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Last Request

Mark Rush's houseFor years I’ve been telling my kids I want to be cremated when I pass from this plane of existence. I then want them to grow some tomato plants and/or marijuana plants in containers. They can take my ashes and spread them on within the containers. My thought being they could then enjoy me in a nice salad or relax on the patio with a doobie.   Either way they could remember me one more time.

David has never said much either way about my last request. Keely has remarked in the past that she thought that be a gross idea. However, she may be coming around a little.

I came up with another idea today.   They could bury me in my little blue Miata. In one hand they could place a doobie. In the other hand they could put a bottle of nice wine. And for the crowning touch, place a mannequin in there with me in such position that it looks like she is giving me road head.

Now that is the way to enter the afterlife.

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James Watt by Andrew Carnegie

jameswatt_1206James Watt invented the steam engine.  This is a fact that I learned in grade school.  Such was my comprehension that I often mixed up James Watt and Robert Fulton, the inventor of the first commercially viable steamboat.

James Watt invented the steam engine.  This brings up an imagine of a man having a flash of inspiration, sitting down at his drafting table, sketchy a design in 30 minutes, and passing it on to mechanics to build.  The nature of such things is not so.  Like Edison and his light bulb, Watt ran a long, arduous race to bring his steam engine into fruition. He built upon the work Thomas Newcomen and the atmospheric steam engine.

Watt was home schooled and self-educated.  He inherited a natural genesis for things mechanic from his father.  Being somewhat impatient to begin his career he did not want to go through a 7 year apprenticeship in the mechanical arts.  He managed to learn what he needed to about the trade in about a year.  Unfortunately, the union/guild laws of the time Continue reading “James Watt by Andrew Carnegie”

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This IT worker had to train an H-1B replacement

The H1-B program is such a cluster fuck visited on the American worker that cluster fuck is not a strong enough term.  I’m in IT and I have been watching this disaster for years.

I was contracting at large financial firm.  I begin noticing a large number of young Indians coming in as contract workers.  Contracting is a very common method in IT.  Companies like because they can staff up and staff down as needed.  I used to like because the companies generally compensated well for the insecurity of a contracting positions, and I did not mind moving around to different jobs.  To get back to my position at the financial firm.  When I saw all the Indians coming in I knew my days were numbered, and they were.  They found a pretense to terminate my contract nine months early.  It was my second contract at this firm, and they had actually given me more money to come back for a second contract.  Additionally, they had given me an 18 month contract when normal they did not go over a year.  They seemed to like my work. My consulting firm later told me that they were bringing in the Indians at $25/hour  less than I was receiving.  I can promise you I was not getting rich.  This was at a time long past the glory days of contracting.

This particular consulting firm ended up going out of business as they could not compete with the cheap off-shore labor either.  And this was one of the older and bigger consulting companies.  Now days, when a consulting company calls you about a contract if you are talking to an American it is a miracle.  If the consulting company is not Indian it is even more of a miracle.  You have to give the Indians credit.  Many of the Indian companies have used the minority preferences given by our laws to gain an advantage.  Essentially this has allowed Indian firms to corner this market in preference to American firms.

Who do I blame?  I do not blame individual Indians, but I do blame Congress and our President who are in cahoots with our corporations who only care about profit and cheap, cheap labor.   It is something I have ranted about for years.  Congress briefly played lip service to all the complaints, but I do believe the problem is even worse than it was before.

To read about one of these horror stories, go to This IT worker had to train an H-1B replacement at Computerworld.com

 

Just in case you do not know what a H1-B Visa — click the link for the Wikepedia article on same.

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John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London

John_Barleycorn_Alcoholic_Memoirs_1112Most people know Jack London from such books as Call of the Wild or White Fang.  London was also a Socialist and attempted to motivate public opinion to correct social ills, uplift the poor and champion the working class in such books as People of the Abyss. For the last book, London went undercover in the notorious East End of London, where the poorest of the poor lived.  If you can read this book and remained unmoved about the vileness of unfettered capitalism, you are a stronger person than I.

John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs is a very interesting book to read. For someone like myself who knows more than a few folks who have shipwrecked their lives on one or both of the conjoined reefs of depression and addiction, it is also a very hard book to read.   London’s goal in writing this book was as a warning to generations coming after him on the dangers of John Barleycorn aka alcohol.

There is some controversy over how Jack London died.  The immediate cause was an overdose of morphine.  Whether it was accidentally or purposeful is the controversy.  What is not at controversy was that he was in the late stages alcoholism.  He was also suffering from various diseases picked up in his travels.

Perhaps one of the most telling of passages in the book is the beginning of chapter one: Continue reading “John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London”

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought # 4,234

…yeah I know you did not ask!

Life is purposeless.  Life just is.  Anyone beyond scrambling daily to just meet their existence needs knows this at some level.  Most folks do not acknowledge it.  Perhaps this is actually the healthier response, to remain somewhat delusional.  However it is this unacknowledged comprehension that drives so much of human behavior.  The mass psychoses that are the various religions stem from this.  The fanaticism of the sports aficionado is a symptom of this.  You can add anything that pretends to provide or reveal purpose to life. Being a creative species we have concocted many.

The question becomes what happens when this purposelessness is acknowledged.  An argument could be made that this is a possible cause of depression, addiction, and a varied list of maladaptive behaviors.

The more I dwell on it, the only sane response when you are aware enough to acknowledge that life is without purpose is to live in the moment, to just be.  Another possible response when you accept this is to provide your own purpose realizing that ultimately your purpose is an ephemeroptera.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought # 6,787

…yeah I know you did not ask!

Intelligent Design… If there were truly a loving, compassionate god, would he/she/it design a system of carnivorous might.  The strong preying on the weak, biting through their jugular veins, and ripping them apart bite by bite.  A system designed such that many of the males of the species will eat the young of their species if given half a chance.  And so on and so on and so on …