Happy New Year from Siri

Babba's New Year's Resolutions:

Become an off the grid, Prius driving, medicinal marijuana growing, trans-fat free, free-range, non caged Ron Paul supporter.

Speaking of my 2012 revolt against technology, how about this kids iPhone that told him where to go. I have to purchase some droid named Siri to tell me the same thing I hear at work everyday.



The average American family's net worth decreased $127,000.









Cheer up, things are not all lost; this fellow will be picking the Republican presidential nominee.

Bo Time

Faces In The News

Is it just me, or is there a slight resemblance? I knew there was a reason I like Chelsea.

Positively "K" Street

"Positively 4th Street" was the first 45 rpm record I ever bought. It was my introduction to Bob Dylan around 1966. Last night I watched the Republican debate in Iowa. It was the first debate I watched this year. This morning I was driving and thinking about the debate when "Positively 4th Street" came on. This Dylan tune although not one his famous "finger-pointing" songs kind of summed my whole attitude towards Washington D.C. and "K" street especially.

You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning

You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that’s winning

You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
If you’re so hurt
Why then don’t you show it

You say you lost your faith
But that’s not where it’s at
You had no faith to lose
And you know it

I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with

Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with

You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”
But you don’t mean it

When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once
And scream it

No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them

And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problem

I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you

Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you

Kahuna Snow-Blower

The Almanac predicts a brutal winter on "YOMAMA DRIVE"

Shower Faucet Part Deux

All week I waited patiently until Sat. came to replace the mixing valve in our bedroom shower. Since I couldn't isolate the shower from the rest of the plumbing it was stressful.

What I did right:
1) bought the right part (thank you, Amazon)
2) used plumber's grease
3) turned off the water
4) didn't break a pipe in the wall
5) didn't once mention "your sister's rear end"

What I did wrong:
1) installed the valve a hundred and eighty degrees off
2) didn't once mention "your sister's rear end"

I put it in and looked for leaks and turned it on; it seemed fine. I brought CP in to see it. When one drop fell from the shower head, she said "It still leaks." I explained to CP how with the double shower head and my heated shower mirror one could expect a single drop of water after it's turned off. Then I turned it on full and waited for the hot water that never came. After considering all the possibilities and remembering which plumber I wanted, I realized that the valve was in upside down. I could have gone back to my Polish roots and just left it like that; eventually we would have gotten used to the HOT coming on first and then the COLD. However, I reluctantly did the job over again and now it operates the same as all the showers in the Northern Hemisphere. The final touch was to remove the safety stop that keeps the water from getting hot enough to burn little Johnny's bottom. In a year from now I'll know exactly what to do when the other bathroom bath faucet starts to leak.

Hey! Who's that guy having an "experience" in my shower?

I Hate Kohler Products

I hate Kohler plumbing fixtures. I replaced the kitchen sink fixture with a Delta faucet and then a few months later I have a dripping shower in my bed room. Short of removing the whole shower stall I have to fix the existing P.O.S. Kohler mixer valve. This is a bit scarier than the kitchen sink because I can't isolate the water supply to the shower. I have to shut off the main valve and fill up a few 5 gallon buckets of water to guarantee CP five good flushes.

I watched the repair on YouTube so I feel totally capable of doing this whole job in thirty minutes. The part is available on Amazon for half the cost of buying it at Lowe's. It's not that I'm some kind environmental-commie-lib-vegan-global warming-aquifer bathing-socialist (I realize it would take ten years of drip to make up the cost of the $26 valve) it's just I grew up with dripping faucets. As a child janitor I played with re-seating tools, lamp-wick and a tin of assorted rubber washers on a monthly basis.

One thing I've learned in sixty years is don't work on the plumbing right before Thanksgiving. There's nothing like a house full people and no water to bring down the mood. Well like Red Green would say, "If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."

I Just Got Tired Of Waiting David

If you're tired and confused
And you don't remember who you're talking to
Your concentration slips away
Because your baby, sweetheart, sugar's so far away

And there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one you love
Honey, love the one you're with (that's right)
Love the one you're with

Bo

The Babba One "G" Network

This is my cell phone that I've had for five years. I'm sure it's a dinosaur but I get my calls nevertheless. I went with Ben to Verizon for his i-Phone with the 5G network and voice recognition that tells you you're fat when you pick up a doughnut. Now with SIRI formally IRIS allows you to stop talking to idiots all day long and just talk to your phone. It's sort of replaced the magic Eight Ball of the 60's. There's nothing as fulfilling as walking around with a hand held device that has more information than the New York Public Library.
Poor Babba, "One G", goes into the Verizon Store hoping to see some cell phones. The store is full of Droids, Blackberries, iPhones and Smart-Phones. Off in some dark corner marked bargain-bin are three primitive cell phones. The message is clear: if you only want a cell phone you must be some low-life Cretan that only needs a phone in case you break your hip on the way to the day-room.

Since I don't want a desk-top computer on my hip, or an eight pixel camera, or a GPS, or a talking friend, perhaps I should pick up a few Motorola W-385 cell phones before they are kept behind the counter and carried in brown paper bags.

Latest Read

I'm halfway through a book about the Italian artist Caravaggio. I reserved
the book thinking it was more of a biography than an art history text, but I'm being pleasantly surprised.

What I'm surprised to learn is how religious art was created as an aid to prayer and meditation. The commoner would meditate on the the painting and put themselves into the story. That answers a question I always had as to why the great artists mostly paint anachronistically. That's why one sees pictures of the Madonna dressed like Mary Queen of Scots.

So I'm making my way through this 450 page book which is mostly about art. I'm almost halfway and the book is due back in a week. It is weird to read about Rome, the eternal city where I walked and visited the churches, the squares, the neighborhoods and the ghettos. The city is a museum with its art displayed in every chapel, church, cemetery and plaza. I hope to return in the spring.

Maybe by then there will be a new Caravaggio. Maybe his next fresco will be "The Holy Family Escapes To Egypt In A Punto."

A Journey of 8,760 Days

1987 Marianne starts school in Derry Pennsylvania.
8,760 days later Marianne emerges with a PhD in literature.

How will she handle a terminal degree? Could there be an MFA in her future, an "Our Town Theater?"

Babba's Picks

--------- Occupy Reality ----------

"American Thinker" Goes Politically Correct

Help! I'm being repressed!

American Thinker has gone "pansy". I have been banned from commenting on their site. So much for an open forum. My comment was funny, that's all, just funny. It was accurate. I've noticed that A.T. has become rather bland. It's sort of like the the Baptist, Home School, Emily Post lobby has taken over their comment moderation bureau (aka STASI).

I won't miss A.T. too much. They have become P.C. boring. They have about a hundred authors that just recycle the same dozen themes. I think I'm in good company with the hundreds of other revokees. I have broken the 11th Commandment, thou shall not offend.
As John Adams said in the musical 1776:
"This is a revolution, dammit! We're going to have to offend SOMEbody!"

Anyway, I've been tossed out of better places than A.T.

The More Things Stay The Same

Nebraska Educators Issue Grinding Alert In Advance Of High School Homecoming Dance | The Smoking Gun







I can't imagine why anyone would bring a grinder to a dance. Perhaps, they are afraid of the sparks causing a fire.

Oh, you mean the other grinding, that chance to grope a girl you never met? Oh, the torture of dancing all those fast songs for that chance to catch a slowie with that special person (by special I mean having the XX chromosome). The usual ratio was five fast songs to one grinder. Unfortunately, one could not count on this and sometimes one missed the train completely by going to the bathroom. There was a group of bottom-feeders that only danced the slow songs; they hid in the shadows like U-Boats waiting for a convoy. The bonus-play was the fast song that morphed to a grinder. There the hunter had the advantage of still having direct contact with his prey. Some girls were able to escape this trap by bolting away like a herd of gazelles.

The enemy of the grinder was the K-of-C ushers at the Catholic School dances. They wouldn't give you a warning, they would pick you up by the arms and hurl you out into the alley with the rest of the trash. They didn't tolerate any torso-to torso contact. The rules were one hand three inches above the waist, other hand held high up in the air with palm facing backwards and at least two inches of free air between you and the girl. If you lost your head and actually touched, an usher would come running over and place his hand between you and whisper in your ear "leave room for the Holy Ghost." This warning would immediately cause the young man to lurch back like he touched a spark plug.

Somehow, even with all these impediments one occasionally walked a girl home, got her phone number and never called her. It's good to see that traditional values are making a come back.

Good Book

I finally found a decent book. Quite a surprise, since my local branch library's new fiction section is 99% schlock.

It's about how a family that ran the Warsaw Zoo hid Jews during the Holocaust. It's not your usual ghetto memoir. It's a tale about animals and humanity. Maybe it's because I'm half Polish, but I did relate to the plight of Poland. The Poles were a conquered people only outdone by the Sicilians.

This book was recommended to me. I've decided that from now on I'm only reading books with personal recommendations; just going to the library is a waste of time.

Two Vehicles Slam House

WLOS ABC 13 News :: Top Stories - Serious Injury: Two Vehicles Slam House

A little excitement here in Fletcher. Every six months someone would take out a pole or a fence on this curve, but this time they got a house. This time we heard a bigger bang and the usual snap as the transformer blew up. Quite the excitement on the circle.

We met more new people than we do at the annual neighborhood garage sale. It took the paramedics 2 hours to get the victims out, another couple of hours to get the vehicles out of the bedroom and then two more hours to get the power back on. CP and I went out to Bojangle's for fried chicken, then it was listening to podcasts until we went to bed. I'm glad I had this EMERGENCY LEGO MAN to give us light. (Thanks, Marianne!) Just a twenty second crank and we had light in our bathroom until morning. I should tell Glenn Beck about the amazing Lego End Times Night Light.


Do you think those people will have to disclose their house was in an accident when they try to sell it? I looked at that house six years ago when it was new and thought to myself "I don't want to live ten feet below dead-mans-curve." After the previous crash the town put in steel I-Beams and a guard rail; I wonder what they will add now? Giant boulders? In the land of NASCAR, you shouldn't build your house in the pit.

9/11: "So Ten Years Ago"

I thought one celebrates their victories, not their defeats. It’s “T-Ball,” estrogen-laden, liberalism that has reduced us to a nation of Pollyanna’s. Ten years after 9/11 we are bankrupt, mired in recession and celebrating a a five acre hole in the ground.

Every week in Israel some homicide-bomber blows up a busy intersection and kills a hundred people. What do the Israelis do? They rebuild the intersection, the stores reopen and life goes on. A month later all that remains of the incident are perhaps some small holes in the stucco. Here we build a park, we commission some artist to create a statue. In some Jackson Pollard way that statue is supposed to remind us of what happened while not making us angry. Ground Zero is New York's number one tourist attraction. It eclipses the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and Yankee Stadium. Hey everyone, come take a look at America's hole!

America's hole is so big that five trillion dollars of debt, twenty percent unemployment, airport strip searches and the lives of ten thousand soldiers can't fill it. We now have ten million dollar border crossing stations on rural farm roads on the Canadian border. We now have senior citizens and children marching past TSA agents while they yell Mach-Schnell! at our airports. We have a sheriff in Pigs Knuckle Arkansas with an Apache helicopter. We have transparent backpacks, metal detectors in malls, color coded threat levels and duct tape on our windows. We have trillions of dollars of wasted money, all meant to create the illusion of safety.

Someone who has been to Afghanistan told me what it will take to win that war: “20 years, 20 trillion dollars and 200,000 lives.” We have neither the will, nor the resources. We send out a million dollar missile to kill two peasants. The Taliban hires a peasant for five dollars, gives him a hundred year old rifle and twenty dollars worth of ammo and he keeps a whole company of Marines pinned down for a day and possibly kills one.

As a nation we have grown old and entered the stage of despair. We talk about the old-days, we make do with less, we are consumed with security and stifled by ambivalence. We think in terms of our life expectancy instead of our children's future. We are a collection of platitudes, PSA commercials, politically correct androgynous zombies claiming to be free a people. A free people would have rebuilt the Trade Center in two years, made it 125 stories high and put SAM missiles on the roof instead of a restaurant. Instead, "men without chests" and a throng of "empty suits" will be holding a Ten Year Celebration. Fill the freakin hole! It's a hole in the heart of our country. Then again, perhaps they are afraid of losing the tourist dollars.

The U.S. is like the cape buffalo surrounded by hyenas. It’s death by a thousand small bites. We don’t feel the bites because we are too busy celebrating our “hole in the ground.”

Dumb Holiday

It's raining here which tends to make a boring BS holiday even more of a snooze. CP is working however, and since I'll be retiring soon I'm trying to find new ways to pull my weight. Against all common sense and intuition CP agreed to let me do the grocery shopping. I was off to Wally's at 0800 with my detailed list of items for this week's menu. The above picture shows all the Great Value items I picked up for CP's Mexican dish for Weds. night church.



Here are the four items I got wrong. I never imagined there were 24 different types of canned tomatoes. There are stewed, crushed, peeled, paste, shredded, sliced, diced, pureed and pitted. They also come in Mexican, Italian, French and Dill varieties; I never heard of the country of Dill. I also screwed up the Hidden Valley Ranch dressing by getting the dip instead. No-Salt diced tomatoes; wrong again. I got so excited that I found the last can of Tex-Mex tomatoes, however, I got the diced instead of the stewed. Then CB ignored the Campbell's beef broth on the list and got the Great-Value brand which isn't condensed.

Luckily, Wally's is less than a mile away so I'm off to return the four wrong items and hopefully get the right stuff. But guess what? Wally's doesn't carry stewed tomatoes Mexican style, so I still have to go to the supermarket find that one style of stewed tomatoes that the recipe calls for.

CP was just so sure me doing the shopping would be a disaster that her eyes are rolling back in her head when I try to explain. She is praying "Oh God please don't let him retire." Imagine what life would be like as one big continuous rainy dumb holiday.

Labor Day Weekend, Without The Jobs

It was a choice between the Apple Festival in Hooterville and the LAAFF Festival in Asheville. I prefer the latter. I'm just not ready for the Dockers and pastels of the AARP crowd. I get enough senior agitation at work.
I tried to book this band for an opening act at the Feed-n-Seed. They didn't have a business card, a telephone # or a web-site. I think they just met each other that morning at a bar. The clogger came prepared with her own little dance floor. Now in Greenville you will get a ticket for playing in the street. In Asheville you can make a good living at it.


This is your car on "Asheville". So many bumper stickers and so little space. I'm imagining this going down I-26 shedding the Taj-Mahal and its cast of characters.

The Activia Challenge

We must keep Bo's digestive system in tune, otherwise he gets sluggish and grumpy.

Man Versus Bear

WLOS ABC 13 News :: Top Stories - Man Versus Bear

The heck with Hurricane Irene, the national debt, and earthquakes, this is the kind of news we like in western North Carolina.

Bo's Thoughts

I'll Throw In The Kitchen Sink

I've had it with our kitchen faucet. It's this fancy Kohler model that I can't find parts for. I found some generic O-Rings to fix its leaky stem, but otherwise parts are hard to find. About three years ago the diverter valve for the sprayer stopped working. Lateley the valve has caused the faucet to occasionally develop BPH (benign prostatic hypertrophy) and just go into dribble mode. Last week I was cleaning the fridge and just couldn't take the lack of spray nozzle any longer.

I went to Lowe's and picked up a cheap Price-Pfister brand one. I haven't changed a faucet in forty years and I was amazed at how easy it is now. No more pipe compound, basin wrench, pipe cutting etc. I just had to replace the original plastic pipes with flexible hoses. Everything went relatively smoothly except for having a problem snapping in the sprayer hose (I had to remove the whole fixture once because it didn't just "snap in" like the directions stated). Only three trips to Lowe's to get the job done. The replacement generic $40 single handle faucet is perfectly adequate. I'm so pumped-up I may even put a new toilet seat in the guest bathroom. I don't want to go nuts here, we'll probably sell this dump next year. Plumbing is much easier than it was in circa 1968. Plus, I have a working spray nozzle!

Vacation pix

Marianne, David and the little
woman.




















Primitive conditions; slow cable.

















David's Pork Roast











It's not the humidity; it's the
6,000 ft. elevation.















I know Mom!

















We will put the Fabric Store here.












Help, I've fallen and I can't reach my beer!














The D-Q Sandwich














A road to nowhere; another broken
government promise.



















Bar is open!


















View from the porch.
















Ice Cream for lunch.







Single Scoop
























Dam Picture













Step back a bit.










It's a tick.

















Joyce Kilmer Forest.










The time share Ben is buying for
Marianne and David.