What do you do with all the time you save?

In today’s society, we strive to save time. We want to be more efficient. “What’s a quicker way to do this?” We shorten words like “web log” into “blog”. Why not “wog”? Even shorter. With “wog,” we saved the trauma of having to make or think  an “el” sound. That’s probably worth a whole twentieth of a second.  Such a bother…

Maybe it actually started back in  World War 2, when GIs, (Short of Government Issue (soldier)) were saying things like SANFU,  “Situation normal, all effed up”. and FUBAR  stood for  “Effed up beyond all belief.”  Like when two fighter planes were in battle it was a “dogfight.”  When a whole bunch of planes were in a battle, it was a “Furball”.  Those were descriptive phrases, born of necessity, because to stay on a radio for even an extra second could cost lives.

Did that lead to the shorthand kids use in texting? Or was it laziness? Sure, some of the shorthand is designed to baffle adults, especially parents and/or teachers. “POS” for example equals Parent over shoulder”, which actually means, “Nosey mom (or dad) looking at my screen so I can’t say what I really want to say.”

Or LOL.  I hate lol.  It’s gone mainstream so much its used sarcastically in TV commercials.  For the guy who lives in that desert cabin 30 miles out of Las Vegas, lol means “laughing out loud”. Well, so does “Ha ha”.  Would it really hurt to type “laughing”? I would even accept “laffing”

Let’s face it. All the time , and then some, you save short-handing is probably used up used correcting typos. (Oops… I used a shorthand word.)  But in this case its ok (another shorthand).  Most people can’t spell “typographical error”.

ROFLMFAO, is short for “I’m really laughing at that.”  Actually its the acronym “Rolling on the floor, laughing my effing ass off.”  Even that’s become mainstream.   A rocker has taken part of this acronym and given himself the name LMFAO.  Never heard of him?  His music is the soundtrack for many Kia car commercials and for something called Kiss.  Not only that, he just appeared on DWTS… oops, I mean “Dancing With The Stars” as a guest judge. Brought his own score paddles. Now, if that ain’t mainstream, I don’t know what is.

Maybe acronyming [word?] came about because until Steve Jobs and Bill Gates came along, we wrote things out in longhand. Longhand was a pain in the south-end, so making a little easier was considered just fine.  We had typewriters of course, but now I doubt that a kid in high school or middle school would see one and wonder were the screen was. Do you remember how hard you had to push on a typewriter key to make is strike the paper properly? Do you remember the revolutionary electric typewriter?  All you had to do was touch the key.  Startled the older secretaries in the industry…

My grand-neice, a college student in the arts, can “thumb out” text messages in milliseconds.  Texts fly in and out of her phone so fast the NSA can’t keep up with her.  At the end of the day though, I doubt she has saved enough time to stand up, go to the fridge, get a coke, and return. Betcha that if she had texted in normal English, she’d still have time to go grab that coke… and maybe even a cookie.

We’ve saved time, though. Nowadays all you have to do is type a few letters to convey a message.

R U OK?

C U,

 

Have You Ever Wondered?

 

Even as a kid, just beginning to realized that boys and girls were different, the first time I heard the phrase, “She’s built like a brick s___house”, I wondered how in the world a human with soft curves and a giggle could be compared to an out building.  The thing of it was that I was raised in the mountains in the summertime, and all houses in Pinecrest has outhouses.  Indoor plumbing was a rarity, leastwise in the oldest residential section.  Our house was built in 1914.  A “new” outhouse was built in 1948-49. It was a nice one. Had a shower and sink plus a smelly chemical toilet. And a doorlock.

A lot of my work is creating cartoons. I use a combination of programs, including Poser, Daz Studio, Bryce 3D, and Photoshop. Bryce on my computer is my own little world. What’s neat about it is that most physical laws are suspended. If I wanted to hang Captain Hook’s Galleon in the sky, I can, and make it pretty realistic.

With that in mind, I like to posit strange imagery depiction a saying, a quote, or a weird situation, and most of all, really rotten puns… Flying hillsides, or five hundred mile, 300 foot wide oil tanker (VLCCs) ship channels and so on. A WW 1 Biplane cutting off a 747 landing in San Francisco. Women counting horses. So when I come down with a case of Writer’s Block, I can go to one of my toons, post it and write a bit about it, and hopefully entertain you for a while.

So it’s all good.

As seen on TV

A currently running commercial on television says, “No one ever takes the second biggest cookie.”  Whoever wrote that stupid line never considered wives or mothers.  I cannot count the number of times  my wife or I would bring out a cookie for ourself and one for the other person.   Invariably, if I went into the kitchen and came out with and offered her a choice of two cookies, she would take the smaller of the two.  I knew she would, she knew she would, but I never didn’t offer her first choice.  Or there’s two cookies left in the cookie jar.  She would always give whatever child was in the kitchen the bigger one. So to the writer of that like.  Apologize to your Mama!

54 vb  (My cat typed that getting off my lap.I don’t know what it means.Maybe it’s cat code.)

If you had asked me six months ago, I would have said I was  dog person.  Dogs do things.  They run after anything that’s been propelled from it’s human companions hand.  They follow commands from their owners.  Roll over.  Fetch. Help the blind.  Guard military stuff. Capture crooks. Find drugs. They do all this so they can play with a squeaky toy. Dogs have no sense of worth.   There are thousands of names for dogs, unless they’re bird hunting dogs.  They they all have the same name. “No, over there. you Dummy!”

Cats are far too aloof for this kind of behavior.  My cat will come when I call her, but at her leisure  Other than being fastidious, she has no other attributes. Cats don’t do tricks.  No guard duty, no picking up dead wet birds in a cold miserable marsh.  They’ll play with a squeaky toy, but they ain’t gonna work all day for the honor.  Most of the time, cats practice killing things. Like squeaky toys, shadows, lasers, etc. My cat is welcome because she is something I can talk to.  If I talk to a dog, the critter’s butt, hindquarters and tail go into an uncontrolled high speed mayhem setting, knocking kids down, rapping adult’s shins, sweeping everything off the coffee table.  His tongue comes out, slopping dog spit all over everything.  A dog does not know the meaning of the word halitosis. They think you’re inviting them to become a human, on the couch, and they have a difficult time distinguishing between you and said couch.

But if you talk to a cat, she’ll look at you with the expression that says, “Do you really think I can understand any of the noises coming out of your mouth except the names for meals?  I also understand ‘Get down’, something that stoopid dog doesn’t.”  When I talk to my cat though, even with her superior attitude, it helps me to remember the mechanics of talking.  When to move my jaw up and down, what to do with my tongue, you know, that kind of talky stuff. What I say to her doesn’t matter, but it seems to make more sense to me that I’m talking to a quiet adult cat, instead of a wiggily, bouncy, utterly immature canine..

Maybe that’s the difference.  Cats grow up, Dogs don’t.

This has been buzzing around in my noggin for a while

Our national debt is out of hand.  the numbers of dollars are so vast, they don’t mean anything to the average Joe Sitzpak.  17.5 trillion bucks.  To paraphrase the late Sen. Everett Dirkson, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talkin’ about some real money!”.
A million, a billion, a trillion. And not just one trillion, seventeen and a half of `em! Next number is quadrillion.  There probably isn’t that many atoms on and in the earth. … Wait a sec. I just read on the web that there are about one quadrillion ants on earth. And you know they can’t lie on the web…

But what if dollars were miles?  How far would we get with some well known common distances/amounts?  If we begin here in Las Vegas the average monthly Social Security Check would take us to Kansas.  A year’s SS income would get us half-way around the world. You get the idea.  Someplace on the web, Microsoft’s Bill Gates income is set at around 157 million bucks.  I don’t know if that’s take-home or gross.  Really don’t care.  But he can make a trip to the sun and back. (He’ll have to go at night though, to keep from getting burned.)  To get from the highest point on land to the deepest seabed under water would only take $12.32.  Not even a good living wage…

Now let’s talk space. We add to the national nebt at the rate of a million bucks every minute and twenty-one seconds. 1.33 minutes, about.  So in an hour, we’ve added 45 million plus.  If we use that as the speed we can travel, we’re cookin’ along at 45.11 million miles an hour.  About 6.5% of the speed of light. So we can get to the sun in about two hours   Hell , we can get to the moon in 19 seconds!
Jupiter is a seven hour and forty minute trip. Saturn is sixteen hours away.
Alpha Centuri, our closest star neighbor, is 63.8 years away. That’s 4.3 light years.  The good news is that we’ve already traveled, 17.6 trillion miles, so we’re about three quarters of the way there.  At this rate, we should be there in another 16.9 years.

So what can we do about the debt?  I  haven’t got a clue. But since this is my blog, I don’t have to.

You know it’s gonna be one of those days

When your cat is up and had her breakfast before you get outta bed.  Every morning begins with great intentions, doesn’t it?  Your alarm goes off (mine is a bugle playing Reveille, nice and loud from my cell phone.  I have other audio signals from my phone, but we’ll go into that later… So el Gato tries to shame me into an upright position, but I’m refusing because, I’m watching the Fox News Channel, then the newsy part of Good Morning America in a reclining position.  And my bedroom telly is safely propped on a slant to match my head so that when I lay sideways, everything is oriented correctly.  Another sign of our inherent  state of relaxedness[word?].

Once I’m up, done my stuff, and gotten dressed, I retrieve my coffee leftovers.  No no, not yesterday’s grounds… On Monday, I brew a full pot of strong coffee and pour it into a 64 oz hot and cold giant mug I bought from our local Rebel Gasoline Station.  A big `ol green one.  So I put some Hazelnut creamer in, and fill to the brim with hearty black coffee.  Ergo, on Monday, I drink hot coffee, but I don’t finish the whole mug.  I put the remainder into the fridge around 11:00 and switch to diet cola.

Now before you get on my case about the evils of diet soda, I like diet soda, and I don’t like the effects of sugar on my svelte body.  So leave me alone.  For the rest of the week, I drink refreshing cold coffee, out of the same giant mug I made on Monday.  Efficient, hah?

Since my wife passed, I have added alarm tones to my cellphone. The sounds emanating my ever-present Samsung helps me keep my day somewhat organized.  It also allows me to ignore something audible, which makes me feel like someone is here trying to control my day.  We all have to get our little chunks of victory somewhere.  So my bells and whistles are:  At 8:00 am, a school bell goes off, telling me I should have been sitting at my dest, ready to do my chores. These comprise opening a folder in my bookmarks and doing a global opening of the websites therein.  My bank, a daily text and the photo of the day from National Geographic.  I check my email at that time.

Unless I decide to go outside and walk a mile in my shoes, (it’s rather difficult to walk a mile in my apartment), it’s time to write.  I compose one of three blogs I maintain, and that can take a while.  Then I zoom way in on the words, so that I can go over what I’ve written, looking for something, anything, that needs changing. When I’m satisfied with whatever I’ve written, I post it.
After I posted yesterday, I made several edits to the posted and published material, possibly generating a lot of stupid email notices to those who follow my blogs. So now, I’m using a simple text editor to compose.

I usually knock off sometime between 11:00 am, and 2:00 pm.  The Five comes on at 2:00 pm.  I eat my lunch and watch to find out what my political views of the day are.  BTW, I think Dana Perino should run for President.

At 3:00 pm, another school bell rings, just for nostalgic reasons.  It means I can officially relax.  I watch TV, munch on snacks, and wait for the five o’clock alarm, which is a San Francisco Foghorn.  For most people this means the start of Happy Hour.  For me, it means to get the hell off the streets, because drinking drivers will soon begin to show up on the roads.  I have an alarm set for 7:00, but I’m not sure why.  Maybe it signifies the time to go watch TV in my bedroom, and close out my day.

One of these days, I think I’ll teach my feline roommate how to make my coffee.

 

I hope I haven’t PO’d too many people.

On another blog that I write, this morning I performed several updates, and full revisions of one blog post. I think that I may have automatically sent update emails each time. This will work, once I get the hang of all this. So if you got a bunch of e-messages from the other blog, my apologies.

I’ll post here Thursday or Friday.

 

 

Didya Notice?

That when I put in my web address for my blog, I added an extra “w” to the word “wordpress”.  Here is the correct URL http://www.rbpahl.wordpress.com.  I have a good excuse though. 

       I have dry macular degeneration, pretty heavy on one eye (my right) and light to moderate in the other.  Four days after a laser eye surgery bout on both eyes to correct fogging capsules, (the part of my eye anatomy that hold my cataract-replacement lens in) in my good eye, a tiny blind spot appeared in the dead-center of my good eye.  It is just about the size of a letter in a word that I can read comfortably so to read I have to flick my eyes just slightly from side to side to see the word.  My other alternative is to zoom my screen image in so I can see bigger print.  Its a little scary, because there isn’t much future for artists or photographers who can’t see so well.  My neice sent me Dragon for Mac so I can still dictate my musings and book chapters.

   Enough about that…

And on the URL for another site instead of http://www.rbpahl.blogspot.com, I wrote blogsite.  Sillyme.

Bringing U up 2 date

The past couple of days, I’ve been getting my three (Yes, three.  Count `em.) blogs attached to my website. One blog (http://www.rbpahl.blogsite.com is going to be primarily about my various books.  Another, (http://www.rbpahl.wwordpress.com) will be my personal blog rife with opinions, commentary and general musings.  The third is going to be primarily for seralizing books.  I have one book in serial form, available for free on my website (http://www.richardpahl.com/TCPI/TCPI-index.html) or you can pick it up here, as soon as I get it copied and relocated.

That’s it for now, 

 

BTDT

But I have been workin’

The past couple of days, I’ve been getting my three (Yes, three.  Count `em.) blogs attached to my website. One blog (http://www.rbpahl.blogsite.com is going to be primarily about my various books.  Another, (http://www.rbpahl.wwordpress.com) will be my personal blog rife with opinions, commentary and general musings.  The third is going to be primarily for seralizing books.  I have one book in serial form, available for free on my website (http://www.richardpahl.com/TCPI/TCPI-index.html) or you can pick it up here, as soon as I get it copied and relocated.

That’s it for now,

BTDT

 

BTDT

Back to it.

Ive been working on spreading the word(s) about my books.  Aso checked email, did my banking online,   And cropped and posted a picture of my lazy ol cat, Misty Blue.

Wait… Did you say lunch?

I’m trying to live up to my word, that is, to keep this blog active.

Don’t forget to visit my website, http://www.amansart.com

BTDT