buncha jagoffs.

Who Knew?

 Finally, something worth writing about!  Silly me, I have always thought that "jagoff" and "jackoff" were different variations of the same word.  After all these years, I have discovered that they are two distinctly different things. It just goes to show that you are never too old to learn something new.

About that other thing, it reminds me of an old joke:

A man who worked in Washington, DC and lived in the suburbs found that all traffic was gridlocked during his morning commute.  After sitting there for a while, he saw somebody walking down the line of stalled cars, stopping briefly at each one.  When the man came alongside him, he asked him what was going on.

"A bunch of terrorists have kidnapped the entire US Congress and are holding them for ransom.  They say that, if the ransom is not paid by noon today, they will douse the whole group with gasoline and set them on fire.  Would you like to make a contribution?"

"I don't know. How much is everybody else contributing?"

"On average, about two gallons."

A Great American

 If those jagoffs in the House stop trying to shut our government down, and fully support Ukraine, then I will save democracy by wearing a suit on the Senate floor next week.  https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4214013-fetterman-says-hell-wear-a-suit-to-avoid-shutdown/

So spoke a Great American yesterday.  

What did we hippies accomplish?  We like to think we ended the unpopular Asian war, but I think that that is too far a reach.  We had great music, but of course not everybody likes our music, and I guess I am a bit prejudiced because every generation likes the music of their youth.  But we did make it so that many Americans no longer had to put on the uncomfortable, stifling, suit and tie to go to work.  

Suit and tie, the very mention makes my skin crawl.  A waste of money and of time, and oh, that stifling thing too: don't want to wrinkle those creased pants, don't want to get any mustard on that stiff stuffed shirt, don't want to scuff those shined shoes.  Fuck it all, fuck it all, fuck it all.

Maybe it is a stretch to connect suits and ties and lack thereof to hippies but it was a time of freedom and before it almost everybody had to wear suits and ties to go to work, and anymore it is just lawyers and bankers, and hopefully not politicians anymore.

Oh and he called the clown car of the Trumpy house of reps jagoffs. I am sure that that word was a part of all of our lexicons growing up in Chicago.  Jagoff this, jagoff that, just fun to throw around.  But as I grew older I noticed that nobody around me was using it anymore.  People were still saying mother fucker and asshole, but nobody was saying jagoff.  Maybe it was a Chicago thing.

A trip to the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagoff and apparently  it is also a Pittsburgh thing, hence its use by the Great American.  There is some discussion there also about the mixup with the term jack off, but we won't get into that this morning.

And then one has to ask why is this clown car getting so upset by a guy wearing a hoodie and shorts while they are sitting on their hands while Putin is trying to eat Ukraine?  Oh well you know, they have a deep patriotic urge to save us from the national debt (which their idol, Trump, ballooned by spending like a drunken sailor and giving a big fat tax cut to the rich), and they are making their point by shutting down the government (which will cost us dough and increase the national debt).

Buncha jagoffs

history of science

 I went down to the park to where I took a walk carrying a piece of cake (red velvet) but there were no ducks on the pond let alone a red one.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, Uncle Ken hates blank space, so I am making an entry here.  It is one of those meandering pieces where I don't know exactly what my point will and am writing until it comes up so if you have better things to do you can just shine it on. On the other hand it is pretty short. 

Picked up this odd duck of a book at the Newberry Library book sale this July, Critical Problems in the History of Science edited by Marshall Clagett.  Big fat book, three bucks, but half that if you bought it on a Sunday which I did. 

The history of science is a subject which interested me when I was subbing and thinking seriously of actually becoming a teacher.  I am a big fan of science but the way they were teaching it appalled me.  It was just like a bunch of facts: three states of matter, Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun, amebas reproduce by dividing.  How do we know this?  Never mentioned.

When you are teaching something and there is a going to be a quiz afterwards you tend to teach what can easily be tested with the focus here on the multiple choices: 3, 5th, dividing.  Those horrible textbooks had a whole section full of little recaps and sample quizzes to guide you to what was really important so that the student could get a good grade on the test and pass the course and move on to the next grade.  There was no time for discussion or speculation.  Just the facts Ma'am.

But how do we know this crap, how did they discover it all?  What discovery led to another discovery?  Here is interesting stuff, but you know it is hard to dissect that stuff so that it fits into multiple choices.

To be continued.

Heads up...

The red duck swims at midnight; do nothing.  Pass it on.

 

 

brave new world

 Well good for you Beagles I thought after I read his post.  They are always out to get us aren't they?  We are no longer at the top of our game anymore and sometimes looking at oh popular culture these days with all those crazy social media and people somehow making a damn good living just by doing something with it, and the goofy looking people with the goofy names, why we don't even know what is going on anymore.  

And that name, CRASHDOCS.ORG, doesn't that sound like something that a bunch of smart alecky lads in Lagos thought up?  And why do you have to go to these guys to get the police report?  Crazy Man crazy.  I would have done the same thing Beagles did.

So I googled it just to read about their criminal nature.  And shit, apparently they are legit.  They work with the police even.  What kind of world is this?

That credit union guy, maybe it sounded fishy to him too, or maybe he didn't care. If somebody thinks they need to change their number, better to be safe than sorry.  Don't want to discourage this activity that likely saves the credit union big bucks. 

In the hot weather I take my walks along the lake, less shade from the sun but that good old lake breeze makes up for that.  But last week it was cooler than usual and I started walking west.  Ukrainian Village.  Did a lot of subbing in that area back in the day and it always seemed a pleasant neighborhood.  Most of the residential buildings are two or three stories, chock a block with each other, allowing only narrow dark gangways of mystery.  Appeals to my urban nature.  Interspersed on the solid blocks are a bunch of those awful new two or three story condo buildings in unpleasant modern style, but plenty of those good old buildings are still hanging in there just fine.  Just like us, good buddies.

Walking back on one of these walks I came by way of the Fulton meat market, hadn't been by there in a few years.  Beagles, the son of a butcher I am guessing is familiar with the district.  Big beefy guys with cigs dangling from the corners of their mouths hauling big slabs of beef out of humming refrigerated trucks and into squat old buildings whose big doors slam shut after them, and one suspects that all kinds of unspeakable things happen to the the slab of beef that the beefy guys slam onto some sort of steel table, but we sure do love that Italian beef when the bored teenage girl slaps it down on the counter don't we?

Anyway, that is not the way it looked twenty  years ago.  The expensive restaurants were moving in back then, something terribly cutting edge about having your glitzy restaurant smack dab in the middle of those grimy abattoirs.  And right on the heels of the trendy restaurants came the even trendier bars with their hard-eyed purple-haired barmaids.

The guys with the beef on their shoulders were getting nervous.  The big tough brute is no match for the snotty hipster with the big fat wallet.

And now the beefy guys are all gone.  Randolph Street is nothing but restaurants and bars.  In the streets to the north and south where the warehouses were are cloud buildings.  I am speaking of that mysterious cyber space where it seems that everything is going on today.  Nothing cloudy about the buildings.  They are huge devoted to oh computer crap as we oldsters call it.  The skyscrapers were built downtown because space was at a premium and you had to build up.  But there is plenty of space in the old Fulton Market so these buildings spread out to cover whole city blocks, maybe about     stories tall and ultra modern I guess, something science-fictiony about them. Mostly young people on the streets, doing the mysterious things that young people do these days to afford to live in those brand new condo buildings. 

Who are these people?  What is this city?  To quote Ross Perot's VP running mate, the admiral.  "Who am I?  What am I doing here."

I Dodged a Scam

On August 20, I was involved in a little scrape in the Walmart parking lot.  I didn't even know about it until a cop came looking for me in the store.  He took my contact information for his records and let me go on my way.  The damage to my vehicle was minimal, and I never even met the other driver, nor have I heard from him since. When I got back to my truck, I found a card by my window that said: "Get your police report at CRASHDOCS.ORG after 5-7 business days." 

I went to the site later for my report.  I should have known there was something fishy about that site, but I didn't at first.  After filling out some forms, it said that I had to pay them a dollar to get my report.  I guess I should have stopped right there, but the charge seemed reasonable, so I gave them my card numbers.  When I clicked my last click, it said that they couldn't give me my report due to an error in their system.  I thought about trying to get my dollar back, but I was tired of this game, so I just quit the site and went to have a cigarette.  During my break, it occurred to me that they probably didn't care about the dollar, they just wanted to get my numbers.... Duh!

Our credit union, which issued my card, has 24-hour hot line, which I called post haste.  They told me that this was a common scam and offered to block my card immediately, to which I agreed.  First thing next morning, I called our local credit union, and they said I would get a new card in the mail.  All's well that ends well, I guess, but I should have been more careful in the first place, which I resolved to be in the future.

Happy now?

 

Pentagon releases new website on UFOs

BY BRAD DRESS - 08/31/23 5:46 PM ET

SHARETWEET

A mock ‘Unidentified Flying Object’ (UFO) and three mock aliens are pictured in a garden in Jacobsdorf near Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, Friday, June 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

The Defense Department on Thursday released a new website that will provide official declassified information on UFOs, including pictures and videos, for the public to easily parse through.

The website is the official page for the public to interact with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a relatively new Pentagon office tasked with reviewing and analyzing UFOs.

The site appears to still be under construction, but it can be found here. The Hill has reached out to the Defense Department for more information about when the full website will go live.

The U.S. government, which now refers to UFOs by the name of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), has taken the presence of unknown flying objects more seriously in the past few years, as has Congress.

In a Thursday release about the website, the Pentagon said it was “committed to transparency with the American people on AARO’s work” on UAPs.

“This website will serve as a one-stop shop for all publicly available information related to AARO and UAP,” the release reads, “and AARO will regularly update the website with its most recent activities and findings as new information is cleared for public release.”

The AARO website will allow the public to review photos and videos of UAPs as they are declassified and will publish reports, press releases and a “frequently asked questions” section about the phenomena.

Users can also find available aircraft, balloon and satellite tracking sites on the page.

In the fall, AARO intends to create a contact form for former U.S. government employees or others with knowledge of federal government programs to easily submit a report if they have relevant information related to UAPs.

Since its inception in 2022, AARO has investigated about 800 UAPs. Some of the phenomena have innocuous explanations, but many others remain mysterious and unexplained.

UAP interest grew this year after former intelligence official David Grusch claimed the Pentagon is covering up evidence related to extraterrestrial craft and lifeforms. Grusch was unable to provide evidence at a House hearing this summer.

And here it is: https://www.aaro.mil/

Click on the CASES on the bottom.  Pretty cool stuff.  But don't panic.