Monthly Archives: November 2007

Wheels of Industry

Hitting the big leagues…

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At least power-wise, that is.  Gas pipelines are odd things.  Every fifty or sixty miles up a pipe two or three feet in diameter, there’s a compressor station.  It sucks the gas out of one pipe and pushes into another.  This requires horsepower.  some of our stations have twenty thousand horsepower to push gas.

In the beginning and still in service were big piston engines.  they operate on principles similar to the one under the hood of your car, except the things are HUGE, four or five thousand horsepower, slow, your car runs several thousand revolutions per minute, ours run at a couple or three hundred, and we burn natural gas.

Why natural gas?  ‘Cuz that’s right there.  We have a pipeline full of the stuff.  Indeed, these stations in many cases were originally totally free of the local electric utility because they’re quite often in remote areas.  What electeic power that was needed, for the lights at the office and such, that was taken care of by yet another natural gas engine powering a generator.

As stations upgraded and utility company electricity became available, stations added electrical loads for things and the old generator was relegated to stand-by service, set up to come on automatically when the utility company’s power failed.

That was us at the station I’ve been working at the last couple of weeks. Our old utility company power system was on the same 13,200 volt line as the gas station/grocery store up the road, along with the farm on the other side…  We had three pole-mounted transformers the same size as the ones you’ll see in many residential neighborhoods, except ours took that 13,200 volts down to 480 instead of the 240/120 volts your house uses.

Power failures during stormy weather was a fact of life, and our stand-by generator got a frequent workout.  We had an automatic transfer switch.  When the utility company gave up, the transfer switch would start the generator, then, when the generator was pumping  out 480 volts, the switch would transfer to plant’s load to it.  When the utility company got its stuff together and the power came back on, the switch would transfer us back to the utility source and let the generator run for five minutes at idle to cool down nice and easy, then shut it down automatically.  It did this without any human interaction at all.  Neat.

Today’s festivities changed our status significantly.  Since our NEW 9000 horsepower motor would not run on the old power system, a large chunk of the project, MY chunk, has been to bring in a new utility feed at 69,000 volts.  We transform that down to 13,200 volts to feed that big new motor’s drive system, and we also transform it down to 480 volts for the rest of the plant.

When I got to the station this morning,w e had both systems hot, but the new transformer wasn’t feeding anything.  During the day, we shut down all the electric power (480 volt, anyway.  We have some control stuff…) and cut the old system loose and tied in the new system, and we moved the generator’s output cables to a new transfer switch.  That was a seven-hour task.  When I left, the place was running normally, but we’re now on a 69,000 volt transmission line feed.  69,000 volts is the lower end of the electrical Big Leagues:  Transmission!

What’s the difference?  Distribution feeds residences and small businesses.  If a residential distribution line goes down,well, some of you folks can relate stories about getting power back on after a thunderstorm.  I can tell you how long it took to get those circuits on after a hurricane: 2-3 weeks.  Transmission lines come up first.  They have to, because the transmission lines bring power into the distribution substations.

Our new feed also feeds the major city in the area, so it’s unlikely that said line would go out without the utility company mobilizing every possible resource to return it to service.  We have some other advantages built into the system, too, and I’m sitting here thinking that the poor ol’ generator will get mighty lonesome except for the regularly mandated test runs.

Now all I have to do is get that 9000 horsepower motor to run.  I’m confidant of that event happening in the coming week.  And then my life will have lost some major stresses.

Wheels of Industry

Work Stuff – more…

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My newest substation is on line tonight. It’s only a day behind schedule. We were shooting to get it energized yesterday, but one of the last tasks was for the electrical contractor to connect a remote control cabinet at the fenceline of the substation so that we could open and close breakers from a more safe distance.

Since this box controls three circuit breakers, one 69,000 volt and two 13,200 volt, and has indicator lights to show each breaker open or closed, there are quite number of wires to connect the stuff in the cabinets of the switchgear. Accordingly, the contractor installed a 37-conductor cable. We needed 26 wires, and the rest were to be spares, a relatively standard approach. These wires had specific places to connect at both ends for everything to work, and the electricians finished the installation at noon. I turned the technicians of my testing agency loose on the box to verify proper operation of the controls and indicators. Nothing worked. In a hurry, the electricians had made numerous errors in wiring. We were out until 8:30 PM. The electricians finished redoing the task they should have done right the first time at 8:15. It took us the next fifteen minutes to verify proper operation.

That was growl one.

Then today we get there at the substation in a heavy fog. The fog burns off by 10 AM while we’re tying up some loose ends. We have the guys from the local utility company standing by and they close in their switches to put 69,000 volts into our substation. Everything looks good. I close the 69,000 volt circuit breaker, and our main transformer starts humming. More good.

We check an neat little hi-tech meter on our 13,200 volt switchgear and it doesn’t read right. That’s a little programming issue. Five minutes. That’s good. Now we close the 13,200 volt circuit breaker to feed the small 480-volt transformer that will soon feed our station. I walk over to the remote control panel that was last night’s festivities, and I turn the handle. The breaker closes, the red light comes on and the green light goes out, telling me my breaker is closed, and the transformer is humming. Good.

I walk over to the building housing our new motor control center and run everybody out while we energize it for the first time, then I walk back to my new 480-volt distribution panel and watch as one of the technicians, clad in a flash suit (OSHA regulation) closes the 800 amp 480 volt breaker feeding that building. It closes and we check voltage in the building. Good.

One more test. A 1200-amp breaker, enough to feed a block full of houses, sends feed to the old part of the plant. The tech, still in his falsh suit, closes that breaker and ****BLAAAPPPPPP!!!!**** It immediately trips. Like instantaneously!

That was growl two.

So we kill the 480-volt transformer and rack out washing machine-sized breakers and lock them in safe positions so we can investigate the trip. A few covers come off, exposing a mess of cables each as thick as a mop handle. A quick poking about with a meter and it’s obvious. The electrical contractor has a couple of cables in the wrong place.

There are three poles on the breaker at each end of a thousand feet of cable. Because of the amount of current, two cables must run from each pole on one breaker to a pole on the other breaker. That’s six cables. Three poles at each end. The two cables that leave a pole at one end must hit the same pole at the other end. That was the way it was supposed to be. It wasn’t. If you don’t do it that way, you have a dead short. We did. You close a breaker on a dead short, and it should trip. Fast. Ours did.

We left the problem with the electricians and went to lunch. When we got back, they’d done right this time what they did wrong the first time. We checked their work to be sure, then we went back through the procedure of energizing the transformer and this time when we closed the breaker, it did not trip. Good. After a few more checks, we opened and locked out things to leave the place in a safe condition. And we’ll pick up on things tomorrow morning.

Current events - national

And these people vote…

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In an interview with Time magazine, Stephen King has some comments on his writings, the movies made from them, and the way the news is reported. Mr. King turns the table son the interviewer:

STEPHEN KING: So who’s going to be TIME Person of the Year?

TIME: I really don’t know, there’s a very small group of people who make that decision.

STEPHEN KING: I was thinking, I think it should be Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

TIME: Really?

STEPHEN KING: Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, “You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you’re missing the whole fox hunt.” Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who’s gonna get custody of Britney’s kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit. You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West’s mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that’s going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his… wife.

I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a massive conspiracy to keep the majority of the electorate horribly uninformed, but then I am reminded of an aphorism that says “never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity,” to which I must add “or the blind quest for the Almighty Dollar”.

The managers of the news outlets are not blind to the fact that Britney Spears’ drawers will bring a horde of interested and brainless viewers with daddy’s credit cards int heir hot little hands. It’s all about the numbers. The people working over the demographics don’t weight their numbers based on IQ points.

TIME: Do you actually think Britney and Lindsay should be on our cover?

STEPHEN KING: Yeah, I do.

TIME: Sort of a, ‘This is what the media’s actually interested it, so let’s just put it out there’ thing?

STEPHEN KING: I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics — trying to play a serious part in the world — to a culture that’s really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don’t know who their f—— Representatives are.

I know that manufacturing and farming are important things, things, where you take something of little value and add to it the seat of your brow and your God-given intelligence adn by those means the value is increased. In subsistence societies the farmer and the maker of tools strike a balance wherein the fruits of the fields pay for the product of the artisan. Then along comes the economist and the politician who produce nothing but hot air. In the best of cases they do nothing to the work of the artisan and the farmer. In the worst case, they are an drudge and an impediment. But as long as the media sees fit to talk about Britney and Lindsay, there won’t be enough people to worry about how fare the artisan and the farmer. Until the food doesn’t come to the table, that is…

But I digress. I do that a lot…

TIME: But you’ve been well in the public eye for decades now. Is it pretty blatant how much worse it’s gotten?

STEPHEN KING: It’s worse every year. And the guy says to me — the Nightline guy — I didn’t get the guy’s name. Granted, I haven’t been feeling real well and it was a long day of interviews. But he said to me, “If we didn’t cover cultural things, we wouldn’t be covering you and The Mist, and promoting the movie.” And I’m like, “Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan aren’t cultural.” They aren’t political. They’re economic only in the mildest sense of the word. In fact, if I had to pick somebody, some celebrity who has had some impact this year, some sort of echo in the larger American life, I would say Hannah Montana. That whole issue of online ticket sales and scalping fascinates me. There are [legitimate] issues there about the Internet, so that actually does seem to have some cultural significance. But Britney? Britney Spears is just trailer trash. That’s all. I mean, I don’t mean to be pejorative. But you observe her behavior for the past five years and you say, “Here’s a lady who can’t take care of her kids, she can’t take care of herself, she has no retirement fund, everything that she gets runs right through her hands.” And yet, you know and I know that if you go to those sites that tell you what the most blogged-about things on the Internet are, it’s Britney, it’s Lindsay. So I think it would be terrific [to have them as TIME Persons of the Year]. There would be such a scream from the American reading public, sure. But at the same time, it’s time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

It’s not “real news and fake news”. It’s real news, fake news, and pseudo-news. The fake news is the stuff that is reported that is just plain wrong, whether intentional or not.

The pseudo-news is orchestrated and manufactured. It’s thrown up on the screen with all the fanfare of an announcement of a permanent peace in the Middle East, like it was something of REAL importance in how our lives would proceed in the future. But it’s not important, not at all, unless you’re looking at some sociological barometer of the declining mores of glitterati. But there it is… Precious air time is devoted to discussion of the meaning and implication of “trailer trash” activities.

Why? BECAUSE THE REPORT CAN’T BE WRONG! And if it is, who cares? It doesn’t matter. It costs the reporter no danger except getting run over by other reporters and their retinues. It’s not like taking a film crew out of Baghdad’s Green Zone to see what’s really happening at a soukh in Fallujah. You can get seriously killed in Iraq, but reporting on Britney’s panties won’t even cost your hairdo.

And if you report it seventeen times a day like it’s important, the sheeple of America will darned sure ACT like it’s important. After all, in todays’ society, one very likely has personal knowledge of a slut and how she acts and the trials and tribulations of sluttosity, but fewer and fewer know a combat veteran and can relate to the trials and tribulations of walking down the road in the vicinity of people who would happily take your head off and display it on al Jazeera or its American subsidiary, CNN.

And remember, folks, that the little airhead down the hall who knows exactly what’s going on in the lives of Paris and Lindsay and Britney, the one who can’t locate Iraq or New Hampshire on a map, who thinks that the government MAKES the money that it gives out, that little darlin’ has a vote just as valid in the count as yours.

And people call me pessimistic…

The Name Game

The Name Game #122

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I arose this morning to temperatures near fifty, awakened by the rumbles of distant thunder as a series of nasty showers moved through the area. This is one of those “inside” days. After I finish this post, I’m determined to poke holes in a big chunk of dead cow, stuff them with the bulbs of an odoriferous vegetable and the subject the result to hours of low heat while I occupy myself with random acts of domesticity.

I read the morning paper this morning, and one hospital is reporting births from October 2 through November 7, a total of 98 births. Of those, 42 of the new babies meet the future with parents who didn’t happen to be married at the time of birth, and of those, ten of the new mommies had reason NOT to post a daddy’s name, reasons like “He be a secrit agent an’ I doan wanna blow his cover” and “It wuz a big, cool party an’ I passed out and I woke up with no clothes and it coulda bin ANYBODY!”

Getting on with the proceedings, let’s start off with a few of those fine folks who find that a first name and a middle name isn’t sufficient:

Dory G. & John P. bring out their new daughter, little Dorian Jahnae Alivia.

Natasha W. & Earl B. present a new son, Jayden Earl-Christopher.

Now let us gaze upon the people who think that spelling a name in “creative” ways is the key to making their kids unique, you know, just like everybody else…

Miss Stacy T. has a new daughter, little Reileigh Belle. Never make do with five letters, “Riley”, when you can do it with eight, “Reileigh”. Baby daddy? No got!

Mr. & Mrs. Calvin H. know that if you’re going to pick a random surname and make it your son’s first name, then you can’t be having no “C”, so they tag him with Konner Ray.

Mr. & Mrs. Donovan S. wade off into the abyss with their daughter, Kynsle Klar as they do two names with ten letters and three vowels. I guess there weren’t many vowels left after little Reileigh, up there.

Now we’re going to ask the question, “Where’d you get THAT name?”:

Mr. & Mrs. Gregorio C. present their new son Gauge Isaiah. Is this a theme, using the names of indicators for your children? Will he soon have a little sister named “Dipstick”?

Shantel H. & Marvin J. have a new daughter and they gave her her daddy’s name: Heaven Marvinique.

Valarie S. & Winfield M. present their daughter, little Fanieve Jewel. Is that supposed to be pronounced “Fanny-eve”, or do they have something more creative in mind?

Michelle M. & Jared G. have a new son, Baylor James. If this is a theme based on Texas colleges, then he’ll have siblings named Aggie and SMU.

Francis F. & Aaron B. have a new son, Willbert Jabari. I don’t know where they got “Jabari”. It sounds like south American wildlife…

Gia C. & Catlin M. present their baby girl, little Aalaysia Sarai. Nothing says class and intelligence like a name with a bunches of “a’s”.

Aglacia G. & Darrion L. tag their daughter with Amiyah Nachelle.

And lastly, we look at the wonderful world of people who KNOW that real sophistication comes from names with punctuation:

Mr. & Mrs. Damon D. present their daughter, little Devyn Lynn’ae. No, people, exactly what are you supposed to do when you come to an apostrophe in a name? Stop and hiccup? Stomp your foot for emphasis? Ring a tiny little bell?

Miss Brandi R. throws in punctuation for her son Le’Land Fontella, possibly to make up for the absence of the daddy from the birth announcement. Let me clue you in: Punctuation doesn’t make up for stupid parent(s)!

Sherika J. & Donald S. present their little girl, Ma’Kaiya Mo’Nique.

Tarenza L. & Jermaine W. show us their daughter, Ja’Mya Renee’.

Mr. & Mrs. Kenired A. have a new son, Ja’Kinired DaJuan. Two names, four capital letters, and an extra apostrophe…

Miss Katin C. hits a triple with her new son, little N’Keethan Javon James. Sounds like the starters of an NBA team. Might be why she didn’t list a baby daddy.

Brittney (How original!) D. & Michael G. show us their new baby girl, little A’rianna Danielle. I dunno, maybe they were writing out “Arianna” and a tiny blood vessel burst in one of their brains…

Sharon W. & Jemarick A. have a new daughter, little Ja’Myra De’Asia. “de Asia?” “No, de Louisianne”. (That’s a little Cajun French play on words, in case you’re wondering…)

LaToya S. & Antonio P. present a son, little Antonio D’Vorak II. Does this mean that we can expect a sister, “Q’Werty”? Okay, that’s a bit geeky, but hey!, it’s MY column, okay?

Courtney D. & Brandon J. have a little girl, Re’Auna Angelia.

Nina D. & Stephen G. have a new daughter, little Shaleashea Da’Nae. I guess Nina and Steve got picked on a lot as kids for their plain ol’ names and they figured they wouldn’t put their kids through such misery…

That’s pretty much it this week. I had to skip a lot of the “I named my daughter “-son”” silliness to keep this post at a reasonable size.

Education, Wheels of Industry

Giving back…

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A week or so ago I got a call from an old friend, former co-worker and one of the finest technicians in the business. He’s truly a giant in his knowledge, although he has an East Texas accent that makes Gomer Pyle sound like a Rhodes Scholar.

Anyway, he has a stepson who’s enrolled in the local university in search of an electrical engineering degree. The problem is that my friend is on a project in Canada and his stepson is down here in Louisiana and would I be so kind as to help the kid out with some guidance and direction in a laboratory exercise.

Accordingly, this morning I was in one of the labs of the local university talking with four engineering students about process controls for a distillation column. It’s fortunate that I didn’t just keep my head in the electrical side of my career because their questions spanned quite a range from care and feeding of a reflux distillation column to the different types of inputs and outputs of a computerized industrial control system.

Things I’ve learned over the years, often at considerable pain and effort, I dispensed freely. I have a vested interest, you know. These young students will be the people the make America run in the coming years, and I want them sharp and capable. Considering that they were in a lab on a nasty rainy Saturday morning, I think these kids have a chance.

Wheels of Industry

Grinding onward

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The day after Thanksgiving is an official company holiday, but I found myself on the road at 0800 this morning headed to work. One of my projects is behind schedule and we’d asked technicians from my former employer to work this weekend to get our new high voltage power system checked out.

The jobsite sits in the midst of bare red clay. If you’re not familiar with red clay, then you’re lucky. You can make pottery out of it. Last night it rained. This morning the clay was suitable for making pottery. It wasn’t pleasant to work in. It’s extremely sticky stuff, and walking across it to my substation results in shoes weighted down with a couple of extra pounds of gummy clay. It does not make for a pleasant day.

We found a couple of errors and omissions in control wiring. Those are being fixed. This chunk of the job is not the real problem as far as the schedule slippage is concerned. That part lies with one of the vendors who’s been supposed to install some needed parts in a key part of the power system.

I’ve got several groups working their butts off, but no matter what I might try, weather and vendor delays are costing us the completion date that management desires. Oh, well… Just because you WANT a thing doesn’t mean you actually get it.

General

Giving thanks

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It’s that day where I formally give thanks for so much in life. In no particular order:

I have a good job working with friends on things that I am happy to work with.

I have friends who I can share everything in life with.

I have the love of a good lady. She is a delight to my soul in a way she’ll never quite understand.

I have WONDERFUL children. I don’t know who THEY are, because I have some of my own, too, and they’re a handful. Actually, I love my kids, and I spent a pleasant evening playing “Trivial Pursuit” with my daughter.

Despite being rather plump, I am healthy.

I still have brother and sisters and nieces and nephews that bring joy to me.

I have a weird white cat to make this house a home. Or maybe the cat has ME.

I’m still in AMERICA. The place is not perfect, but it’s better than any place else.

There are still men and women who will stand before our enemies in my place to protect this way of life, this shining city on a hill.

For these things and a million others, LORD, I give thanks.

Cajun culture, Humor

Boudreaux’s Thanksgiving Dinner

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Boudreaux, him, he calls his son who’s working in California. “Son,” he says, “me an’ yo’ momma is gittin’ one a dem divorces.  After all dese years, me, I’m tired a puttin’ up wit’ her crap.”

“But Pop,” stammered the son, “you and Momma wuz good wit’ each udder….”

“Mais, no, son,” says Boudreaux.  “Me, I’m tired a’ dis crap.  We gittin’ a divorce.  I’m so mad, I cain’t talk, me.  You call your sister in Arizona an’ tole her what’s happenin’….”

“Pop, don’t you do nuttin’.  Lemme call Sis,” said the son.

A little while later, Boudreaux’s phone rings. “Bon jour,” he says.

“Pop, me an’ Sis is gonna be there tomorrow.  Don’t you and Mom do nuttin’ until we get there.”

“Okay, son,” says Boudreaux.  He hangs up the phone and turns smiling to his wife Clotile.  “Hon,” he says, “Boaf our kids is gonna be here for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow and they payin’ dey own way!”

Blogging

Blogging onward…

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Sometimes blogging can be a bit of an effort.  My last couple of weeks have started and ended with hour and a half drives to and from jobsites, and the effort on the jobsites has included a lot of walking around and climbing and bending and poking.  At the end of the day, a shower is all I need for a good night’s sleep.

Under such circumstances, it’s easy to be a little lethargic about writing.  With an hour and a half drive, I get quite a bit of radio time, and I tend to listen to public radio in the morning.  We won’t talk about bias, but I usually find myself beginning to foam at the mouth after I listen to one article slanted to the left, the next one spun into a Hillary! campaign ad, then a few “let’s hug a tree and kiss that whale on the lips” stories, and occasionally a “we’re all gonna DIE” paean to Algore and global warming.

A dozen posts pass through my head, but none of them stick around very long.  That’s why you get a post about work.  Right now, WORK is the big thing in my life,  so that’s what you get. Did I mention that I love my job?

I could post about the apparent stupidity of some of the traffic I have to deal with.  There’s construction in Interstate 10 starting just west of the Texas state line and it extends all the way to the thriving metropolis of Vidor, Texas.  Barricades make the lanes narrow and hold rainwater to make the driving experience more challenging, and when you combine an uncertain roadway with fools and idiots behind the wheels of various motorized vehicles, there’s plenty of aggravation, but hey, you guys face construction and aggravation the roads yourself, so it has to be some spectacular level of stupidity to make me write about it.  Mostly I just grit my teeth instead.

Things will straighten out, though.  We have one project complete past the point where i am needed, and tomorrow I go out to the other, and hopefully in a couple of weeks that one will also be history, and things in my life will return to a less active pace.

We’ll see…

Wheels of Industry

It’s alive!!!!

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3 PM today, after a careful procedure of energizing and checking various components in my new power system, we did our first run of our new 9000 horsepower motor.  It was almost anticlimactic.  The first “run” was at five RPM to make sure it turned in the correct direction.  I was certain it would, but there’s always a chance it wouldn’t in other applications.  In this one, though, I was sure.

After 5 RPM, we bumped up the speed by steps to 105%:  1890 RPM.  No hitches.  No glitches.  If the construction site had not been rendered a sea of mud by autumn rains, the day would have been even more pleasant.

Tomorrow they’ll tie it to the compressor it’s supposed to drive, and begin the final process of completing the installation.

My part is done.  One down.  One to go.

Current events - global, General

Shutting Down Imagination

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I was astounded to read this. Well, actually, I WASN’T astounded, because it’s the logical progression of the politically correct, nanny-staters:

PC publishers ban dragon from breathing fire in children’s book… because it’s too dangerous
By KURT BAYER and JAMES TAPPER – More by this author » Last updated at 00:35am on 18th November 2007

A leading children’s author was told to drop a fire-breathing dragon shown in a new book – because the publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations.

It is just one of the politically correct cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories.

As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

Somebody please tell me how a civilization brought up under this thinking is going to survive when its enemies feed their children stories and fables of swordsmen and fighters and heroes, of feats of daring-do, of chances taken, of fights against great odds, of last stands and noble victories?

Here’s the author and some of the pictures that are apparently expected to cause children to harm themselves:

lindseyg.jpg

In Who Wants A Dragon? – published by Orchard Books last year – Ms Gardiner says: “I was told, ‘You can’t have the dragon breathing fire because it goes against health and safety.’

“It doesn’t really make any sense.

“Sales and marketing departments are worried something might offend somebody, or that a child might copy something in a book and their parents will sue the publisher.”

You know, I have a suggestion for society at large: The first time some a**hole parent finds a lawyer who’ll take such a case, both the parent AND the lawyer should be subjected to horrible and public execution. Kids? Oh, the kids’d be better off raised by a society of baboons than a parent such as this.

Pointing out that classic fairy tales such as Hansel And Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood would not get published today, Ms Gardiner said: ‘It’s a sad reflection of modern society.”

In When Poppy And Max Grow Up, published by Orchard Books in 2001, Max was originally shown on a ladder “They didn’t allow that because they thought it was precarious,” said Ms Gardiner.

“Then I had to change the element on a cooker from glowing red to green.

I was read “Hansel und Gretel” when I was a kid, and somehow I managed to read my advanced age without thinking that gingerbread was a construction material. But wait! “Rapunzel” may have been responsible for my dislike of long hair…

“It is crazy. When I go to book signings, I sometimes take with me some colouring pictures, and the kids draw the elements as red because the cooker is on and it’s hot. They are not stupid.

No, kids aren’t stupid. They are teachable, though, and if you stifle the idea of adventure, you’ll raise a generation of sheep.

And sheep have only limited utility: shear. Or slaughter.

General, The Name Game

The Name Game #121

A rainy morning, this. I’m up early because I’m getting ready to go to work, but I took the time to read the paper with my breakfast.

We have one hospital reporting births from October 31 to November 7. That’s 24 new babies, fifteen of whom are born to parents who are not married. I can add “yet” in hope, but I doubt if that’s a safe bet. Four new babies have mommies who didn’t come up with a daddy’s name for the birth announcement.

Moving on, we have some triples: folks who had too many commitments to naming kids after other people to meet the old “first name – middle name convention:

Miss Tomica S. presents her new son, little Herman Maleek Joseph. Note how she bravely inserts a name with an Arabic tone, thereby glorifying the group that colluded with white people to enslave black folks in the African slave trade. She didn’t do anything to credit the sperm donor for this child. I’m thinking Hillary’s “village” is gonna raise this child… with my money, of course.

Eddie & Jennifer C. present their new daughter, Eloise Anna-Grae. Note that spelling of “gray”. Just so you’ll know it’s a name and not a color.

Brandon C. & Stephanie (different last name ) C. give us their new daughter, little Claire Elizabeth Michelle. Either the second OR the third name would be a great middle name, but they couldn’t make up their minds.

Next we have a few who think names are lovely places to display creative spelling:

Clyde & Lisa S. join the hordes of people who just are fascinated by the ways you can spell “Chloe”, naming their baby girl Cloie Christina Jean. And making a triple out of it.

Denny D. & Daisha K. bring us their new daughter, little Destanii Diana. Oooooh!!! TWO “i’s”, so she can dot each of them differently, using little circles or hearts or stars…

Miss Allison T. presents her new son, and demonstrates her fascination with the letter “y” by naming him Kaydynn Lamonte. She don’t name the baby daddy.

Lastly we have the “:punctuation makes my baby special” bunch:

Miss Tashmikia P. perpetuates a stereotype by tagging her new son with Ja’Vonte Edward. She don’t tag de baby daddy.

Deshaun C. & Ashley M. hang their new son with Kamari Dae’Jon. Great! They named a kid after squid and mustard. Oh, wait! That’d be calamari Dijon…

Okay… that’s it. Short list, and nobody crossed the line to make me pick a “Name of the Week”. It’s time for me to hit the road.