Uncommon Sense

The past few weeks have sorely tested my patience I wish everybody would go out and invest in some self-help books that include how to recapture some common freaking sense. Let’s start.

It’s summertime in the good old U. S. of A. which means, even in the absence of global warming, it gets hot. Glass amplifies heat. An enclosed space holds heat. Things inside hot enclosed spaces cook. And that’s how Jordan Mott came up with the oven in 1490 (minus the glass – that’s a bonus). Because we know it doesn’t count unless it happened in America, we can fast forward to 1882 when Thomas Ahern worked out the details for an electric oven. Granted, he was Canadian but that’s as close as we’re going to get unless you want to count the first person who fried an egg on the hood of a car. That had to be a “real” American, and that gets us to cars, hot cars, hot car interiors on hot summer days. There have been such a spate of kids being cooked in the back seats of cars – again. The government is mandating that by 2025 all auto manufacturers to put in systems that display and sound warning messages to check the back seat for Junior and Fido when you shut off your car. If you aren’t lucky enough to have one of the cars that already have such a warning and/or until you do, they suggest you put “something of value” in the back seat so you don’t forget your kid. Duh! Is it just me or is there nothing anybody owns more valuable than their own child? That was an honest to gosh, news piece just within the last week on most major news outlets. Don’t forget your kid, put something of value in the back with them.”

While we’re on the subject of kids, in June in a small Pennsylvania airport, the TSA confiscated a loaded handgun – in a baby stroller! According to a report on TSA.gov, “The man said that when he and his girlfriend take their dogs and child for a walk that he keeps his loaded gun in the rear stroller pocket and forgot to remove it when they came to catch their flight.” I call bull-doodoo! If you’re taking a baby on a plane with a stroller you are using every cubic inch of that to add carryon volume. And where in H-E-Double Toothpicks is this guy walking that he needs to carry a loaded gun with him when he’s out with his pseudo-family? Let’s stay with guns in airports for a while, even though I ranted about this before. Also, from TSA.gov, “Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers detected twice as many firearms per million passengers screened at airport security checkpoints nationwide in 2020 compared to 2019, and at a significantly higher rate than any other year since the agency’s inception.” A total of 3,257 guns were confiscated from passengers carry them on their persons or in their carry-on bags, and about 83 percent of them were loaded. Those figures didn’t include the number of guns confiscated because they were improperly packed in checked baggage, or toy and BB guns. All while people on planes are beating each other up for taking too much of the shared armrest or [shudder] being compelled to wear a mask.

And now that the delta variant has bloomed in the US to where masking might become more routine again, I figure something in August I get to write this post all over again with a new set of “can you believe this” tales.

Patience. Please give me patience.

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Reading Isn’t Believing

And they say you can’t believe everything you read. (I say you even can’t believe everything you think but that’s a topic for a different post.) No, this is really about what you read, or don’t, or think you’ve read. Or maybe even for some people what you think you wanted to read. Rarely it might be what you read that you wanted to think.

Not only are 4 out every 5 calls I get enticements to either throw my money away on a non-existent extended warranty, or to have them syphon money out of my accounts if I do so much as to actually think to answer it with a phone that had once been near an ATM machine while I was making a withdrawal (I don’t really know about that but it seems like the scammers have to do less and less to get our money, and what could they do to me for presuming otherwise, sue me for libel?) (now where was I?) (oh yes, I remember), not only are there oodles more nuisance phone calls, nuisance emails – either spam or outright phishing schemes – have taken a dramatic upward arc on the occurrence scale. However…every now and then you come across a spammer who didn’t get the new spam scam users guide. These are the ones that have multiple fonts, bold, lots or asterisks and exclamation points, and refer to accounts at banks and retailers you’ve never used or refer to you as your email address.

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Yesterday I found a new one. Just in case you thought all the bold type, red bullet points, and mysterious name weren’t incentive enough to open the email, they included in the subject line, “This message is From a trusted sender.” I know that convinced me to open that missive right then and do whatever it said.  Hey, that Nigerian prince might still have some of his millions left to give away.

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Clearly that was something not to believe even if I did read it in black and white.

Some signs nobody ever reads. Not far from me there is a stretch of road where for about 30 yards the posted speed limit is 5mph. I’m not sure my car can go that slow. It seems to me nothing between stop and 15mph even exists. Another instance of not believing what I read, although with not quite the same conviction. Oh I’ll slow down as slow as I can get, but 5? Ehhhhhh, probably not.

There is a sign I take with great seriousness and wish everybody who read it would believe it. No, it’s not the “Masks Required” sign but it would be nice if more people believed that too. No, this is this sign.

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The rate of confiscated guns per million passengers doubled in 2020, a year when the number of people flying decreased by 60%. So far, with 2 whole months in for 2021, the rate is close to 4 times that of 2020. That puts the TSA on pace to confiscate close to 15,000 guns at security checkpoints. If that doesn’t worry you enough, over 12,000 of those guns will be loaded. Eighty-three percent of the handguns pulled out of pockets, purses, and carry-on bags are loaded.

The most common reason people give for attempting to enter an airport secure area with a concealed and loaded weapon is that they forgot they had it. Yeah right. Put that in writing and I won’t believe it then either. According to the Pew Research Center, 67% of gunowners say they purchased their guns for protection. If all those people getting on the planes are representative of gunowners, when the time comes to protect life or property I suppose they will have to convince the assailant to “hang on there a second, I want to shoot you which is my right, I just have to remember where I put that darn gun.”

Gun-Sign-Crop-1-768x377It would be nice if people who decide they don’t want to believe the part of the TSA sign that says firearms aren’t allowed through airport check points at least would believe the rest of the sign, the part in smaller print that says they can be fined up to $13,000 dollars for doing so. Then again, maybe that’s not a lot of money to them. In that case … I know this Nigerian prince who needs a little help.

You can believe me on this. I am a trusted sender.