4.07.2011

Post Office Blues

I've used that title before a long time ago, but I've got them again, the post office blues. <harmonica solo>

So almost a month after my request for a copy of the signature that I paid the post office to receive (signature confirmation), I finally get a response!

That is, a letter from USPS regretfully informing me that they can find no record of that item. Thankfully I know it got there, as I received a refund for the item I was returning, but come on USPS! What gives?

 Where I work, we receive a lot of mail....a lot. And I get to send a lot of mail too. I have to say that once one of the mail sorting centers in my state closed down a year ago or so, the quality of USPS's service has drastically diminished. Envelopes come with the original contents removed and other whole pieces of entirely different mail still in their own envelopes stuffed in them! Envelopes come empty too. Know a lot of people that received empty envelopes during the christmas season. Lots of mail getting lost too. Used to rarely happen, even with the amount of mail we receive/send out. But anymore, you almost have to expect it.

I guess it's a sign of the times. Cutbacks, economic depression, probably some irate postal workers....

In high school myself and a few friends wrote a play about a huge mysterious package that arrived at an apartment complex with an illegible shipping label. All the tenants came up with wild stories about how it was something for them, but it turned out just to be an empty box. A disgruntled postal worker was trying to cause some havoc. It was a pretty ridiculous play but a lot of fun too. 

Anyhoo, I really have lost a lot of faith in the postal service. There needs to be some competition for first class mail.

4.06.2011

Funny Money

My brother sent me a link to a few years old story about a man being arrested at a Best Buy for trying to pay with $2 bills.

Try here (or alternatively, here) to read about it.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the times I've tried to spend my $2 bills. It never goes well. Even had a bank teller look at me odd once for trying to deposit them. Same goes for 50-cent pieces and $1 coins! The cashiers won't listen to you because they don't like being called out as an idiot I suppose.

Along a similar vein, Lowe's once wouldn't accept my beau's passport as photo identification to go along with his check. Funny thing is, to apply for that passport he needed his driver's license and his birth certificate. So in my world, a passport should count at least twice--a double or even triple form of ID.

I feel this post could develop into a heated rant about the state of our public "education" system, but I've got a slew of chores to do. Another time then.

4.03.2011

DOWNSIZE DC

(I first mentioned this site back in Feb 2007. some of these campaigns are still just campaigns. COME ON PEOPLE, THERE ARE SOME WORTHY CAUSES HERE!!!)

you know, they do have a point. or two or three or four or.... and by "they" i mean "DOWNSIZEDC.ORG"

and why should we need campaigns like this? i mean, you'd think it would just be the logical sensible thing to be doing when you're drafting a bill or running a government, etc,  anyway.

things like:

  • reading a bill before voting on its passage ("Read The Bills Act")
  • not combining unrelated bills together ("One Subject at a Time Act")
  • auditing the Fed, because it's a private organization and should follow the same laws the rest of us/other businesses follow. ("Audit the Fed") - Also see Ron Paul's own "audit the fed" campaign & his book: END THE FED. Also, while on the subject of Ron Paul, go ahead & sign this petition.
  • not ignoring the constitution ("Tell Congress to Obey the Consititution")
  • not strangling the small family farmer... got to repeal some of this one now. i was against a lot of this stuff when i first started hearing about it. especially the NAIS. i think corporate farms might get a fair amount of exclusions. it's a typical approach to lawmaking: penalizing the common man & making endless exceptions for the wealthy or for large business entities. ("Preserve the Freedom to Farm") 

just need to get a large number of people on the same page. is that impossible, improbable, or just unlikely?

Past Madness Comes A-Knocking

Decided to go through former posts at earth*asylum and pick out some oldies & goodies for reposting here. What can I say, I'm feeling a wee bit lazy right now. But also so there'll be something filling the void here until I really get back into the blogging groove.  It's been quite a while. Been letting the day job get me down, but no more!

3.27.2011

We're All Mad Here

The Cat: We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.
Alice: How do you know I'm mad?
The Cat: You must be. Or you wouldn't have come here.

(Duly noted.)

Many years ago I rambled some whimsical albeit mindless rants and now am back once again. Properly URLed. 

I dubbed myself fairiechild, but it was others who insisted on the madhatter. I have preferred to say "the madhatter in fairie form," but more often now than not it is the madness that drives me more so than fayness...or is that feyness? I prefer the latter. Maybe this is why:


FAY: "resembling an elf" [hence, fairiechild]

FEY: marked by a foreboding of calamity; able to see into the future; marked by an otherworldly air; crazy, touched; excessively refined; quaintly unconventional"

FEY is more appropriate I think. And perhaps I'm wrong about the madness being the driving factor. I'm starting to feel the madness is just a symptom of the feyness.


Anyhow....the rambling has begun. Delve in or dash away. But remember, we are all of us mad.

10.26.2008

x-rays from scotch tape?!?!

this is very very cool….very very interesting….come on, what’s in that scotch tape?

Peeling Scotch Tape Powers X-Ray Machine (from Discover.com, 10-22-08)
"Peeling a roll of ordinary sticky tape can generate 100 milliwatt pulses of X-rays, enough to capture a human finger on X-ray film, according to a new study by UCLA scientists. …"

 crazy, no?

9.02.2008

disappearing aircraft and other flying oddities

a couple years ago i noticed some weird goings on. of course, i’m always noticing weird goings on, but i like to look upwards and check out what the aircraft is doing from time to time. i have a lot of chances to witness their activity. by the way, i’m in a quiet zone and some high altitude commercial flight paths with an occasional military “game”……

the constant goings on include chemtrail spraying. sometimes they let up and allow us a sunny day or two. the best are seeing the unique patterns of the chemtrails (swastikas!?!?! upside-down peace signs!?!?!). and yes these trails are rather different from the normal contrails. i’ve even seen two planes near each other, one with a short, quickly dissapating contrail and the other with a long long long chemtrail that stays in the sky and slowly spreads out (typically to meet other slowly spreading out chemtrails, thus blanketing the sky and blocking sunlight). the other thing i’ve witnessed the chemtrail-spewing planes do is finish their dump, there’s a break, than the contrail starts up with it’s normal short distance behind the plane that quickly dissapates. interesting, no?

but back to this one summer (2005). i just happen to be outside during the afternoon. it’s bright. clear skies (for once). i’m walking up the drive and look up. for no reason really, except maybe habit. i’m surprised to notice two shiny silver planes near each other. i was surprised because i didn’t hear them. you can always hear the planes around here, even through the walls, even when they are at their highest altitude. and oddly, these two planes were much lower than most of the planes i hear & see. then another anomaly catches my attention: there are no chemtrails and no contrails. nothing. i watch them for a bit, never hearing anything, nor seeing any trails. i look away for a second and they disappear on me. which is kind of weird as they had a ways to go before being blocked by trees. there were no visible markings that i could see. i have this odd feeling that what i was seeing wasn’t really what i was seeing.

ok. another day. again (and oddly) a decently sunny afternoon. i’m inside. washing dishes if i remember rightly. i hear this high-pitch whine. it’s really bizarre, so of course i want to investigate. the back door is about 15 feet from where i was standing, so i leap across the floor, swing open the door, and look up. flying so low i could have seen faces in the darkened windows had there been any to see, is a white plane. no markings, flying very slowly. it’s front tip is just passing over the roofline. right next to the door (which is open) i have a table with my camera on it. i look away to grab the camera and look back. couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. but when i look back, the plane is gone. i thought for sure i could have caught an image of the tail end before it passed the roof. oh well, i quickly dash to the front door. about 5 quick leaps across the floor (yes i live in a small place) and i dash out the front door expecting to see the plane passing over the front yard, or at least down the road. it had quite a ways to go before it should be out of view at the speed it was going. but it was no where. this incredibly low plane was no where to be seen. oddly i still heard the high-pitch whining. i just could never see anything. so how does a plane vanish from sight within seconds, but still can be heard? and for that matter, since when did a plane ever make a high-pitch whine like what i heard? i’ve never heard a plane make that sound before and i’ve never heard it again. so what the heck was that?

military jets have flown so low before i thought i could hit them with a rock. they are very very noisy (thunderous roars you hear a while before they come and after they leave) and they fly extremely fast over you. the plane i saw was crawling at a snail’s pace in comparison.

and then there was that night in january of 2004 when that odd light flashed on me while i was walking towards my home, flashed at my home (witnessed by those inside through a window), and then just disappeared. and when it was on me i had such a hard time moving, concentrating, speaking, thinking….and had this odd idea that a dark brown boxy car with dark-tinted windows was pulling up the driveway, until i realized that the light was coming from behind me and not from the driveway, and that there was no car coming up the driveway. there was a full moon that night as well–you could draw a triangle between it, the light, and the driveway points, yet that moon illumined no dark shape behind the light, even though it was just above the treeline and i could see the dark shape of the trees. like maybe a helicopter to which a search light might have been attached. and everything so eerily silent. but when i turned to look at the source of the light is when it flashed to the house and disappeared. very odd. slowly i regained proper functioning of my motor skills with the dawning realization that something completely unordinary and just a bit frightening had occurred. i wish i could write this off to some sort of imbibed substance, but i was unfortunately sober at the time and had been for a long while before and a long while after. not much of an unsober person i suppose.

so….strange aircraft.