Various Things All Posted Together

Previous post prompted protests of professional preclusion, to wit: What of structural engineers? Hydrologic engineers? To which I reply: Who? What? The companies that have employed me have always been about teeny tiny silicon transistors, the integrated circuits that contain them, the circuit boards that interconnect them, the enclosures that house them, and the software wrapper that compels the market to think all that stuff is worth paying for. That's all covered by EEs, MEs and SEs so nothing personal, since I also didn’t mention chemical engineers, and they’re hot stuff down in the fab, but they’ve never had anything to do with me, and that’s really what it’s all about isn’t it. (We had a guy with a PhD in physics, too. No one was impressed particularly.)

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I don’t understand why people think there’s any difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. First Obama, now Edwards, claim to cheering crowds that if Pakistan doesn’t do its part against Al-Qaeda, he as President would send American troops in himself. Fundamentally this is no different than Bush’s foray into Iraq. Just less an unsubstantiated WMD or two. All those other differences – abortion, gay marriage, taxation policy – are merely the means whereby the two halves of the power structure maintain the myth that the electorate has any significant choice. Both parties’ positions on these and other major issues are based on no consistent moral philosophy and serve only to fuel rhetoric with which to carve us up into allegiances based mostly on where we live or who our friends are. The important stuff – our place in a violently shrinking world and the means with which we expand and protect our turf – is already planned out.

A great American philosopher said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Another said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

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I said this a few days ago because Asia is missing Edison and so I’m saying it again:

When Max had his head in my lap and wheezed and sighed and asked me what is wrong with me Daddy I sat with him on the garage floor and cried like a little boy, and then he finally went to his peace two days before Christmas and I missed him terribly and Christmas was colder and lonelier than usual, but hey, I was only a kid of forty five at the time. I still get sad but it only lasts a few seconds, like a flower of love tossed into a breeze that blows it back again because it has nowhere else to go. Why does it hurt when it comes back?

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Yet another great American philosopher said,

I want a new duck
One that won't steal my beer
One that won't stick his bill in my mail
One that knows the duck stops here

We recently attended a lecture by this luminary at the local annual cultural emporium and large animal auction and once I had completed my oenological analyses, I snuck around to the side of the lecture hall to catch a snap or two.