Grandma is burried in the garden.

As usual Kadizzle woke up to the cacophony of The Commander jumping around like a grasshopper in a field of wheat that was on fire.  The Commander was having fits because the temporary bag collecting Kadizzle's urine had some leakage problems over night.

After The Commander settled down to the point it seemed like normal conversation could ensue Kadizzle pondered on where to be buried.  The garden seemed appropriate.  The Commander quickly explained that the ashes of the mother in  law  had already been spread there among the tomatoes and cucumbers.  Immediately Kadizzle wondered what vegetables he would be assigned to.  Quickly both Kadizzle and The Commander realized his ashes would be used as weed killer.

The Commander's mom was certainly good to the Kadizzlites, and to her grandchildren, but it was clear she did not have a frictionless relationship with old Kadizzle.  If granny is out in the garden in peace with the cucumbers maybe it is best to just leave her alone.

Well Kadizzle knows for sure he wants a few shotgun shells loaded with his ashes and passed out to his hunting friends, and perhaps some ashes sprinkled in the lake.  No matter where the ashes go Kadizzle will be blamed for the commander for something.  If your water intake plugs up on your boat, no doubt it was Kadizzle, if your pheasant shot goes astray, it was Kadizzle,  if the potatoes from the garden go bad it was Kadizzle ashes.  More than likely my last trip will be through the sewer pipes of Hazen,  then every time they dig up the sewer on main street the whole town will say that god damn Quinn did it again.

The Tubular Man

Kadizzle never thought he would have his own bildge pump, but here he sits with not one but two tubes draining the sin from his body. The real fear is the thought one of these tubes is going to get caught on something and come ripping out unexpectedly.  Not a disaster fun to contemplate.  Tuesday the bildge pump comes out and the drain from the bladder has another week and a half to go.  The only benifit is you don't have to get up and pee at night.  We just have the hose running out the window. 

Come Healing

Tomorrow is the big day.  The plan is to open poor old Kadizzle up and take his cancerous prostate out.  With luck all the damn cancer will come out with it.  Music has a wonderful way of " soothing the savage beast".   In the course of exploring music while surfing the web Kadizzle ran across this Leonard Cohen song on Spotify.  The name of the song is come healing.  The song perfectly captures the thoughts running through my mind.  Kadizzle is not religious in any traditional sense.  That does not mean he cannot be awed by the universe and suspect something is up.  Hope is what keeps us all alive. Hoping for a better world and a better tomorrow is fundamental to life and progress.   Prayer is really hope in disguise.  There would be no point in waking up tomorrow if there was no hope for something good to happen.  Before you can convince anyone of anything, you have to convince yourself. 

Songwriters: Leonard, Patrick Raymond / Cohen, Leonard

Chorus:
O, gather 'round the brokenness
Bring it to me now
The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow

The splinters that you carried
The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

And let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb

Leonard:
Behold the gates of mercy
In arbitrary space
And none of us deserving
Of cruelty or the grace

Together:
O, solitude of longing
Where love has been confined
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

O, see the darkness yielding
That tore the light apart
Come healing of the reason
Come healing of the heart

O, troubledness concealing
An undivided love
The heart beneath is teaching
To the broken heart above

And let the heavens utter
Let the earth proclaim
Come healing of the altar
Come healing of the name

Chorus:
O, longing of the branches
To lift the little bird
O, longing of the arteries
To purify the blood

Together:
And let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb

O let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb

Send "Come Healing" Ringtone to your Cell

Come Healing lyrics

Now I give a shit

It used to be that Kadizzle pretty much did not give much thought to cancer.  Things changed.  Now, Kadizzle has prostate cancer.  In two days Kadizzle will be sliced and diced to have his prostate removed.  My, but things have changed.

Prior to this marvelous adventure Kadizzle knew our health care system was in deep trouble, but now it is even more evident and more relevant.  The simple truth is that many people are suffering and dying, not because they have to, but because we simply will not address some basic truths.  Watch the video posted below.  We can have a long conversation about this video.  People are dying needlessly because we do not share information in our medical system.  The refusal to digitize and share records is killing and making thousands suffer.

The same vested interest that do not want a decent national health care system, do not want shared or good medical records. Why?  Good records and shared records mean the fraud in they system instantly is found out.  Good records and shared information means you know what drugs work, what treatments work, and provide a host of useful information.  However, drug companies know they are selling you worthless drugs, doctors know they are doing questionable surgeries, radiologist know they are overcooking people, but they do not want you to know.

So what do they do?  The medical industry dreams up a phony scare about privacy. You can share information and remain anonymous.  I can let a computer data base know I am 63, I have high blood pressure,  I weigh 225lbs,  I have good cholesterol, but I don't need to let the computer know who I am.  Watch this video, and listen carefully.  About a third of us will get cancer.  You may suffer and die, because you did not think this video is important.  It was not that important to me three months ago.   A lot of people are dead right now because special interest groups do not want information shared.  Once you cross the line from an onlooker to a participant in the cancer adventure you will take this all more seriously.   The odds are one in three you will have cancer, so good luck ignoring this video

Solar living in the sunshine

Old Lord Kadizzle is sitting in his daughters house. Up on the roof top where Santa normally would be are 12 solar panels. The panels were just hooked up a day ago.  One neat aspect of the panels is the data collection. On the giant PC screen the chart can be projected to show what is going on up by the shingles. 

Study the chart reveals a lot. The Keurig Coffee maker sucks up over 2,000 watts, when you make a cup of coffee. Luckily it just takes about thirty seconds.  You can see the sun rise on the chart. The green, which is power you are producing gradually overcomes the red, which is the power you are buying.  In the last two days we saved $3.92 with solar. It appears if one were cautious and conscientious you could probably get pretty close to all the power you need with the 12 panels. However the experiment so far was during very sunny days.

A big observation Kadizzle has made about people an power is the need for feed back. If you have some way of knowing how much power you are using or wasting, you are more inclined to do something about it.  Often when camping we hear someone's generator take off and go wild.  This usually happens when they use the microwave, hair dryer, or toaster.  At Erin's house you see a big red spike in power consumption.

If Kadizzle has learned anything so far it is the fact that solar water heating would probably be the way to go. Such a large amount of power goes into heating water, and making hot water with solar direct is relatively cheap and easy. Combining solar panels with a solar water heater would probably get you farther down the road than any other move for saving energy. 

A very high percentage of homes in Erin's neighborhood are being built with solar.  A neighbor stopped by who has 20 panels on their roof. Their intention is to get an electric car and use their excess power to run the car.

Wonderful story and One of best songs ever

If you believe it, it is true

Everybody must have watched Sienfield at one time or another.  Kadizzle ran across a quote from George, " It's true if you believe it".   Looking around the world we live in it is amazing how many people use that as the standard for reality and what is true.  How much of what we believe is simply not true?  Look at the stuff that has been floated around as truth. People used to believe flies came out of nowhere. People had no idea that flies came from maggots.

Below is a letter Richard Dawkins.  I may have put it on here before, but it is one of my favorite essays in the world and it is so important that we think about how we think.  Until you examine yourself, and how you think, you cannot understand how others think.  If Kadizzle had infinite cash he would have this letter published in every newspaper in the country.

To my dearest daughter,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?
The answer to these questions is ‘evidence’.
Sometimes evidence means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling, smelling….) that something is true. Astronauts have traveled far enough from the Earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The ‘evening star’ looks like a bright twinkle in the sky but with a telescope you can see that it is a beautiful ball – the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or hearing or feeling…) is called an observation.
Often evidence isn’t just observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there’s been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the dead person!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots of other observations which may all point towards a particular suspect. If a person’s fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn’t prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it’s joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realize that they all fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists – the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe – often work like detectives. They make a guess (called a hypothesis) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: if that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveler, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor says that you have measles he doesn’t take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: if she really has measles, I ought to see… Then he runs through his list of predictions and tests them with his eyes (have you got spots?), his hands (is your forehead hot?), and his ears (does your chest wheeze in a measly way?). Only then does he make his decision and say, ‘I diagnose that the child has measles.’ Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-rays, which help their eyes, hands and ears to make observations.
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called ‘tradition’, ‘authority’, and ‘revelation’.
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about 50 children. These children were invited because they’d been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by ‘tradition’. Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like, ‘We Hindus believe so and so.’ ‘We Muslims believe such and such.’ ‘We Christians believe something else.’ Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn’t all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite proper, and he didn’t even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn’t the point I want to make. I simply want to ask where their beliefs came from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over centuries. That’s tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn’t true, handing it down over any number of centuries doesn’t make it any truer!
Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England, but this is only one of many branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as the Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other often go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons – evidence – for believing what they believe. But actually their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.
Let’s talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn’t die but was lifted bodily into Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don’t talk about her much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don’t call her the ‘Queen of Heaven’. The tradition that Mary’s body was lifted into Heaven is not a very old one. The Bible says nothing about how or when she died; in fact the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn’t invented until about six centuries after Jesus’s time. At first it was just made up, in the same way as any story like Snow White was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as an official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented 600 years after Mary’s death.
I’ll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the Pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are old men with beards called Ayatollahs. Lots of young Muslims are prepared to commit murder, purely because the Ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.
When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary’s body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950 the Pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The Pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that Pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the Pope, you should believe everything he said, any more than you believe everything that lots of other people say. The present Pope has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow his authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases and wars, caused by overcrowding.
Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven’t seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else’s word for it. I haven’t with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like ‘authority’. But actually it is much better than authority because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary’s body zooming off to Heaven.
The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called ‘revelation’. If you had asked the Pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary’s body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been ‘revealed’ to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling ‘revelation’. It isn’t only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You’d be very upset, and you’d probably say, ‘Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?’ Now suppose I answered: ‘I don’t actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead.’ You’d be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you’d know that an inside ‘feeling’ on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’.
But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn’t even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can’t trust them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a ‘hunch’ about an idea that just ‘feels’ right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.
I promised that I’d come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish are built to be good at surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of … other people. Most of us don’t hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters, we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ‘swim’ through a ‘sea of people’. Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.
You speak English but your friend speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to ‘swim about’ in your own separate ‘people sea’. Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way. In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more truer than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at ‘swimming about in their people sea’, children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The child’s brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can’t be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.
It’s a pity, but it can’t help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed – even if its completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place – it can go on forever.
Could this be what happened with religions? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood – not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this is because they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers, Mormons or Holy Rollers, and all are utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and someone speaks German.
Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can’t be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can’t be alive in the Catholic Republic but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
Your loving,

Daddy

Music Makes you think and stirs your emotions

 Kadizzle set up some better speakers in the computer room.

The combination of new speakers and the Spotify music service

have made for some good music.  The lyrics to so many songs are 

so well written and evoke memories.  Recently in New York City

The Commander and Kadizzle toured a tenement museum. 

The hardship and suffering those people went through was 

hard to imagine.  These people came worked hard and finally made

it in our country. Many of us came directly from families that struggle 

just back a generation or two.  Sadly people are still trying to go 

forward today.  It makes Kadizzle very sad to hear Mitt Romney call 

Hard working people moochers.  When we were in New York we stayed 

at a very nice hotel. In the lobby we met a very nice man from Nepal.  The 

young man had not seen his wife and family for four years. He was 

intelligent, had a master's degree in business, but was struggling to earn 

a living a bellman.  Doubtfully was this man in a position to pay 

taxes.  To call him a moocher was an insult beyond compression, certianly 

from a man born into wealth like Mitt.  The lyrics below are from the song 

"Eyes of the immigrant".  by Eric Anderson.  Pull up the song and listen to 

it.  While you listen think about the moochers. Think about the black woman 

who was a moocher according to Mitt, but she cleaned floors all her life and 

left a black college $250,000.  Mitt needs to apologize and look at the real

moochers, the billionairs that will get an additional 3 million with the Bush 

tax cuts.                 

They came by day, and they came by night. 
They came like cattle they were packed so tight. 
They rolled on the stairways and they slept on the decks. 
And the only thing they knew was they could not turn back. 
They came from Sweden and they came from France. 
They came from up and down along the continent. 
They came in floods and they came in waves. 
They came for glory and they came to escape. 
Some held their breath in the morning light. 
As New York Harbor came into sight. 
They leaned on the rails and the decks just to see. 
A statue of a lady known as "Liberty." 
Their hands gripped the rails and their eyes peered up. 
Some were crying with their eyes; some were crying with their hearts. 
They were dreaming of the future; they were crying for a chance. 
Maybe the son of a shipper could even be the president. 

CHORUS: 
Eyes of the healthy and eyes of the lame 
Eyes of the free and the eyes of the chain 
Eyes of the wealthy and eyes of the poor 
Eyes of an Indian who rides nevermore 
Always remember and never forget 
Beneath all the dirt and beneath all the sweat 
Who looked to the future and knew what it meant 
But the hearts and the minds and the souls and the dreams 
In the eyes, eyes of the Immigrant 

Out of Ellis Island they poured like sheep 
Onto the land and into the streets. 
With their hands on their children and their coats on their backs 
They brought nothing more than they could fit in their sacks. 
Carpenters, steel workers, firemen, and cops 
Peddled rags full of shoes in all the neighborhood shops. 
They worked with their hands and they worked with their backs 
Bringin' coal from the ground and puttin' smoke up the stacks. 
Wave after wave the flood never stopped. 
Soon the ones on the bottom they rose to the top. 
They dreamed and they said no matter how its gotten bad, 
You give to your kids the things that you never had. 
Be doctors and lawyers and chairmen of the boards. 
Be the guardians of peace and protectors in the wars. 
You work with your knowledge and your skills and your minds. 
Now its everybody's future that you hold in your sights. 

CHORUS 

Some tried to settle, some couldn't out of fear. 
Some kept dreaming of the new frontier. 
Everybody was convinced they had a place in the sun, 
That it wasn't what you were so much as what you could become. 
Everybody's future wasn't everybody's dream; 
The land could be barren and the streets could be mean. 
It was a fact in the suburbs and the farms and the shacks 
That you only knew ahead there ain't no room to fall back. 
This is the land and the home of the free. 
That's what we want the whole world to believe. 
Not everybody makes it to the top of the heap: 
Some were brought in chains from far across the sea; 
Some lost their way and some lost track; 
And some realized that you can't look back. 
And sometimes you hear it but you don't know where 
The sound of the waves still crashing in your ear. 

CHORUS 

Tonight will be fine.

Sometimes I find I get to thinking of the past. When we swore to each other that our love would last. You kept right on lovin and I went on a fast. Now I am to thin and your love is too vast. But I know from your smile, and I know from your eyes that tonight will be fine, will be fine for awhile, will be fine for awhile.

I choose the rooms that I live in with care. The windows are small and the walls are bare. There is only one bed there is only one prayer. There I wait every night for your step on the stair.  And I know from your eyes and I know from your smile that tonight will be fine, will be fine, will be fine for awhile.

Sometimes I see her undressing for me. She is the soft naked lady love meant her to be. She is moving her body so brave and so free. I have got to remember that is a fine memory.  Yet I know from your eyes,  yet I know from your smile that to night will be fine, will be fine, will be fine for awhile.

The Accumulation

Today was a slow lazy day when the Kadizzles wandered around like ghost in their own house. A light snow fell outside on a dreary day.  The Kadizzles have taken on the task of slowly cleaning the joint.  His Lordship decided it was time to take on the TV room.  Under the television in the den is the historical record of music compiled by the Kadizzles over a life time.  Once the decision was made to clean out the museum, it became apparent two major historical eras had to be discarded.  First was the cassette era.  Once upon a time people listened to music on little cassettes. So there were a couple boxes of those to go into the master mess room down in the basement. Next was the CD era.  Looking at each of those CD's and thinking that is ten bucks, was pretty distressing, but no one actually plays the damn things anymore.  A couple hundred of the disk were rearranged as if someday they might get played.  In the back were some old VHS tapes. Perhaps there were a couple family treasures on them, but they have to go. 

Modern man can trace his life through musical periods.  Kadizzle has lived through the 45 rpm, the 78 rpm, the giant reel to reel tape deck, the 8 track, the small cassette, the CD, and now as we live in either the ipod or cloud era Kadizzle wonders what the next medium will be.

Tablemeat comes through.

The weather in Hazen was perfect for hunting yesterday, so The Commander and Kadizzle set out to put some meat in the pot. My old shotgun was named Table Meat. When the old gun died the new one inherited the name.  Kadizzle would rather make one difficult shot than three easy ones.  My favorite shot is when the bird flies out of the tree row high overhead right towards you.  The trick is to shoot slightly ahead.  The other day the classic dilemma came up.  Mr. Pheasant in his infinite wisdom got up on the wrong side of the bush.  Kadizzle saw a hole through the bush about the size of a dinner plate.  Table Meat blasted through the hole and put the meat on the table.

Yesterday Kadizzle saw a rooster sitting by the road as he was driving to the hunting ground.  Thinking he might pop the guy Kadizzle stopped and quickly found a malfunction with the gun.  In order to shoot Kadizzle had to disassemble the gun and put it back together.  Rarely will a bird sit ten yards away and wait while you rebuild your gun. This was a very sporting pheasant.  Kadizzle finally got the gun ready jumped out of the truck and yelled " I am ready now".   The pheasant took to the air and Kadizzle sent him to the Muslim pheasant heaven so Mr. Pheasant could have 28 virgin pheasants at his disposal.  It worked out for everyone.

It is a big canvass

Kadizzle had some plans for his new tattoo, but they did not all work out.  The plan was to use the bellybutton as the mouth of a cannon.  However, the artist hired to do the work was not sure how it could be done.  Once we turned Kadizzle over it appeared there was a big orifice that would make an ideal cannon.

To Lazy to complain, Here is a simple answer

Kadizzle gets stuck with nothing to do in Denver, or somewhere else and too many times he turns to fighting the right wing Hoopleheads on the blog sites.

The give and take can be fun, sometimes funny, and sometimes educational. It gives a chance to get into the mind of gun nuts, and right wing fanatics.  On one of these right wing sites there was something suspicious about a guy complaining about Kadizzle.  His complaint seemed like it was computer generated. Kadizzle is familiar with buzz word generators so he thought he would check to see if this was were the long winded diatribe was emanating from.

It turned out to be coming from a rant generator.  Google rant generator and you will find it.  The rant generator will crank out from one to three paragraphs of ranting either at a person or organization.  All you do is type in the person's name or the name of the organization, and there it is a rant.  Kadizzle will cook up a one paragraph rant by putting the name Staunch Republican into the input apparatus.  Lets see what happens.

As you read this letter, you may feel confused at points. If you do, keep reading. The rationale underlying Mr. Staunch Repbulican's expositions is confusing. Fortunately, as you read the superfluity of examples about how Mr. Repbulican has been trying to trample over the very freedoms and rights that he claims to support, this letter will slowly begin to make some sense. Let me get to the crux of the matter: His undertakings have a long and iracund lineage. In particular, they're based upon all of the temperamental devices of the past: spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim periods, appeasement of ethnocentrism.
Of course, I'm generalizing a little here. But that's only because Mr. Repbulican broadens his appeal by seeking influence and adherents in the charlatanism movement. If you'll forgive my parrhesia, I'd like to add that he says that undiscoverable, unmeasurable, magical forces from another plane of existence have given him superhuman wisdom. What he means by this, of course, is that he wants free reign to harvest what others have sown. If some people are offended by my mentioning that each day, I see the world becoming more negligent as a determined Mr. Repbulican carries out his morally questionable plans, then so be it. He's good at one thing, and that's keeping his ulterior motives secret. Only a few initiates in the inner sanctum of Mr. Repbulican's entourage know that he's planning to gum up what were once great ideas. Even fewer of these initiates know that as our society continues to unravel, more and more people will be grasping for straws, grasping for something to hold onto, grasping for something that promises to give them the sense of security and certainty that they so desperately need. These are the sorts of people Mr. Repbulican preys upon.
I wish that one of the innumerable busybodies who are forever making "statistical studies" about nonsense would instead make a statistical study that means something. For example, I'd like to see a statistical study of Mr. Repbulican's capacity to learn the obvious. Also worthwhile would be a statistical study of how many uninformed dimbulbs realize that if we don't do something soon, Mr. Repbulican's slaphappy, lubricious policies will rise like a golem with a million hands on a million throats to choke the honor out of decent, hardworking people. Now that you've heard what I've had to say, I want you to think about it. And I want you to join me and stick to the facts and offer only those arguments that can be supported by those facts.

Bad News for Fat guys

Kadizzle is granpa babysitter in Denver.  Erin will be home tonight and Sylvie will be one happy peanut.  The calories have launched a new war on Kadizzle.  With a lot of new homes popping up around here there is an abundance of Latino workers in the neighborhood.  That means food trucks with Mexican food are roaming the neighborhood looking for victims.  Yesterday Kadizzle had about his third trip to the food truck.  Mind you this was not all on the same day.  The ladies on the truck yesterday hardly spoke an once of English. In fact the only English the lady could say was " I don't speak English".   Kadizzle had no idea what he was buying,  but he bought three for himself and Fran.  It turned out to be some kind of pepper and cheese concoction, and was good.  For $2.50 it was a good deal, fresh and tasty.  If the truck is here to day it will be hard to resist.

When you see these food truck people working hard to make a living you might realize they do not make enough to pay income tax.  Of course in the Republican world that makes them moochers.  Every time I see a service person working hard to make a living I get pissed about Mitt calling them moochers.  A guy with a car elevator who has not had a full time job for eight years and makes 23 million a year insulting working people is a crime.  Kadizzle is sure those moochers get up early and make all that food.  Those moochers provide a good service to the other moochers that are putting up all the houses in the neighborhood.

When I think of the Republican rats trying to carve out tax breaks for the rich Kadizzle always thinks of the woman who worked as a janitor at a black college in the south.  The woman probably paid very low or no taxes her whole life.  When she died she left the college $250,000.   Mitt would have called her a moocher.   It is just a terrible disgrace the way Republicans have insulted working Americans.

Farts never smelled so Good.

Kadizzle's poor daughter Erin has had about five major surgeries.  It all started from an accident playing high school basket ball.  Erin was a terrific athlete.  She won the State Class B hurdle championship and was on the track team that won the state championship five years in a row.

Erin's kidney was split into three pieces from the basketball accident and she nearly bled to death.  The long term effect of her accident has been adhesion's.  The adhesion's make it difficult for food to pass through Erin.

Last Thursday at 4 A.M. in New York Erin went to the Emergency room.  Erin was hospitalized and everyone has been waiting to see if her system would clear without surgery.  The first sign things are turning around is gas, followed by a good fart.  The farts started yesterday and her system got back in gear today.  Knowing the poor kid is not going to have to face surgery is a blessing of major proportion.  Kadizzle has been in Denver babbysitting his poor little Sylvie who misses her mother terribly. Cissie is in New York with Erin.  It will be so exciting for Sylvie to see her mom tomorrow or the next day.

The swing on the porch.

/On the porch of this house where Kadizzle grew up there was a swing.  Many days were spent sitting on that swing watching the world go by.  When the sun would shine on that swing a guy who had just graduated from high school might be able to take a nice nap in the warm glow of the sun. Little did Kadizzle know that on that porch he would take a nap that would shape the rest of his life.

George Madison walked by one day just as Kadizzle was in a pleasant haze on the swing.  "Where are you going George?", Kadizzle inquired.   I am going down the river to the Ireland Mine to apply for a job was George's reply.  "Do you want to go?" he said.  With nothing to do Kadizzle joined George in his hunt for a job at a coal mine.

About thirty miles down the Ohio River Kadizzle stood outside the Ireland Mine office with about ten other people.  Some guy came out and said " All you guys come in here I got to give you a test".  Like a sheep I followed everyone in and sat down.   The person doing the hiring passed out some sort of intelligence test.  Everyone carefully filled out the answers on the timed test.  The guy said pass me all the test.  Kadizzle can still remember the exact words and what happened next.  Mr. hiring guy said as he put the test in neat order  " The company requires me to give you a test, I did",  he threw all the test in the wastebasket without even looking at them.  Next he announced " I told ten people to show up here, and there are eleven people here, someone is here who doesn't belong, who is it?".  Bashfully I raised my hand.  "Well" he said " You are all hired, including you",  as he looked at Kadizzle. 

This was the beginning of Kadizzles coal mining career.  Just about every young guy there had put on his application he wanted summer work.  Kadizzle thought the chances of getting hired would be better if you put on the application you wanted permanent work.  This turned out to be magic.  All the other poor guys ended up with shitty jobs cutting weeds and doing manual labor.  Kadizzle was trained to operate machinery.  At the end of summer with money in his pocket Kadizzle went to college.  The coal company said come back next summer we could sure use you to fill in for people on vacation.  Every summer Kadizzle worked underground and made his way through college.  The rest is coal mining history. 

That summer Kadizzle was on the first coal mining crew in history that ever mined through an old exploded coal mine to get to new coal.  The original mine blew up in 1913 and killed over one hundred miners.

The Jehad between my legs.

Recently old Lord Kadizzle found out he has prostate cancer.  This is not good news.  The prostate is not in an easy place to get to.  So it looks like in November they will dig deep in Kadizzle to cut out his prostate.  Hopefully this will solve the problem.

Like so many Kadizzle always thought of cancer as a problem someone else has.  Things are different now that Kadizzle knows there is Jehad going on in his prostate.  Now cancer research, and cures seem a lot more important. Sure there are are people in other countries that would like to kill us, but the reality is a lot more of us are going to die a miserable death from the cells in our body that are playing the role of Al Quada.

We don't need more drones in Afghanistan, we need drones in our bloodstream.  As the military pisses away billions on a few misguided Muslims we are being assaulted by the food we eat, the chemicals we are exposed to, and the stuff we smoke.

It is not Muslims that are forcing us to cut out our bowls, cut off our women's breast, and pitch my prostate in the garbage.  If we had better health care, better screening, and better imaging, millions of Americans would have better outcomes.

Our country spends more on our military than the next ten countries combined.  If we fought our real enemy like we fight every imagined threat, life would improve for a lot of people.  Dying is something we all have to do. Dying from curable diseases is a choice Americans have to make.  As the election approaches are we going once more allow the military industrial complex to lie to us, cheat us, and piss away our tax dollars, or are we going to spend the money where we could easily save thousands of lives?  Are we going to continue to get thousands of Americans killed in some foreign country because some hopeless politicians have lied to us? We need to identify our real enemies and one of our worst is the military contractors bleeding us blind while we lack health care, roads, schools, decent housing, and dollars for research.  Ask yourself how many close friends you have that have been killed by Al Quada, then ask yourself how many people you know killed by cancer.  Now, ask where is the real threat?

A Windy story for a Windy Day.

Wind turbines have sprouted in North Dakota like giant sunflowers.  Even a hard core green energy person would have to admit they destroy the scenery.  The fossil fuel industry hates the damn things,  so the propaganda blows as strong as the wind is blowing today.

The right wing supporters of the coal industry always like to say wind power does not work.  One of their favorite arguments is that there is no way to store wind power.  Generally speaking there is no way to store any electrical power except with batteries,  but there is a way to store wind power the coal lobby just cannot admit.

In North Dakota on the Missouri River there is a huge dam.  The dam generates a very large amount of electricity.  Water runs through the turbines at the dam and produces hydro power.  The wonderful thing about hydro power is that it can be turned on and off very quickly. You do not have to heat up anything to get more water through the turbines.  On the other hand coal fired plants cannot rapidly change the amount of steam they put through their turbines.

What does this have to do with wind power.  It is pretty straight forward.  On a very windy day in North Dakota like you have right now, you can produce a lot of electricity from wind.  Wind does not create pollution.  Since you are producing electricity with wind you can throttle back the dam.  Guess what?  When you shut down the turbines powered by water at the dam,  the water backs up behind the dam.  Anyone who studied physics 101 knows this is stored power.  When the wind dies down you can release the water from behind the dam and produce electricity. The dam is serving as a giant battery.

The blows to shreds the favorite argument of the coal industry.  However, you will never get anyone to admit to this simple reality.  Instead the coal industry always says you have to have idle capacity of coal fired plants to backup the wind power.

One key to all of this is cooperation between the hydro power and the wind power.  There is none.  Why?  The two sources of power are not synchronize because of politics and stupidity.   Your toaster does not know where it is getting it's electricity.  Toast made with wind power taste just the same as coal fired toast.  However, a coal company does not get to sell as much coal on windy days, and when coal is not burnt CO2 is not produced, nitrous oxide is not put in the air, nor is mercury.  In the name of profit and greed the coal industry will fight and lie about wind power.  They will tell you it does not work.  Somehow it works in Europe, but not here.  In Europe high speed trains work, but not here. Special interest groups make sure the physics in the United States favor coal fired plants and slow trains.

Secret Pheasant places.

Kadizzle took off by himself hunting today.  The first stop was where we usually make the first stop.  Down the fence row by the wheat field Kadizzle could see some pheasants flying ahead of him.  Which side of the fence do you want to be on? The age old question.  Well Kadizzle was on the wrong side, and bushes were between Kadizzle and the birds when they got up. One nothing birds favor.  Now to the other side of the field.  Kadizzle saw the grass move.  Something is in there.  Up she comes. Yup, it was a hen.  The next fellow was not so fortunate. His flight was canceled when a number four went up his exhaust.  There is a reason they call Kadizzle's gun Table Meat.

On to the next spot.  An abandoned farm yard. Always good.  Of course some silly dinger has to shoot by on an ATV scattering the birds in all directions, but it looked as though some had flown in by the house.  The usual honey corner produced nothing, nor did the old yard behind the house, both spots that are usually good.  However, when Kadizzle saw a clump of big weeds he thought " If I were Willy the pheasant, that is where I would be".  Sure enough a bunch busted out.  Another poor fellow got put on the menu.

Next a secret honey spot.  As Kadizzle took the wrong route he became disillusioned.  It looked like the honey spot was dry.  A little tired and considering giving up Kadizzled decided to try some reeds. Pheasants always love to meet for a beer in a reeded area.  Sure enough as Kadizzle approached bird went every direction.  A few long shots to no avail.  A lot of the birds went over the hill.  On the way to give them another treatment Kadizzle saw one fellow sneaking off in the cornfield.  The detour to get him did not pay off.  When Kadizzle got back in the cover birds went everywhere.  This patch has some great potential for another hunt. Making long shots that did little more than clean the barrel left Kadizzle with only one shell.  Kadizzle decided to work back to the truck and only shoot if it was a sure shot.  Birds got up, but no shots were any good, so Kadizzle kept his powder dry.  The last part of the hike to the truck was a fence row.  Kadizzle suspected some of the felons would be in that grass.  Yup, two came out too far ahead to shoot.  So that little adventure was great for viewing a lot of birds, and doing some home work for the future, but it did not put meat on the table.

After a brief trip just to look at Hungry Man's Kadizzle headed to public land.  On the way out of Hungry Man's two roosters were begging to be shot on posted land.  It was a great temtation, but the empty pickup truck in the field was not  a good sign.  Kadizzle did the right thing and drove past the two roosters as they gave him the finger.

On the public land at last Kadizzle thought he was wasting his time because public land gets hunted pretty badly.  On the way in it did not look like the road was beat down, a good sign.  Within fifty yards of the truck Kadizzle stirred up some hens, this was a good sign.   Another fifty yards and some roosters got up on the wrong side of the bushed.  Kadizzle aimed through the bush and shot, thinking what the hell.  It was good fortune for Kadizzle, and bad forrune for the rooster. Somehow the shot made it through the bushes and a nice big rooster met the Pheasant Jesus.  That was three in the sack and time to go home.

Meet you at the Bus St0p

When you are up and moving things are great, but once your body stops, and you try to resume movement, you realize your age.  Yesterday Kadizzle and The Commander had their first pheasant hunt of the season. Hunting down in the promised land near Mott, North Dakota can be very frustrating.  What was once a glorious pass time for peasants has turned into a rich man's sport.  Now the Mott airport runway has a row of jets parked side by side.  Hunting has become something for the rich.  Common people need not apply.  The frustration comes from driving down the road and seeing fields popping with pheasants, but you cannot hunt them.  The birds are being saved for the rich guy willing to pay 500 dollars a day.   Do the math.  You can shoot three birds legally.  That would come out to over 150 bucks per bird, but that is if you don't put in the cost of jet fuel.  Every field is posted and those farmers who have been getting those nice fat farm subsidy checks are now getting one more.

Such is life.  The Commander and Kadizzle drove to a public area set aside for the peasants.  On the way to the peasant area the pheasants were like grasshoppers, but of course the signs all said " These birds are exclusively for the rich".   It is bad enough to give the rich more tax cuts, but to see them get all the pheasants also is a heart breaker.   When Kadizzle and The Commander got to the public area it was picked clean.  All the peasants were packed in the area and every bird had been shot twice. It was hopeless, so we left.

God does smile on Kadizzle so a blessing came.  The night before as luck would have it Kadizzle and The Commander met the guy who ran the great hunting cabal for the terminally wealthy.  The is an outfit call the " Cannon Ball Company".   They are the Arabs of the Pheasants.  They are the sheiks that control the pheasants.  Our friend said that if we had a problem finding a place to hunt let him know.  Kindly he put us on some good land.

After this diversion it is time to get to the bus stop story.  Shooting a pheasant is fun.  Now, Kadizzle is not really into shooting anything.  Kadizzle is a live and let live person and enjoys wildlife.  Kadizzle gets very pissed when some brave North Dakota hunter shoots a mountian lion and thinks it is wonderful. Leave the damn mountain lions alone.

However, keep in mind pheasants are not native to North America, they are from China.  So when Kadizzle hunts pheasants he puts on his Republican hat.  Now the pheasants are Mexicans coming across the border, or Muslims on jihad, and it is all right to shoot them.

Anyone can shoot a pheasant at a short distance.  My brother in law calls them flying box cars.  The real fun for Kadizzle is to make  a good shot.  A good shot means the bird is going across, or coming overhead toward you.  The trick is to shoot ahead of the bird.  Now this is the skill.  The lead and the pheasant have to meet in the sky at a predetermined place.  This is the "bus stop".   Ideally the bus and the pheasant will get to the bus stop at the same time.  Our gracious host set Kadizzle up in the perfect spot to do some bus stop shootin.   Sure enough The Commander and our host stirred up a pheasant.  As the pheasant came flying overhead from North East to Southwest, Kadizzle was standing South .   Kadizzle yelled  " Meet you at the bus stop" and pulled the trigger.  With joy the pheasant met the bus, and Kadizzle was well pleased.  The chicken is in the pot.

Attack of the Potato Heads

One reason Kadizzle likes where he lives is the children in the neighborhood.  Up the street on the North Side are the Potato Heads. There are four Potato Heads.  Last night the oldest boy knocked on the door wanting to sell Kadizzle some popcorn for the Cub Scouts.

The Potato family are great people, but they have a habit of accumulating junk about their house and on the street. The Kadizzles have become frustrated because they parked junk on the boulevard.  Finally they managed to move the old camper and pontoon boat of the public boulevard, but they just cannot manage to get rid of the old blue pickup truck sitting on the street for months.

All of a sudden Kadizzle had a brilliant idea.  Kadizzle told the Potato Head standing at the door Kadizzle would donate $20 if Father Potato head would get the truck off the street before winter set in.  Young Potato was instructed to come back in half hour to collect the cash.  Kadizzle wrote a not to Father Potato about the agreement and put it in an envelope with the money.  Little Potato never returned for the cash.  Kadizzle is puzzled.  Was little Potato confused, did Kadizzle create a diplomatic riff, what happened?  Perhaps today the mystery will be solved.

Care Taker and the Five Million dollar death.

What a year for The Commander.  Kadizzle's little band has four members.  Cheech the great fashion designer in New York City,  Snoocher Bear the mom, and public relations magnate in Denver,  and the two parents.  This year everyone in the family will undergo surgery except The Commander.  The poor Commander will have to nurse back to health two more before Christmas.

Cheech underwent surgery on her sinus's already and has recovered.  The poor old Bear will have a knee operation shortly,  and Kadizzle is scheduled to have his prostate removed.  Three in one year is taxing, but The Commander is as tough as they come.

All this slicing and dicing will undoubtedly cost well over a hundred thousand before it is all over.  Fortunately we are all covered by insurance, but still the out of pocket expenses hit hard.  It is very sad to know that Americans pay twice what any other civilized country does for health care and gets such a poor return.  Yesterday The Commander, and Kadizzle watched a very good program on American Health care on PBS.  The waste in our system is staggering.

The program featured an elderly woman kept alive on life support.  Her case was hopeless and she should have been allowed to die, but her son insisted she be kept alive.  Her final year of life cost a staggering 5 million dollars.  There is no way this cost will be born by her family.  The poor black woman surely did not live a luxurious life.  Society was unwilling to spend money for her education, her health insurance, her housing,  or any of the normal things that make life better,  but incredibly the same society that did not care for as she lived,  spent five million in one year for her to die.

One can only shake their head and wonder what in the hell is wrong with us.  

Truely an Ignorant Bastard

Mr. and Mrs. Kadizzle are now plowing through the Flashman series.  The books are entertaining and so much of Flashman's life is like our typical politician.  Flashman is as phony and big a chicken as ever existed, but he manages to portray himself as a hero.

In his current pickle he has been forced to impersonate the man about to become the King of Denmark.  On his fist night as the fake Carl Gustaf, Flashman decides he can get away with having sex with the chamber maid.  The chamber maid of course thinks Flashman is Carl Gustaf.  After they procreate, this is what Flashman has to say about the event.

"I've sometimes wondered what the result of that encounter was, and if there is some sturdy peasant somewhere in Holstein called Carl who puts on airs in the belief that he can claim royal descent. If there is, he can truly be called an ignorant bastard".

The Morning Report.

If Kadizzle can get his cycle to start he has been taking a morning ride to check the kingdom.  Hazen is on the edge of the oil boom so BNSF is upgrading the rail siding.  When done it will be longer and have heavy steel. This will accommodate 100 car trains so they can pass in Hazen.  All the oil loaded in the famous North Dakota town of Zap can now make it to your gas tank.

Down by the Knife River the the little Riverside park is being revived.  A new shelter is being built and things are looking up. Houses are still sprouting up.  The oil boom has even created a housing shortage this far East of the big goings on. North of town a little road is being up graded to take care of traffic while they fix highway 200 next summer.  The Cenex can now fuel large trucks with high volume diesel pumps.  Between the tow gas stations in town you can get any kind of junk food you need to shorten your life.

The town itself has elected a new city commission full of the worst sort of Tea Party mentality.  Our good city auditor gave up and left.  The right wing dingers are off to a good start wrecking havoc.

The ex mayor put a sidewalk in front of his daughters house on Third Ave.  This is a main street and it is a sad comment that you cannot get from one end to the other with sidewalks because no one has the guts to enforce the ordinance

It appears there may be a decent crop of pheasants.   Lord Kadizzle made a deal with a guy in New York to send him some pheasant feathers, so Kadizzle needs to pop a few.  Today we will probably go to the boat to finish up winterizing the good ship.

Magic Underwear

Albert Einstein said " The world is not stranger than you think, it is stranger than you can think".   The Mormons have proved Einstein correct.  Mormons actually believe in magic underwear.  I wish I was just making this up, but unfortunately we have a man running for president who believes in magic underwear.

Don't take Kadizzles word for it.  If you look up sacred garments you will find some amazing things. You are supposed to keep the garments on all the time.  That means when you go to change garments you are supposed to keep one leg in the garment you are taking off and put one leg in the garment you are putting on.  Some Mormons think they have been saved from fire by the garments.

Flashman

A good lake friend insisted Kadizzle read the story about Flashman pictured above.  Flashman did not have an once of morality, but he was not afraid to capitalize on anyone who thought he did.  Flashman considered himself the ultimate scoundrel.  Reading of Flashman's unending ability to turn every lie, and event to his advantage is refreshing because he freely admits what he is doing.  It would be so nice to know if so many of today's rotten rats know the truth about themselves.  Does Rush Limbaugh laugh to himself when he knows he is manipulating the Hoopleheads?  Does Glenn Beck have a good drink and think how easy it is to make millions with his nonsense?  Mitt revealed what he thought about most Americans when he made his 47% remark.  What if he revealed his real knowledge and how much he really believed in the silly Mormon stuff he claims to believe.  You have to give Flashman credit he at least came clean in his memoirs.

Thank Ya Jesus

Looking backward on how he spent his life Kadizzle is pleased he did not have an office job.  At one point Kadizzle thought he might like being a lawyer.  The Kadizzle family is polluted with lawyers.  The grandfather was a lawyer, three uncles on that side practiced law, two sisters were in the legal game, Kadizzles dad had two years of law school, and Kadizzle's brother in law was a law professor.  So law ran thick in the gang.

Long hours sitting at a desk would have driven Kadizzle nuts.  Fortunately most of Kadizzle's career was in coal mining.  Coal mining allows one to move around.  Mine safety involves getting out and seeing what might go wrong and trying to stop it.  That means Kadizzle spent three or four hours per day roaming around thousands of acres looking for where the next accident might happen.  After the mining career Kadizzle was a safety specialist in the Power Generation field.

Generating coal fired power is not an outdoor activity, but power plants are huge.  The plant Kadizzle worked at was the largest building in North Dakota. There was plenty of space to roam around.  Walking completely through the power plant could take two days, and it would be a walk of miles.

The greatest think about the safety business for Kadizzle was you got to be your own boss. You decided when to do what.  On most days if you got bored sitting at your desk you could get up and go for a walk or drive.  A key element of safety is surprise inspections.  If you don't know when you are going to be somewhere, how could anyone else?  So if all of a sudden you get bored and go to some remote area of the plant or mine, it is a good thing.  Someone out there may be about to do something stupid, and they don't think you are likely to show up.  There were times when Kadizzle could not sleep at night.  He would put on his clothes drive out the mine and surprise the dragline crew in the middle of the night.  It kept them honest.  Thank ya Jesus Kadizzle never sat in an office all day.

A Bum RV

The Bismarck Tribune reports the city will crack down on bums and panhandlers.  In North Dakota it is not much of a problem.  Just like mosquitos the cold weather chases the bums out.  Kadizzle remembers an old article in the New York Times about someone who designed a special shopping cart for bums to live with.  The Shopping cart had a little seat in the front that could keep the bums dry.

While we were in Denver the Kadizzles saw a bum sleeping in a parking lot which happened to be under a bridge.  Sleeping in a parking lot seemed like an ideal way to get run over.  Kadizzle is thinking about designing a bum RV.  A bum RV has to be light,  cheap,  turn into a bed, and ideally would have some amenities.  Solar power is a given.  A can crusher would be nice. Dual purpose cushions for sitting and sleeping will be included.   Perhaps there should be a five gallon bucket for washing, and as a portable toilet.   There could be a small electric heater for plugging in. The challenge for the Bum Rv will be a fun design project.  All ideas are welcome.

Back in the USA

After a long drive the Kadizzles are back in Hazen.  It is like going from one planet to another.  New York, Denver, Hazen, are all entirely different.  From one of the largest cities in the world to one you can spit across with a good wind.  There is something to be said for each environment.

Made it back from the grocery store with eggs in a backpack on the new Kadizacycle.  A little chilly but it is going to be a great day. 

Once upon a time 700ft under a hill in West Virginia

Once upon a time when Lord Kadizzle was trying to earn money to go to college he operated a shuttle car like the one pictured above.  Kadizzle was nearly killed by operating one of these machines. A shuttle car hauls coal from the face of the mine where it is cut from the seam by a continuous miner to an underground conveyor.

The shuttle car steers with all four wheels and is powered by an electrical cable. The cable is played out as the shuttle car goes toward the miner and is picked up on a reel as the shuttle car goes toward the conveyor.  Shuttle cars are equipped with two drivers seats which face each other.  When you need to go the opposite direction you simply switch seats.  Operating this vehicle in a tunnel 20 feet wide and four feet high is difficult and dangerous.

One  day Kadizzles foreman instructed him to pick up some supplies with the shuttle car. To do this Kadizzle had to make a turn contrary to the way the mine was laid out for shuttle cars.  As Kadizzle made the turn his head got caught between a block of wood on the roof of the mine and the seat back of the shuttle car.  Normally stopping the shuttle car would have been a simple matter of taking your foot off the throttle.  However, when Kadizzle took his foot of the throttle the wheels on the shuttle car continued to move the shuttle car forward.  Kadizzle quickly realized his head was going to be crushed.  By some miracle the shuttle car became stuck and lost traction.  With the wheels spinning Kadizzle was trapped. Another miner came to his rescue and hit the emergency shut off.  Kadizzle was almost killed.  Coal mining is a dangerous occupation.