I’ve been cleaning drains for fifteen wonderful years. You’d think that I would have learned how to do it by now. But today I developed a new technique.

I cabled a kitchen sink drain, removed my cable, and closed up the opening I’d used. I then ran the water to test the drain. It backed up; the clog wasn’t moving, even though I’d put a steel cable through its evil heart just minutes ago.

We have ways of dealing with such clogs. I continued to let the water run and fill up both sides of the kitchen sink. Then I waited, minute after minute, for the weight of the water to move the clog on down the line. This has worked for me on dozens of previous occasions. Today’s clog wasn’t impressed, however.

The next step, since the clog wouldn’t move, was going to be a lot of trouble. I decided to try something I’d never done before, since it was easy and might work. I grabbed my ladder off the top of my truck and climbed up to the roof over the kitchen, put my mouth against the drain’s vent pipe, and began blowing into it, letting off, and blowing again.

If you don’t know diddly about drains and vents, this might be Greek to you. But trust me: I was blowing pressure against the water that was standing in the drain. Lo and behold, after half a minute the clog gave way and the system drained with a mighty roar.

I’ve probably cleared 12,000 drains, but this was the first time I tried this maneuver. Truly a red letter day.

(And you thought your life was going nowhere?)

Man sues over toilet collapse at rest stop

[His lawyer] stated in the filing that the turnpike commission is responsible for the defective quality of the construction, maintenance and repair of the toilet, and should have known it was going to fail and should have warned him.

Sure they should have. “Hey, Keller, that toilet’s gonna fall off the wall. We can’t see it and we know that you can’t see it, but we’re telepathic and we know it’s gonna happen.”

In fact, something like this cannot be seen ahead of time. If a wall-mounted toilet were half-off a wall, nobody would try to sit on it. Obviously that toilet looked perfectly secure. The weak places were inside the wall, totally out of view, and only a visual inspection of the scene of the crime can establish what went wrong. My guess is that the wood in the wall weakened from water or termite damage.

Get over it, Keller. We all have days like that. :hehe:

Harvard University’s president Lawrence Summers, dared to say that men tend to be more mathematically inclined than women, so the left is convulsing and foaming at the mouth. David Horowitz made some good points in his blog. Here’s an excerpt:

But even if Summers had raised a point that was incorrect, the attempt to suppress it and therefore to suppress his right — and with it the right of any faculty member or student — to raise an intellectual issue and to declare it politically incorrect is totalitarian in its very nature.

In case you’re interested in this sort of thing, Peter Nulty, the father of one of the jurors who convicted Bernard Ebbers, wrote this today:

We offer a few tidbits about the jury’s deliberations that my daughter, Aran, who was juror #10, shared with the family over the dinner table on Tuesday after the verdict was rendered. Her comments suggest that pundits who comment on jury proceedings from the outside are usually just guessing and guessing wrong. This is her account of what happened:

8. Back in the jury room, many of the jurors wept. Suddenly the judge entered. She told them their case had been extraordinarily difficult and important. She thanked them for their service and said that she was proud of the way they had deliberated so patiently and painstakingly. Then the judge, too, shed tears.

Ann Coulter has hit a home run this week:

The New York Times said the problem was not enough government spending on courthouse security (“Budgets Can Affect Safety Inside Many Courthouses”). Yes, it was tax-cuts-for-the-rich that somehow enabled a 200-pound former linebacker to take a gun from a 5-foot-tall grandmother. 😀

Here’s a good quote: “The question isn’t ‘what causes poverty?’ but ‘what causes wealth?'” Read a good article.

Reader’s Digest (April ’05, p. 168) reprinted this from Outside magazine:

Q: How did elephants come to have trunks?

A: Scientists believe that the trunk developed through natural selection. As Hezy Shoshani, a biology professor at Eritrea’s University of Asmara explains, elephants grew bigger as they evolved. Of course, as they grew away from the ground, they still had to reach down for food. So the trunk was born–probably emerging from the upper lip and nose, to ultimately become the tool elephants use for browsing.

I’m taller than my father was. My son is taller than I, and he will marry this summer. I fear for his children. Since my boy is farther from the ground than I or his grandfather, but his kids will still have to tie their shoes every day (just as he, I, and my father did), Prof. Shoshani’s highly scientific rejection of creationism indicates that my grandchildren should have the beginnings of a trunk emerging from the nose and upper lip. 🙁

You missed it. “We had an amazing turnout. Everyone really enjoyed themselves.”

A common slogan I’ve never understood is “diversity is our strength.” It sounds to me more like a faith assumption or a desperate wish. Honestly, would you rather your football team be half female? Would your brain surgeon do a better job if half of his training was in Pakistan?

Would your neighborhood be a richer place if your neighbors married their children to dogs? Well, that certainly goes on among diverse people.

Show me a department of philosophy and religion at a liberal school who wants to diversify their staff by hiring a Fundamentalist who believes all of the Bible. Hah! I may represent typical American Christianity, but there’s no way they’d diversify their faculty that far.

A snake might be in your toilet. 😥