FLOW: a plumber’s weblog

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.

I am indebted to my friend David Gish for this link.

There’s a coffee available for $300/lb called Kopi Luwak. It’s made from the excrement of an animal called a paradoxorus, who climbs around in coffee trees and eats the berries.

“Bottoms up!”

I came across this photo, which I like very much:

Well, I guess that I don’t like the photo all that much, but I certainly like the captions.

Two facts should stand out when considering the Second Amendment. First: it is not a grant of a right. The government does not create rights. Instead, it is a prohibition against the federal government infringing on a right that already exists. Second: the purpose of an armed citizenry was to make government tyranny impossible. Our right to guns is not based on the need to protect ourselves from local punks, it is based on our right to be free from government tyranny.

Jefferson said “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. The hand of force [he meant government] may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” Rights come from God and they are intact even when government uses force to deny the free exercise of those rights. The right to keep and bear arms is one of those rights.

I grew up in Houston, Texas. It only snowed once every six years or so, and that snow would melt within a day. This makes me sensitive to people who’ve never seen snow and how it can paralyze a city. Therefore I submit this photo, shot from my front yard.

We lived through the snow and ice.

Eight degrees is nothing to sneeze at; but I successfully avoided all frozen pipe calls, kept my old truck running, escaped the ditches and oncoming cars that awaited me on every side of the slick streets, and kept the fireplace at home stoked and radiating. And the crisis passed.

Now, one week later, it’s 70 degrees in Memphis and the forecast says it will continue for several days.

Eat your heart out, Indiana.

And what does a Fundamentalist get his son for Christmas? Here is Wesley with his new T-shirt and Taurus PT-132 semiauto:

We had a great day at the Barley household this fine Christmas. I was going to go to work, but The Voices said to stay home and clean the guns. So we’re doing our part to spread the message of the angels: “Peace through Superior Firepower.”

Yes, we Barleys live in a world where “gun control” means hitting your target. The Kingdom of God will be a time of universal peace. This isn’t it. In a fallen world such as ours, thugs need more than a smile and an assurance of unconditional positive regard. They need the fear that comes from knowing that their prey might be armed. And if they guess wrongly and attack us, we hope to assist the city of Memphis in its beautification program by eliminating a little of the trash at no charge to the taxpayers.

And should you dislike the idea of shooting an attacker dead, I suggest that, in the event that you happen to be attacked yourself, that you call out for a social worker to counsel the poor, disadvantaged punk who’s about to feed upon you. If that doesn’t work, maybe you should hope like heck that there’s a trained handgunner nearby.

In the final analysis, we are the richest and most free nation on earth because our military forces defeated those who would have enslaved us. People in hellholes across the third world work hard and live carefully, but they still don’t enjoy blessings such as ours. Other people, such as their government or bandits, make it impossible for them to flourish and grow rich.

We are a free people only because other people, evil people, cannot overpower us and steal what we have produced. Such people are out there. Make no mistake, they’re there. The newspaper is filled with stories of such people. The primary restraint against them is firepower.

I have my health and my family. There are a number of millionaires who’d gladly trade places with me, because I’m richer than they. But I can continue to be rich only if evil men are restrained by the fear of deadly force. God bless our military, and God bless all the responsible gun owners who stand ready to defend themselves and their families this Christmastide.

A big ol’ storm has paralyzed the midwest, and Memphis isn’t doing so well, either. When I crawled under a house yesterday morning, everything was fine. When I emerged some hours later, the city was covered with sleet, with more coming down all the time. By the time I set out for home (a fifteen-minute drive under ordinary conditions), it was dark and just at the time when rush hour is worst. It took an hour and a half to get home. Nobody was driving over 20 mph, and most of the time, when we were moving at all, we were going about 5 mph. All of the streets were packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic, as the Interstates were impassible.

Thus it is in the South. We don’t know how to drive in ice and snow, and it just doesn’t pay to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars preparing for a storm that might occur once every three or four years. We have no snowplows, very little salt and sand, and apparently a governmental workforce that isn’t too enthusiastic about getting overtime hours.

Today the roads were iced over. You could drive 40 mph, but you couldn’t stop! So folks were still creeping along like a snail on his way to see his mother-in-law. Combine that with a backlog of plumbing jobs I had to get to and you can imagine why I see little attraction in the song “It’s the *most* wonderful tiiime of the year.”

Ah, remember the halcyon days of working for a plumbing company. I put in for my vacation months in advance; I broke it up so that the days would adjoin my regular days off. I’d put another log on the fire, put my feet up, and let the Company fend for themselves. Christmas was a great time.

Now I can no longer tell the Company to go jump in the lake. I am the company. So I fight the single-digit weather and the icy streets, solving one problem after another, because folks rely on me and turning them down would be the equivalent of throwing them to the wolves.

But it’s still too doggone cold.

Here’s a great video that everyone should view.

These are the words to “Homeward Bound,” the song playing in the background:

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing and the sky is clear and red.
When the summer’s ceased its gleaming, when the corn is past its prime,
When adventure’s lost its meaning, I’ll be homeward bound in time.

Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

If you find it’s me you’re missing, if you’re hoping I’ll return,
To your thoughts I’ll soon be list’ning, and in the road I’ll stop and turn.
Then the wind will set me racing as my journey nears its end,
And the path I’ll be retracing when I’m homeward bound again.Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow.
Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.

In the quiet misty morning when the moon has gone to bed,
When the sparrows stop their singing, I’ll be homeward bound again.

-Music and Lyrics by Marta Keen

Rhodesia, once the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa, has become Zimbabwe, an economic and political basket case. I just learned from a contact in South Africa that Air Zimbabwe is going bankrupt and will soon close. They can’t get enough passengers. It seems that Zimbabweans are now so thin, they can be faxed to their destinations.

Joe Blundo, of the Columbus Dispatch, wrote a fine column on Nov. 24. Unfortunately it is not available on the newspaper’s web site, so I’m reproducing it here. If they sue me, I’ll take it down.

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The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The re-election of President Bush is prompting the exodus among left leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and agree with Bill O’Reilly. Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal rights activists, and Unitarians crossing their fields at night.

“I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. The producer was cold, exhausted, and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn’t have any, he left. Didn’t even get a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. So he tried installing speakers that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields. “Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through, and Rush annoyed the cows so much they wouldn’t give milk.”

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons, drive them across the border, and leave them to fend for themselves. “A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged conditions,” an Ontario border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a drop of drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet, though.”

When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about the Bush administration establishing re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR.

In the days since the election, liberals have turned to sometimes ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have taken to posing as senior citizens on bus trips to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans disguised in powdered wigs, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior-citizen passengers. “If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we get suspicious about their age,” an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic broccoli shortage and renting all the good Susan Sarandon movies.

“I feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them,” an Ottawa resident said. “How many art-history majors does one country need?”

In an effort to ease tensions between the United States and Canada, Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Canadian ambassador and pledged that the administration would take steps to reassure liberals, a source close to Cheney said. “We’re going to have some Peter, Paul & Mary concerts. And we might put some endangered species on postage stamps. The president is determined to reach out.”

The International Chicken Sequencing Consortium reported today that they have sequenced and analyzed the genome of the chicken. If you don’t believe it, this cartoon, which is self-explanatory, will prove it:

This feat is supposed to help scientists in their study of human genetics, since 2.5% of the chicken’s genetics overlap with ours. But you already knew that we were like chickens. For instance, they have feet, so do we. They have a head, eyes, mouth, beating heart, etc., and so do we.

And why are we so much like chickens? According to International Chicken Sequencing Consortium, it’s because those genetic elements were preserved for 350 million years while we and the chickens were evolving from our common ancestor.

The family resemblance is unmistakable:

Col. Sanders, the cannibal, never realized this. He probably thought that God created the heaven and the earth and put the chickens here for us to fry. But, thanks to Darwin and the International Chicken Sequencing Consortium, we know better. The old view, that we’re supposed to eat fried chicken, is now called “speciesism.” It’s now considered wrong (by some of the more consistent thinkers within the leftist intellectual movement) to think that your species is better than another, or that you have a right to eat the other species.

Behold, Mr. Potato Head really is my brother!