Dragon Laffs

Moving A Computer

Sometimes it becomes necessary to move your computer to a new location for whatever reason; installing/adding new hardware or just decided to move it for “easier access”, for instance (note easier access in quotation marks).

Whatever your reason is, this handy guide may help you alleviate some of the stress that always arises in such occasions.

Keep in mind that this is a venture only to be undertaken by those who know what they’re doing…and masochists.

1. Bone up on your cursing. You will need it later.

2. Pick a *good* spot to locate your computer. Don’t be too picky; you will regret having started on this venture soon enough.

3. Disconnect all cables, cords, power sources, umbilical cords and plumbing. Look at the black, gray & white spaghetti mess on the floor and sob. Refer to number 1. While you’re at it, it helps to focus on cursing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for making all this possible.

4. Be sure to dust machine off, since it’s been sitting for months in one spot, gathering a dust mound the size of Mt. Rainier. This is especially essential if you have asthma.

5. Now that you’ve picked a *good* spot, it’s time to replace all the cables, cords, etc. Make sure it’s in a dark, hard-to-reach location.

6. New computers have color-coded plugs and plugins to make assembly easier. This has no bearing on you since your computer is in a dark, hard-to-reach location and they’re all the same color: gray. See number 1.

7. Get a flashlight. Look for new batteries for flashlight you’ve left in the junk drawer for months. Go to store to buy new flashlight batteries since you don’t have any. Rule number 1 is coming in handy now.

8. While inserting various cords and cables, be sure to drop at least one on the floor behind the desk, where it will take a contortionists to retrieve it.

9. Find out that your printer cable is now not long enough to reach the computer (see number 1). Oh well, you didn’t use it that much anyway.

10. Once you have all the cables, etc. back in place, turn computer back on.

11. Sit, puzzled why computer isn’t working.

12. Plug monitor in.

13. Ponder why keyboard and mouse don’t work.

14. Switch keyboard and mouse plugins.

15. Call spouse in to admire your handiwork.

16. Spouse informs you that he/she liked it better where it was, and to move it back.

17. When asked why you’re banging your head on the monitor, don’t reply. It would only confuse him/her.

Good Morning Campers.

Not much to say this morning…can’t talk very loud anyway, because of the pneumonia.  So, it would probably be best if we just let the other authors have their say and give you guys a laugh.

“A new study found that heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers,
but the ways they die are a lot more embarrassing.” -Jimmy Fallon

The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson

I shouldn’t make fun of cruises because I’ll probably end up working on one.

Jimmy Kimmel Live!

The use of profanity on broadcast television is up 69 percent in the last few years. That should level off once Oprah steps down.

Abdullah enters a nursing home
An Arabic family was considering putting their grandfather Abdullah in a nursing home. All the Arabic facilities were completely full so they had to put him in an Australian home. After a few weeks in the Australian facility, they came to  visit Grandpa.

”How do you like it here?” asks the grandson.

”We’re so happy for you. We were worried that this was the wrong place for you. You know, since you are a little  different from everyone.”

”Oh, no! Let me tell you about  how wonderfully they treat the residents”, Abdullah says with a big smile. ”There’s a musician here– he’s 85 years old. He hasn’t played the violin  in 20 years and everyone still calls him ‘Maestro’!
There is a judge in  here — he’s 95 years old. He hasn’t been on the bench in 30 years and  everyone still calls him ‘Your Honor’!
There’s a dentist here — 90 years old.. He hasn’t fixed a tooth for 25 years and everyone still calls him Doctor?!
And me —
“I haven’t had sex for 35 years and they still call me ‘The Fucking Arab”.

For you history buffs and anyone else who is interested, here is a GREAT site full of wonderful pictures from the Pacific Theater of Operations during WWII.  Click here

Captured: The Pacific and Adjacent Theaters in WWII

and you will be taken to a site that opens in a new window …. at least, that’s what the instructions on the outside of the cereal box said.  If you just want the link to cut and paste, since some of you seem to have issues with clicking on links:  http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2010/03/18/captured-blog-the-pacific-and-adjacent-theaters/?source=ARK_plog

A short and simple story from Molly:

One day, long, long ago, there lived a woman who did not whine, nag or bitch.

But it was a long time ago, and it was just that one day.

When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bike.  Then I realized that God doesn’t work that way.  So, I stole a bike and asked Him to forgive me.

I was walking down the road and saw my Arab neighbor Abdul standing on his fifth floor apartment balcony shaking a carpet.  I shouted up to him, “What’s wrong, Abdul?  Won’t it start?”

Guns don’t kill people…..Husbands who come home early kill people.

Ed has a problem.  He continually gains weight, is very sick and very fat. He is always eating turkey right from the refrigerator. It keeps making him sicker and fatter but he can’t stop. His friends and family worry about him but he keeps on with his addiction.  Finally, after years of sickness, he stops, loses a lot of weight and looks great. His friends ask him how he did it. His reply… “I quit cold turkey.”

“What is that sound?” a woman visiting our nature center asked.

“It’s the frogs trilling for a mate,” Patti, the naturalist, explained. “We have a pair in the science room. But they’ve been together for so long, they no longer sing to each other.”

The woman nodded sympathetically. “The trill is gone.”

No kidding!  A bloody fortune!

The following are new Error Messages planned for Windows Vista:
1) Smash forehead on keyboard to continue.
2) Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue.
3) Press any key to continue or any other key to quit.
4) Press any key… no, no, no, NOT THAT ONE!
5) Press Ctrl-Alt-Del now for IQ test.
6) Close your eyes and press escape three times.
7) Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner.

Working as a computer instructor for an adult education program at a community college, I am keenly aware of the gap in the computer knowledge between my younger and older students.  This was confirmed the day a new student walked into our library area and glanced at the encyclopedia volumes stacked on a bookshelf.

“What are all these books?” he asked.

Somewhat surprised, I replied that they were encyclopedia.

His response told it all. “Really?” he said, “Someone printed out the whole thing?”

New  Teacher
Having served his time with the Marine Corps, a man became a school
teacher and before school started he injured his back.
He was required to wear a plaster cast around the upper part of his body.
Fortunately, the cast fit under his shirt and wasn’t even noticeable.
On the first day of class, he found himself assigned to the toughest students in the school.

Walking confidently into the rowdy classroom, he opened the window wide and sat down at his desk.
When a strong breeze made is tie flap, he took a stapler and stapled the tie to his chest.
He had no trouble with discipline that year…

FOR A GOOD LAUGH……This is for the over 50 generation:

I thought about the 30 year business I ran with 1800 employees, all without a Blackberry that played music, took videos, pictures and communicated with Facebook and Twitter.

I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook, so my seven kids, their spouses, 13 grandkids and 2 great grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.

That was before one of my grandkids hooked me up for Tweeter, Tweetree, Twhirl, Twitterfon, Tweetie and Twittererific Tweetdeck, Twitpix and something that sends every message to my cell phone and every other program within the texting world.

My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation. I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag.

The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue tooth [it’s red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife as everyone in the nearest 50 yards was glaring at me. Seems I have to take my hearing aid out to use it, and I got a little loud.

I mean the GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, “Re-calc-ul-ating”.  You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then when I would make a right turn instead, it was not good.

When I get really lost now, I call my wife and tell her the name of the cross streets and while she is starting to develop the same tone as Gypsy, the GPS lady, at least she loves me.

To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house. We have had them for 4 years, but I still haven’t figured out how I can lose three phones all at once and have run around digging under chair cushions and checking bathrooms and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.

The world is just getting too complex for me. They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store. You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden “Paper or Plastic?” every time I check out just knocks me for a loop. I bought some of those cloth reusable bags to avoid looking confused, but I never remember to take them in with me.

Now I toss it back to them. When they ask me, “Paper or Plastic?” I just say, “Doesn’t matter to me. I am bi-sacksual.”  Then it’s their turn to stare at me with a blank look.

I was recently asked if I tweet. I answered, No, but I do toot a lot.”

PS:

I know some of you reading this are not over 50;  I’m just giving you something to look forward to as you ripen.

You knew THIS was only a matter of time right?

So many of you wrote in after the Dragon Laffs Extra and said that you got the post but didn’t get the pictures that I thought I would recreate the Extra here with the pictures. 

Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler    

Thursday, 07 October 2010
Tinian Island , Pacific Ocean.  It’s a small island, less than 40 square miles, a flat green dot in the vastness of Pacific blue.  Fly over it and you notice a slash across its north end of uninhabited bush, a long thin line that looks like an overgrown dirt runway.  If you didn’t know what it was, you wouldn’t give it a second glance out your airplane window.

On the ground, you see the runway isn’t dirt but tarmac and crushed limestone, abandoned with weeds sticking out of it.  Yet this is arguably the most historical airstrip on earth.  This is where World War II was won.  This is Runway Able:

On July 24, 1944, 30,000 US Marines landed on the beaches of Tinian .  Eight days later, over 8,000 of the 8,800 Japanese soldiers on the island were dead (vs. 328 Marines), and four months later the Seabees had built the busiest airfield of WWII – dubbed North Field –  enabling B-29 Superfortresses to launch air attacks on the Philippines, Okinawa, and mainland Japan.
Late in the afternoon of August 5, 1945, a B-29 was maneuvered over a bomb loading pit, then after lengthy preparations, taxied to the east end of North Field’s main runway, Runway Able, and at 2:45am in the early morning darkness of August 6, took off.
The B-29 was piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets of the US Army Air Force, who had named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay.  The crew named the bomb they were carrying Little Boy.  6½ hours later at 8:15am Japan time, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima .
Three days later, in the pre-dawn hours of August 9, a B-29 named Bockscar(a pun on “boxcar” after its flight commander Capt. Fred Bock), piloted by Major Charles Sweeney took off from Runway Able.  Finding its primary target of Kokura obscured by clouds, Sweeney proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki , over which, at 11:01am, bombardier Kermit Beahan released the atomic bomb dubbed Fat Man.

Here is “Atomic Bomb Pit #1” where Little Boy was loaded onto Enola Gay:

There are pictures displayed in the pit, now glass-enclosed.  This one shows Little Boy being hoisted into Enola Gay‘s bomb bay.

And here on the other side of ramp is “Atomic Bomb Pit #2” where Fat Man was loaded onto Bockscar.  

The commemorative plaque records that 16 hours after the nuking of Nagasaki , “On August 10, 1945 at 0300, the Japanese Emperor without his cabinet’s consent decided to end the Pacific War.”
Take a good look at these pictures, folks.  This is where World War II ended with total victory of America over Japan .  I was there all alone.  There were no other visitors and no one lives anywhere near for miles.  Visiting the Bomb Pits, walking along deserted Runway Able in solitude, was a moment of extraordinarily powerful solemnity.
It was a moment of deep reflection.  Most people, when they think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , reflect on the numbers of lives killed in the nuclear blasts – at least 70,000 and 50,000 respectively.  Being here caused me to reflect on the number of lives saved – how many more Japanese and Americans would have died in a continuation of the war had the nukes not been dropped.
Yet that was not all.  It’s not just that the nukes obviated the US invasion of Japan , Operation Downfall, that would have caused upwards of a million American and Japanese deaths or more.  It’s that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of extraordinary humanitarian benefit to the nation and people of Japan .
Let’s go to this cliff on the nearby island of Saipan to learn why:

Saipan is less than a mile north of Tinian ..  The month before the Marines took Tinian, on June 15, 1944, 71,000 Marines landed on Saipan .  They faced 31,000 Japanese soldiers determined not to surrender.
Japan had colonized Saipan after World War I and turned the island into a giant sugar cane plantation.  By the time of the Marine invasion, in addition to the 31,000 entrenched soldiers, some 25,000 Japanese settlers were living on Saipan, plus thousands more Okinawans, Koreans, and native islanders brutalized as slaves to cut the sugar cane. 
There were also one or two thousand Korean “comfort women” (kanjiin Japanese), abducted young women from Japan ‘s colony of Korea to service the Japanese soldiers as sex slaves.  (See The Comfort Women: Japan ‘s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, by George Hicks.)
Within a week of their landing, the Marines set up a civilian prisoner encampment that quickly attracted a couple thousand Japanese and others wanting US food and protection.  When word of this reached Emperor Hirohito – who contrary to the myth was in full charge of the war – he became alarmed that radio interviews of the well-treated prisoners broadcast to Japan would subvert his people’s will to fight.
As meticulously documented by historian Herbert Bix in Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, the Emperor issued an order for all Japanese civilians on Saipan to commit suicide.  The order included the promise that, although the civilians were of low caste, their suicide would grant them a status in heaven equal to those honored soldiers who died in combat for their Emperor.
And that is why the precipice in the picture above is known as Suicide Cliff, off which over 20,000 Japanese civilians jumped to their deaths to comply with their fascist emperor’s desire – mothers flinging their babies off the cliff first or in their arms as they jumped. 
Anyone reluctant or refused, such as the Okinawan or Korean slaves, were shoved off at gunpoint by the Jap soldiers.  Then the soldiers themselves proceeded to hurl themselves into the ocean to drown off a sea cliff afterwards called Banzai Cliff.  Of the 31,000 Japanese soldiers on Saipan , the Marines killed 25,000, 5,000 jumped off Banzai Cliff, and only the remaining thousand were taken prisoner.
The extent of this demented fanaticism is very hard for any civilized mind to fathom – especially when it is devoted not to anything noble but barbarian evil instead.  The vast brutalities inflicted by the Japanese on their conquered and colonized peoples of China , Korea , the Philippines , and throughout their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was a hideously depraved horror. 
And they were willing to fight to the death to defend it.  So they had to be nuked.  The only way to put an end to the Japanese barbarian horror was unimaginably colossal destruction against which they had no defense whatever.  Nuking Japan was not a matter of justice, revenge, or it getting what it deserved.  It was the only way to end the Japanese dementia.
And it worked – for the Japanese.  They stopped being barbarians and started being civilized.  They achieved more prosperity – and peace – than they ever knew, or could have achieved had they continued fighting and not been nuked.  The shock of getting nuked is responsible.
We achieved this because we were determined to achieve victory.  Victory without apologies.  Despite perennial liberal demands we do so, America and its government has never apologized for nuking Japan .  Hopefully, America never will.

Note:  Tinian and Saipan, along with a third island, Rota, form a very interesting political jurisdiction, The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands or CNMI, which both is and is not a part of the U.S.   It is directly north of Guam (the islands north of Saipan are currently uninhabited).: