Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 266

Closing the door on June (2007)…

Well, with this morning’s update from the archive, we can finally close the door on June 2007. I have to admit, there’s at least one pretty good rant in there. It’s always reassuring to find that my opinions about people and life haven’t really changed that much in the last six years. I’m a big fan of consistency and I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been nothing if not consistant over the intervening years. Seriously, if I’d have posted it as “new,” I’m pretty sure no one reading would know the difference. Maybe my style has improved slightly with lots and lots of practice, but other than that, the sentiment is right on target.

I did notice that one of the archive updates slipped through into my “regular” feed and is showing up on Facebook and Twitter. I usually try to avoid that so you’re not getting spammed with six “new post” notices every Sunday morning, but in this case, I think I’ll let it stand. If you have any love for Johnny Cash, the Army, America, or some combination of the three, it’s worth a watch. And with that, I now return you to your previously scheduled Sunday activities already in progress.

Fooling myself…

After a day of working in the yard, doing laundry, running errands, and making a passing effort at starting dinner, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we’ve entered that time of year where some activities are going to have to get thrown over the side. I’ve talked before about some of the unique challenges of being a one man show, but the simple fact is if there isn’t enough time to get to everything, the stuff I don’t particularly like doing is going to be put off indefinitely – I’m looking at you here vacuuming, mopping, and dusting. Frankly, I never much liked you anyway and since you’re in head-to-head competition with working in the yard, you never really stood a chance.

It’s one of those times I wish I wasn’t quite so OCD about things being “just so,” but I’ve pretty much given up on ever letting things slide with being good enough. So what’s really going to happen for the next five months is a cycle of ignoring the interior dust and dirt until I get twitchy, launching an all-day cleaning binge about once a month, and repeating as necessary until the grass stops growing in the fall. Sure, I could hire it out… but then I have to deal with the awkwardness of having strange people wandering around in the house. I’m sure you can guess how anxious I am for that to happen. So in the spirit of spring, here I sit trying my best to ignore every rug that needs vacuumed, every stray bit of dust and dog hair, and don’t even get me started on the wood floors that need mopped.

OK, so I could have probably spot cleaned the kitchen in the time it took me to tap this out, but let’s face it, writing isn’t one of those things that I’m very likely to give up in favor of cleaning now is it?

Best of breed…

I’ve been using the blog a lot lately to hock my own merchandise. I’m going to spare you from a round of that this evening in the understanding that as much as I wish it might be otherwise, you might be interested in hearing a voice other than mine from time to time. In that spirit, I wanted to take this opportunity to feature three blogs that I read and enjoy on a regular basis because they’re some combination of funny, inappropriate, or informative.

I’m listing these in no particular order other than the way my bookmark folder has them organized:

1. ChowderHead – Wildly funny and decidedly inappropriate. Do you need more reasons to click over and give it a read?

2. 25ToFly – Commentary on life, blogging, and the hilarity that ensues. She’s good stuff.

3. Break Room Stories – I did a four year hitch with McDonald’s, but I was always mercifully protected from the general public by two or three flat-top grills. This blog confirms what a good idea staying in the kitchen was.

One of the things about blogging is that you tend to do a lot of reading of other blogs in your travels around the internet. Some, obviously, are better than others. If you don’t have quite as much time to wander around the internet looking for the good bits as I do, these three blogs are some of the best of breed. Give them a read. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Note: I know you expected to click in tonight and find the usual laundry list of what’s aggitated me at some point this week. Suffice to say that it’s been one of those weeks where it would take more space than even the internet allows. However, I did stumble across this little jewel that captures the mood just perfectly. The fact that the stage was set over 200 years ago and that we’re still fighting the same battles is strangely comforting. Sadly, I have not been able to verify that this is, in fact, a dispatch from Wellington to his political masters in London, but if it isn’t, it should have been.

August 11, 1812

Gentlemen,

Whilst marching to Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your request which has been sent to HM ship from London to Lisbon and then by dispatch rider to our headquarters.

We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.

Unfortunately, the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensive carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstances since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government, so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue one with the best of my ability but I cannot do both.

1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or perchance,

2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.

Your most obedient servant,

Wellington

But not the others…

One of the worst arguments I’ve seen repeatedly in the gun control debate over the last six months almost always goes along the lines of: Well, you have to have a license to drive a car, so why not a license to own a gun? The thing is, the Constitution does not specifically address your right to transportation – by car, horse and buggy, train, air, slow boat, or on foot. Ownership of a car does not require licensure or permission from the state or federal government. If a 15 year old has the coin in his pocket (and his parent’s permission as a minor), he can buy and possess any car on the lot. Licensing drivers conveys the privilege to operate the car on the roads, not the “right” to own it in the first place.

Since gun ownership is a right defined by the Constitution, the more analogous argument would be in requiring a state and or federal license to speak publically. Since words are so often used to bully people and that bullying directly results in emotional and physical harm up to and including suicide, before someone is allowed to exercise their “right to free speech,” they should be required to take a four hour word safety course and obtain a license from their state indicating that they understand how harmful words can be. Perhaps we should also extend the licensing requirement to the right to vote, since elections, too, have real world consequences. In order to exercise your vote as a citizen, you should be required show identification and pass an exam showing a minimum proficiency and understanding of the issues of the day. Since we’re free to abridge one constitutionally protected right, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be equally free to abridge the others in order to make the world a safer, more harmonious place.

As much as I hate to say it, for me it’s not a pro-gun/anti-gun position that’s the real issue here. I would be every bit as apoplectic if the state and federal government were trying to restrict the other right that I enjoy as a free citizen of the United States of America. The right to keep and bear arms is just the one that the powers that be have decided to come after first. I’m a good enough student of history to know that once one right falls, the others are all the more endangered. I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with how people can love some freedoms, but not the others.

Over the horizon…

Some days you just have nothing to show for getting out of bed. As far as I can tell, this is one of those days. For the record, that’s not a complaint. It’s a simple acknowledgment of fact. It’s one of those days where the best thing you can say is that you’ve managed to do no harm – neither advancing the cause or making it substantively worse in any way. It’s a draw… and if you’re a smart bureaucrat, you’ve survived long enough to know that a draw is effectively a win, because the scales are almost always weighted in the direction of making things worse off than they were before you touched something.

I should really put a more positive spin on the day. To paraphrase what a wise man told me this morning, “Look on the bright side, it’s Tuesday. That means were as far away from next Monday as it’s possible to get.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic. After all, it’s Tuesday night now. If you strain your eyes hard enough you can start to see the first signs of the weekend coming on, even though it’s still out there somewhere over the horizon. That’s as cup-half-full as I’m likely to get, so make of it what you will.

And people say I never post anything positive. This’ll show ‘em.

The difficult right…

The obvious direction to take tonight’s post is towards a memorial for Baroness Thatcher. The trouble with having a job and not being able to update the blog in real time, of course, is that the major outlets are already doing a fine job of lionizing the only Prime Minister other than Churchill that Americans know by name. I’m not sure that I can add much in the way of new information or even original thought. Still, marking the passing of one of the 20th century’s great statesmen only seems fitting.

​For those of us of a certain age, the world we’ve inhabited all our lives was largely shaped by the Cold War trinity of Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul II. ​Even though she’d been out of the public eye for more than a decade, with Lady Thatcher’s death this morning the one last living thread connecting us to our much younger selves is severed. Through the benefit of 30-years worth of hindsight, it seems she was on the leading edge of a political movement that got a lot more right than they got wrong. In a career that spanned some truly tumultuous times, that’s as much a mark as anyone could hope to leave.

Long after anyone reading this has made their own final exit from the world’s stage, it will be left to the historians to judge the merits, unencumbered by personal memories of their subjects. The historian in me has a lingering suspicion that our successors will be far kinder to them as a group than their contemporaries have been.

Godspeed, Lady Thatcher. The world is a safer and more free because you chose to stand on principle and do the difficult right rather than ​following the path of ​the easy wrong.

Sunday mornings in June (2007)…

Hello and welcome to this weeks edition of random posts from the mists of time… or in this case, from June 2007. This week we take on topics ranging from using lawn care skills to make your neighbor look bad, the end of The Sopranos on HBO, and explore one of the many ways worrying about work can lead to ulcers. I think one of the best elements of these Sunday tours through the past is that none of us are really sure what’s going to show up. As much as I enjoy the process of getting all my old posts collected into one place, I think I enjoy the insight into where I’ve been and where I’m going even more. There are definitely some familiar themes that keep showing up. Personally, I’m glad to see that kind of consistency in my thought process from year to year.

As always, I hope you enjoy the trip to 2007 as much as I’ve enjoyed bringing it to you. Don’t forget to stop by the giftshop on your way out to pick up some reading material for the week ahead.

Consider yourself pestered…

So the experts on how to do thing online seem to all be telling me that I should be pestering you at least once a day about buying a copy of the book. Cajoling your friends into giving you $2 at every opportunity strikes me as a little unseemly, though. I’ll try to limit the direct self promotion, at least here in the blog, to no more than once a week. With that being said, please consider yourself pestered about the high quality book that I have available for sale from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. With that out of the way, we can get on to other topics and all feel better about ourselves.

With that, we’ve reached the point in the weekend where I find I have nothing really to discuss. Saturday is, as it often is with me, a function of routine. Trash went to the dump, I filled up the gas tank, I wanted to burn Walmart to the ground, and I looked around outside and realized that I’m going to have to start cutting grass sooner rather than later. Dull by most standards, I’m sure. I’ll get some laundry done, hopefully find enough muse to write a blog post and a few hundred words on another project. Again, nothing earth shaking. It’s been my experience that earth shaking isn’t everything is made up to be. Give me quiet, calm, and predictable any day of the week.

Because she thinks I won’t…

In order to alleviate any potential confusion, I’m issuing the attached all access building pass effective immediately. Please remember to display identification prominently at all times while inside the Team Tharp complex.