Really?

One of my jobs is dangerous. People that are stupid, incompetent, physically unable to do it or are afraid of heights should not do this job. It's rigging. I walk on I-beams 100 feet in the air and pull up chain motors for rock concerts and events. It takes skill and a bit of fearlessness. Or rather it takes an awareness of fear and the danger and the ability to still do the job without freaking out. It takes common sense, strength and the awareness that if I fuck up and drop even the smallest thing like a shackle pin, it can kill someone.

One of the places I work is the Anaheim Convention Center in the Arena. Or used to. There's going to be a lot less work for riggers now. OSHA came in and said it was not safe. Hmmmm.... Not safe for whom? Your average person who doesn't even know what I do for work?  Not safe for some incompetent fuckhead who can barely walk on the ground without getting hurt? It's safe for riggers. Every building is unique in it's challenges. The arena was built back in the 1960's with a Jetson like aesthetic. Weird angles, false tile ceiling covering the beams of the building.

Since the building was built there was never a death nor serious injury. The roof was safe because of the people rigging in it. OSHA came in an saw the way things were done and levied a fine and said everything must change. So a massive reworking of the building was done. It's safer? I don't know. But I do know that a ton of work has now gone away for riggers because of this retro fit. Everything is now done from 100 foot boom lifts. It's slow and ponderous and load ins will now take a day or more for the rigging before anything else loads in. The floor cannot have anything in the way of the huge lifts; you can't drive over a truss.

If you had a large show you would have 12-16 riggers. 3 man teams in the air and a ground rigger. The rig could be done in a day. The motors could hang virtually anywhere they needed to. Now the arena has fixed places to hang the motors, so you are screwed if you need variations it can't do. How long would it take 2 lifts to rig 100 points? Who knows. But it's safe.

So basically OSHA makes the world safe for the lowest common idiot to do any job. Well, some jobs are not safe. How does OSHA make fire fighters safe? They run into burning buildings. Would OSHA just say let the building burn? It's not safe? Many places are not safe. Coal mines, diamond mines, outer-fucking space. Being an astronaut would be cool, but probably one of  the most dangerous occupations. You are sitting on top of a controlled directed explosion. How do you make that safe?

Life is not safe. You're going to die. The idiots die, the smart people die, the careful people die.

I do wonder what a n OSHA inspector's house looks like. All smooth round corners? Bubble wrap clothes? Dull knives and cold food?

They put a lot of skilled labor out of work. The key word: Skilled. Skilled. Skilled. Just saying...

SCOTUS AZ Decision

In light of the decision by the Supreme court to uphold the "papers please" part of  AZ 1080, I have one question.

If I were arrested without ID and didn't say a word, would the AZ police try to determine if I was Swedish?

JUSTICE

Back 7 months ago I was OUTRAGED by Jerry Sandusky, the now convicted child rapist. (Really, was there any question of guilt?)

He was convicted of 45 out of 48 charges against him. The minimum time he will do is 60 years. The maximum is 442 years. The penalty I suggested was repeatedly feeding this monster to sharks, healing him and doing it again.And again. And again.

He will be sentenced in 90 days. Currently he's in solitary because it's not safe to put the child rapist in the general population. He would be beaten to death. And I'm really okay with that. He needs to actually pay for his crimes. Putting him in an 8 X 10  jail cell for 23  hours a day is not enough. He needs to be put in there with rabid weasels. Hungry tigers. A bigger more violent killer with children that he loves.

I want him to realize he is a MONSTER. The things that hide under the bed in a child's imagination are nothing compared to him. Cthulhu is nothing compared to him. 

I didn't find it unusual his wife got up on the stand and lied about knowing nothing about him being a child rapist. She had to have known. He even molested his adopted son. When the prosecution had the chance to cross examine Dottie Sandusky they declined. Because they knew she was perjuring herself on the stand. How could she admit she knew he was a monster and turned a blind eye to all the horrible things that happened under her roof?

The attorneys will try to appeal. I want the judge to say, "No! Are you fucking kidding?"

When he was taken away after the verdicts, reporters were saying he will die in prison. Now? Please? Can a bunch of convicts beat him to death with  broomsticks right fucking now? Why wait? Kill the MONSTER.

Cursive

On talk radio today I heard the people talking about cursive writing. Apparently it is becoming more and more disused. Why? Kids with keyboards, computers, emails, texts. No on writes letters anymore. I'm guilty of it too. When I hand write anything I use block lettering. But not totally block lettering. Because I write fast there are letters which are connected, like in cursive, but it's not a style of writing, it's a shortcut I created while block writing.

I remember learning to write. They taught block letters first then in 2nd or 3rd grade changed everything. We could only write our assignments in cursive. I was duped!! They played us for a bunch of suckers. Here's the tools for writing, learn them, get used to them. They don't mention that they expect us to totally change everything we just learned. Bastards. 

I have bad handwriting. At least I think it's bad but compared to some I have seen, it's legible. So as an experiment I just tried to write in cursive. It was weird after spending since 5th or 6th grade not writing in cursive. I remember roughly when I stopped. I didn't get in trouble at school, I just decided it was easier not to write cursive, and my teachers could actually read what I wrote. But I remember being in the school library, a kid across the table from me looked at something I was writing and nudged his friend. "He doesn't use cursive." Like it was some sort of schoolyard crime. Like he was better than me because he wrote in a way "grown ups" wrote. "So?" I think was my reply. I don't know what he said to that. It's only the initial admonition I remember. 

Yep, I was a rebel even in 5th grade.

The talk show this morning said that learning cursive makes different parts of your brain work which don't get used when typing on a keyboard or phone pad. They also mentioned a story about a couple girls who were cleaning out their dead grandmother's house and found letters to their grandfather written in cursive. They couldn't read them because they didn't learn cursive. Now I don't know if that was true, but I can see how it might happen. I think if the girls looked closely they could have figured it out. It wasn't Latin, just a strange way of writing English.

It does make me wonder if there is a "grown up" way in foreign languages to write like we have for English. Is there a French, Spanish, Czech way of writing as an adult?

But like Algebra, my need for cursive has long since disappeared.

Paper From A Wall

 Flappers? 

Thomas Meighan? 1879-1936


While rigging in the roof of the Orpheum Theatre on Broadway in downtown LA I noticed paper poking out of the poured concrete of the building. It looked like newspaper. So I pulled on the paper and tore some bits of it out of the building. The chunks were not huge, some 8" long, brittle, tattered, yellow. I was looking for a date on the paper to tell me when it was from and maybe what paper. 


The pieces were several layers thick and I tried to figure out the mystery there in the ceiling but they were ripping so I stopped and put them in my pocket for later, when I had my glasses and could carefully look. 


There was no date on the paper but there was an article that said the word "Flapper" which was the 1920s, and I knew the Orpheum was built sometime in the 1920s. It opened in February of 1926. Also the writing was interesting. It seemed a lot more personal than you would see in the papers of today. There was personality to it. I did find the name of one reporter. Ira C. Tichenor. I looked him up on Google. I didn't find much about him. He was married in 1882 and had a daughter in 1901 who became an actress in the silent movies. 


Thomas Meighan was an actor on stage and silent movies. The film mentioned in the bit of paper above is The Man Who Found Himself.   A 1925 movie. So this narrows down when the paper was put into the cement. The movie came out August 25, 1925.  So the paper would be maybe a September edition of either the LA Times or the LA Examiner. 


The ad in the top bit of paper was pretty funny to me. They were worried about being too thin. TANLAC made them more robust. Tanlac was a medicinal "with alcohol, gentian, buckthorn, rhubarb, licorice, glycerin, wild cherry." But since it was the 1920s and Prohibition was in effect, the 15% alcohol content made Tanlac a popular "medicine." So you might have "puny children" but give them Tanlac and they will grow strong. Or they will just be drunk and not give a shit. 


There was also a reference to Sid Grauman of the famous Chinese Theatre in one of the bits of paper. His Chinese Theatre opened in 1926. It was not mentioned in the scrap I had, but said something about a party he was at. 


It would have been cool to see more of the paper that was buried in the wall, but it was trapped in poured concrete. I wondered how it got there. Was a worker on the grid, 70 feet in the air, reading the paper at lunch and when he was done instead of taking the paper back down or throwing it 70 feet to the ground, he put it inside the form where the concrete was going to be poured. The building is old and parts have crumbled away to reveal this time capsule to me. The worker was discarding a paper. I found part of it 86 years later and searched the internet for answers to my questions. 


Here's the Flapper story from the top scrap:


                                                        THE ESCAPES
                                                      (Confession Story)

Nifty flapper, lugging satchel, gets off car late at night. So did we. Couldn't help it. It was our stop. Flapper gave us one furtive glance, and began ankling away from there like a frightened doe. We tried to be as non-burglarious as possible, business of carrying newspapers in hand, etc. Whistled to appear innocent. Found we were doing "Hotsy Totsy." Hardly fitting. Made quick switch to "Nearer My God To Thee." Stumped at the end of two bars. Flapper in fright, had made a feint to go in a direction in that to which we were proceeding...  

That's the only bit of the story I pulled from the wall. I wonder what happened next.


Thanks to that long lost construction worker for unknowingly leaving me an intellectual mystery to solve.