Ah, Labor Day weekend, the last big hurrah for the summer!  The party weekend that is a feeble grasp at holding on to the summer for just a little longer.  Most of the kids are already back in school.  Not like when we were kids and school never started before Labor Day, Izzy Dragon has been back in school since August first.

But, why do we even celebrate “Labor”?  What’s that all about? According to the History Channel’s website, History.com, Labor Day is:

Observed on the first Monday in September, Labor Day pays tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers. It was created by the labor movement in the late 19th century and became a federal holiday in 1894. Labor Day also symbolizes the end of summer for many Americans, and is celebrated with parties, parades and athletic events.

“Paying tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers”?  That kind of makes me wonder how much the truth of the “real” meaning of Labor Day still exists, since most manufacturing and such has been sent overseas where it is cheaper.  The “American Worker” may still be celebration worthy, but maybe not so much the company owners and managers.  Let’s read some more.

Labor Day, an annual celebration of workers and their achievements, originated during one of American labor history’s most dismal chapters. In the late 1800s, at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, the average American worked 12-hour days and seven-day weeks in order to eke out a basic living. Despite restrictions in some states, children as young as 5 or 6 toiled in mills, factories and mines across the country, earning a fraction of their adult counterparts’ wages. People of all ages, particularly the very poor and recent immigrants, often faced extremely unsafe working conditions, with insufficient access to fresh air, sanitary facilities and breaks.

That’s how it was in America then, and now we’re sending work overseas to conditions that mimic that time, that we fought so hard to get rid of here.  Am I missing something?

As manufacturing increasingly supplanted agriculture as the wellspring of American employment, labor unions, which had first appeared in the late 18th century, grew more prominent and vocal. They began organizing strikes and rallies to protest poor conditions and compel employers to renegotiate hours and pay. Many of these events turned violent during this period, including the infamous Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which several Chicago policemen and workers were killed. Others gave rise to longstanding traditions: On September 5, 1882, 10,000 workers took unpaid time off to march from City Hall to Union Square in New York City, holding the first Labor Day parade in U.S. history.

Okay, so the parades for Labor Day now make more sense.

The idea of a “workingmen’s holiday,” celebrated on the first Monday in September, caught on in other industrial centers across the country, and many states passed legislation recognizing it.Congress would not legalize the holiday until 12 years later, when a watershed moment in American labor history brought workers’ rights squarely into the public’s view. On May 11, 1894, employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago went on strike to protest wage cuts and the firing of union representatives.

On June 26, the American Railroad Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, called for a boycott of all Pullman railway cars, crippling railroad traffic nationwide. To break the strike, the federal government dispatched troops to Chicago, unleashing a wave of riots that resulted in the deaths of more than a dozen workers. In the wake of this massive unrest and in an attempt to repair ties with American workers, Congress passed an act making Labor Day a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.More than a century later, the true founder of Labor Day has yet to be identified.

So, are they saying that the Labor Day holiday was a way to mollify the “common man” into behaving and not causing trouble?  “Yes, yes Johnny, you are a good boy.  You are special.  Here’s a special holiday just for you, now quiet down and get back to your chores.”  Or maybe I’m still not getting it.  I am on pain medication after my hip-surgery, after all.  So, maybe it’s just me.  Let’s finish up. 

Many credit Peter J. McGuire, cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, while others have suggested that Matthew Maguire, a secretary of the Central Labor Union, first proposed the holiday.Labor Day is still celebrated in cities and towns across the United States with parades, picnics, barbecues, fireworks displays and other public gatherings. For many Americans, particularly children and young adults, it represents the end of the summer and the start of the back-to-school season.

So, maybe that wasn’t as satisfying as I had hoped.  Let’s look at what Labor Day means to me.  A common blue dragon working like the rest of you to make ends meet.  What is so special about the American Worker?

How about looking at the incredible war material making machine that was put together at the start of World War II? 

In May 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for the production of 185,000 aeroplanes, 120,000 tanks, 55,000 anti-aircraft guns and 18 million tons of merchant shipping in two years. Adolf Hitler was told by his advisors that this was American propaganda; in 1939, annual aircraft production for the US military was less than 3,000 planes. By the end of the war US factories had produced 300,000 planes,^[2][3] and by 1944 had produced two-thirds of the Allied military equipment used in the war—bringing military forces into play in North and South America, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, Western Europe and the Pacific.

And take into account that most of the “American Workers” doing this incredible feat were women, old men and those deemed too infirm to be in the military.  The country rationed everything in order to take care of our boys fighting overseas and the country itself stepped up and accomplished what needed to be done, when it needed to be done.  That incredible attitude is worth celebrating.  To this blue dragon, anyway.

The American Labor Force has accomplished so much.  Throughout the rest of this issue I will attempt to insert some facts and statistics that may help us understand a little bit more why Labor Day is such an important holiday and why it deserves to be celebrated.

But for now, I think it’s time we took a break, so …

I need to speak to some of my “prepper” friends.  I’m sure someone has some bacon seeds put away for the end of the world scenario. 

And this little guy just goes full throttle evil way too quick.

Now there’s a man after my own heart!  I’m so tired of getting those kinds of things…and I’m only on Facebook for one reason!  My Dart League.  If they didn’t pass most of their messaging through the group page, I wouldn’t even HAVE Facebook!  I hate it with a passion!

One day a group of scientists united and decided that man had come a long way, and no longer needed God. They picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.

The scientist walked up to God and informed him that, “God, we’ve decided that we no longer need You. We’re to the point that we can clone people, and do many miraculous things, so why don’t You just go on and get lost.”

God listened patiently and kindly to the scientist and, after the man was done talking, God answered, “Very well! How about this? Let’s have a man-making contest.”

The man replied, “OK, great!”

But God added, “Now we’re going to do this just like I did, back in the old days with Adam.”

The scientist replied, “Sure, no problem,” and bent down to grab himself a handful of dirt.

God just looked at him and remarked, “No, no, no. You go get your own dirt! I CREATED that dirt!”

Good luck with that guys!

Yes indeed, we will be having our normal weekend bash for Labor Day for all of our patrons and employees and their families, but on Monday, it will be a day for just our dear employees to have their own day where they won’t be serving us (or any of you) but instead, we will be serving and celebrating them.  Now, since neither myself, nor Lethal are in any great physical shape to be doing the manual labor, we will use both a pool of volunteers from our dear readers and anyone who is still around, passed out, or too incapacitated to get away in time will be drafted into working the day away for them.  It ought to be great fun!

This is a hilarious video and a great concept.  Something you will pick up as you watch is the amount of languages these guys are fluent in is amazing.

From the Pew Research Center here are:

10 facts about American workers

BY DREW DESILVER

More than 150 million Americans are part of the U.S. workforce, and many of them (but not all) will spend the Labor Day national holiday away from their desks, cash registers and workbenches. We can’t predict how workers will use their day off, but we do know a fair amount about who they are, what they do and the U.S. working environment in general.

1Over the past three decades, the share of American workers who are union members has fallen by about half.Union membership peaked in 1954 at nearly 35% of all U.S. wage and salary workers, but in 2015 the unionization rate was just 11.1%. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the actual number of union members has risen in recent years, from 14.4 million in 2012 to 14.8 million last year.

2There is broad support for the right of workers to unionize across a range of occupations.  Among six industry categories we asked about in spring 2015, about eight in-ten Americans (82%) said manufacturing and factory workers should have that right. Big majorities backed the rights of transit workers, police officers and public school teachers to do the same. About six-in-ten (62%) said fast-food workers should be able to unionize, while 35% opposed that. In general, though, Americans have mixed views about the long-term decline in unionization: About as many people said it’s been mostly bad for the country as said it’s been mostly good, though by 52% to 40% they said it’s been mostly bad for working people.

We’ll have some more of the facts later in the issue.

Yeah, try it while you are physically incapacitated with a new hip and you have to rely on her to drive you everywhere…that’s not the worst look I’ve had on my face.

And what are most of us going to be doing this weekend?
 And what are some of the rest of us going to be doing this weekend?

And if you’re in New Jersey, what are you going to be doing this weekend?

Or this

Yup, cause it’s Labor Day Weekend!

And what are we going to be doing on Tuesday?

Recovering and trying to find missing partiers.

I’m still looking for those bacon seeds. 

I founds them!

It wouldn’t be a proper issue without our posters.  I was going to go with just Labor Day stuff, but thought you might be getting a little tired of it, and I’m running out of pain-free time to work, so I have these handy:

They say it’s now worse than drunk driving.

Thank God for Dragon and Leprechaun Laffs to help you through.

Let’s get the rest of the ten facts about American works.  Some of them are quite surprising.

3 Most Americans work in the service sector. In July, 102.6 million people (71% of all nonfarm payroll employees) worked in private service-providing industries, according to the most recent employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among the major industrial sectors, the biggest was education and health services (22.7 million workers), followed by professional and business services (20.3 million) and retail trade (just under 16 million). Manufacturing employed 12.3 million Americans; about 22.2 million were government workers (nearly two-thirds of them at the local level).

4 Nearly 15 million Americans are self-employed. A Pew Research Center report last year found that 14.6 million people, or about 10 percent of the active workforce in 2014, were self-employed. Those self-employed people had an additional 29.4 million people working for them; together, they accounted for 44 million jobs, or 30% of the national workforce.

But only about a quarter of self-employed people (3.4 million) had employees of their own, and those who did have workers didn’t have very many: Among self-employed people with employees, the median in 2014 was three and the average was 8.6.

5 Millennials are now the largest generation in the labor force. More than a third of American workers today are Millennials (adults ages 18 to 34 in 2015), and last year they surpassed Generation X (ages 35 to 50 in 2015) to become the single largest generational group in the U.S. workforce. Gen Xers’ place as the dominant generation within the labor force was very short-lived – just three years. (On a chart, they are easily overlooked, sandwiched between Baby Boomers and Millennials.)

6 American women earn 83 cents on the dollar compared with men, but that gap is narrowing substantially among younger workers. In 2014, among workers ages 25 to 34, women’s hourly earnings were 91% those of men, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly wages that includes full- and part-time workers. Among even younger working adults, ages 16 to 24, the gender wage gap lessens further, with women making 93% of what men earn. But there’s no guarantee that today’s young women will sustain their near-parity with men in earnings: The analysis shows that young women fall further behind their same-aged male counterparts as they age and deal with the responsibilities of parenthood and family.

Within the American workforce, there are many gaps in earnings between demographic groups, including by race and ethnicity. However, a separate Center analysisfound that white men had higher median hourly earnings ($21) than every other racial/ethnic/gender subgroup except one: Asian men, whose median hourly earnings were $24.

7The wage gap between young workers with college degrees and their less-educated counterparts is the widest in decades. On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment, young college graduates are outperforming their peers without a degree to a greater extent than in the past. With the cost of college soaring and student debt rising in recent years, there’s been much debate about the value of a college education. An update of our previous economic analysis has found that college graduates ages 25 to 34 working full time in 2015 earned more annually – about $20,000 more – than employed young adults holding only a high school diploma. The pay gap was significantly smaller in previous generations.

College-educated adults also are more likely to be employed full time than their less-educated counterparts, and are significantly less likely to be unemployed: In July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment was 2.5% among adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, versus 5% among adults with only a high-school diploma.

8 A much smaller share of U.S. teens work today compared with earlier decades. In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, most teens could expect to be working for at least part of their summer vacation. But the share of teens working summer jobs has dwindled since the early 1990s: After bottoming out in 2010 and 2011 at 29.6%, the teen summer employment rate edged higher but was still only 31.3% in summer 2014. (It had edged up to 32.3% by last summer.) The decline of summer jobs reflects an overall decline in youth employment in recent decades, a trend that’s also been observed in other advanced economies.

Another way of looking at youth employment, or the lack thereof, is by focusing on “NEETs” – that is, young people who are neither employed nor in education or training. Last year, 16.9% of all Americans ages 16 to 29 – or nearly 10.2 million young people – were NEETs. That’s actually a modest improvement: In 2013, the first year for which data are available, there were just over 11 million NEETs in the U.S., or 18.5% of the 16-to-29 population. Our analysis found that in the U.S., the NEET youth population is more female than male (57% to 43%); two-thirds have a high-school education or less, and blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to be NEETs.

9 By contrast, more older Americans are working. In May of this year, 18.8% of Americans ages 65 and older – nearly 9 million people – reported being employed full– or part-time, continuing a steady increase since at least 2000. Older workers represented 5.9% of all employed Americans that month, up from 3.1% in May 2000. Older Americans were working at higher rates than in May 2008 – the only age brackets about which that can be said.

10 Raising the minimum wage is a highly partisan issue. Overall, 58% of Americans favor increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15, according to an August Pew Research Center survey. There’s a stark divide between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: 82% of Clinton supporters favor raising the federal minimum wage to $15, while nearly as many Trump supporters (76%) oppose it. Twenty-nine states, plus the District of Columbia and nearly two dozen cities and counties, have set their own higher minimums. But wide disparities in the cost of living in different parts of the country – and even within individual states – complicate the policy debate.

Okay, okay, wake up you guys in the back.  I’ll get back to the funny stuff now.

Strange Thoughts

– The location of your mailbox shows you how far away from your house you can be in a robe, before you start looking like a mental patient.
– My 60th year kindergarten reunion is coming up soon and I’m worried about the 195 lbs. I’ve gained.
– I always wondered what the job application is like at Hooters. Do they just give you a bra and say, “Here fill this out”?
– The speed in which a woman says “Nothing” when asked “What’s wrong?” is inversely proportional to the severity of the shit storm that’s coming.
– Denny’s has a slogan, ‘If it’s your birthday, the meal is on us.’  If you’re in Denny’s and it’s your birthday, your life sucks!
– The pharmacist asked me my birthday again today. Pretty sure she’s going to get me something.
– I can’t understand why women are okay that JC Penny has an older women’s clothing line named, “Sag Harbor.”
– I think it’s pretty cool how Chinese people made a language entirely out of tattoos.
– What is it about a car that makes people think we can’t see them pick their nose?
– When I die I want to be reincarnated as a spider… just so I can finally hear a women say, “Oh my God, it’s huge!”

Quite funny and not a single bad word used:

9 pounds of gold

A husband and wife were very happy over the nine pound baby boy that was born to them.

Mr. Brown, who could not conceal his delight, called up the editor of a famous newspaper and reported that he had become the proud owner of a nine pound nugget of gold. The editor, upon hearing seemingly extraordinary news, sent his star reporter to interview Mr. Brown.

When the reporter came, Mr. Brown was away and his wife was alone at home….

Reporter:- Does Mr. Brown live here?

Mrs. Brown:- Oh! yes.

Reporter:- Is he in?

Mrs. Brown:- No, he went somewhere.

Reporter:- Is it true that he owns a nine pound nugget of gold?

Mrs. Brown:- (Realizing the joke) Yes! Indeed.

Reporter:- Can I see the place where he found it?

Mrs. Brown:- I’m afraid not because Mr. Brown objects in as much as it is strictly private.

Reporter:- Is the place far?

Mrs. Brown:- No, it is quite near and convenient.

Reporter:- How many years has Mr. Brown been digging the hole?

Mrs. Brown:- Just about two years.

Reporter:- Is the hole deep?

Mrs. Brown:- Quite so…

Reporter:- At about what time does Mr. Brown start digging?

Mrs. Brown:- Oh, he does his digging mostly at night.

Reporter:- Does he work hard on it?

Mrs. Brown:- You bet….and how he perspires!

Reporter:- Is Mr. Brown the first to dig?

Mrs. Brown:- He thought he was….

Reporter:- How do you know there was someone ahead of him?

Mrs. Brown:- I’m in good position to say so, because I own the place.

Reporter:- Oh, I see, but did you sell the place to Mr. Brown?

Mrs. Brown:- No, but for the present he has the legal title to the site.

Reporter:- Has Mr. Brown any helper when he works?

Mrs. Brown:- Yes, I work under him….

Reporter:- Do you think Mr. Brown will sell the place?

Mrs. Brown:- I don’t think so because he enjoys working on it.

Reporter:- Can I see the nine pound nugget of gold?

Mrs. Brown:- Yes, certainly…

(She showed him the nine pound baby boy..)

The reporter fainted….

Safety First.
Just kidding, coffee first.  Safety’s like third or fourth.

The Department of the Navy is now assigning females to quarters in a separate private “OFF LIMITS” area on all aircraft carriers.  Addressing all personnel at Pearl, CINCPAC advised, “Female sleeping quarters will be “out-of-bounds” for all males.

Anyone caught breaking this rule will be fined $50 the first time.”

He continued, “Anyone caught breaking this rule the second time will be fined $150.

“Being caught a third time will cost you a fine of $500.  Are there any questions?”

At this point, a Marine from the security detail assigned to a ship stood up in the crowd and inquired; “How much for a season pass Sir?”

Figures it would be a Marine.

And here’s a really nice story with a good moral at the end.

In the dead of Summer a fly was resting on a leaf beside a lake. A hot, dry fly who said to no one in particular, “Gosh… if I go down three inches, I will feel the mist from the water and I will be refreshed.”

There was a fish in the water thinking, “Gosh…if that fly goes down three inches I can eat him.”

There was a bear on the shore thinking “Gosh…if that fly goes down three inches… that fish will jump for the fly… and I will eat him.”

It also happened that a hunter was further up the bank of the lake preparing to eat a cheese sandwich. “Gosh” he thought “if that fly goes down three inches… and that fish leaps for it… that bear will expose himself and grab for the fish. I’ll shoot the bear and then have a proper lunch.”

You probably think this is enough activity for one bank of a lake, but I can tell you there was more. A wee mouse by the hunter’s foot was thinking “Gosh… if that fly goes down three  inches… and that fish jumps for that fly… and that bear grabs for that fish… the dumb hunter will shoot the bear and drop his cheese sandwich.”

A cat lurking in the bushes took in this scene and thought, as was fashionable to do on the banks of this particular lake around lunch time “Gosh… if that fly goes down three inches…and that fish jumps for that fly… and that bear grabs for that fish…and that hunter shoots that bear… and that mouse makes off with the cheese sandwich… then I can have mouse for lunch.”

The poor fly is finally so hot and so dry that he heads down for the cooling mist of the water… The fish swallows the fly… The bear grabs the fish… The hunter shoots the bear… The mouse grabs the cheese sandwich… The cat jumps for the mouse… The mouse ducks… The cat falls into the water.

The moral of the story is…. Whenever a fly goes down three inches… Some pussy is probably in danger of getting wet.

So, for today’s last word, a fast update on how my hip is doing.  I haven’t been back to see the surgeon yet, that happens on Tuesday, but I believe things are going okay.

There’s a lot more pain involved than I thought there would be, as well as a lot of swelling.  My right leg is swollen from my waste line to my toes. And that has me worried about my replaced knee, which is on the same side, and whether it is suffering any damage. 

But, overall I am doing okay and am happy that I had it done.  I’ll send you out with a couple of medical humor cartoons.  Be well my friends until next week.