When I was a kid, growing up in Reseda, garbage collection was much more freeform than it is today. We had several oil drums that we used as garbage cans. My father managed a Standard Oil station and later had his own Chevron service station. For yard clippings, our front yard was basically ivy, we just stuffed it into one of the cans. 

I have previously written about my lack of adequate career orientation in high school and subsequent lack of preparation for college. Well, I went to college anyway. The closest community college to home, Los Angeles Pierce College. I thought it was a good school but one thing I noticed in retrospect was that I learned nothing about doing research. After two and one half years and some time at West Valley Occupational Training, learning about refrigerators and air conditioning, I enrolled at San Fernando Valley State College.

My feeling is that just as with human induced climate change, societal violence has reached a tipping point. I personally doubt that anything can be done to reverse planetary warming. That doesn't mean we should just give up on trying to reach a more rational and efficient, as well as cleaner means of powering our toys. The same with our societal violence. It's the dominant theme in movies, video games and unfortunately in much of our personal interactions.

I was just an average student in grade school (k-12) and had no real aspiration of going to college. I had some strange ideas about college graduates, PHds in particular. Afterall, what was the use of college unless you went all the way. Professors, and other PHds should all speak multiple languages and should be well versed in mathematics as well as the classics. The idea of a Renaissance Man still existed in my imagination. I was not one of them. 

I watch very little television and when I do it's generally old movies. However, at my retail job during my lunch break a television is generally on with a football game or some ridiculous talk show. On occasion there has been a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, which I was surprised by. They made a joke involving Schrödinger's cat. This is a subject that I suspect only a small portion of the television viewing public would be at all familiar with. The joke worked too. The punch line was "the cat's alive". The writers adhered to the Copenhagen interpretation.

Working retail during the Christmas season, I'm barraged by Christmas music. I find one especially puzzling and annoying. There is this line about a shivering infant and the response is "let us bring it silver and gold". Now just what does an infant want with silver and/or gold or frankincense and myrrh for that matter. That kid wants a blanket and probably a tit.

Sometimes I just want to make a quick lunch, so I heat up a can of chili. I do try to be conscientious about such things as GMOs and the big multinational monsters. For a long time I would buy Dennison. I since discovered that Dennisons is a ConAgra product so I had to switch. Lately I've been purchasing Staggs chili. I decided to look them up on Google and discovered they are a Hormel product, the same as Spam. That's not so bad but Hormel was one of the major contributors to the effort that defeated Proposition 37 on the recent California ballot.

Mark Twain visited the Versailles in 1867 and marveled at it's extent and craftsmanship in construction and maintenance. One point that struck me is the relationship between the workers and the high borne that had it built: