You’ve Got To Be Kidding!

I was stumbling around the Internet a few days ago and I came upon an article with this title, The Most Disappointing Planes and Choppers in Aviation History. Of course, I read it top to bottom.

The article did have some strange looking Flying Machines. Rather than see each one as a failure I saw each one as an Experiment. Without mankind’s attempt to try and do something different we would still be pulling unstable carts full of our stuff that only had one wheel because no inventor had gone to the trouble to dare to try and invent the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th wheels.

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To my utter shock and amazement I found that the people who put together their list of what they considered to be Aviation Failures had included The Wright Flyer!

In case I just went right by what you know about aviation history, allow me to be more specific…

These IYI’s included the first airplane that was put together by Wilbur and Orville Wright! They actually included the machine that started everyone everywhere flying anywhere. Aghhhh!

Here is what these nut cases had to say about The Wright Flyer…

“Here is how the Smithsonian Institution describes the Wright Flyer: “the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard.” They did not mention that it could not last over 59 seconds mid-air. On top of that, it was hard to manage and covered only 852 feet. The aircraft only ever flew four times on the 17th of December 1903. Pilots just gave up on it after that.”

The point should not be that it was Hard To Control or it Only Flew 852 Feet or it Only Flew For 59 Seconds or it was Only Flown 4 Times and then Orville and Wilbur “gave up on it”!

They did not give up on it! They went back to the drawing board to put together the Apollo Moon Landing Program to get us to the moon and back only 66 years later.

The shortcomings pointed out above were not the end of the road. They were the shortcomings discovered on the beginning of the road.

Hey, IYI Guys, The Point is... It Flew!

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Other “failures” on the IYI Most Disappointing Blunders of Mankind List…

• The Model T Ford because it was not a 2020 Cadillac.
• The entire Apollo Program because it only went to the Moon and fell woefully short of making it to Mars.
• The Gutenberg Printing Press because it only printed one sheet at a time and could not hold a candle to the High Speed Printing Machine that puts out the New York Times.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe: Have you Googled “IYI”? If not, I’ll save you the trouble. It is the abbreviation of, “Intellectual Yet Idiot”.

Baltimore You Have Major Problems and We Are Gratified That You Are Taking Action to Address Your Problems…Or are we?...Or are you?

Baltimore’s Problems

Ø Baltimore violent crime has spun out of control in recent years.
>There were 342 homicides in Baltimore in 2017.
>This is the highest homicide count in the nation.
>2019 is the fifth year in a row that there have been more than 300 homicides and there is still more than a month remaining in 2019.
>To add insult to injury, the number of homicides is climbing in Baltimore while it’s falling around the rest of the country.

Ø If that’s not bad enough, the city has an astounding amount of poverty to go along with crushingly high taxes.

Ø Baltimore isn’t even offering much hope for future generations because it has some of the lowest-performing public schools in the country, despite the fact that the city annually spends about $16,000 per student.
>In 4^th and 8^th grade reading, only 13% of city’s students are considered proficient or advanced.
>In 4^th grade math, 14% were proficient.
>In 8^th grade math, 11% were proficient.

Ø To top it all off, the city is contending with a heaping helping of corruption.
>The past three Baltimore mayors have resigned in disgrace.
>Former Mayor Catherine Pugh, who at one time was billed as a “reformer”, resigned in May and has been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, seven counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and two counts of tax evasion.
>Pugh was originally caught in a scheme allegedly involving kickbacks for selling her children’s books to hospitals, in which she was able to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Baltimore Has Decided To “Fix” Something Else

Rather than addressing these serious problems, Baltimore’s politicians have opted for empty virtue-signaling. The residents of Baltimore are the ones left holding the bag, literally and figuratively because their leaders have decided to look right past all the above terrible and growing real problems and have Banned Plastic Bags.

That ought to do it…Or ought it do it?

This Blog Posting could end here but the Late Paul Harvey happens to be visiting Fella today and he is shouting at me to tell you the Rest of the Story.

The problem Ole Paul is shouting at me about is the fact that Bag Bans are not just annoying and inconvenient but they also add up to little more than Virtue-Signaling of being “Environmentally Conscious” but not actually Helping or Saving the Environment but only Brushing by it. There’s even evidence that such bans end up doing harm to the Environment.

A study by University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor in Australia found that banning plastic bags certainly caused customers to use fewer plastic shopping bags.

Warning: Some “Scientific Analysis” might stop right here and take solace in the Use Fewer Bags as Case Closed and Mission Accomplished.

Plastic Bag Bans Just Might Do More Harm Than Good…

Ø People begin to use other kinds of plastic bags to make up for the lost supply of the Banned Bags.

Ø The study found that in areas that had plastic Bag Bans, there was a surge in the use of the thicker 4-gallon bags, which use more plastic.

Ø Many customers actually reuse plastic bags for lining wastebaskets, among many other secondary uses but now they have to find something else to do these jobs.

Ø The laws also create a huge uptick in the use of Paper Bags, which—according to some research—are actually worse for the environment than Plastic Bags.

In the meantime, all the Baltimore Problems described in the 4 Bullet Points at the beginning of this Blog Posting are continuing to continue.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe: In the Warning above I put “Scientific Analysis” in quotes. Not all things out of the world of science are carved in stone. Science is always evolving. It’s called Progress. It should not be called Mistakes.

I am presently reading a book by Mike Rowe named The Way I Heard It. It is like the next iteration of The Rest of the Story.

I know you are tired of me by now, so I’ll try and be quick…

Ø One of the shows Mike Rowe hosts for the Science Channel is How the Universe Works.

Ø He is sometimes called into the studio to re-record a piece of a show already recorded because new information has been received that corrects/contradicts the Prior Recorded Science.

Ø One of the quotes that needed to be corrected was that there were “approximately one hundred billion galaxies in the known universe”.

Ø Within a week a new method of measuring the cosmos had led astronomers to revise the number of galaxies from 100 Billion (that’s 100 Thousand Million) to 2 Trillion (that’s 2 Thousand Billion).

No matter how you look at it, the first estimate was not close but it was Scientific Fact at some point in time.

The Youth Of Today Have It So Hard. I’m Glad I Have Advanced Beyond Their Pressure-Filled Age Level.

I just read another article about how today’s young people have it so hard. The article tried to convince me that they are under constant pressure to succeed and to survive, in the Dog Eat Dog world of today.

The picture that is painted of what they have to go through far surpasses anything faced by those who came and went before them…Or does it?

The article gave several examples to prove its They Got It Tough Contention…

• They have to cope with the constant pressure of having to keep their Smartphones charged. What could be worse than having a cell phone go dead right in the middle of a really important Tweet?
• How about the hour upon hour of laying in your bed unable to fall asleep worried about whether your mother had made a mistake when she only offered that Admission Official $100,000 to get you into that snotty Ivy League College instead or the $125,000 he had hinted might be a more “acceptable” figure. The way he had verbally underlined the word “acceptable” has really been keeping you on edge for days now.
• From personal experience I know the shock and horror of walking into a Jacuzzi with my Smartphone in the pocket of my swimming trunks. Actually this is probably worse than the What Could Be Worse Tweeting Catastrophe in the first bullet above.

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I was really beginning to Feel Modern Youth’s Pain when I started to think that maybe when compared to times past their pain may not be as painful as I think they think it is.

Imagine you are a Young, Skinny, Wiry Fellow Not Over 18 in the Spring of 1860 and you need a job badly. You need a job so badly that you respond to and accept the job offered by the following poster…

Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18.

Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily.

Orphans preferred.

Wages $25 per week.

You, young skinny man (you could not weigh over 125 pounds), have just become a Rider for the Pony Express!

• It was determined that a pony at full gallop could travel approximately 10 miles a day.
• You are expected to travel alone, day and night, regardless of weather.
• You could stop at one of the Pony Express Stations (approximately 10 miles apart) to switch ponies and get water.
• Only after traveling 75 to 100 miles could a rider switch out with another rider and rest.
• Since the riders would be traveling alone, they were subject to the elements and attacks from Wild Animals, Native Americans (back then they were Indians) and Bandits.
• Originally, the riders were armed with guns, but eventually most of the weapons were taken away to lighten the load. Speed of travel and carrying capacity were more important than the Skinny Riders.

There turned out to be some light at the end of the tunnel. The Pony Express went out of business after 18 months. It had earned approximately $90,000 but it had lost more than double that amount.

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Somehow, Keeping Your Smartphone Charged, Bribing Your Way Into Snotty Schools and Taking a Jacuzzi Dip With Your Smartphone in Your Pocket does not seem to measure up against being a Skinny Orphan on a Fast Pony Without a Gun.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Note to President Trump... It could be worse. You could have been born Abraham Lincoln.

Many news organizations opposed Lincoln from the beginning – much as they have President Trump in our time.

Negative attacks on Abraham Lincoln…

• “Within 90 days from the time Lincoln is inaugurated, the Republican Party will be utterly ruined and destroyed. His path is environed with so many difficulties, that even if he had the ability of Jefferson and the energy of Jackson, he would fail, but he is a weak and inexperienced man, and his administration will be doomed from the commencement.”
• “If he takes that radical section of the Republican Party, the conservative wing of it will cut loose and repudiate him. If, on the other hand, he courts the conservatives and pursues a moderate conciliatory policy, the radicals will make open war upon his administration.”
• “his election was a rash experiment, his administration is a deplorable failure.”
• “As President of the United States he must have enough sense to see and acknowledge he has been an egregious failure. One thing must be self-evident to him, and that is that under no circumstances can he hope to be the next President of the United States … (he should) retire from the position to which, in an evil hour, he was exalted.”
• “evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”
• “Lincoln was “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.”
• “a frontier hack”
• “an idiot”
• “the original gorilla”
• “is universally an admitted failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity… and his spirit necessarily infuses itself downwards through all departments.”

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

I Am In A Quandary. I Need Your Help. You Could Go A Long Way Toward Helping Me Out Of My Predicament By Answering One Simple Question.

I wrote a Blog Posting in January of this year that contained this excerpt…

This kind of thing happens all the time in the Middle East...Someone says to a Middle East Extremist, “Why are you so determined to kill that guy drinking coffee over there? He looks just like you.”

After asking this perfectly logical question the questioner gets this indignant response from the guy who wants to kill the Coffee Drinking Other Guy, “Do you know nothing about history? Do you not know what his people did to my people in the year 1277?”

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I don’t want to imply that all people in the Middle East hold long-standing grudges…Or do I?

I just need a bit more specific information. Was the guy who wanted to kill the Coffee Drinking Other Guy talking about 1277 BC or 1277 AD?

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Hillary Elizabeth Selfie's Chickens

Hillary Clinton’s Strategy for getting elected in 2016 was to take a Selfie with Everyone in the Good Ole USofA.

When I wrote my Blog Posting about this I thought I was joking around (I have been known to Joke Around) but it seems the Strategy did not die with Hillary’s Defeat.

Enter Elizabeth Sometimes-I’m-An-Indian-and-Sometimes-I’m-Not-An-Indian Warren. She is actually attempting to Selfie her way into the White House on Steroids.

Last night I heard her say she had taken her 75,000^th Selfie. My heavens! Are they really keeping track of how many Selfie’s they take? If this works, it will be conclusive proof that the Smart Phone has made all of us Stupid.

Below, between the asterisks is the link to my May 8, 2017 Silliness about Hillary and her failed Pantsuit Nation Take a Selfie with Everyone in the Good Ole USofA Campaign. After that you will find that Pantsuit Nation has been taken over by Elizabeth’s Wear A Sweater In The White House All The Time Campaign.

Yea, I played around with the term “Pantsuit Nation” but I did not invent the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsuit_Nation

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Here is the promised link to the May 8, 2017 Blog Posting…

https://forii.blogspot.com/2017/05/if-you-are-sad-hillary-lost-it-is-safe.html

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You really ought to have something better to do than read these articles below. I am just listing them to make my point that Taking A Whole Bunch of Selfies is an Actual Vote-Getting Strategy … AGAIN!...

• https://time.com/5683099/elizabeth-warren-selfies/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/09/18/frederick-douglass-photos-smashed-stereotypes-could-elizabeth-warren-selfies-do-same/
• https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/voters-wait-hours-elizabeth-warrens-selfie-line-strategy/story?id=65251043
• https://news.yahoo.com/inside-elizabeth-warrens-selfie-strategy-135837940.html

I’ll stop now but this list could go on forever…Or could it?

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One final Wise Guy Commentary…

Somewhere back in Political History a savvy politician came up with the Catchphrase, “A Chicken in Every Pot”. (The phrase has been attributed to 4 Presidents between 1920 and 1936 but actually it goes back to King Henry IV of 17^th Century France who reputedly wished that each of his peasants would enjoy "a chicken in his pot every Sunday").

Thank heaven this Blog Posting is about to come to an end but I promise you it’s going to have a great big ending thanks to the Town of Fitzgerald, GA.

It seems Fitzgerald, Georgia is planning to build a 62 Foot Tall Chicken that will cost $150,000, use at least 16 tons of steel and include an apartment inside that town officials intend to rent to visitors.

Hats off to Fitzgerald’s Mayor who will go down in history for replacing, “A Chicken in Every Pot” with…

“Why Don’t We Just Build A Big-Ass Chicken?”

Read all about it… https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/why-dont-we-just-build-a-big-ass-chicken-small-georgia-town-plans-to-build-world-record-rooster

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Millennial, You Are In Danger!

I've officially now have gone over the hill and am careening down the Slippery Slope. I sent this out as an EMail and not as a Foolishness...Or Is It? Blog Posting.

If you want to read it again, have at it...If you don't, don't.

Personally, I'm going to listen to Kitty Kallen one more time.

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Here is the Blog Posting...

I’m not going out of my way to impugn Millennials but we must face facts…Or must we?

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Picture these radio transmissions in your Mind’s Eye (whatever that is) between an Old Timer Combat Flight Leader and his Millennial Just-Out-Of-Flight-School Wing Man…

Ø Old Time Flight Leader: Millennial 22, heads up! Bandit approaching you at 2 O’clock High!

Ø Millennial 22: I object to your transmission regarding my being high. I have not been high since last night.

Ø Old Time Flight Leader: Forget your highness, jerk! You are in danger! I say again. Bandit approaching you at 2 O’clock High!

Ø Millennial 22: I appreciate your concern but what is this 2 O’clock High Stuff you keep talking about? Does this have anything to do with an old-fashioned wrist watch with those little Mickey Mouse Hands on them? I never did figure out what those hands were for. You should understand I am from the digital age. Request a more modern way of warning me of the danger you are so worried about. OK, try again. Explain 2 O’clock and don’t say anything about High or I will turn this thingy around and head back to Happy Hour early.

Ø Millennial 22: Hey, what’s that big noi…

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe Bonus: From an era when singers depended on strong vocal cords and actual singing and not screaming and tattooed necks: https://www.last.fm/music/Kitty+Kallen/_/Little+Things+Mean+a+Lot

Communities Around The Good Ole USofA Are Telling Other Communities Around The Good Ole USofA That They Know What’s Good For Other Communities Around The Good Ole USofA And Threatening The Other Communities To Start Thinking As They Are Told To Think Or Economic Pressure Will Be Brought Upon Them To Correct Their Thinking.

So Far I Have 140,804 Views of My Blog. I’m Right Behind Justin Bieber…Or am I?

In this country we once had a bunch of Freedoms. Now we are evolving into a nation of We Know Better Than You Know and, if you don’t do as we tell you to do, we will organize my fellow clear thinkers to stop buying your Cheez-Its and, if that does not work, me and my fellow clear-thinkers will come into your grocery store and stomp on your Cheez-Its.

Once upon a time we used to be able to make up our own minds about what we liked and disliked but now we are being told what we have to like and dislike. I like the old days (where I come from).

For example, the City of Galoshes depends on the sale of Galoshes for its survival. The City Council of Galoshes has determined that any City, Town, Village, Hamlet, Cardboard Box in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle that does not support the City of Galoshes by buying their required assigned annual quota of Galoshes is no friend of the Galoshenites of Galoshes.

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If the above paragraphs sound silly that’s because they are silly. However, the very fabric of this Good Ole USofA is being turned into a confusing quagmire of dos and don’ts and if you don’t do your required dos or do do your forbidden don’ts, you are subject to harsh penalties.

You can bet that all of this craziness has something to do with the Once Great State of California because craziness in the Good Ole USofA usually gets its start in the Land of Fruits and Nuts.

If you want to read all about it, you can read the Lagniappe Link at the bottom of this Blog Posting.

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Actually, City Governance has now become easy in the Good Ole USofA. Find out what San Francisco is doing and do the opposite. 

Here is a partial listing of what San Francisco is demanding of us…

Ø Eat one package of Rice-A-Roni (the San Francisco Teat) every day for breakfast (the flavor is optional for now but that may change in the not too distance future).

Ø Take a ride on a Trolley every day. If there is not a Trolley where you live, move to a place where there is a Trolley where you live.

Ø Each of us must accept the fact that the $1,000,000 Cardboard Box is the wave of the future.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe: Before you read the link below think back to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

Ø When Americans had the right to express themselves openly without fear of seeing throngs of demonstrators marching outside their place of business.

Ø When we did not see signs that read…”We respect your right to think for yourself. We just hate you for thinking for yourself.”

Ø When your customers came into your Grocery Store and said to you…”I could not disagree with you more about what you just said but I’ll buy your Pork ‘n Beans anyway because you have a right to think what you think and Pork ‘n Beans aren’t that important”.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-16/san-francisco-22-states-for-restrictive-abortion-laws

Lagniappe #2: Would it not be great if Californians loved Kumquats and Kumquats could not be grown in California and the other 49 States refused to sell them Kumquats?