Department of Redundancy Department

Ummm, yea....

Someone's Gonna Get It!!!

There are a couple of pigeons that have taken up residence in the shop.

Could be they have a nest going somewhere in there. I've heard that they used to be in the warehouse side, but now they are in the production side. Maybe they migrated away and now they're back???



Apparently all the noise doesn't bother them in the least.

But with pigeons in the shop, you know what's going to happen!!!

She Don't

She don't want nobody near
But you can't get away from that
They appear and disappear
And they all get a string attached
Pretty soon they got you hanging on a line
Pretty soon they're singing one by one the same old rhyme
They say, "I'm alright, I just can't get home tonight."

She don't want nobody home
Cause it's a little too crowded then
But she don't wanna be alone
So they just keep pouring in
Pretty soon they got her headed for the door
She comes home to find that they're not hanging 'round no more
She says "I'm alright, you just can't get home tonight."

Don't you wonder what she looks like in the light?
She says "I'm alright, I just can't get home tonight."

Pretty whitewashed lies
Endless alibis
And the reasons that need cleaning every night
Half a world away
You can't wash away the stain of the deceiving
And the things that you cannot believe, and well...

She don't want no one around
Cause she don't want anybody to see
What she looks like when she's down
Cause that's a really sad place to be
Pretty soon she gets them crawling up the walls
Then she wonders why they beg her please to never call
She says, "I'm ok. It's alright. Hey, look who's on TV tonight."
She says, "I'm alright, I just can't get home tonight."

Don't you wonder why it's dark outside at night?
She says, I'm alright, I just can't get home tonight."

Pep Boys Sucks and a Fun Party

Starting yesterday, I was attempting to replace a bearing and half shaft on my newly acquired Storm. One of those things I knew I'd have to be doing when I bought it, and the previous owner had even already picked up the rather pricey bearing. To me, however, it really sounded like a CV joint, so while I had it all apart I'm going to take care of that. I called around to the local parts stores, and the only one who had it in stock was Pep Boys. I got it and took everything apart. The bearing is a press fit, so I had my wife take it over to the other Pep Boys that has a garage to take care of that. She comes back a while later and tells me that the guy who operates the press isn't there today. WTF, how hard is it to operate a press??? Oh well, guess I'm not finishing it today. I got to thinking that evening that there are a couple places real close that might do the press work. First thing this morning I get up, put the old axle in the trunk and try out the first place that might get the bearing installed. No problem (for me, anyway) they can do it. Ended up taking them almost an hour straight to get it handled, they really earned their money on this job!!! Glad it wasn't me!!!

I took the old axle to Pep Boys and got my core money back and headed home to finish putting things together. I went to put the spindle on the new axle, and it practically falls through it!!! The new one is about 1/8" smaller in diameter that the original!!! I call up to my wife to call Pep Boys back and tell them to look for the one for the GSI model (the same thing I asked when I first called them up, and when I was there picking it up). They don't have it. She calls the store with the press specialist, and they say they have it. Great, I take the old new one out and get the receipt and head on over there. When I get there, the guy pulls out the one he's got in stock. Its the exact same thing that I have!!! He looks it up, and next to all the part numbers it says "All models - except GSI is not available" I left out of there bitching quite loudly about thanks for wasting my damned time...

I head back to Pep Boys #1 and head up to the parts counter. The guy there made the mistake of asking me how I was doing. I let him know rather loudly in no uncertain terms. Not too good, y'all sold me what was supposed to fit my car, now I can't get shit and gimmie my damned core back and credit me...." He did, and was rather diplomatic. He gave me the name of a place in East LA that does rebuilds. Drop it off in the morning, pick it up that afternoon. I got home and called them up and asked them how late they were open until today. Only 1. It was already after 12. Looked like it was going to be Monday evening before I'd have a part in hand. Damn. Well, what choice do I have???

We have a birthday party going on this afternoon, starting at 1. I loaded the boys into the car and set out for East LA. It was actually a couple minutes after 1 when I got there. I brought the shaft in, and told the guy at the counter the deal. He says he'll take a look first to see if he's got it in stock. Lo and behold, he's got it!!! Almost half the price of Pep Boys, too, although no lifetime warranty.

I don't think I'll ever buy another thing from Pep Boys. Pep Boys sucks.

The party was a lot of fun.

I kept trying to get mid air pics of the kids jumping into the pool. I got a lot of right before and right after shots, but I got these few.


The kids sure seem to like me!!! I wonder if its because I was the only "big kid" in the pool???

Historical perspective

"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it"
Mr. Hurd, my 7th grade history teacher

I received the following in my Email. It is credited to Raymond S. Kraft. It is quite wordy, but makes a salient point and is well worth the read. No one likes to see our boys coming home maimed, or worse yet in boxes. However, when Osama has asserted that the armies of the infidels should vacate Iraq and Al Qaeda will take over operations there, one has to wonder about the politicians who call for a quick withdrawal.

Here is the contents of the mail:

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.

Bushido Japan had overrun most of Asia, beginning in 1928, killing millions of civilians throughout China, and impressing millions more as slave labor.

The US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war, or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally, the Vichy government of France aligned with its German occupiers. Germany was not an ally, it was an enemy, and Hitler intended to set up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, it was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia. Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders, after they had settled control of Asia and Europe.

America's allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia, and that was about it. There were no other countries of any size or military significance with the will and ability to contribute much or anything to the effort to defeat Hitler's Germany and Japan, and prevent the global dominance of Nazism. And we had to send millions of tons of arms, munitions, and war supplies to Russia, England, and the Canadians, Aussies, Irish, and Scots, because none of them could produce all they needed for themselves.

All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russiain the east, was already under the Nazi heel.

America was not prepared for war. America had stood down most of its military after WWI and throughout the depression, at the outbreak of WWII there were army units training with broomsticks over their shoulders because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have tanks. And a big chunk of our navy had just been sunk and damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England that was the property of Belgium and was given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler - actually, Belgium surrendered one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day anyway just to prove they could. Britain had been holding out for two years already in the face of staggering shipping loses and the near-decimation of its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.

Russia may have saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.

Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a million soldiers. More than a million.

Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that war.

Had Hitler not made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941, instead, there would have been no England for the US and the Brits to use as a staging ground to prepare an assault on Nazi Europe, England would not have been able to run its North African campaign to help take a little pressure off Russia while America geared up for battle, and today Europe would very probably be run by the Nazis, the Third Reich, and, isolated and without any allies (not even the Brits), the US would very probably have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were basically Nazis by another name then, and the world we live in today would be very different and much worse. I say this to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. And we are at another one.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so.

France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology at least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan, paid for with billions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the UN with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his son.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs - they believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world, and that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, purge the world of Jews. This is what they vow and openly say.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East- for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win - the Inquisition, or the Reformation.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies, the techno-industrial economies, will be at the mercy of OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the well-educated and somewhat rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.

You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want jobs? You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it nowhere. And we cannot do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq.

Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we did and are doing two very important things.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a terrorist.

Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad guys there and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or anywhere else. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle Eastfor as long as it is needed.

The Euros could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. We now know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihad, the French, Germans, and Russians were selling them arms - we have found more than a million tons of weapons and munitions in Iraq. If Iraqwas not a threat to anyone, why did Saddam need a million tons of weapons?

And Iraq was paying for French, German, and Russian arms with money skimmed from the UN Oil For Food Program (supervised by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and his son) that was supposed to pay for food, medicine, and education, for Iraqi children.

World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really began with a "whimper" in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for fourteen years before Americajoined it. It officially ended in 1945 - a 17 year war - and was followed by another decade of US occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again .. a 27 year war.

World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP - adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars, WWII cost Americamore than 400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the US about $160 billion, which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 2,200 American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably greater - a world now dominated by German and Japanese Nazism.

Americans have a short attention span, now, conditioned I suppose, by 60 minute TV shows and 2-hour movies in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be.

If we do this thing in Iraq successfully, it is probable that the Reformation will ultimately prevail. Many Muslims in the Middle Easthope it will. We will be there to support it. It has begun in some countries, Libya, for instance, and Dubai and Saudi Arabia. If we fail, the Inquisition will probably prevail, and terrorism from Islam will be with us for all the foreseeable future, because the Inquisition, or Jihad, believes they are called by Allah to kill all the Infidels, and that death in Jihad is glorious.

The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away on its own. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an "England" in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. And now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. Unless we prevent them, or somebody does.

The Iraq war is expensive, and uncertain, yes. But the consequences of not fighting it and winning it will be horrifically greater. We have four options

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).

3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.

4. Or we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It will be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier then.

Yes, the Jihadis say that they look forward to an Islamic America. If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.

The history of the world is the history of civilizational clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.

In the 20th century, it was Western democracy vs. communism, and before that Western democracy vs. Nazism, and before that Western democracy vs. German Imperialism. Western democracy won, three times, but it wasn't cheap, fun, nice, easy, or quick. Indeed, the wars against German Imperialism (WWI), Nazi Imperialism (WWII), and communist imperialism (the 40-year Cold War that included the Vietnam Battle, commonly called the Vietnam War, but itself a major battle in a larger war covered almost the entire century.)

The first major war of the 21st Century is the war between Western Judeo/Christian Civilization and Wahhabi Islam. It may last a few more years, or most of this century. It will last until the Wahhabi branch of Islam fades away, or gives up its ambitions for regional and global dominance and Jihad, or until Western Civilization gives in to the Jihad.

Some complaints have been:

1. We went to Iraq without enough troops.

We went with the troops the US military wanted. We went with the troop levels General Tommy Franks asked for. We deposed Saddam in 30 days with light casualties, much lighter than we expected.

The real problem in Iraqis that we are trying to be nice - we are trying to fight minority of the population that is Jihadi, and trying to avoid killing the large majority that is not. We could flatten Fallujah in minutes with a flight of B52s, or seconds with one nuclear cruise missile - but we don't. We're trying to do brain surgery, not amputate the patient's head. The Jihadis amputate heads.

2. We went to Iraq with too little planning.

This is a specious argument. It supposes that if we had just had "the right plan" the war would have been easy, cheap, quick, and clean.

That is not an option. It is a guerrilla war against a determined enemy, and no such war ever has been or ever will be easy, cheap, quick, and clean. This is not TV.

3. We proved ourselves incapable of governing and providing security.

This too is a specious argument. It was never our intention to govern and provide security. It was our intention from the beginning to do just enough to enable the Iraqis to develop a representative government and their own military and police forces to provide their own security, and that is happening. The US and the Brits and other countries there have trained over 100,000 Iraqi police and military, now, and will have trained more than 200,000 by the end of next year. We are in the process of transitioning operational control for security back to Iraq.

It will take time. It will not go without hitches. This is not TV.

Remember, perspective is everything, and America's schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.

The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany.

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50 million people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The US has taken a little more than 2,000 KIA in Iraq. The US took more than 4,000 Killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism. In WWII the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

But the stakes are at least as high . . . a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms . or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

I do not understand why some do not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis. In America, absolutely, but nowhere else.

300,000 Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our problem. The US population is about twelve times that of Iraq, so let's multiply 300,000 by twelve. What would you think if there were 3,600,000 American bodies in mass graves in America because of a president of the United States. Would you hope for another country to help liberate America?
The mentality that is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multi-culturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy.

Raymond S. Kraft is a writer and lawyer living in Northern California. Please consider passing along copies of this to students in high school, college and university as it contains information about the American past that is very meaningful TODAY - - history about America that very likely is completely unknown by them (and their instructors, too). By being denied the facts and truth of our history, they are at a decided disadvantage when it comes to reasoning and thinking through the issues of today. They are prime targets for misinformation campaigns beamed at enlisting them in causes and beliefs that are special interest agenda driven!

The Less Than Perfect Storm

I hope you were right, Eyeball. I really loved that Brat, but she was kinda weak, manually shifted, and impractical.

This little cream puff, however.... She looks fairly decent, starts right up and has a nice ride. Good power, nice interior. Only 94,000 miles.


Should get pretty decent mileage. The guy I bought it from (original owner) said for a couple of years it had a hard time passing emissions, and ended up having to go to a state test only center, then to a state repair facility. Turns out someone (he suspects a shady smog test operator) had put a pop rivet in a vacuum line to keep it from working right. With that removed, it passed with flying colors. However, since it had landed in the gross polluter category for a few years, the state offered him $1000 to let them destroy it, a standing offer!!! He thought since it has been so reliable and is in decent condition it would be a shame to do that, and he sold it to me for just a tad more than that. So, no matter what happens, I'll probably always have that amount of equity in this car!!!

But no open air motoring!!! Whaaaaaa!!!

You Little BRAT!!!

I'm doing some car shopping. Looking at a lot of ads and making a lot of calls, mostly. Finally made it out to look at one this afternoon... I think I'm in LOVE!!!

My criteria: small, economical, of course in my price range. Something I like. Some sort of removable top would be a big plus. An automatic would be a plus, too, since I seem to be stuck in downtown stop and go driving four days a week.
I had been thinking of a VW cabriolet, because they are easy on gas, rather plentiful, and, of course, I have some experience with VW's. One of the two I actually got through to needs a fuel pump (so the owner says, could be one of those shams so you don't actually drive the thing and find out the transmission is shot). The other, was a bit on the high end of my price range. The guy said he's on a fixed income, but if I'm interested after the first of the month, he'd get the smog check taken care of.
This little jewel, though... I've always loved these Brats!!! It has an exhaust leak that would probably need fixed before it'd pass emissions. Gonna need new tires. Its a manual transmission. Its rather sleepy off the line, not at all good for entering the freeway by my house. It would not be real practical for the family. I don't know that having a car seat strapped in the back would be practical OR legal!!! Probably that would mean the younger would have to ride inside, and one of us would be out back. What happens when it rains???

Having said all that, though.... I LOVE THIS LITTLE TRUCK!!! It has the T-tops, which are actually not full-on T-tops, but more like sideways moonroofs, so the integrity of the door frame is preserved. It has a slider rear window. Of course, it is a 4x4, not that that has ever been a criteria for my consideration, but it does present the option of taking it out dune buggying!!! It looks fairly decent, only major damage being a large dent on the tail gate (which seems to keep it from opening, too) that the owner's dad said was exactly where there was a "support our troops" magnet. Damned communists!!! Its only on the second owner, and has lots of documentation. It is really a great little truck. I could probably pick it up, fix the exhaust and buy tires, drive it all summer until I get tired of working that clutch, and sell it off for more that I bought it for. They don't make 'em like this no mo', and everyone seems to really like them. I think it would make a great truck for picking up girls.... For my wife!!! Subarus seem to be the unofficial car of lesbians around these parts.

I was going to look a a Geo Storm on the way back, but we'd left the oldest with a friend and it was getting late. Interesting story on that one, too, about how I would probably never experience negative equity if I got it. Maybe I'll share it if I get a chance to check it out tomorrow (which is shaping up to be a very busy day) but suffice it to say I've always liked their style, too, and it is an auto.

But, OH, that little BRAT!!!

June, One-Six, Seven-One

The day, mama pushed me out her womb,
Told me, "Nigga get paid"


Happy birthday. Rest in peace. The world would never have been ready for a middle-aged 'Pac.

What's The Buzz???

I was cutting a prototype tool the other day on my CNC. Using a 3/4" cutter with a radiused end, I roughed out the cavity. Upon finishing the rough cut, I was amazed to see that it looked quite a bit like a beehive!!!
Well, with an astonishing development like this, I knew I could go no farther until I had a picture of the hive!!!
I brought my camera today and first thing took a few pictures.

Later on in the day, my screensver (3Aline, the coolest in my humble opinion) came up with the image at the bottom here, and I thought it was rather beehive looking, too!!!

The Sunday Wrap-Up

Here's another picture that I took Friday that I had meant to post but apparently forgot. I love the way the ivy covers the whole outside of this structure!!!

I have been a little busy over the weekend with doing some web pages. I updated my wallpaper page tonight. Yesterday I made a couple of new additions to the garage page. My dad had an incident with his Studebaker a couple weekends ago, so I put up a couple pictures of that, and finally made up a page to show off the paint job on my Falcon.

Extreme Sports

Extremely dangerous, at least!!!
One of those things about growing up in Southern California, you really don't get much experience of playing in the snow... Making snow angels, snow men, snow forts and having snowball fights, and, of course, sledding...

Leave it to my boy and his friends to decide that snow isn't really necessary for sledding!!!
Lost a shoe!!!


I gave it a few runs.... its a lot of fun, but I was injured a little. Those weeds don't agree with me!!!

More From Friday

Some more of the pictures I took yesterday

Bein' Hassled by THE MAN

Inspired by seeing Lilly's pics, I took my camera with me today. Outside of my bank's Pasadena branch is rather picturesque!!!




I took several shots, when a well dressed guy comes up to me and tells me that the private property that we are on does not allow photography upon its premises.


I immediately put my camera away, said yea yea, I understand....



Of course, later I think of what my proper response should have been


"This is SO going on my blog!!!"

Drive Time

Twenty six miles, twice a day, four days a week. Sometimes its OK, sometimes its all backed up.
Here are some pictures I took while attempting to keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel.

The first five are from last November.


The last two were taken one foggy morning a little more than a month ago.