Day 249: The Heat Wave

 

September 6th, 2011Summer finally showed its hideous face today with a massive heat wave striking most parts of Southern California. After waking up and actually eating breakfast (Trix!), I proceeded to work at EHS, where the weather outside was cloudly but also most definitely humid. It’s a good thing I stayed indoors at EHS where there was plenty of air conditioning the whole time. I met up with Geetha at Panda Express and she gave me some delicious lunch as I took it back to work to finish out my shift. Afterwards, I went home to escape the heat. Thankfully my room isn’t too hot due to its central location so low (and hence, farther away from the sun). I played some Facebook games before Alexis picked me up. We got some delicious Five Guys, and then went to the park to chill and catch up for an hour. Despite all our regrets from freshman and sophomore year, it’s good to know we’re still friends even after everything that has happened between the floor family. At the end of the night, I relaxed in my room watching the latest episode of Breaking Bad and while eating some rotten bananas.

On this day in 1915, a prototype tank nicknamed Little Willie rolls off the assembly line in England. Little Willie was far from an overnight success. It weighed 14 tons, got stuck in trenches and crawled over rough terrain at only two miles per hour. However, improvements were made to the original prototype and tanks eventually transformed military battlefields. The British developed the tank in response to the trench warfare of World War I. In 1914, a British army colonel named Ernest Swinton and William Hankey, secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, championed the idea of an armored vehicle with conveyor-belt-like tracks over its wheels that could break through enemy lines and traverse difficult territory. The men appealed to British navy minister Winston Churchill, who believed in the concept of a “land boat” and organized a Landships Committee to begin developing a prototype. To keep the project secret from enemies, production workers were reportedly told the vehicles they were building would be used to carry water on the battlefield (alternate theories suggest the shells of the new vehicles resembled water tanks). Either way, the new vehicles were shipped in crates labeled “tank” and the name stuck. I absolutely hate war.

Rep. Ron Paul has openly advocated for an end to paper money, but during the Palmetto Freedom Forum hosted by Sen. Jim DeMint today elaborated he wants more than just a gold standard. After listing the federal powers he would protect (to efficiently answer “what would you downsize?”), Rep. Paul suggested gold and silver “competing currencies,” as opposed to a system where “the counterfeiters are over at the Federal Reserve.” Sen. DeMint began the conservation asking the Republican 2012 candidate which federal programs he would downsize, to which Rep. Paul laughed, “it’s a difficult question, because that’s a long list.” Instead, he answered as to the things he wouldn’t downsize: “a system of sound money, property rights, contracts, a judicial system, a government, a defense of this country… but not a heck of a lot else.” He particularly attacked the fact that, in our federal government, “100,000 federal bureaucrats [are] carrying guns… people are supposed to carry guns, not the bureaucrats!” TOUCHE.

P.S.: