Isolated Blurt Thread

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Postcards from Hell: Day 33

Not everything is about you. I know you are incapable of understanding this, given your disorder, but I shall say it anyway.

You do not have the right to tell me how I feel. Standing up for myself by attempting to explain exactly how I feel (instead of allowing you to tell me how I feel) is not an attack on you. I know you are incapable of understanding this, given your disorder, but I shall say it anyway.

I forget sometimes that you are not normal, that you are incapable of the most normal conversational events; I forget that you must make every situation about you. I forget that you have no empathy, that you must always be right, and that you will take any semblance of disagreement with your point of view as an out-and-out full-frontal attack. I know you are incapable of understanding this, given your disorder, but I shall say it anyway.

You are the master manipulator, and I will not be manipulated. I will not be made to feel guilty over your numerous perceived slights. Not anymore. I know you are incapable of understanding this, given your disorder, but I shall say it anyway, now, and often, until my final day in hell.
 
is it so wrong to give into self-pity every once in awhile?

It's okay for other people, but I have to be perfect all the time, never falter, never fail.
 
Some days I feel like I made the right choice and that things will eventually work out. Some days I feel like I made the worst decision of my life and wonder if things will ever get better. I wish I knew which one is true so I can figure out what to do next.
 
I get the feeling that my kung fu instructor is trying to gear me up for my blackbelt test, when I just tested for gray back in October or September. I think I want a bit more of a lead-up time for this...
 
It was just starting to flurry snow when I got to the office at 7:00 this morning. When I looked out the window at 9:30 the road was starting to get covered. that was my cue to leave. A mile up the road was completely covered.

It wasn't supposed to start snowing until 12:00 to 3:00pm.

And the roads in my town weren't covered at all. The town my office is in would have prevented me from getting home had I stayed much longer, and yet I feel guilty because it wasn't bad up here until, you guessed it, after 3:00pm...
 
Postcards from Hell: Day 38

A herd of elephants just charged through the room.




Too bad we aren't allowed to talk about elephants in the room.
 


Tosca !

It's today's Saturday afternoon broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera ( 1300 EST ).



3_Tosca_0320.jpg

http://www.operainfo.org/

Synopsis:
http://www.operainfo.org/broadcast/operaSynopsis.cgi?id=73&language=1

 
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I wish Lit would invest in some memory, or something, so these posts work a little faster. Faster! Faster! Faster! OMG! YES!
 
We have been receiving record amounts of snow this year, and we are due even more over two of the next three days... From Tuesday morning into Wednesday night... Help?
 
Dear Paperboy ( ;) ),

Just when I think you're the most amazing, delightful sexy boyfriend a lady could ask for...you up the ante. You melt me with something totally unexpected. I'm still smiling, sweetheart.

Signed,
Your Waitress ( ;) )
 
I have a radio which can receive weather reports from an alternate universe. The weather reporters are talking about snow related accidents all over this area. I look outside, and not a single flake of snow fell last night.

The "Groundhog Blizzard of 2011" is supposed to last through tomorrow evening, with up to 12" of snow. I'll believe it when (if) I see it.
 
Today/tonight is Imbloc or St Brigid's Day.

I ought to write another story in my series about the Goddess Brigid (who is no saint!).

Og
 
Went to put the dog out the back door which faces north. He said "Fuck you!" and ran back inside.
 
I bought some ebooks from eBay.

I received 3 DVDs which claim to be 200,000 books. I have loaded 2 of the 3 disks to my computer and I have found a large number of books that are obviously still copyright.

I can't open some of the files because they are in formats that my system doesn't recognise, but I have thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of books in .pdf, .txt, and .rtf files.

I'm concerned that I have bought many copyright books for next to nothing.

Og
 

You probably haven't heard of him but he was one of the last pioneers of rotary aviation. He was a classic American inventor and tinkerer; unfortunately, they don't make them anymore.

Kaman Corporation was a large supplier of helos to the Armed Services until a fellow by the name of Lyndon Johnson came along. Lyndon had a Texas company named Bell Helicopter as a constituent; all of a sudden— for some strange reason— Kaman didn't win new contracts.


____________________

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/business/03kaman.html?


Charles H. Kaman, Helicopter Innovator, Dies at 91
By MOTOKO RICH

Charles H. Kaman, an innovator in the development and manufacture of helicopter technology and, following a wholly different passion, the inventor of one of the first electrically amplified acoustic guitars, died on Monday in Bloomfield, Conn. He was 91.

Mr. Kaman, who had suffered several strokes over the last decade, died of complications of pneumonia, his daughter, Cathleen Kaman, said. He lived in Bloomfield.

Mr. Kaman (pronounced ka-MAN) was a 26-year-old aeronautical engineer when he founded the Kaman Aircraft Company in 1945 in the garage of his mother’s home in West Hartford, Conn. By the time he retired as chairman in 2001, he had built the Kaman Corporation into a billion-dollar concern that distributes motors, pumps, bearings and other products as well as making helicopters and their parts.

Within the aerospace industry, Mr. Kaman is best known for inventing dual intermeshing helicopter rotors, which move in opposite directions, and for introducing the gas turbine jet engine to helicopters. The company’s HH-43 Huskie was a workhorse in rescue missions in the Vietnam War.

Mr. Kaman, a guitar enthusiast, also invented the Ovation guitar, effectively reversing the vibration-reducing technology of helicopters to create a generously vibrating instrument that incorporated aerospace materials into its rounded back. In the mid-1960s he created Ovation Instruments, a division of his company, to manufacture it.

The Ovation allows musicians to amplify their sound without generating the feedback that often comes from using microphones. It was popularized in the late 1960s by the pop and country star Glen Campbell, who played it on his television show, “The Glen Campbell Good Time Hour,” and who appeared in advertisements for the company. A long roster of rock and folk music guitarists began using it as well.

With his second wife, Roberta Hallock Kaman, Mr. Kaman founded the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation, which trains German shepherds as guide dogs for the blind and the police. Since 1981, Fidelco has placed 1,300 guide dogs in 35 states and four Canadian provinces, said Eliot D. Russman, the foundation’s executive director.

“It came down to the helicopters, guitars and dogs,” Mr. Kaman’s eldest son, C. William Kaman II, said in a telephone interview.

In addition to his daughter, Cathleen, an artist who is known professionally as Beanie Kaman, and his son William, Mr. Kaman is survived by another son, Steven; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Born on June 15, 1919, in Washington, Charles Huron Kaman was the only child of Charles William Kaman and Mabel Davis Kaman. As a teenager, he loved building model airplanes from balsa wood and tissue paper and flying them in indoor competitions. He had once hoped to be a professional pilot but abandoned that ambition because he was deaf in his right ear.

He received his bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the Catholic University of America in 1940. After graduating, he went to work at Hamilton Standard Propeller Corporation, a unit of United Aircraft. He soon met Igor Sikorsky, another pioneer in helicopter design, who ran United’s helicopter division and who inspired Mr. Kaman to begin developing his own parts.

One of his first inventions was the “servo-flap,” which could be added to the edges of a rotor blade to help stabilize a helicopter. But one of his greatest contributions was to introduce jet engines to helicopters.

“It gave them more power,” said Walter J. Boyne, chairman of the National Aeronautic Association and the author of numerous books on aviation. “Helicopters really moved into their own.”

Terry Fogarty, who worked closely with Mr. Kaman for nearly a decade developing the K-MAX “aerial truck,” said Mr. Kaman, who developed the first remote-control helicopter in 1957, envisioned an unmanned cargo helicopter that would take over the “dull, dirty and dangerous missions.”

The company is developing such a helicopter, based on the K-MAX, and has a contract to deploy it to the Marine Corps for use in Afghanistan.

Mr. Kaman married Helen Sylvander in 1945; they divorced in 1971. Later that year he married Roberta Hallock, who died last year.

Ms. Kaman recalled her father strumming different versions of the Ovation in a studio at home, trying to figure out how deep or shallow to make the rounded back to produce the best sound.

“That was his big gift to the three of us,” she said. “When he would come home, he would play guitar.”


800px-K-Max_Swiss.jpg



 
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Postcards from Hell: Day ??

There are levels to this purgatory. Of course there are! Why didn't I realize this earlier? I've traded one level of hell for another; I am unsure, however, if this is a lateral or vertical move. The cruise director has disappeared (no surprise). I don't believe a beverage cart is forthcoming, either.

This is, after all, hell.
 
I thought I had purged all politics, but it seems public policy and political action is in my blood after all. Dammit, mom.
 
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