Category Archives: Personal

Personal

9/11/01 9 Years Later; Never Forget

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A relatively short post today. Last Sunday I asked your thoughts about 9/11/01. All week long I thought briefly about it, but wasn’t getting too deep into it because, well, it seemed that life was going on, and people were saying they were ready to move on.

I changed my mind. I’m not really going to dwell on it all day long. However, it’s important to show a few images from that day, some very disturbing things, and then close with something sort of positive, though not exactly what I wanted to show. And this article is posting at the time the first plane hit.

This first clip is of the first tower of the World Trade Center being hit. There’s graphic language, but I believe it can be forgiven this one time:

This next clip is of the second tower of the World Trade Center being hit, with commentary about the first one going on before you see it. Strange thing that there’s not a single clip of anyone on the other side of the WTC getting a real shot of it being hit, but seeing this plane, which I saw live at the time, is still chilling after all these years.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any real clip of the Pentagon after it was hit, and the same obviously goes for the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. The folks who helped take that plane down and giving their lives for many others took a lot of courage, and in my mind they were heroes as well as anyone else.

This next clip was the first large assembly of people in the country after this event took place, and I watched it live because I wondered what they would do. The WWE has always been upfront in its support of the troops of this country, and they didn’t let me down here.

This final clip isn’t the one I wanted to show, but NBC has a lock on the copyright and, to date, has never allowed the clip to be seen by anyone after the first few copies got out. Saturday Night Live did a show 4 days later, which was the opening show of the new season. They asked Paul Simon to come in and sing The Boxer, and had Mayor Rudy Guiliani and a host of police and firemen standing behind him as he performed the song by himself with just his guitar. I thought it was drastically inspiring, and why NBC has kept a lid on it I’ll never know. No matter; here’s a different clip of Paul Simon singing the same song, in an odd way more of what New York City used to be than it is now, or actually was on 9/11/01.

Personal

Where Would You Go In A Disaster?

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Today I got a CPAP machine, and that will be a story for another time once I start using the thing. Instead, I want to talk about one of the questions that I was asked that came from left field.

The question was “where would you go in a disaster?” I found the question stunning, so much so that I was lost for words for about 15 seconds, which doesn’t happen often for me. I said it was an intriguing question, and asked why they would ask me that. She said because the CPAP machine needs electricity, and that many people, once they start using it, find they never want to sleep without it again, and thus if the power went out where would they go to still be able to use their machine.

Of course, me being me, my mind had gone elsewhere. I’ve always had the scenario in my mind that if I heard about something happening like we were being targeted by a nuclear bomb that I would just hop in the car and drive as far west as I possibly could to try to outrun it, since we’d have some notice that something was coming. And I live within 35 miles of a nuclear plant, but it’s recommended to be safe trying to be 45 miles away, so I always figured I’d hop in the car and head south if I knew something had happened there.

Yet, when all is said and done, how many of us have thought long term about where we’d go if a disaster struck? For that matter, wouldn’t your believe be like mine, that it would depend on what the disaster was? For instance, since my house is a mixture of gas and electricity, if the electricity went out I could stay in the house, keep warm, and eat just fine. But if it was a flood obviously I’d have to get away, but where?

Have you given this one much thought? By the way, I answered eventually that I would probably go to one of the local hotels about 2 miles away, hope they had power, and get a Jacuzzi room and just chill for a few nights if I needed to. That made them happy, and all was right with the world. Weird, right?

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Personal

Do You Protect Others Better Than You Protect Yourself?

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Last night my wife and I were having a conversation about things that had surprised us about each other. One thing that came up was how, when the need arises, we tend to change our demeanor up in protecting each other, as opposed to when we’re protecting or supporting ourselves.


Safety and Protection

I’m not one who raises my voice in anger. When I raise my voice, I’m usually happy in some regard. And I’m generally a very easy going guy. However, I’ve noticed what when someone or something is not treating my wife well, I don’t yell, but I do go on the attack. And I don’t play nice, something that surprised my wife because she’s noticed I usually give people a lot of leeway when it comes to messing with me, although I do try to cerebrally castigate them if I have to.

My wife has done the same for me. We’ve been in restaurants where she’s made demands on stuff that I might not like. Not that I won’t say something many times, but how I address things and how she addresses them is much different.

I noticed earlier today that our friend Sire had a comment on his blog where the guy pretty much called him an idiot. Sire responded in his normally gracious way, and the guy didn’t quite apologize, saying he likes to speak directly with people, but was glad Sire took it in the matter in which he meant it. I didn’t; I thought it was grossly inappropriate, and I decided to take up the spear and thrust it back in my own way. You’ll remember that I wrote an article on web courtesy; you come into my house, I don’t mind that you disagree with me, but you’re going to respect me. And you’re going to respect my friends in their house, unless you want to pay the bills.

Am I sensitive? Sometimes I’ll admit that. I tend to believe you teach people how to treat you, and you also treat people as you wish to be treated. I’m so thankful that everyone who has participated on this blog has shown great deportment over the years, and trust me I appreciate it. I hope I treat everyone with the utmost respect because I hope to get that back. We can disagree; I’m certainly not perfect. But there are ways we can all support our beliefs without being rude.

Kind of like customer service, eh? 🙂

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Personal

Three Warnings Or Fears

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There are three things I feel compelled to talk about, none of which has anything to do with internet marketing, but one does have something to do with social media, so I’ll start with that one.

A few days ago, a federal judge decided that high school students should have the right to blast their teachers on Facebook or anywhere else because of the 1st amendment right to free speech. I was astonished when I read this, and it seems there’s a lot of folks, including the American Civil Liberties Union, who believe this is proper.

Sorry folks, but I’m not one of them. We had a local incident just like this, and the student who created the page was suspended and every student who signed up for it got detention. I agreed with suspending the student, but not for punishing everyone else who signed up, especially since some kids never said a word.

Here’s the thing. What this moron basically did was give license to anyone to find someone they don’t like, create a Facebook group in their name calling them whatever they want to do, then invite other people to come in and join the ugliness. And that person has no recourse whatsoever because of this bad interpretation of the 1st amendment. By the way, the first amendment doesn’t say everyone gets to say whatever they want whenever they want, which is why we can’t go around screaming “fire” in a crowded theater and many other things.

I wonder who he and the ACLU are going to feel when the first person either gets killed or commits suicide because of this ruling. And allowing kids to do that against their teachers is absurd; imagine the repercussions of this type of thing later on. If I’m the teacher, I’m failing this kid. And what happens when one kid starts doing this to another kid?

I can tell you this; if I knew someone was doing something like this to me, I’m going after them in more ways than you can imagine, and the last way will definitely be physical. No one has the right to slam an individual without expecting consequences, and whatever they are, outside of taking out anyone else who’s around, isn’t off limits. If you’re in the public eye, or a company, that’s different. Allowing students to publicly slam teachers… I see trouble brewing.

The next thing on my mind is news this week that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, this week produced a substance that was 250,000 times hotter than the sun. This is another group that’s trying to create things that should remain in space and far away from Earth, in this case mini-stars instead of a black hole. Now, maybe I’m just an alarmist, but I’m thinking having substances on the Earth, even if they don’t last long, that are hotter than the sun is a bad thing. I don’t care how far underground it is, that can’t be a good thing. For my own comfort, Long Island isn’t far enough away from me for them to be doing that kind of testing anyway. Does anyone else think this is a bad idea?

Finally, there’s a guy named George Church who is the top guy when it comes to mapping out genomes. He has actually gotten to the point where he believes we can and should create a neanderthal so that we can see if it might offer resistances to diseases and the like to humans of today. By the way, that link downloads an MP3 file of his interview talking about it. He also believes we should recreate things like dinosaurs and mammoths and the like so we can study them better.

Once again, I’m reminded of the Jeff Goldblum line in Jurassic Park: “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” When this movie came out I thought about how cool it might be to recreate dinosaurs, but it’s now 17 years later, I’m no longer an idyllic 33 year old, and I’m thinking this is a bad idea as well. We have no idea what kinds of diseases these things had or just how lethal or smart they actually might have been, and reintroducing these things into our lives now is a horrible idea. The idea that we can create life that doesn’t exist anymore is scary to me; I can see how this one could get out of hand.

Oddly enough, I’m not against cloning, which one might think is the same thing. The thing about cloning is that it’s not like what people think it is. A clone of any animal is still a distinct and individual life form that will live a totally different existence and life than its predecessor, and we already know what the predecessor was and how we interacted with it.

Anyway, those are thoughts I’ve had today that I just finally had to write about. I know, my mind is in a weird place sometimes. Comments?

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