This…
Wouldn’t be a teacher today for all the tea in China… Nope…
This is what happens when kids never fail due to helicopter parents and participation trophies.
THESE were our ‘participation’ trophies back in the day, and those who are serving today.
I wonder how many of today’s generation would have any clue to what some of these are… sigh
My uncle had one of these in his store…
This one is pretty easy…
This one is pretty easy too…
Not so much, but still easy…
And this one will confuse the hell out of them…
Enjoy your week and all those ‘modern’ things… Some of which DO make our lives easier, but others who’s planned obsolescence tends to bite us in the ass on a routine basis… Oh yeah, and NOTHING here required a battery to work… 😀
Ladies day!
First up is Holly Chism’s short story collection
As always, click on the cover to go the Amazon page.
The blurb-
Look closer. The things that you’re assuming you’re seeing? May not be what you think. Is that really a mouse, or is it a Brownie? Is that really an owl? Is that polished gemstone a stone…or an egg?
We take so many things for granted. Some of them may be harmless, but many are a lot less so. I wonder how many people ignore red flags every day, because they only see what they expect to see?
This collection takes what’s “normal” and asks “What if it’s something more?”
Alma Boykin’s Daughter of the Pearl
The blurb-
Count Chang wants glory. Leesan dreams of marrying. Neither can foresee the power that awaits them—or the danger.
Cloud-dancers use magic to keep the world in balance. But the Great Northern River ails, and strange, twisted and evil things move across the land. The humans along the river cannot see the danger, but the Great Sky Emperor does. He grows angry. His wrath will remake the world and none of the cloud-dancers want that.
Count Chang hears a rumor of a Chosen One living far to the south, the only human able to heal the river. Instead he finds a corrupted naga and Leesan, the unwanted third daughter. Valueless, cursed, ignorant, Leesan would be better off dead, or so her father’s mother insists. Instead Chang claims her and takes her north, to train the gifts she unknowingly carries.
Chang detests the idea of marrying. Leesan cannot imagine a woman with value of her own. Together they must find the cause of the river’s ailment and heal it. Evil lurks in the land, and it will take all their power, trust, and strength to do their duty and save the world from the Great Sky Emperor’s wrath.
That is, if they can.
73, 000 words.
Next is Cyn Bagley’s novella Diamond Butterfly
The blurb-
It’s in the blood.
Someone is after Nova Tewa’s son and that someone is willing to kill to get the child. Nova is on the run in the middle of the a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountains. She will do anything to survive.
A novella in the EJ Hunter world.
And last but not least, Dorothy Grant’s Scaling the Rim
The blurb-
Never underestimate the power of a competent tech.
When Annika Danilova arrived at the edge of the colony’s crater to install a weather station, she knew the mission had been sabotaged from the start. The powers that be sent the wrong people, underequipped, and antagonized their supporting sometimes-allies. The mission was already slated for unmarked graves and an excuse for war…
But they hadn’t counted on Annika allying with the support staff, or the sheer determination of their leader, Captain Restin, to accomplish the mission. Together, they will overcome killing weather above and traitors within to fight for the control of the planet itself!
Old school EDC, going back to carrying a revolver, but I HATE breaking in a new leather holster…
Colt Cobra in Galco leather. Bianchi speed strip loaded with Hornady Critical Duty.
And I got ‘chastised’ on FB for not boosting the signal for a Veteran Owned Business, so…
My little challenge coin… The top one was carried daily for a little over three years. So yes, they DO wear a bit. The bottom two show both sides of the coin.
These came from Warrior Chip, a VOB started by Gunnery Sergeant Donny Campbell, USMC Ret. who is the founder. Link to their site is HERE, and you can either design your own, or have them do it. Their costs are reasonable!
I paid with my own money for my chips, so there… 🙂
US vs. Canada spelling… sigh…
Both countries celebrate it on the first Monday September as a tribute to the working men and women.
Like most cultural events, there is still some doubt over its origination. Some records show that Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, was first in suggesting a day to honor working men and women.
However many believe that it was Matthew Maguire, a machinist, not Peter McGuire, who founded the holiday as recent research seems to support the contention that Matthew Maguire proposed the holiday in 1882 while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York.
Whoever the source was, what we do know is that the Central Labor Union adopted the Labor Day proposal and appointed a committee to plan a demonstration and picnic.
The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union.
In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.
In the USA, governmental recognition first came through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. The first state bill was introduced into the New York legislature, but the first to become law was passed by Oregon on February 21, 1887. By 1894, 23 other states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28 of that year, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.
I remember growing up, we didn’t start school until AFTER Labor day, and we always got out in late May. Of course we also went to school from 8AM-4PM, seven periods a day. We had six classes, and a one hour study hall or PE/sport (if you played a sport, last period was always the ‘sport’, usually followed by one or more hours of ‘practice’).
Talking with a friend who is a teacher, apparently with the ‘new’ layouts, they only get about 80 hours of ‘dedicated’ instruction a semester now, of which they get ‘maybe’ 65-70 actual hours. And we wonder why the kids can’t spell, read, or do simple math… sigh…
Anyhoo, enjoy your day off, unless you’re military, police, fire, EMS, hospital, and… and…
So you get pictures!
BIG sky…
Sunset…
And that’s all folks…
Where they are going with THIS study…
Sixty-six percent of Veteran firearm owners stored at least one firearm unlocked, and 46.7 percent stored at least one loaded.
Storing a firearm loaded and unlocked was more common among Veteran firearm owners who:
Full article, HERE at Science Daily.
Honestly, I think this number is probably low…
The article goes on to prattle about Veterans Health Administration (VHA) initiatives to stop suicide and claim this is the first ‘comprehensive’ study…
But the total numbers are less that 4000 interviewed, with only a little over 550 veterans interviewed. That, to me, is NOT a comprehensive dataset. There are roughly 20.4 MILLION veterans in the USA, so to have a statistically significant study, one would need to systematically sample over 200,000 people!
Sigh… But they will run with this data, and I’m betting we (VA users) will start seeing more and more intrusive questions concerning gun ownership and storage in the home.
Now we all know that PETA has forced Barnums’ Crackers to change their box to this…
It represents their ‘utopia’ that doesn’t even come close to reality…
Now ‘my’ proposal would be a little more realistic, and I’d credit it to PETA too…
h/t Tom and Jeff for that one
And apparently somebody designed a ‘new’ vending machine for the south side of Chiraq… Takes a dollar coin! 🙂
Of course they need to expand their selections a little bit… 😀
h/t JP
I’m old enough to remember the riots and the media coverage, both in the papers and on the three channels we got… And it went on for days…
Fifty years ago tonight, a great American political party was murdered by its own children and closest friends.
The party in question was the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and JFK, which perished during the riots in Grant Park, Chicago, on the night of Aug. 28, 1968, in the midst of the party’s national convention.
Full article, HERE on the National Review.
This was, if I remember correctly, also the point at which the media really changed their coverage of not only Vietnam, but also the draft dodgers, protesters, and others who were anti-American.
They were lauded, law enforcement was vilified, and Bezerkley really became the forefront of the ‘protest’ generation when Haight Ashbury collapsed in early 1968 due to overcrowding. Remember, this was only a year or so after the hippies started in Haight Ashbury, and the psychedelic rock music was receiving more and more commercial radio airplay.
The Monterey Pop Festival in June further cemented the status of psychedelic music as a part of mainstream culture and elevated local Haight bands such as the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Jefferson Airplane to national stardom. A July 7, 1967, Time magazine cover story on “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture,” and other major media interest in the hippie subculture exposed the Haight-Ashbury district to enormous national attention and popularized the counterculture movement across the country and around the world.
And here we are today… Sigh…
Apparently some of the Brit science is settled crowd are getting up on their high horses… Again…
We are no longer willing to lend our credibility to debates over whether or not climate change is real. It is real. We need to act now or the consequences will be catastrophic. In the interests of “balance”, the media often feels the need to include those who outright deny the reality of human-triggered climate change.
Full article, HERE at the Guardian.
For a good basic primer on the whole climate change hoorah, go to Borepatch’s Blog, HERE. He does an excellent job of laying out the basics in understandable language, with graphs!
One thing I do find concerning, is that the RSS data is now apparently being ‘adjusted’ too… Since this is supposedly the ‘raw’ data, that’s a serious issue, as there is apparently a move to ‘make’ the data align more closely with the models. It’s NOT supposed to work that way. Control/raw data is just that. It’s NOT supposed to be ‘pre-adjusted’ to get the numbers one wants…
Sigh…