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FUN: Keep calm … and … May the Fourth be with you
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
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Posted by reinkefj
FUN: Remembering when I was a “Miles Chaser”
Thursday, April 14, 2022Bitcoin Songsheet: Airline Miles Are The Original Altcoins
Airline miles are the original altcoin, allowing zombie companies to issue
value for nothing while encouraging people to be “Miles Chasers.”
Jimmy Song
Apr 11, 2022
*** begin quote ***
Confessions of a Miles Chaser
I used to be one of those Miles Chasers. I’d spend an hour looking for a way to earn miles so I could get the equivalent of $8 in miles. Somehow, it never registered that I was giving myself a job at $8/hr. The sadder thing is that the work didn’t really benefit anybody or build anything. It was as productive as doomscrolling through Facebook. Unfortunately, Miles Chasing is a hard habit to break because of the scarcity mentality that’s so common to fiat money: You can take the miles from my cold, dead hands.
*** end quote ***
I was once a “miles chaser”, but I never bought into the credit card offers and other ”extra miles” gimmicks.
I had a job at AT&T where I was doing database trying for a new footprint side roll out. I had to visit an absurd number of cities in — as I remember it — in 8 week window. The United plan had some number of miles and “segments” for a few week in Hawaii including free round trip first class tickets for two people. Getting miles was the “easy part”; segment were much harder. Reading the “rules”, a non-stop counted as one segment, but stops along the route counted as segments. Since I was allowed to chose my flights, I took the roll out schedule and figured out how to do the training and collect the required number of segments. Laugh! (Just tell me the rules and I’ll figure it out.) So I was doing two cities a week Monday / Tuesday in City #1 and then Thursday / Friday in City #2. So Sunday night I went Trenton to Pittsbugh to O’Hare then proceeding to City #1. On Wednesday I’d fly from City #1 to City #2; non-stop unless I needed more segments. And finally on Friday night, inbound to home from City #2 to O’Hare, Pittsburgh, and Trenton. Laugh! No problem. Then Frau Reinke and I went to Hawaii via LA and San Fran with side trips to Las Vegas and Reno.
Made it all worthwhile. Got a great appraisal for doing the training with a raise, bonus, and promotion. No much of a life for those 8 weeks but everything in life was a trade off. I even got kudos for “saving travel money” since the price of direct flights at the time was about triple my connectors.
It was a great “life hack” and I learned to always study the rules.
Laugh!
I never used or collected “miles” after that.
Laugh!
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FUN: Capturing a getaway eagle
Wednesday, October 6, 2021https://gizmodo.com/kodiak-the-eagle-has-been-captured-after-week-long-adve-1847792273
Kodiak the Eagle Has Been Captured After Week-Long Adventure in Pittsburgh
Preliminary veterinary tests suggest the bird is healthy and uninjured.
By George Dvorsky
Yesterday 10:03AM
*** begin quote ***
On Sunday, October 3, a National Aviary team spotted Kody at a residence in Pine Township following reports of the bird loitering nearby. Using “professional falconry techniques and equipment,” the team was “able to safely retrieve Kody and bring him back home,” according to a National Aviary tweet. Apparently this entails a large net and running towards the eagle as quickly as possible.
*** end quote ***
Pretty funny to watch the guy chasing the bird. Good think the bird wasn’t hurt or anyone else.
I’m not so sure if I would want to be that close to one big bird. Especially if it was mad!
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FUN: White House Fence
Sunday, July 11, 2021https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3975231/posts
White House Fence
Three contractors bid to fix a broken fence at the White House. One is from Chicago, another is from Kentucky and the third is from New Orleans. All three go with a White House official to examine the fence.
The New Orleans contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil.
“Well,” he says, “I figure the job will run about $9,000. That’s $4,000 for materials, $4,000 for my crew and $1,000 profit for me.”
The Kentucky contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, “I can do this job for $7,000. That’s $3,000 for materials, $3,000 for my crew and $1,000 profit for me.”
The Chicago contractor doesn’t measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, “$27,000.”
The official, incredulous, says, “You didn’t even measure like the other guys. How did you come up with such a high figure?”
“The Chicago contractor whispers back, “$10,000 for me, $10,000 for you, and we hire the guy from Kentucky to fix the fence.”
“Done!” replies the government official.
And that, my friends, is how the Government Stimulus plan worked.
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FUN: From the “why can’t they keep drugs out of prison” file!
Sunday, May 23, 2021https://www.boredpanda.com/people-share-dumbest-school-rules/
#28
My highschool had “coordinates”, not a uniform. But they stopped selling the shorts like a decade before I started there… So me and a bunch of buddies tracked down used pairs and started wearing them.
Next year, shorts were banned outright… So me and a bunch of buddies on the rugby team started wearing skirts, because the rules said skirts were acceptable, but didn’t specify gender. So you had a bunch of guys with hairy, hairy legs walking around in skirts we deliberately hiked up a little to show some thigh.
Shorts were allowed again in a week.
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FUN: Ever hear of “cork ball”? I hadn’t.
Wednesday, May 19, 2021In: Health & Sports, Sports
Brett and Kate McKay • May 6, 2021
Corkball: The Mutant Baseball Game That’s a St. Louis Tradition
*** begin quote ***
Welcome to corkball: a mutant baseball game hailing from the streets of St. Louis, that you just might want to import to your own neighborhood.
The Origins of Corkball
In the 1840s, Irish and German immigrants came pouring into St. Louis. Many of the latter brought beer recipes from Deutschland and opened breweries that mass-produced German lagers for the country’s growing population. While brewing companies like Anheuser-Busch were innovating beer-making with pasteurization and refrigeration, the employees at these breweries were making innovations to American baseball and created a version of the game that allowed them to play with a limited number of players, in a limited space, without the usual regulation equipment.
Legend has it that corkball got its start in an east St. Louis tavern sometime around 1900. Some bored, slightly drunk dude popped the cork bung off a beer barrel and wrapped some tape around it. He then tossed it to a drinking buddy who tried to hit it with a broomstick.
Boom!
Corkball was born.
The most significant difference between corkball and baseball was that corkball had no runners, so there were no bases. Because there were no bases or runners, men didn’t need a big space or many players to play corkball. They could technically get a corkball game going with just four total — two to a team.
*** begin quote ***
Ever hear of “cork ball”? I hadn’t.
Sounds like it could be a real winner.
Except for calling balls and strikes.
That injects subjective judgments.
Have to think about how to eliminate that.
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FUN: Never take your eyes off little kids!
Thursday, March 18, 2021Chinese girl gets stuck in claw machine after climbing inside to claim prizes
*** begin quote ***
A girl got stuck in a claw machine in northern China after she climbed inside to get her hands of the prizes inside.
The CCTV video, captured in the city of Hohhot in Inner Mongolia on March 14, shows a girl in a black dress climbing into a claw machine through the pickup hole.
After she grabbed a doll, she was trying to climb back out but could not manage it.
Her friend informed their parents and the workers at the arcade game centre were called to the site to open the claw machine door to free the girl.
*** end quote ***
Never take your eyes off little kids!
They are amazing.
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FUN: “Driving Ms. Crazies”
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Sadly, he is so impaired he shouldn’t have a license!
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FUN: Entitled “Karen” Mistakes Customer For An Employee, He Makes The Situation Hilarious For Himself
Thursday, July 2, 2020Ever been mistaken for an employee? If you have, it’s fine, everyone has. If you haven’t, it’s okay—nobody likes to accept it. But there’s a safe space to talk about hard things and it’s a subreddit called r/IDontWorkHereLady . It turns out, people assuming you’re a staff member is a thing.
Source: Entitled “Karen” Mistakes Customer For An Employee, He Makes The Situation Hilarious For Himself
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Laugh!
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FUN: Horses’ Asses control almost everything.
Friday, June 19, 2020History of Railroads
This may have been around before, so apologize if a rerun but thought it was both interesting and funny!
(FJR: It has but it’s timeless)
Railroad Tracks
The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.
Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?
Because the people who built the tram ways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So, who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.
Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
In other words, bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’, you may be exactly right.
Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank.
These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.
The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.
And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important!
Now you know, Horses’ Asses control almost everything.
Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn’t it??!!
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Credit to my “old” as opposed to my “older” and “oldest” friends.
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