FLOW: a plumber’s weblog

It’s Monday and I am reminded of one of my favorite one-panel cartoons. Two old black men wearing overalls are sitting on the front porch of a house in the country, guitars across their laps, and one holds up a tiny object and complains to the other, “It’s this *&^% Prozac. I ain’t had the blues in weeks!”

I’ve never understood “blue Mondays” or other excuses for being miserable. Oh, I understand being miserable all right. I used to do it whenever possible as a teenager. I wore sunglasses, even at night. I slumped. I wrote sad stories and I played sad songs. “Poor me.” One day I realized that nobody cared that I was so miserable. I thought that they should see me, feel my pain, commiserate, pet me, and admire my nonconformity. Instead they just went on about their lives and I found myself ignored. What a revolting development.

So I grew up, and I find that it’s much better up here. Now I wake up happy that I have another day to live in, and on Monday I’m happy that I get to start another week. Even though the week began yesterday, I have the same clock in my brain as everyone else and I tend to “start” on Monday. Who feels bad on Monday? I can’t understand it.

The morning’s work and study are done. A French-pressed cup of High Point coffee is smoking on the computer desk, and I’m about to hit the road and solve plumbing problems for people who need it badly. (That’s a tautology. By definition, if you need a plumber, you need him badly.) And they even pay me money. The temperature in Memphis was 72 degrees this morning and it’s 73 now. The air was ionized by some front that came through last night. It’s close to paradise.

Except for one thing: thieves came and stole the air condtioning units at our church last night. As I remember, we have about twelve. Well, we had about twelve. We’re at zero presently, and today is the first day of summer school at our K-12 Christian school. I guess if I were over there, I wouldn’t be in such a good mood. Those big honkers cost oh, $3,000 apiece, plus labor (I’m guessing). But that’s how the world has always been. Wherever anyone has been happy, he has been near others who were suffering.

A Rasmussen poll indicates that 30% of Americans would consider voting for a third party in the ’08 presidential election if that party made immigration enforcement its top priority.

Although I favor the enforcement of existing laws and the improvement of our system, I can’t bring myself to say that it should be our top priority. I am encouraged, though, to see the positive attitude toward third parties. To me, they parallel my own status as an independent plumber. When customers break away from the large plumbing shops with their high overhead and their self-centered philosophies, those customers can actually get what they want instead of what the powerful shops tell them they must have.

I voted for the Constitution Party in the last election and will probably do so again in ’08.

In yet another tribute to the triumph of Communism over the evil white rulers of Rhodesia, the New York Times has reported “Zimbabwe’s government on Wednesday announced 20-hour daily electricity cuts for households across the country as supplies are shifted to irrigate the crucial winter wheat crop amid persistent food shortages.” This country used to produce far more food than it needed, and it exported to other nations.

I suspect that Air America has figured out a way to blame this on President Bush.

Upon the death of Jerry Falwell this week, the editorial cartoonist for the Memphis newspaper dashed off a drawing of Tinky Winky welcoming Falwell into Heaven. The cartoonist, who is well known to be a good artist and deadeningly devoid of creative thinking, was alluding to the uproar of vitriol that was directed at Falwell in 1999 when his magazine stated that Tinky Winky was a homosexual cartoon character.

The magazine was right, and anybody who cared to research it knew that it was right. But nobody cared. They just wanted to hate and vilify Falwell. It’s a lot like the crucifixion of Rush Limbaugh when he said that Donovan McNabb was being overrated (at that time) because the sports media establishment was anxious to see a black quarterback do well. Rush said nothing racist, but it was called racist thousands of times. So with the ridicule of Falwell.

Ann Coulter’s column this week (May 16) gives the quotations and documentation for the mainline media’s statements that Tinky Winky was homosexual. (Of course, they quit saying it when the Falwell business hit the fan.) For instance:

Michael Musto of The Village Voice boasted that Tinky Winky was “out and proud,” noting that it was “a great message to kids” not only that it’s OK to be gay, but the importance of being well accessorized.”

More info appeared in an article on Newsbusters.

It’s bizarre. It’s Orwellian. It’s like trying to write by looking in a mirror instead of at your hand.

Coinciding with Cinco de Mayo, the illegal aliens in America are staging a nationwide protest, calling for reform of immigration laws. They complain that their current status is a major problem for them. Their familes are torn apart. Congress is doing nothing to remedy the situation. When immigration officials round up illegals, it makes them afraid to speak out in public.

It’s crazy. An intruder breaks into your home, commandeers a bedroom, and begins living off your shelter, insurance, utilities, appliances, and furniture, and then starts complaining that the police are hassling him and you’re not doing enough to get his family moved in with him?

Y’know, I have a solution for these problems they’re complaining about . . .

I often do plumbing for an organization which promotes, among other things, “peace and justice.”  One of their slogans (you see it on buttons, bumper stickers, etc.) is “Stop the Violence.” Someone there asked me once why I wear a sidearm. I told him “It’s sort of a fundamentalist version of ‘Stop the Violence.’  If somebody starts some violence, I intend to stop it if I can.”

This past Saturday night I discussed carrying with a friend and mentioned that, once you get used to it, you feel somewhat vulnerable whenever you happen not to be armed.  Philosophically, I oppose the existence of places where only criminals are armed, and I mentioned schools as an example.  It is not legal for me to be armed on school property. He and I both agreed that shooters would gravitate to such places, knowing that they have a free hand against their prey.

And so thirty-six hours later we hear that a shooter went to Virginia Tech and blew away over thirty kids.  I am literally horrified when I think of what the students endured while this evil murderer casually snuffed out one life after another.

If a trained handgunner had been present and armed, the murderer would have been summarily stopped and most of those kids would be alive today.

Several articles about Don Imus have appeared recently. No two agree in details, but all agree that he is worse than Hitler, Bloody Mary, and James Dobson all rolled into one. That is a tipoff that something is askew in the analyses, but don’t expect many to notice.

I did. I’ve never listened to Imus. I’d heard that he was ugly and I happen to think that the world already provides enough ugliness to last me for a day, so I haven’t sought him out. Then I heard that he’d said something ugly about the Rutgers basketball girls. “So what else is new,” I thought. “Isn’t that what he’s paid to do?” I mean, does anyone pay Don Imus to restrict his speech to acceptable levels of depravity? No, they pay him to be ugly.

Imus was just using the degrading jargon of the black underclass to elaborate on the appearance of the black girls whom he and his partner had observed to be tough and tattoed. He was saying that they looked like the people who typify the culture where such language is used.

I didn’t see the girls. I don’t know what they looked like. I can say, generally speaking, that no one should look like the underclass and expect to be treated as upperclass. But I have no opinion of the girls’ appearances, since I didn’t see them.

The airwaves would be better off without filthy talkers, but I don’t think that’s what the sharks have been after for the past week. I hear them on Air America. They want to silence anyone who refuses to conform to their dictates. Running Imus through the disposal is just a strategy to try to get to Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck.

I like to give God credit for things, but the word “miracle” is overused. If everthing is a miracle, then nothing is. If one says “I believe in miracles: I saw the sun rise this morning,” then he and the atheist both agree, for the atheist saw the sun rise as well.

It is difficult to define “miracle” because it involves certain presuppositions about God’s relationship to the universe. The Bible says that he upholds all things by the word of his power and that all things “hold together” by, or through, him. Yet a miracle goes beyond that, and I think a miracle is when God intervenes and does something that could not occur naturally.

If a sick person gets well, that’s not a miracle. But if he gets well in an instant, that’s a miracle. God usually answers prayer through providence rather than through miracles. If one is dying of cancer and God’s people pray seriously and the cancer goes into remission, that’s only a miracle if it conflicts with the large record of cases where other cancers have gone into remission. I’m not saying God didn’t do it, I’m saying that he did it through providence and not through miracle.

Why quibble? As I said at the beginning, if everything is a miracle, then nothing is. Unbelievers have a long history of laughing at believers because the believer experiences nothing unusual, but still calls it “God.” The believer is thanking God for a medical recovery and the doctor gets ignored along with the scientists who developed the effective medicines. The unbeliever thinks that there is nothing compelling in the believer’s worldview because he sees plainly that the believer is looking at nature and calling it supernatural.

If there is such a thing as nature, (and I think that there is), then those things which are within that realm need to be labeled as such, and “miracle” needs to be reserved to those phenomena which conflict with the natural order of things. Examples would be a storm ceasing suddenly when commanded to do so, a structural deformity in a human body being remedied instantly, or an uncanny coincidence in response to prayer such as an exact dollar amount arriving in the mail precisely in response to a specific need. Such timing and specificity may rise to the level of “miracle.”

A plumbing inspector failed me because I plumbed the job according to the Code book. Really, that’s what happened. It seems that there are three sets of rules by which we plumb in the Memphis area: (1) the Code book, (2) the “Blue Pages,” which are Shelby County’s amendments to the Code, and (3) an unwritten body of rules I’ll call “We’ve never allowed that.”

An inspector came to my job, looked at a certain joint, and said “You can’t use a 90 there; you have to use a long sweep.” That surprised me, so I got out the Plumbing Code and showed him the pertinent paragraph and asked “What does this mean right here?” (The book specifically said that I was correct.) He was surprised by what he saw, but he repeated “We’ve never allowed that.”

I decided to call the office where the top Code guys sit. “Mr. ____ tells me I cannot use a 90 to change from vertical to horizontal.” The Code official answered “We’ve never allowed that.” I protested “But the book says it’s legal.” All he could say was “Well, we’ve never allowed that.”

So I crawled under the house, cut out the 90, and replaced it with a long sweep. Nobody ever said the world was fair.

The long national nightmare is over.

The crisis has passed.

I’m back.

There has been a lot of water under the bridge since my last post nearly a year ago. And you see where the nation has gone since my absence. Coincidence? I think not!

This is the new blog with a new look and address. The old one was powered by Greymatter, fine software, but subject to exploits by porn-peddling spam-spewing pond scum. Greymatter is ancient history in the world of blog software and WordPress has a good reputation–so here we are. Maybe I’ll learn soon enough how to customize it.

Meanwhile, we need to resume issuing those correctives which, if adopted, will make the world a better, saner place. And tonight we begin with President Bush’s State of the Union Speech.

The nation has forgotten Reagan’s rhetoric: government isn’t the solution, it is the problem. To hear Bush speak is to hear about programs, initiatives, and funding–that is to say, more and bigger government. That’s all I’ll say. The implications are obvious and frightening to anyone who knows the history of what governments do.

In December of ’04 I wrote that Air Zimbabwe was going out of business because the Zimbabweans were now so thin, they could be faxed to their destinations. Well, things are no better today. One might have guessed it, of course, since it is still a Marxist nation. The NY times reported today:

“How bad is inflation in Zimbabwe? Well, consider this: at a supermarket near the center of this tatterdemalion capital, toilet paper costs $417. No, not per roll. Four hundred seventeen Zimbabwean dollars is the value of a single two-ply sheet. A roll costs $145,750 — in American currency, about 69 cents. The price of toilet paper, like everything else here, soars almost daily, spawning jokes about an impending better use for Zimbabwe’s $500 bill, now the smallest in circulation. But what is happening is no laughing matter. For untold numbers of Zimbabweans, toilet paper — and bread, margarine, meat, even the once ubiquitous morning cup of tea — have become unimaginable luxuries. All are casualties of the hyperinflation that is roaring toward 1,000 percent a year.”

Under “white minority rule” Rhodesia was the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa. Now they are starving.

Perhaps they will ask for handouts from non-Marxist, non-Black nations to keep from dying of starvation? But that would demonstrate who is superior to them. No, they couldn’t do that.

Could they?

The plumber-customer relationship includes a certain trust common to all professionals: the plumber is responsible to advise the customer honestly. When he does otherwise, he is dishonest. Such a principle precludes overselling.

I recently got a call from a man who said he needed his sewer replaced and asked if I did such work. After assuring him that I did, my first question was “How do you know that it needs to be replaced?” He answered that Leech Plumbing had told him so. (That’s not their real name, but it should be.)

To really shorten the story, I fixed his problem for $76, compared to the $4,000 that Leech quoted him. As I sat at his table, preparing to rake in my loot, I saw Leech’s invoice. They took $730 off this fellow a few nights earlier. Eliminating the useless work and charging my prices for the necessary work, I could have provided the same services for $140. More specifically, they charged him $300 for some extra work I would have thrown in for $40.

I went behind this same company a week earlier as well. They quoted a man $3,200 to replace his sewer. I quoted $1,500, and I would have made plenty of money at that price. Come to find out, it didn’t need replacing at all; Leech had misdiagnosed it.

On my company web site (see link on sidebar to the left) I have a page labeled “company philosophy” and it tells a story about Vampire Plumbing, another nest of bloodsuckers posing as professionals. I’m happy to report that Vampire closed its doors here in Memphis a few weeks ago.

AP news reports this morning that a bear attacked a family camped in Cherokee National Forest, killing a six-year-old girl and wounding others. The unhappy campers tried to beat the bear with sticks to drive it away, but the bear prevailed.

Why didn’t the father put a bullet into the bear’s skull and save the life of his daughter?

Federal law deems that, despite the right to keep and bear arms, and despite any legal permit you may have to carry your weapons, you cannot be armed legally in a national forest. You are at the mercy of any lawbreakers or bears who decide to feed upon you.

Isn’t it nice that Ol’ Massa is protecting us so well?

I realized a decade-long ambition today: I bought a Sears water hose. 😎

As a plumber for large shops, I used to visit about a thousand homes a year. Now, on my own, I make about 1/3 as many calls. Even still, for over sixteen years, I’ve been to a lot of homes and I’ve used a lot of water hoses. Never have I seen a hose that compares with the ones sold by Sears. They’re just good.

Can’t say as much for their legal, department, though. On the cardboard that came wrapped around my new hose, I found this on the inside:

“WARNING: Do not spray water into an electrical outlet. Severe electrical shock could result.”

By rights, other such warnings should be equally necessary. “Do not use this hose for colonic irrigation.” “Do not drive with this hose coiled around your head and eyes. You could have a wreck.” “Do not swing the end of this hose around when others are present. It could hit someone in the eye.” “Do not spray water on passing strangers. They could charge you with assault.”

We’re doomed, I tell ya. :angry:

According to the Washington Post, “Former D.C. mayor Marion Barry pleaded guilty yesterday to two misdemeanor tax charges, admitting in federal court that he failed to pay most of his income taxes for five years after departing from the District government in 1999.”

He faced a possible 18 months in jail and $30,000 in fines. He got probation, and he’s supposed to pay the taxes. That’s why he’s laughing.

Barry is a habitual offender: philandering, drugs, perjury, publicly exposing himself, nonpayment of debts. They arrest him, they convict him, they issue judgments against him–he doesn’t care or comply. He just gets a criminal underclass to vote him back into office for business as usual and dares anyone to enforce the law against him. That’s why he’s laughing.

He’s 70 and in poor health. If he can finish his current term, he can retire at taxpayer expense. Is this a great country, or what? If he dies, he gets by with a lifetime of living off the labor of others. (Of course, he then faces a holy God, but that’s another topic.)

Memphis can be proud when it looks at Barry–proud that it got rid of him fifty years ago. :laugh:

One doesn’t automatically think of concrete as something that can be sawed, but we do it all the time in the plumbing trade. In this photo you see me sawing a path through a driveway. We removed a 24″ swath, excavated beneath it, and laid a 3″ drain pipe.

This isn’t easy work. It takes a few hours to cut that much concrete, get it out, and haul it away. The circle saw blade you see in use here costs $350. We used up about 1/4 of its cutting edge on this job, including some cuts to the brick and sidewalk behind the house.

In Memphis, it is altogether too cold.

It’s so cold, the weather people can’t even tell how cold it is. When I checked the ‘net this morning, no two sources agreed, but they reported us being between ten and seventeen degrees. Southerners have way too much common sense to live in a place like that, but this weekend we’ve had no choice.

I had jobs yesterday, which is not always the case on Saturday. These jobs, as luck would have it, were outside. And they were hard. I was digging in the precipitation and the mud for six hours. Pity me, oh pity me, my readers.

See what it did to my truck? I wash that thing faithfully at least once every three months, and I happened to have washed it just this week. Now look! –>

Most of the churches in Memphis are closed this morning. I’m not sure why. At any rate, I’m home and blogging, furnace and fireplace operating at full tilt.

Alas! Relief is on the way. We just finished the warmest January in recorded history, and the high tomorrow is predicted to be 40. I suppose I can’t complain. But I will anyway: it is altogether too cold. :angry:

I must disagree with my fellow conservatives on this one. Dick Cheney was dead wrong, and this event bears all the marks of a coverup.

First: that line initially offered by Gertie Armstrong about Harry Whittington “not announcing himself” as he rejoined the group after retrieving his downed quail is hogwash. From all evidence I’ve been able to research (and the info is hardly available), Cheney was inexcusable to have followed that bird and swung around to where he could hit a fellow hunter. I’ve hunted quail myself, and that’s something you just don’t do. The initial story was “damage control.”

Next, there are conflicting reports about alcohol consumption. At first, there was no alcohol that day, only Dr. Pepper. Then the story changed to one beer at lunch. To cover the inconsistency, the hostess then said there might have been some beer, as if she didn’t know. And there may have been other versions of this story in addition to these.

Then there is the unwillingness of the sherriff’s department to report what they knew and when they knew it. They claimed that they were turned away by the Secret Service when they arrived to question Cheney. But the SS claims differently. Now the sherriff’s office won’t talk.

What are the real facts? That’s the problem: we can’t learn them because the administration is stonewalling and feeding us one line of inconsistent bull after another. I dare speculate that Cheney’s blood alcohol level was such that he didn’t want to interact with anyone for a few hours. He didn’t go to the hospital with his victim and apparently he was unavailable to the police until the next morning.

Here we go again. The weathermen predicted some snow tonight with little to no accumulation. The result? It’s showering down by the bucketfulls out there with no end in sight. Since I shot this photo, the ground is now covered. Winter wonderland my foot! And it’s only 3:00 PM. Rush hour is yet to come.

I’ve never understood romantics who “just luvvv snow.” Don’t these people ever work for a living? Bing Crosby is fine for an evening in front of the tube; but when the alarm clock rings in the morning, somebody’s got to get out of bed and provide the goods and services that make the world go ’round. At that point, it’s goodbye White Christmas and hello John Henry.

(In case you don’t understand that allusion, John Henry was a steel drivin’ man who died with his hammer in his hand, Lawd Lawd, died with his hammer in his hand.)

I presently hear a load of kids who just got off the school bus in front of my house. As I look out my window, listening to their cries of glee, I see them frantically scooping up gobs of snow and flinging it at the bus, one another, and the world in general. Of course they love it. They’re just kids. They don’t have to make the world go ’round tomorrow morning. Daddy will shovel the car out of the snow, Mr. Baker will get the food to the stores, Mrs. Mommy will make sure that there’s food from the store, into the oven, and on the table. Mr. Sparks will make sure that electricity flows into the house and powers all the gizmos they play with when they’re tired of the cold. So kids love snow.

But why do grownups?

There’s just no limit to human stupidity. Libertarian or Communist, Christian or infidel, Black or White, we’re surrounded by idiots on every side. Which is why I formulated Barley’s Third Law of Plumbing, which states “Everybody’s an idiot, just at different times.”

Some convulsive-fits-foaming-at-the-mouth left wing extremists have created a little video showing what America is about to be like since Samuel Alito is heading toward confirmation today. Check it out.