Some smart people invented a tennis ball launcher that’s powered by pedaling a bicycle. This speaks to me on so many levels, including my love of tennis, the great deal of time I’ve spent on stationary bikes recently and my love of gadgetry (although I myself struggle to even put together IKEA furniture). Readers of this blog may remember that I partially tore my LCL about six weeks ago and part of my rehab is pedaling my butt off on a stationary bike. Well with this gadget I could satisfy my rehab requirements while getting back on the tennis court sooner than planned. If only I had even an ounce of engineering acumen I’d give this a go. Here’s the video:
Pedal Powered Tennis – Ball Launcher – video powered by Metacafe
Last night we drove on down to Davidson County where my Grandmother, known to all as GG, is now living in an assisted living facility. My Aunts put on a surprise party for her to celebrate her 89th birthday and I think she was tickled pink.
She’s in great health at 89 as evidenced by the fact that she blew all those candles out in one breath. Losing a great percentage of her eyesight a couple of years back has caused her to change her lifestyle as you might expect, but she soldiers on. Every year for at least the last 15 she’s thanked everyone for celebrating her "last" birthday with her. She comes from a long line of women who live longer than Methuselah so we figure we’re going to have her around for at least another 15 years.
Ever since she moved into her current digs GG has complained about the food, but I’ve been informed by my Aunts that despite those complaints she’s managed to put on about 15 pounds (which is a good thing, btw). She also claims homesickness. Sounds just like a college freshman doesn’t it? She really is young at heart.
Happy Birthday GG!
Don’t have the patience to follow the goings-on on Capitol Hill? Wouldn’t be caught dead watching C-Span? Well, here’s the simplest way in the world to know what the hot button issue of the day is, and it will take you all of 5 seconds to use. It’s CapitolWords, a site that scans the Congressional Record and tallies up all the words used the previous day and then provides the one word used the most. Today it’s "oil". Cool thing is it goes all the way back to 2000 so you can see the words that were hottest for the last eight years.
These are the words for the 13 session days of June reported so far:
energy, energy, energy, energy, energy, bush, energy, oil, energy, caribbean, tax, health, oil. Nine out of thirteen are either energy or oil. Go figure.
Hat tip to bookofjoe for the lead.
I thought I got a lot of comments here for my post Random Stop? until I saw the debate that it provoked on the Chatham County BBS (thanks to Esbee for the tip). The site’s administrator Gene Galin posted my piece on the BB and it provoked a whole bunch of comments, and I think it’s a good debate that provides a look into the various viewpoints on illegal immigration and how we as a society are dealing with it.
Some of the comments pointed out that I was probably in Alamance County and not Chatham County and I think they’re right. I’m not real familiar with that area but I do know where I was in relation to I-40 and upon further inspection it does seem I was in Alamance. The importance of that detail in the overall debate was highlighted in a post by "belle" that references an article in the Raleigh News & Observer pointing out that Alamance County’s sheriff has been involved longer than any other sheriff in North Carolina in the federal program that provides funding for identifying illegal immigrants that have been arrested for other crimes. Alamance has had 434 illegal immigrants deported, 64 of whom had been arrested for felonies and 302 for traffic stops.
One of the main questions in my original post was whether or not the feds meant for these funds to be used in this way. Typically the federal government has not looked kindly on state and local agencies infringing on their territory and I was wondering if the folks at ICE would be happy with this kind of operation.
A second issue that I didn’t articulate well, but came out in the comments, is whether or not it’s a good idea to have traffic stops to identify illegal aliens. The problem is that there are plenty of Hispanic folks in this country who are here legally and it’s not fair to them to be pulled over and have their residency status checked. The point is that if you’re going to pull over Hispanics to check status, then you should pull over everyone since there are plenty of illegal immigrants from non-Hispanic countries.
The police routinely set up roadblocks for a variety of reasons. Drunk driving checkpoints on New Years Eve, checks of inspection stickers, checks of registration, etc. No one likes them but I think we all understand them and live with them because we’re all subjected to them. In my original post I wrote that you could very well say that the checkpoint I drove through was set up for that purpose, and maybe it was. What seemed off to me was that there were lots of cars pulled to the side when we passed and they were all driven by Hispanics. It also seemed strange that the sheriff barely glanced at my ID, in fact he never even got close enough to take it out of my hand, and that he didn’t appear to look at my stickers or plates. I suspect that if I hadn’t been a middle aged white guy with a family, but rather had been a middle aged Hispanic guy with a family I would have been scrutinized much more carefully.
Lots of issues here that are important: illegal immigration, due process, civil rights and state rights among them. No easy answers, but then there never are for the truly important things in life.
Last time I typed and you read I was sitting in O’Hare waiting for my flight home. I must say that I had an exceptional run of good travel luck over the last 10 days. I had two business trips, one to San Diego and one to Chicago. In all I had six flights and in all that only two delays, the longest being about one hour. On the red eye home from California I had a young mother with a 7-month old baby in her lap sitting next to me and the baby slept the entire trip. Last night I was crammed into my seat next to a rather large person overflowing from the seat next to mine when the stewardess asked me if I’d like to move three rows back to one of the two empty seats on the whole flight, the other empty seat being the one offered to me. It’s been years since I’ve been this lucky.
So it should have come as no surprise when I walked in my door last night at 11:30 to find our refrigerator pulled away from the wall and lots of towels on the floor. It seems that while Celeste and the kids were at the kids’ swim meet last night the water line to the ice maker/water dispenser in the refrigerator had a blow out. Celeste came home to find water coming out of our basement ceiling and running down the wall just outside our storage closet. Keep in mind that the drop down ceiling and wall were just added to our basement three months ago when we had it finished. In other words it’s all brand new.
Shaking my head I made my way back to the bedroom to find Celeste sucking down a glass of red wine. She took one look at me and said, "I think I need to get drunk." This from a woman who’s had one too many drinks maybe two times in the 18 years I’ve known her. She didn’t proceed to get drunk, but she definitely bent my ear about the piece-of-**** refrigerator we bought when we moved here four years ago.
Can’t say I’d argue with her on that point. The auger that moves the ice from the ice maker to the ice dispenser broke exactly one day after the warranty expired. Then the motor in the ice maker started making horrific noises so I decided to fix the whole shebang. I got the motor fixed (see here), but never the auger. It really is a piece of crap.
Funny thing is that the seminar I just attended in Chicago featured two speakers one who works for Whirlpool. Guess which company manufactured our piece-of-**** refrigerator? When I get a chance I’m going to type a nice email to send him with some not-so-objective feedback on at least one of his company’s products.
Kharma’s a funny thing isn’t it?
Well, it looks like my last post, Random Stop?, attracted the most comments I’ve had on a post since I wrote about Ernest Angley. Writing about a hot-button issue like illegal immigration and wondering aloud if the police were racial profiling at a trafic stop AND getting a link from Esbee will do that. I haven’t responded to most of the comments because I’ve been working in Chicago since Sunday night and I’m just now getting the chance to sit in front of my computer for the first time since then. I’m sitting in O’Hare waiting for my flight back to GSO and honestly I’m too tired to respond effectively. I’ll do it tomorrow when my brain’s a little less fuzzy.
O’Hare’s fun for people-watching but not much else. The internet connection I paid $6.95 for is agonizingly slow. The same people who are fun to watch are often also rude, and many smell a little ripe. Maybe that’s the food court. Anyway, it’s a nuthouse. That makes for a great contrast with the GSO terminal, which is so quiet you could hold a meditation session in one of the 80% of gates that aren’t used at any given time.
Here’s how quiet GSO is. My flight out on Sunday night was scheduled to take off at 7:50 p.m. It was delayed an hour so I was hanging out in the little Sam Adams bar near the gates on the United side of the terminal. Tiger was struggling down the back-9 at the US Open and I was enjoying the show with about 10 of my fellow passengers. Unfortunately the bar shut down at 8:00 (8:00!) so we all had to leave, but luckily the TV was left on while the cleaning crew was doing their thing so we watched through the security gate. The cleaning crew finished right after Tiger teed off on the 18th and they shut off the TV so we all returned to the gate and a guy did a play-by-play while listening to the broadcast on his iPod. Classic.
I think we were the last flight out since the approximately 30 people on our flight were the last people in the terminal and the gate agent was so desperate to get rid of us he helped clean the plane when it arrived from some exotic locale, Minneapolis I believe. I think he had a party to get to.
I love flying out of GSO, but I wonder how long it can survive with so few passengers. Normally I’d mark up the experience to an anomaly, but the airport has been this sedate all four years I’ve been using it regularly. Sadly, it only seems to be getting worse.
Oh well. No more travel for a while, which is nice. I’ve met lots of interesting people over the last week and a half, which makes the travel more than bearable, but I’m looking forward to being home for a while. Not sure if Celeste and the kids feel the same, but they’re stuck with me so I think we’ll all adjust.
Just drove home from a birthday party near Pittsboro, NC. As we were driving north on NC-87 we encountered a road block being manned by sheriff’s deputies and state troopers about 14 miles south of I-40. They were checking everyone’s IDs and either letting them through or pulling them to the shoulder. I thought maybe it was a DUI checkpoint or an effort to nab people whose inspection stickers were expired, but then I noticed that all the cars being pulled over had Hispanic passengers. They also barely looked at my ID before wishing me a nice day and I could swear the deputy never looked at my windshield.
Now I’m wondering if we were in one of the counties mentioned in Sen. Dole’s campaign ad that features sheriff’s praising her for securing funding from a federal program that enables local law enforcement to identify illegal immigrants in their jails and have them deported. I’m not sure, but I don’t think the program allows locals to act like ICE agents and go out and find illegals, rather they are to use it to ID illegals who have already commited a crime. Well, other than immigrating illegally.
My gut tells me we were seeing an NC version of an immigration sweep and the road block was a pretense to find illegals committing a crime. Me thinks a lot of those cars are going to be found to have broken tail lights or some such thing.
Of course it could just have been a coincidence that all the folks who were pulled over when we passed by were Hispanic. Or that all the Hispanics had some kind of problem with a license, or title, or tags, or stickers or something. And yes there could be some other explanation, but my gut tells me it was a roadblock specifically set up for illegals
Oh, and don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with deporting illegal immigrants (don’t get me started on our screwy immigration system though), but I don’t know if this type of activity would be an appropriate use of the federal funding. Please do correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the Feds are pretty territorial about immigration enforcement. I’m thinking they wouldn’t be too happy if they found out that local sheriffs were proactively pursuing illegals
The trip to San Diego ended up being a good one. No flight delays and great weather definitely helped, but being able to spend a couple of days talking to some really smart people from companies in a variety of industries was really the highlight. If I’m going to spend four days away from the family it’s great to be able to learn a lot in the process, and the best way to learn is to surround yourself with people smarter than you are.
It’s also fun to have a "small world" moment. One of the people I met this week grew up a mile from one of the neighborhoods I lived in while growing up in Northern Virginia and since he’s a year younger than my brother they actually went to elementary school together. He now lives in Atlanta and since I had a layover in Atlanta we ended up on the same flight home, and when we ran into each other at the airport he invited me and another person from the conference into the Delta Lounge as his guests. Drinking free cocktails is a great way to pass the time at an airport.
In one of the conference sessions I attended I set next to a guy from a health care company and in the course of the group discussion he talked about a technology that had turned into a home run for his company. Ends up they had licensd it from Wake Forest University. That conversation helped reinforce to me how big a player WFU is despite its diminutive size and I’m darn glad we have it here in Winston-Salem.
Finally, on the last day of the conference I was trying to figure out how to kill the five or six hours I had until my flight. A couple of other conference goers had cars and were staying for the rest of the week so they offered to drive a bunch of us into the town of Coronado from the hotel, and then after doing some sightseeing and dinner they offered a ride to the airport to those of us flying out that night. So we got to walk through Coronado, see the beach, have a nice dinner and then have a comfortable ride to the airport. And as I mentioned before we also got to hang out in the Delta lounge. Nice!
Makes me wonder if fate has a nasty trip in store for me to try and even things out.
Befuddled 