Filed under: family, Government, Society | Tagged: Canada, Friendly Neighbor, Memes | 1 Comment »
PSA-230130-Useless Information on Canada
Posted on 30/01/2023 by Grumpa Joe
Making Dust
Posted on 30/01/2023 by Grumpa Joe
Intarsia is considered a craft, but it is also art. It is a little known art form which evolved from fifteenth century marquetry. Although marquetry is usually a picture in wood made from very thin and flat wood which is carefully inlaid onto another flat surface like a tabletop. Intarsia is very similar except the wood is thicker and shaped to give the picture three dimensions. Both Intarsia and marquetry came into existence somewhere in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A more modern form of Intarsia has come into being in the twentieth century. The latest form is less formal and more whimsical. It is what I endeavor to practice.
Many pieces that I craft are my original designs. So far the most pieces I made are from patterns designed by gifted artists. After making several pieces from patterns I began to experiment by adding a small touch of whimsy of my own. This practice is now evolving into completely original works.
My first Intarsia work circa 2000 A.D. Two Dolphins from a pattern
More work from patterns
Work from a pattern that has been embellished
COVID 19 Nurse, Thermometer added to a pattern design
The cloud, sky, grass, and the dandelion are touches to a pattern
The lure is an embellishment
My first original work. The image is from a calendar photo.
Horn Man from a photo of my grandson practicing his trumpet
Three Red Roses, from a photo
Cecil the Lion from a photo
Night Hunter, from a photo of a Barred Owl in Flight
Hummer Snack, from photos taken in my garden
Two White, One Red Rose, from photo
Coming in 2023 but to be unveiled later because I am just beginning the pattern design. A typical original work like Horn Man, Cecil the Lion, or Night Hunter can take up to five hundred hours of cutting, shaping, sanding, framing, and finishing. Because I pride myself on being a wood worker, I also make the frames. The round frame shown on the last photo has been my biggest challenge to date. Cecil the Lion is my favorite, and Horn Man took the longest.
I have gotten my inspiration from Intarsia artist Judy Gale Roberts.
Filed under: Arts, Biography, family, Hobby | Tagged: Intarsia, Judy Gale Roberts | 2 Comments »
Abolish the IRS
Posted on 27/01/2023 by Grumpa Joe
This week the news reported that a member of Congress was floating the idea to eliminate the IRS. Now we’re talking, I’m all ears. If we can pull that off I would propose we do the same with every other bureaucracy that was invented to help us out.
The biggest problem I see with eliminating the IRS is what will be put in it’s place to finance the big, big, big government. As my father would warn us, “be careful what you wish for, it may come true.”
The flat tax idea, I have learned is not a new one. It is as old as the United States itself. Over the years the flat tax was debated, but never implemented in favor of tariffs and sales taxes. Our current income tax system wasn’t implemented until the1940’s during WW II. The new flat tax system being talked about would use federal sales tax as a way to generate money. This makes sense because it spreads the joy to anyone buying anything, like a yacht to a pack of gum. Today approximately 50% of the working class does not pay income tax. If we change to a flat tax, even children who buy candy would be paying the bill. Buying new cars would be a major producer of cash. The tax rate being discussed is 30%. If I were to buy a new car listed at $50,000, I would have to tack on an extra fifteen thousand dollars for the federal flat tax. A hundred dollars worth of groceries would add another thirty dollars to the bill. Here in Illinois I would also have to pay Illinois Income tax, and sales tax to add another ten percent to afford living in this wonderful state.
Of course I could move from the USA to one of the European countries that many of our citizens are trying to make us into because they think these states have a much better way of life than us. Which countries are they, you ask, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden? I don’t think I would like living there. Besides the weather being colder there, the Tax Foundation figures show that overall taxes collected from the Scandinavian countries is much higher than in the USA. (Compare 24.76% in the USA to 46.76% in Denmark, 43.7% in Sweden, and 39.9% in Norway. I realize that these tax figures are all mysteries, as the old adage proclaims “Figures lie, and liars figure.”
What I like best about a flat tax is that it will work without the need for a huge IRS to administrate. Biden’s request to hire 87,000 new IRS agents would vaporize without the Internal Revenue Service.
We’ve been using the current system with tweeks for the past seventy-three years and all we have to show for it is a huge bureaucracy. Remember the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.” It is time.
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Taught Hatred
Posted on 25/01/2023 by Grumpa Joe
During World War Two I was taught to hate the Japanese. It didn’t matter that I never knew a single person of Japanese heritage, but the teaching was effective. I learned to hate Japan and Japanese people. At the time we had limited sources for news, mainly newspapers delivered to the house, or newsreels at the movie houses. Our regular paper was the Sun-Times dropped on our porch every day. I delivered the paper myself to many neighbors. Although we didn’t go to the movies often, but when we did, we saw government screened images of the war before the featured film. I would have been five or six years old at the time. Mom and Dad didn’t go to the movies often, so the film images of war that I saw were limited. The headlines on the newspaper featured large scale photos of war with large bold print proclaiming battles. Inside, the stories added wordy pictures of the carnage that went on. Whatever it was, I don’t really know, but I was seeded with a lifetime hatred for all things Japanese.
Shortly, after WW II ended the United States became involved in the Korean conflict. This time I was a teen ager and went to the movies regularly. Again, the brainwashing about Koreans who vaguely look like Japanese began. I still hadn’t met anyone who was of either Japanese or Korean ancestry.
It wasn’t until I went to the University of Illinois that I began to meet people of different races. There was a large population of Chinese, Indians (from India) and a few Iranians. Many of my professors in engineering classes were from India. That is when I finally began to see different people as people and not as war. It turned out that one of them was an Iranian named Dark Mirfahkrai. We became fast friends and I once asked him if he would stay in America after he graduated. He explained that he pledged his allegiance to the Shah and felt a moral obligation to return to his homeland. I learned that foreign people were not much different than I was. I did dislike foreign teachers only because I couldn’t understand what t hey said. Their pronunciation of English was horrible. But thanks to the quiz-classes that were a part of the lectures I survived. Most of these were led by upper class men who were headed for Master Degrees.
When I entered the working world another source of input crept into my life. There were always story’s about how our major industries were being lost to the Japanese. My fellow workers were often very vociferous about companies that raced to leave America for cheap labor in Korea and Japan.
In the nineteen sixties we were invaded by Japanese car companies with cute economy cars that were considerably cheaper than USA made product, namely, Nissan and Toyota. Nissan was so afraid to market a Japanese sounding car that they didn’t put their real name on the product. Datsun was really Nissan, and stayed Datsun for a number of years. I fell in love with a cute little Toyota Corolla station wagon, and bought one for less than eighteen hundred dollars. The VW Bug was priced at that and I was tired of the problems I had with mine so I opted to change.
Owning that little car is what caused me to develop a deep seated hatred for Japan and all things Japanese. Up until the Toyota I owned cars for a minimum of eight years, I sold the Corolla after two years and during those twenty-four months it spent six months in the dealer service department. That is when I coined the phrase “Jap-Crap.”
About that time I met my first real bona-fide Japanese person. Mike Fujimoto was Council Level Boy Scout volunteer. His name was well known throughout the Chicago Area Council and he was a true Scouter. I attended several of his training sessions and he turned my thinking around about Japanese. He was American born of Japanese migrant parents, just like I was American born of Hungarian parents. He was in scouts to give his son the best possible experience he could have, as was I. I didn’t hate Japanese people as much after I met Mike, but I did hate Japanese cars and their shitty quality. I never even looked at a Japanese car for forty years after that. My kids, on the other hand, would not buy American. I had friends at work who bragged about their great experiences with Honda and Toyota, but I stayed firm. What finally got to me is when my Assistant Chief Engineer Hank told me he had to take his Honda in for service at 140,000 miles to replace the gas filler tube. I finally relented and bought a Toyota Avalon sixteen years ago and I still love it. Everything still works, and there is no rust anywhere, and it still runs great, and I now love Jap-Crap.
This brings me to the real reason I am writing this story. I just finished reading “Bridge to the Sun” by Bruce Henderson. It is about American born Japanese men who joined/or were drafted to fight in WW II. It has totally erased my hatred for Japanese Americans, and Japanese people. I learned that these people should be commended for putting up with fighting two wars simultaneously, first was WW II against the Japanese, and second the racist hatred they endured from their own people, us, me.
Filed under: Biography, Immigration, Manufacturing | Tagged: Boy Scouts of America, Hatred, Japanese American, Toyota, WW II | 1 Comment »
