Tony Alamo in the news

After I graduated from New Mexico Tech in 1978, Poss and I took a road trip to Washington, D.C., our nation's capital. On the way there we had a meal at a restaurant in Alma, Arkansas, where I had grits for the first time.

At the restaurant I picked up a tract where Tony Alamo tells us of his life and conversion to Christianity. I seem to remember that the restaurant was owned by Mr. Alamo. What a thrill it was to eat where a great evangelist spreads the Word of the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation! As Poss and I drove east, I read his story. The nutcase somehow got stuck in my brain. He occasionally shows up in the newspaper and the stories often somehow seem to catch my attention.

His sainted Susan died in 1982 and Tony was planning on her resurrection. He's been jailed for tax evasion from his sequined jacket business (he apparently didn't pay his cult members followers wages that should have been taxed). He's apparently been charged in various child abuse and brain washing incidents.

Today's news article was about a raid on his compound for a child pornography and abuse investigation. According to Mr. Alamo, little girls reach the age of consent at puberty.

And Poss and I ate at his restaurant!

Anyway, I saved his little tract all these years as a souvenir of our trip to D.C. It's not worth reading but here it is anyway. (The blots are Windex.) The news stories from today are interesting in a very scary way.


And as I was commanded, I didn't destroy the tract and am now passing it on!

Successories

You've probably seen Successories^® products. Their motivational posters feature beautifully photographed scenes and extraordinarily apt sentiments that high-powered managers strew around their workplaces to inspire their extraordinary teams to perform at 110%. No, make that 120%!

I had a manager who had many of these posters around the office and in the conference rooms. Most of us felt that they were rah-rah, cheerleader-y drivel. We enjoyed the products from Despair, Inc. that are parodies of the Successories. They feature the same sort of beautiful photography but sentiments befitting the Dilbertesque environment we work in. Wally's desk surely holds the Pessimist's Mug that lets you know when the glass is half empty.

But there might be something to the Successories items (or at least the people who think that they're swell). The manager who provided us with all that inspirational sap left the company and started his own company. He sold it to a big, multinational company for megabucks, started another company and sold that one to another company for more megabucks. He made many people rather wealthy.

Our marketing group seems to have seen those posters and have decided that they can show potential customers that we can be just as inspirational.

Or something.

There are some posters on the wall outside the bathrooms in the part of the building where they make presentations to potential customers. I guess they're supposed to see that they'll become high-powered competitors in their fields if they use our product.

But the posters are lacking the beautiful photography of the Successories. And the sappy sentiments. Heck, I don't know what the point of the posters are. They wouldn't inspire me to buy anything.

One tells them that we'll make their companies smarter.
The model doesn't really give me the impression that intelligence is to be found here. He's just somebody smiling for the camera. And I'm not sure what the swirls of light are supposed to inspire. That he's getting brighter?

The one that really bewilders me is the one that says we'll enable business growth.
How does a bored looking person staring blankly into the camera illustrate that a company is going to make its customers' companies grow? What are they trying to tell me?

I'll never understand those people in Marketing.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A bell for summoning the butler (press on his tail or head and he rings!).

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Bookends (ironically used to hold DVDs, most of which we haven't watched).

Naked ladies

Back in March, I mentioned that I had transplanted some naked ladies around the yard. In that post I said that they take a few years to get established before they'd bloom so I probably wouldn't be posting pictures of them this year.

I was wrong.

Imagine my surprise when I walked passed our overgrown acacia this morning and happened to see some pink beneath it. There was a naked lady! Blooming! Its first year after being transplanted! A month after everybody else's naked ladies have bloomed!

So here is the picture I promised I wouldn't be posting this year.

Ladies (naked or clothed) and gentlemen, my naked lady.

I can see clearly now

The following is really MrBears's project but he seems to have gotten out of the blogging business. So I get to share the news.

Today we lit up the house. We had some Solatubes installed. They're basically skylights that bring the light into the house through a mirrored cylinder.

There were parts of the house that weren't lit very well. The hall, even with its light turned on, was rather bleak. That has all changed. Here are some pictures taken after the installer got finished. The whole project took only about four hours to install.

Mind you, these pictures were taken with only the light from the new Solatubes.

Here's the hall lit up all pretty and nice. The Solatube replaced the former, very inadequate light fixture. There is a light in the tube so that we can light up the hall at night.

The family room has a lot of lights in its ceiling. We had to turn them on in the middle of the day if we wanted to see on the side of the room away from the windows. We now can see without using electricity! We can even read in our red recliners without turning on lights.
We were planning to have a dimmer sort of thing inside the family room's Solatube. But that would have involved engaging an electrician to run a wire through the rafters, down a wall and to a new switch. The installer supposed that it was going to be unlikely that we'd find an electrician who is willing to do that work in a space that is very inconvenient to get to. So we scrapped that and the light will always come in when the sun is shining. We don't watch many movies in the daytime so it probably won't ever be a problem that the light is always there.

And Jerry is always thinking of others. It would never have occurred to me to add such a light to the garage where I do the laundry. He thought that I might like to be able to work in the laundry room without having to turn on the fluorescent lights. It will be great laundering in natural light. Saturday is the day I usually do laundry but I couldn't do it today since the ceiling was going to be torn up. I can hardly wait to do laundry tomorrow!

If you thought that all that was enough, you're not thinking as well as Jerry. The Solatube folks have a solar-powered attic fan. Our attic space gets hot. And that keeps the house hot through the night. The dormer vents we have probably help to cool things off up there but they're passive. We had two of these fans installed. One is over the family room and one is over the main part of the house. The two parts are pretty much separate spaces with just a tiny hole in the wall between them that electricians probably don't want to shimmy through to run a wire.

Here's a view of the project from the roof. The attic fan is the black thing near the weather station. The Solatubes' tops are the domes beyond the dormer vent. (The disintegrating ridge caps are shoddy materials used when we had the family room and garage added. We need to get our roofer to replace them.)

Here's a close-up of the Solatube collector.

And here's a close-up of the inside. This picture used the flash to show the ceiling and lens's frame. We got the OptiView diffusers. The light coming from them is sharper than the other diffuser and is somewhat prismatic. We get pretty rainbows on the walls.

Here's one of the attic fans.

All of these improvements aren't using any electricity from the grid. We're Green! (Now if only we had insulation in the walls...)

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Baccarat and Waterford crystal from Mom.

See here for a handmade present from Mom (posted earlier by MrBears).