Archive for June 19, 2009

Moving in Slow Motion

June 19, 2009 · Filed under life in Florida

I have a list of things to accomplish that I’m supposed to be crossing off daily. Painting various portions of the house is on the list. Cleaning out cabinets is on the list, too. So is building concrete countertops, tabletops, hypertufa troughs. Woodcarving is on the list. Pulling up the carpet in the dining room and office, acid staining the floor, and sealing is on that list.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m outside in the morning at @ 6:30 a.m. feeding, watering, and switching pastures. I do a little weeding, maybe a little mowing. I come inside @ nine a.m. to cook breakfast. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing things like falling asleep for hours after breakfast, sometimes until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. Then, of course, I’m not sleepy until 3 a.m., up at 6:30, and fall asleep at mid morning.

Maybe it’s the dang heat that has me messed up. I was outside until the sun went down this evening and came in with my hair dripping sweat, my skin wet, and my clothes completely soaked through.

I’m not getting anything done! Perhaps I should give SwampMan his computer back so that when I’m awake, I quit going online!

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Chubby People Live Longest

June 19, 2009 · Filed under Don't That Beat All, Interesting Medical Stuff

If you packed on some weight after you hit 40, don’t stress over it:

People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.

“We found skinny people run the highest risk,” said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people. Read the rest here.

Of course, the NIH (busybodies) adjusted BMI “healthy weights” downward by 2 points in 1998 which made thousands of people instantly “overweight”. These same “chubby” people would have been called normal weight a few years ago, and obese would have been called chubby.

The people dieting and exercising like crazy to maintain a “healthy” BMI are cutting years off of their lives.

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Choose Your Honorific, Please!

June 19, 2009 · Filed under Politicians ain't got no damn sense

The inimitable Paco at Paco Enterprises has a post entitled Barbara Boxer Answers the Question “How Much Ego Can Be Crammed Into a Pinhead?” which links to a site that asks people to come up with the title by which they prefer to be addressed.

Generalissimo Paco, Blog Lord of Occupied Northern Virginia has such a ring to it, don’t you think?

SwampMan, however, requests that he be referred to as “Asshole”. He worked soooo hard to get that title, and he’d appreciate it.

Personally, I kinda like “Goddess of All She Surveys”.

In passing, I have to note that people that go out of their way to demand respect will never get any. It has to be earned.

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Florida May Unemployment Actually 10.2%

June 19, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

From the Miami Herald:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida’s unemployment rate in May jumped to 10.2 percent.

The state agency that tracks unemployment numbers said Friday that unemployment rose by half a percentage point over the revised April figure of 9.7 percent.

The Agency for Workforce Innovation said 943,000 Floridians workers are out of a job.

More than 417,000 Floridians have lost jobs in the last year. In May 2008, the state’s unemployment number stood at 5.8 percent.

I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but that is not the “real” unemployment rate. The teachers and other school employees that were terminated at the end of this school year won’t be counted as unemployed until the start of the school year. The owners of the countless failed small businesses aren’t counted because they aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits. People that have accepted part-time work because they can’t find full-time work aren’t counted. The real unemployment/underemployment rate is probably closer to 20%.

The unemployment rate in the Jacksonville metropolitan area — consisting of Duval, Baker, Clay, Nassau and St. Johns counties — rose from 9.3 percent in April to 9.7 percent in May, the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation reported today.

Then there are all of those new graduates looking for jobs.

Could be worse. Could be California.

California’s unemployment rate climbed to 11.5 percent in May, the highest in modern record-keeping, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Friday.

And the good news just keeps on a-comin’:

In Arizona, which along with Florida suffered the largest percentage drop in jobs last month, the losses were spread across many industries, including health care and government, said Marshall Vest, director of the University of Arizona’s Economic and Business Research Center.

After the West, the Midwest had the second-highest unemployment rate, at 9.8 percent. The South’s jobless rate was 8.9 percent. The Northeast had the lowest, 8.3 percent.

The government report showed employment conditions deteriorating in 48 states and the District of Columbia last month.

Michigan, the heart of the sinking auto industry, had the highest unemployment rate: 14.1 percent.

Eight states had record-high jobless rates. Only two — Nebraska and Vermont — reported no increases. Nebraska’s jobless rate dipped, and Vermont’s was flat.

The five other states that set new unemployment highs were North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia.

After Arizona and Florida, the next-largest percentage drop in jobs last month was Oklahoma, followed by Arkansas, Kentucky and Michigan.

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GCP – The Banned of Brothers – is BACK and Badder!

June 19, 2009 · Filed under Uncategorized

READ THIS, FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE

Look, there’s a wide variety of people here with a lot of shared history and a wide variety of expertise and experience. Almost all of them adults. Many of us are prior service. Mostly conservative, mostly rational, mostly religious (of many varieties, we’re a regular Church of the Holy Sepulchre, what with the way we regularly pummel each other).
Mostly Harmless (shh, be vewwy qwuiet, I’m hunting newbies).
Most of all we’ve got an extensive sense of humor and little patience for stupidity or lying frauds.
Most of us have blogged together for 5-6 years. There’s a collective zeitgeist here that’s kept us together through many things. Don’t come in here and get in the middle of our knife fights, you’ll be sorry.
Don’t be an asshat. Especially a Liberal asshat.
Solicit a crime, you’re on your own. Commit a crime, you’re gone.
Blanket expressions of bigotry against any race, ethnicity, religion, you’re gone.
Profanity? WTF? Seriously? Oh. Don’t frighten the ladies, they might shoot you.
Pr0n? Broadcast TV standards. And I don’t mean ‘bored overnight tech accidentally switches cable feeds’, either.
Known trolls, prior pugnacious prods, and Talking Points (sock-)Puppets will be Shot On Site [sic]. And then out of a cannon. Or maybe a catapult, we have a penchant for Monty Python here. We’re whimsical. Capricious even.
There’s no third chances here, and no didactic rules to play barracks-lawyer with. Piss more than a few of us off, you’re gone.
And above all, we remain the people that fact-check your ass.

Beyond Here There Be Dragons

eta And Landmines. Almost forgot the Landmines.

As always, a site that takes no shit and no prisoners. Well, naturally! I’m one of the group, as is Nuke and Robert D.

Grouchy Conservative Pundits, Formerly Gulf Coast Pundits.

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