Monday, July 18, 2011

"Sell Crazy Someplace Else..."

"...we're all stocked up here."* Fair warning: I'm going to start posting discussions and links to information to counter the dangerous and self-defeating assertions of my Republican and other right-wing and "libertarian" friends -- not to try to convince them, they're too committed to their unfortunate and false-to-fact belief systems -- but to try to give heart to those with more sensible views, and perhaps even help (in a very small way) to mobilize a few from among the great majority of Americans who are moderate and liberal... (which is not a dirty word as some would try to have it, but instead a proud tradition that has served this country and its people well).

* Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks, "As Good as It Gets," 1997.

The Marching Morons

Seems to me that for every quantum leap that personal technology takes, we must accept a corresponding erosion in the quality of the experience the technology offers. Have you made a phone call lately? No matter which of the new platforms you're on, most calls are plagued with distortion, static and drop-outs -- and this has become the accepted norm. When once in a while I get a call from someone using a wired land-line phone and I answer it on my 1930s-vintage Bell South set, the clarity and tone are just remarkable. Our new flat-screen non-plasma bedroom TV can only be viewed from almost directly ahead, on plane; makes watching from bed dismaying instead of enjoyable. We watched a DVD of the last Harry Potter movie last night on the big 52" plasma set in the living room. It was so dark as to be almost unwatchable, darker than we remembered it being the theater -- because it had to be filmed at low light to make the 3-D effects work, and to hell with what it looks like in 2-D? The more I see, the more I believe that Kornbluth got it all too right in "The Marching Morons." http://www.scribd.com/doc/23657356/The-Marching-Morons

Friday, July 15, 2011

Shit Happens

There are things that, until yesterday, I did not know about a septic system. The septic system here at Tottering-on-the-Brink is an old-fashioned dry-well setup -- no tank, no leach fields, just a pipe that runs out to a large, rock-lined hole in the ground with a sturdy pressure-treated lumber cover overtopped with sod. Last fall an inspection/pumping hatch, like a small manhole cover, was installed to make servicing and troubleshooting easier. On Wednesday I had opened the hatch to see what was happening in there, and found it full to near the top. Not knowing that this was a normal condition, and that the salient concern is the depth of the "solids" at the bottom, not the height of the more-or-less liquid waste in the well, I called and asked for a pump-out. The driver arrived yesterday, opened the well hatch, connected two lengths of four-inch hose together, fished one end into the well, attached the other end to the truck, and started the big high-speed pump.

The way we later reconstructed it, the driver and me, was like this.

Not knowing that the well was full of mostly-liquid, the driver had diligently fished his hose down to the bottom. Because ours is not a tank, but a well, the hose encountered muddy soil and rocks. The pump obligingly sucked mud and rocks up into the hose. I had retrieved my checkbook from the house and was walking from the truck to the well, to ask the driver a question. As I reached the juncture of the two hoses, so did the rocks and mud and effluent. They stuck momentarily there, briefly increasing the pressure on the joint, well beyond its capacity to remain sealed. A small seam opened between the hose sections, and, at about a million miles per hour, a thin stream of waste water, urine and liquefied feces sprayed out of that seam. Sort of like a jet from one of those rotating lawn sprinklers.

It hit me on my left side. There was shit in my hair, on my glasses, in my ear, down my arm, soaking my T-shirt, Jeans shorts, socks and sneakers. The driver seemed too genuinely shocked and dismayed to think of laughing, and probably would have suppressed it anyway in what I imagine was his horror that I might try to get him fired. "Hey," I told him, "shit happens," and we went over the incident and figured out what had gone wrong. These things only need to be pumped every three to five years, he told me, unless you get symptoms (smells or a backup). I did not know that. I thanked him for the explanation as something dripped from the ends of my hair down the back of my neck and under my shirt.

My checkbook, having been in my right hand, had been spared; I was able to write the check for the $172.00 that this lesson cost.