Since I first joined SodaHead I have met many nice people with a wide variety of backgrounds and opinions. I have enjoyed discussing, debating, warring, and laughing with you all.

I will check mail from time to time but I have decided to drastically minimize my time here in the community in the future. I wish you all the best.

Bitwise Operator

Keep thyself first in peace and then thou wilt be able to bring others to peace.
A peaceful man does more good than one that is learned.
A passionate man turns every good to evil and easily believes evil.
A good peaceful man turns all things to good.
He that is in perfect peace suspects no man, but he that is discontented and disturbed is tossed about with various suspicions; he is neither quiet himself nor does he suffer others to be quiet.
He often says that which he should not say, and often omits that which would be better for him to do.
He considers what others are oblidged to do , and neglects that to which he himself is oblidged.
Have, therefore, a zeal in the first place over thyself, and then thou mayst justly exercise the zeal towards thy neighbor.
Thou knowest well enough how to excuse a color thy own doings, and thou wilt not take the excuses of others.
If were more just that though shouldst accuse thyself and excuse thy brother.
If though wil be borne with bear also with another.
See how far thou art yet from true charity and humility, which knows not how to be angry with any one, or to have indignation against any one but one's self.
It is no great thing to be able to converse with them that are good and meek, for this is naturally pleasing to all. And everyone would willingly have peace and love those best that agree with them.
But to live peacefully with those that are harsh and perverse, or disorderly, or such as oppose us, is a great grace, and highly commendable and manly.
Some there are who keep themselves in peace and have peace also with others.
And there are some that are neither at peace within themselves, nor suffer others to be in peace; they are more troublesome to others, but always more troublesome to themselves.
And some there are who keep themselves in peace and study to restore peace in others.
He who knows how to suffer will enjoy much peace.
Such a one is a conqueror or himself and lord of the world, a friend of Christ, and an heir to heaven.

My Imitation of Christ
Thomas a Kempis

Hope this is enjoyed by my friends here as much as I enjoyed it.(please pardon my transcritpion errors)

My home sits on the corner of a cul-de-sac and has a rather nice fenced yard to keep the younger kids from wandering. It is currently not the nicest looking place on the street due to the fact that I bought it pre-foreclosure and the previous occupants knew little about maintenance, upkeep and possibly personal hygiene. As a family we have been applying gross amounts of elbow grease with an eye toward turning this into a showplace.

The neighborhood is nice enough as the people are generally friendly with a small gradeschool just down the street and the bus stops for high schoolers along my fenceline. In the morning there are hoards of children all walking to school - the teenagers wait along my fence for the bus that stops there.

Sadly, the children and teens often carry some (perhaps all) of their breakfast as the walk to school or wait for the bus. That translates to large amounts of trash being discarded along their route that eventually makes its way into my yard through (and ocassionally over) my fence. Pop tart wrappers seem to be the most popular discard with glad baggies a close second. In third place are various brands for chips bags from kids who cannot wait until lunch.

There sheer volumn of discarded refuse is unbelievable for this upper middle class neighborhood and I watch other adults walking with the children to see their reaction. They ignore the kids dropping trash and step on, over, or around it. It blows down the street around them like dust around the people in a thrid rate western. They seem oblivious to it.

The neighbors too seem content to ignore the majority of it and they stoop to pickup only what officially becomes part of their yard. One or two feet into the boundary generally evokes a healthy response but anything laying in the curb does not seem to be worth the effort. Why bother picking up something in front of your home when it might become your neighbor's problem?

Why does it seem that pride in the community is a lost value?

That was "Cranium", my typing is rotten today.

Several weeks ago my doctor thought it wise to get a CAT Scan of my entire body. For the most part I'm a non-interventionist when it comes to medicine as I prefer a more holistic approach by way of prevention.

The thought of being swallowed whole by an enormous medical device and being bombarded with x-rays isn't the first thing I want to do when I get out of bed in the morning. On this occasion I decided to take my doctors advice.

The results of the procedure caused quite a disturbance to the attendants and they called in several other physicians. Having checked the device several times in succession they called in a mathematician, an astro physicist and even a biologist who happened to be in intensive care to view the results.

It appears that the scan of my cranium returned a volume of unspecified size but astonomically large. The image looked like this:



Prominent astronomers report that a close examination of my CAT Scan reveals several hundred million perfectly normal galaxies and from that perspective I have nothing to worry about. Initially they thought an over abundance of supernovae might be a problem, however; they later retracted that opinion as I am usually a rather creative sort of person.

To date doctors, psychologists, and physicists have been unable to explain the phenomenon but have generally agreed that I must spend a good deal of time thinking about things.

In the end I was sent home with a rather large medical bill for having overloaded the CT machine. I did manage to get the hospital staff to let me keep some of the nicer photographs.

It is beyond human comprehension why anyone would try to raise a family out in California. Not only is the price of real estate so high that a cardboard box over a steamvent rents for $3400 per month but the people there are constantly under attack from their own public servants.

Now comes the most recent attack on the people of California by the California Court of Appeals wherein hard working and law abiding parents are stripped of the right to provide a decent education for their children. Here is what the court said.

“Parents who fail to comply with state school enrollment law] may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program,”

- Justice H. Walter Croskey

This opinion reversed a superior court judge’s ruling that “parents have a constitutional right to school their children in their own home.

What's taking place out in that bastion of social dung is that schools and their officals are at war with parents who seek to provide a real education for their children. For the parents this is a struggle to protect their children from the establishment filthmongers who seek nothing less than to require children to read such titles as: "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”. It's not about education out there, it's really about the right to protect your children's innocence and purity - little doubt on where the State of California stands in that regard. You child will be subjugated to the most vile and putrid materials with or without your consent and as far as the courts see it you have no right to say anything.

The real reason increasing numbers of parents want their kids at home for school is that they want to teach them math, science, history and oddly enough - english. Meanwhile the state run schools are debasing themselves to the point where any student who can apply a condom to a cucumber has already taken the final exam in their eyes.

One possible solution is to put a stop to California itself by boycotting anything and everything associated with the state. We know that they're already on the brink of bankruptcy so all it will take is some gentle nudging by decent folks in the US. Don't buy their wine, grapes, lettuce or computer software. Let fire ravage their state and keep your fire fighters at home. Don't visit their state parks or their attractions (most are closed anyway)

Write your own state representatives and let them know that we the people demand that our freedoms be protected against the judicial tyranny that is eroding our rights. It's already happening in California and they're working hard to export it to the rest of us.