Tuesday, April 6, 2021

This Vacuum Sucks - or Maybe it Doesn't

 Your love is like  trying to suck up gloves with the vacuum


Los Angeles pitcher Ty Buttrey (whoo, that must've been a rough childhood) unexpectedly retired from baseball. He says it's become more of a business than a game.

Do baseball players get those Traumatic Brain Injuries, like football players?

Is Mr. Buttrick going to insist all of MLB take 1/10 of their salaries, including the owners? I smell an unfortunate car accident in his future. This is almost as dangerous as testifying against Hillary Clinton.

I'm dying here.... when did he realize major league sports was a business? Did he catch a lot of foul balls with his head? Did he come from one of those special leagues?

His coach said he wants to be of any help he can, and promises to find out who slipped the roofie in Ty's Gatorade.


  • 8 states cannot do auto inspections because of malware
  • yet no one has declared PANDEMIC or come up with a vaccine 


I mentioned, in the last post, our 25 year love/war with vacuums. This is part 2 - based entirely on what just happened...

I got enough dog hair off the rollers to build several new dogs. I emptied the old dirt,  in preparation for the new dirt. I found a place to plug it in, which is worse than finding a place to park. I beheld the New, Improved old vacuum. It was immediately apparent that I got the idle up to 6k, so it sounded bitchin. It picked stuff up - double bitchin! And it found new and exciting ways to move the hair around, while occasionally picking up other stuff. Desperately trying not to send it up to play with the Mars Explorer, I sat down to take it further apart. Why yes, it was clogged to the motor unit.

DOCTOR:  Screwdriver. Forceps. Chainsaw. Second vacuum to suck out the first.

NURSE: don't ask me - I'm out visiting for a few days.

The connecting beam is aluminum and very handy for teaching me how to twirl, like my old cheerleading days. I didn't actually have any old cheerleading days, but it never hurts to come up with something to make my criminally shy, boring childhood sound interesting. I couldn't twirl anything at all, having two left hands.

Fire it up, Boys!

The idle is back down to non-racing levels. Annnnnnd it won't pick up a speck of dust, although it did get about 95% of a glove. I made the mistake of not taking the entire blessed device apart. There were more spots of blockage. Now the funny thing here.. well, not exactly funny.. is that the clogs were all dog hair. What's the ($&@ing problem in picking it up? I located another clot at the top end. Normal people do not have to hold each hose up to the light to see if the hose is still blocked. And the Trouble light is green. This thing is messing with me.

Fire it up, Please!

Not only isn't it picking anything up, I think it's depositing dirt on the carpet, in addition to rearranging the existing dirt. I don't want to think about the fact there is no dirt in the vacuum to deposit on the carpet. When we bought the house, no one told us the place was haunted - or at least it haunted vacuums. This is now law - I'm not kidding - you must disclose haunting.

I would be swinging the M($&#rf*$&er around like Pete Townshend did with guitars, but I'm afraid of damaging something other than the vacuum. The doctors tell me this is progress. The vacuum is named after a sea-dwelling creature with a large amount of really sharp teeth, that sometimes goes out for a bite of human. Let's call it Shark. I've had Sharks before, including a great little one that picked up just about everything. The police cleared me in the case of that small child. Perhaps Shark should modify their advertising:

  • Shark: it picks up everything
  • *except dirt - don't ever try to pick up dirt with Shark
  • Shark works on all surfaces
  • *except carpet and floor
  • Shark: with our new anti-clog feature
  • *you will immediately learn how to take the entire thing apart
  • Shark picks up dog hair
  • *never try to pick up dog hair with Shark, especially cocker hair


I'm an honest guy - if I'm wrong, I'll be the first to admit it. And if that ever happens, you'll be the first to hear it.

Ok, I owe Mrs. lefty an apology. I said she was crazy for running around, picking stuff off the floor before I vacuumed. The truth is she's crazy already, and picking stuff up before vacuuming has nothing to do with it. After moving stuff around a bit, in preparation for vacuuming, I found a few small things that the vacuum wouldn't handle: plastic hangers, two automatic transmissions from an old Chevy, a missing guitar, a full sized Pac-Man arcade game, Steven Tyler, and some coins. The thing that baffles me is the coins. For the entire time in the house, I've picked up coins. Absolutely no one knows how they get there. Let me school you on something: even people with multiple personalities can not have penny fights on both sides at the same time. I suppose they could go from one side to the other, but that would be exhausting, plus it would lack that real time excitement. The universe is probably playing a joke on me... I asked for money, and it is giving me money: a few coins at a time, on the floor. This will work in reverse, because the first time the vacuum attempts to pick up a coin, it will break, costing me another vacuum.

Nothing good will come of this.
Mrs. lefty will tell me she'll have a look at the satanic device. Then she'll forget. Or she will have a go at it and it still won't work. The tricky part is that I'll get all smart and male and insist on 'taking a look', completely forgetting I spent four days on it before she checked it over. Then there will be another blog post - stay tuned.


  • a New Jersey man who posed as a cop is charged with child pornography
  • this guy ruins it for the rest of us posing as cops


A Philly chiropractor has been accused of indecent assault, with more victims coming out. Is there a decent assault? My chiropractor had a really hot female trainee, who I spent two years trying to get to indecently assault me. I failed completely, as if she were a vacuum I was trying to fix.


  • 1 man killed, 1 hurt in a shooting at Walmart
  • thinking out of the box: will the crime rate go down if we shut down all the Walmarts?


Speaking of which, the doctors tell me to react proportionally to the event. You know, like not driving up the sidewalk and running over the pedestrian who just flipped me off. Another person who needs to see a doctor was unhappy with the wait time in drive-thru at a Memphis Burger King. To prove her point, she got out of her car, walked to the window, and started firing on employees. Now all of us have endured wait times and incorrect orders at fast food places. Firing a gun at the employees is not usually the first thing to occur to us. Well.. maybe it is, but we keep that shit inside, and instead reach for the bow and arrow or the flamethrower. Sheesh.


  • How to check if your info was in the Faceyspaces leak


Monday is not a great day if you work. It's not one of those overly-productive days, when you spring from the gate, ready to take on the world, at top speed. So it is with some confusion that I ask who decided on the Full Computer Virus Scan as soon as you turn on the computer? I am 100% about security and run my own scans on my own computers, but this particular activity will shut down any planned activity or new activity, or pretty much any activity at all. I don't program at all, but I wonder about the necessity to eat every single resource the computer has at once. Hey - let me open Notepad. Notepad is a very light, inoffensive program. Wait. Wait. Wait. Oh, it's Monday... it must be doing the Whole Complete Entire Computer Scan. So I drink my coffee. Then I go out and get a coffee. Then a little food shopping. The guitar stores don't open this early, so that's out. But hey - Notepad finally opened! I knew the next one would be bad, but I opened Outlook anyway. I figured the guitar stores would be open by the time it came up. And of course when it eventually came up, it came up full screen. Because Outlook is worth exactly what I paid for it. Mind you, I logged in early, because I'm that way, and the computer already has me way behind. So with an entire workforce of zombies on Monday, you have a program that is sucking every last resource out of their computers, making their already zombiefied state even worse. What do they call it - the Monday Work Penalty? Eventually, somebody Up Top is going to look at charts (if they can pull them up on Mondays) and notice Monday productivity is way worse than it was last year, which was already mind-bendingly slow. They'll say something is wrong here, because our staff could not possibly get less done than normal. These people will crumple up a piece of paper, throw it in the basket, and call it a productive day.

Rather than just moaning (and typing blog posts), I got hold of the people who set up the scans. I suggested perhaps there's a way to run the programs so they didn't take up 101% of all resources on the computer. I don't want to have to go out for lunch while waiting for programs to come up. They suggested there's something coming up that will fix this issue and to hang on a little longer. I was pleased as could be. Until I realized that this conversation happened last year. It's what they tell everyone smart enough to find out where they're hiding

When everything finally comes up and the scan is still running for a bit (the next 5-6 hours), there is a notice that updates were made and it has to be rebooted. I don't have male pattern baldness - I have Windows Pull Your Hair Out baldness.

Linux has a nice command, which can reduce the amount of resources a program is eating.

What's it called?

Nice.

Yes, what is the nice program called.

It's nice.

I'm sure it is, but what's it called?

Nice.

Look, I understand it's nice to have this program, but what program?

Nice.

Ok, you fire up the program to help you. What do you run?

Nice.

and so on....



Donald Trump Jr. just asked his dad, repeatedly, about Roswell in a Father’s Day 2020 interview. Red or blue, it is still semi-astonishing to hear the sitting President of the United States admit his awareness of Roswell, and say, “I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting.” If it was just a 73-year old mistaken weather balloon or even crash dummies story, it wouldn’t be all that interesting, would it? Those deceptions are now old news. But if Roswell was something authentic, well, that would be… interesting.      -medium.com


  • his biography calls him The Father of Loud - Jim Marshall died this day 9 years ago. Everybody knows Marshall amps - the huge black cabinets with the white script logo in back of most bands


The world just moved closer to a working warp drive.
This is well over my head, but maybe you'll understand.
my favorite part: 

Creating a warp bubble for a 656-foot-wide spacecraft traveling at the speed of light requires roughly 100 times the energy contained in the mass of Jupiter,


  • Things were different when I was a little boy.







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