Flavoring Fish With Lemon Sharks

If you say "OMG" out loud, I don't want to know you.

• As JFK said, "Ich bin ein blogger"

Remember Wyatt Earp? Now there's a tv show Wynonna Earp. Because there's nothing worth doing that can't be done again and again and again. And there's nothing that can be done again and again and again that can't be done with a woman replacing the man. Oceans 11, with an all female cast, was such a flop that they had to make more. In fact, Oceans 27 is in production, starring Rosie O'Donnell, Rose Marie, Rose McGowan, and Roseanne Barr, with Rosie Perez narrating.

Here's what's coming up for next season:

Jeez Louise Christ Superstar, starring Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg as Jesus, and Michele Obama as Paul, who has to keep poking Ginsburg with a cross to keep her awake

All in the Family, with Bea Arthur as Archie Bunker

Family Guy, starring an animated Meryl Streep as Peter

Young Shelly, with Whoopie Goldberg as Sheldon

Americans Idle, featuring Joan Jett as Howard Stern

Better Call Sauly, starring Sally Struthers

Fargo, with Oprah Winfrey as the town of Fargo

Orange is the New Black, featuring the cast of Orphan Black

The Walking Dead, with an army of zombie Miley Cyruses. A new reality show!

Game of Thrones, with every role played by Emilia Clarke. That I'd watch. And Allison Janney as Peter Dinklage

Parks and Recreation, with Taraji P. Henson as Chevy Chase and Queen Latifah playing the part of King Latifah

• LabCorp, the largest blood testing lab in the US, was hacked over the weekend. Test results were delayed, although no misuse of data has been detected. Parts of the network were shut down upon discovery.
• They have your test results, folks.

I remember the Good Old Days<tm>, when the sexes 'worked out', wearing their cute little outfits and leaving each other alone. Of course, this was not to remain as-is, because the Social Justice Workers were out for blood. Men's blood, more specifically. Male only gyms were sued to let women in. They won. Female gyms were sued to let males in. They lost. 

Three women were recently thrown out of a Planet Fitness for objecting to a transexual woman in their locker room. Once again, the SJWs were out, in all their glory, dictating who the new protected minority is.

It was a great run, ladies.

If you ever need to get out of anything, identify as Trans. Until the next protected minority is announced. At this rate, if we hang in long enough, it'll be men.

P.S. the Google spellchecker choked on transexual.

• Speaking of words, here are some taken from my morning reading:  a shift in tactics to reach new heights in volumetric campaigns, patchwork IT systems, both legacy and non-legacy, that are impossible to secure holistically

There's an awful lot of words in this article, but I think I have the idea: A Seattle University professor recently worried that women in STEM may feel bad after reading an article on innate sex differences. Some words in the article are unconscious bias, flat earth, and innate sex differences.

The professor denies there are any inherent differences in the genders; the differences are due to conditioning. The gender bias must be corrected.  If I were a woman, which, as of last time I checked, I am not, I'd be pretty charged up over this article. I will now carry on in my Woman Voice: This lady argues for more of my gender in STEM but that reading an article on the possibility of inherent gender differences might make me feel bad. If that's where the SCIENCE leads, it doesn't matter how I feel. I am not a snowflake, I am a scientist. To treat my entire gender otherwise is to insinuate we need to be treated as special, with bias. I'll get by on my brain, not my vagina. [/end Woman Voice]

• You were just wondering to yourself what the undisputed king of ransomware was, weren't you. This week it's GrandCrab. This ransomware can only be treated with GrandPenicillin (and a pot of boiling water).

In light of 12 Russians being indicted on election tampering charges, you should read this article about software used to count votes. The vendor supplied remote control software PC Anywhere to 'a small number of customers'. PC Anywhere, remote control software, contains a bug that allows anyone accessing the machine access without a password. Hackers stole the source code to PC Anywhere.  This was discovered in 2006 but not released until 2012. The company that produced the voting software is stonewalling official inquiries.

I am not offering a theory as to how or whether any election was hacked. This is purely information from the industry - you can use it with other information to make up your own mind. It definitely proves my statement that there should be NO remote access to any part of voting and paper ballots are the way to go. If any of you remember, back in the Bill Clinton days, Diebold machines were being used. Diebold was a vocal supporter of the Clintons.

• The Japanese are killing whales. America turned their oceans brown with crap dumped into it, and wildly overfish salmon and others. We're burying trash and nuclear waste that will not be safe until after the sun burns out. Illegally hunting and decimating entire species of animals. Destroying the rainforest. Corporate and individual greed isn't new, but we really seem to be intent on shooting ourselves in the foot with very large caliber weapons.
• Then we're going to be surprised when the excrement hits the rotating device.

Attack of the Canes

My wife occasionally uses a cane and we have dubbed them Attack Canes. I can't even begin to explain this, but the name is quite accurate. If you open the car door from the outside, one of the canes jumps out at you. If you go to sit down, one of them is waiting for your butt to almost hit the seat. If you're driving, the little bastard will move itself onto the armrest or in the way of the shifter.

In the house, the evil manifests differently. Kept by the front door, anyone walking near it will get tripped when it falls over. If you leave it there, it will leap out at your foot. If you put it back and open the curtains, it will fall right on you. We could easily blame it on one Wayward Walking Device<tm>, but it's two of them. It used to be three, but one felt it wasn't able to do enough damage so it walked away and adopted another person who has trouble getting around.

It's not too big a thing, or wasn't, until today. Picking up a bottle of water, a broom fell on me. Then while making coffee, it fell on me in the other direction. Christ, what is it with tall thin sticks in this bloody place? You could blame it on gravity having effects on wood, but one of the canes is aluminum. We found one of those As Seen on TV jobbies that you put on the end of the cane to keep it standing up. They still jumped at us at every possible opportunity. Maybe they don't like dust.

• Which algorithm did the marketing department use to tell them that if I saw Jeff Beck and ZZ Top, I'd be a shoe in for Diana Ross?
• But it's cool because Yanni and The Price is Right Live are coming too.

Do It For the Children [and other orchestral nightmares]

I have nieces and nephews.
This came as quite a shock to me, even though I saw them shortly after they were born. It is said there are no ugly babies. Wrong. This is just one of the many reasons I have a dog.

No one ever told me that being an uncle actually came with responsibilities. I was all set to be a bad influence... I've got that one down perfectly.  I can purchase toys and musical instruments that make horrible, loud noises, then leave their home. But no, there's stuff I gotta DO for the little so and sos. You will notice, although nobody else does, that I do not invite them for Marshall's chemotherapy party or birthdays. I'm considerate that way.

Two of the little blighters are in their orchestras. It's wonderful that they picked up an instrument, even if it happened at gunpoint. As a musician of many years, I still don't get the school program. They give (force) an instrument on a poor unsuspecting child, then demand that he play only ancient classical songs. If  anybody were to just stop and ask the child what instrument he wants to learn, then what music he'd like to play, you'd have a much happier and more cooperative little musician. Let's face it... the kid is going to want to play the guitar or drums*. Perhaps classical music is a concept whereby parents insist on not having their children play drums. There's something to be said for it.

I feel very safe in saying that after the child decides guitar or drums, he'd rather not play something by Handel, preferring Led Zeppelin or Megadeth. This will also upset the parents, unless they like Led Zeppelin or Megadeth. They might breathe a sigh of relief that the child doesn't play a drum machine along with Nikki Manaj mp3s.

My Uncle Responsibility for the week involved watching the orchestra perform. It became my responsibility in a second hand way, when the child asked my wife to please come to his concert. Like most of my life, I was an afterthought; a person who showed up attached to the popular aunt. This doesn't bother me at all, and makes for a great reading.

So there we were, walking into an elementary school. I dared not count the years since I've been in an elementary school (and the times I was asked to leave elementary schools). They decided that since there were a lot of people showing up, they'd use the gymnasium, with its hard, acoustically-hostile cinderblock construction. You know... instead of the auditorium, where it's comfortable and things sound good, plus the seats did not come out of an old torture chamber, like the folding ones in the gym.

It was Standing Room Only in the makeshift concert hall.  All the parents were out with their phones held up, focused on the spot where they knew their kid should be (they couldn't see them either).  I thought this a good time to search for MILFs, and it was, except the MILFs all stayed home, preferring to go to the earlier show (to avoid the guys at the later show, who would be searching for them). We had to be there early, although no one has been able to figure out why. Perhaps they wanted everybody to be good and agitated before the concert started. It works well for Guns n Roses.

The show started and although we were assured our nephew was there, no one could actually locate him. His cello dwarfs him to begin with. These kids did very well, all things considered. Everybody knows children under five feet tall cannot play as well as the taller kids.**  They played reasonably in tune, although not exactly in time with each other. Their teacher/conductor, an Asian lady (you think I'm kidding, don't you?) played piano. After only a few hours, we finally figured out the method behind the madness: the conductor was actually the performer, while the kids were convenient accompaniment. Put another way, the teacher was the Indy pace car, which ran at precisely 55mph, while the children raced their cars in front of her, behind her, in the pit, across the grass, or anywhere else that wasn't next to the pace car. No one seemed to notice this but me, judging by the fact that I was the only one in the room without a camera pointed in the general direction of the stage.

Please don't take my gentle mocking as an indictment of the childrens' talents. I do not expect them to perform like Itzach Perlman (yes, I spelled it wrong - go read some other sarcastic bastard's blog).

When my nephew's group was done, I applauded enthusiastically, then raced for the exit. Unfortunately, my tires were shredded by The Pit Boss, who semi-politely explained that there was another group playing shortly. As loud as it was in the room, everyone wondered where that soul-shattered SIGH came from.

The next group was over five feet tall, which increased my hopes that I could sit there for another four hours.***  As soon as they started, it became glaringly apparent that the charming young lady up front with the violin was intent on 'interpreting' the songs in her own style. Her own style was largely not playing the same notes as everybody else. The egregious out-of-tuneness went unnoticed also, except for the fact that it kept waking me up.

My nephew proudly told us he was first chair. We learned later that first chair meant he was the first one in that particular chair at the moment. The orchestras were so large that the basses and cellos were located offstage. This was also the reason I was given for my location offstage with my guitar. I'm sure it had absolutely nothing to do with my appearance or my playing.

Here's where things got hairy (not me, the orchestra): something got in my ear and kept trying to bore a hole through and start eating my brain. It took me a few seconds to figure it out.. the group had another 'individual stylist', like the young lady with the violin. He and his bass decided that they were not happy with the key the song was in and proceeded to make the changes he felt necessary. This came in the form of playing every note a half-step lower, which seemed to make him happy, as it went on for the whole concert.  For the non-musician readers, the worst musical noise you can hear, aside from the aforementioned Niki Manaj, is two instruments playing a half-step apart. It has been known to make people go through windows on the upper floors of tall buildings. You can feel it right where your coccyx (COCK-six) is, and it goes up your entire spine painfully, attempting to exit via the top of your head. Perhaps the reason they didn't use the auditorium was all the bits of brain matter on the ceiling.  In these sad financial times, public schools cannot always afford ceiling cleaning services. They either hold functions in the gym or pray that no one looks up.

I thought I was home free when I got home, but it was not to be. Another nephew has an orchestral performance in three weeks. If I am not there, his mother will TALK to me. A lot. For a long time. With her grating Philadelphia accent and a liberal helping of Guilt. But the joke's on her... I'm bringing Bluetooth earpieces, so I can listen to Hendrix mangle a guitar while the children molest Bach.

*************************************************************

*Unless the family is Asian, in which case it will be an orchestral instrument and classical music, which they will practice daily and excel, while we discover that 80% of the orchestra is Asian.

Before you go off on me like Nagasake, stereotypes don't appear from a vacuum. This is exactly the makeup of one nephew's orchestra. I looked around and noticed that most of the musicians were Asian (this is strictly an observation). They did not, however, have cameras, but on the other hand, it was very difficult to get out of the parking lot...

**I just made that up.

***20 minutes.