Contrails over Nebraska are usually of the straight-as-an-arrow variety, since we're right in the middle of fly-over country. Thus, the trail left below caught my eye when I was on my way home for lunch today.
Makes a guy wonder what exactly was going on up there when the pilot decided to make a 90 degree turn in mid-flight.
St. Louis is a strong "union town," and while we were living there I got to see just how out-dated, foolish, and delusional unions are. A couple of years ago the grocery store union (it had a fancy name, I just don't care enough to find out what it is) went on strike because they wanted something like a nickel-an-hour raise for everyone across the board, and they were offended because the grocers were changing their health insurance plan to a $500 per family deductible and 80/20 co-insurance up to $1,500 per family after that.
The grocery workers' strike lasted for almost three months and, frankly, it was a great three months with the management employees working the union employees' jobs. The clerks actually looked at us while they were speaking instead of talking to each other as if we weren't there. They smiled, didn't chew gum, and didn't have piles of visible piercings. It was almost as if they cared about the company they worked for and wanted to see it succeed. A novel concept, I know!
What blew me away at the time was the thought that people would DEMAND a raise of a nickel an hour for a job that I did (and did well) as an uneducated 10th grader. Simple supply and demand forces explain why someone who does a job that anyone else can do won't get paid very much. Bagging groceries? Somewhere near 95% of the population can do this job. Hitting major league pitching? Ask Albert Pujols how many people can do that. If 95 out of every 100 people can do your job, you probably shouldn't walk away from it.
So today I hear that the United Auto Workers have called for a nationwide strike against GM. Brilliant, says I. Their number one reason for going on strike? You're not going to believe this… "job security."
This might be news to the folks who run the machines in Detroit, but there are millions (billions?) of people in the world who are willing and able to build cars. On top of that, many of them live in countries where the idea of HAVING A JOB is enough of an enticement to get them to stand on the assembly line. You want a pension? You want health insurance? You want "job security?" Well, mi amigo, there are plenty of people who will do your *old* job without all that stuff. And, this is probably the excuse GM needed to justify moving their production facilities to Juarez, or maybe even some nice little city in Indonesia.
The good people of the UAW might want to reconsider their little escapade here, especially since it's going to get cold soon. While they're all standing around a burn barrel this fall outside of a shut down factory, they might want to think of the nice, tropical climates around the world since they'll probably have to relocate to one of them if they want to get their old job back.
This might be the first time ever that a messenger has been shot for bringing a message of good news.
- Rich Lowry, The General Meets the Senate
When good news about the success of a country's military is bad news for you, one can only assume that you are, in fact, an enemy of said country's military and, consequently, and enemy of said country.
I was on Adams street, heading West just past Cotner Boulevard. I was on my way to my 8:30am Japanese 101 class when the DJ on KFRX announced that an airplane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. At the time, he said it was thought to be an accident and it was unclear as to what size of aircraft it was, and he and the co-host speculated about whether it was a small single-engine plane or something larger. The tone of the report made it sound like it was just another accident.
By the time I was on my way to my 9:30 class, Econ 365, the second plane had crashed as well. The professor had the CNN coverage projected on the 20-something foot wide screen in the front of the classroom, CBA 143. The professor, Dr. Donna Dudney, turned it off after about 10 minutes and told everyone that class was canceled. I made my way from the CBA over to the Lambda Chi house as quickly as possible, where I found a spot in the TV room with 15-20 other guys. Just a few minutes after I sat down the first tower fell. Nobody said anything for several seconds, before Joel Webber summed up everything we were all thinking by whispering, almost inaudibly, "Holy shit."
Somewhere along the way video started coming in from the Pentagon, with a map of Pennsylvania and reports of another missing plane interspersed regularly. In the half-hour between the collapse of the first and second towers, I remember feeling as if these events on the screen were about 3 million miles away, but also that I was deeply and personally offended and impacted by them. The attitude in the room oscillated between foggy disbelief and acute outrage. An almost palpable blood lust filled the room as words like "al Qaeda" and "bin Laden" were introduced into vocabularies that were otherwise devoid of Arabic-sounding words. Somebody in the house found an American flag, which had probably served as a curtain in some Freshman's room, and hung it from the outside of the house with several strips of duct tape. With the images of the second impact replaying over and over, I headed back home to grab some lunch before work.
I don't remember much about how work went that afternoon. I think I alternated between Yahoo news and the small TV mounted in the conference room that could barely pick up channel 10 if you turned the antennae just right. By then the coverage had been reduced to the same 20 minutes of content being rehashed again and again.
Amanda and I had just started "officially" dating two nights before, and she called me from Hannibal, MO, to make sure that I wasn't somehow secretly involved in the military or FBI or something. I remember thinking that was a really cute question, and I wondered if it was just an excuse for her to call me.
That was six years ago. In some ways it seems like it couldn't possibly have been that long, while at the same time it seems like it's been hundreds of years since Osama and Co. slaughtered thousands of Americans in cold blood. Like the Kennedy assassination, which was before my time, I expect that this event will be the "Where were you…" of my generation.
So, where were you? How do you remember it? What vivid details stick out in your mind? Feel free to leave a comment below.
If you're bored at work this afternoon, check out the two links below:
The first one, Light, lets you view pictures with varying levels of light, exploring how light (and darkness) affect the feel of the image.
The second one, which is my favorite, lets you click on an area of a picture and zoom in to see the composite images that it is composed of. Click again and again and again and watch your afternoon go sailing by…
From the Sumona project
We're only two hours out from kickoff, and I still haven't got my pick up yet. I guess I'm a little rusty after the long off season.
Nevada:17
Nebraska: 27
RSS 2.0
