Author: Kevan

This testimony was given by a nurse who took care of Terri Schiavo:

Throughout my time at Palm Gardens, Michael Schiavo was focused on Terri’s death. Michael would say “When is she going to die?,” “Has she died yet?” and “When is that bitch gonna die?” These statements were common knowledge at Palm Gardens, as he would make them casually in passing, without regard even for who he was talking to, as long as it was a staff member. Other statements which I recall him making include “Can’t you do anything to accelerate her death – won’t she ever die?” When she wouldn’t die, Michael would be furious.

I am indebted to Carl Vonnoh, who bills himself as the Grub Street Plumber, for blogging this info first.

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

By Matthew Junker
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, March 18, 2005

Scott A. Keller, of Box 46, Everson, says he stopped at the Amos K. Hutchinson Bypass mainline toll plaza in Hempfield Township to use the restroom on May 4, 2003, when the accident occurred.

Keller stated in the lawsuit that he suffered whiplash, along with various other back and neck injuries, when the wall-mounted toilet fell to the floor. He’s seeking an unstated amount in excess of $30,000 for lost work, pain and suffering, and embarrassment and humiliation.

[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:

1. From the start she believes the jury unanimously distrusted the testimony of the prosecution’s star witness, Scott Sullivan. (Some experts are still saying Ebbers was convicted because the jury believed Sullivan, but the opposite is true.)

2. Bernie Ebbers helped his case by going on the stand and denying Sullivan’s version of events. She said this effectively convinced most jurors that Sullivan was lying to get a reduced sentence. (Many experts are saying Ebbers hurt himself by testifying, but the opposite may be true.)

3. Several days into the deliberations, after ruling out Sullivan, being wary of Ebbers, and becoming bleary-eyed by poring over financial evidence, the jury was still left with the possibility (i.e., with “reasonable doubt”) that Ebbers didn’t know that WorldCom’s books were being cooked. It also left the jurors with a pile of very circumstantial evidence and no “smoking gun,” i.e., evidence of something Ebbers did, said, or wrote that showed that he knew what was going on.

4. So the jurors pored for a second time through the judge’s instructions regarding what constitutes “conspiracy” and came to focus on a statement that willful ignorance of the wrongdoing was not the same as “innocence.” So they called for a white board and started methodically listing the pros and cons of whether he should have known what was going on.

5. They concluded that he should have. Or rather, they concluded that either he knew the books were cooked, or, if he didn’t know, it was because he chose not to know and was protecting himself by remaining ignorant of circumstances that were his responsibility to understand.

6. In the end, the two big witnesses probably canceled each other out, still leaving reasonable doubt that Ebbers was guilty. But, facing attack from highly circumstantial, yet voluminous, evidence, “reasonable doubt” survived until about noon on the eighth day when it finally winked out. It was the Byzantine financial record (which included two sets of books) that finally decided the case.

7. In the courtroom, the judge polled the jury individually, asking them one by one to confirm the verdict of guilty on all 12 counts.

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. 😥

Namibia, formerly known as South West Africa, has been reduced to abject poverty and chaos since the white minority regime was replaced by the communist South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). This workers’ paradise (by Marxist standards) now has so much wealth, they can occasion this news story:

WINDHOEK. When outgoing Namibian president Sam Nujoma hands over power to his successor, Hifikepunye Pohamba, on March 21, he will reportedly receive a retirement package consisting of the same monthly salary as the new leader of the country, plus an extra gratuity equal to a year’s salary amounting to just over $71 000 dollars, plus a Mercedes Benz S500 (which currently retails locally for about $146 000), plus a four wheel drive station wagon, plus a light truck ten security personnel, plus three drivers, two private secretaries, two personal assistants, two office attendants, three domestic workers, three gardeners, two cooks, two waiters and two laundry persons to run Nujoma’s household, plus an office equipped with computers, telephones, furniture and other materials as may be determined by the cabinet, plus medical cover, first class seats on international flights and local travel – as well as entertainment, water and electricity expenses. All of the money will be tax-exempt.

Tsk, tsk. Kinda makes you nostalgic for the good old days, eh Namibians?

For people who have more money than brains, behold the Hatbox Toilet.

Here’s how you can tell that the Chinese are destined to rule the world.

I’m a right-wing extremist. Rush Limbaugh couldn’t even hold my flashlight while I’m formulating a conservative opinion of something.

But I also enjoy immensely learning what others believe and why, so I’m an avid listener to Air America, which recently began polluting the airwaves of Memphis. On Tuesday, the Al Franken Show played a most amazing clip of Bill O’Reilly claiming to have been an astronaut, and telling Buzz Aldrin that he (Aldrin) was the first man on the moon.

When Aldrin corrected him and said that Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, O’Reilly responded that Aldrin was mistaken. Eventually he hung up on Aldrin and said that it’s too bad when a guy is the first man on the moon and therefore thinks that he knows everything.

Here’s an interesting web site: Discover the Network is dedicated to identifying the Left, who often try to pass for “moderate.”

At about 6:30 this evening I and a coworker finished up a big job. It involved removing an electric water heater and installing two gas ones in its place. We probably spent twenty four man-hours on it if you include the time it took to hunt down various necessary components.

I tallied up the receipts tonight. It looks like we cleared $210. My coworker will get $200, since it was my job and he was helping me. It isn’t his fault that I underestimated the job.

The customer got a bargain. I got a lesson in careful estimating.

On Dec. 18th I posted a link to an excellent video presentation honoring our military troops who would be spending Christmas away from home. That link is now broken. Use this one instead. If you haven’t seen the video, do it.

As most of the blues songs say, “I woke up this morning” to a really cold Memphis: 21 degrees. That makes us Southrons worry, as we are never really prepared for anything below 30. I began to lament my fate until I got on the web and read about the blizzard up in Yankeeland, as is depicted here:

When I walked out to get my newspaper, I was greeted with the Memphis version of January:

So here I sit with a hot cup o’ joe, fireplace consuming wood like a hornworm on a tomato plant, looking out at such a scene.

Y’all be careful up there.

See an animation of the aforementioned coffee.