Tag Archives: flag

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Lawn boats. Every morning I drive past three houses that are literally falling down around their occupants. At least I assume they’re occupied because I occasionally see people coming and going. At each of these three houses there are boats on trailers, boats on blocks, and boats shoved back into the bushes. These are obviously not new boats, but I’d estimate conservatively that each one of these homes has at least $100,000 in boats sitting around it. Now that pesky logical part of my brain is just dying to know the thought process for someone who would let their home fall to pieces hanging on to a personal fleet larger than some third world dictators. While I’d never tell anyone how to spend their money, it seems to me that at some point selling off a boat or two and patching the hole in your roof with something other than a tarp would be a good idea. But what the hell do I know about anything?

2. Help desks. Why do we call them that? It’s certainly not a case of a name that follows a function. Given the sad state of customer service in general I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise. I’m probably just a fool for expecting things to work the way they’re supposed to – or maybe I’m even more the fool for expecting anything at all. But in all seriousness, if the standard is going to be a help desk that is essentially unwilling or unable to provide any help why not just throw them over the side. If the official policy of the organization is to cripple individual computers to the point where the user can’t make even basic fixes to settings it strikes me that the help desk should be able to fix the occasional problem that crops up instead of an 800-number designed to give the illusion that something, someday might happen.

3. Foreign flagged “protestors”. When you show up at a political rally waving a foreign flag and then violently attack people who peaceably attended that rally, you are not a protestor. You’re a criminal whose opinion is unworthy of further consideration. In fact once you’ve decided that marching under the flag of a foreign county and dispensing violence in the street sounds like a good idea, the only two things I can consider you are either a) a domestic terrorist or b) an agent of foreign power intent on disrupting the lawful electoral process. In either case, you have proven yourself unworthy of any consideration beyond how to disperse and apprehend you and your fellow travelers.

Mixed signals…

Posted on by

I grew up in a part of Maryland where it’s possible to stand in one spot and see well into both Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Inter-state rivalries were common and a “mixed” relationship could easily mean one part of a couple was a WVU fan and one cheered for UMD. Most people are (reasonably) good natured about it.

Confederate_Rebel_FlagWhile I was home, though, I saw something I couldn’t bring myself to reconcile – Flying side by side from someone’s shed were the West Virginia state flag and the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (or what the internet is determined to call the “Confederate Flag”).

I don’t mind state pride (even though this individual was flying the WV flag over the sovereign soil of the great state of Maryland). Flying the battle flag doesn’t bother me (even thought, again, we happened to be standing in a part of the country that was never even tangentially represented by that flag). What annoyed me to no end, of course, was that the West Virginia flag and any flag representing forces of the Confederate Flag_of_West_VirginiaStates of America are, historically speaking, mutually exclusive. They’re so mutually exclusive that the entire state of West Virginia was created in order to make that fact absolutely clear to everyone who may have been confused.

The voice in my head who just wants everyone to have some semblance of logic supporting what they do urged me in the strongest possible way to pull over just to ask the guy in the driveway what, exactly, was the point he thought he was making. The other part of my brain, the one given over to self preservation and not wanting to get my ass kicked by a redneck yokel told me to just keep moving… so I did… but I’m dying to know what kind of tortured logic is banging around that guy’s head.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. LED lights. Apparently the previous owner of my house had a stash of incandescent bulbs. I wish I’d have known that before we closed so I could have asked him to throw them in with the sale. Now those “leftover” bulbs are failing at the rate of about one a week and I’m trying to replace them with LED bulbs as much as possible. The projected energy savings is a nice perk, but I’m really a fan of the idea that it could be 10 years or more before I need to replace the bulb again. It should be an easy enough process; go to store, buy appropriate wattage replacement, install as needed. It should be, but it’s not. There’s apparently no such thing as a “60-watt bulb” anymore. Now you’ve got bizarrely small wattages, concerns about the right “color temperature,” lights that change color all together, bulbs with built in speakers, and remote controls. Great. That’s lovely, but honest to God all I want to do is go out and buy a basic light that will sit there and look like the old GE 60-watt incandescent that we’ve used since humanity got around to “capturing” electricity… and I’d like to not pay $14.97 for the privilege.

2. “Banning” the Dukes of Hazzard. Look gang, I don’t like the fact that some pansy executive decided to take a 40 year old televisions show out of rotation because the way a car was decorated might offend some viewer’s sensibilities. That being said, it was a business decision. No one “banned” the Duke boys. You can’t blame this one on POTUS, the government, or anything other than a TV network trying to avoid having people send them a raft full of letters and calling them damned dirty racists. Not a decision I’d have made if I were the TV Land Vice President for Commercial Programming, but you’ve got to stop running around saying something was “banned” when it wasn’t. It makes you sound like a moron.

3. Shark attacks. It may come as a surprise to many people, but sharks (for the most part) live in the ocean. They can often be found feeding in the same shallow areas along the surf line where people tend to congregate in the summer months. If you decide to jump in to the shark’s natural environment understand that you are assuming a risk wherein you are no longer the apex predator. The natural advantages we humans have on land don’t lend themselves to the water. Life is all about assuming (and trying to mitigate) risk in everything that you do. It’s a game of chance and percentages. Even in North Carolina the chance that you the individual swimmer are going to become the main course are awfully slim when you consider just how many people are in the water with you. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d bet that the drive to get to the beach is far more likely to end in a fatality. Just something to think about as the media get themselves up in arms about sharks just doing what they do.

All the news…

Posted on by

It’s a busy weekend. That’s good in so much as it means that this post more or less writes itself. That’s bad in that the world seem shell bent of flinging itself apart at the seams. Terror attacks on three continents that may not have been coordinated, but the timing of which is certainly close enough together to be suspect. A political fracas in the US that covers all the ground from heritage to hate to healthcare to marriage. The greeks have declared a bank holiday and appear all but determined to drive their country over their own fiscal cliff and straight into default while the European Union hopes the rest of them can shrug it off.

If you’ve kept an ear on the news, there’s a lot of information coming in on all fronts. Weekends are usually where they bury the stories we’re not supposed to pay attention to, but any one of the headlines this week would usually have legs all by itself. Combined, there’s almost something in there guaranteed to keep everyone stirred up at least for a few more turns of the news cycle.

I’m not fool enough to think any of these problems amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but they pace at which they keep coming is a little troublesome. I’ve got at least half a dozen methods of information delivery in an arm’s reach right now… and I find myself wondering if we all weren’t just a little bit better off when we got our news from the morning edition, the evening edition, and 30 minutes of TV highlights at 6PM.

The world’s always been a complicated place, but it’s only recently that we’ve all gotten the opportunity to watch the sausage made each and every day. I wonder if it isn’t time I try to force myself to tune it out for just a little while.

Royal Warrant…

Posted on by

For the last couple of centuries companies that provide goods and services to the royal households of Europe were permitted to advertise themselves as Royal Warrant holders. Basically that means they get to slap a royal coat of arms on their letterhead and let everyone and their brother know that they are the official purveyor of some product to the sovereign. That probably ment more three centuries ago than it does today. As usual, though, that’s not really the point.

When I moved in here at Rental Casa de Jeff I inherited a US flag that had been flying from a bracket on the deck for God knows how long. It was faded, but serviceable and survived a hurricane and whatever other weather northeastern Maryland threw at it. After the most recent round of storms, though, the frayed ends graduated to full fledged tears and it was time to retire the old girl. This finally brings us to the point of the day’s post.

The Flag Shop in North East, Maryland occupies probably 100 square feet in the corner of a building at the southern end of Main Street. As far as I can tell they’re open mostly at random times and the only employee is the old guy who owns the place. After trying to sell me on the virtue of the 15-star, 15-stripe “War of 1812” flag, I picked up a more conventional 50-star variety. Let’s just say that the prices aren’t exactly competitive with Amazon. Still, there’s just something about the place that I like. It might have been that he reminded me that the VFW down the street would take my old, worn flag for proper disposal or that he knocked a buck off the price because I paid cash. I’m going to go ahead and proclaim The Flag Shop my official purveyor of flag and flag-related accessories, if for no other reason than I like having the option of walking into a place that’s not Walmart and buying a flag that wasn’t made in China.

Against the Constitution…

Posted on by

Three times today in three different contexts, I heard three different people say that something was “against the Constitution.” That’s all well and good of course, assuming that what you’re talking about has anything even remotely to do with the national user’s manual. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that nothing we were talking about today came anywhere close to that level importance. Look, “against the Constitution” is a fine figure of speech and I’m all for it, but these people were adamant that their particular issue was certain to be covered somewhere in an Article or in one of the Amendments at a minimum. I won’t cover the specifics other than to say simply that they were wrong. Not just wrong, but breathtakingly wrongheaded in fact.

It occurs to me that these are all educated people and then the real truth sinks in. Aside from knowing we have a Constitution and possible that there are amendments to it the average person knows alarmingly little about the Constitution and what it actually does. Now I’m not a fancy big city lawyer or even a passable excuse for a constitutional scholar, but I managed to follow the gist of it. I know more or less what the each Article covers and have a rough idea which amendments were added during which historical periods and the general topics they address. For those of you playing along at home, the first 12 were post revolutionary, 13-15 were a result of the Civil War, 16-21 were all about the Progressive movement, and 22-27 came along because the last half of the 20th century is when we started thinking that we needed an Amendment for things that would have been regular legislation in earlier eras.

I’ve long since given up on expecting people to know details about anything really, but if you’re going to try to buttress your argument by claiming constitutional blessing, it might help if you had at least some basic knowledge before opening your filthy pie hole. Otherwise you’re going to make me want to find a flag, wrap you in it, and then set you on fire. At least one of those two acts is constitutionally protected. Sadly, it’s not lighting dumbasses aflame.

Shifting my flag…

Posted on by

In the age of fighting sail, an admiral’s headquarters was identified by a unique banner or pennant, his flag. Hence we have the terms: flagship and flag officer. If the ship were holed or too damaged to stay in the fight, the admiral, and his flag, would be transferred to another ship. In that way, flagship refers not so much to the physical vessel, but to the high-ranked personage aboard. When the fleet returned to port, the admiral’s flag was shifted ashore.

While I’ll make no claim to be a high ranked personage, I am shifting my flag for at least the next two weeks, I am taking this show on the road and will be back in my home-away-from-home at Winchester, Virginia. Same great posts, new geographic location. Possibly even better posts because the group I will be with provides some of the best grist for the mill.