My Old School

We have a lot of random stuff in the news.  The US Senate finally passed a federal budget yeterday for the first time in four years. It of course has a lot of progressive provisions our side likes.  Those in the House passed a conservative budget nobody likes.  The President might have filled out his basketball "brackets" in time, but Obama won't have his own budget out till mid April.  Of course you know by now that the odds of winning Power Ball of ANY of these lottery things are MUCH Greater than successfully filling out every NCAA bracket correctly.  The odds of doing the latter are but in fifty quintillion, and there really is such a number.  Sea Lions off the shore here in California are beaching themselves in record numbers and over 700 have been rescued this winter being grossly under-weight and nursed back to health.  They say that people who were active as children have denser bones in their old age, which probably explains why women have more problems with osteo-perosis than do men.  If you suffer from this condition, never use a Calcium blocker as blood pressure medication.  A well respect Cleric was gunnned down in Syria, who was an ally of Assad and without this cleric's support Assad himself is put in increased jeopardy.  Passover is this Monday night, Melissa Lee reminds us.  Of course this is the earliest Passover can come.  Unlike Easter- - if the full moon rolls around within the first five days of spring, the Jews and some Eastern Orthodox will skip celebrations till the next month, as they did, for instance in 1967.  Of course you know that as a general rule when the Chinese Newyear comes early, Easter comes late and when Easter comes early, it means that Chinese Newyears came late.  They of course use the DES RHO scrambling system, which is one of our favorite letter scrambling systems we use- and you can recognize the code if you see it.  Melinda Lee advises you to use whole milk in your cake recipes because skim milk is "Just like baking like water with a little bit of protien power in it".  Besides the ammount of milk in any given slice of cake is infinetessible.  Melinda Lee says to cook your brown rice three times as long as white rice.  My rice theory and practice varies from her.  First of all I use twenty minutes for white rice and I use a two cups to one water ratio, where Melinda Lee uses a half cup less of water.  For brown rice I've found 'You need to cook it a little longer and add a little more water" but you don't need to cook brown rice any 45 minutes.  Dr. Levy says that if you and your wife have different electronic sensor ID trhingies to automatically open your car door- - that the car will know it's you and adjust the front driver's seat accordingly, and will have your own CD song picks on file as well as your own personal "black book" of girls you call that you don't want your wife to know about.  Of course you can speak to the GPS and the GPS will answer back.  Bill Gunderson suggested that it will be a break through when all you need to do is alert your car in the parking lot to come and pick you up in front of the store so you don't have to carry your packages to your car.  Of course Bill has an automatic honk the horn and find your car device.  Dr. Levy says he took Statistics but "hired someone else to do the work for him, but everybody does that.  Wally does his own statistics and Wally was a bookkeeper for twelve years, so he's in my frame of reference.  The importance with Statistics is to ask the right questions and know which specific question is being answered by the numeric results.

A dentist once told me that I have dense bones.  I think he or she gleaned this fact from looking at my X Rays.  Of course I did all the usual kid things such as running and hiking and climbing and playing tackle football.  I was also into gymnastics, which I was into as far back as the second half of the second grade.  I also learned to type in second grade.  I was in a special school for two and a half years and leaped out way ahead in areas like math and astronomy.  Of course I learned to play the piano the first summer after we moved out of LA when I was seven and developed good digital strength, which has nothing to do with my computer skills.  However I only scored a little above average in one of these "auto shop" tests that CETA did where you screw on bolts on nuts of varying sizes, - - - on a day where I pretty much screwed up the rest of the test.  I was flawless in sorting huge numbers in the right order but screwed up in the alphabetical part of the thing because back in those days I wasn't fermiliar with the "computer way of sorting" and used a different system I thought was the correct one.  Part of this test was reflexes- like air traffic controler school- - and I flubbed up badly on that- - and the "secretarial skills' following directions test - - I also screwed up badly.  This test was done at CETA in March of 1979.  Jumping back in time- - we moved around Halloween when I was six and a half.  Of course we moved to an area where it was a whole lot windier and greater extremes of heat and cold that took getting used to.  Going barefoot on the weekends was now out of the question.  I took an IQ test at the new school I didn't know the results of for a while. I was at this school that fall till the Christmas break and two days after that, and then I began going to the new school.  Strangely we began going to church that Sunday January 5th 1958 we went to for just over three years till early 1961 but them my parents had some dispute with the pastor they kept to themselves having something to do with a personal counseling session they were at.  The pastor was Irish and was roomered by the kids in Sunday school to "be one who hates kids".  I never met him personally the entire time I was there.  Actually I liked this church because it was in a more expensive neighborhood than we lived in and the terrain was something other than flat.  What stuck me was how "flat" everything was and how abnormally straight and regular the streets were.  We used to play in the street like football and kick ball and baseball and "500" and usually this guy who lived two doors down named Brian, who was also Irish- - was the "rule maker" except when we played with the big kids, then one of them made the rules.  There was also an Irish guy accross the street who all the kids in the neighbor hated, including me.  His last name shows up in the script of "Lost Weekend' for those inclined to search that, and it doesn't even have to be St Patrick's Day.  (even Jews tell anti semetic jokes among themselves.  At least I'm not groundskeeper Willy, who is part of a Scottish sect that doesn't recognize Easter)  In this new school I started at the beginning of 1958 I went to school by bus and the bus driver was Miss Miller, and she was a super cucumber- - unflappable.  Fist fights would break out among the older Juvenile kids on the bus and she seldom even turned around.  I picked up a lot of swear words from that croud.  There was one early report card that used to be in my baby book (when I had that) where the teacher said I was doing third grade math.  At any rate at one point I got to be two years ahead in math for my grade, but then in fifth grade when I went back to my old school - - - I got stupid again.  OK I was bored. An amazing number of students I hadn't seen in years still remembered me, and there were roomers I had been attending Catholic school, which wasn't the case.  This is the "Hamburg fall" for you Beatles Fans out there.  And we all know that John Lennon's guitar playing was the consistent glue that held the band together when someone ELSE screwed up.  He used to be called "Johnny Rhythm".