Our dining room set was moderately expensive 25 years ago. It has held up well. But it is “factory made”, not “craftsman made”. The worst part of the factory is the machines that shoot staples and some sort of flat metal thing into the joints. These make repairs impossible. These items probably stabilize the joints while the glue dries. Because they are impossible to extract and damage the wood when they go in, they weaken the joint to begin with and make repairs impossible later when the joint lets go. I would recommend that Congress ban the domestic manufacture of furniture using these devices and the import of same.
Next Blog
I have become addicted to the “Next Blog” button on the Blogspot.com pages. This button takes you to a random blog. It can help you to find pages in many languages about many topics. And consume a lot of time. If you would like to exercise your French or German or Spanish or your Malay or whatever, try it out. (All of the Asian languages are a complete mystery to me). Warning – some of the pages have “Adult Only” content. There may be a filter but I do not know about it yet. Vicarious Tourism at its best.
Teenage Jonny Quest in Tokyo
J. L. Mann High School in Greenville, SC is presenting an original play “Teenage Jonny Quest in Tokyo” tonight 5 April, 2008 at 7:30PM, tomorrow Sunday 6 April, at 3:00 PM, Thursday and Friday (10 and 11) at 7:30PM at the new J. L. Mann High School Auditorium at the corner of Ridge Road and Fairforest Way. Refreshments available for purchase.
Mugabe, man of myth and mystery
There is a European folk tale about a man who teaches a woman to spin straw into gold. The man’s name is Rumpelstiltskin. Perhaps Mr. Mugabe should become the center of an African folk tale of a man whose hubris taught him to spin gold into straw. While a leader can be great, times change and new leaders are needed to adapt to new times and new situations. I am tired of the Republicans and will never trust the Clintons.
Michael Masley
One of the CD’s that I just took off the player is by Michael Masley. I think that I bought this one near the corner of Jefferson and Hyde in San Francisco in 1999 when I was there for a SHARE conference. I guess that Michael Masley is still going strong as attested by his own web site and the number of Google entries. But most especially by the Wikipedia article. A very intense, dedicated, talented and interesting fellow. He played on the street outside Mac Expo in January.
Primary
Yesterday was the South Carolina Republican Primary. Since this area is pretty much Republican, that was the hot topic. So much so that the Public Radio Network preempted Piano Jazz to cover it. For some reason South Carolina Public Radio (scern obsolete link) has been renamed South Carolina ETV Radio. Even though there were no results at 8:00 PM, the announcer remarked, they did have coverage. Better that they had waited until they did have results and use the points provided in the programming to interrupt or preempt.
The election may be hot but the weather is cold, even for January. We have had a bit of snow twice now. And a cold rain a couple of days. This is a good thing as we are way behind on rain since last year.
Unsweet
I keep finding that products that I have used for years because they do not have evil chemicals in them have been reformulated to include nasties like sorbitol (causes diarrhea) and aspartame (gives me headaches). Wrigley’s Doublemint gum is a prime example. It contains sugar so it does not qualify as sugarless AND aspartame.
No New News?
While reading the newspaper this morning, I had the thought that while reporters question everything that comes out of the president’s mouth (as they should), they seem to give a “pass” to all of the candidates. The reporters for both the newspapers and the networks do not seem to apply any sort of journalistic skepticism to any of the campaign talk. Perhaps we have a press corps full of repeaters rather than reporters.