Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Hopefully Mine Will Be Appropriately Offensive

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Esbee lists some euphemisms for "died" that were used in today’s obituaries in the Winston-Salem Journal.  Most involve God which is no surprise for this town, but when I’m ready to chew dirt I hope those responsible for my obituary come up with something quirky, odd and downright offensive.  I was thinking I could mandate it in my will, but that requires the kind of planning everyone knows I’m incapable of so I’ll just leave it to my dearly un-departed.

Watching Bush’s War

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I’m a huge fan of PBS’s Frontline.  So much so that it’s my top ‘Season Pass’ on Tivo so that I’m sure no other show will preempt it for recording.  Last night PBS aired part 1 of Frontline’s Bush’s War which was duly recorded and I’ve now had the chance to watch about half of the 2 1/2 hour segment.  The quality of the show surpasses even Frontline’s excellent standards and I look forward to watching the rest of it at the earliest opportunity.

If you didn’t see it or get it recorded you can view it online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/

Fec points to a write up in Reuters about the show and excerpts a part that includes this paragraph:

In dozens of interviews and with meticulous fact-gathering, “Frontline”
makes a convincing case for two important aspects of the war. First, it
was primarily orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Bush was only “the decider” insofar as he
signed off on their plans, often paying no heed to Secretary of State
Colin Powell and others.

Fec also loaned me Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine which I’m about halfway through, and when you combine that book with this show you have pretty convincing evidence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld bent us over and were none too gentle with us.

Commode Wrangling

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Longtime readers of this blog will know at least two things about me.  First, I have a tendency to get stuck dealing with all things turd-related in my house.  Floaters, pluggers and just strange s*** included.  Second, I’m the least handy person ever born.  I can take a thirty minute project and turn it into a two day docudrama.  And of course there’s the fact that everything about my house is all kinds of effed up.  Okay, that’s three things.

Last week we discovered that the toilet in our basement bathroom was leaking.  The leak seemed to be emanating from one of the bolts that secures the tank to the seat so I thought I had an easy fix.  On Sunday I made my way over to Lowe’s and purchased a neat little $4 kit that includes the two 5/16" bolts and all the nuts, seals and washers needed to secure any standard tank to any standard bowl.  Ah, but what was I thinking?  Nothing in my house is freakin’ standard so when I get home and start to put the bolts in I find that the holes in the tank are probably a millimeter too small, which explains why the previous owner had used 1/4" bolts and then put a bunch of green putty around the holes to seal them.  Dumbass.

So I headed back to Lowe’s to see if I could put together my own little DIY kit that ended up costing me about $9.  When I got back home I quickly discovered that my DIY kit would have been just as crappy as the previous owner’s so I took my preferred tack on any such endeavor and just muscled the 5/16" bolts through the holes using the biggest screw driver I could find.  Once I got them through I proudly re-mounted the tank, hooked everything back up, flushed the toilet and watched a fountain of water spew from the main hole that connects the tank to the seat.  Apparently I’d upset some sort of delicate balance between the seat and the tank because no matter what I did to re-seat the tank it continued to spew forth water.

Since I’d already been told by my boss/wife that we’d soon be replacing the toilet when we put a new floor in that bathroom I decided that Easter Sunday was as good a day as any to replace it.  We had friends coming over for dinner so I thought I’d head over to the store afterwards.  Celeste and I headed out after our guests went home and of course Lowe’s and Home Depot were already closed.  Perfect. This morning I arose early and headed off again to the store and purchased our new single-piece toilet. (I wasn’t going to risk another bad hookup experience between tank and seat).  When I got home I removed the old toilet from it’s seat above the poop-pipe…always a pleasant experience… and started to unpack our new toilet.  That’s when I discovered its base was broken.  Much cussing ensued as I re-packed the toilet, loaded it back in the van and headed back to the store.

The folks at Lowe’s were very nice and predictably unsurprised at my tale of woe with the broken poop pot and they efficiently processed my return.  I grabbed the one remaining toilet of the model that I desired and prayed that it was intact.  You see it was the only single piece toilet that didn’t cost as much as a semester of college so if it was broken I was faced with another two-piece assembly that I just wasn’t up to.

Thankfully the unit was indeed intact so I headed home, unpacked the toilet, put the wax seal on the base and then tried to put it on the poop-hole while getting the floor bolts to go through the bolt holes.  That’s when one of the bolts fell through some sort of gap in the floor and disappeared.  Much cussing ensued.  I grabbed one of the old bolts and re-used it and, voila, I had a new toilet installed.  Time elapsed from first effort at repair to final solution, not including breaks: Roughly eight hours.  Trips to home improvement stores to complete task: Four.

If my life was a home-improvement show and it had one of those little "This will take you x hours to complete" graphics it would show two numbers; X would represent the number of hours it would take an average person and X to the 10th power would represent how long it would take me.

Recipe for Middle Aged Disaster

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So I joined up to play in an over-40 soccer league.  I’m thinking, "Hey, I’m on the younger end of that spectrum so how bad can it be?"  I played the first couple of games and discovered how truly out of shape I am.  Since I haven’t played competitive soccer in over 23 years and I’ve put on more pounds than I’d like to admit, those 40 yard sprints ain’t to easy to recover from.  So this week when they asked me to play goalie I thought, "Hey, why not?  At least I won’t feel like I’m gonna pass out after five minutes."

Sunday I stepped into goal and little did I know that the team we were facing was a perennial power in the league.  Thus I found myself flopping around like a fish on land as I went after shots, crosses, through balls, etc.  I really enjoyed it, but yesterday when I woke up I felt like someone had beat me with a 2×4. Then on top of that I got hit with a mild case of the flu bug which engendered me not venturing too far from the facilities all day long.  By last night I had the shakes something fierce and all I could do was lie in bed under several blankets with a heating pad on my lower back.

Thankfully a good night’s sleep seems to have cured all that ails me, with the notable exception that I’m still over-40 and wondering why I can’t party like its 1984.

links for 2008-03-14

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  • Working in Kenya: Sorry for not posting!

    Laura Hendrix’s blog about her work in Kenya for Mentor Initiative. Very interesting stuff from an “on-the-ground” perspective on doing work on flooding, malaria control, etc.

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Headlines

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I’m no grammarian so please keep that in mind as you read the following.  I’ve noticed lately that I have to re-read headlines to make sure I understand what the author is trying to say.  I understand that headline writers are dealing with very limited space, but sometimes I think they need to be edited a little more closely.

Here’s one I found today on WXII’s website: Woman in Court Accused of Killing Daughter.  Uh, is the court accused of killing the daughter or is the woman?  Can a court kill a daughter? Wouldn’t a better headline be Woman Accused of Killing Daughter is in Court? I mean you’re adding two letters and a total of four spaces and it’s a website for goodness sake so space isn’t that precious.

There’s this headline found on the Winston-Salem Journal’s website, although the article originally appeared in the LA Times: Features of New $5 Bill Aim at Thwarting Counterfeiters.  Can features aim?  At a minimum wouldn’t it read better if it was written as "aimed"?  Or how about New Features of $5 Bill Intended to Thwart Counterfeiters.

I understand that the idea is to convey the main thrust of the story in a few words, and I don’t think that you can always do it and be grammatically correct at the same time.  But if the idea is to get the point across quickly then I don’t think it’s a good headline if it causes the readers to say, "huh?" when they read it.  So with that criteria I think the first headline is pretty bad, while the second headline doesn’t really get in the way of understanding what the article is about. 

Maybe I’m just being picky because, you know, these people are supposedly paid to write and edit well.  All I know is it bugs the hell out of me when I read these things.