Archive for July, 2012

To fully appreciate this tale you’re going to have to know a few things. English would be nice. Although Para Español oprime número dos. If you’d like this story to entertain you, blink once. If you’d like this story to inform you, blink twice. If you blinked at all, please seek psychiatric care immediately and then just read the damn story OK.

Sign of the times: Unemployed pick up moves back in with parent.

I’ll set the stage. The year was 1976 and as a 15 year old hormone factory living in frigid Syracuse, NY I was privileged to work on the most mega-ginormous off road equipment ever built. I use the non-word mega-ginormous to convey my sense of adolescent shock and awe at the sheer enormity of these machines. I’m talking monumental dump trucks, massive front end loaders and colossal excavators. My route to this “It’s a Large World” Disneyland of construction equipment was through my family’s glass and mirror business. Whenever I wasn’t in school I was immediately and profitably absorbed into the work force doing anything from cutting glass (actually scoring glass, then exploiting the fault line) to slapping up mirrors in cookie cutter tract homes. Great work if you can get it, or are fortunate enough to be born into a family that has it. In any event, one of our heavy industry accounts was LB Smith. LB Smith was a General Motors dealer, but not in the traditional sense. They were a dealership in GM’s steroidal Terex division. This division didn’t manufacture Impalas or Corvettes, instead they produced the world’s largest collection of outrageously gargantuan off road equipment the universe had ever seen. Bigger even, than a Dolly Parton wig. Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas Jefferson: Polymath extraordinaire.

When I meet with a proposition beyond finite comprehension, I abandon it as a weight human strength cannot lift, and I think ignorance in these cases is truly the softest pillow on which I can lay my head — Thomas Jefferson corresponding with John Adams 1820

Few fantasies would give me more pleasure than stealing a couple of contemporary hours in the cherished company of that revered forefather and complex Renaissance man Thomas Jefferson. Oh, would that I could lovingly lay before him the fantastic national landscape he carefully cultivated so many years ago. Patriots everywhere herald his Declaration of Independence as the Big Bang in our 232 year old Colonial Chemistry set and I’d thrill to show him all the new elements discovered in our federal laboratory. If only God would grant me a few precious moments with Thomas Jefferson, I’d promise never to tax without representing. I’m not asking much, merely the transubstantiation of matter, energy, space and time. Jesus got to do it. Why not me? Read the rest of this entry »