Cardboard Crisis Averted

Everyone can relax, the cardboard emergency at our house is over.

Just in time, too.

Cardboard was really piling up at the house. And in the garage. And in the new Slanty Shanty. I knew it was only a matter of time before something happened and I'd wished I'd kept preserves and basketballs distributed strategically around the property.

But late Thursday I finally got really desperate and made a phone call to the county, to discover they've offered cardboard recycling for years. So I stuffed the Red Herring to the gills, went to the transfer station and got rid of a lot of stuff.

Galoot v Bozo

Today, something startling from the Vox crossword:

I had never regarded galoot as a synonym for bozo. Bozo, in my mind, is a harsher epithet, while galoot carries more of an "innocent goober" vibe to it. Bozos are complete jerks and do things on purpose to annoy others. Galoots are just goofy guys tripping over their own feet.

Indigant, I raced to the Internet to find the definition for galoot and discovered thus:

This kinda vibes with what I suspected: clumsy and oafish aren't necessarily "on purpose" behaviors, while bozos are, well, bozos.

As for the word origin: I suspect, somehow, it's Dutch. I don't know exactly why I suspect that, but I do. Galoot sounds like an Englisher trying to say something they've heard a Dutch sailor say. And that's generally not a good thing.

Also, what casued the surge in the use of "galoot" in the 21st century? Or the surge in the late 19th and early 20th century, for that matter? The long tail leading into the '50s and beyond can probably be explained by Hollywood westerns, but as for the rest, I'm lost.

Probably the late surge can be explained by the Internet, and having the word counters have a lot more and a lot more easily-searched text to delve into.

In contrast, here's the same dictionary's definition of bozo:

Note the inclusion of "rude" in the definition. Rudeness, to me, is what sets a bozo apart from a galoot.

Red One: A Review

Before the movie scrolled, I made a prediction:

Skeptical kid turns into pseudo Santa-napper.

Has his own delinquent kid.

Meanwhile, Santa's right-hand man is quitting.

Prediction: Santa-napper has a Grinch-like heart attack, rescues Santa, becomes his new right-hand-man, his own kid sees the light, the crappy little elves dance around like little green idiots, I puke, the end.

Or maybe not. Time will tell.

I was, of course, proved wrong.

But if you want to talk about a movie where there's little to no discernible character arcs, then this is the one.

First: The Rock's character. I can't even remember his name. He starts off resigning his job, saying the magic is gone. He gets totallly fooled by the bad guys, buys a Monopoly game he tells another character to hold onto because they're going to need it, drives a lot of Chevys, then turns into a wuss at the end and takes his job back because -- he saw another character talking with his son. I should admit that the Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots he picks up along with the Monopoly board do appear as a plot device later in the film. And the Chevys, well, they *did* need transportation, so . . . 

Second: Jack O'Malley. Played by someone I don't know. The black hat guy who helped the Christmas Witch! track down Santa Claus' massive toy production facility at the North Pole because, well, I guess the North Pole is really big and the Christmas Witch's gnarly powers aren't gnarly enough to know where Santa is. He was a delinquent kid. He has his own delinquent kid. They get captured by the Christmas Witch's bad ju-ju magic, but figure out how to get out of it about sixty second after being caught. They reconcile, I guess, though I don't really know; they don't dwell on mushy relationships here when there are PUNCHES to be MADE.

Those are the two characters where development was expected. Development was virtually nonexistent.

It's almost like I wrote the story, it's that underdeveloped. So a good lesson for me as a writer.

Verdict: The film had its moments, but it's generally unforgettable and not one I need ever watch again. For the as-viewed blow-by-blow, go here.

One Week to Curtailment

This has the potential to be a long week.

Week before curtailment -- the traditional Idaho National Laboratory mandatory work break between Christmas and New Years -- is bound to be slow. We might have a little paperwork cleanup to perform, but there's going to be a lot of general cleanup going on this week as any starts to new projects will be put on hold and current projects will gradually begin to be understaffed as people take off early for the holidays.

My plan is this: I'll work this week, and the following Monday. That Monday will be extremely dead. Then the Thursday after New Years.

Plans for the holiday include making progress on a few home projects, including the basement bathroom, finishing the hole around the water shutoff valve, and some work on our home network, including (I hope) the installation of additional lines tied to the router with an ethernet switch.

That's going to mean tile on the floor in the bathroom, poking some holes in the walls for ethernet cable, and hopefully getting everything tied together before I have to be back to work in January.

Fixing the Hole in the Wall

The mouse in the house is no more.

And of course it decided to go into Michelle's craft room and sniff around and find her hidden chocolate and eat it and leave little poops all over the place.

We tried the old-fashoned snap traps, but he was too clever for them. Also too clever for the bucket traps Michelle used in her commissary days until she got some thin-enough wire.

The snap traps did almost catch one of the dogs, however . . .

Now the mouse is, as they kinda say in Dutch, a doya verdomde ding -- a forlorn dead thing, if Dad is to be believed, and as he was Dutch, probably the only thing off is my spelling.

Now I'm busy fixing the hole he likely came in - this open area around our water shutoff valve. I've sealed every hole I can find and added a bit more insulation, as this has always been a cold spot in the wall. Hopefully this stops the critters from getting in.

I'm going to shrink the opening here and I've ordered a little metal door from Home Depot that should arrive on Monday, so all of that should make the spot look and function a lot better than the bigger hole and the furnace vent cover over it.

Something About Polk

I'm closing in on finishing James Thurber's "92 Stories," and have found a treasure-trove of delights.

One such is a bit called "Something About Polk," focusing on the then-current (and also now-current) general ignorance of the accomplishments of James K. Polk, the 11th President of the United States.

He was impressed that a previous reader of a book on Polk was indignant enough about the author's dismissive view of Polk to write in the margin three concrete facts about the former president, showing he wasn't as "almost unknown" as the author thought.

The facts, for the curious:

1. Governor of Tennessee

2. Twice Speaker of the House of Representatives

3. The Jackson leader in the fight against the U.S. Bank.

Thurber, of course, agreed with the author -- he himself knew little of Polk, and lamented that he'd neither been shot or impeached or anything to help the common man cement an idea of Polk in their heads, unlike other presidents.

I learned the word "roorback," or a last-minute political trick, coined from such a trick played by Polk's opponents meant to convince voters that Polk was a slave-trader who branded his slaves, as reported in a fictional book by Baron Von Roorback.

But even contemporary historians and writers dismissed Polk as forgettable, with Thurber pointing out that Carl Sandburg included an anecdote about Polk's wife in his "Abaraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years," but not about Polk himself.

He concludes the best would be to make up more memorable Polk stories and share them to the point they entered the zeitgeist, and concludes thus:

"These are all that I can think of myself, and i am afraid that none of them is going to hurl our hero into immortality, but at least they are a start in the right direction. Let somebody else try it. There's no great rush."

I suspect he would have been amused by this:

Ah, Irony.

A commenter pointed out the missing apostrophe in CANT, and an awful lot of people got offended or snippy on the poster's behalf.

I'm a technical writer, so I make a living fixing things.

I also make a fair number of mistakes in published documents, so I know the sting. Nevertheless, it's important to get as much correct as we can, something I'm reminding myself as of late. What's important, of course, is to learn from our mistakes and not take offense when they're pointed out to us.

 

Verdict: Still Flickering

While we have nice, new light switches and a few new switch plates, we also still have a flickering light in the basement.

What to do?

I talked today with an electrician in our ward, and he figures the light driver is broken and the light should be replaced. I'm game to do so, but it's still a bit infuriating, as these lights aren't all that old.

A few more things I may try first:

1. Check the connections in the fixture. Might have a loose connection. Or I might still have it wired to a bit of wiring that goes to a light that is no longer serviced by that particular bit of wire.

2. Replace the breaker. I'm less sure this will do anything, but as it's less expensive than replacing the fixture, and there's a good chance I won't be able to find a fixture that'll match the twin in the same room.

A little disappointed that replacing the switches didn't work, but I'm not sad I did it -- the switches were original equipment with the house and the plastic on some of them was a bit brittle, so to have new switches in the wall is fine, and I'm only out the time spent in replacing them.

The light *is* flickering less, however. It still is flickering, though.

It's not quite this bad, but I am getting to the point I want to knock Mr. Waturi's artificial testicles off his desk.

"Let's Go, Old Man."

Got to hang out with my brothers today, first time in a very long time. Al, Randy and I drove down to Utah to see Jeff. We stopped at his house for a while, then took he and Jenia out for lunch.

Jeff is set for back surgery at the end of the month and isn't as mobile right now as he'd like, so we finished the rest of the day with just the travelers. We went to the Hill Aerospace Museum -- a first for me -- and looked at many, many planes.

Forgot -- on the way in, we stopped at Smith and Edwards, where Al was in search for flying poops. No luck on that. 

It was a good day.

*COMPETENT* Bad Guys!

 

Got a call early this morning from our daughter, concerned that she had a headlight out on her van.

A bit of a concern, yes, because she doesn't want a ticket for driving with only one headlight, and their other vehicle is off-limits at the moment as it's going to be headed to the shop.

She's in North Dakota, though, and I'm in Idaho. All I could do was suggest she find an auto parts store, buy the replacement bulb, and see if they'd replace it for her. I know they'll do that in our neck of the woods.

She discovered, however, that the folks at the auto parts store thought the job looked too hard and recommended she take it to a mechanic.

She bought the bulb anyway, drove the van home, (thinking all the time about the "incompentent bad guys" at the auto parts store) and got to tinkering. She found a screwdriver and managed to get one of the bolts out, but couldn't budge the other three. I suggested a few things.

She reported back a bit later with the photo above, showing success.

Not a big deal, maybe, but for her it was. She got it done, and that's always a good feeling.