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Sunday, March 11, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #82

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.

1. Do zombies have constitutional rights? I mean, the ones that haven't actually been declared dead by a doctor (the ones in the hospital morgues).

2. I watched a bunch of those Doomsday Prepper shows on National Geographic. I find the whole concept ludicrous because anybody with a year's food in their house is going to be a target for desperately hungry neighbors with guns. Even building an armored castle in the desert isn't going to help much. You need more warriors with guns to defend the place than you can feed. The guy who thought he was (in the middle of a crisis) going to walk four blocks from his storage locker to his home with a duffle bag full of food had to be very naive. The bunch of New England farmers who thought they didn't need guns to protect their year's supply of food were just nuts.

3. The average American soldier or Marine infantryman in the Pacific in World War II saw a total of 40 days of combat, spread over 4 years. The average American soldier or Marine infantryman in Vietnam saw 240 days of combat in one year. Most Americans sent to either conflict only rarely saw any combat at all, as they served in rear area units.

4. Back in high school, I read the book A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS about Sir Thomas Moore (and later saw the movie). Both praised him for being a man of principle, a man who went to the executioner's block rather than pretend to change his political position. Funny how the book never mentioned that Sir Thomas Moore spent the previous few years burning Protestants at the stake.

5. Leanna and I tried to watch THE RIVER and gave up halfway through episode #3. We just were not enjoying that show. On the other hand, we're down to just three episodes of CHUCK that we haven't watched yet. RINGER and REVENGE remain intriguing, CASTLE and GREY'S ANATOMY remain favorites, and I still think that GOLD MINING MORONS is the best show in the history of television.

6. The US did not know that the Japanese super battleships Yamato and Mushashi had 18-inch guns until after the war when they got the blueprints from the shipyard. For the whole of World War II, we Americans thought those ships had 16-inch guns (same as those on our battleships).

7. Bad career move #74: Tell the woman you sleep with that you have a stockpile of chocolate in your desk and then eat it all before she comes by (a week later) asking for some of it.

8. Bad career move #75: The woman you sleep with asks you to pick up her favorite snack when you stop at the quickie mart, and you forget. (Go back and get it, even if she says it doesn't really matter.)

9. Something is very wrong. American universities gave about 61% of the advanced degrees in engineering and 50% of the advanced degrees in math went to foreign students. Worse, American students claimed 65% of the advanced degrees in education.

10. The so-called gender gap in salaries is actually far less than it appears. Averaged over all men and all women, sure, women make 64% as much. Women also tend to be in lower-paying jobs (by their own choice, such as teachers for lower grades). Many women have shorter careers (if they take time off to have kids), which is one reason the rare cases of exactly equal jobs don't always have the same salaries. Female doctors make less than male doctors, but that's because surgeons made more than other doctors and most surgeons are male. Very few women work as bricklayers, stonemasons, or steelworkers, which tend to pay well. Women who are 30 years old and have never been married actually make more than men who are the same age and have never been married. It's not all sweetness and light; sometimes men just get promoted faster than women because older men don't like pushy women who fight for promotions. But sometimes, women just don't want the stress (politics, long hours, and danger of getting fired for screwing up) of better paying leadership positions.