Willem's Planet

I had time to stop by the sports store after work tonight and spotted these ‘little team mates’ Pittsburgh Steelers. From left to right it is the quarterback (currently Ben Roethisberger in person), the referee, and the running back.  The franchise has so far triumphed in six Super Bowl Championships : 1974, 1975, 1978, 1979, 2005, 2008.

Soo .. on this Thursday the Miami Heat got their second straight NBA Championship, the Dow Jones takes a 2.3% hit and : the Farm Bill fails unexpectedly in the House of Representatives.  The Farm Bill has been around since the Great Depression and the New Deal in various forms, and is not just about farms.  It is the primary agricultural and food policy tool of the US Federal Government.  It outlays spending of a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.  Why did it fail? Oh so many reasons why. It’s worth noting the White House signaled it would veto it in its current form anyway, had it passed.  The cuts in the allocated money for food stamps was too much.   I will leave it up to the pros at the Washington Post to explain the rest of the politics.  This was supposed to be a bill with broad partisan support, though. It now looks as if this Congress is not capable of passing any legislation whatsoever.  That pending immigration reform bill?  Best to forget about it.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2013/06/20/8d04ba3a-d9de-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html

‘Would you happen to sell bicarbonate of sodium?’ I heard an elderly man ask the store clerk at the grocery store today.  ‘Of course the store does’, I thought.  It’s baking soda.  Well, the clerk was nonplussed, did a search on the computer, went to the medicine aisle, searched for a minute then declared they don’t have any and that Walgreens might have some .. at which point I decided to go for it and intervene.  I grabbed a little box of baking soda from the baking aisle, showed it to the customer, and explained to him ‘This is baking soda, and it really is bicarbonate of soda.  Might this be what you are looking for?’ Yes, yes! he said.  ‘Look, he found it!’ he yelled at the store clerk.  So there : my good deed for the day.  (What did he need it for? To clean his dentures with). The funny thing is that I bought a little packet of baking soda just for fun this Sunday at the Uwajimaya store.  I couldn’t resist the packaging with the cute picture showing all the uses for baking soda, and I think the picture reminded me of my mom : ).

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads – and especially to mine!  The picture is from Google’s home screen.   Looks like the dad is taking a coffee break while tinkering in his garage.

The long summer break for schools here in the USA have started.  So for many parents the typical day of getting the kids up out of bed, into the car, to school, work until school gets out, taking care of everyone’s needs until bedtime, and then sneak in a few hours of work or personal time late at night, is upended.  It’s three months of unstructured ‘chaos’ ahead.  School calendars in the USA are on the low end of number of school days (180), compared to as many as 240 in Japan.   The shorter number of days in the USA is compensated for somewhat by longer hours of instruction -but there are many other differences.  In the USA each state determines its own curriculum while in Japan (and many other countries), the government decides what each school must teach, how to teach it, and even what books to teach it with.  Less choice, but  far fewer disparities in student education when the time comes for a student to compete nationally to qualify for higher education after school.

Alright, so the deepwater horizon oil spill it was not – just a major coffee spill all over my workhorse lenovo t430 notebook computer shortly after lunch.   i jumped up, turned the machine sideways so that the coffee drained off the keyboard, mopped it up with a towel, and went to the washroom and tried to dry it out further with the powerful dryers our office building has in.   one of the usb ports was wet inside, got that dried out, but i still don’t have a shift key. CAPS LOCK can get me uppercase characters, but i cannot get the symbols that i need to log onto my lotus notes e-mail.  lotus notes does not allow me to cut and paste from Word into the password field either.  other keys are sticky now.  got to use the keyboard.   so .. off i am tomorrow to the pittsburgh pwc office to get some help.  they tell me they can do a shell swap – just install this machine’s hard drive into a new shell.  that will make me very happy.

Here’s a t-shirt I saw on Saturday. It shows two face-to-face T-Rexes and the phrase ‘T-Rex hates high fives’.  Aww.  Turns out there is a whole slew of T-Rex is trying  to (do something for which it needs longer arms). Check out the link below the picture for Morgan German’s collection of pictures.  Some of the ‘T-Rex is Trying’ memes are very funny! http://pinterest.com/morganrosegerms/t-rex-trying/