I always thought Trump could curtail democratic elections without the excuse of war … by relying on a convenient terrorist attack instead.

He knew the secrets: blame your tools and be the same religion as your bosses. He was also, to his credit, a fantastic softball player, which helped the company team win the championship every year.

Where did I say yellowjackets were bees?

They already like to have fun by attacking sailboats. Orcas are comrades!

Yellowjackets can sting the fuck out of you multiple times, too. I got stung by two of them last summer and then they somehow got inside my t-shirt and stung me a bunch more times before I made it inside and flung my shirt off. After waiting half an hour for the pain to subside, I picked up my t-shirt to put it back on and the two yellowjackets fell out of it, still alive. Fortunately they were as surprised as I was and I was able to stomp them before they stung me again.

Ooooooooh what a lucky man … he-ee was ^{was was was}

And this wasn’t even his biggest disaster as long as you don’t count the potential for death. The baseball-throwing gig was just him and his manager; for his next project he led a team of five developers that turned three months into three years and never produced working software. The only revenue it ever produced was an initial $50K from the client that was later refunded to preempt a lawsuit. For the project he chose Ruby-on-Rails despite the fact that neither he nor anybody else on the team - nor anybody else in the entire state for that matter - had any experience with RoR. I have to give him credit, though: he was a true Renaissance Man in the sense that he could fuck up a project in any language or platform.

We got hired by a company that was developing a remote-controlled baseball launching machine. The machine itself was just the standard two spinning wheels (although the max rotational speed of 125 mph was a lot for this sort of thing), but it could also pivot 360 degrees and also angle itself between straight up and 45 degrees down towards the ground, so it was capable of simulating any hit ball in baseball. The idea was that you would put this machine at home plate and then the coach could walk out among the players and use the remote (which was a Windows Mobile PDA) to generate any kind of hit, like a grounder to short or a pop fly to right field etc. Because the wheels could be independently controlled, you could put any kind of spin you wanted on a ball by having one wheel spinning faster than the other.

Really a cool device and a cool project, but my coworker who got the gig was a remarkably terrible programmer who spent more than a year fucking things up in various ways. At one point, for example, he spent three months trying to develop a Physics engine to control where the ball went, despite the fact that a) he knew nothing about Physics, and b) the Physics of a spinning baseball is actually incredibly complicated and well beyond the processing power of a PDA circa 2005. Not to mention that the balls used varied tremendously in how old and scuffed up they were, which would have defeated any attempt to calculate where they were going with any kind of real precision.

Despite being well over budget and past the original schedule, he had things sort of working (sometimes) and the client asked him to produce a variant of the software that would let the machine be used by Little League coaches. My coworker in addition to writing the version to scale back the speeds appropriately, also decided to completely change the API that was used to communicate with the machine. Previously, the speeds had been specified by short integer values between 0 and 32768, but he decided it would be better to use floating-point values between 0 and 1. All well and good, except his way of dealing with the huge amount of compiler errors this generated was to cast all the hard-coded short int values as floats and clamp the result between 0.0 and 1.0.

As bad as this was, he also decided to test this version - for the first time - on a field with actual Little Leaguers (in his defense - but only slightly - we rarely had access to the actual machine itself, so proper testing was always difficult). The coach sent the command for a slow grounder to the shortstop. This should have produced a horizontal ball with about a 30 mph speed on the bottom wheel and 35 mph on the top wheel to give it some topspin. Instead, his hard-code int values were about 10000 and 12000, which got cast and clamped to 1.0 by the API call - in other words, maximum speed (125 mph) on both wheels. This ejected a ball with no spin going 125 mph, the most deadly knuckleball in human history (human pitchers throw knucklers at maybe 50 mph and they’re nearly impossible to hit or even catch). At least he had the angle and azimuth “right” so this was fired straight at the shortstop! Had it hit him, the kid for sure would have badly concussed and very possibly killed, but fortunately it sailed just over his head.

This was my entire 25-year career. No way in hell would I want to watch a show like that.

Although if there were a show based on my career, I’m sure the highest ratings would be the show where my coworker fires a 125 mph knuckle ball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. It was the only time in my career when I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between my boss and the client.

Being single and childless is the best decision I ever made in life.

I am single and childless. A few years I started driving a school bus - it has made me simultaneously regret never having kids and thrilled to the fucking core that I never had kids.

Castlemates.

They’re all here already. That’s who’s been propping up his real estate since the '90s.

I used to take my cat to an old horse vet out in the country. Like, he had literal horse stables for when horses would come in, and I’m pretty sure the dude was in his 90s because he’d opened his practice in the 1950s. He had to give her some medicine one time and I said he wouldn’t be able to give it to her in pill form because she was very resistant to being given pills, like bite-your-brain-off resistant. He said “son, I’ve been pilling cats for decades; I won’t have any problem giving her a pill.”

He ended up needing multiple bandaids and had to give her an injection, and she was only a six pound cat. I was never more proud of her than that day.

I take care of my elderly parents and they would not last very long without me. I have fears of what could happen to me but they’re greatly compounded by having people dependent on me. I’m so glad I don’t have any children, at least.

All my life Spring has always been a happy time for me. This one has just sucked, though, even though the weather has been near-perfect.

And it’s not like withholding some tax revenues would have any effect on Republican spending. Despite their bullshit “fiscal conservatism” rhetoric, they’ve had no qualms whatsoever about running enormous deficits for more than half a century now. A tax strike would just produce more debt and give Republicans ammo to blame it all on Democrats.

Most people have their federal tax withheld by their employers and do their taxes in order to get back their overpayment. Are we all going to not do our taxes and leave that overpayment in the government’s coffers? Are employers going to stop doing the withholding? Neither scenario is very likely.

I used to hang out with behavioral psychology grad students (BF Skinner types) who did a lot of research with pigeons. They transported the birds head-down in juice pitchers with air holes punched at the bottom; they just held the pitcher up to the cage and the bird would jump into it, sometimes so hard they would knock themselves out. They loved that lever-pressing shit - it helped that they were kept at 80% of their normal food intake to maximize the reinforcing effect of the pellets.

I bicycle past a catholic church that has a banner that says “JESUS WELCOMES YOU WITH OPEN ARMS” and a drawing of Jesus nailed on the cross. I’m like … wait a minute, is that actually a joke? Jesus’ arms are open because they’re nailed to a piece of wood?

And yet having sacrificed himself, he’s now back hanging out with his Dad in heaven and having a great time. That’s not a “sacrifice”, it’s more like a bad time at summer camp.