At a time when our president and other politicians tend to apologize for our country`s prior actions, here`s a refresher on how some of our former patriots handled negative comments about our country. (I have verified all stories on Snopes)
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JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60’s when DeGaulle decided to pull out of NATO. DeGaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible. Rusk responded “does that include those who are buried here?” DeGaule did not respond…..You could have heard a pin drop.
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When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush.
He answered by saying, ‘Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.’…..You could have heard a pin drop.
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There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying ‘Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intend to do, bomb them?’
A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: ‘Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?’…..You could have heard a pin drop.
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A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of Officers that included personnel from most of those countries. Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks but a French admiral suddenly complained that, whereas Europeans learn many languages, Americans learn only English. He then asked, ‘Why is it that we always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking French?’
Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied, ‘Maybe it’s because the Brit’s, Canadians, Aussie’s and Americans arranged it so you wouldn’t have to speak German.’…..You could have heard a pin drop.
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Robert Whiting, an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry on.
“You have been to France before, monsieur?” the customs officer asked sarcastically.
Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously.
“Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.”
The American said, ‘The last time I was here, I didn’t have to show it.”
“Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in France!”
The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained, ”Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn’t find a single Frenchman to show a passport to.”…..You could have heard a pin drop.
I was on my way to invest more money at Home Depot this morning, trying to do my part to stimulate the economy. I found myself behind this little rice burner of a car bearing a bumper sticker that read, “We did it!” – “Obama / Biden”. Well, as luck would have it she pulled along side of me at a red light about a half mile down the road. I beeped my horn and gave her a big thumbs up. She rolled down her window and I said, “I love your bumper sticker!” She heartily thanked me…
And I quickly added, “It’s a really good that you are taking responsibility for your mistake!” She gave me the finger and drove off. Such a humorless wench. (thanks, Ron!)
A Harley biker is riding by the zoo in Washington , DC when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion’s cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents.
The biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.
Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly. A reporter has watched the whole event.
The reporter addressing the Harley rider says, ‘Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I’ve seen a man do in my whole life.’
The Harley rider replies, ‘Why, it was nothing, really, the lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger and acted as I felt right.’
The reporter says, ‘Well, I’ll make sure this won’t go unnoticed. I’m a journalist, you know, and tomorrow’s paper will have this story on the front page… So, what do you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have?’
The biker replies, ‘I’m a U.S. Marine and a Republican.’ The journalist leaves.
The following morning the biker buys the paper to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on the front page:
U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH
That pretty much sums up the news media’s approach to the news these days.
(Thanks, Ron!)
I have obtained an advanced copy of the proposal for a new government program which is named
CASH FOR CODGERS
and it works like this :
Couples wishing to access health care funds in order to pay for the delivery of a child will be required to turn in one old person.
The amount the government grants them will be fixed according to a sliding scale. Older and more prescription dependent codgers will garner the highest amounts.
Special “Bonuses” will be paid for those submitting codgers in targeted groups, such as smokers, alcohol drinkers, persons 10 lbs over their government prescribed weight and any member of the Republican Party.
Smaller bonuses will be given for codgers who consume beef, soda, fried foods, potato chips, lattes, whole milk, dairy products, bacon, Brussels sprouts or Girl Scout Cookies.
All codgers will be rendered totally useless via a toxic injection. This will insure that they are not secretly resold or their body parts harvested to keep other codgers in repair.
Being an IT professional has it’s ups and downs, and many of us have a warped sense of humor. I thought this story, reprinted from Matthias Endler’s web site, was quite funny. You see, there are literally hundreds of web posts out there that explain some person’s experiences with some Linux distribution: how they like it or hate it and their conclusions. This article is written from the perspective that Linux is the “big dog” in the operating system world and Windows is just a niche player. Enjoy!
My First Steps with Windows XP
I’ve heard of a new Operating System called Microsoft Windows the other day and wanted to give it a try because it is said to be easy to use and intuitive. Unfortunately the author offers no live-cd to test everything before I have to install. Instead of downloading it from the Internet as I always do I had to go to the computer store and buy it for a price of €150. There is also a so called “Professional Edition” but it would cost even more. The first thing when I came home was to open the box, put the included CD into my DVD-Drive and start my PC. The install screen consisted of a simple blue background and an easy-to-use menu. I wanted to backup my data at first so I tried to open a virtual terminal but the normal CTRL-ALT-F1 didn’t work (WTF?). I had to reboot, make a copy and restart the installation all over again. The menu presented an option called “Install Windows XP” and I selected it.
Then there was a strange message that said “End-User License Agreement” and that I have to accept it in order to continue. I have never heard about something like this in Linux so I read most of the long text. I am not allowed to distribute this product and I may not make copies for my friends. This was somehow the extreme opposite of a license I’ve previously heard of that is called Gnu GPL. After I accepted it with F8 the installation continued. Windows didn’t recognize that I had ext3 and reiserfs partitions on my system and told me that it had found an “unknown filesystem”. I always thought that they were standard but maybe I was wrong. There was an option to erase the whole harddisk and install WinXP and I chose it. The next curious thing was that Windows doesn’t create a separate partition for my precious data but only one big system partition instead. “Maybe Windows has a highly secure file-system that makes automatic backups in case of data loss” I thought. Because I have a relatively big disk I wasn’t able to select Fat32 and had to cope with NTFS. It took a while to format my disk.
Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to select any packages from a list as I always do on Linux – Windows selected everything alone instead. The only adjustments I could make were entering the correct system-time, my username and something called registration key. This is a 25-digit number I had to enter manually before setup continued. After another reboot Windows was finally up and ready – well almost. Windows wanted to be activated at first. Within this procedure Microsoft tries to access the web to verify all registration data. No way! I canceled and Windows told me that I have a 30-days trial until I must register. That sucks!
The new user interface appeared and I began to forget all the initial difficulties. It was a bit strange that there was no prompt to enter a default user for daily work. At the moment I was in administrator mode and had root access. That made me feel a bit uncomfortable because my little sister would have the same rights on that system. There also was no option to adjust file rights (something like chmod) manually and this could be another possible threat on a workstation. I’ve looked for system documentation material to start adjust my new system just as I want it but I couldn’t find anything usable (F1 is really no help). Suddenly an ugly yellow pop up appeared in the bottom right corner. It said something like “New device found.” A window in the middle of my screen told me that I should insert the device driver CD for my printer and click on “Continue”. At first I didn’t know what that means but suddenly I knew that a device driver was something like a module. I remember getting a CD together with my printer and I found it in a box on my attic. I clicked on “Continue”. My new system warned me that the device driver has not passed the hardware compatibility test and that I should try to find another driver. I was a bit afraid to click on “Continue” but finally I brought myself to do it and – everything ran flawlessly. I was a bit irritated why this stupid message annoyed be but I didn’t have time to fuss. Afterward I installed all other hardware and was ready for surfing.
There was no firewall or anti-virus software installed and I felt a bit insecure when I first entered the web. I surfed for maybe two minutes before I received a message from “Al Dick” who offered a six-year-ration of Viagra. Despite I don’t need such things (really!) it was unbelievably annoying. I found a howto on the net to turn off such messages. The Internet Explorer doesn’t have a popup filter and seems to attract ads and after fifteen minutes my taskbar looked like a battlefield full of spam. I had to close every window manually. My former Browser Firefox had tab-functionality included but IE seems to have own browsing rules and standards. But that was just the beginning: When I wanted to chat with my friends I found out that Windows Messenger doesn’t support ICQ, AIM, TOM and Jabber. I was forced to create a so called MSN-Account to continue but I refused. When I wanted to watch a newly bought DVD I got from France Windows Media Player told me that I may not use my dvd on PC because of a so called “region code”. I was a bit confused about all this and asked a friend what to do. He told me that there is data transfer from a PC running Windows directly to Microsoft in order to check my hardware specifications and to make a genuine check of my software. I was shocked. I was paying a lot of money to own a stable, secure system that respects my privacy and not a buggy, talkative piece of crap open to others like a barn door. I wanted to take a look at the source code to see if those recriminations were right but I couldn’t because there was no source included! I don’t want to talk about the so called “file hierarchy” of XP where the systems config files can be accessed via C:\Windows\system32 instead of /etc. You don’t want to know what defragmentation is (there’s no need for it on a linux box), I won’t speak about the lousy terminal called “command” and why you should never ever open email attachments with Outlook Express.
After the system crashed when I wanted to burn a CD with the skinny burning tool included and at the same time do some spreadsheet analysis with Microsoft’s miserable OpenOffice alternative called “Office XP” that cost me another €119 (I got it a bit cheaper because I’m a student) I put everything back into the nice green box and took it back to my trader. At the same day I installed Linux again giving a review on a half-baked, single-user operating system called Windows XP that may be ready for desktop use in about five years. Until then I enjoy freedom with BSD, OpenSolaris and Linux.
Happy Anniversary, BillH and KC….. HEY! That’s ME. Happy anniversary, KC. I can’t believe you’ve been putting up with me for 31 years today. I love you.
Muscatine, IA
