Skip to main content

Sometimes I Wonder



Here are a few stories from today’s local newspaper:

“Suspect in bat assault case headed to trial.” A homeowner caught a thief going through his (the homeowner’s) van, and hit the thief with a baseball bat. The homeowner is going to trial. The thief pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.

“Marshals, police nab city woman.” Twice she tried to run them down with her car, then started punching them.

“Marietta man charged with raping child.” Needs no explanation.

”U.S. call driving while distracted an ‘epidemic.’” Again no explanation needed.

I was beginning to think the SETI searchers (see 9/27 blog) should be trying to find signs of intelligent life on earth. Then I came across the following letter to the editor:

“Day of Caring volunteers energetic, inspiring.” This is a thank you letter to 3,100 local volunteers who took part in United Way of Lancaster’s 18th annual Day of Caring. Among many other things they weatherized the home of a local soldier, scrubbed graffiti off a park pavilion and prepared 1,300 sandwiches for a Thank You Picnic. It restored some of my hope for the human race.
As long as there are people like this, the SETI searchers can stay with their original objective.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There Are Only Seven Jokes - Introduction

      The statement “There are only seven jokes – all the rest are variations,” has been around for a long time, but no one ever seems to know what the original seven are. I think I have found the solution to the mystery.       The answer is to be found in an article published in the New York Times on May 2, 1909. Entitled “New Jokes? There Are No New Jokes, There Is Only One Joke,” it goes on to say that all jokes are a distortion, and lists seven categories of distortion. Supposedly every joke will fit into one of the categories. I believe that repetition changed the seven categories into the seven jokes.       Each of my next seven blogs will be devoted to exploring one of the categories. In addition, I shall attempt to give an example or two of jokes which I think fit the category.       You must realize that this article appeared over one hundred years ago, so most of the jokes a...
The Future of Work This is for folks who don't mind stretching their imagination a bit. Let me review some of the things that are happening in today's world. A recent news article stated that in spite of the decreasing jobless rate, the number of retail jobs has been dropping rapidly. An article in Business Insider calls it a retail apocalypse. According to the article, in the retail industry, "Since October about 89,000 workers in general merchandise stores have lost their jobs, which is more than the number of people employed in the entire US coal industry." ( http://www.businessinsider.com/retail-job-losses-are-hurting-the-economy-2017-4 ). This loss is due to the rapid expansion of online merchandising. But this is only one example of the point I want to make. According to an article in Scientific American, two professors at Oxford University published a study estimating the probability that "702 occupations would soon be computerized out of exist...

It's Not Just Semantics

     It seems there are two competing definitons for the term “small business”; to no one's surprise the Democrats are using one and the Republicans are using the other. For the convenience of anyone who doesn't know which party he prefers, here are the definitions: 1.) A small business is a business which is not very large, e.g., a corner grocery, a machine shop with a couple of employees, a mom and pop enterprise, etc. Most Democrats use the term in this context. 2.) A small business is a business which operates as a pass-through tax entity, e.g., most of the businesses in def. 1.) plus most mega-farms, some manufacturing firms, and practically all high-tech and professional firms. These organizations use the individual proprietorship, partnership, S-corporation, limited-liability company (LLC), etc. tax reporting format. Under this definition the business could have anywhere from one to thousands of employees. For example, with over 163,000 employees worldwide, t...