Chemical Analogies

The thing about the prairies is that you can see your enemies coming a long ways off.
The other thing about the prairies is that you can watch you friends leave for a long time.
The melting point of Gold Au is:

Name: Gold
Symbol: Au
Atomic Number: 79
Atomic Mass: 196.96655 amu
Melting Point: 1064.43 °C (1337.5801 K, 1947.9741 °F)
Boiling Point: 2807.0 °C (3080.15 K, 5084.6 °F)
Number of Protons/Electrons: 79
Number of Neutrons: 118
Classification: Transition Metal
Crystal Structure: Cubic
Density @ 293 K: 19.32 g/cm³
Color: Gold

Source -> http://www.chemicalelements.com/elements/au.html

All Along the Watch Tower

All Along The Watch-Tower

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

          -- Bob Dylan
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Good poetry is timeless.
Great poetry unlocks the emotions and is transcendant.
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I get the same emotion reading this as when I finished the last lines of Brownings poem, The Dark Tower.

And Roland, to the dark tower came.

Despair Inc.

I forget where this came from, maybe despair.com lol . ..

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I'm Lawrence Kersten, Co-Founder and COO of Despair, Inc. And today I'm going to talk to you about the signs of a demotivated workforce. Now one of the perennial problems that managers and executives face is motivating their employees. And despite all of the work that's been done on all of the incentive plans that have been developed, motivating employees is still a problem in need of a solution.

Well at Despair, Inc. we believe the problem is trying to motivate employees and we believe instead that you should try and demotivate your employees. So what I'd like to do today is explain seven signs of a demotivated workforce and explain the benefits that we've experienced at Despair, Inc.

The first sign of a demotivated employee is a feeling of powerlessness. Employees who feel powerless over their lives tend to be satisfied with less. Because they feel like they have no control over their life, they feel like anything they do could perhaps create even bigger problems than the ones they're experiencing now, so they tend to be satisfied with whatever they've got.

The second sign of a demotivated employee is they tend to feel like they are victims of a hostile fate. They feel like any changes they might make are going to be like going from the frying pan into the fire. So consequently they tend to be very loyal to the organization. And as a result of their loyalty, this tends to reduce turnover and as a result of reducing turnover, that saves the company money.

The third sign of a demotivated worker is they tend to feel low self-esteem. Now we have all been taught that low self-esteem is a bad thing. But the benefit of this is it tends to eliminate the need for employee recognition. Employees who have low self-esteem tend to want to avoid the spotlight. Consequently the last thing they want is a recognition program, and we know how expensive these programs are. So eliminating those tends to help the bottom line.

The fourth sign of a demotivated worker is acute defensiveness. As a result of their feeling defensive, they do extra work as a means of ingratiating themselves to executives. Now any time you can get an employee to do extra work, particularly for something as irrelevant as ingratiation, that's a good thing.

The fifth sign is employees feel acute self-doubt. As a result of their self-doubt, they will work very hard as a means of salvaging their identities.

The sixth sign of a demotivated workforce is the employees tend to feel a lack of emotional resilience. Now this is very important, because employees don't want to feel badly about themselves, and so consequently they will work extra hard to avoid humiliation. Though they tend to avoid seeking recognition, they will work very, very hard to avoid humiliation.

And then the seventh sign of a demotivated workforce is intense risk aversion. And this is very, very important, because employees are so unwilling to take any risks on their own, they will tend to be satisfied with simply being an extension of executive ambition. As a result of that, they will essentially do whatever you're asking for, and really that's what we're looking for.

So, at Despair, Inc. we have sought to demotivate our employees and we have experienced the benefits that I've outlined here as a result of our demotivational program, and I would encourage you to do the same.

Ike the Spike

We got two weanlings when I was nine very early in the spring. Dad paid five dollars for each of them. They were males, so Dad wanted them castrated so they would grow better to eat. I learned later on that these were called barrows. Ike offered to come and do it for a shot of whiskey.

Saturday afternoon Ike came over and we slogged through frozen snow and mud to the half painted barn. Red faded into the more faded white.

Inside, Ike leaned on the thick boards along the top of the pen. He reached down, grabbed a little pig by a hind leg. The pig squealed, but not too loud to put up with. Ike grabbed the other leg and held the legs on the edge so the head hung down. Ike got Dad to reach over and hold the weanling. in the shuffle I caught an elbow in the head. Ike reached into his pocket and pulled out something I had never seen before. Ike smiled and showed his missing teeth. He laughed his good natured laugh. "I used to use this one for shaving." He flipped open the straight razor.

He reached over and pinched the little sac just under the weanling's arsehole so that the skin was stretched tight. He touched the razor to the skin between the pigs nuts and a cut appeared and two little ovals popped out. He sliced them off and flicked them to the floor in the pen. The high pitched squeal registered finally in my head. I glanced up at Dad. He had a slight frown. Ike motioned for Dad to let the little one go. Ike focused in the pen. One of the other two weanlings sniffed at the white pieces on the pen floor, and Ike leaned forward and scooped a back leg. He brought the pig over to where Dad was so Dad could hold this one again. The squealing was loud, but when Ike made his cuts, I could hear the different pitch in the weanling's voice.

The third weanling had eaten the first's nuts off the floor, and when it smelled the second's nuts laying on the floor in the clean straw, Ike scooped it up. He repeated his operation. This time I could hear the different pitch in the squeal as Ike made the first cut, and there seemed no difference as he made the second cut.

Ike told us that if there was even a bit of red around the cut the next morning to get the penicillin from town. They hardly ever got sick from the way he did the castrations he said. He always cleaned the razor and kept it very sharp. He wiped it on the leg of his coveralls. He said he'd clean it at home. Dad showed him the horses in the east end of the barn and we fed and watered them. Ike helped us chuck a couple of bales to the cattle, then we went in.

Ike stopped at his car and carried in the smallest guitar case I had ever seen. He answered my question with just a grin and arched his eyebrows. Iniside Ike pulled out the instrument and tuned it. Mom pulled out her guitar and they tuned them together. When Ike was ready, he turned to me and said, "This is a mandolin."

He led us through songs I'd never heard of, but Mom and Dad had. They had the half bottle of rye whiskey out and finished it before supper. Ike wouldn't stay for supper, but said he would come back to help us cut up the pigs if we got the local slaughter house to do the killing. That way we would know that we got everything from the pig. I had never thought that a butcher might cheat us, but then I thought about how easy that would be when the meat always came wrapped. How would we know.

A few years later we saw Ike on the local TV station playing with his trio. He sat stiff-backed on stage as if he was nailed there. He only moved his hands in time to the songs. I looked at him on the black and white screen. He was out of place.

Years later, after I moved back to the area, I joined the fire department and took the emergency medical training. One of the others was the wife of Ike's only son. Everyone called her by her right name now that she was a mom instead of the nickname that I remembered from high school.

2 thoughts

A reversal at the end that the bad guy wins the fight and then tries to be like the dead good guy. But fails. But some one else sees that struggle and gets the desire to succeed as the new good guy.

The struggle was large. Most of two families had been involved. But the third family is what they ended their struggle over.

The last cataclysmic fight did not end as the good guy expected. Was it luck, bad, that he had slipped? Fatigue? Not focused enough on the fight? When the final death blow came, he was looking into his enemy's eyes. He said just one word. Don't.

His enemy watched the life go out of the kneeling man's eyes. He got angrier as the body grew colder. As the spirit fled farther and further away, out of reach forever. Don't what! He thought. Was he begging for his life? Accepting that he was about to die and suddenly decided to give Kraken a final bit of advice to live by? Or worse yet, had Morlox given Kraken a bit of advice to die by?

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If Vikena is Mother Nature, then Roland is Father Time? Time is inexorable. Inexorabilis. Inexorability. Mother Nature is fluid.

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Weather Channels

On to Dunston, Manitoba

Manitoba TaeKwonDo

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There is an area west of Dunston where huge windmills used to exist. They were built in the years 2005 and 2006. That was before the world slowed. For a while the world moved quite fast and included Dunston. But all things move on. Even the wind.

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