Pro-tip: Your vacation activity choices should not include rhinos...

'Stand closer to the rhino' results in grave wound

This headline from an AP story pretty much says it all.  As I have reported here before, South Africa seems to be a hot bed of places where you can go to get your picture taken with large dangerous animals.  Note my intentional use of the word "dangerous" here.  These animals are so-called because they are, in point of fact, capable of hurting, even killing you.  Hence they are labelled, "dangerous."

Let's review what we know about the rhino:  Large pointy horn on it's nose, bad eyesight, evil temper, small brain, weighs in at 2 tons...that's 4000 pounds, about what my Dodge 1500 pickup weighs.  What about this says, "cuddly, wild, and, oh-I-so-want-to-have-my-picture-taken-with-this-thing creature"?  Wait...let me answer that for you:  Nothing.

Again, people...enjoy your vacation, but try to avoid dying.

I am indebted to Mike Elgan on Google+ for bringing this story to my attention.  I hope he forgives me for totally stealing the above picture.

Our continuing saga of bad vacation choices...

I frequently use this space to report on various bad vacation choices people make.  Mostly, I have focused on poor choices of location; pleasure boating in pirate infested waters, camping on islands where hungry polar bears out-number humans, that sort of thing.  However, I feel compelled to also report on poor activity choices people make while on vacation.  For example, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sight-seeing trip to the Farallon Islands, but when you throw scuba-diving into that mix...well, you've made a poor choice.

In that light, I present, for your edification, zorbing.  What, you may ask, is zorbing?  Zorbing is a "sport", recently become popular in Russia.  Basically, it consists of allowing yourself to be strapped into a large plastic ball and then said ball is rolled pell-mell down a ski slope.  Yes...I know.  You just said, "What the fuck??", right?  So did I.  Nonetheless, it is a thing in Russia these days and, apparently, a very popular thing, indeed.

For those still unclear on this concept, the Los Angeles Times has helpfully posted a video that demonstrates the whole zorbing concept and, at the same time, shows why it is an egregiously bad idea:  Don't try this at home and it's probably not a good idea to try it on vacation either.

Let's note:  One man killed, another critically injured.  Let's also note that the manufacturer of zorbs is quoted as saying, "It's all or nothing.  They either survive or they don't."

You've been warned...

Confessions of a Reformed Conservative

For my entire adult life, I have voted as a fiscal conservative.  I viscerally believed that the government that governs least, governs best.  Consequently, through the last few election cycles, my voting decisions have been based almost entirely on which party and candidates were most likely to support debt reduction and entitlement reform.  It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I voted for Romney/Ryan this past Tuesday.

Obviously, Tuesday's election didn't go the way that I had hoped.  Elections are like that sometimes.  So be it; the people have spoken, etc., etc., etc.  Entitlement reform, while a huge deciding issue for me, was apparently not so for the majority of the American electorate.  Millions of voters showed up to vote for a party and a candidate that have consistently acted to expand entitlement programs over the past few years.  Other millions of voters stayed home because Mitt Romney was a) not socially conservative enough, b) not promising them enough free stuff, c) a really rich guy, or d) a Mormon and, by staying home, gave tacit approval to entitlement expansion.

Thinking on the results of the election, I had an epiphany:  I've been wrong.  Totally wrong.  Utterly and completely wrong.  The American electorate does not want entitlement reform; in fact they consistently and relentlessly vote against it and elect representatives who lack the will or inclination to enact reform.  I live in a society that has institutionalized entitlements and, through all these years, I've been tilting at windmills by basing my votes on entitlement reform.  It's time to step back and, finally, accept the will and apparent wisdom of the people.  Actually, I am going to do more than accept it.  I am going to embrace it like William Hurt embraced Kathleen Turner in Body Heat...which is a rather disturbing analogy now that I think about it.  Sorry...

In point of fact, supporting entitlement reform is no longer in my best interests.  I'm 58.  In four years, I will be eligible for Social Security, at which point, every month the U.S. taxpayers will send me a check that is roughly half of what I have been contributing every year since I started working.  Every month until I go down for my dirt nap, I will get a check, for doing nothing.  Since the wrath family DNA clock seems to max out at 90 or so, that's potentially a lot of scratch.  But taxpayer largess does not end there.  There's Medicare.  There's my lifetime pass into national parks and monuments.  There's the $1.25 taxpayer subsidized lunch I can get at the Henderson Senior Citizen Center.  Of course, the menu there is going to need some help.  I'd like to see an artisanal cheese plate with fresh fruit, a baguette, and a glass of Columbia Valley merlot or a brie, bacon, and tomato sandwich on lightly toasted six-grain bread with a pint of a nice hoppy IPA served up on a daily basis.  No matter, once my fellow seniors and I organize a few "Henderson feeds their senior citizens dog food" protests, I'm sure the city fathers will come around...it's not like its their money after all.  They'll just get more from the taxpayers.  Also, there must be a free Obamaphone program for seniors.  If not, I'll join AARP - they've been bugging me to join for, like, eight years now - and get them to make that happen.  Oh...and that comes with unlimited data, right?  I gotta be able to use my tablet when I'm having my subsidized lunch down at the Senior Center, don'tcha know?

Food stamps!  Oh, hell...I almost forgot about food stamps.  I'm going to freaking wear out the magnetic strip on my EBT card....and I'm not talking frozen pizzas here.  Look for my column in Bon Appettit, "The EBT Gourmet".

Oh...and all the young people who turned out of support a second term for our President?  You might want to think about a second job.  Actually, you'll probably need a third one, too, since part-time jobs are going to become the rule when Obamacare kicks in.  Can you do that for me?  Yeah, um, thanks...I'll buy you a (subsidized) lunch sometime.

...and then there's my mortgage.  I've been making mortgage payments for thirty years; never missed a payment, never even paid one late.  In another age, this statement would have been a point of pride, but now it's a confession of just being plain stupid.  Mortgage payments are optional these days.  I'll leave it to the administration and their pals in the mega-banks to conjure up whatever fiscal fantasy they need to keep this senior citizen on a fixed income from being foreclosed.  In the meantime, my current mortgage payment will pretty handily cover the lease and insurance on an Audi R8.  Sweet.  Thank you, Mr. President.

Yes, intellectually, I still understand that this entire system is unsustainable and becomes increasingly unsustainable as fewer people are working and more are opting for living off government largesse.  At some point, to quote Jim Morrison, "...the whole shit house goes up in flames."  I just figure that I might as well live in a nice shit house - that I don't pay for - before someone throws in the match.

Another oopsie for NASA

Remember a few years back when NASA announced that they had discovered a microbe in Mono Lake that used arsenic in its DNA and ATP instead of phosphorus like all other life on the planet.  It was a big deal for a while; big NASA press release, big NASA press conference, stories all over the popular press...all for a piece of work that was published on-line without peer review.  The discovery of a form of life  whose basic biochemistry was based on anything other than phosphorus would be extremely significant.  The NASA group even speculated that this microbe might have been a throw back to the earliest forms of life on the planet, when Nature was still experimenting with biochemistry, if you will.  An intriguing thought, but one that completely ignores the fact that the geology that created the conditions in and around Mono Lake are only 3 millions years old at the outside.


However, almost as soon as this "discovery" was announced, the scientific community began to express doubts as to the nature of the NASA group's experiment and their interpretation of the results.  Public discussion of this soon faded into the background, but it remained an active debate in the scientific community as the publication of two recent papers in Science demonstrates.  Both papers refute the NASA claim that the microbe was incorporating arsenic in its DNA and both suggest that the NASA study was compromised by potential contamination.  In other words, the results from a sloppy experiment were rushed into print, press release, and press conference before anyone bothered to double check the results.


The lead author of the NASA study, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, responded to the new papers saying, "there is nothing in the data of these new papers that contradicts our published data."  Apparently, English is Dr. Wolfe-Simon's second language because two papers claiming that your results were due to contamination  is pretty much contradicting your data.


Abstracts of the two Science papers can be found here and here (Since Science is a "real", peer-reviewed scientific journal, you have to pay to read the full paper).

Why make such a big deal over sketchy research that hasn't been confirmed?  Why go public with results without getting comments from your scientific peer group?  Quite simple:  Someone's funding was coming up for review and what better way to demonstrate how important your research is than to hold a press conference to announce a "breakthrough".  In truth, this sort of thing happens all the time; probably 90% of the scientific articles you read in the popular press are a result of these fluffy, attention-whore press releases.  It goes without saying that the bureaucrats at NASA that make the funding decisions lack the technical skills to critically evaluate Wolfe-Simon's work, so to them, a press release is just as good a sign of "progress" as a paper in a refereed journal, besides a press release is shorter and not filled up with all that technical stuff.

Sic transit gloria scientia...

Dinosaur flatulence

Popular science reporting is so egregiously bad these days that, for the most part, I just roll my eyes and let things slide, but every once in a while, I come across a story that is so heinous I have to say something.  This bit of douchery for instance: Dinosaurs a gas, gas, gas, scientists say.

Doctors Ruxton and Wilkinson would have us believe that dinosaurs farted out so much methane that it effected a climate change that ended up killing them off.  Two things are immediately obvious in this article.  First, we are not told what Doctors Ruxton and Wilkinson are actually doctors of.  Second, there is no reference to the journal article where, one assumes, this work is to be published.  Perhaps, this is just sloppy reporting and, for the sake of argument, I'll assume this is the case.  But a story that does not establish credentials and reference the original literature is automatically suspect.

But, let's assume this is just sloppy reporting and accept what we are being told.  Fine...even then, this story has so many things wrong with it, it's hard to know where to start criticizing.  The doctors reference an argentinosaurus and point out that it would have produced "thousands of liters of methane per day".  Let's assume that the good doctors recognized that a reptile metabolism is much, much slower than a mammal's and scaled their methane production rates appropriately.  We don't know as we have no original literature to reference back to.

But, now we come to the really mind-blowing part of this story:

Ruxton and his co-researcher David Wilkinson, of Liverpool John Moores University, designed a mathematical model to work out how much methane the animals, thought to have numbered in their billions, would have generated during the Mesozoic era, from 250 million to 65 million years ago.

"Thought to have numbered in their billions..."  Where in the name of all holy fuck did the number "billions" come from?  The planet is very marginally able to support a few billions of 150 pound (plus or minus) human beings and Doctors Ruxton and Wilkinson tell us that there were billions of 90-ton reptiles roaming the planet during the Cretaceous.  Seriously?  No, really...are these guys saying this with a straight face?

The "billions" of giant sauropods number is so patently absurd that any person with brain function has to call, "bullshit" on this nonsense.  However, let me make on additional comment.  Methane is reduced carbon, which is why we combine it with oxygen and burn it.  When it is released in the atmosphere, its greenhouse effect is transient, because it tends to break down relatively quickly when exposed to oxygen and the sun's ultraviolet radiation.  Methane emissions from dinosaurs over the course of tens of millions of years are just not a vehicle for climate change.

If shame exists in the scientific community anymore, the unnamed "Canadian science website" that published this silliness should be ashamed of itself.

Bad vacation choices, Part something-something...

In this year's Bad Vacation Choice awards, Large Animal category, we may have a winner: Man photographs cheetahs attacking wife.

Before we get to the "large animal" part of the story, let me get one thing out of the way:  Squirrely's Rule of Marriage #23 - When cheetahs are attacking your wife, you may want to put down the goddamned camera and, I don't know, like maybe, TRY TO FUCKING SAVE HER!!

Just sayin'...

Having addressed that, back to the large animals.  Apparently, it is possible to go to this game preserve in South Africa and get your picture taken while standing next to "pet" cheetahs.  Yeah...and Sea World should let tourists swim with their "pet" sharks.  Here's the thing:  I've had pet cats for most of my life.  I like cats.  I like their independence.  I even like their aggravating "What? Were you talkin' to me?" attitude.  However, I completely understand the one-sided nature of my relationship to my cats.  Cats don't give a fuck and haven't given a fuck since ever.  When the Duke hops up in my lap while I'm reading the paper in the morning, he's not being friendly, he's cold.  When Duke's sister, the very aptly named Morgana le Fey, pokes me with her paw at 4am every morning, it means she's hungry and is checking to see if I'm dead.  When Admiral Halsey starts rubbing against my leg, he's not being friendly either.  He's hungry and figures I'll either feed him or he can get me to trip and kill myself.  Halsey's good either way.

To cats, humans are animals that are too big to eat (while we're alive anyway), but are convenient to have around to provide food, open doors, clean up the disgusting messes they make, and other, similar services.  Let's face it, the Tribe of Tiger has been around for most of the Cenozoic and, after 60 million years, the cat brain is pretty much hard-wired to kill things and, even today, there are parts of the world where humans are still very much on the cat menu of dietary choices.  As Siegfried and Roy discovered several years back, there is no such thing as a "pet" cat.  Inside even the fattest, laziest domestic kitty cat, the kill switch is always a hair breadth from being engaged.  Timbuk 3 has very succinctly summed up the situation with cats:

"Cats will be cats, and cats will be cruel
Cats can be callous, and cats can be cool
Cats will be cats, remember these words
Cats will be cats, and cats eat birds
Cats will be cats, and cats eat birds"

...or humans as the case may be.

Another look at Sharia law...

In yet another example of Sharia law barbarity, Saudi Arabia recently beheaded a woman for being a witch, after a trial that, it's presumed, looked a lot like this.  However, buried in Uri Friedman's story on this bit of Islamic pleasantry was a reference to "an Eritrean national [who] was imprisoned and lashed hundreds of times for "charlatanry"..."  Wow, I thought, maybe there are some aspects of Sharia law we could learn from; these charlatanry provisions, for example.  Imagine if the FBI formed an Anti-Charlatanry Unit, charged with rooting out and expunging charlatanry wherever it existed.  Why, I would personally turn in 535 members of Congress, the entire management groups of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy, the entire Nevada State legislature, and the Clark County School Board.  Oh, yes...the Special Charlatanry Prosecutor would have a full docket.

Don't get me wrong...I consider Sharia law a barbaric anachronism that should have died at the Battle of Lepanto (Lesson: Mess with capitalists and you'll get your ass kicked, Islam), but "charlatanry" laws...think about it.

The wussification of America continues...

What do you get when you raise a generation of kids in playgrounds covered with foam rubber?  Cowboys wearing helmets and body armor, that's what...

The National Finals Rodeo is in town and the Las Vegas Sun, which normally alternates between acting like the UNLV student newspaper and the Nevada Democratic Party newsletter, is all rodeo, all the time.  Today's edition even includes a column by a stripper - I could not make this shit up - who admits that cowboys are actually very nice in spite of the fact that they are all - gasp! - Republicans.

I digress...

Bull riders wearing helmets and body armor...W.T.F??  Sure...riding bare-back on an evil-tempered, 2000 pound animal, who by the way, has strap cinched around his gut to make him even more grumpy, is a dangerous gig.  But isn't that the point?  Don't get me wrong here.  I am not the sort that goes to rodeos and roots for the bulls (Bullfights, yes, but not rodeos).  It seems to me that part of the challenge of bull riding is overcoming a perfectly rational, perfectly understandable fear and engaging in something that "normal" humans can't even conceive of doing.  Part of the reason we watch bull riding is, not so much to observe the skills involved, but to sit there and marvel that there are people who even do things like that.  When you remove the risk and, consequently, remove some of the "fear factor," you somehow diminish the sport.

Mountaineering has gotten to a point where essentially anyone with enough money and free time can get to the top of Mount Everest.  That being the case, where is the challenge and the subsequent sense of accomplishment?  It would seem that bull-riding is heading to where anyone with enough body armor will be able to hop on a bull.  Hell, as soon as my Master Chief Spartan body suit, complete with regenerating electromagnetic armor and shield lock feature, shows up, I'll probably give it a shot.

But maybe that's just me...

Butch up...

I put this up on Twitter this afternoon.  The University of California at Davis, the media, and the Occupy Wall Street crowd are all up in arms that the UCD police pepper-sprayed some of the OWS protestors there.  Maybe the cops over-reacted, maybe they felt legitimately threatened, who knows?  But at the end of the day this was pepper spray.  Pepper spray.  A chemical considered so non-lethal that anyone can walk in off the street and buy some.  Please.

Okay, protestor wannabees, let's talk about protests.  Tienanmen Square was a protest.  I wrote about it in one of my first blogs.  The protest at Tienanmen Square was so effective that the Chinese government had to call out their army, send tanks into the square, and start killing people.  Killing...as in dead.  You were sprayed with pepper spray.  Think about that.  What happened in Tienanmen Square was, literally, world changing.  It put the most populous country in the world on a course that, in a few years, changed it from a third world backwater to what will be the dominant economy in the world within the next ten years.  You, on the other hand, just got pepper-sprayed and roundly ignored.

Your little encampments are being tolerated because you're threatening no one.  Certainly not Wall Street, the banks, or "evil" corporations, who are ignoring you because they have the law on their side.  The "law" that exists because it is supported by the power of the government, which oddly, you seem to have no issues with.

If you want to to take your "movement" beyond the exercise in quasi-intellectual masturbation that it has become to a legitimate protest, make sure you are protesting against the right things to the people who are really responsible...and when the police start using bullets instead of pepper-spray, you'll know you're on the right track.

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt...and that's how it should be.

Driving in to work today, I found myself stopped at a light next to a large step van belonging to TotTurf, which purports to supply "playground safety surfacing."  What. The. Fuck.  Have we come to a point where we've become so wussiefied that we have to cover the world with foam rubber to protect "the children"??

Warning!  Geezer rant sequence initiating in 3, 2, 1...

When I was growing up, we had playgrounds and those playgrounds were made of galvanized steel pipe and surfaced variously with concrete, asphalt, gravel, or just plain dirt.  By today's standards these places were safety nightmares.  Kids fell down and they bled, kids jumped, fell, or were pushed off these abominations and they broke bones, bruises and lacerations were so common we didn't even think about them...and note:  We usually only played at these playgrounds under adult supervision.  Why, you may ask?  Quite simply, by our standards of "fun," playgrounds were just plain boring.  Left to our own devices, we had far better ways of entertaining ourselves...like playing with fire.  This was back in the days when people burned their garbage and everyone had a "incinerator" (generally, an old oil drum) in their back yard.  Burning garbage was one of my brother's and my "chores."  Heh.  Little did our parents know that we would have burned all that stuff, and more, without being told.  But trust me, we were absolutely zealous about getting every last bit of combustion out of every last bit of garbage.  Poking the fire with sticks was required, flames leaping 10 feet in the air, a goal, and showers of sparks, a source of joy.  Setting parts of the garden on fire in our zeal only added to our entertainment as it required a scramble to get the hose to put the fire out.  Good times.  As I type this, I am looking down at a scar the size of a quarter, acquired when my brother flung a flaming, molten piece of plastic at me in one attempt of ours to maximize the spark generation rate.

The town I grew up in was in a transition from rural to suburban and our house backed up to a cattle ranch...and not just any cattle, it was a Brahma bull ranch that raised bulls for the rodeo.  The primary fixture in the pasture behind our house was Black Dempsey, an enormous, retired rodeo bull who, it was rumored, had actually killed a few rodeo clowns, or so the story went.  Black Dempsey presided over a harem of a few dozen cows, who exceeded even him in bad temper when calves were around.  Of course, the pasture was strictly off-limits and the penalties for disobeying parental dictates were threatened to be particularly fearsome - this, in a day and age when corporal punishment was a daily occurrence.  Naturally, we never passed up a chance to climb the fence and mingle with the livestock.  I suspect my brother and I escaped goring and/or stomping solely for two reasons:  1) Small boys can easily hide in 3 foot high field grass and 2) Our half springer spaniel/half cocker spaniel dog was an absolutely fearless cow chaser, in spite of his ridiculously short legs.  Good times.

Within walking distance of our house, there was a landlocked piece of undeveloped and wooded property that was bounded on one side by Little Cottonwood Creek (known simply as "the Crick" in the local lexicon).  Of course, there were as many parental edicts against going anywhere near "the Crick" as there there were involving the bull pasture.  So what to do with 4 acres or so of forest?  BB guns wars, of course.  These were highly organized, if infrequent, events with pre-chosen teams and agreed upon starting times and starting points.  I marvel even now that several dozen 12 year old boys were able to put these events together in complete secrecy.  A BB gun war involved, as one might expect, showing up with a BB gun - I had to borrow one - with whatever protective gear you might deem necessary and running about "the Grove" as it was called, shooting the other team.  No rules and we didn't keep score.  We would fight until we ran out of ammunition or were completely exhausted, which generally didn't take too long as a heavy winter coat was standard body armor and these wars were always in the summer.  In retrospect, this was all appallingly dangerous, but we never had any injuries outside of returning home sporting a few telltale round bruises.  Good times.

I really feel sorry for the kids whose concept of "fun" involves a foam rubber covered swingset.

More bad vacation ideas...

In my on-going efforts to stay abreast of bad vacation choices, even incipient ones, I have come across this story: Take a Volcano Vacation.  Well, sure...who doesn't have a hankerin' to see molten lava spewing hundreds of feet into the air?  However, let's review this "tempting" offer:

1. It's in the Congo.
2. It's Nyiragongo, referred to by Forbes as "the world's deadliest volcano."
3. It's an actively erupting volcano.
4. Armed escorts are required.
5. Reread #4: Armed escorts are required.

But, not to worry..."experts" say that it is perfectly "safe."

Developing...

Perceived risk

The Chevy Volt catching on fire recently has gotten a lot of attention and has many people raising the issue of how dangerous electric cars might be.  The car in question was being used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in some routine crash tests that every new vehicle is subjected to.  In the crash test, the vehicle's battery was damaged and three weeks later, the car burst into flames in a NHTSA storage facility.

I'm not a fan of the Volt and tend to agree with Johan de Nysschen, the president of Audi, when he called it "a car for idiots."  However, my assessment of the Volt has nothing to do with how safe it is.  Let me repeat, the car was involved in a crash and three weeks later it caught on fire.

Some perspective:  The Chevy Volt has a 16 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery (to be specific, since there are a lot of flavors of lithium-ion out there, it has a lithium manganese oxide/graphite battery manufactured by LG Chem of South Korea).  For you techie types, that is 57 million joules of stored energy...a big battery by any measure, but it has to be; it takes a lot of energy to move 3700 pounds of metal and plastic around.  However, ponder this...my truck has a 23 gallon gas tank.  When full, that is 3 billion joules of stored energy; more than fifty times what was sitting in the Volt's battery.  Twenty-three gallons of gasoline, properly dispersed and ignited, would flatten several city blocks...and yet none of us thinks twice about getting in these mobile explosive devices we call cars and driving around at high speeds with other mobile explosive devices driven by individuals whose driving skills are almost always vastly inferior to our own.

Let's get a grip here.  While we still don't know the root cause of the recent Volt fire, at the end of the day, my bet is on the problem being a lack of understanding of how to deal with a damaged battery. Remember  it took three weeks for this fire to start.  If the battery had been fully discharged prior to putting the car in storage, chances are we would never have heard this story.

Speaking as someone who has seen his share of battery fires, the most likely cause of death for any electric car owner is: boredom.

Knowing who you are...

Travel is inherently a self-centered activity.  Surrounded by strangers, each of whom is intent on their own plans and destinations, loaded into and unloaded from metal tubes with the same courtesy  afforded cows on their way to slaughter - and less personal space, it is hard to avoid devoting your full attention to getting yourself and your baggage to your destination with as little discomfort and inconvenience as possible.

If you travel enough on a given airline, you'll invariably find yourself elevated to one "elite" status or another.  This is, of course, a sham as the benefits in most of these programs are inconsequential and do little to make travel any more civilized.  However, given the generally dehumanizing nature of travel these days, it is hard of avoid a slight feeling of self-importance when an airline lets you board slightly earlier than the mass of hoi polloi.

With these observations, I present the following vignette recorded by Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari:

The best story about the Cairo Railway Station, told to me by a man who witnessed it unfold, does not concern a luminary but rather a person delayed in the third-class ticket line.  When this fussed and furious man at last got to the window he expressed his exasperation to the clerk, saying, "Do you know who I am?"  The clerk looked him up and down and, without missing a beat, said, "In that shabby suit, with a watermelon under your arm, and a third-class ticket to El Minya, who could you possibly be?"

...and aren't we all holding third-class tickets to El Minya these days?

The 99 percent...

This picture appeared on the Occupy Wall Street website along with many other, similarly presented tales of woe and I don't doubt that this young citizen posed for this with the very sincere intention of telling his story and showing his solidarity with America's downtrodden.  But, in reading his little bio-in-Sharpie, I am forced to conclude that this is nothing more than the pathetic - and really embarrassing - admission of a failed life.

I will assume, Mr. Ex-Printer Repairman, that you are not so morbidly stupid as to have paid 87 Large to be trained as a printer repairman.  Under that assumption, you obviously borrowed eighty-seven thousand dollars to get a degree in something that did not make you employable when you graduated.  One can only wonder what your degree is in, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.  At your age, I borrowed $36K to buy a house and it scared the crap out of me, but I recognized that I would end up with a house.  Did you know what you would end up with after your $87K expenditure?  Did you have a plan beyond spending four years on an all-expenses-paid bong binge?  Did you have an inkling of what the job market was for the skill you had chosen to train yourself in?  Or were you just fucking clueless on the concept of "borrowing"?  Whatever.  You took $87,000 of someone's money and now they want it back.  Welcome to the real world.  Be grateful you didn't borrow from someone who ties delinquents to some cinder blocks and tosses them in the East River.

Listen, broheim, I've been unemployed twice in my life and also underemployed for something like 3 years, although admittedly not underemployed-squared as your toilet cleaning job would seem to be, and it sucks.  Totally sucks.  Suckity-suck-suck-sucks.  I could even argue, with some legitimacy, that my unemployment was not my fault and the result of dark forces at work, incompetent corporate overlords, yadda, yadda, yadda.  However, for all that, it never even crossed my mind that anyone should be involved in fixing my problem except me.

I'll leave you with two thoughts, Mr. Ex-Printer Repairman:

1. The real unfortunates in your Sharpie bio are your cats.  Unlike you, they didn't get to pick the loser life they now have.
2. Capitalism has been much, much better to me than the government ever was.  Food for thought as you have your hand out for some of the alleged "Obama stash."

CORRECTION:  On closer examination, it would appear that, contrary to using a Sharpie as I stated, Mr. Ex-Printer Repairman used the mad skillz he picked up as a printer repairman and actually printed his bio.  Apparently, mom's basement is fully wired.  However, he did print it using Comic Sans font, which further highlights what a loser he is.

A geek's tale...

Nobel Prizes are all in the news right now, so here's a Nobel Prize story:

In 1922, Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the structure of the atom.  Bohr’s model, where an atom is represented as a micro-solar system with electrons orbiting a central nucleus, is the one most people are familiar with.  Unlike some recent Nobel Peace Prize awards, Bohr’s Nobel Prize was well-deserved and made him quite a celebrity in his native Denmark....so much so that the Danish Academy offered Bohr lifetime free occupancy in the Danish House of Honor.

The Danish House of Honor was originally the palatial estate of the founder of the Carlsberg Brewery, Jacob Christian Jacobson.  When he died, Jacob left his entire estate, including the brewery, to the charitable Carlsberg Foundation.  The Foundation turned Jacob’s house into the so-called Danish House of Honor, occupancy of which was reserved for Denmark’s most distinguished citizen, and was considered to be the most prestigious address in the country, outside of the king’s palace.  An invitation to live in the House of Honor was considered a very significant honor and Bohr's being awarded lifetime occupancy is indicative of his celebrity at the time.  The House of Honor was located immediately adjacent to the Carlsberg brewery and one of its many perks was a hard-plumbed line to the brewery that provided an infinite supply of fresh-from-the-brewery beer.  Sweet.

Bohr’s tenure in the House of Honor was interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Denmark in 1940.  Although the American Embassy had guaranteed the Bohr's safe passage to the United States, Bohr decided to stay to help insure the safety of the Jewish scientists on his institute’s staff.  He also found himself in a minor dilemna - and this is the "geek" part of the story:  Max von Laue and James Franck had given him their gold Nobel Prize medals for safekeeping.  However, with the Nazi occupation, sending them out of the country was impossible as exporting gold was illegal and, since each laureate’s name is prominently engraved on the medal, could not be done without incriminating von Laue and Franck, who were both still in Germany at the time.  Keeping them was also dangerous as the Nazis, who were desperate for hard currency to finance their war effort, would confiscate them for the value of their gold if they were discovered.  Bohr came up with a physicist’s solution, in a very literal sense, to the problem.  He dissolved the medals in acid and stored the solutions in unmarked jars on his laboratory shelves.  These jars sat out the war unmolested and, afterwards, the Nobel Foundation recovered the gold and recast the medals.

Side note:  I don't doubt that some might claim that Bohr actually came up with a chemist's solution to his dilemma, but physicists have always claimed that chemistry was nothing more than the smelly part of physics.

Another side note:  Bohr remained in Denmark until 1943 when it was learned that the Nazis were about to start rounding up Jews (Bohr's mother was Jewish).  Bohr's international celebrity was such that he was able to travel to Stockholm where he convinced the Swedish government to agree to intern any Danish Jews that made their way to Sweden.  The Swedish government also sent a formal letter of protest to the Nazis, which was made public.  The publication of the letter had the effect Bohr desired; the Danes were alerted to the imminent danger to their countrymen and when the Nazis began their round-up, there were no Jews to be found.  The Danes, to their eternal credit, had hidden their Jewish citizens away and began to smuggle them into Sweden.  Of the 7,000 Jews living in Denmark at that time, only 284 were picked up by the Nazis.