Author Archives: Timmer

About Timmer

An Active Duty Master Sergeant in the USAF who spent four and a half years at Loyola University, Chicago, studying to be a starving actor. It worked. He was starving. Now a husband, a father, a stepfather, a dog-walker, a practitioner of Tai Chi and Disc Dogging, he's looking forward to his retirement from the Air Force in Summer of 2007 and finding the answer to the eternal question, Now what?

Stuff

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So apparently Governor Rick Perry of Texas has a Baptist pastor who’s going off on Mormons.  I guess Michele Bachmann has jumped on that wagon as well, haven’t seen it, just heard about that one so…  Ya know, we’ve retired in Idaho.  There are a lot of Mormons here in Idaho.  They make good neighbors.  Given a choice between living with Baptists and living with Mormons, I’ll take the Mormons.  Once you tell them you’re not interested in going to the temple with them, they have the courtesy to leave you the hell alone.  And seriously?  You really want to trash the Osmonds?!  Donnie?  Marie?  America LOVES Donnie and Marie!  I know it’s a way to discredit Romney, but come ON.  The only thing these nimrod, close-minded, gay bashing, moralists are doing is making Mitt Romney look like the only rational candidate for the GOP.

Herman Cain?  Kinda liked him for a minute.  Cool, business man.  Then he started talking.  Total meltdown.

Occupy Where-Who-What-Ever they are.  I’m for it!  Seriously.  They might be a conglomeration of all the leftist “pissed off ats” all in one, but ya gotta admit, they have a couple of valid points.  The chief one being that we’re a good 3 years past the economic melt-down that the suits brought down on us and the only Armani clad shit bird that’s in jail is Bernie Maddoff?  And not only did these suits NOT get prosecuted…they got rewarded for their f*ckups with OUR tax dollars.  The only thing that surprises me is that it took so long for someone to organize a protest.

President Obama.  Sigh.  What can I say?  Not a fan.  Don’t like a damn things he’s done other than capture OBL and he did THAT by sticking with the same strategies and tactics that he beat up President Bush for.  I REALLY hoped he’d do something to get a real, sustainable alternative energy program going and create a bunch of jobs while doing it.  We all know how THAT turned out.  To call it feeble is an insult to feeble.

Okay, so now we’re only leaving 5,000 armed “advisers” in Iraq and pulling out all the combat forces?  Meanwhile, last week it was announced that we’re sending 100 armed “advisers” into Uganda.  I guess there’s some Rebel faction there that needs cleaning out.  Uganda.  “Suddenly” we need to do something about one of the warlords in Africa?  Because…?

The Tea Party.  What the hell happened?  It was brilliant, it was exciting, and then…Buellor?  Buellor?  Ya let the media run your message and now we don’t hear anything BUT their version of your message.

Bottom line?  Everyone’s fed up.  They’re fed up with blowing up people who probably had nothing to do with hurting any of us.  They’re fed up with spending billions of dollars blowing those people up.  They’re fed up with the way we treat our vets when they do make it home.  They’re very fed up with losing their houses.  They’re fed up with spending thousands of dollars on an education only to find out that nobody is hiring.  They’re fed up with their movie collections being outdated due to ANOTHER format change.  And to quote Tyler from Fight Club:

“I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

RIP Clarence Clemons

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In late August of 1975 I was 13 just a week away from 14 and a week and a half from high school when music for me suddenly changed drastically.  If you were like me, you fell asleep with a small FM transistor radio under your pillow playing soft enough so Mom and Dad couldn’t hear it.

One of those nights it was so hot that I actually left my bedroom door open so a breeze could run through the apartment.

On that night, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Born to Run” came over the radio in it’s entirety.  From Thunder Road to Jungleland.  That big block of wood guitar.  Those keyboards that sounded like they come straight off a midway.  That bass and drum-kit driving, driving into the night, and that saxaphone…that soaring magical flow of brass that rose me above the street right down the gangway between our apartment and the next.

I can’t tell you how many times that saxaphone literally saved my life through the rest of the 70s.  Some of it’s just normal teenage hormonal angsty bullshit, some of it was real insanity that comes from living in as a teen in a major city in the 70s.

Thank you Big Man.  God bless and keep you in his band.

I Swear…

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If I see one more politico or blogger who I used to respect stand up and tell me that Paul Revere actually WAS warning the British on his midnight ride, I’m going to vote for Obama just out of sheer spiteful frustration with the WingNuttery of it all.

No, it’s NOT worse than 57 states, but come ON people.  We learned this in 8th Grade.  And it wasn’t a “reasoned” response, she was spewing word salad.

I don’t care if it’s a Dem or a Rep, if you goofed, just say so.

Because You’re Pissing Us Off

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I saw an online headline in the past couple of days that read, “Teachers wonder:  Why the scorn?”  Had a similar question pop up from an old friend from high school on Facebook.  It also came up up last election season when yet another old friend was running for some position in California (he’s a teacher by trade) and wanted to know why military people seemed so dismissive of “Teacher’s rights?”

I can’t say it’s the right answer or the only answer, but it is my answer:  Military people teach every day.  We train our subordinates, in and out of the classroom.  We help them develop their careers.  We act as mentors, counselors, teachers, friends, parental surrogates, and boss.  We don’t think it’s all that big a deal.  Yes, some people are better at teaching in a formal situation than others, but the passing on of information is not magic.  Not in 2011 when people actually get degrees without interacting with a teacher other than via email or online forum.

One old friend argued that because she has more formal education than most lawyers, and certainly more than “most idiot Republican” politicians, she’s entitled to more money.  I asked if she were teaching MORE as a result of that education?  No.  Was she teaching harder material as a result of that education?  No.  I asked her how her level of education effected how well she taught a standardized curriculum and she got downright pissy.  “There is NO such thing as a standardized curriculum, if you’d ever REALLY taught, you’d know that.”  I ignored that entirely and drove home my point:  A teacher’s level of education has little to no effect on their ability to communicate a set collection of information to their students.  Follow up questions, in-depth subject background, oh-by-the-way-you-might-find-this-bit-of-minutia-interesting, THOSE all benefit from you’re having an advanced degree IN THE SUBJECT YOU’RE TEACHING.  Your advanced degrees make YOU a more informed person, but you’re not doing my kid any more good than the fresh faced youngster with a new BA and teaching certificate who may actually still CARE about teaching.

“Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have.”  ~The Wizard of Oz to Scarecrow.

Unions:  At this point, unions aren’t helping teachers one bit.  When teachers’ unions were formed, they were necessary to ensure that teachers could make a living wage.  And they ARE making a living wage.  They don’t get paid a lot, in most cases, but they now have pay and benefits that are above the poverty line by a good margin.  Good teachers, exceptional teachers, get paid exactly the same amount as really crappy teachers.  Why?  Unions.  The unions are for equality, across the board, no matter how much you suck.  They are a beast that must be fed and to be fed, they must get more for their union members so the union members can feed them more.  They’re like many another bureaucracy, the initial reason for their existence has LONG passed, but they must justify their continuation and the way they do that is to insist that their members are some sort of victims, insist that only the union can keep the evil political machine at bay, only the union can “fix” what is broken.

The problem is that these days we’re all victims, we’re all not making enough, we’re all working harder for less money and teachers unions trying to argue that they’re still worse off than most of the rest of us, just isn’t flying.  If you’ve got a salary AND insurance these days, you’re doing pretty damn well.  We’re broke too, and for you to ask more of us while we’re still struggling to get back on our feet, is just damn insulting.

THAT’S why the scorn.

This Won’t End Well

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So, it looks like the mosque in NYC near Ground Zero has cleared another hurdle.  Seriously though, the NYPD is against it, the NYFD is against it, the families of those who died that day are against it.  Having known and befriended just a couple of NYPD’s finest in my life, I have to wonder if anyone thinks for a moment that it will get completed much less stand for very long.  I predict many unfortunate accidents.

Noggin’ Bloggin’/Product Review, Headblade (100802)

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About a month or so ago I got another trim at another one of those discount “Master Care Hair Care Performer Care Clips Care” places and realized that the “stylist” was messing with my hair in such a way as to make sure the ever growing thin spot on the crown of my head was covered.  Sigh.  Beautiful Wife, bless her heart, insists this isn’t technically a comb over.  Just one reason I love her, she doesn’t slam my ego at every turn.

Since I retired from the Air Force (can you believe it’s been three years?) I’ve tried various and sundry hair/beard configurations.  While I’d like to have the patience to go for Billy Connolly in “Boondock Saints,” the best I can really hope for is Jeff Bridges in anything from the last dozen years, but with a Monk’s Bowl where the crown of my head is.  I don’t think The Dude prevails with a bald spot.

A couple of Saturdays ago, it was hot and we hadn’t quite got the air conditioner thing worked out for the summer yet and I had beads of sweat running down my neck and back etc., so…out came the clippers.  A quick buzz and then into the shower with the good ol’ Gillette and poof, back to the cueball look.

I’ve tried going back to AF short.  I’ve tried medium.  I’ve tried medium-long.  With my hair thinning more and the weird color pattern that seems to refuse to balance out, and the fact that it’s just plain easy, I think I’m going to keep it shaved at least for the foreseeable future.

So six years ago when I first shaved the dome, I tried this thing called a Headblade.  It’s a razor specifically made for shaving your head.  It looked cool.  It’s well-designed.  It’s got kind of a YinYang logo.  They supported the UFC.  It was an American invention from the 90s, back when Americans were still inventing things that worked better.  But I digress.  Six years ago when I first tried the Headblade Classic, I pretty much shredded my scalp.  It used a two-blade cartridge and I never quite got the balance of the thing.  You’re supposed to put NO pressure on the blade end.  I somehow couldn’t get my hand to to figure that out.

The latest version, the Headblade Sport, ran $12.99 at my local Walgreens and works so well it’s kind of scary.  Yes, it looks like half a Hot Wheel.  And it’s got three blades vs two so the blades are a bit more pricey.  However, one pass and the hair was gone, leaving all the skin intact and smooth as a baby’s butt.  So not only did it shave amazingly close, it did it with LESS irritation than my (insert ridiculous number)-blade face razor because I only had to make one, maybe two passes to get the hair gone.  I don’t know if it’s the wheels or the three blade configuration or that I’ve mellowed considerably over the past six years, but this thing works!