Posts Tagged ‘under the fedora’

I spent some time watching World Cup Highlights yesterday and those highlights demonstrated why the sport is not worth my time.

The highlight reels ran 15-20 min with several replays in them so maybe 10-12 minutes of play. That from a match that runs 90-100 minutes. That’s 80 minutes of dead time where there is no much happening but a guy kicking a ball back to another while they look for a chance to make something happen,

Contrast this with Baseball which while not having a clock has the potential for a run to be scored & a highly happening on every single pitch.

Give me the pine tar & the leather any day.


The worst part of being out of work is the waiting.

Last time around in 2008 I couldn’t buy a job interview. This time I’ve had quite a few. I’m waiting on three companies right now 2 of which had told me I’d be hearing back from them up or down before this point.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy that I’m getting interviews it’s the waiting that throws me for a loop.

It’s not easy at 63 to be competing for positions with people 20+ years younger than you.


Let me remind you of several somethings concerning Elon Musk’s soon to be Trillion dollar net worth.

  1. Musk employs tens of thousands of people
  2. Musk is actively using his wealth for some rather incredible things
  3. There are plenty of people who have never built anything who will critique his wealth for profit. power & clicks.
  4. There are plenty more who only started hating on him once he became a threat to the power of the left or to virtue signal to said left that they’re one of him.
  5. As the old saying goes, he will still be able to only eat one meal at a time & sleep in one bed at a time & will like all of us eventually die.
  6. The only think that really counts in the long run is his relationship with God, I’d worry more about that but I’m too busy worrying about my relationship with God.

But the real thing about Musk’s wealth is this: It’s nothing to do with me and not my concern. He has what he has and does what he does and what he so does is his own business, not mine. I have no more right or claim on what he has than the guy down the street has to mine.


Over the past two weeks gasoline has dropped .29 cents from it’s high in my area. About 9%.

While that’s nice it’s still up 57% from the low it had hit before the Iran War.

This causes me pain but it’s still worth it if Iran is emasculated. What the people who are complaining about the lack of a deal or Trump not getting said deal or bombing them on any given day either don’t understand or ignore is that every day that passes Iran grows weaker and we grow stronger.

As the tankers continue to come to the US & we keep getting tankers in the straits out Iran’s leverage continues to drop. Yeah if we were willing to commit 100,000 troops we could likely bring them down and take the country & the oil but at the cost of 1000’s of US lives that while justifiable in the long run to destroy once & for all the leading terror sponsor in the world, is a price our current society is unwilling to pay & unnecessary if Iran can be emasculated without doing so.

The price will keep trickling down slowly as the alternate supplies continue to open up. I suspect if things aren’t concluded right away it will take till the end of August to see gas at $2.99 again. By that time Iran will be capping wells and their ability to finance jihad outside will be practically finished, which frankly they are almost at now anyways.

That’s a lot less sexy than seeing the Mullahs fall just like winning the cold war over 50 years was a lot less sexy than Patton leading his army against the Soviets in 1945 would have been, but I’ll take less sexy with thousands of less casualties every day of the week.


Finally word is out that the Doctor Who Christmas special is nixed & the BBC is pretty much taking bids to see who wants a shot at running the franchise that they’ve driven into the ground once again.

Like the anti-thatcher stuff that killed it in 1989 the work stuff has made Doctor Who so Toxic that actors have no interest in the iconic role & fans don’t care.

In my opinion the solution is obvious, I’d give it to Big Finish which has been producing original Doctor Who stories for more than a quarter of a century & doing so without needing a government imposed fee to pay the way.

While they have their share of woke they are experts at making stories that people are willing to pay actual money to hear, and while they don’t have experience in TV that doesn’t matter as the special effects and or cinematography are not the problem here. it’s the stories and as Big Finish says: Big Finish, We Love Stories!

Let Big Finish supply the scripts and Doctor Who can thrive again, or let the TV show die and let Big Finish run the Time Lord as strictly audio. Remember it was six years of Big Finish stories starting a decade after the final show that caused it to return. And even if it dies here, remember the first episode was broadcast in 1963 when I was six months old.

Not a bad run.

As a general rule there is no good time to be unemployed, however just as my last day became in stone my wife’s Asthma which had been pretty much under control flared up something horrible to the point where she ended up unable to function without multiple nebulizer treatments and a bunch of new perscriptions.

She ended up home sick for a week and it turned out I was very available to help her and keep an eye on things.

If you’re going to lose a job that’s the time to do so.


Last week I had three job interviews and a job fair. This week coming I have a 2nd interview at the job I want the most, and two other jobs that I can move to the “next step” on. I have also not double check availability on a third position that a friend clued me into.

To say that this is a huge contrast to the 13 months with only a single job interview during the Obama years is the understatement of the year.

Apparently it’s a buyers market for Job seekers, even in Massachusetts.


How good is the market? I went to one interview last week for a national company that has local warehouses. The job itself seemed pretty straightforward although requiring a bit of physical labor and the pay is very good it unfortunately is a 12 hour shift FIVE days a week.

If I was turning 43 on Monday instead of 63 I think I would have jumped at it as that would have pretty much doubled my pay and put all my debts in order in no time. It’s the type of job a young guy who wants to buy a house should rush to grab. Being an honest bloke I told the interviewer that I don’t know if at 63 I’m physically capable of a 5 day 12 hour shift that ends at 5:30 AM anymore, but if I found nothing else I’d certainly consider and would like to be kept in mind on that basis.

We shook hands and I headed to the exit and out the door into a pouring rain, when I was half way to the car he literally came running out into the rain calling me back. I presumed I had forgotten something but instead he mentioned that there is an opening on that shift for a supervisor and that while I might not be physically able to do 5 days 60 hours of serious labor I might be able to do those hours as a supervisor. He urged me to apply for that position.

That’s one hell of a boost to the ego when it comes to self worth, but it also illustrates the difference in the job market when a 63 year old guy gets chased into a rainstorm to be asked to apply for a job.


This week I’ve had a lot of time to be with DaWife, cook for DaWife and go out to eat with DaWife but due to the weather have not had time to walk and it goes without saying that the physical aspects of my previous employment are not taking place.

I found myself dreading weighing myself as I suspected I had put a bunch weight back on. I had gone into my final day down needed 2.2 pounds to complete my diet (down 51.1 out of the 53.3 goal). Today I weighed myself fully expecting to be outside of the five pound window and having to go hard, but instead found myself 3.8 pounds from completing my died (down 49.5) which is basically in the 2 pound range that I’ve been for a couple of week as those final pounds to officially end my diet just won’t go.

It was a pleasant surprise but I have to make sure I don’t get comfortable with it. That’s the danger.


Speaking of danger there has been one thing apparent over this week.

I’ve done the math & figured out that if I we work to age 70 both my wife and I can retire off of social security alone & cover all our regular bills and still go out several times a week without an issue while reserving all we’ve saved for retirement for special things, maybe a day trip or two, perhaps some season tickets to the woo-sox, maybe another quilting trip etc etc etc.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m the son of depression era parents with a father who served in World War Two and the grandchildren of a bunch of folks who were born in Sicily in the 1800’s with very little to their name who came here 120 years ago for a better future. I find a life spending the day with my wife at home, cooking for her, maybe hitting daily mass, punctuated by a few dinners or breakfasts out & shooting the breeze with strangers at a lunch or dinner counter while reading a book to be a pretty nice life.

I don’t need big flashy trips, expensive stuff or anything else much. I know enough about history to understand that a nice quiet life with a few comforts is all a person really needs.

Alas this week I’ve had a preview of that life and I REALLY like it, however I can’t have this life until I work another seven years to get it, so it’s no time to be lazy about finding work, however comfortable this time living off a severance package and unused vacation time seems.

It’s a trap & I have to make sure I don’t fall for it.

Well the moment that the left has been waiting for and working hard to achieve has finally come.

Lefty pols, lefty press and lefty activists have been doing all they can to produce a dead body that they can decide to lay at the feet of Trump and ICE and now that has come to pass. Several thoughts:

  1. Do not think for one moment that the pols the activists and the press are sad about this woman’s death. I submit and suggest they are absolutely delighted. This has been their goal for almost a year and they’ve done all they can to produce it. While they might have preferred a person of color to be the body in order to cry “racism” the fact that this is a white lesbian woman with children will fill the bill in other ways for them. While publicly they will wail and gnash their teeth I assure you privately they are overjoyed, particularly at the prospect of taking Minnesota fraud out of the news loop.
  2. I feel bad for the dead woman in question and her family. Not because her actions didn’t warrant getting shot, trying to run over a federal agent is a fine way to get yourself killed but while it’s possible that she was all in on the “ICE is the Gestapo” business based on reporting she was persuaded to come down and her lawfully married spouse who was busy was busy blaming herself for making her come down there. Now her dead body and her family are going to be exploited again by the left and used as a prop. You’ll see tearful pols and angry leftists screaming bloody murder and talking fondly of the dead as a brave warrior for freedom when she was in fact a useful idiot who is more useful now that she’s dead than alive.
  3. This will have one of two effects on the rest of the useful idiots out there being paid to harass ICE who should at this point realize: “Oh my God this could have been me!”. I suspect given the idiocy of the left we will get a lot more of the 2nd than the first.
    • What the hell am I doing out here risking getting killed? The money isn’t worth it, I’m being used!
    • This lady will be remembered as a “hero” If it happens to me my life will have meaning and purpose at last!
  4. The fact that there is plenty of video evidence that this woman refused to leave her car when ordered and was trying to run down the Ice agent (whether due to panic or malice) will be immaterial to either the leftist pols or the leftist media or anyone else. Their narrative is out there and no actual physical evidence will matter. Tim Waltz particular is going to go all in as the topic is no longer him or the scandals in the state and even better for the left the President’s success in Venezuela and vs Russia and the revolt in Iran, all of them stories they do NOT want to cover, can be pushed to the back burner. Reality doesn’t matter to these people, just the narrative and now they have their narrative and they’ll push it through as many news cycles as they can, oh and don’t think for one moment that those involved in the fraud will use this distraction caused by this to destroy records etc that will hurt their cause.
  5. Finally Consider this from a non-political angle. You’re a woman with young children, what the HELL are you doing harassing federal agent during the day and taking this kind of risk? What kind of example are you setting? With your spouse filming are you really more interested in getting a viral moment than being a mother to your children? What parent sets this kind of example, and if she was pressured by her spouse what parent doesn’t resist such pressure for the sake of her kids? It reminds me of the transgender craze where mothers are spaying their own kids for status. It’s bad parenting, it’s narcissism and her kids are going to pay the price for the rest of their lives.

Will someone please ask all these idiots who are cheering violence against Tesla cars and Tesla owners, who are by and large rich leftists if they REALLY want to normalize political violence in a country when a very large amount of their political foes are armed?


One of the dumbest things POTUS 46 Mr. Autopen did was not allow Elon Musk to save the Astronauts who were stranded in the space station in orbit.

Will somebody ask the Democrats what the plan was if Kamala won? If Musk was going to be persona-non-grata and Boeing wasn’t able to get the job done how were the Astronauts going to get down?

By not letting Musk do it was Biden was still in office their rescue became a TRUMP success and a Biden/Democrat failure instead of it being an AMERICAN success.

Idiots.


You don’t have to go far on the net or the media to see leftists denouncing Chuck Schumer as the greatest traitor since Judas for voting for cloture on the GOP budget.

Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who already announced he would vote for cloture was already pissing off Democrats for his support of Israel that he shares with Schumer so hitting him would be redundant but Schumer, he was a new and apparently legit target.

Jon Stewart did a huge piece on Schumer first acting tough then folding on a shutdown and in that piece he noted that the GOP needed 8 votes to stop a Democrat filibuster.

Yet while Stewart named and shamed Schumer he seems to be weak on his math as Schumer and Fetterman only brought the GOP vote to 53 as Rand Paul did not support the the bill leaving the GOP still seven votes short.

This proved not to be a problem as Gillibrand Schumer’s fellow Democrat senator from NY, Both NH Democrat Senators Hassan and Shaheen (who is retiring), Cortez-Matso of Nevada , Schatz of Hawaii, Peters of Michigan, Angus King of Maine an independent caucusing with Democrats) and Dick Durbin (Illinois) the Democrat Whip and #2 Dem in the Senate.

Yet neither Stewart nor any of the other leftists screaming bloody murder online or on the air seem to have a word to say about any of them?

I wonder why?


Speaking of Fetterman he asked a rather practical question concerning cloture, what’s the endgame?

If the government shuts down and the Trump administration gets the right to furlough all the Federal workers (and trust me he wasn’t about to close national parks like Obama did) that he wanted to what is the endgame? What do Democrats do next? Unlike the republican who like the idea of a smaller government Dems love big government.

What was the plan? Was there a plan? Was there a way out?

Nobody on the left seems to have an answer to this question and none of the people screaming for King Chuckie’s head seem to have one either.


Finally while the left keeps running to court to try to slow Donald Trump advance through the government he runs nobody seems to be asking the single most obvious question concerning this tactic.

Right now left is judge shopping trying to curtail the power of the president in the knowledge that they will have to face a Supreme Court which only has 3 secure Democrat votes, perhaps 4 with John Roberts.

What happens in 4 to 12 years when the Democrats come back to power and the GOP decides to judge shop to stop them? What happens when those cases go to a Supreme Court that Donald Trump and/or JD Vance had 4-12 years naming members to?

Nobody seems to want to answer that question.