Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

Here is reason #652 why I'm no longer a Republican. Once upon a time, this country accomplished pretty much everything it set out to do. Defeat the Nazis. We did it. End racial segregation. We did it. Put a man on the moon (during war time, no less). We did it. Conserve energy during an oil embargo. We did it. We used to be a "can-do" nation. But as the extreme right-wing nuts have taken over the once respectable Republican party, they keep telling us we can't do the things we need to do. Let people marry whoever they choose, regardless of their sexual orientation? It goes against the Bible, so we can't do it. Make our transportation systems more efficient and comfortable by modernizing passenger trains and developing high speed rail corridors? It's too expensive and government shouldn't be subsidizing trains (even though we subsidize roads, airports, waterways and shipping ports), so we can't do it. Develop environmentally friendly energy sources to...

The Monterey Herald reported today that some folks in Seaside are asking the city to rename Broadway Avenue as Obama Way. I'm as much a fan of President Obama as anybody. I support his work on health care reform, I support his efforts in the middle east. I'm behind him on pretty much everything. But let's not let our excitement get in the way of good sense. So far, President Obama hasn't had time to accomplish much, and it remains to be seen how much he can do. He may indeed be the greatest thing since Abraham Lincoln, but he needs to accomplish something enduring before we start naming things after him. Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger first became governator? Republicans were so ecstatic that they wanted to amend the United States Constitution so that he, a native of Austria, could run for President someday. That was before the state crashed head-on into fiscal reality. Arnold has turned out to be just another mediocre governor in a long string of mediocre gove...

The recent passing of Robert McNamara , who was the U.S. Defense Secretary during the Vietnam war, brought to mind a brief encounter I had with him a few years ago. I never got close enough to talk to him , but I was within eight feet as he sat at a banquet table in the hotel where I worked. He was scheduled as the after dinner speaker that evening. As the in-house audio/visual technician on duty that night, I was in charge of the microphone. I don't remember the purpose of the event, but it was part of a larger multi-day conference. Most of the attendees were much younger than me. As I was setting up that afternoon one of the meeting organizers in the group told me that the guest speaker would be Robert McNamara. I recognized the name before he proceeded to tell me he was President Johnson's Secretary of Defense. He was quite excited about the prospect of hearing someone of that stature speak at his event. The fellow was visibly disappointed that I did not share his enthusi...

An engineer I know brought this video to my attention. The tornado occurred in Illinois on January 7, 2008. The camera was mounted in the last locomotive, facing the freight cars they were pulling. Watch the trees in the background as the rain starts. Then hold on!!!!

Now that the digital television age is underway, an interesting situation has come to my attention. Some people have widescreen (a.k.a. 16x9) TVs and some people, like us, have older TVs in the standard format (4x3). The problem is how do TV stations deliver their new widescreen pictures to people who have standard TVs. I understand that over the air converter boxes, the kind they were telling everyone to get with their government coupon, have a zoom feature which enables the user to either crop the picture to fit their TV, or display it in widescreen "letterbox" format with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. All well and good. But we have digital cable, without that feature. How the system is delivering the images is a mystery to me, but generally it works OK. Sometimes the picture is letterboxed. Other times it is evident that the image is cropped, because people's faces or some text is cut off at the edges. Whatever the technique, somebody needs to exp...

Wednesday afternon UPS misdirected a package to our door. It was meant for somebody with a similar address. I called UPS to correct the problem and got stuck in a voice recognition phone maze that didn't give me any relevant options. So I used my usual method of pressing "0" to speak to a real human. Unfortunately, unlike most other systems, it just put me into another maze. I was not in a good mood to begin with, so in desperation I screamed "GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" into the phone. The system politely replied "One moment while we connect you to a live agent." I guess voice recognition software is more sophisticated than I thought. It can now recognize anger. The story has a happy ending. The agent took down the information and within 30 minutes I got a call from the local UPS office saying the driver would return within the hour. He actually arrived one minute later with an apology and took the box away.

The people awakened one morning to hear That the Grinch of Prop 8 had stolen their cheer So they marched in the streets to protest the decision As victims of public discrimination. But one of them said, in a voice starting low “Maybe, just maybe, it need not be so. “Does love need a license from officials of state To affirm what our hearts know will never abate? “Perhaps marriage is something that can't be constrained By a book of religion or a statute ordained. “Marriage is defined in the hearts of two lovers And can't be affected by the thoughts of the others. “So let the Grinch live by his own set of rules. They need not define us unless we be fools “Someday he will learn what we already know That love's unconditional, and that's how we grow.”