Sunday morning I went to the Children’s Mass at St. Peters, what a lovely group of children took part. We forget sometimes that we do have children living on these islands and what we do affects them greatly. There were over 200 children at the Vineyard party last week, the caregivers of these youngsters are to be congratulated.

[Emergency Poop Pump] From the 7/26/13 issue of the News-Barometer paper come these two paragraphs quoting the FKAA Managing Director of Engineering, Don Hubbs: “We will have two trucks with full crews and a generator that travel through the neighborhoods where low-pressure pumps are located to fire up those pumps and drain those tanks,” said Hubb. He said that the crews should be able to drain 50 units per day each, or about 100 total.

In stark contrast, the following quote comes from a James City County, VA proposal seeking to outsource the troublesome maintenance of its (only) 885 grinder pumps: “During power outages, JCSA found it impossible to support the large number of grinder pumps. This is because a grinder pump needs to be emptied at least twice a day and typically a two-person crew can only empty two or three grinder pumps per hour.”

That sounds more realistic than the FKAA’s promotional fantasy of 100 per day, but with the 2800 grinders expected when Hubbs was quoted, that would still be 28 days between pump outs! Can you hold it that long?

There are now two online petitions you can sign to protest grinders on private property: Petition1  Petition 2

Lost Tabby Cat from Ramrod Key (Ramrod Shores subdivision – Bayside). Possibly taken from property on Thursday, October 24. About 9 or 10 years old polydactyl cat (6 front toes). White-tipped tail. Very high-pitched voice. Reward If found, call Bryan. Classified Ads > Lost and Found 

Lou Reed dead at 71. He had a liver transplant last year and it didn’t seem to work. Lou Reed was the creative force of the Velvet Underground that iconic 70’s band that some say lead the way for punk, heavy metal and grunge. The running joke is that Velvet Underground sold only 30,000 albums (when it first came out), but all 30,000 listeners went on to start their own bands.

Andy Warhol collaborated with him on the album even suggesting that the banana actually peels off the label and it did. 

[UFO] If governments are involved and covering up the knowledge of aliens, then they are doing a much better job of it then they seem to do at anything else. ~Stephen Hawking

[“How to remove latex paint from fiberglass screens”] Goof-Off works real well or you can go to the flea market and buy a $3 bottle of Amazing cleaner from Cindy’s Discounts and let it soak for a minute and then brush off the paint.

[Marathon Jopurnal] The Journal interviewed the President of Forgotten Felines, Jessica Mintz.

-How did Forgotten Felines get their start? Forgotten Felines started in 1997. A few Marathoners were concerned about feral cats. The volunteers started the Trap Neuter and Release Program. Currently, Forgotten Felines feed 500 cats daily.

-How were you hired? She was hired as President January after 2011 when she joined the organization.

-Cats break your heart. Her longest lived cat was 19.5 years. He was her first American cat. And he was a black cat, hard to adopt and hard at Halloween time too. I talked about my cats at Rainbow Bridge Kitty, Ebony, and Abby. I adopted Lucy, a black cat with some white hairs, from Forgotten Felines. She turns 5 soon. Jessica talked about her black cat Teddy who is 7.5 years. There is a sister organization in Islamorada with another store.

-Any upcoming events? Forgotten Felines celebrate their new store on the corner of US1 and 63rd Street right next to Island Time Tattoos. The grand opening will be in mid-November. There are two balls being considered as well as an annual fundraiser.

-You and Marathon’s Safe Harbor Animal Rescue of the Keys (SHARK) get along? Yes, both organizations help one another. Joint fundraising has potential. We talked about the no-kill shelter’s cat colony. There are several large enclosed areas joined by tunnels in the overhead. If you have not seen the cat colony, go visit and see. Cat snacks and catnip are welcome gifts for the cats that is.

Don’t forget visiting Forgotten Felines’ new store as well. Again, they are located at the corner of US1 and 63rd Street next to Island Time Tattoos.

-Any last thoughts? We talked about obtaining more sponsors. I told her the Journal is looking to sponsor an event, since losing Sun Motors as an advertiser with the go-cart track. Forgotten Felines is a great non-profit rescuing cats and finding most with new, loving homes.

-The Journal will interview Islamorada City Councilman Dave Purdo next. 

I hooked a sailfish just off the reef.  After fighting it for a while we got it next to the boat.   I reached over to get the the hook out and release it.  Looking down I could see a few big brownish shapes circling below us.  When I released it the sail swam down and out of sight.  I wonder what happened to it.  Later I wished we had put it in the boat and ran off a good ways before letting it go.

[Removing Paint from Screens] Ideally is to catch it while it’s still wet and wash with water for water based paints or paint thinner for oil based. Fresh dried use MEK for latex and paint remover for oils. My experience has been unless it’s wet latex and flushed, and brushed away immediately is not to bother and replace the screen to ensure success as there is usually always some residual discoloration.

Put a clause in the painting contract and take pictures beforehand because painting doesn’t draw the best talent in our hot climate, high cost of living and not enough new construction to support them. Big jobs bring seasoned talent from the mainland now, many local crews are the desperate untalented, more likely to be drunks, druggies, fall off ladders and get paint on everything.

[Paranoia] The other day I wrote about the senseless mutilation that is circumcision being traditional and serving no modern day purpose. I forgot that Jews would take it as a slam against their religion. I apologize for that, I forgot about their lack open-mindedness.

Do you make donations to charities of your choice voluntarily (private money)? Volunteer is defined by Webster Dictionary “as a person who does work without getting paid to do it”. Do you see a contradiction or dichotomy here?  Voluntary work by FKMCD employees but we, the taxpayers are picking up the tab. With the newly adopted policy of FKMCD it now seems you, the taxpayer, will be making donations with your public tax money to charities without benefit of your choice of charity or non-profits you are making a donation to.

Hope you drop an email to the Director of FKMCD asking Mr. Doyle; Michael Doyle mdoyle@keysmosquito.org  to bring this new policy back to the Commissioners to rescind this vote.

Creepy Halloween. Video

The Navy is replacing all air conditioners at Boca Chica and the contractor says it’ll take a year to do it.

[Is Google Big Brother?] Google is a more aggressive agent of Big Brother’s (NSA) spying network which also includes nearly all and many less obvious other corporations, like Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Verison, Comcast, banks, credit unions, car dealers etc.,that can provide it any information they can to profile, locate and keep tabs on everyone they can. They are forced to do so by law or coercion to participate in a covert fashion against all their customers, this way flagging one’s behavior, actions, locations, network of associates, friends, familes, business clients, websites visited, posts, emails, texts etc., through complex programs searching for any pattern of behavior they are interested in and deemed a possible threat, including political or religious. The NSA provides information it finds to other agencies like the FBI, CIA, ICE and ATF according to their function and ordered to conceal or lie about the source of the information in a court of law as protect the source and prevent further discovery.

[Remove Paint] Try shave cream. I know that’s what works for your hair.

Yamaha R-9 Natural Sound Receiver. This is a superb sounding receiver from Yamaha, high quality made in Japan, rated at a very robust 125 watts per channel, fully featured with lots of inputs, has mm/mc phono input and hookups for 3 pairs of speakers, class a/b operation, fully tested and working excellent, this is a real beauty flagship receiver from Yamaha. $40 OBO.  Classified Ads > Electronics

No Woman, No Drive. Music Video

Lou Reed — “Rock and Roll Heart” is a fantastic documentary.

And all this time I thought Lake Okeechobee was one of South Florida’s main fresh water sources? Another voice from somewhere else:

“A long time ago the lake was our source of fresh water. Before Disney poured concrete in the Kissimmee basin and stopped the natural water flow which came down the state via a series of rivers and streams like “pearls on a string” which flowed into Lake O and then out the Caloosahatchee river into the GULF and into Florida Bay at the 10,000 islands. That’s why the sand is different on the west coast of Florida than on the east coast.”

Read Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. She is a Florida historian.

[Eclipse] Weather permitting, early risers along the Eastern Seaboard can see a partial solar eclipse at sunrise on November 3.  A partial eclipse of the Sun will be in progress at sunrise Sunday morning for the Eastern Seaboard of North America and points inland, as shown at the top of this page. The partial eclipse happens in the daytime on Sunday for Africa, the Middle East, southernmost Europe, and elsewhere. The eclipse is total for a narrow band crossing the Atlantic and Equatorial Africa. 

In response to the person asking about screens on Sunday, we’ve had excellent results with Quality Screening. We found them in the Business Directory on this site. They are even a locally owned and operated business on Big Pine.

I was at the Senior Center today and failed a Health and Safety course that was put on for us old fogies. One of the questions was: “In the event of a fire, what steps would you take? “F**king big ones was apparently the wrong answer!

[Circumcision (aka The Snip)] A mohel (pronounced mo-yell) is a Jewish man who performs the ritual of brit milah (Circumcision) on a baby boy eight days after he is born.  The mohel is specially trained in the procedure and may often be a medical doctor.  The mohel does not charge for the procedure but may accept a gratuity from the father.  Some mohels work just for tips!

[Gambling With Our Money] If a person is on welfare, unemployment, food stamps, or any other form of support, it should be illegal for them to gamble, right? So if they do gamble and win a lottery, make them pay back all the money they were given!

If you’re up before dawn, watch the waning Moon pass Regulus and Mars in the east.

[How to Replace Screens] Replacing screens is rather simple, just a matter of removing the old screen and spline. Overlapping the new screen, starting at the top with new spline using the spline tool, pulling tight as one nears the bottom. It’s usually a two or in the large screens, a three person job. Once the spline is in all the way around, the overlapping screen is trimmed with a razer on the outside edge of the spline. Very large screen is sold by Strunk Hardware down in Key Weird, also the aluminum parts of the frame which can be cut with a fine blade chop saw and assembled if need be. Wood frames needing repair will likely require a tablesaw and painting as well.

The problem is ladders and people falling off them, then out of necessity having to sue the homeowner and their insurance company to pay for care. Unless it’s ground level and just replacing screen, spline and paint, anything involving saws or ladders should be handled by verifiable insured professionals.

How long did your ancestors live while eating bacon, lard, & whole milk? The answer just might surprise you. Link

The night Lou Reed bopped David Bowie. Link

[AIDS] If you give U.S. tax dollars to a Mexican male prostitute, will he agree to stay disease-free? That’s what government-funded researchers at Brown University would like to know. Link

If you use Windows 8 or 8.1 and Windows 7, sign up for this free newsletter with tutorials. Link

[Affordable Care Act] I have come to believe that our President truly thinks he is a modern day Robin Hood. The ol’ “take from the rich and give to the poor” sounds real good unless you’re the rich. In this case, something is amiss. ACA is taking from the young and healthy and paying for the 30 or 40 million people who currently don’t have health insurance. They don’t have health insurance for only a couple of reasons… they can’t afford it or they are young and healthy and don’t think they need it, yet. So after reading all the comments on C.T. about the ACA (good and bad) here is the one thing that no one has brought to point. If you are one of the 30 to 40 million who is now going to receive free healthcare (thanks to the young and healthy) are you going to be subject to a $10,000 a year deductible? If that’s the case, we’re back to the place we started.

[Death Panels] Hey Republicans! Yes, death panels do exist. They’re called insurance claims departments.

[ObamaCare] Want to sign up?  Good luck.  The ObamaCare website doesn’t work.  Any team of high school computer nerds could have designed, tested and put up a working website but, as usual, the feds can’t get it right with millions of tax dollars flushed down the toilet of political ineptness.  And, if you think that SNAFU  is a fiasco, just think what it will be like to actually be enrolled in this mess and be dependent on it for your health care insurance needs.  High deductibles, procedures not covered, high premiums (if you think is gonna be free, think again), and, meanwhile, giving the Feds full access to your most personal information, banking transactions (read the fine print), threats of fines and jail time if you don’t comply with the ObamaCare plan, (read the fine print) and full control over your health care.  Sound scary?  You bet it is!  And that’s just the tip of the horror to come.  While many will be forced into ObamaCare and pay the price (that will increase dramatically as the program becomes top heavy with all the illegal aliens and welfare dirt bags free loading on the government (taxpayers) , and receiving free care that the working class has to pay for), we will see another massive federal bureaucracy created that will be a black hole sucking tax dollars like a cosmic vacuum cleaner  (it’s not free, someone has to pay).  Of course the answer to the eventual monetary short fall will be to raise taxes on the working class. This agenda, orchestrated by the Obama, Pelosi et. al. socialist regime is nothing more than a grab for more political power and control over our everyday lives.  

If we are to survive as a nation we must get these people out of power before they break our back with their out of control, non-stop, tax and spend programs.

Since FEMA (AKA the Feds) have mandated the sewers in the Keys, would it be remotely possible for our benevolent government to divert perhaps just a few million, of the billions of dollars we send to third world shit holes , so our local homeowners won’t be put out of their homes trying to pay for a sewer system that we actually don’t need.  (Sorry Barfistan, we have a problem at home!)

[Harry Reid] If someone were to ask me who is the most out of touch career politician in Washington today it would be a tough call as there are so many to choose from. But my answer would have to be Harry Reid. This is the guy who said, out loud, that he was glad the Capitol Visitor Center was completed (Four years late and $300 million over budget, mind you.. Only in Washington) because he was tired of smelling the tourists! And who can forget when he stated that the nation would be in peril if federal funding were to be cut off for a cowboy poetry festival? Really, Harry? Cowboy poets? Nothing against cowboy poets, but why does this need federal funding? Especially when the nation is trillions in debt! The list goes on.

But now it seems he’s outdone himself. He’s found a new way to accuse the GOP of obstructionism, by claiming that they are holding all Americans back from the higher taxes that we all want to pay!! Seriously.. Is this clown for real?? It’s time for a lot of these old relics to pack it up and go home, but he’s on the top of the list as far as I’m concerned.

Contrary to Tea party zealots rhetoric I don’t have to change my insurance coverage or my doctor. Holy Cow the company I work for just hired 3 more drivers. The twisting you here is the sound of Conservatives heads spinning around.

Wonder why you haven’t been reading more from the Gallup polls on here? Check it out more Americans are starting to support the healthcare act. Check it out for yourself before the spinmeisters twirl that beauty around.

Half the US is getting some form of Government assistance.  Is that Socialism or what?  But I guess it is OK if it is you or somebody you know.  Someone once said that an honest man was a man who never had to be dishonest.

An election looms and their Obamacare train wreck is deservedly being called the worst law in American history. Voters hate it, and why shouldn’t they? The Democrats’ promises — that patients could keep their doctors and current insurance and that the law would reduce premiums, lower the deficit and create millions of jobs — have been exposed as outright lies. Now a central tenet of the fundamentally flawed law, the employer mandate, is collapsing. What ever will Democrats do?

In a word: panic. The Tea Party was Right all alone.

Creepy Obamacare. Video

In hopes to balance out some of that left sided slant & spin: Obama Care website suffers new outage as Republicans say glitches only ‘tip of the iceberg’

Obama Care website suffers new outage as Republicans say glitches only ‘tip of the iceberg’.

The federal government’s online portal to buy health insurance suffered another glitch Sunday when the data services hub, a conduit for verifying the personal information of people applying for benefits under the law, went …

[National Health Care Not Important] I don’t believe we need national health care because it makes people not want to work, not produce anything for themselves and take from those who work. This socialism bs has got to go, it doesn’t work in Russia or anywhere else. Get government out of business and into maintenance of the basic things we need, and let people run themselves.

Part 1) It’s not likely that you would think that there is any connection between the disaster of the Obamacare roll out and the Hurricane Sandy disaster of last year. But there is.

We all now know that the Obamacare roll out was an unmitigated screw up, the damned thing just doesn’t work.  We now also know that CGI, a Canadian Company that had failed in a similar health care roll out in Canada was the Obama choice for the ACA work up. We also know that one of CGI’s top execs was a roommate of Michelle and that CGI became a whale contributor to Obama after they got the contract. We now know that the cost overruns are horrendous. We now know that Team Obama has given GCI about $1.4 billion since 2009. We’re paying piles of money more than we contracted for, and the product we were forced to buy doesn’t work.

But what about Hurricane Sandy relief and rebuilding, what is the connection with Obamacare.

Team Obama in the personage of The Disaster Hosing Assistance Program, hired CGI (of Obamacare roll out fame) to implement the Disaster Housing Assistance Program for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Additionally, they were tasked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, a $1.7 billion assistance program.

The Associated Press has just reported that only about $700 million of the $60 billion federal aid package – 1.2 percent of the total funds – has been given to victims of super storm Sandy. CGI strikes again.

Nearly a year after the devastating storm, a majority of the 24,000 families victimized by Sandy that have requested monetary assistance have yet to receive a penny from the federal aid package. There you have it Deer Friends, Team Obama and its minions strike again. Democrat/Liberal/Progressive governance again revealed as being contrary to the good of our nation.

Part 2) There’s a very interesting argument ginning up. Some officials and some groups want to install devices in your cars to keep track of the miles that you drive. You then would be taxed on the total number of miles driven. They say that such a system is necessary because our highway infrastructure is decaying and gas tax revenue is declining as a result of the new breed of cars that burn very little gas. It’s amusing that many of the proponents say that vehicles that burn little or no gas should “pay their fair share”.

The opposition is adamant in its concern for privacy.  They say that the devices have the potential of tracking every move of the vehicle.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay Area, says Congress could very simply deal with the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund by raising gas taxes. Or an extra one-time or annual levy could be imposed on drivers of hybrids and others whose vehicles don’t use much gas, so they “pay their fair share.” Check out the link, its an interesting read. Link

Part 3) Special to the CT’er who was looking for info on Social Security income and outgo.  I think you’ll find what you need at. Link

I fully agree that SS must be reformed. Some logical and relatively painless measures could be: 1) increasing the retirement age.  2) Means testing benefits. 3) Eliminating the cap on payroll taxes, it’s currently at about $107k. That means that if you make more than the cap, you will pay no payroll tax on the amount earned above the cap. That’s unfair because if you’re making two or three or four times the cap you pay nothing on the dollars that exceed the cap. 4) There should be some mechanism that would permit a citizen to opt out of Social Security and to invest the @13% of earnings that are now paid into SS into investment vehicles. I assure you that if I had had that option when I first began paying SS taxes, I would now be far better off than I am. The reforms that I suggest need not affect anyone currently on SS or anyone over 55 years of age. If we fail to reform SS, those under 55 will find that the well is dry when they reach 65.