Tag: random

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #4,831

yeah I know you did not ask!

At times, it is so very, very hard being a sarcastic SOB.

I was filling out a medical form, and even though it was a computerized form that could have been carrying redundant information from section to section, it was not.

One question it kept asking, besides my name, DOB, etc., was sex.  It got where it was all I could do to not put “Yes, and often please.” But I kept reminding myself that it was a very tired, old joke, even by my standards.

Why they had not provided a drop down box with the two options – male, female – is beyond me.  A free form text box seemed to be exactly the wrong option for gathering an either/or piece of data .  Perhaps they were trying to be “woke”. It just struck me as stupid programming.

On a related note…

A while back a doctor asked me, “Do you drink?”

“Sure,” I replied, “Scotch neat with a splash of water, otherwise I will take whatever you are drinking.”

Apparently that was an inappropriate response in a medical setting.

And so it goes.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #8,089

yeah I know you did not ask!

Florida is the American state with the highest percentage of retirees.  While folks can retire from the work-a-day world at an early age, most commonly do so in their 60s.  This obviously implies that there are a lot of old geezers in the Sunshine State.

There is an Oscar Wilde quote based on the venerable adage, “With age comes wisdom.” The complete Wilde quote is “With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”

Given the gawd awful politicians that Florida voters keep electing to national and state offices, I do believe Oscar had it right.  There is not a lot of wisdom in Florida’s selection of politicians.  I frequently wonder what is in the water down there, or what they are smoking.

And so it goes.

 

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #3,726

yeah I know you did not ask!

File this under ironic.

When I first moved in with Señora around 2012 in this St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield (population 49,703), there was a big discussion going on in the media about racial profiling, The city of Chesterfield was listed as one of the most egregious cities in Missouri for profiling of black drivers. A quick search on Google did not bring up any current articles, however.  Chesterfield is 77% white, 13% Asian, and only 3.5% black. Hispanics are 2.9% and the rest vary.

Continuing through the pandemic until now, home deliveries of whatever has become and remains massively popular.  There seems to be delivery vans constantly driving down our street.

The ironic part… the vast majority of the folks driving these vans are exactly the type of persons that the Chesterfield PD was accused of profiling a decade ago. Apparently it is okay if these folks are delivering your goodies and wearing a corporate uniform.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #8,069

yeah I know you did not ask!

As you surely know, the primary sensory input for canines is the sense of smell. Our particular canine, Princess Lily, has the common but  troubling habit of rolling in whatever odoriferous substance she can find. This seems to be some sort of bold statement for dogs – here I am, I know you can smell me now.

Of course, this results in Señora giving The Wee Dog frequent baths. Lily tolerates these baths, but just barely. But she is so happy when they are over that she runs around the house crazily for five minutes. Señora being Señora, chases the ecstatic Lily and everyone is having a good time.

Thinking about this other day I came to the conclusion that if our precious little dog was human she would  dress in wild, bold, colorful clothes that would generate jokes about needing sunglasses.

Loud smells, loud clothes, all in the same ballpark… smell me, look at me!

And so it goes

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #1,560

yeah I know you did not ask!

I wonder if at the various universities and colleges that teach Internet technologies if there are special writing classes, perhaps in the Marketing Department under Internet.

There seems to a certain, very common style of article on many websites.  There is a teaser headline that grabs your attention, so you open the article. You then start reading or perhaps scanning to through the article to find the tidbit that attracted you, but it is not readily apparent. So you scroll, and scroll some more trying to find it.  As you do so you go past one advertisement after another.  If you are exceedingly lucky you find the tidbit towards the end of the article, but it frequently has an O. Henry twist to it.  Not uncommonly, however, there is nothing in article that relates to the teaser.

It is amazing what we humans are willing to do to other humans in the endeavor to extract money from them.

And so it should not go.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #2,688

yeah I know you did not ask!

I was doing yoga style stretches before launching into more vigorous, traditional exercises in our basement gymnasium area.  As I was doing so my various joints were snapping,cracking and popping so loudly and so often that I thought I was consuming a bowl of Rice Krispies.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #1,799

yeah I know you did not ask!

In a post I used the phrase “in the Weinhaus-Rush household”, being a senior with a floppy neural network (do they make a Viagra for that?), I began to play around with the meanings of our two last names.

All my life people have made puns or jokes on my last name.  In the start of the Cold War era in the fifties it was, “Hey David, are you a Rush-AN?” During the hippie sixties it was, “Man, what a rush”, referring, of course, to the effects of drugs, generally said as someone passed me in the hallways at school.  My least favorite has been, “Hey, RUSH Limbaugh.” I quickly dissuaded folks from the use of that obnoxious appellation in regards to me.  And there is always the omnipresent jest, “Hey what’s your rush, Rush.” For the purpose of this randomness we are going with sixties version.

Indubitably, you are aware that Weinhaus is German for wine house as in the anglicized name, Amy Winehouse.

So our household is the Wine House Rush or perhaps the Rush Wine House.  Apparently, we are running some sort hippie opium den tavern/pub/wine bar.  Man, what a rush! Y’all come on down here, hear, aprisa, before the Ruskies  and MAGAs take over.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #6,930

yeah I know you did not ask!

There is a unit on vehicles called a flasher; it controls the flashing of the turn signals and emergency lights.  It also is responsible for the clicking sound that you hear when they are engaged.  I became familiar with this device when I drove an ice cream truck a couple summers in Oklahoma City while I was in college.  Since we drove very slowly in neighborhoods and had kids running up to the truck we had the emergency flashers on much of the time.  This resulted in the flasher unit having to be replaced several times a season.

I don’t have this problem in my Tacoma, but in my MX-5 Miata and my wife’s Subaru Outback I have an issue with leaving the turn signal on.  In the Outback if I get everything adjusted just right, I can see the indicator on the dashboard.  I have a harder time in the Miata.  This results in the old man syndrome of driving with my turn signal on for miles and miles and miles.

I went looking on the Internet, and they do make flashers with a louder sound.  One was advertising up to 5 times louder than normal. Why they are not marketing these aggressively to senior citizens I do not know, but if anyone wants to buy me a birthday present next year…

Just as an aside I was driving somewhere with the grandkids and their mother in the Outback.  She advised me that I still had my turn signal on even though I was done changing lanes.  I politely informed her that I was entitled as I was over 60.

And so it goes.

 

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #4,845

yeah I know you did not ask!

After much gnashing of teeth, after much scrutinizing of checking  accounts, after accepting that she would not be 21 again, Señora bit the proverbial bullet and bought herself hearing aids.

This purchased has wrought an unexpected change in my life. In the past when we had a cross transaction I was wont to mutter some reply under my mustache, knowing that it was very unlikely that she would hear my utterance, thus avoiding fueling whatever fire was raging.  If she noticed my lips moving, and asked what I said, I would disingenuously reply, “That I love you.”  That is no longer an option. I know this to be true as I was in my man cave upstairs talking back to a balky computer when from the kitchen downstairs I heard her ask, “What did you say dear?”

Hopefully I am not too old a dog to learn a new trick, and can avoid being taken to the pound.

Let me see, how many cliches did I manage to get into three short paragraphs…

Keep well.

 

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #8,342

yeah I know you did not ask!

A little after I woke up this morning I looked at the weather app on my phone.  For all the world I was hoping I had changed it from Fahrenheit to Celsius.  I do that sometimes as I talk regularly with folks in other countries via Skype in my endeavor to learn the Spanish language.  While I can do the temperature conversion fairly rapidly in my head, it easier just to change the settings on the app.  People living on or close to the equator are somewhat fascinated by cold and variable weather of the northern latitudes.  Or maybe we are just trying to find a topic to talk about!

The story I like to tell about is talking to a young man in Honduras.  When he popped on my Skype screen he was in a jacket and had on mittens.  I asked him if he was cold.  He replied that he was freezing and explained to me it was 15 degrees (59 degrees Fahrenheit). All is relative.  Some folks here would have been in shorts at that temperature in January.

Long story, short…I had not changed the temperature scale in use on my phone.  It is just freaking cold today and getting colder.