Ancient Aliens...

Wherein the writer pontificates on the arrogant beliefs held by one of the camps of this topic...

I just saw a show on the History Channel about "Ancient Aliens" where talking heads point to murky cave paintings, tapestries, carvings, woodcuts, and paintings, interspersed with paintings and drawings of modern origin, none of which were identified as such.

They did try to balance out the true believers, with one talking head who was the token skeptic.

The show was very biased towards the true believers, who basically retold every historic event as terms of aliens intervening in human affairs. That none of the great works of man were really built by man.

That is the arrogant belief. That our ancestors were too stupid to build the pyramids, that aliens had to build them for us.

Give me a break. C'mon, aliens will travel billions and billions of miles to move a bunch stones to build a temple? Especially when you backtrack these massive stones to their quarries and find not the pristine cuts made by super science devices, but the signs of stone and a bronze tools?

The extraordinary claims made by the ancient alienists fall apart when you watch the locals do the impossible all the time, or when you go down to a little coral castle in Florida and see stones bigger than the ones in Great Pyramid were put into place and perfectly balanced by a single man.

You need to move a forty ton stone? All you need is manpower, not ancient aliens, and a little intellect and some ingenuity.

My Life with Cars, Part One...

Wherein I explain my origins and my early encounters with Cars and Public Transportation and the emotions therein engendered...

I was born in Michigan, home of Detroit City and the Big Three. If you didn't drive a car then you were a loser.

I never bought into that mindset. I didn't get my own personal car, till I was 24. Before that I used my parent's car. My brother, on the other hand, went through cars like they were water.

Me, I hated driving, the mind numbing drone of the highway, the gridlock of the freeway. When I went to CDI, (see my tirade on Education and Technical Trade Schools), I was routinely caught in gridlock, sitting there in the summer heat, the fumes rising up and polluting the air.

I hated it. I'd rather take the bus... but you see, this is South East Michigan, who's lifeblood was automobiles. Where if you drove an import to the Ford Factory, it would be at the very least, keyed by everyone who saw it. Buses existed, they were for the dregs of society, people so poor that they couldn't afford a car.

There was no trains, at least when I was busily commuting to school from Lake Orion. There was one that used to run from Pontiac to Detroit, I know, because I rode on it on it's last day.

My Mom arranged a day in Detroit for us, and made it extra special by having us ride the train. It was the last train to Detroit from Pontiac and it died with no ceremony or fanfare.

We sat together, old style, facing seats. The toilet emptied out on the tracks, I checked, and ran through mostly industrial areas of region. We spent a couple of hours in Detroit and then came back. This was in the early 70's. From what I can tell, no one has been able to bring it back.

Why? I'd claim the Grand Car Company Conspiracy, but the truth is that no one rode it enough to make it viable. Everyone was in their car.

The region was and is car crazy. Woodward Ave, also known as Widetrack, is so wide that at some intersections, to turn left, you have to turn right, pull into a special left hand U-turn, and then end up facing the direction you want to go in.

When I went back for my mother's funeral, I was shocked by the size of the streets. Six lane streets in areas that shouldn't see that much traffic! That's something I don't want to see in Seattle.

People in that region of Michigan are car crazy. Even people on welfare had to buy the latest Caddy. A high school acquaintance of mine is the perfect case study. Let's call him Mr. Car Nut.

Mr. Car Nut went out and bought a new Trans Am special edition, '76 edition and blew the engine in the first week. In the next three months he went through four engines. Then new Trans Ams came out with new tail lights and front end. So he decides to ruin a the body of a '76 Trans Am special edition and cobbles on a new rear end and front end.

Then he goes and blows three more engines and two transmissions.

The amount of money he spent on that car was staggering, and most of it was his father's as best I could tell. He finally got cut off and he went to work at K-Mart where he went on to help raise prices by stealing auto stuff, radios and other things from the place to deck out his cars with. Yes, with his new job, he got himself another car. Did he sell his Trans Am? No. Insanity, that's all it was, insanity.

My brother, however, had to buy his first car, so he spent about $200 bucks and bought this black car that was held together by rust, a prayer, and the doors being shut. How he got it home must have been a story and a half. He spent more time working on that sucker than he did driving it.

Me, I was either in the basement writing Basic programs for my Trash 80, or over at my good friend Bruce McMeans trailer plotting the end of the world as we know it, or another round of DnD. I was not at all interested in the mechanical bits of a car whatsoever.

That changed when I got my first car, a 1963 Belvedere...
[to be continued...]

Mr. Walker, Mr. Wheeler

Car companies portray car owners as greedy, spoiled children, which may not be too far from the truth...

A guy is sitting in his car, waiting for it to move. Finally he honks his horn, revealing that he is sitting in side the car on the assembly line. As commercial fades out, we hear that security is being summoned.

A car moves so fast that when it enters a tunnel, it sucks all the air out and all the loose items on one side of the tunnel come blowing out the other end, including at least one road sign.

Cars are touted to be so safe that you can drive them while distracted, allowing you to steer around stopped cars, boulders, sheep.

A couple are watching a deer when an idiot in a SUV comes a thundering along and scares the deer.

A man is so enamored with his car, he spends his entire life inside of it, refusing to leave it. (I wonder what that car smells like with him living in it 24 by 7)

Two men, full of testosterone, get into a shoving match with their SUVs over a parking space.

In general car drivers are portrayed as oblivious to danger, impatient, rude, speed like maniacs, and care more for their car than they do anything else.

Thing is, that is closer to the truth than most people would like to admit. I should know, I deal with them all the time on roads. I ride a Honda Reflex, which means I don't have two tons of steel protecting me, so my attention is always on the road and driving.

You'd be surprised at how many people are busy on their phones, reading newspapers, eating, doing makeup or arguing with their passengers. And when it's wet, they drive like they're immortal. More than once I've had someone in a SUV/Pickup truck pull up behind when its pissing rain and flash their high beams at me. Normally in those conditions I'm driving 10 MPH below the rated speed limit 'cause I'm not going to lay my bike down because I was stupid.

The thing is, when I'm in a car, yes, I drive carefully, but... I find I become Mr. Wheeler a little bit. There is something about being in a car that makes you feel invulnerable...

Evil Commercials

Some Commercials are just Plain Evil. Filled with Evil People, doing Evil Things.

So I'm watching this commercial for Circuit City, you know the one, the poor schmuck who's emptying out his pockets, desperately looking for his receipt.

Oh, I know, the commercial is about how you don't need to have your receipt to exchange an item. That they keep a database on all your purchases and know how many teen age exploitation flicks you've bought in the past year. Nothing Evil in that.

But still, when the commercial opens up, the poor slob has a pile of crap in front of him already. That the customer service bitch just stood there and watched him empty out his pockets, naming each item, denoting just how pitiful his life was.

Then after he pulls out a reel of floss, "Just in case", she finally takes him off the hook and tells him that he doesn't need a receipt.

Bitch. She could have told him from the start! Instead she stood there watching him humiliate himself before her, before she magnanimously freed him.

The commercial ends with him packing away the remnants of his lonely life and he says, "Floss? Who flosses these days?"

Of course the counter bitch chooses to grind him a bit more under her heel and says "I floss."

Of course, the man, desperate to impress her, blurts out "I floss too." You can just hear the unsaid words "Can we have sex now?" that obviously were running through his be-smitten head.

Evil commercial. It plays the man as a boy desperate to prove his manhood, to impress the ice queen behind the desk, who has absolute control of the situation.

Technical Trade Schools

ITT Tech, CDI, are they really worth the money?

You're looking at a graduate of the Control Data Institute, now called Career Development Institute, circa 1979, primarily because Control Data Corp couldn't afford them any more.

Was it worth the money my parents shelled out for it? Well, it gave me an edge when I joined the Army, but other than that, I couldn't get arrested with my "certificate" from CDI.

Note: Before you go to a Corporation sponsored trade school, find out how many of the trade school's graduates are hired by the sponsoring Corp. CDC hired almost nobody from their schools, and those that they did hire, they would have hired anyway.

My experience at CDI was one of working by myself through self paced courses on old VT100 terminals buffed up with touch screens. I could have taken a correspondence course and saved a few bucks.

Take for example that you had to get your workbooks signed off by an instructor to prove that you completed a portion of a course. Trouble was you couldn't find one to save your soul. So I used my forging skill and would sign off my own workbooks. I wasn't cheating, I did finished the workbook, but if I waited for an instructor to sign off my workbook, I'd wait upwards of an hour or so.

But, it's the fact that I was able to get away with it tells you a lot about CDI at that time.

So, are trade schools worth it? Well, I only have the one that I went to, so it's hard for me to judge them all.

Did my time at CDI help? Yeah, it did, it gave me the basics of working and repairing electronics, that helped me when I was in the Army. But besides the Army, did it get me a job? No, not really, I had to go to college to get the depth of education that companies look for.

Companies are no longer looking for the single subject worker, you have to have other skills to survive in the marketplace these days. A trade school can give you the basics, but but getting a bachelor's degree helps a whole lot more.