Sep 192013
 

If you are a long time reader to the Cantankerous Old Coots, you have noticed some changes and tweaks as I have changed it.  Now it is paneled in a lovely wood.  My compatriot Ralph had asked me if I was afraid of termites with this background.

That brings me to this post.  I told him if I saw a termite I would squash the little bastard.  This goes for all vermin in my life.  There will be no quarter given for any spider, ant, crawly thing, rats, mice, snakes, lizards, or cats in my house.  If any of these show up on my blog I am in trouble.

I don’t know how you may feel, but the thoughts of anything in my house that I don’t specifically want there, piss me off.  They don’t even really creep me out, they just piss me off.  Things that lurk around in my space and cause problems are not welcome and they will be obliterated.  Period.

That goes for hackers of my blog and spammers as well.  You have been warned.

Tune in for Ralph’s Earth Day Tribute tomorrow.

Comment freely but at your own risk.

Carry on.

Justin

Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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Down with Tolerance

 Posted by at 09:47  Down with
Sep 092013
 

tolerance

ˈtäl(ə)rəns/

noun

  1. 1.

    the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.

    “the tolerance of corruption”

synonyms: acceptancetoleration;

These days tolerance is just another name for wimpishness. We are all expected in these enlightened times to sing cumbaya and put up with crap because it is intolerant to make a judgment. “Who are you to judge?”, we are constantly scolded. They don’t want to hear the answer in my head: “I am somebody who as raised to know what’s right.” They quickly retort, “Who are you to say what is right. You were brainwashed. You should be more tolerant.”

Tolerance is for wimps!

Tolerance is for wimps!

The fact is tolerance is just plain lazy. It is having standards that is hard. My mother was intolerant with a passion. She didn’t tolerate a messy room, homework not done or chores ignored. She didn’t tolerate dirty clothes, bad language or disrespect. It’s a good thing she’s dead because today she’d be called a Nazi and all in the name of tolerance.

It’s an amazing turn of reality when having an opinion and standards is makes you a bad guy. When you have standards or try to hold yourself up to good role models, people go at you another way. “You think you’re better than me.” they tell you and when you tell them. “You’re damn right.” they smile and stop because they have won the argument. These days nobody is better than anyone else and only a fool or a fascist pig claims it. Ironically they never notice that my putting you down they claimed superiority. Continue reading »

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Aug 112013
 

Schedules suck lets face it.  I lump deadlines in with schedules as well here.  They all suck.  Over the last few days my wife and I have been trying to come up with a schedule for the family to get back on in preparation for school starting in less than one month.  Whatever happened to the Lazziez-Faire school of summer?

Over the past few weeks all sense of timing and schedule have gone out of our kids.  They end up in bed at midnight, wake up near noon, eat whenever and don’t get all of their chores done.  Well now we have decided that this just won’t do any more so a schedule we have devised.  It is simple, spells out time for everything and it sucks.  I don’t want to be on a schedule but there it is, I have to, they have to.
And if a daily schedule is not bad enough, trying to figure out when to go on vacations amid all of the things that the kids get into and before school starts sucks just as bad.  At least we only have a few free days to go fishing, we can’t afford anything else.  At least the kids like camping.  And the only schedule I have to keep in the mountains has to do with the sun rising and setting and how much gas I have in my boat.

Schedules suck.  How do you feel about them?  Oh that’s right no one really reads this blog, or if they do, they don’t bother to interact so whatever.

Have a great weekend anyway.

-Justin

Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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Jul 202013
 

This is a fantastic Rant by Rick Santelli of CNBC.  It may have been a year ago, but it has some truths today, plus it is just a fantastic rant.  And it keeps going.  enjoy it!

Justin

Justin is the young Coot with a Cantankerous Soul who continues to be educated by older, more cootish Ralph and Bob. His Cantankerosity is his own.

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Down with the News!

 Posted by at 13:17  Down with
Jul 202013
 

Catching up on the News

 

The Sacramento Bee

The Sacramento Bee (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been back for two weeks now and finally recovered from jet lag. Yeah, I know that’s a poor excuse but I always say that a poor excuse is better than none. Our first instindt was to find out what might have happened while we were AWOL. On this trip we never bothered to turn on the TV and the only news from home was whatever my wife saw on her iPod. It was delightful to be blissfully ignorant of whatever agendas the media were pushing while we were gone. So far as we can see nothing improved while we weren’t looking but then nothing was improving when we were. The world is still going to hell in a hand basket. But you would never know it listening to the news.

I’ve given up on the media. Nobody out there seems to remember that journalism is supposed to inform and not to indoctrinate. We sought refuge with the Fox team for a time but after the last election I realized that there is no hope that Republicans will stand on principle and Democrats will do no harm and no journalists exist that are willing to tell them that they are all lying blaggards so I turned to the Food Network and HLN neither or which is concerned about anything important. It makes our evenings much more placid.

For a long time I subscribed to the Sacramento Bee in spite of its mindless support of the dysfunctional government in California. My rationalization was that they covered local news and would keep me informed about important issues like moving the basketball team to Seattle. I figured it was a relatively small expenditure and some of the features in the Sunday paper were actually useful but it turns out that the Bee is also dysfunctional. They can’t even collect from subscribers.

I have been organizing my services and, where possible, paying by credit card to receive airline miles to mitigate our travel costs. I attempted at least three times to set up my payment for the Bee on automatic charging to a credit card but apparently the Sacramento Bee is unable to handle something so complex. I naively believed each time I mailed the form that this time would be fine. Not true.

One day the paper stopped delivery and the next I received a letter from a collection agency wanting to collect for all the papers I hadn’t paid for. This was back before we left for Rome and now it is hard for me to remember why I thought the newspaper was important. We moved on.

So much has changed since I used to look forward to the morning and evening edition of the paper when I was a kid. Local news, national news, international news, comics and ads- lots of ads. You could spend the entire morning going through each thick issue. Even better, you believed that the information it contained was true and intended to inform and not to indoctrinate. Those were the days.

It took a long time but I finally weaned myself off the daily newspaper. Does anyone still read the newspaper? Are there still newspaper readers out there? If you still subscribe – or regularly read a local newspaper, I’d love to know why.

 

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Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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