Welcome to my little Nerdery on the Net! :)

Fifty years ago today, Fayetteville and Fort Bragg would be shocked to their core by the murders of Jeffrey MacDonald's pregnant wife Colette and their daughters Kimberley and Kristen in their home on Castle Drive. Not surprisingly given the notoriety of this case, the Fayetteville Observer ran a retrospective story (linked below) and one picture in particular took my breath away. The officer standing behind Jeff MacDonald as he's getting into the car is my…

Back in the day, the laundromat in the old hood was THE place to hang out and socialise. Lots of good memories and this one even has the obligatory billiards table! :) Especially when there are towels full o’ sewage from the latest main line clean out I’d rather wreck their machines with rather than mine. One heavy bleach cycle and one hot rinse cycle later…I think we should be good to return these utility…

No, that isn’t a scorpion but rather the head of a plumbing snake my neighbour and I lost in my main sewer clean out last April when we tried to clear a clog that a professional plumber didn’t completely clear. The plumbers who came today to clear yet another nasty clog (after having the hot water heater die a couple of weeks ago…plumbing curse!) saw the snake head on the video scope and managed to…

Today started out somewhat gloomy and overcast and not just because of the weather here in the Raleigh area. Today would have been my father's 75th birthday and there's no getting round the fact that ever since he passed away four years ago, words just cannot properly express just how terribly I miss him. Sometimes it's something really stupid that takes my breath away. When I would ring him up on his birthday to wish…

No matter what one might think of the President, or his administration’s policies…you’ve got to admit that getting his signature on the legislation raising the purchasing age to 21 for tobacco and e-cigarette products can’t reasonably be seen as anything other than a GOOD THING. Would I prefer an outright ban? Yes…even knowing it would likely suffer the same fate Prohibition did…bootlegging and the black market will get round the government ban. But the difference…

As the House eventually gets round to debating and voting on the two Articles of Impeachment, you may well notice that curiously time seems to dilate in much the same way as it does round a massive black hole…particularly when votes are called. Long time CSPAN viewers know that when the person in the Speaker’s chair announces a recorded vote and gives a time limit of five or fifteen minutes, it is very rare that…

Sometimes HealthCare.gov and the insurance companies providing the data gets the messaging totally spot-on when it comes to the health care plans on offer on the exchange in NC… :(

The Tories are set to win a massive majority in the general election but for me, the most interesting contest is the one in Bolsover which has been held by the “Beast of Bolsover” Dennis Skinner of the Labour Party since 1970. Skinner is famous for heckling Black Rod when they come into the Commons to summon them to attend Her Majesty in the House of Lords for the State Opening of Parliament. Tory frontbenchers…

This is actually honest to goodness advice given from the Electoral Commission for the general election going in right now. The utter irony of it is palpable and might well explain recent results of elections and referenda better than the pundits have! ;) —- Suppose you've been drinking - can you still vote? Yes. You can vote if you are drunk or under the influence of drugs, unless you are disruptive.

In the five years of being on Marketplace coverage as an individual, I’ve never had a year where the new plan: Was the same plan as the old one. Every single plan I’ve ever had was withdrawn at the end of the year it was introduced. You can’t even get low-deductible Platinum plans in the Raleigh area anymore!Had a larger network than the old one. This year was particularly bad as the statewide network was…

So I'm considering which of the utterly depressing offerings available on the Healthcare Marketplace is the one that I should select for the "World's Most Appallingly Expensive Flu Jab" (tm) and the first two options were interesting, to say the least. One has a deductible/out-of-pocket maximum of $8,150 and the other one is a HSA-eligible HDHP with a deductible/out-of-pocket maximum of $6,900. In all other respects, the Summary Plan Description shows these two plans are…

The presser acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney gave today concerning the ongoing scandal vis-a-vis the quid pro quo of aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on the Bidens was certainly an interesting affair. He actually admits that there was a coercive element to the decision to withhold aid pending Ukrainian cooperation…and then tries to immediately walk it back and deny the quid pro quo. The first thing I thought of watching that clumsy statement…

The long awaited Queen’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament is going on right now and I’m sure she’s just loving this one with the farce of Brexit going on in the background. You’ve just got to love the British penchant for pomp and circumstance…the Queen being kitted out in the Robing Room in plain sight of Charles I’s death warrant on the wall to Black Rod’s trek to have the door of the…

This is unprecedented, to put it mildly. Never in all my years of following the goings on in the Palace of Westminster would I have ever imagined a sitting PM getting smacked so comprehensively as this 11-nil vote by the Law Lords of the UK Supreme Court. Effectively the advice given to Her Majesty and the subsequent Order in Council suspending Parliament are now vacated and null and void and the Speaker has already indicated…

I would have SO loved to have done something this cheeky when I've been made redundant and I'd be forced to attend an "exit interview" with HR under threat of them not paying severance (which is illegal as hell but HR counts on the fact that most people are usually so shocked that they don't think of ringing up the Wage and Hour Division and filing a complaint). If you've never experienced one, thank your…

My first visit to the site of the attacks on the World Trade Centre was in April of 2009. Mind you, this was well before the 9/11 Memorial opened in 2011 but the scale of what they had to excavate and haul away just to get to the point of laying down the footprint of what would become the Freedom Tower was more than a little overwhelming. All of this in the very tight confines…

Trust me, it could be far worse. You could be the current Prime Minister of Her Majesty's Government of Great Britain and Northern Ireland! Yes, ol' Boris is finding out that sometimes having something isn't quite the same thing as wanting it. A fair heap of the Conservative Party saw fit to pack him off to No 10 Downing Street after Theresa May realised that the EU has already figured out that the House of…

President Trump has unveiled a new diagnostic chart for testing just how much you miss seeing "The Grand Tour" now that Jezza, Captain Slow, and the Hamster are just doing special adventures rather than the weekly episode from the tent in Clarkson's back yard. It also works for diagnosing those petrol heads who prefer the classic "Top Gear" prior to Clarkson's bust-up with the producer if you can imagine President Trump as The Stig's American…

Even though our current President's "negotiations" via Twitter with the Kingdom of Denmark over the proposed purchase of Greenland were at best ham-fisted and then petulant and insulting toward the good people of Denmark...there are times that he (or whoever tweeted this) does actually show something approximating a sense of humour. I don't care who you are...that was right funny!

Mind you, Pele’s jam was cursing those who would steal volcanic rocks from Hawai’i…the Italian authorities seem to go for swifter economic retribution! :) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49394828

By now, I'm sure everyone has heard of President Trump's novel idea of purchasing Greenland from the Kingdom of Denmark. And to be fair, this isn't the first time this has come up as a serious proposal given Greenland's strategic location. But I'm thinking that too many people are being a bit hasty at writing off the latest proposal as more than a little bit daft or an April Fools' joke that's either way late…

Yesterday, we celebrated a certain someone completing the hat-trick of teenaged children which meant that I could finally set up an Apple ID for her iPhone and start loading apps/music. Between finding bugs in trying to set up an Apple ID on an IOS device (where it'd verify the phone number but then fail the phone number on validation on a later step) to fighting with iTunes to get it to recognise the MP3 files…