This year Pintastic NE was the week before thanksgiving rather than in late June and while it meant a very long wait for its return it paid pretty big dividend for me. During our “Peak” period in the warehouse we tend to work 6-7 days a week till Christmas. Even before the supply chain issues people started ordering gifts early in the last few years so instead of peak beginning Black Friday it’s now starts for us as early as the first two weeks of November which used to be pretty dead.
That late Pintastic provided a welcome break just before the crazy week began and as I’ve often said NOTHING relieves stress like a pinball machine.
So imagine my surprise when a familiar face turned up at the door on Boxing Day an hour before Mass.
Brian was bearing the game Diner which was never one I really mastered but I guarantee you that with a month of play if there is a tournament including said machine I’ll be ready to go.
It was not a gift that I was expecting and I’m flattered that my sons were thinking of me. I’m even more flattered that this game out of his personal collection as the newer games were all out.
As of today a Diner goes for between $5200 & $8000 it’s a pretty good deal to get it for a month. For those who missed the interview from Pintastic NE 2021 here it is
Ironically when I interviewed Brian I said that while my wife would never let me buy a machine she might let me rent one and now it’s here for the rest of the Christmas season and two weeks beyond.
If I may suggest it might make a great Birthday gift particularly if you’re not born in December or January since the volume will be higher during those months and thus the availability of the newer games might be a little more iffy.
I’m going to have a lot of fun
You can find the Bushey Brothers facebook page here.
I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.
Today is the feast of the Holy Innocents whose story is told in the Gospel of Matthew:
When they [the Magi/three wise men] had departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.” Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed for Egypt. He stayed there until the death of Herod, that what the Lord had said through the prophet might be fulfilled, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi, he became furious. He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi. Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the prophet: “A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be consoled, since they were no more.”
Matthew 2:13-18
I can’t help but think of the parallels between this event and the left’s love affair with abortion.
Abortion has been made a sacrament in the post Christian west. It’s been painted as a boon for women and a solution to many problems but actually solves only one: How can I have sex without risking the presence of an inconvenient child that is intrinsic to the sex act?
This was exactly the problem that Herod faced, an inconvenient child, one that he was afraid might eventually supplant him as King of the region and Herod was not having that. He was not going to risk his comfortable life to deal with new responsibilities that such an inconvenient child brings. He would deal with it once and for all.
The difference of course was that Herod never denied the humanity of those he had killed or even that he had killed but even that difference, which was prevalent for decades after Roe in order to give those who claimed Christianity while supporting murder a false comforting veneer for the sake of public consumption has largely been torn off.
Now they boast of their abortion and in many cases don’t deny that it involves a death. They have morphed into Herod and are proud of it. It’s a wonder that they don’t have votive candles of him in every so called clinic.
Yes I think Herod would make a great patron for the abortion industry and it’s a wonder that the left doesn’t consider this feast day one of celebration. The great public abortion that they have spent generations emulating.
Christmas day in the DaTechGuy House was first rate. It started with mass the previous night where the family got together and managed an updated picture:
That would be a good Christmas Card if we did Christmas Cards.
Anyways the boys crashed over our place, we all slept a tad late Watched the George C. Scott Version of A Christmas Carol (one of the best in my opinion) Cooked a solid late Breakfast and had a late ham dinner.
I had called my brother Dominic and it turns out that he was at home rather that with his son and grandson on Christmas. It seems both he and his wife had the sniffles and everyone decided it was best they stayed up just in case.
And that’s where the COVID came in.
My first instinct was to invite them down for dinner as it didn’t seem serious enough to warrant them being home alone for Christmas but under the rules where my wife works she is tested daily. If she ended up with a positive test, even if completely asymptomatic, she would be out 10 days and has only one sick day to play with and under the rules of my place if she was out with COVID I’d be in quarantine as well.
It wouldn’t matter if we were actually sick the test for the virus would have been enough to lose us work.
Because of this I reluctantly didn’t invite my brother and sister in law over and they spent Christmas with each other. Not a bad thing when you’ve been married 36+ years I’m sure but I think it’s a crying shame.
If this was 18 months ago when we knew a lot less I could see it, but with where we are and what we know it’s a crying shame. They’re not spending Christmas alone because of COVID they spent Christmas alone because under the current rules our income would be jeopardized.
Don’t get me wrong, my wife had long COVID and I’m very aware that for some it can be rather nasty, just like the flu can be nasty, but we’re reached a point where we’re cutting our throat out of irrational fear and or politics.
It’s become a lie that people are living and in a sense that’s appropriate, because by it’s definition a post Christian society is going to advance the cause of the father of lies.
With Christmas past us it’s time to look back at the current year, 2021. And with a less than a week left we can say that 2021 was America’s worst year since 1864.
Why was 1864 so bad? While there were significant military successes for the Northern armies fighting to keep the United States together–Atlanta and Savannah were captured and General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was locked into siege warfare in Virginia–and a potential political victory of the Confederacy was averted by Abraham Lincoln’s reelection, Americans were still killing each other by the thousands. The following year was an improvement, despite Lincoln’s assassination. The Civil War ended in the spring of 1865 and the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified.
As for 2021, it got off to a wretched start when hostiles, American ones, stormed the US Capitol in a riot. We have to go back to another horrible year for America, 1814, when the British Army seized the Capitol, for the only other time that happened. The hooligans who entered the Senate and House chambers on January 6 were not participating in an insurrection, despite claims made to this day by CNN and MSNBC. Sure, the rioters wanted to keep Donald J. Trump in power, but they had no plans for a coup, such as imprisoning Joe Biden, taking control of the military, and dissolving Congress.
And what about the people who were supposed to protect the Capitol, such as the Capitol Hill Police and the who they report to? You know, Congress, which is run by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They failed America.
In the fraught election of 2020, a feeble old man, Joe Biden, was elected president. “Lunch Bucket Joe from Scranton” was chosen as the Democratic nominee because he was viewed by many as the “safe” alternative to Trump, and not a radical like Bernie Sanders. Biden’s “good years,” assuming he ever had them, are well in the past. Biden, and the people who control him, such as Ron Klain or Susan Rice, went full-blown leftist on Inauguration Day. Economically, the result is the highest level of inflation in decades. These price increases, once dismissed by the Biden White House as “transitory,” will likely continue indefinitely, serving as a hidden tax for all Americans.
While not quite energy independent as Trump claimed, our nation was headed into that direction under his leadership. Shortly after his inauguration Biden suspended new drilling and fracking on federal lands. It has since been reversed in court, but the White House maintains a malevolent attitude towards the world’s most reliable form of energy, fossil fuels. Gasoline costs over $1 more per gallon since Biden became president. Biden also cancelled the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, essentially firing thousands of union workers.
An effective commander-in-chief, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, does his job so well it appears that he is doing nothing at all. While Trump certainly doesn’t have Ike’s soft touch, I’m of the belief that Trump would have seen the possibility of a supply chain crisis coming and would have taken steps to ensure we would not have seen the bottleneck of cargo ships outside America’s largest harbors.
Meanwhile in the Biden administration the cabinet officer in charge of our supply chain, Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, went on an unannounced two-month paternity leave just as the shipping crisis began. Rather than resigning for failure or dereliction of duty, Buttigieg’s is being hawked by some Democrats as a possible 2024 Democratic presidential candidate should Biden choose not to run for reelection. While family is of course important, liberals often claim that public service is the highest calling. Buttigieg could have simply quit as Transporation secretary. Or not taken the job at all.
While not something that the federal government is directly in charge of, violent crime plagued America’s largest cities this year–and all of those cities are run by Democrats. A dozen cities endured record murder totals. Some jurisdictions, such as San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles County, Milwaukee County, and Cook County (Chicago), are burdened with woke prosecutors engaging in catch-and-release policies regarding criminals.
Biden was elected last November because more voters saw him as more capable to fight the COVID-19 epidemic than Trump. But wait, what’s this? There were more COVID deaths in the United States in 2021 than in 2020, despite the availability of vaccines. And lockdown and mask mandates are ramping up again with the new omicron variant, which so far has killed one American. That number will surely climb but I have a strong suspicion that omicron will not be killing 15,000 Americans a week as soon as next month, which is what the politicized CDC is predicting.
In order to prove Trump wrong, Biden has proved him right in regard to enforcing the law at our southern border. In late October the Washington Post reported that a record 1.7 million people arrested while trying to cross that border. In addition to illegal aliens, it’s believed that large amounts of fentanyl have been smuggled across the border in 2021.
As Biden as Biden is, his vice president is even worse, the inept cackler, Kamala Harris.
I’ve saved the worst for last. America suffered a humiliating military defeat in Afghanistan. Biden vowed that our departure from Afghanistan would look nothing like our bugging-out from South Vietnam in 1975. He was right, it was worse. As with the border crisis, the Biden White House blamed Trump for the debacle. While Trump did enter an agreement to pull our troops out of Afghanistan this year, it was not a treaty. We could have back out. Trump says, and I believe him, that he never would have made our country look so feeble, yes, feeble like Biden physically and mentally is, if we had departed Afghanistan under his watch.
When the next international crisis comes, our allies will have understandable doubts about American resolve.
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