Lotsa little bits Vol. 5

ITEM:  As of Monday 6 AM, I will be gainfully employed again.  It is a lot like the job I had for twenty years, on a smaller scale so employees are more than turnips to be squeezed.  And more modern equipment, which I am learning everybody else had but that former job.

My old job seems more and more like this!

ITEM: That game I was waiting for the other day went to the third period scoreless, until Alexei Kruchinin got his 2nd of the season about 7 minutes into the last stanza.  Minsk tied it with under five to go, but you know Lokomotiv's record in OT (and if you don't, it's now 10-0), and it was Yuri Petrov who got the only goal in a shootout for a 2-1 win.  We don't play until Monday and host Torpedo.

ITEM: Italy was joined in starting their hockey playoffs by Austria's EBEL, after Vienna Capitals took the regular season crown by one point with a 24-11-9 record and 61 points. The KHL will be the next to finish the regular season on the 17th of February.  5 other leagues will finish that month, with the rest in March, Britain's EIHL playing until the 24th. I thought I'd give you a map of where the leaders (and the two winners) of the European leagues sit .

They are the bold tyed cities on the map, and go like this:
Angers in France (16-1-5 and a 9 point lead);
Nottingham in the UK (21-7-7 and a 2 point lead);
Fribourg in Switzerland (20-9-13 and a 3 point lead);
Adler Mannheim in Germany (22-11-5 and a 2 point lead);
Frederikshavn in Denmark (21-4-7 and a 5 point lead);
Stavenger in Norway (25-8-3, tied in points with one more win);
Skelleftea in Sweden (27-11-4, 6-point lead);
Val Pusteria in Italy, currently taking lumps in the first stage of the playoffs;
Vienna's Caps in Austria, 1-1 in their first stage playoffs;
Plzen in the Czech-Rep (19-9-14, 5 point lead);
Zvolen in Slovakia (27-8-8, 13 points ahead);
Jokerit from Helsinki, Finland (20-11-15, 7 points up);
Sanok in Poland ( 24-5-2, a dozen in the lead);
and of course SKA St. Petersburg in the KHL (32-10-4) up 3 points overall and 7 in their division).

ITEM:  Last night I wanted to listen to something as I went to sleep, and chose the Ground Zero program, one of the late night "conspiracy theory" call in shows.  One caller urged the host to watch a video on YouTube by a young man who, if I remember right, was named Brandon Hunt.  Hunt apparently gathered every speck of info he could find on the Sandy Hook shootings, and I believe tried to use it to "prove" that the whole thing was a government set up to push gun seizures, and that there is no proof that any children really died.  A friend and fellow blogger made much the same point this morning.

I remember years ago, a girl I hung with had a father that believed we were deep in the grips of the "Tri-Lateral Commission", whose ranks included Henry Kissenger and whose mission was to eliminate states rights by eliminating states, combining them into regions which would then be under the control of the UN.  Now, I'm no big fan of the UN, but I also believe that they struggle every day to figure out which end to wipe, and certainly don't have the acumen to forge a one-world government for "the Beast." I have to believe the same thing today.  Our current administration is very opportunistic, and I'm sure there are some lunatics within it that believe Sandy Hook is the best thing that ever happened to their cause of gun control.  What I don't believe is that ANY of them were smart enough to a) think up such a plan as to have a fake school shooting, or b) to be able to carry it out.

One point that my friend brought up was "the absence of tears" amongst the begrieved when caught on camera.  I would like to say something about that.  When my Mom died, I cried so hard that I never cried again for a decade- no lie.  BUT, if it hadn't been for my Mom's best friend, NOT ONE TEAR would have been shown in public.  That didn't mean that my mother didn't die, it meant that I was determined not to share them with the public.  I can easily see the families of Sandy Hook feeling the same way, especially in light of being at the mercy of every joe with a cell phone.

In my humble opinion, I feel I would rather go on believing, incorrectly or correctly, that a duck is indeed a duck, and the shooting did happen, than to plaster a lot of innuendo and speculation about to promote whatever cause I have and one day see the body in the casket and have to apologize for being a jerk.  Or as I quoted Isaiah to my friend,

¹¹ For the Lord spoke thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people, saying:

¹² “Do not say, ‘A conspiracy,’
Concerning all that this people call a conspiracy,
Nor be afraid of their threats, nor be troubled.
¹³ The Lord of hosts, Him you shall hallow;
Let Him be your fear,
And let Him be your dread.

 

For every person on the internet that raises a valid point (e.g. the holes in the Warren Commission), you have someone who makes something up to make themselves look big (like Dan Brown claiming the military has guns you can load with sand and fire glass bullets, which he claimed in, I believe, Deception Point).  When it becomes like modern "science" which sees what it wants to see and builds the theory first rather than making observations and THEN the theory, you only harm your own cause.