Grey Matters

Ford found my truck. It finally arrived Friday, May 6, 2011. It was ordered on December 14, 2010. It was built some time in February. (I’m hoping I can find the actual build date somewhere in the paperwork.) The Ford store called me at 4:45 PM on Friday to say it had arrived a few hours earlier.

Built in February, it then took more than two months to get all the way from Dearborn, MI to northern AZ.

Compared to the 1977 Chevy Suburban and the 1980 BMW 320i I traded in, the F-150 is way techy. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me configuring everything from the driver’s seat position memory to the nav system and the Bluetooth interface for my and my wife’s phones. Just figuring out how everything works is going to take a while. I’m gong to miss the Beemer’s tight turning radius.

I look at it and all I can think is: “Man, there’s so much that can go wrong.” Power this, electronic that… and I’ll bet all of it is very, very expensive to fix.

Anyway, the long wait is finally over.

The dad-blasted manuals are all in grey text against a white background, like many web sites. Not easy for these old eyes to read. The really important stuff is grey against a grey background.

Oh, to have young eyes again!

There’s an owner’s manual, a tire warranty manual, a Navigation System manual… There’s even a separate manual that explains in agonizing detail that trucks and SUVs don’t handle like ordinary cars.

First off, a tip of my hat to Barack Hussein Obama on the take-down of OBL. His willingness to strike inside Pakistan without first notifying Pakistani officials was doubtless key to not warning OBL of the impending attack. Likewise, kudos to BHO for his willingness to strike despite his aversion to the U.S. acting unilaterally. So, attaboy, Mr. President.

That being said, I was surprised to hear a terrorism analyst (interviewed on TV) say that he expected Al-Qaeda to wither and die without OBL.

I am not a terrorism analyst but I do know that post 9-11, Al-Qaeda evolved into less of a top-down organization and into more of a multi-headed monster with Al-Qaeda operatives and supporters acting more autonomously, often with neither funding nor permission from any Al-Qaeda leaders.

That’s not to say that there is/was no leadership, only that OBL was recently more of a figurehead/inspiring leader than he was pre 9-11. Al-Qaeda today is less an organization that an amalgam of organizations sharing Al-Qaeda’s goals.

I don’t see “Al-Qaeda” going away any time soon. In fact, to avenge the death of OBL, I’d expect to see more terrorist activity against the U.S.A.

It is amazing to me the amount of time my wife and daughter spend on Facebook farming. The other day before we could go to do our grocery shopping, my wife delayed us so she could do some planting.

I wish I could visit their farms at night to mutilate their cattle and leave crop circles!

As of yesterday (April 27) I was told my truck would be here on Friday, April 29th. Tomorrow. Yay!

From the Good Old Days of 2008 when the National Debt was only 9.5 trillion bucks… and I wrote:

“… the Soviet Union collapsed because it could not afford to continue paying for all its pet projects….

This will be America’s undoing as well. The U.S. simply cannot afford all that we have committed to do and it will bankrupt us.

…

“It should be obvious that the interest payment on a debt of 9.5 trillion dollars is a significant portion of the federal budget. In 2007, interest on the national debt was 430 Billion dollars. It wasn’t all that long ago that the entire federal budget was less than that.”

Worth revisiting…