illth.org » Work

G+ All the President’s Facepalms Summary

LHP — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 23:05:09 +0000

Warren G Harding: "You had better."

Over at G+ I’ve been collecting photographs of all the president’s facepalms. Yesterday’s discovery of a suitable candidate for Woodrow Wilson wrapped up all of the 20th and 21st Century presidents.

G+ doesn’t include robust text formatting or link listing tools, so here’s the roster, with links back to the relevant G+ post:

20th Century

Theodore Roosevelt Note: Not a true Facepalm. Just TR being TR. Bonus TR #1. Bonus TR Caption Contest. Bonus TR Gallery.
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson Note: Not a true Woodrow Wilson. Just a professional facsimile.
Warren G. Harding Finger pointing Bonus.
Calvin Coolidge Note: Not a true Facepalm. Just Old Cal in his Indian Chief get-up.
Herbert Hoover
Franklin D. Roosevelt Note: Not a true Facepalm. Just an old guy looking at a globe. A big globe.
Harry S. Truman Note: Not a true Faceplam. Just Harry S and a bunch of Greek generals shaking hands over a globe.
Dwight D. Eisenhower Helen Keller Bonus.
John F. Kennedy
Lyndon B. Johnson Bonus #1. Bonus #2.
Richard M. Nixon
Gerald R. Ford
James Carter
Ronald Reagan
George H. W. Bush Note: Not a true Facepalm. Just evidence of the Crack Epidemic.
William J. Clinton Note: Not a true Facepalm. Just Slick Willy giggling about something.

21st Century

George W. Bush
Barack Obama Note: The Facepalm that started them all!

Chocolate Covered Peeps

LHP — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 02:12:44 +0000

Chocolate Covered Peeps are turning up everywhere (google ‘em) and I just want to point out that CCPs have been a tradition hereabouts for about a decade.

I’m a terrible monetizer.

Grim Work

LHP — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:35:44 +0000

Robespierre, a frequent contributor at Fodor’s Travel Talk Forums online, suddenly stopped posting to the boards in July of last year. NPR’s All Things Considered did an essay on why he stopped and the reactions of his fellow forum posters.

Robespierre died. People he knew online — friends and acquaintances — knew only that he’d stopped posting.

Clearly there is a need for several web 2.0 services to fill this niche.

Notification of one’s demise sent to one’s online communities, automatically, via iBit, the Online Obituary service.

Funeria to host one’s online funeral services.

The bits and pieces of one’s online persona collected from Flickr and MetaFilter and twitter and World of Warcraft and so on and deposited and cataloged at Deathbook, the reliquary updated over time as the service’s worms crawl through the deceased’s decaying virtual corpse, grimly digesting all the accumulated errata and depositing it in DB’s vast servers, where, perhaps, the accumulation will fertilize the lives and thoughts of future visitors.

If Conrad Deletes This

LHP — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:57:53 +0000

Hey Man.

I’m a little sore that my comment to your Germs post didn’t make it through moderation. Sure it was rambling and not entirely relevant, but I thought the link to Dan Graham’s documentary Rock My Religion was mostly on target since it examines, among other things, the same era (although it does so through a New York camera lens).

In any case, the link is entirely relevant here since Sonic Youth contributed to the film’s soundtrack.

Speaking of Sonic Youth, I saw that a Ciccone Youth track was included on Brand Neu!, a compiliation of tributes and covers to the early 1970s German noise rock band Neu!
Funny story about me and Neu!

Last summer I helped my friend John Scane build 14 plywood recessed spotlight housings. The housings were simple five sided boxes with holes cut in one side for the illumination to escape and attachment points for the light fixtures and the rods from which they would be suspended from the ceiling. The boxes were to be installed at Pharmaka, the Downtown LA arts co-op Scane co-founded.

Here’s the tricky part. Pharmaka had been chosen for one of those Cable TV renovation shows, something green on Planet Green, and the boxes needed to be finished and prepped for paint before the next day’s shoot.

It was a long, long day in the shop. We loaded up the van at 1:00am or so, made the run from Scane’s shop in Long Beach to the gallery in LA, made the delivery and turned for home. We were punchy as hell, halfway into our Red Bull boosters, enjoying the muscle ache and fatigue that comes only after you’ve pushed yourself further than you thought you could go and done more than you set out to do, when, from near the chatter of old tires on cracked freeway and inside the shush of wind on steel and glass, there came a steady driving drum beat, simple and insistent, and a steady driving guitar note, chikk-chikk, chikk-chikk, chikk-chikk, on and on, then another guitar came in from somewhere over the top, soaring near and far, as simple and insistent as the rhythm underneath.

I turned up the volume. The music went on and on and so did we, rolling down the night-vacant freeway under the soaring 105 Freeway overpass and on to the lights of the harbor.

We flew like that for ten minutes or so, the song lifting us off the road and out of our bodies and then the song faded back under the wheel sound and wind noise and another began and it wasn’t the same and I said, “Goddamnit, man. Why don’t the DJs ever tell you the name of the song when you need to know?”

The next morning I visited KCRW‘s website and browsed the playlist and eventually figured out we had heard Neu!’s “Hallo Gallo“. From 1972 or so. How in the world had I missed it for so long?

IHWE Competition!

LHP — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:03:18 +0000

Wily Kenyans…

We live in the age of plastic doodads and gadgets. Face it, you probably don’t have a single wooden item anywhere on your desk top right now. And, we think that’s a shame.

Safaripod!

Hardwood Electrics

LHP — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 23:22:06 +0000

Inching forward.

Vandegrift

LHP — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 20:53:43 +0000

Yesterday the USS Vandegrift became the first US Navy ship to visit Vietnam since the Vietnam War.
I cut my left thumb with a pneumatic grinder on the upper level (port side) of the Vandegrift‘s engine room when I worked on the ship as an apprentice pipefitter in the early 1990s. We had finished a piping run in that part of the space and were moving to the starboard side, and my job was to switch off the air back at the main valve, bleed the air hose, disconnect the whip and the grinder, re-route the air hose over to the other side of the engine room, reconnect everything, and turn the air back on up at the main valve. I was on ‘bleed the air hose,’ which I did by running the grinder at full speed until it stopped because there was no more air in the hose to make it go. I wasn’t wearing gloves, and with the grinder in my right hand I let the machine whirr and my mind wander — What an amazing piece of machinery! Look at the size of that engine! Look at that shaft! Look at all the shit they have to control it! — until “shffft…” the grinder wheel was into my flesh. Blood spurted onto my coveralls and fell in glops onto the floor and my boots. As quick as I could, before I made the situation worse by looking at what I had done to myself, I pulled a rag out of my back pocket and wrapped it around my thumb. I had no idea how much damage I had done, but I imagined it was considerable. I had been using the tool to grind at slag on welds joining pipes and fittings, a job the grinder handled easily, a job that was far more difficult than grinding my thumb into a stump.
The ship was at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, and every morning, I and everybody else assigned to it rode a cramped bus from Southwest Marine (our employer) over to the ship. Working at the Navy Yard was unpleasant because you had to show up early to catch the bus, and because there was always a line for tools, though there was no guarantee the tools you needed would be available once you finally got up to the counter, and the Navy was right there looking over your shoulder every minute, and there was nothing to buy off the lunch truck and you couldn’t leave the Navy Yard to find something better, and at the end of the day you got home late cause you had to ride the bus back to Southwest Marine. While I was there, I did not notice very many happy shipyard workers at the Navy Yard.
There was a cargo container on the pier that we used as a tool shed, and this is where we went if we needed pneumatic tools, or a new pair of gloves, or emergency first aid.
After the wrap job I climbed five or six decks up to the main deck, holding my thumb and my arm over my head whenever I could. The throbbing began when I reached the flight deck, where a gangway lead down to the pier. I got in line behind a dozen or so guys waiting their turn outside the Tool Shed to check out tools or retrieve parts special ordered from the yard. It was mid-morning, and except for a pair of shipfitters at the front of the line, nobody talked. Shipfitters seemed to think they were at the top of the shipbuilding food chain, and they were, a status earned by their skill with cutting torches and arc-welders, the blunt massiveness of the pieces of steel upon which they regularly worked, and their position at the heart of the industry. Shipfitters built ships, everybody else supported shipfitters (the carpenters, the riggers, the administrators), or filled with conveniences the ships that the shipfitters had made (the electricians, the pipefitters). Like everybody else in line, they were dirty and tired and unhappy about working at the Navy Yard, but they were shipfitters, so they laughed and chatted while the rest were sullen.
After a moment, the guy ahead of me looked back to see who had joined the line, and after getting a glimpse of my bloody rag, said, “Here, you go on ahead.” Then the guy ahead of him looked back and did the same thing and so on until I was standing behind the shipfitters. The tool shed attendant was nowhere in sight, was probably back somewhere in the racks of tools and supplies locating something only the shipfitters understood.
“Look here,” said someone behind me. “Make way.”
The shipfitters turned quickly upon the line and glared back at the others, then at me.
“Cut myself,” I said, holding forth my hand in its bloody rag. “With a grinder.”
“Well hell! Why didn’t you say so?” They grabbed hold of my shoulders and pulled me up to the counter.
“Tool Man!” yelled one of the shipfitters. “Forget about my calipers and get out here quick. We got a man hurt!”
“How bad is it?” asked the other shipfitter.
“Little cut,” I said. I was feeling important. “A coupla stitches.”
“Shit, with all that blood I’d say you lost the tip, at least.”
The Tool Man, whose name was Jefferson or Jasperson appeared from the shadows of his store room. “How many times have I told you not to call me ‘Tool Ma…’” He paused and looked at my hand and then at my face. “Ahh hell. You’ve only had that grinder since this morning and already you let it get the best of you.”
I shrugged.
“Nevermind. Lemme see.”
I peeled off the rag and the Tool Man took a look and pronounced that I’d need a couple of stitches, that was all, a development that seemed to disappoint everybody who was involved in getting me to the front of the line, especially the shipfitter who had asked me how badly I was hurt. “I was there when that painter lost his head from the sandblaster,” he said to the line. “I was standing right across the road, having a smoke. He tried to pull the top off the tank while it was still full of air and sand. ‘BLAM!’ Shot the lid right off, and everything above his shoulders went with it.”
The Tool Man cleaned me up and half an hour later I rode back to the shipyard in a pickup with the leadman whose job it was to ferry parts and communications (and injured workers) between our yard and the Navy Yard. The nurse gave me two stitches and in return I gave her a cupful of urine for the drug test.

Occupational Hazards in the Front Office

LHP — Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:13:21 +0000

Coal miners in dungarees and sweaty tees get black lung. Coal miners’ bosses, in their white collar shirts and freshly pressed ties, get bobble eye (and eventually glaucoma and blindness).