HORSEPOWER -

It has been a long while since I have had the time and the inclination to put more foolishness in writing.  I have to admit that for the last three weeks or more, I have been mentally and physically over-booked.  I have a fairly long list of things that have crossed my mind lately, and to tell you the truth, I have no idea why I chose this topic to break the silence.  It's just one of those things.  Just below this one you will find some deeper considerations about "Secret Thoughts," but this is bound to be more fun.
When I was younger, some 65 years younger, I remember asking EFR Dion the question that is the topic for today:  'What is horsepower?"  He looked at me and said, without missing a beat, "It is the strength that it takes one horse to lift 16 tons in one minute."  Well, I have lived all these years with the conviction that I knew exactly what horsepower is.  I have no clue of how to translate it into torque, or watts, or speed, or heat, or BTU's or calories, or any of that other fancy stuff, but I still remember my father's sure and solid answer.  Despite the fact that he was one half ton off the mark, as you can readily see, it was good enough to last all these years.  It would still be good enough except that I found the half-ton short-fall when I betrayed my conscience and second guessed Ol' EFR by going to Mr. Google in search of a horse.
A couple days ago, amid my clogged schedule, this idea came to me like a hair on soup.  The strange thing is that it would not go away.  So often, I get waves of inspiration like this and despite my best efforts, I forget what the inspiration was about. If I had a better memory or a faster pencil, I would have scribbled a lot more things than actually have found the light of day as a result of coursing through my brain.  This one though, kept pinging on the inside wall of my coconut, relentlessly.
The other thing that got me to smiling was how useless it was that I should have this fact tucked away on the dark, dank corners of my mind and neither one of my sons has ever asked me the question.  In this world of ours, where nanoseconds, picofareds, megapixels, kilobytes and terabytes, keyboards and quartz screens, smartphones and WIFI's, I'm practically dead certain that neither my sons nor anyone else will ever deem it necessary to ask me what horsepower is.  Horses don't move anything other that themselves these days, for which I am sure that they are quite happy.  So, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, that's the thought for today.  If I'm lucky, the Good Lord will slip me another one tomorrow.

SECRET THOUGHTS

I was listening to an interesting interview earlier while driving back from visiting family in another city. It was on NPRI, National Public Radio International.  It was originating in Canada because, I suppose, it being a holiday (Labor Day) in the USA, the out of country divisions were providing the on-air presence.  This was about the ever more deeply encroaching surveillance being foisted on the people of the USA. I don't remember the names of the main interlocutors but one question, among many provocative ones struck me. It was, "What do you say to those who postulate, "If you have nothing to hide, there is nothing to fear.'?"
The answer from the expert being interviewed was swift and sure: "Everyone has something to hide."
My internal, personal reaction was, "I do."
I haven't murdered anyone, raped anyone, robbed any banks or some such things, but if the snoops want something, they can find it in my public life.  It doesn't even matter whether or not it is morally correct.  Snoops can make up all kinds of stories once they have enough information about you.  Since I have confessed that I have something to hide, let me show you where a serious snoop could start, even before I even had a presence on the Internet and a Smart Phone.
I never attended a public school.  I never spoke less than two languages.  I was never drafted into the military.  I was exempted by the nature of my continuing education.  During the time when I could have been drafted, my continuing education took me to Europe.  To Italy where the Communist party was still very strong.  When my continuing education was finished I went to "work" in the Philippines where I stayed for 11 years.  During my time there I lived in the section where the anti Marcos insurgency was fairly strong.  A colleague of mine spent five years in prison for rebelling against the government.
I came back to the United States and when I went to work in secular industry, I did not work for a purely American corporation for many years.
I could go on and on. Now, some nasty snoop could, I suppose, make hay by the fact that I have a fairly constant presence on the Internet and have voluminous writings open and available to the world to ruminate.  It should be clear to you by now, that over these 50+ years of of non-typical existence, there's gotta be something that I should worry about.  Maybe there is, but at 76 years young, I don't give a damn.  But you do get my point, I am sure.
It is the same point that the expert made during the interview.  We have all been to the doctor, many of us have consulted lawyers, or worked for a corporation where our responsibilities put us in positions of having to work with lawyers on a fairly regular basis. Many of us have worked overseas, many of us have picketed our employer's facilities, many of us camp outside of abortion clinics and pray and intervene with the entry of prospective patients, many of us send emails that are not kind to the leaders of the government, and the beat goes on.  The man was making the point that it is not just public speech that is being watched, it is our private expression of personal opinion that is also being monitored. In the end, therefore, says the man, we all have something to hide, we often times don't know what it is.
Over all, I was fascinated by the fellow's point of view.  It was all the more interesting because he is the owner of a company that makes products that prevent the government from snooping on the exchange of messages between two people by using these products. The product has the name "Silent..." I can't remember the whole thing.  I do remember that it is expensive, of course!
So, there you are.  A little sample of the stuff that you can hear while your spouse is sleeping in the passenger's seat on the way home from a holiday in sunny San Diego.

USA EXCEPTIONALISM? YOU BET -- NOT!

Exceptionally high prescription drug prices, the highest in the world, even higher than the many developed countries who have single payer health care systems.

Exceptionally high infant mortality rate, the highest among wealthy nations.

Exceptionally well educated graduates who can’t read cursive handwriting

Exceptionally high private gun ownership…the highest in the world

Exceptionally proud to be the number one nation in the world in the number of gun related homicides

Exceptionally violent…more than anywhere else in the world

Exceptionally inclined to mass murder, much more than anywhere else

Exceptional by the fact that the USA has more crime by far than any other country

Exceptional by the fact that the USA has more people incarcerated than any other country

Exceptionally proud that our life expectancy at birth is a resounding 49^th place on the charts of the world

Exceptionally obese.  Number one in the world, in fact.

Exceptionally poor public mass transit infrastructure

Exceptionally driven to meddle into the affairs of others, at home and abroad

Exceptionally weak Commander in Chief who always consults the “Generals” rather than commanding them

Exceptionally weak Head of State who seems to fear to dare the opposition to cause senseless havoc

There has been a lot in the news lately about the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government to kill some of its citizens.  That is certainly not a very nice picture.  There is also another ugly picture to contemplate right here in the USA.  We also have a government that wages chemical warfare.  We don’t get gassed, we just die because we can’t afford the chemicals we need to survive.  I’m a lucky one.  The prescription I can’t afford is not a cure or a control for a terminal condition…painful, but not terminal.  So, I do without.  But there are people who choose to die because they cannot afford the astronomical prices of some of the “miracle” drugs that are for sale, all the while being unavailable because of price. 

There is also another crime that kills our fellow citizens in this country and that this the legalized bribery practiced between politicians and special interests.  If politicians had a moral compass they would stop taking the standard “campaign contribution” and “lobbyist” bribes and start to protect the citizens of the country with common sense health care and gun control laws.  The canard of the second amendment is just that, canard.  There is nothing in the second amendment that says that the government doesn’t have the right to protect innocent citizens of the country. 

Yes, the USA is Exceptional.  It has constructed the best legalized bribery system known to humans on this planet or any other one where humans may exist.  The immorality of this ingenious system has succeeded in substituting the authority of the government with the power of the special interests.  This displacement of truth and honesty has despoiled the franchise held by the citizens of its guiding force.  The citizens vote, the politicians get washed downstream by the flow of the bribes.  Along with the politicians goes the will of the vote only to go over the Niagra and fall into the churning miasma of unrest and unrequited expectations for a decent, well organized, productive life in an honesty based land. 

No, I don’t live in Russia.  No I’m not a bleeding heart liberal, nor am I a tight-sphinctered conservative.  I am a hard working, 76 ½ year old who still holds a job and has experienced life in many places in this world.  Given my internationally grounded experiences, I can fearlessly say, yes, even along with Vlad Putin, “Get over yourself, America, you’re just as ordinary, and in many ways just as bad if not worse as anyone else.”

FROM THUNDERBOLT TO THUNDERMUG

Brace yerself, this one's gonna getcha.
I saw sumthin' taday that brought all kinda thoughts to floodin' my mind...
Thunderbolt - you know the WWII P-47 types...
Thunderclap - you know, the explosive snap after the lightning bolt that happened just 1/2 mile away...
Thunderhead - like the thick, gnarled black clouds just over the hill...
Thunderstorm - like in raining cats and dogs for 15 minutes accompanied by fiery lightning and noise from Hell...
Thunderstruck - like too much $50.00 a fifth Bourbon on New Year's eve...

Thundermug - ...

... nuff said!
    I honestly thought that EFR Dion had made that word up when he first used it in front of me.  I still thought that when today, for the first time in at least 60+ years, I actually saw the cutie that you see up above.  It showed up at our place in San Diego, on the patio, please, just as pert and pretty as you please like you can all appreciate from the picture.  So, just to test myself and my skepticism about the name of this artifact, I put EFR Dion's word in the slot at the top of the Google page,

and there it was, just as big as life, a real, enameled metal thundermug, without the gentile cover and the cute design on the side.

Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and cousines, friends and neighbors, ladies and gentlemen, you all, old and young from near and far, you have before you a hint of some of the things that run through my warped, pretzel shaped mind on any given day. 
Hey, it's better than Alzheimers, ain't it? Hmmm,or is it?