Author: bill

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Hell hath no further like a jilted lover!

 

Thirty-three people were killed and 15 others were wounded at Virginia Tech university on Monday in the deadliest campus shooting rampage in U.S. history.

Source: 33 killed in Virginia massacre – Yahoo! News

I graduated from Virginia Tech so this story hit me hard. Ambler Johnston was a girl’s dormitory when I went to school. Lots of my female friends lived there but I do not remember getting above the lobby. I studied Engineering at Virginia Tech and several of my classes were in Norris Hall where most of the students and professors died. I think it was in Norris Hall that I took a Statics class many springs ago. It was a ball buster of a course back then and everybody knew it. You either got it or you didn’t but you couldn’t skip it. It was a required course. I can still remember being in that class and wanting to be someplace else on those spring mornings. It seemed like all my friends were out having a good time while I was locked in a mortal combat with a course that was going to determine my future career. Did I have the right stuff to be an engineer or are was I really a business major in training? It was so unfair! For a college sophomore this was hell on earth, that is until yesterday.

To love and to be loved is a great but somewhat mysterious goal in life. We all aspire to love deeply but it is probably never more difficult than when we are college students. I look fondly at my relationships in my college years. I was incredibly inept at relationships though I did not think that at the time. I desperately wanted to know what it was like to be passionately in love. It didn’t happen for me and for most of my fellow students. I learned pretty quickly that failure to love someone is not the end of the world. Love can be foolish but never give up. Love is always around the corner.

For the shooter his story of love had ended. It was the end of his world for reasons we will never understand.  The first people he shot that day point to a crime of passion. Maybe the shootings were about a love lost. Maybe it was about an unrequited love. Love and fury are typically lethal. Why he shot the rest of the people we will never know. They are all dead. 

For many of the students at Virginia Tech and elsewhere, a piece of their innocence was ripped away from them yesterday. Worries about passing classes while their friends played in the sun are trivialized now. They will grieve for their lost friends and the professors but the pain will linger on. Was this an act of senseless violence or an act of passion? For many students closure will be painfully hard. It will be hard to forget the people who died when you walk into Ambler Johnston or Norris Hall but you must press on. It will be eery sitting in front of a substitute professor in Norris Hall but the degree requirements will not change. Life is unfair! The students have embarked on the hardest course in their life, getting over this tragedy. Unlike their college courses they cannot drop this course if they find it too tough and there is no time limit to this course. There is no way to restore lost innocence and there is no time limit on grieving.

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Determined

Some people are just determined to be… odd.

A man and woman came in yesterday for lunch, he wanted a Cobb salad. But he did not want chicken, bacon, avocado, or blue cheese. Which basically leaves egg and lettuce. To be helpful, his server suggested a less expensive alternative of a plain salad with egg. That made him mad. She apologized. He demanded she bring him the Cobb Salad.

The woman sitting across from him asked if we used clam juice in our clam chowder, and could she get a bowl without clams. Apparently she’s allergic to shellfish.

I am going to start a fund and pay people like this not to eat here.

Link to Determined

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Cat Blogging Friday Part 3

Pearl on the chair

Here is another installment of Cat Blogging Friday. Pearl is a cat my wife found as a kitten in the middle of the road. Not exactly the brightest cat I have ever known but it got the job done! Most of the time Pearl does not trust me and runs away to hide under the bed. She is young and her personality is still developing but I think we are as close as we will ever be. She allows Chewie to play with her but not Sassy.

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Intelligence Analyst Challenges Good Friday ‘Spin’

(2007-04-06) ”” While Christians around the world gather for so-called “Good Friday” observances, an intelligence analyst studying primary source documents challenged the “irrational exuberance of the true believers,” and said his research to date indicates things did not go according to plan.

“At this point, you have a leader in whom a lot of people had placed their hopes, who failed miserably,” said the unnamed source who is in the process of translating and exploiting the documents. “There’s no progress ”” no movement at all. It’s a classic case of a bad plan, poorly executed. A rational person would ask, ”˜What’s so good about it?’”

The source said that “while fanatics encourage taking a longer term hopeful view of the situation, and try to position the conflict as an epic struggle between good and evil in which good ultimately triumphs, the immediate reality on the ground shows the enemy has won, the plan lies in ruin and the way forward is blocked by an immovable obstacle. Any way you look at it, it’s a dark day.”

“You can call it Good Friday if you wish,” he said, “but that’s just spin. I can’t say it any clearer, ”˜It is finished.’”

Link to Intelligence Analyst Challenges Good Friday ‘Spin’

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Cat Blogging Friday Part 2

Chewie
This is the guy. He is a strange and kooky cat. If I try to read while in bed, he likes to lay on my chest between me and the book. He is fixed but he likes to torment our two female cats. He attacks them and chases them around the house. He likes to play with common items, rolls of stamps, USB sticks, plastic bags, etc. He fishes these “cat toys” out of their hiding places and bats them around the room. This is especially annoying in the middle of the night.

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My Sony DSC-F717 camera is fixed!

Sony DSC_F717 camera

About a week ago my Sony camera went on the blink. Up until that point I was very happy with the camera. When I looked through the view finder I got garish yellowish-green monochrome image. When the image started to smear across the screen I decided that it needed to be fixed or trashed. After searching the net for some ideas on how to fix it, I came across a post that said that Sony had settled a legal case concerning a variety of cameras and they were fixing the cameras as part of the settlement. He said that although his camera’s symptoms were not the same as shown on the Sony support website, when he talked to the folks at Sony they said they were willing to fix it under the settlement. So I gave them a call and they offered to fix my camera, too. Yesterday I got my camera back and it works. I am a happy camper again.

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Cat Blogging Friday

Sassy on the railing
My wife found Sassy when she was a wild kitten. Sassy had accidentally gone inside a friend’s house looking for food. My wife brought her home. Sassy has adjusted to living indoors quite well but she displays a few wild tendencies.

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en la lucha por la locha

Mr. Chávez’s reintroduction of the coin invokes a period when Venezuela enjoyed large foreign investment and remarkable price stability. A common response then to the question “how are you?” was “en la lucha por la locha,” an expression revolving around the coin, meaning roughly “struggling to make a buck.”

This quote from the NY Times stuck my fancy. I was in Venezuela during the period of stability that Mr. Chávez longs for. Compared to the rest of South America, Venezuela was both a prosperous and progressive country. In the 1960’s Venezuela was making major strides in many areas. I believe I was there for the first free elections. Since much of the population was illiterate, the candidates were assigned colors. If you wanted to vote for a candidate all you had to do was remember their color. This was a major step forward for South America who traditionally relied on the military to make changes. This was also a period in which American businesses dominated the economy. It is ironic that as Mr. Chávez is nationalizing industries he fondly remembers a period marked by a very close relationship to foreign investment. I guess he has to learn the fundamentals international economics the hard way.

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Family Facts #4

On average, teens from intact families with frequent religious attendance earned the highest GPA (2.94) when compared to (a) their peers from intact families with low to no religious attendance (2.75), (b) peers from non-intact families with frequent religious attendance (2.72), and (c) peers from non-intact families with low to no religious attendance (2.48). Source: Fagan, Patrick, A Portrait of Family and Religion in America: Key Outcomes for the Common Good, (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation 2006) (HT: FamilyFacts.org)

Link to Family Facts #4