We're All DOOMED

AhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Real Estate Idiots

Almost As Bad As Used Car Salesmen Sales Persons...


I wish I could get into a position in life where I could be a complete incompetent idiot, sit around with my thumb up my butt, and still be able to look people in the eye and make them pay me cash for doing virtually nothing.

Doesn't that seem like the perfect job description if you have no self esteem and conscience?

Well, since I have a HUGE ego and a great deal of self esteem, and my Dear Mother endowed me with a conscience which tortures me when I don't do what I'm supposed to do, I guess that apparently I'm not cut out to be a Real Estate Agent (or a used car salesman.)

Don't get me wrong here this morning Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm not saying that all people in the Real Estate Business are bad people or thieves or are incompetent...

...I'm just saying that I am like a magnet which attracts Agents which "sell like hell" when trying to get my business but then disappear over the horizon and drop the proverbial ball when it comes time to actually produce a PRODUCT...in my case leasing my house and leasing me a furnished Condo and a long term home rental later.

I've also known a couple of great Real Estate Agents and Brokers over the past 26 years I've been buying and selling homes and investment properties, but they have been few and far between for some reason.

I've already fired one idiot in the past week that wanted to handle leasing out my home here in Knoxtown, and if the next idiot which came along and took pictures and signed an agreement for services and took $100 of my money as a down payment/"set-up fee" doesn't get off of his ass and get some pictures up on his website tomorrow--SEVEN DAYS AFTER THE AGREEMENT--along with a written description which isn't full of typographical errors, I guess I'll have to fire him also.

I think I'll go find my old pair of worn out steel toed boots in anticipation of sticking my FOOT UP HIS ASS if he gives me any further trouble.

Is it just me?

...And In Local News...

A Potpourri...Low...A Veritable Cornucopia of Crap What Makes My head Spin...


So I see where the University of By-God Tennessee allowed their so-called "Athletic Director"...some idiot named Mike Hamilton to resign yesterday.

Big Mike gets almost $1,400,000 just to go away after presiding over a string of  miscues and miss-steps and hiring and firing of Coaches and recruiting of various and sundry gangster Negro's and White Boys which have made me laugh my ass off at the collective "Student Athletes" and the "Athlitic Programs" here in Knoxtown.

The good news is that I guess that you can't refer to me as a "Tennessee Athletic Supporter" or a "Jock Strap Sniffer In General" or any other term or phraseology generally directed in the direction of people that give a flying shit about sports these days.

At this point in my life, I admit that I really Really REALLY just don't give a damn.

After living through almost 35 years as a Georgia Tech Fan,

and almost 40 years as a Fan of the Braves after Ted Turner bought Channel 17 in Atlanta and put them on Cable TBS...

and living and dieing with Leeman Bennet's Atlanta Falcons featuring Steve Bartkowski and Alfred Jenkins in the mid/late 1970's...

This morning I can't tell you where the Atlanta Braves are in the standings right now.

I laugh my ass off at the fumbling of the current day Falcons franchise with Dog Fighting Quarterbacks and early post season exits during playoff games they should win...

I can't tell you who is where in the NBA playoffs...a sport that starts during the end of one baseball season and doesn't end interminably until the start of the following baseball season...

and the world cup and soccer and polo and Lacrosse and golf and...

 AHHHHH...

you can have it all as far as I'm concerned...I just don't have enough of a Damn to give anymore for inane stuff like that in this day in time.

Yet here in Knoxtown in Eastern Tennessee there are more Morons running around living and dieing on a daily basis worrying about "THE VOLS" and calling into Radio Talk Shows talking about "THE VOLS" and spending craploads of time and money worrying about reading about "THE VOLS" in the local newspaper...

when instead they should be worrying about our Country and our Economy and the wild eyed towel headed Islomofascist Jihadists that want to blow us all up.

And then there is this little prick Anthony Weiner who as of quitting time yesterday is still allowed to wander around the halls of the House of Representatives.

Seriously people...

Do we really want little shit heads like this pompous, egotistical  liar with a bad case of "little man syndrome" working for us in Washington DC?

Even if you are dumb enough to live in NY City?





(Taking a big breath here boss...)


OK...as you can tell I'm in a quite pissy mood this evening, so I believe that I'll just go now and say "au revoir" Y'all
 

A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

Somebody Tell Owl Gore To Sit His Giant Butt Down...


So I'm hanging out here early this morning, Googling around for good deals on replacement batteries and a new hard drive for my back-up lap top computer with one eyeball and watching re-runs of Glenn Beck with the other on Fox News.

Then just now a "Fox News Alert" comes across my TV window on the computer talking about an 8.5 Magnitude earthquake offshore of Chile in South America about 1:30 AM this morning.

This following a 7.0 magnitude quake off Japan a few hours earlier in the evening on the other side of the the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Of course in usual fashion the idiot news people have to say the words "there are [as yet] no reports of damage, injury, or deaths."

Another report said that "the extent of damages and injury are unclear."

WTF?

If the details are "unclear", why don't the news morons just say "we don't know" or better yet...just say "there's been an earthquake, preliminarily estimated to be of magnitude 8.5, off the coast of Chili"?

"We'll get back to you when the sun rises and we actually know the extent of the damage."?

Hang on...just now at 3:04 AM they're updating the magnitude to 8.8 on the Richter scale and saying they have Tsunami warnings out from Central America to Antarctica.

So any way, my point this morning is this...

Get over it...there's nothing that we can do but watch the news organizations and "news people" spaz out and hyperventilate...

That would be because the earth has been vibrating like hell for how ever may thousands or millions or billions of years your religion (or the lack thereof) tells you it's been around.

I'm sorry as heck for everyone injured, killed, and suffering with damaged property, but at the same time I'm dreading the next week onslaught of news coverage.

Isn't it amazing that the Haiti story has virtually disappeared off the front pages of newspapers and your TV screen?

It's not that they are still not digging up dead people in the Caribbean and people aren't still starving and peeing and pooping in the bushes outside due to a lack of facilities, it's just that the news consuming public...particularly so called AMERICANS...and the idiots in the news business have no real interest in presenting quality information...they're interested in headlines and SENSATIONALISM.

So now, in the interest of extending to you my own personal, infinite internal database of obscure knowledge most people never care about or bother to learn (because they usually have better things to do...) I offer these tidbits regarding earthquake history here in the Western Hemisphere and the US specifically.

First of all...If I lived on the West Coast of the US, based on what I've been seeing going on on the Geological Service Website, I'd be packing my bags and moving the hell out...because if the "wild fires" and mudslides haven't gotten to you thus far, I say that the states sitting on the fault lines...anywhere between San Diego and the Canadian line...are due to shake harder than hell in the next year.

Think about it...the last real earthquake was in what ...1987 in San Diego during the World Series and the Northridge Quake in 1994?

Earthquakes don't care who is President.

Earthquakes don't care what Owl Gore says about "Global Warming."

Earthquakes just happen...earthquakes just ARE...earthquakes are the result of the realities of living on a planet that is not a "static structure."

Almost everyone seems to forget that the earth is rotating on it's axis at a rate of 1,041 miles per hour.

Add to that the fact that the earth is flying through space in it's orbit around the sun at a rate of...ready??

...about 67,000 miles per hour.

Then add the un-symmetrical gravitational pull of our moon, which is spinning around the Earth at a rate of a little more than 2,200 miles per hour.

Add all of that to the realization that we're all living on the outer thin skin...the so called "Crust" of the Earth...under which there is a blazing hot, 780 mile diameter, 9,800 degree core cooking the crap out of everything it comes in contact with...i.e. the source of volcano magma...and you can understand why things might just be a little bit unstable up here in spite of the best efforts of Obama and the UN and the patchouli stinking, Kumbaya singing, Barbara Streisand loving, tree hugging liberal/progressive Democrats.

Seriously Folks, I'm not a geologist or seismologist...but I could play one on TV...and I'm real concerned about the trend I'm seeing in the frequency of significant seismological "events" around the globe. There's nothing we can do about it, but if I lived in couple of areas here in the US I would be thinking about my own personal safety and that of my family and property.

Everyone knows about California, but having been in the business of designing significant industrial structures for much of the past 30 years I happen to know about and have written about here previously the areas in the New Madrid Fault Line in the central US suffering an a catastrophic earthquake in 1812 along the Mississippi River basin and the 1886 Magnitude 7.3 earthquake which struck in of all places, Charleston, South Carolina.

Think about it with me for a minute...CHARLESTON, SC?

EARTHQUAKE?

(FOX News UPDATE...now they say there is definitely a Tsunami wave traveling along the South American Coast, with a travel time to Southern California of over ten hours...)

I thought FEMA spent all of their time in Charleston, South Carolina worrying about Hurricanes.

OK Folks...stay calm...don't get all crazy and out of sorts...

I say forget the GOVERNMENT...forget FEMA...watch the news, go to the store, keep your supplies in order and your powder dry.

Life and reality is going to come to your front door regardless of who you vote for...

...and when something bad happens, I say it's your own fault if you aren't prepared.

Snow In The South Cools The Fire In My Fireplace

Yielding A Slightly Mellower Tone...NOT!!


Dang I must have sounded more than a bit cranky last night when writing about Amtra(c)k.

I woke up this morning in time to make a drizzly trip over to Brunswick, but before I left I re-read my writing and while I still stand by 99.7% of what I said--I sure had a sharp edge on my sword an attitude on the keyboard.

Oh well...

In other news, I see where the Atlanta airport is a shambles with four hour delays as a result of an inch of sloppy snow that fell there in the past 24 hours (actually nothing new to anyone that lived there for 27 years like I did), but the good news is that Home Depot and Lowe's are still open here on the Georgia Coast as we endure frigid lower thirty degree temperatures overnight, with highs in the lower 50's tomorrow...

Bwaaahhahahahahahahahahhhhhhhaaaaaaahhhhhaaaaahhhhhhaaaaahhhhh.

Gasp...

Sorry, I lost control there for a minute.

My apologies to anyone living north of Macon, Georgia that has to negotiate the weather to attend worship services tomorrow morning, or is possibly stuck out of town traveling.

Half the reciprocal fun of personally putting up with our 100% humidity, mosquitoes, "no-see-um's" and tourists for most of the year when you live on an Island is making fun of everybody else when the weather gets cold elsewhere.

I'm fairly new to the process, but as I understand it weather effects Democrats and Republicans equally, and in my ongoing efforts to be non-partisan (on which I failed miserably last night), I have to point that out in my defense.

But Wait.....

The newspapers and TV tell us that the Poor, Women, Minorities, children, and old people are the most affected by the cold.

I'm concerned, but skeptical, because this comes from the very same people which tell me almost every week that Global Warming effects the Poor, Women, minorities, children and children of Minorities, old people, insurance underwriters, homosexuals, left handed people, philosophers, artists and people with the name Earl.

So which is it?

By the way, what are we expected as a society to do to protect people from the weather, especially when they ignorantly and constantly insist on ignoring the forecasts of the "experts" over at the Weather Channel?

I seem to remember the city of New Orleans moving a bunch of displaced minority people and their kids into the Superdome as a result of and in order to remove them from the effects of warm weather, and things didn't work too well there in the Crescent City in the end.

Further, from my experience, my wobbly middle aged white male carcass has been susceptible to the weather just like everybody else regardless of race, creed, and national origin (and sexual orientation) for most of the past 48 years, but I haven't had any phone surveys or written correspondence directed toward me asking how I handle the seasonal extremes.

As a result, I'd like to impart some of my self proclaimed expert advise and wisdom on everyone that's interested--regarding the weather...such as it is.

If it's raining outside, I buy an umbrella, stay inside, else go out and get wet if I have to change a flat tire or am just too lazy to care.

If it's cold outside, I put on a coat, or stay inside and pay my gas and power bill on time so the thermodynamic differential between the inner and outer surfaces of my abode are maintained at an acceptable level.

Conversely, if it's warm outside, I wear the minimum acceptable amount of clothing--a measure which seems to be changing each and every year as I look in the mirror.

So there you have it...a turn-key solution to handling the weather, and I know that most of you probably were already on to those little tidbits of intellectual genius long before my fingers hit the keyboard this evening. I just had to say it any way just in case some poor lost soul was wandering by here on the Internet and needed some advice.

In closing, another solution I've found quite helpful is one promoted by the late comedian Sam Kennison (this one is for you again Rusty...)

Having problems with the weather in your area?

Is it always too cold or too hot or too wet or too dry?

Here's an Idea...MOVE.

That's right, MOVE to somewhere where you can tolerate the weather.

I did about five years ago and found the results to be very satisfying.

Isn't that easy enough?

Back to Sam Kennison who was my definitive authoritative reference on this concept if you want one...

Paraphrasing the late Mr. Kennison when he was lamenting all of the US Foreign Aide Money and charitable contributions sent to the people living in the arid countries like Northern Africa because of crop failures and drought related suffering:

Sam said instead of sending them money every year, that we should instead send them ....

LUGGAGE.

Possibly an entire set...and maybe a few bus or plane tickets to go along with it.

Packing Boxes and U-Haul trucks would also go a long way...

Sam said: "You're Hungry? It's because you're LIVING in a DESERT...GET OUT...Ah ah aha ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh."

(Taking a big breath...)

Any way, I offer similar condolences and encouragement to everyone up north in places like Minnesota and Wisconsin tonight.

While we're at it, what brand do you like?

Luggage that is...

Samsonite, or American Tourister?

Just do me a favor and buy it yourself instead of voting for someone that will steal the money to pay for it though additional taxes on "the wealthy," because I secretly still intend to be one (of "the wealthy") one of these days and I already have luggage.

Now throw another log on the fire, and enjoy your evening...

and you're quite welcome for having received my keen insight into this situation.