What is the ugliest piece of furniture you can buy? A sofa bed! What is the most uncomfortable sofa? A sofa bed! What is the most uncomfortable bed? A sofa bed! What is the piece of furniture most hazardous to your health? A sofa bed! What is the most difficult piece of furniture to dispose of? A sofa bed! Given the foregoing why has our household been graced by three different sofa beds? Why did we have two sofa beds at the same time in an apartment? Why did I venture to single-handedly move a sofa bed from one floor to another and consequently adopt a chiropractor as a lifelong friend? To adequately answer these questions would require the services of Tony Soprano’s Dr. Melfi. On the other hand was it just to impress our young granddaughters so that during their visits we could announce that that they were going to sleep in a magic bed? "Abracadabra , Grandpa is going to turn this sofa into a bed"! I must admit they were impressed but our granddaughters are young ladies now and have relegated magic beds to childhood memories. Our sofa bed reigns in our living room and thwarts every attempt to come up with an attractive furniture arrangement. It hasn’t exposed its inner workings in years. So why do we still have a sofa bed? I guess I’m just too cheap to have it moved out and replaced with a real sofa! That’s what Dr. Melfi would say.
10/25/07
About Sofa Beds
What is the ugliest piece of furniture you can buy? A sofa bed! What is the most uncomfortable sofa? A sofa bed! What is the most uncomfortable bed? A sofa bed! What is the piece of furniture most hazardous to your health? A sofa bed! What is the most difficult piece of furniture to dispose of? A sofa bed! Given the foregoing why has our household been graced by three different sofa beds? Why did we have two sofa beds at the same time in an apartment? Why did I venture to single-handedly move a sofa bed from one floor to another and consequently adopt a chiropractor as a lifelong friend? To adequately answer these questions would require the services of Tony Soprano’s Dr. Melfi. On the other hand was it just to impress our young granddaughters so that during their visits we could announce that that they were going to sleep in a magic bed? "Abracadabra , Grandpa is going to turn this sofa into a bed"! I must admit they were impressed but our granddaughters are young ladies now and have relegated magic beds to childhood memories. Our sofa bed reigns in our living room and thwarts every attempt to come up with an attractive furniture arrangement. It hasn’t exposed its inner workings in years. So why do we still have a sofa bed? I guess I’m just too cheap to have it moved out and replaced with a real sofa! That’s what Dr. Melfi would say.
10/22/07
The Curse Of Chief Wahoo
Another baseball season is over, at least for the Cleveland Indians. How do you blow a 3-1 lead in the American League Championship Series? Poor pitching, poor hitting, stage fright, shaky coaching - all of the above. The real culprit however is Chief Wahoo! The Chief continues to curse the Indians. He wants out and the sooner the Indians management realizes this, the sooner meltdowns in championship play will be over. I for one have disposed of any paraphernalia I possessed with the racist Indian's logo. Long live the the script I.
10/17/07
Democrats See The Light
The Democrats will not push for a genocide resolution after all. This has to be an embarrassment for Pelosi. Hopefully it is a lesson learned for the Democrats and they will now stick to legislating. Shrewd leadership is needed by the Democratic Congressional majority now! We cannot wait until the 2008 elections.
10/15/07
Torre Should Tell Steinbrenner To Shove It!
Joe Torre is a very successful major league baseball manager and a classy individual to boot. There is no way he should be enduring the debasing speculation as to whether or not Steinbrenner will have him back. My advice to Torre?Don't wait for Steinbrenner to decide whether or not you should continue to manage the Yankees. Joe you are 67 years old and I imagine well set financially so just tell Steinbrenner to shove it and move on. Don't give the Steinbrenner clan the option of deciding whether you should be back or not. Don't let your affection for the Yankees tempt you to to endure another year which is bound to be a repeat of this year. I'm sure you don't share my opinion about the Yankees but they are not the Yankees of Gehrig, Ruth, Berra and Rizzuto. The aura is not real, its all marketing.
10/9/07
New York Fans Are Cry Babies
Reading New York accounts of the New York Yankee's defeat at the hands of the Cleveland Indians one gets the impression that the Indians won by default and not by being the better team. Some writers imply that the gnats from Lake Erie won game two. Of course these gnats were released by Indian fans after being trained to annoy the Yankees not the Indians. The fact is that the Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain was a wimp! Of course the Indians were fortunate to win the other two games because the vaunted Yankee sluggers were slumbering. Ridiculous! The Indian pitchers made mince meat out of the Yankees. The Yankees were out managed and outplayed by a superior Cleveland team. Cleveland deserves to be playing for the pennant! As for the Yankee fans, they must finally realize that their raucousness can no longer intimidate visiting teams. The overrated lore of Yankee invincibility has been finally put to rest. Incidentally what happened to the other New York team?
10/6/07
GE's Hate /Love Affair With LEDs
The General Electric Lighting business shut down its Solid State Lamp ( their name for light emitting diodes) manufacturing plant in 1975 . The cash cow for the lighting business was then and probably even today the sale of incandescent bulbs. Now all has come full circle. Thirty -two years later GE has announced a global restructuring plan to reduce production of lower efficiency incandescent light bulbs. Why? A Slate article tells all:
Edison's Dimming Bulbs - How Wal-Mart and the government are killing the incandescent light bulb.
Guess what? GE now predicts that solid state light emitting diodes ( not Solid State Lamps) may become tomorrow's principal lighting source. When it came to solid state technology GE never got it right ( visit my Semiconductor Reminiscences web site). Once a leading producer of diodes , rectifiers, transistors and integrated circuits it bowed out of the semiconductor field when the going got too competitive.
So it was with light emitting diodes . Nick Holonyak invented the first visible spectrum light emitting diode in 1962 while at the former GE Electronics Laboratory in Syracuse, NY. A May 23, 2005 Business Week article reported that "Nick Holonyak's LEDs may soon make incandescent and flourescent bulbs obsolete".
GE piloted light emitting diodes at its Lamp Division in Cleveland, Ohio. They called them Solid State Lamps even though one of its researchers invented LEDs ( a marketing decision which reflected misplaced ego) and launched a manufacturing facility in 1972 in Chesterland , Ohio. The facility was shuttered in 1975 (Solid State Lamps were dragging down the bottom line of its parent Speciality Lamps Department). Solid state technology and incandescent lamp making technology just did not mix or better yet solid state technology was too foreign to the country's leading producer of incandescent lamps (GE is back in the LED business - not solid state lamps- through a subsidiary called GELcore). Now that GE has declared incandescent lamp making a 100 year old technology implying that it should be put out to pasture, perhaps it is finally ready to embrace a technology which is forty-five years old.
Edison's Dimming Bulbs - How Wal-Mart and the government are killing the incandescent light bulb.
Guess what? GE now predicts that solid state light emitting diodes ( not Solid State Lamps) may become tomorrow's principal lighting source. When it came to solid state technology GE never got it right ( visit my Semiconductor Reminiscences web site). Once a leading producer of diodes , rectifiers, transistors and integrated circuits it bowed out of the semiconductor field when the going got too competitive.
So it was with light emitting diodes . Nick Holonyak invented the first visible spectrum light emitting diode in 1962 while at the former GE Electronics Laboratory in Syracuse, NY. A May 23, 2005 Business Week article reported that "Nick Holonyak's LEDs may soon make incandescent and flourescent bulbs obsolete".
GE piloted light emitting diodes at its Lamp Division in Cleveland, Ohio. They called them Solid State Lamps even though one of its researchers invented LEDs ( a marketing decision which reflected misplaced ego) and launched a manufacturing facility in 1972 in Chesterland , Ohio. The facility was shuttered in 1975 (Solid State Lamps were dragging down the bottom line of its parent Speciality Lamps Department). Solid state technology and incandescent lamp making technology just did not mix or better yet solid state technology was too foreign to the country's leading producer of incandescent lamps (GE is back in the LED business - not solid state lamps- through a subsidiary called GELcore). Now that GE has declared incandescent lamp making a 100 year old technology implying that it should be put out to pasture, perhaps it is finally ready to embrace a technology which is forty-five years old.
10/3/07
American Style Ayatollahs
The word is that a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate in an attempt to stop Giuliani. Giuliani’s offense , he supports abortion rights. The threat came out of a meeting on Saturday 9/29/07 in Salt Lake City involving the secretive Council for National Policy which includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps the most influential of the group, as well as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and dozens of other politically-oriented conservative Christians. Almost everyone present expressed support for a written resolution that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”
Whether or not such a third party materializes ( great for the Democrats) is not important. What is important is that fundamental evangelical Christians are becoming a threat to American democracy. Increasingly religion is being injected into our politics. Increasingly candidates feel obliged to proclaim their faith. The evangelical political agenda is bent on destroying our religious freedom and spits in the face of our Constitution. Fundamental evangelical Christians prey upon the ignorant who find it too difficult to probe the meaning of life and defer to an American style Ayatollah.
I feel threatened, not by terrorists but by religious zealots! Who is going to stop them? Certainly not the Republicans whose base is dominated by right wing conservatives and religious nuts. Maybe the Democrats can in spite of events of the past few months where Democratic candidates fell over themselves to pledge allegiance to some kind of faith. Hopefully this was for show rather than substance. But isn’t this the problem? Why must anyone cow tow to a religious movement in order to successfully run for office? Before its all over it may take an assault on our liberties to awaken the citizenry. More to the point once our entrepreneurs find their ability to make money being diminished by American Ayatollahs there will be an uprising returning us to the separation of church and state.
Whether or not such a third party materializes ( great for the Democrats) is not important. What is important is that fundamental evangelical Christians are becoming a threat to American democracy. Increasingly religion is being injected into our politics. Increasingly candidates feel obliged to proclaim their faith. The evangelical political agenda is bent on destroying our religious freedom and spits in the face of our Constitution. Fundamental evangelical Christians prey upon the ignorant who find it too difficult to probe the meaning of life and defer to an American style Ayatollah.
I feel threatened, not by terrorists but by religious zealots! Who is going to stop them? Certainly not the Republicans whose base is dominated by right wing conservatives and religious nuts. Maybe the Democrats can in spite of events of the past few months where Democratic candidates fell over themselves to pledge allegiance to some kind of faith. Hopefully this was for show rather than substance. But isn’t this the problem? Why must anyone cow tow to a religious movement in order to successfully run for office? Before its all over it may take an assault on our liberties to awaken the citizenry. More to the point once our entrepreneurs find their ability to make money being diminished by American Ayatollahs there will be an uprising returning us to the separation of church and state.
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