This is the picture I’m not using of the two taken for the Destination – Ocean (Atlantic). From the 3rd floor stairs of the Admiral’s Row building on the Hilton Head Beach & Tennis Resort.
Unless of course you have just stepped through the stones at Craigh na Dun and arrived from the 18th century, you’ll know that there is a new Starwars movie coming out on Friday. I wanted to prepare for this by watching the prequels and the original trilogy all over again, even though the odds of my going to the theater to see the new movie were fairly high, say on the order of the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field.
Seeing as I am old enough to have seen the original 3 in the movie theater these are my favorites. But not only do I prefer the Episodes IV, V & VI to the prequels, I’d prefer Episodes I, II & III didn’t even exist. I’ve seen them because I am a fan, but…
In which order should I watch them in? Episode order or release order? I found the answer to that question where all the answers are, the internet. Watch IV & V, then go back and watch II, III. Finish with Episode VI: Revenge Return of the Jedi – The Machete Order.
That blog post is pretty long winded and because of how I prefer the Episodes IV, V & VI I was sorely tempted to take the advice in the very beginning and just go with the Original Trilogy and be done with it and I did indeed seek out Harmy’s Despecialized Editions, but I did want to try and see if I could watch some of the prequel material too.
Another internet article I found held some promise of me being able to incorporate the Prequels – The Anti-Cheese Edits. These can be found on YouTube which make them easily watchable on your internet connected Smart TV.
Donna and I watched Episode IV: A New Hope on Thanksgiving. At Blu-Ray definition on the big TV in the living room the movie as probably better looking than it was when we saw in a movie theater on Guam 38 years ago. I watched Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back on the 25″ computer monitor in on my own last weekend. Last night I tried to watch the anti-cheese Episode I and even without the cheese I only made it 20 minutes into the now shorted to 1:33 minute movie.
This weekend I may try Episode II: Attack of the Clones. If I don’t make it through that, I guess I’ll just jump to the last of the Original Trilogy and be done with it.
I’m not sure how I got there now, but somehow I followed a link and watched the second of the six parts of this conversation. Then I went back and watched the first part. Then I watched the rest. Apparently I’m Bernie’s choir because he was preaching to me, right to me. Does he have a chance in getting elected? No, probably not (and they touch on that in the first few minutes of the third part), but he should be.
Talking Shop w/ Bernie Sanders
Friday before last when we rode the tandem to work I had to add a bit more air to the front tire than the normal touch up after a week or two of inactivity. So this Thursday night I checked to see what the air pressure was and sure enough it was low. So I pulled the tube, found a small leak and patched it. The patched tube became our spare and I put a new tube back in the front tire.
On the way home from work on Friday a couple miles from home we hit a big piece of gravel with the front tire in just the wrong way in that it snapped up, poked through the sidewall and punctured the tube. Hss, hsss, hsssss. No problem, we always carry the stuff needed to fix a flat. Unsnap the front panniers, back the whole front quick release out and remove the wheel. I pull the tube and place the recently patched one back in.
To pump it up we have one of those CO2 cartridge things where you tighten the bottom into the top to puncture the cartridge. Well, I twist it a couple times and then it gets too hard to turn. I back it off and try again. This time I force it so much that I strip the plastic threads. Crap. Fortunately we also carry one of those collapsible 4 section pumps too. After about a 100 strokes I get enough air in the tire to limp home.
Thursday night I dropped Donna off at the home of a co-worker’s house for the ASCO Ladies Christmas party. On the way back home I noticed that the low tire pressure light was on. I figured it was a 3 p.s.i. air loss, just enough to trigger the light, that seems to happen annually around this time of year. Today I broke out my little garage air compressor and started filling tires. Left rear, down 3 p.s.i to 32. Left front down 3 to 32. Right front down 3 to 32. Right rear, down 8 to to 27. Huh? As I go to attache the chuck, right there at eye level, I see a nail sticking out about an inch, right at the radius as the the sidewall transitions to the tread. Right at a place that represents new tire not plug & patch.
Back in February when I needed to replace one of the Emperor’s 02 sensors I bought it and the wrench I needed to change it online. The sensor showed up, but the wrench was back ordered, so I went down to the local Advanced Auto and bought one to do the job with. Naturally the online wrench arrived a couple days after I finished the job. I couldn’t return the used one locally and I didn’t feel like spending the $5 to return the online wrench just to get $6 back, so now I have two of the same wrenches that I might not ever have to use again.
A couple times during the year I thought that maybe I’d just give one away as a “Door Prize” to an attendee to one of my MMC led events, but never did. Well it is now towards the end of the year and the MMC Christmas Party was coming up, maybe I’ll just wrap it up and put it under the “tree” for Ol’ Swapperoo Gift Exchange.
Then a couple of weeks ago I overheard my cubical neighbor telling another co-worker about his experience with The Elf On The Shelf and his 3-year old twins. I had heard of The Elf On The Shelf before, but never knew what it was all about. So rather than let on that I was ignorant of the subject, I Googled it. WOW! There is a whole subset of America’s mommies that are The Elf On The Shelf disciples and are not afraid to swap stories and activities and tips on how to make this “fun” for the month of December. This is where I discovered that some folks, that now knew what TEOTS was about, but didn’t feel like spending the money on the book and the official elf doll and could just make their own. A light bulb figuratively illuminated over my head at this point, I’d turn the extra wrench into a automotively themed TEOTS.
What followed was a weeks worth of some fun and some frustration for me and mostly frustration for Donna as we perused local stores scanning shelves for the ingredients for my MMC Christmas present. I already had some red paint for the wrench/body, but needed a small Santa hat, a styrofoam ball for the head, red pipe cleaners for arms and legs and some colored felt for the hands, feet, etc. Then we needed just the right size plain box to put him in. Just when finding all the required pieces proved too elusive we got lucky in Hobby Lobby when we found a $6 elf ornament for half price.
The right box was still missing. Google to the rescue again, the 6th link down for DIY Gift Boxes led to a hexagonal shaped box that I could scale to fit. What better style box for a wrench could there be?
Fearing a copyright infringement lawsuit I couldn’t call it The Elf On The Shelf, so in keeping with the car theme called it The Wrench On The Bench. I photoshopped an homage to the actual TEOTS book cover and now I just needed to put something on the inside to tell the story of TWOTB. Hoping to find a passage or two from the real book to inspire a new story once again I turned to Google. No actual words from the book, but I did find a poem on lil’ luna that got me going enough to hack something just long enough to go on the inside of the hex box cover:
How does Santa know who’s naughty or Nice?
The Wrench on the Bench sits in your garage
Watching if what you do is wrong or right
And reports back to the North Pole every night.Harbor freight junk from Ol’ Saint Nick
Is going to be under your tree if,
You crawl under a car without jack stands, or,
Use pliers when a 6-point socket is called for.Santa will make sure it is presents you’ll get
If you always consult your Chilton or Haynes,
Use a torque wrench instead of a guess
And at every 3,000 miles your motor oil is fresh.There are only two rules for the Wrench on the Bench;
1. Never touch the Wrench on the Bench or it will be gone forever.
2. The Wrench on the Bench needs a name that is clever, but not Murphy, not never.
Years of soakings of oil and fork lift traffic have really taken their toll making the main traffic areas in the Turned Parts department very rough and the whole department dark and slippery. This past week a contractor came in and is floating some sort of epoxy / concrete hybrid mix down about a 1/4 inch thick and following up with a two-step epoxy paint job in light gray. A couple years ago they did a section at a different end of the department before we added some fancy new fangled CNC machines and it looked fantastic, still does, so they are working their way north throughout the whole shop.
We moved some of our machines around and even shipped a few down to Mexico to create about 5000′ square feet of floor that is being upgraded. Trouble is the main entrance to our cube farm is smack in the middle of the area, so since Tuesday we have had to walk out a service door in the back of the plant to get into a side door of the office area. The only down side for me has been that bathroom breaks now take a bit of forethought because what used to be a 30 second walk is now about 2 minutes long.
Where we park the Emperor (or Purple Whale) is in the far corner of the parking lot from the front door and is normally vacant except for us. This week we’ve had company out there because as it turns out our corner of the parking lot is at one end of the hypotenuse of a scalene triangle with the other end being the door to our offices. In other words the shortest distance between parking lot & office chair for my department members is Donna and my normally quiet corner of the parking lot. Hence the crowd.
The final coat of paint goes on the floor on Sunday, so by Monday morning we should be back to having our corner of the lot to ourselves.
From: The Commish
To: Every Tom, Dick & Harry
Subj: [EZEFFL] The Butterfly EffectIn chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
All,
Due to unknown conditions one owner was not paying attention to his roster and back in week 9 around 12:30 on Sunday I noticed his team had 5 of the 9 starters on bye, so thinking in the spirit of competition (and if this was the actual NFL, sanctity of the League itself) I made myself a second owner and adjusted the roster by moving the bench players to starters and vice versa. Turned out it wouldn’t mattered anyway as his opponent scored a beastly 144.2 points.
In Week 10 I reassembled the team back to the way it was and this time they won. I continued to make substitutions as needed through out the rest of the season so Team Gregory went 2-2 over the last 4 weeks and is now in the playoffs.
But I’d irrevocably altered our nonlinear system. A quick look back and the two losses would have obviously occurred, and probably one of the victories as well, but this week’s win would have not.
The way I see it is I have four options:
1) Let Team Gregory in the playoffs and keep adjusting the line up as I think best, thereby setting up a possible hoisting on my own petard scenario when they knock me out of the playoffs. Or
B) Go back and reset Team Gregory’s roster to to its Week 8 lineup to see how those last 5 games would have played out differently and adjust accordingly. Or
3) Just have the top two teams from each division play in the playoffs using the last 4 weeks of the season and each game, the semis and the final, last 2 weeks each. Or
IV) Toss out the whole playoff system and declare myself the winner of the Trophy and all acclaim it entails.Let me know what you think.
—Brian Bogardus
Commissioner
End Zone Entourage FFL
Owner/Director of Player & Personnel
Purple Whales
I received a few replies:
So tonight I booked .0276 milliseconds of computing team on IBM’s Watson and did the math on how things would have gone had I not interfered, then composed this email:
From: The Office of the Commissioner
To: All Concerned & Ships at Sea
Subj: [EZEFFL] Countering the Butterfly EffectLets hope my attempt here to nullify my original meddling doesn’t have even greater dire consequences somewhere further along.
All,
I chose Option B. While I couldn’t actually go back and change players playing in past weeks, I could look at how each of Team Gregory’s starting 9 players did for the past 5 weeks and add their scores up to get just what would been the team total for those games.
Turns out that two victories,Week 10 to Team Hofmann and last week against Aiken Ball Busters, would have been losses. So Team Gregory’s record moves down to 4-9 from 6-7. Team Hofmann goes up from 6-7 to 7-6 and the Ball Busters move from 5-8 to 6-7.
My original intent for the playoffs still stands, the top 3 teams get a bye and Teams 4 & 5 play a “Wild Card” game to see who gets to play in the Semi-finals. So even though Team Hofmann moves above .500 at 7-6 his lower points scored during the season drop him to 7th in the Power Rankings. Frank Hanna’s 6-7 record ties him with Mike Lenio, but the Ball Busters scored 23 more points than the Bone Crushers so Frank is the #5 seed in the playoffs and the defending League Champion will not have a chance to repeat.
So, pay no attention to ESPN’s Final Standings and Playoff Seeding Numbers. Because of the way it worked out both Wild Card teams are from the same Division I have set up the playoffs so that the two divisions will not meet until the Championship Game as in the past.
—
Brian Bogardus
Commissioner
End Zone Entourage FFL
Owner/Director of Player & Personnel
Purple WhalesFor reference I’ve attached a zip file that includes two spreadsheets League Standings (with pre and post wing flap data) and The Gregory Variations (which sounds like a Big Bang Theory episode title.)
