Here we are in familiar territory. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Deja vu all over again. I’ve seen this picture. Whatever cliché one wants to use or abuse, another government shutdown showdown rears its head like a missing Egyptian Cobra rearing its head in surrender in the Bronx Zoo.
How many times have we seen this place? Is this the third concurrent resolution coming to an end, the second? I know its more than one.
The issue is more than just will I be “furloughed” from my part-time job and be paid or not be paid after all the congressional hubris settles. Will a budget finally be passed so I can have my measly $204-attaboy tied up, supposedly because to the budget SNAFU. (For those of you who don’t know but always wondered: “Situation Normal, All F***ed Up.”)
On a whim, I called one of our Texas Workforce Commission Centers a few days ago where the wait to speak with a live person for one minute turned into about a five-minute wait. Still, I spoke with a very nice, Hispanic-sounding lady to whom I explained my circumstances and to whom I asked whether I could receive unemployment benefits if we are furloughed.
Being the government, of course, it wasn’t something lending itself to a simple answer. Yet, the person with whom I spoke said it depended on whether I made money during a certain time period over the last couple of years. It also depends on whether the state asks the federal government for money to pay the unemployment.
“Say what?”
I chuckled and said: “Good luck with that.”
The TWC lady laughed and said: “Yeah, no kidding.”
Thus, if federal workers are furloughed if the government is shut down on the next budget stalemate, the odds of getting unemployment would be unlikely because the state government and our fine-haired governor will do nothing to rankle their radical right voters.
So if federal workers can’t pay bills, so what? Let them eat from garbage bins in the street. Been there, have been close to doing that.
We have some remarkable Christian leaders in this nation and in the state of Texas, don’t we? God help them. Someone sure needs to do so.
I have been temporarily disabled by a fried computer. It won’t run and since its warranty won’t run either — it expired a month before — I’ve said to hell with it and ordered a new computer since the damage is more than I want to pay. It’s an HP laptop. I’ve had good luck with their products and satisfactory service. That is more than I can say for Dell. I will be back on as frequently as possible until my new computer arrives.
The country has “Sweet 16 Fever” or so it would seem. I’ve not watched a minute of college basketball this season and unless something unusual happens, like Butler or one of the double-digit-seeded teams play in the Final Four, it’s doubtful I will watch any college roundball this season.
It seems like “March Madness,” the media-inspired name for the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament, is the biggest thing since sliced bread if you follow the sports world.
Indeed, the tournament is big. How many millions of dollars this extravaganza spreads to television, advertisers, colleges and the towns in which the tournament is held, I couldn’t guess. Then there is gambling. The office pools where people fill out brackets perhaps funnels millions into the so-called “underground” economy. The money is cash and not reported to the government. Then the legal betting on the Las Vegas line no doubt floats around millions more.
The poll, released in January, reveals that only some 4 percent of Americans list college basketball as their favorite sport. This comes behind in order: Men’s soccer, hockey, men’s pro basketball, auto racing, college football, baseball and, at number one, pro football.
Coming as far behind pro football, as the locked-out NFL looms large at 31 percent, one wonders just how much popularity the March NCAA tournament draws in for a sport with a season that extends some four months with about two games played per week during the regular season.
One tired midnight about seven years ago I got a taxi to take me from the crappy Arlington, Va., hotel in which I was staying to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The airport, known by its identifier one sees on baggage tags as “DCA,” obviously is a mouthful so I suppose people calls the airport basically whatever they want just as they would do anyway. I call it “Washington National,” because that’s what it was called before people figured it should be named for the man who broke the air traffic control union, PATCO.
Now I had never really hung around airports at 1, 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, but National was pretty doggone quiet until around quarter to 6 a.m. when the airport came to life including the arrival of the TSA inspectors. I never figured out why the airlines and airports and TSA said you should arrive a couple of hours before your flight for screening because the inspectors at National got to the job at 6:45 and had all their X-rays ready for the first boarding at around 6:30.
With that said, I never heard a thing fly into National from the time I got there around 1 a.m. until sometime after 6 a.m. So it wouldn’t surprise me that the control tower at National might not be fully staffed between midnight and 6 a.m. But to hear as I did in several stories today that only one controller was working during the wee hours Wednesday, and that controller might have been asleep just kind of gave me a chill. Check out this audio courtesy of The Washington Post.
The incident is, obviously, being investigated by every initialed agency that has anything to do with flight control but there is speculation that the controller might have fallen asleep.
Now I admit to being drowsy on the job sometimes. I was drowsy before leaving work this afternoon. I had finished my major tasks and was waiting on signs my crappy work computer was indeed a computing device when a wave of sleepiness hit me. No other humans nor was really anything around to really stimulate me, I will have to say in my defense. But even had I fallen asleep, and likely only I would have known, I would not have had the potential to kill a couple of hundred human beings!
I imagine that controller will face stiff discipline, but as potentially dangerous as that was, the controller is suspended for the time being so as difficult as it might be let’s just chill until the incident has been thoroughly investigated before we decide to hang the guy. The FAA, or the people in charge of the agency locally by having only one person in the tower may also have been trying to cut corners as different offices of federal agencies are wont to do, especially in this age where everyone is paranoid over spending anything. Then again, the controller may have had some medical reason he dozed off. There are many reasons to look at before we start the normal condemnation of this person, who may have fallen asleep.
Thus, let us just see where this leads us. In the meantime, I think I will take a nap.
A bargained-price book caught my eye the other day at Barnes & Noble. I bought the book called “The World’s Worst Cars.” Perhaps it was the “Amphicar,” a German-made half-car, half-boat, described by the author as not being good at either, that caught my eye.
The 2005 stumpy, picture-table book by British auto writer Craig Cheetham, has all the famous flops as well as many obscure one. Perhaps it is the British eye that makes me part ways with Cheetham on some of his conclusions.
This might be a good place for the Amphicar. The 1960s German half das wagen and half das boot was really neither.
Not so with the Ford Pinto. The writer notes the early Pinto’s tendency to burst into flames when struck from the rear due to a lack of gas tank protection which was well-known. It was also well-known to me as a 72 Pinto was my first car. I can’t remember whether it was the 1.6-liter version or the 2-liter. The metric system was completely foreign to me as a high school graduate and were it not for the Internet it would still pretty much be that way today.
But my Pinto got me from East Texas to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and back at least once a month for about a year while I was in the service. And even though Cheetham’s top-speed listing for the Pinto is 82 mph, I used to drive I-12 and I-10 and Texas 87 at a pretty steady 70 mph with no problem. Of course, I was 19 and nuts.
Several years later I would see my first “roast,” a black-humor firefighter term for someone burned to death, in the back seat of a Pinto. The corpse was the first I ever handled and I will never forget the smell, the texture, the ash and the unworldly countenance of the young man whose name I have written down somewhere. As taught in fire rookie school, I wrote down all the details of what I found upon the scene if I ever was required to testify in a court case. I wasn’t. I thought sure this man’s family would sue Ford. If they did, I never heard of it.
The experience left me with bad dreams for awhile and a thankfulness my Pinto, which I traded in for a new Toyota Corolla in 1975, was never rear-ended with me inside it.
I have owned 11 automobiles: 7 2 Pinto, 75 Corolla, 79 Corolla, 84 Datsun/Nissan Sentra, 82 Toyota pickup, 80 Ford Granada, 72 BMW 2002, 89 Jeep Comanche pickup, 92 Nissan pickup, 96 Toyota pickup and 98 Toyota Tacoma. Yes, they are in chronological order, unfortunately, but sometimes desperate times called for desperate measures. As far as I know, however, none of these autos are on Mr. Cheetham’s worst car list excepting my first. That I still drive — though not to work because the air conditioning went out — a 98 Tacoma with at 163,000 miles is a testament to the road-worthiness of the vehicle. My friend Keith, who lives in Arlington, has what? 300,000 miles on his “Taco?” I don’t know, but he has a bunch.
All of this car madness surfaced after reading Cheetham’s entertaining book. I don’t agree with everything he concludes. I have to guess sometimes what he is talking about because this is written in Brit, not English as we know it. Sorry, I know that sounds so ethnocentric, but that’s show biz.
I am hoping soon that my mechanical mastermind friend Rick will replace my air conditioning compressor and accessories while leaving me financially with both my arms and legs in tact. We are in negotiations right now. It’s nice having friends who are competent. And Rick’s also a registered nurse. The dude can change your oil and give you a transfusion, at the same time I’m not certain.
In the meantime, I was given authorization to get a rental car for work until I can get my A/C fixed. But, I was told it had to be a compact. Unfortunately, the car rental place didn’t have a compact handy so I had to settle for a 2010 Dodge Challenger SE.
The SE carries a V-6, 250-horse, 3.5-liter, high output, single overhead camshaft (SOHC). What the hell all that means, I am not sure. But I know this is not quite or not very close to, say the Challengers of old. You hear numbers like 318 (cubic inch) and mechanical idiot that I am, I know this was a very reliable engine used by Chrysler. My Dad had a 72 Dodge pickup with the 318. My friend Waldo had the 318 in his 73 Plymouth Duster.
One thing about my rental that I will say, it’s a damned pretty car, solid black and has the lines of the older muscle car. I have noticed a few people staring at me with envious looks today. It is kind of a nice feeling, no matter how reliable your old * “hoopie” may be.
*”Hoopie” is what my Dad called an old car. The term is known in some places as “hooptie” or “hoopty.” I have seen hoopie used to describe something like a box van. So hoopie may be a regional term or it might be a contraction for “hooptie,” if so, that’s pretty damned lazy. Then again, it might just be one of the odd words and sayings my Dad used to come up with like, “a whole flock of bird dogs flew over.” Who knows?
