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17 March 2016

re-issue Postalo Vleeptron: Very Long Half-Life Ionizing Radiation / funky Flint tap water / Vleeptron Dude could have acquired a Red-Hot Skill Set!


Click to enarge if you need to make it bigger
 to grok what it's trying to tell you.

Doh I can't believe I thought that was a football score. Organized team school sports -- I took a Very Wrong Turn by Age 5 and never found my way back.



Hampshire College nearby, the last of the Alternative Different Little Colleges of the 60s/70s, they're all very big into sports, hackysack, frisbee (one kid wrote his Big Paper on frisbee entrepreneurship), amd they hold a huge summer program for unicycling, juggling, the goofier circus arts. All sports must be non-competitive, no winners, no losers, and the whole point is to include all players and encourage cooperation.



Yesterday at the supermarket I was behind three lovely young women buying a shopping cart filled with hundreds of bananas. I couldn't resist, and they explained they were making banana bread to sell and raise money for their Smith College Frisbee Team.


I also completely spaced on 3/14 until people on chat started chatting about Pi Day around 01:00. A chatter sent me the big Pi(e) image. Tonight I brought home a cherry pie and Cynthia, who'd just returned from visiting an old pal in Maryland, and I ate a slice. The guy who started all this Pi Day stuff was Robert Oppenheimer's brother, he founded and ran a very thrilling science museum in San Francisco. (The FBI thought it best not to invite this brother to work on the Manhattan Project.)



I think from far away reading and TV that Ann Arbor's water is in no way affected by Flint's woes. Apparently your governor has the legal authority to retain and hide official documents (like staff memos about Flint's funky water) and keep them from the media and the public. It takes a pissed-off Big Judge to force government documents out of the governor's office.



Originally I wanted a Geiger counter to survey for uranium in Rock Creek Park near where I lived in DC. Blow me down, the damn place just clicks that Geiger counter enthusiastically, there is indeed uranium in Rock Creek Park!

But the little instruction manual had easy little equations, and if I'd snuck back with shovels, the uranium was worth about 1 cent per dug ton of dirt. Also the Park Police would start to notice me and my buddies digging up their park.



I'm sure I told you that in the List of Army Schools with Openings on the day I got drafted, the nice recruiting sergeant said I could pick any school on his list that struck my fancy, add 1 year to my 2 year active commitment. The only one that caught my fancy -- remember, I was very angry and disoriented that week -- was Nuclear Weapons Maintenance and Repair, in Sandia, New Mexico. I figured I'd learn lots of potentially very useful information.



But if you think about how long the draft lasted, and DoD by 1953 had thousands of A-bombs and H-bombs requiring lots of this arcane MOS/AFS -- well, decades of teaching very angry and possibly unbalanced young men all about nuclear bombs, there's thousands of them out there, old vets like us, young Afghanistan and Iraq guys, but we have a Special Skill Set. Ditto the other big nuclear powers, they put thousands of bright young people on this Career or Home Hobbyist Path, too.



Look, the world is filled with invisible, odorless, colorless, practically imperceivable Toxic Powerful Crap. I've known since my youth prospecting experiences with the $25 PRI portable GC that this box and all its ilk -- well, suddenly I could perceive the imperceivable, I could see the invisible. I know colorless's color.The Deadly Toxins could not sneak past me.



You could be sitting on a chair cushion and inside is a big chunk of radium -- how would you know (other than a warmer than normal ass)?



But I got these gizmos. I know. I know why my ass feels hot. My gizmos tells me to FLEE FOR YOUR LIFE if it ever becomes that kind of situation in the neighborhood. (There are several models that do just that one job: scream that you should FLEE FOR YOUR LIFE NOW BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP .)


Here's the True Story of a Boy Scout (still living, and he eventually attained Eagle Scout) who flipped to the next merit badge in the Manual: radioactivity.


 

When last heard from, he lived in your state. Don't leave him alone with your smoke detectors, he's wild about the chips inside them, Americium-241, it's hot as hell, it pegs the needle and your gizmo makes a lot of noise.



[at top of post] is the recently adapted international symbol for dangerous radioactivity. The idea is that Beavis and Butt-head could understand what the sign means even if it's 190,000 A.D. and nobody knows how to read anymore. Did you read the story of the Goiana Accident in Brazil?
Your old Army pal Joe Schloblodewski

God made me this way, do not criticize or disrespect the work of God.



Oh, thanks for the pie!



Love to Chris and your bairn. Do any of your bairn have bairn yet?

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