Jim Medding’s Blog

I had a coworker who had had a very bad day; kind of like my day a few years ago. I pointed her to my blog posting thinking it might cheer her up, but when I received “How horrible” as comment back from her, I realized that that it hadn’t.

I also realized that my original posting might not have quite caught as much of the retrospective humor that I was hoping for. And there were some very humorous moments. One of the things I didn’t put in the blog is that I had Greg call my wife to let her know what was going on. The conversation went something like this:

Greg: “Hi Mom, were down here by the overpass”
Cindy: “So, you’ll be home soon”
Greg: “No”
Cindy: “Why not?”
Greg: “The van’s on fire”
Cindy: “What?”
Greg: “The van’s on fire”

I regularly glance though a lot of RSS feed headlines looking for subject matter of interest but rarely do I find an article that overlaps my interest quite like Jack Ganssle’s article on his visit to Bletchley Park. . In addition to having lots of photos, the article includes a pretty fair description of the historical significance of the place and the equipment itself.

Enjoy.

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek quote from Raymond Chen:

Bloggers are just idiots with a web site.

As a child, I believed there was no better food than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I could not imagine life without at least one sandwich every day. I remember this because, much to my shock, I discovered my best friend, Earl, could not eat them. He was allergic to peanut butter. I remember the conversation with Earl when he revealed this hideous fact; it was the first time in my life when I felt complete and utter disbelief.

Jim - “What?”
Earl - “I’m allergic to peanut butter.”
Jim - “But it’s really, I mean, really good.”
Earl - “I can’t eat it.”
Jim - “You need to go talk with your mom, that can’t be right.”
Earl - “It won’t do any good.”
Silence

To this day I still pity Earl for missing out on all of those PB&J sandwiches.

So far, I’ve read two books which were truly disturbing – Sheriff David Reichert’s Chasing the Devil and James Bradley’s Flyboys. I mention this to provide context for the following quote from Bradley’s book:

Few people reflect now that samurai swords killed more people during WWII than atomic bombs. WWII veteran Paul Fussell wrote, “The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.”