My Gnome Village(s)

Oscar Treats

From Twitter to Your Conscience

Day 1 of Trump's America

Explaining the Trump Victory

Team America explains the reason Donald Trump 

is president-elect instead of Hillary is because 

America prefers assholes to vaginas.

Letter to The Electric Company

Below is a gift from my friend BG; a copy of a letter she sent to her local electric company. She says, "Once, after a six-day outage, I got mad at the electric company. This is what I wrote to them"
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To Whom It May Concern (at the Electric Company),

Sorry I wasn't home to receive your call Thursday. If it is in your job description to deal with, redirect and or appease crackpots, I'll be at this number most of the day tomorrow. Before you call me though, check out the history of electrical power in America. And when you do, take note of your progress - we've all seen the old photos of horse and buggies alongside electric poles and ugly wires; the first horseless carriages parked near electric poles and ugly wires; airplanes flying over electric poles and ugly wires; rocket launches at NASA and on the ground are...electric poles and ugly wires! Read this at your next CEO conference and watch their faces, er...light up, so to speak. But the lightbulbs above their heads - they're NOT lit. Ironic, isn't it?

The defacing of our landscape with poles and wires has been tolerated for many generations, and yet it is a system that we are promised will fail again and again and again. And after all these years, the only answer your guys can come up with is to bury the lines so you can tear up the roads every five minutes to repair them. You haven't thought outside of the box in a hundred years, but perhaps it's because NO ONE WAS YELLING at you to find a better answer - one that doesn't leave you eating the dust of those who've made REAL progress. You didn't have to crank your Ford to start the engine this morning, although I'll bet you passed miles of electric poles and ugly wires (on you way to work in your climate-controlled office). When you call me or another crackpot, I'd wager your phone doesn't have a rotary dial, and I'd bet you also have a cell phone in your pocket; I'd also be on target if I guessed you have a fancy computer on your desk - and one or two at home. The only reason I have time to type this letter is that I don't have to stomp my laundry in a washtub and hang it out to dry; I don't have to chop wood for the stove or heat water for a bath. And to turn on a light I do exactly what my great grandmother did - I flip a switch (when there's not a black-out). And in her yard and in mine...those hideous things that cannot be disguised or hidden, ignored or denied and around which we must exercise a modicum of caution - are those hideous, horrible, anachronistic, horse and buggy, pony express, Little House on the Prairie electric poles and ugly wires. And they are virtually the ONLY thing my great-great-great grandmother would recognize in this world were she to rise from the dead today.

The electric industry's complacency with OUR complacency with the status quo allows them to be both an eyesore and an unreliable source of power. We haven't complained enough or embarrassed you enough to consider any other answer. Add to those facts that you have no competition forcing you to make improvements.Your CEOs are lazy and stupid; your company is lazy and stupid; and I have hundreds of dollars worth of good reasons to NOT trust you or your service. (That freezer's still for sale, if you're interested.) And since you cannot deny that I'm right and retain any credibility, are you sure you still wanna talk to me?

You can reach me at the number in your files,

BG 

PS: Note that the background image on Hiram's Rants has those ugly telephone wires at the bottom of it.  And if you like this sort of thing, here is that classic, If GM ran like Microsoft

Naguru-Morpheus Connection

Hi Readers,

Recently, I saw an answer posted by the Yahoo Answers User Naguru, a very nice guy whom I have always gotten along with, and the answer so bothered me (It was a kind of "You are right whatever you are trying to say" answer) that I posted a question asking whether this was pandering. As soon as I posted it I regretted putting his name in the details, but Yahoo Answers no longer allows me to remove a question once I have asked it.

So I was about to apologize to Naguru (thankfully some friends in there reported my question for me to take it down,) but then I received an email from Morpheus.

A little background on Morpheus:

Seven years ago, I was a top answerer in Yahoo Answers Philosophy with hundreds of fans and an 8% best answer rating (anybody with higher than a 20% is a fraud and is boosting their own answers by the way.) Suddenly everything I wrote got reported (That is the old method of what they do now, which is move your questions to insulting and erroneous categories like "pre-school.") A friend who knew Morpheus in real life warned me that he was an IT guy and a hacker and that he was a little bit dangerous. Another friend told me Morpheus hacked his email and started posting inappropriate questions under his name. So my account was targeted, questions removed and fan links used to stalk and harass me with nasty anonymous emails, until I removed all my fans and made my user links private. Finally my account was revoked. I will not underestimate Morpheus again.

So after my Naguru debacle I received this anonymous email:

From: M O R P H E U S
Subject: Raging against the machine!
Message: Still here, I see. We never had a beef, you and I. Somethings are best to leave...

At rest.

Be well!
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I, dear readers, consider this a threat, and a threat against me for saying something negative about Naguru. Morpheus is a sham, a fraud apparently a dangerous person and apparently Naguru is his protégé. Remember that in Y!A anyone can have an account called Morpheus and  anyone can send off an email as him. But the fact that his name comes up after I inappropriately slammed Naguru leads me to think maybe it was inadvertent rather than inappropriate, and that I have discovered another con game in Y!A.

I hope I am wrong. I hope someone with a very long memory is F-ing with me and that this is not the psychotic hacker turning his disgusting attentions back on me. I have seriously avoiding being popular or whatever in Philosophy for this very reason.

But perhaps my attempts at obscurity have failed.

If you contact me, Morpheus, I will spread the word to a higher and greater level what you are about in Y!A philosophy. Do not mess with me.

Happy Hiram

If perception changes the perciever does it change what is percieved?

If perception changes the perciever does it change what is percieved?

The mind is a splitter. Everything we look st becomes a zebra when in fact the universe is all gray horses. We see horses when all is gray scenery. 5 million shades of gray when there is one.

The universe is one thing until the mind begins to break it up. Reflection (like a mirror) turned on itself (like two mirrors) results in infinity. Put yourself between two mirrors and see. The mind creates an infinite universe OUT OF ITSELF. Crazier than any Matrix brain-in-a-vat scheme. 

There would be no reality if mind did not distinguish background from object. That is the triad at the center of all things. A father, son and holy scrim if you like. Sky mother and Earth father and you (as the observed one.) Time (out of mind) space and matter/energy.