FLOW: a plumber’s weblog

“Alas, alas, for the great city that was clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, with jewels, and with pearls! For in a single hour all this wealth has been laid waste.” And all shipmasters and seafaring men, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea, stood far off and cried out as they saw the smoke of her burning, “What city was like the great city?” And they threw dust on their heads as they wept and mourned, crying out, “Alas, alas, for the great city where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth! For in a single hour she has been laid waste.” Revelation 18:16-19

The level of Monday morning quarterbacking I’ve heard since New Orleans went under is absolutely overwhelming. The fever to spout off and declare what “they” should do covers the airwaves at all hours of the day and night.

Before the levees broke, I had quipped to my wife “I haven’t tuned in to Air America yet, but I’m sure that they’re blaming the hurricane on Bush.” I was, of course, being facetious. Although they blame everything great and small on Bush (flat tire, measles, pothole on Third Street–it’s all Bush’s fault), I wasn’t really going to slander them by claiming that they’d blame the weather on him.

But, sho ’nuff, they did. According to them, because he didn’t endorse the Kyoto Protocols and because of global warming, hurricanes are getting worse. And he cut New Orleans flood control funding and sent the money to Iraq instead.

But, interestingly, the conservative talk shows also are swamped with callers screaming about how somebody ought to do something. The unspoken presumption is that the caller cares about the sufferers more than do the rescuers who are risking their lives and wearing themselves to exhaustion. That presumption is, of course, stupid.

We can’t talk bad about the looters, you know. They wouldn’t be misbehaving if white folks weren’t so mean to them. We shall call them henceforth “undocumented shoppers” and consider their sniping at the rescuers as home rule and self determination. The fire you see in this entry’s photograph is just the indiginous peoples attempt at authentic self-expression and a symbol of their solidarity and their rejection of oppressive imperialist value structures.

And then we have the panic buying at the pumps: lemmings on the run. I have plenty of gasoline presently, so I look on from a distance. I stopped by a small independent station this afternoon to buy an oatmeal cookie for lunch (okay, in lieu of lunch) and I asked the proprietor “When will you have gasoline again?” He answered “I’ll probably get a delivery tonight. Yesterday morning I bought 6,000 gallons. It was gone by 6 PM. Usually 6,000 would last three or four days.” And Memphians are doing this in spite of the local refinery guys getting on TV and announcing “There is no gasoline shortage; we have plenty of gasoline in Memphis and plenty more where that came from.” But the lemmings are buying it so fast the delivery trucks can’t keep up with them.

Just to rub some salt in the wound, as if it could get any worse, we have the prophets announcing that God has judged New Orleans for its wickedness. But how can anybody know that unless he hears voices in his head? The Bible doesn’t say New Orleans is (was) doomed. Certainly God hates sin, but I question to what degree New Orleans surpassed her neighbors. How come San Francisco is doing fine tonight? What about Saginaw, Michigan? Or Miami, Florida? I’m thinking now of a small town in Mississippi where the divorce-and-remarriage situation was so foul, you needed a scorecard to keep the players straight. The day care center had to constantly update their records to know day-by-day who was authorized to pick up any given child. There were drugs, fornication, drunkards, hate, corruption, blasphemy, etc. All I could say in the town’s favor is that homosexuality was not open and accepted.

The Lord Jesus specifically said that a natural disaster should not be taken to mean that those who perished were more wicked than others. The prophets should know that.

Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no intelligent life down here.

Hurricane Katrina landed ashore this morning in New Orleans.

I don’t usually follow hurricanes. I figure that the world is full of tragedy and there’s little I can do about most of it, including the hurricanes. But Katrina caught my attention early because New Orleans is a little closer to home.

I spent ten years headquartered in Mississippi, and New Orleans was close enough to be considered a neighbor. Part of those ten years was spent pastoring in northern Louisiana. A number of my sister churches were in south Louisiana and they introduced me to cajun culture; another point of contact with The Big Easy.

More recently, I spent a few days in New Orleans in 1996 attending the annual meeting of two organizations: the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. These are professional associations of religion teachers and scholars. In those days, they held their annual meetings jointly. I opined that this was so that the participants would have to endure it only once. I’m tellin’ ya, if engineers were this screwy, we’d still be living in grass huts.

I got to know the city a little better during that visit. I walked the old streets and, plumber that I am, I took note of the sewer system. Some of those manhole covers looked to me as though they were a hundred years old or older. I came upon some city workers who had dug a big hole exposing part of the system for repairs. This was like an artist being invited to tour the Louvre.

Very few people realize the critical role that plumbing plays in civilization. Without it, little would be possible. Instead, we’d be living in mud, walking in our own waste, and drinking polluted water–which was once the description of places like Paris or London.

New Orleans depends on pumps for drainage, since it sits below sea level. As I write these words, more rain is falling down there than the system can handle. It will flood, and the waste that was previously kept at bay by the plumbing system will be unleashed on the city.

That old system of pumps and levees will finally get the appreciation it deserves once this typhoon has blown over and the mess is getting cleaned up.

Rose at 6 and was on the job at 8. Not very early for me, but it was, after all, Saturday, and I had to get in a little biscuits, syrup, bacon, and bluegrass on the radio.

I took my camera under the house this morning, just to see what a photo would look like. Now I know.

Pictured here are my two sons. The older one (on the right) got married in July. The younger one was his best man.

This is the bride, of course. Not the best photo, but what do you expect from a plumber?

It was four years ago today that I opened Barley Services. Like all startups, I didn’t know what was in store. I didn’t know if the phones would ring. My wife was sure that I was going to run us into bankruptcy.

This fear of the unknown prevents many people from leaving the security of a job and striking out on their own.

My problem most of the time is that my phone rings too much! I often joke when the phone rings, “I wish these people would quit calling me.” I cannot remember when I’ve been caught up with nothing to do. The last time might have been four years ago.

I’ve noticed that successful businessmen like to share their stories and to give advice. Maybe we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished. In my case, I really don’t think that I’ve accomplished much of anything in starting and running this business. I just took the step, started, and did my job day by day.

I believe my strategy may be encapsulated thus: I make it easy to do business with me, and hard to choose someone other than me. I try to keep my friendliness and devotion to my customers’ welfare so high, they’d be nuts to go elsewhere.

It’s weird, I know, but I consider the customer more important than myself. I don’t take the attitude “How much money can I make?” My attitude, instead, is “How much can I help this person?”

The money takes care of itself. I don’t make much money, but I’m happier than most of the people who do.

Here are two coworkers and a customer from Friday’s heart surgery:

And here’s the satisfied customer:

They finally killed her this morning–or finished killing her, I should say. Ann Coulter described it poignantly (of course): “This week, an indisputably innocent woman will be killed by the government for one reason: Judge Greer of Pinellas County, Fla., ordered it.” Ann went on to say that Greer’s dismissal from his church was based on the “only one God per church” rule.

So there was victory this morning. But for whom? Terri lost. Her parents lost. Most of the malpractice lawsuit award is now gone, so husband Michael loses (besides the additional cost of having millions of people calling him a scumbag forever). Judge Greer looks worse than the liberal caricatures of Justice Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision; so Greer lost big time.

Did anybody win? Heh heh, there was one big winner, as always. The lawyers won! Not Terri’s lawyers: they’re on salary from their legal foundation. George Felos and his associates walked off with the lion’s share of the loot.

Husband Michael won over a million dollars in a malpractice lawsuit, testifying that he needed the money to take care of Terri. But, once he started the long effort to kill her, most of it got transferred to the lawyers.

The head lawyer was George Felos, pictured here. He’s a new age mystic. Through his psychic powers, handicapped people tell him that they want to die, so he uses the law to get them bumped off, as in the case of Schiavo. Don’t believe me? Read this.

Why does the despising of lawyers reach back to even ancient Egyptian texts 5,000 years old? You don’t find such feelings directed toward, say, policemen. Policemen oppose wrong and work for justice and even kill people sometimes–but there’s no history of hatred for them throughout millennia and across all geographical and cultural lines. But lawyers–ah, that’s a different story.

Well done, Felos. I know your boss is proud.

Okay, here’s a quick quiz to see how bright you are!

The following quotations are from today’s New York Times. Read them carefully and thoughtfully, then proceed to the Key Question that follows them.

Quotation #1

Mr. Felos, who spent more than an hour with the stricken woman on Monday afternoon, disputed that description. “Ms. Schiavo’s appearance, to me, was very calm, very relaxed, very peaceful,” he said. “I saw no evidence of any bodily discomfort whatsoever.”

Quotation #2

As her doctors have said and the courts have ruled, Mr. Felos said, Ms. Schiavo is too brain-damaged to be aware of the world around her.

Quotation #3

Mr. Felos said Monday that Ms. Schiavo had never been on a morphine drip. She has received two five-milligram suppository doses of morphine in the last 11 days, most recently two days ago, he said. Each dose was minimal, he said, and would have worn off in about four hours.

Quotation #4

Another doctor with long experience treating patients at the end of life, Douglas Nelson of Hickory, N.C., said that providing morphine to a patient in a persistent vegetative state was unnecessary because the patient would be unaware of pain or discomfort. But, Dr. Nelson said, “It’s not uncommon for the nurse to suggest, ‘Let’s just give her a suppository to be on the safe side.’ “

Now, here’s the Key Question to see how bright you are:

Key Question: Are these jackals lying? (Y) Yes (N) No (D) Duh, I think the Republicans are politicizing it and it’s a family matter.

Here’s a lawyer whose web site gives a lot of insight into the legal issues surrounding Terri’s trial and execution.

This is a picture of Terri before her heart attack, a photo which you’ve seen a hundred times before

And this is a photo of Terri after her heart attack, which left her brain without oxygen for fifteen minutes and reduced her to a Persistent Vegetative State.

Notice the unmistakable vegetable qualities. How can anyone think that the person in this photo is human? Or, if she is human, how can anyone think that such a girl as this wouldn’t want to die? See how miserable she looks? How grotesque? Obviously she wants to die now.

If the girl in that first photo could have seen this second photo, I’m sure she would have said “Michael, if I ever get into that condition, promise me you’ll let me lie unattended until I die of thirst.”

For the true state of the medical question (is she a vegetable?), see this article.

In his editorial today, Wesley Pruden (my favorite columnist) has done a magnificent job.

The governor might even risk impeachment, but what better issue on which to risk all than to risk it saving the life of a helpless and innocent woman, about whom [the others] care nothing at all. Life is a gift, and precious. This was once the abiding American belief, and it could be again.

I suspect that Jeb could become the most admired man of his generation if he’d move in and rescue Terri. But could the rescue be made permanent? That’s a legal question I haven’t heard discussed and can’t answer.

Sometimes injustice wins and the wicked triumph. They pay later, but that’s another topic. Meanwhile, putting the inconvenient to death has become American policy.

Ann Coulter is dead right once again in this week’s article:

[Judge] Greer has cut off the legal rights of Terri’s real family and made her husband (now with a different family) her sole guardian, citing as precedent the landmark “Fox v. Henhouse” ruling of 1893. Throughout the process that would result in her death sentence, Terri was never permitted her own legal counsel. Evidently, they were all tied up defending the right to life of child-molesting murderers.

Here’s a link to a Windows Media Player stream from the Glenn Beck program where Beck interviewed Terri’s brother. Listen to it! The horror of this whole affair is unspeakable.

No water for three days. If they did that to somebody’s pet cat, they’d have their building torn down by raging mobs and their entrails fed to the birds of the air. But they can do it to Terri. Or they think they can.

What was Terri’s crime? Why nothing, of course. If she were a criminal, maybe an axe murderer or something like that, the loonies and lefties would writhe and scream and be out there with candles and signs that say “Not In Our Name.” Instead, since she’s just an innocent white Catholic, they snarl and sneer and say that Bush is just trying to pay back “the Evangelical nutbags” who elected him. (Yeah, I heard it with my own ears on Air America.) They’re happy to see her disposed of.

I’ve often wondered what it would take to get the tree huggers on Terri’s side. Maybe if she were declared to be Florida’s State Vegetable the environmentalists would weigh in.

The case is far from simple, although partisans on both sides believe that it is. Here is an excellent site that covers all of the data in a sane way, as if anyone wants to be sane any more.

I’ll just make a few points:

(1) there are people on record who once appeared to be hopeless and unresponsive, yet they recovered and testify today that they were very aware of all that was going on–but the experts had said that they weren’t! Experts don’t know everything.

(2) Just because Terri is disabled doesn’t mean that it’s okay to kill her. The fact that she cannot eat on her own only places her in the same class as a baby or a quadriplegic. They want to kill her because her brain is damaged and they’re calling the feeding tube “life support” as an excuse.

(3) It’s hard to consider human life sacred without acknowledging God. Let’s face it: if there is no God, “sacred” is just another name for the way somebody feels about something. Atheism (they call it “the separation of church and state”) is coming home to roost in America.

(4) Why kill her with thirst? As I recommended in October, her loving husband Michael could saw off her head in a second or two; no muss, no fuss.

This testimony was given by a nurse who took care of Terri Schiavo:

Throughout my time at Palm Gardens, Michael Schiavo was focused on Terri’s death. Michael would say “When is she going to die?,” “Has she died yet?” and “When is that bitch gonna die?” These statements were common knowledge at Palm Gardens, as he would make them casually in passing, without regard even for who he was talking to, as long as it was a staff member. Other statements which I recall him making include “Can’t you do anything to accelerate her death – won’t she ever die?” When she wouldn’t die, Michael would be furious.

I am indebted to Carl Vonnoh, who bills himself as the Grub Street Plumber, for blogging this info first.

I’ve been cleaning drains for fifteen wonderful years. You’d think that I would have learned how to do it by now. But today I developed a new technique.

I cabled a kitchen sink drain, removed my cable, and closed up the opening I’d used. I then ran the water to test the drain. It backed up; the clog wasn’t moving, even though I’d put a steel cable through its evil heart just minutes ago.

We have ways of dealing with such clogs. I continued to let the water run and fill up both sides of the kitchen sink. Then I waited, minute after minute, for the weight of the water to move the clog on down the line. This has worked for me on dozens of previous occasions. Today’s clog wasn’t impressed, however.

The next step, since the clog wouldn’t move, was going to be a lot of trouble. I decided to try something I’d never done before, since it was easy and might work. I grabbed my ladder off the top of my truck and climbed up to the roof over the kitchen, put my mouth against the drain’s vent pipe, and began blowing into it, letting off, and blowing again.

If you don’t know diddly about drains and vents, this might be Greek to you. But trust me: I was blowing pressure against the water that was standing in the drain. Lo and behold, after half a minute the clog gave way and the system drained with a mighty roar.

I’ve probably cleared 12,000 drains, but this was the first time I tried this maneuver. Truly a red letter day.

(And you thought your life was going nowhere?)

Man sues over toilet collapse at rest stop

By Matthew Junker
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, March 18, 2005

Scott A. Keller, of Box 46, Everson, says he stopped at the Amos K. Hutchinson Bypass mainline toll plaza in Hempfield Township to use the restroom on May 4, 2003, when the accident occurred.

Keller stated in the lawsuit that he suffered whiplash, along with various other back and neck injuries, when the wall-mounted toilet fell to the floor. He’s seeking an unstated amount in excess of $30,000 for lost work, pain and suffering, and embarrassment and humiliation.

[His lawyer] stated in the filing that the turnpike commission is responsible for the defective quality of the construction, maintenance and repair of the toilet, and should have known it was going to fail and should have warned him.

Sure they should have. “Hey, Keller, that toilet’s gonna fall off the wall. We can’t see it and we know that you can’t see it, but we’re telepathic and we know it’s gonna happen.”

In fact, something like this cannot be seen ahead of time. If a wall-mounted toilet were half-off a wall, nobody would try to sit on it. Obviously that toilet looked perfectly secure. The weak places were inside the wall, totally out of view, and only a visual inspection of the scene of the crime can establish what went wrong. My guess is that the wood in the wall weakened from water or termite damage.

Get over it, Keller. We all have days like that. :hehe:

Harvard University’s president Lawrence Summers, dared to say that men tend to be more mathematically inclined than women, so the left is convulsing and foaming at the mouth. David Horowitz made some good points in his blog. Here’s an excerpt:

But even if Summers had raised a point that was incorrect, the attempt to suppress it and therefore to suppress his right — and with it the right of any faculty member or student — to raise an intellectual issue and to declare it politically incorrect is totalitarian in its very nature.

In case you’re interested in this sort of thing, Peter Nulty, the father of one of the jurors who convicted Bernard Ebbers, wrote this today:

We offer a few tidbits about the jury’s deliberations that my daughter, Aran, who was juror #10, shared with the family over the dinner table on Tuesday after the verdict was rendered. Her comments suggest that pundits who comment on jury proceedings from the outside are usually just guessing and guessing wrong. This is her account of what happened:

1. From the start she believes the jury unanimously distrusted the testimony of the prosecution’s star witness, Scott Sullivan. (Some experts are still saying Ebbers was convicted because the jury believed Sullivan, but the opposite is true.)

2. Bernie Ebbers helped his case by going on the stand and denying Sullivan’s version of events. She said this effectively convinced most jurors that Sullivan was lying to get a reduced sentence. (Many experts are saying Ebbers hurt himself by testifying, but the opposite may be true.)

3. Several days into the deliberations, after ruling out Sullivan, being wary of Ebbers, and becoming bleary-eyed by poring over financial evidence, the jury was still left with the possibility (i.e., with “reasonable doubt”) that Ebbers didn’t know that WorldCom’s books were being cooked. It also left the jurors with a pile of very circumstantial evidence and no “smoking gun,” i.e., evidence of something Ebbers did, said, or wrote that showed that he knew what was going on.

4. So the jurors pored for a second time through the judge’s instructions regarding what constitutes “conspiracy” and came to focus on a statement that willful ignorance of the wrongdoing was not the same as “innocence.” So they called for a white board and started methodically listing the pros and cons of whether he should have known what was going on.

5. They concluded that he should have. Or rather, they concluded that either he knew the books were cooked, or, if he didn’t know, it was because he chose not to know and was protecting himself by remaining ignorant of circumstances that were his responsibility to understand.

6. In the end, the two big witnesses probably canceled each other out, still leaving reasonable doubt that Ebbers was guilty. But, facing attack from highly circumstantial, yet voluminous, evidence, “reasonable doubt” survived until about noon on the eighth day when it finally winked out. It was the Byzantine financial record (which included two sets of books) that finally decided the case.

7. In the courtroom, the judge polled the jury individually, asking them one by one to confirm the verdict of guilty on all 12 counts.

8. Back in the jury room, many of the jurors wept. Suddenly the judge entered. She told them their case had been extraordinarily difficult and important. She thanked them for their service and said that she was proud of the way they had deliberated so patiently and painstakingly. Then the judge, too, shed tears.

Ann Coulter has hit a home run this week:

The New York Times said the problem was not enough government spending on courthouse security (“Budgets Can Affect Safety Inside Many Courthouses”). Yes, it was tax-cuts-for-the-rich that somehow enabled a 200-pound former linebacker to take a gun from a 5-foot-tall grandmother. 😀