Joe's Place

As the recent 2012 presidential campaign is in full swing, I have to admit that my approach to voting in November at the polls has pretty much been, whoever the Republican candidate is has got to be a step up from the Obama regime that is currently in place and suffocating our lives.

However, I’ve had to take a step back from that position and reassess that opinion in light of comments from a recent interview by Reuters’ Chrystia Freeland of left-wing and Obama mentor billionaire George Soros on Davos Today. Mr. Soros offers a report card on Obama’s performance and also gave an interesting comparison of Obama and Mitt Romney. This is worth taking a look at:

So there you have it. George Soros doesn’t see a big difference between Obama and Romney. If that’s the case, I definitely don’t want to be forced to take the “lesser of two evils” approach in November. Time to make my voice heard in the upcoming Missouri Primary election, even if the primary doesn’t have much teeth. It’s just the right thing to do. So get out there and do the right thing too!

Here’s a few more blogs on the same interview.

Freedom’s Lighthouse

Real Clear Politics

Gateway Pundit

Examiner.com

This morning during one of those rare moments of fond reflection, I enjoyed a memory from my adolescence and thought it would be worth sharing.

Back in the day before cell phones, computers and gaming systems were in every household, safe and cheap diversions for boys were limited to mostly playing outside. In 1972 and in a beautiful stroke of marketing genius, Sunoco (Sun Oil Company) came up with a campaign that satisfied the football-craving urges of young men (and women too I suppose) while at the same time causing (maybe forcing) thousands of parents to purchase gasoline from their retail stations across the country. NFL Action ’72 was born.

Sunoco Football Saver Stamps

Anyone remember these things? For the time (and the price — free) they were a big hit in the Midwest where we lived. When you filled up with a tank of gas at Sunoco, the attendant would give you a pack of trading stamps that featured the NFL players of the time. They had stamps of most all the players on the 24 teams that comprised the league. Like trading cards, you’d collect them and if you didn’t have ones you wanted, you’d trade with your friends. They even had a small blue vinyl wallet that you could put them into to bring to carry around. I can’t imagine how many of those things teachers and nuns in schools across the fruited plain confiscated from those of us that got caught looking at them during class.

To heighten the whole collecting experience, Sunoco published a sturdy collecting album that you could purchase too. The album was broken down by NFL team and you’d glue your stamps into the album.

Sunoco Football Saver Album & Stamps

Now I really don’t know if this idea paid off for Sunoco or not, but since it only lasted for a year I imagine it didn’t get them the results they were looking for. But I know this, I remember the name of the brand of the station that I visited a few hundred times to get these stamps! Ahhh, the good old days.

I’ve been waiting for one of the big national TV news organizations to take on the subject of manufacturing in the U.S. for quite some time. Well the topic has finally been broached by ABC in a week long series on “World News with Diane Sawyer” and I’m excited to suggest it for your reading/watching consumption. Here’s a link to their “Made in America” web page with lots of resources and video broadcasts.

The “Made in America” topic certainly isn’t new and why our national media hasn’t given it lots of coverage like ABC finally decided to do isn’t clear to me. U.S. manufacturing jobs have been a critical source of income to people in this country and with the jobless rate is so high right now it makes sense I guess to feature this important topic. Personally, I have a selfish interest in the success of U.S. manufacturing as my career has and does depend on it. So I guess I should be cheering that it has been given some national attention. Let’s call it way overdue but very welcome.

One of those resources at the ABC World News site is a page on the “Made in America” pledge. Now I don’t know how effective “pledge” type campaigns are in our culture today, but I certainly agree and encourage people to make a conscious decision to consider the companies, corporations and countries that they ultimately are supporting when purchasing. If the pledge or one of these stories is what gets that ball rolling in your family and causes purchasing changes, then way to go ABC.

The U.S. economy, manufacturing and jobs are pretty complex subjects and you can be sure there will be plenty more discussion to come about them all.

Do you believe this? Yes it is officially Spring here in these parts of Missouri, even if it doesn’t look like it. It was 80°F just three days ago.

Enough of this already, we’re supposed to be playing golf by now.

Does your day start like this? My lovely wife had forwarded me an email with this headline and image. It had to do with coffee so I was instantly curious.

“FIND THE MAN IN THE COFFEE BEANS”

The email states at the beginning that it is the “Brain Exercise for the Day.” I like brain teasers, so this is worth doing.

The email challenges you to look at the image and find the man somewhere in the image. Seems simple enough. So I look and look and look and about ten seconds later I spot the guy. Sweet, found him. So far so good. Below the image the email stated the following:

OK, that’s cool, my right brain is normal, I think to myself. Thanks Honey for the interersting little brain teaser and ego booster to start the day. That should have been the end of it, I should have taken it for what is was meant to be and moved on to the next email. But you know what happened. I couldn’t just leave it at that. Curiosity and skepticism got to me.

I checked snopes.com and truthorfiction.com to see if this scientific claim was true. Snopes had nothing on it and TruthorFiction stated that it was unproven. Ah ha I say, I had good reason to be skeptical of it. Did I stop there though? No, I was still curious.

I went to Google. Put this exact phrase, “man in the coffee beans” into the search box and boom, 511,000 hits. Amazing! And even more surprising there were 9,490 hits on images with that exact phrase. And in blogs, Google reported “about 9,990 results.” Are you kidding me? (So much for thinking that my blog had original content.)

No wonder I can’t ever get through my email.

I was born and lived my first twelve years of life in North St. Louis County and then returned here with my own  family many years later and have lived the last twenty-three years here. So while I haven’t lived here my whole life, I have certainly spent a major portion of my life here. I say that to say that in the span of all that time, winters here are typically very tolerable and in most cases just a tiny speed bump between fall and spring. But ever since the beginning of December, the winter season has really made its presence felt.

I’m no expert in meterology but in my very unofficial opinion, seems like we’re on the way to having an unusually cold and snowy winter in the great gateway to the west. Part of my theory for this (which admittedly is loosely based in science) is a simple observation. Take for example the following photograph:

This is a view of our back deck after a nice 9″ snow a little before sunrise on January 20, 2011. Yeah a 9″ snow is a bit unusual for this area, I think the last one that we had like that was in March or April 2009. So that in itself is nothing out of the ordinary but what I find to be a little unusual, and the basis for my theory, is evidenced in the next photo:

This is our back deck again photographed about 50 hours later. Anyone that has ever lived in this area will know that it is very unusual to still have the majority of  that snow still here. We can get some crazy snow and ice in the St. Louis area, but if you give the elements a chance to adjust like they usually do, conditions improve.

OK, so this isn’t exactly a huge revelation or even newsworthy, but it’s all that came to mind this morning as I sat here with my lovely cup of freshly-brewed Starbucks Sumatra, while watching the forecast for tomorrow — another 3″-5″ of snow predicted! I just love it.

This video from CBS News is way too cool and… so totally male. Females are allowed to view, but please be warned that it will not stimulate the right side of your brains. (Please forgive me for CBS’S short commercial at the beginning.)

Anvils Fall from Sky – CBS Evening News

Isn’t that awesome? Let’s think about the possibilities here. Toilet shooting?

It’s not exactly news that GM has been closing plants and has been downsizing itself the past few years. But you know that things are really tough when the former world’s #1 vehicle builder asks its 37-year service icon to turn in his walking papers too. Yes that’s right. According to the LA Times on Tuesday 11/9, Mr. Goodwrench has been asked to turn in his tool box.

So if you see a kindly old gentlemen on your street corner that looks like the man in the photo below, give him a couple bucks. It may take him a while to get hired somewhere.

Happy Fourth of July everybody! Use care if you choose to use fireworks. And please don’t drink and drive this weekend.

Don’t give the hospitals or undertakers any of our business!

In the previous post, we were all set with our lovely new raised garden. All that was left was for the good Lord to shine His warm sun down and bring the gentle rain to nourish our babies and help them to grow. Heirloom tomatoes and green bell peppers would just be right around the corner. Our plan was coming together quite nicely. That is until we encountered an small unexpected setback.

It seems that humans aren’t the only ones that like home grown vegetables. Apparently rabbits have a real taste for vegetables and worse, they don’t need to have the fruit for sustenance. They like the plant all by itself. And so, we were very surprised one morning when we awoke to find a tiny, 4″ long bare stem that was once a bell pepper plant. Unbelievable, I thought. I felt like I had been violated.

So now it  was time to fight back and off I went to the big box home improvement store. I returned armed with a defense strategy to thwart the bunny menaces. “They aren’t going to eat the fruits of my labor,” I told myself. And after another hour of labor and sweat in the mid-day sun, I was pretty pleased with the result.

With the bunny preventer all set up. It’s time to do a quick financial reckoning of our project. Let’s see add another $25.00 to the our previous expenses and we’re now into our future vegetables to the tune of $95.00. These babies better taste good! I can’t wait for the squirrels to figure out there’s not a top on this thing.