Yeah...I was gonna do it. I was.
I was on the telephone with my admissions counselor at Westwood College for almost the entire day Saturday, going over and over the admissions process and prep for college entry. We talked until I understood the entire dog and pony show. I was going to do the standard college courses plus intensive study on Calculus, Algebra and Trigonometry. All in preparation for high level computer programming and software design. I was ready to kick ass. I was shown my entire curriculum, and the cost of the entire online college package, $83,000 dollars.
I filled out my letters of intent, my college enrollment papers, readied my paperwork for a Federal School Loan, and was ready to send in my admissions fee of $25.00. I was ready. But one problem. The Western Union was closed so I couldn't put money on my credit card to make an online deposit. So I had to wait until Sunday, when Western Union opened again. Sunday, I went out to Western Union and found it closed until Monday. That was a real drag. Something so stupid was standing in the way of my future.
So, Sunday I went over my paperwork again. I scanned my highschool diploma and emailed it to my counselor as a file attachment and then for some insane reason, I wanted to read some testimonials about Westwood College on the Internet. I was not prepared at all for what I found out. Tons and tons of sites and television news clips all over YouTube about these FOR PROFIT colleges, such as Devry, Phoenix, Westwood, and twenty five more all around the nation who are little more than scam artists.
These powerful organi- zations ARE colleges in their own right. They have college campuses all over, with their own football teams, and faculty and staff and tuition and matriculation and the whole wax show. They are every bit the life and breath of a college, even being able to accept federal loans for Tuition...everything, except for one measly thing : They are not accredited. Meaning, after spending three years for a 'bachelor's degree' from these colleges, you are given a diploma that is recognized by NO ONE. It is just a piece of paper and by no means any indicator of even elementary skill-sets in the career of your choice.
You could have just worn your cap and gown and allowed them to hand you a rolled up newspaper with a red ribbon around it for all it's worth at your graduation. You have been bamboozled after years of study, tests, textbooks, mid-terms, finals...blah, blah, blah. For something so meaningless as one of their diplomas. The worst of it all is when these graduates rush out into the job market. They put on their resumes that they have a bachelor's degree in this or that occupation, and go on a job interview. What happens is they are laughed at by the employer that sees their college as little more than a 'Diploma Mill', using a laser printer in the back room to draw up the diplomas for their graduates.
It's a fucking shame. These poor people, usually the lower, or money strapped middle class, who attempt to go to college to better themselves, only to come out of college, and having to still go back to work in Target, or pumping gas, or daycare. Doing this while trying to find employment in their dream well paying job with a bogus diploma. Soon, within six months, they have to pay the government back for that student loan, and without this dream job, they don't stand a chance in Hell of paying it off.
The interest mounts, the penalties mount and these poor people, poor already, are driven into the ground by never ending, staggering debt. I didn't know that owing the Federal Government is the ABSOLUTE WORST debt that you can have. Can you imagine that? Case in point: It is impossible to get out from under Federal Debt. They will garnish your paycheck, sell your property, debit your tax returns, can't file bankruptcy to discharge them, you can't get ANY federal jobs, or ANY federal services. You are fucked so badly, you had just better put on that tight leather mini-skirt and tank top and give it away on the street corners for free. Uncle Sam is now your pimp.
Shit Hobobob, you came RIGHT to the fucking edge of the precipice that time. All I had to do was follow through with everything and my ass would have been grass. There would be no pulling out of this one. The end would have been nigh. But, like I've always said, "I am a fortunate son." I don't care how bad shit gets, it it never gets THAT bad shitty. I've never been totally screwed. I can get screwed, but never totally screwed. I was so pissed that I could chew nails, piss napalm and shit hand grenades. I was pissed.
But fuck it. I watched one of my guilty pleasures on television. I don't like to talk about it, but hey, why not...it's just a fantasy anyway. I like to watch BURN NOTICE. It's about a wise cracking ex spy who's burned by the Agency and left out, twisting in the wind. What I like about it is that it's sheer fantasy. Nothing about it is rooted in reality, whatsoever...except maybe the main character's trigger happy girlfriend, who carries heavy artillery around like some women carry perfume and lipstick. I love her laying around with sniper rifles, taking out the bad guys, totally believable, and sooner or later, in each episode, they have her in something skimpy, or under-dressed.
She's alright though. A little meager for me, too skinny. I like a little more...well a lot more meat on my women. Shit, skinny just isn't a turn on. I love 'em soft and a little pillowy. That really works for me. But, what the hey. ANY WOMAN half naked is a good day. Still, I was talking about my favorite flight of fancy. BURN NOTICE. It's the funniest thing to watch so much improbability that you wonder if people really believe these things. Case in point. Last season our hero is being held at gunpoint by a killer with a gun to his head. A friend of his from several yards away, with a sniper rifle can find no other way of saving the hero so he fires a round through the hero's chest, cutting RIGHT THROUGH HIM and into the chest of the killer behind him. In fact, passing right through the killer's heart, exiting out of his back.
Probability? Low. Okay, a regular high caliber, low velocity bullet, would probably go through the hero making a hole a little larger than a pencil eraser, and exiting the size of a beer can. This is due to what is called the 'Fragmentation Mechanism' of low velocity bullets.The bullet actually fragments in the body like a mini explosion and tears through sinew and blood vessels on it's way out. The killer could have been hit too, but the chances are much higher that he would survive due to the loss of Fragmentation Inertia of the bullet shards.
The hero? Probably Nil. Well, let's play the game. High velocity, armor piercing round. Most likely will tear through the both of them like butter. The trauma would be great for both involved and the killer, taking the round through the heart will most likely die without immediate medical attention. This is largely due to a mechanism common in high velocity bullets, called the Cavitation Effect, where like waves of disturbed water, the bullet, like a rock in a pond, would cause a 'stretch and displacement effect' of flesh, muscle, bone, blood, actually anything that gets in the way of the round. Would the killer have gotten to pull the trigger on the gun next to the hero's head anyway? Debatable. But likely, due to spasmodic response alone.
Now. let's go back to my fantasy show. BURN NOTICE. A bad guy kidnaps the hero imme- diately after his being shot, stuffs him into the passenger seat of a four by four and peels out of the danger, heading down a highway. Shot, bleeding profusely (only from the front, where he is pressing his hand though) he reaches out with his 'good' arm and pulls the steering wheel sharply, horse heading the vehicle into a sharp skid and rolling the bitch at high speed three or four times.
After this crumpled piece of chewing gum wrapper rolls to a stop from lack of inertia, the hero crawls out of the wreckage to see other bad guys take the secret, super duper spy case from the accident, hop into a car and drive off, before he passes out. Like I said. Sheer fantasy. Television is sheer fantasy. I really can't even watch it any longer. If they don't start showing more and abundant T and A, they can forget people with ANY intelligence or experience in some aspect of real life watching their shows. Forget it.
Heh, I remember being in my ex-wife's car, driving on the Brooklyn Queens Express- way, in fucking bumper to bumper traffic. The car ahead of me pulls up no more than five feet. For some reason my eyes strayed to the rear view mirror. Maybe I saw the motion there first, but the car two feet behind me sped up. All I could do was take my foot off the brake. He must have hit us at ten or fifteen miles an hour from a dead stop. My car, a big assed Buick luxury car, did a bunny hop towards the car ahead, but not connecting.
In the tachy- psychia that followed I watched my wife, still buckled to her seat, do a disco dance in the car. Her long, dark hair whipping about in the air, her forehead swinging forward dangerously close to the windshield and dashboard. I could only imagine what the fuck my body was doing. But I learned soon enough. First. I was hit with so much adrenaline that I was expansive. The world had opened up like a bright flower in a field of poppies. I opened my car door, my legs weak and staggered to the back of my car, keeping my hands on the side of the vehicle to stay on my feet. My body throbbed in pain, my head hurt. The kid came running from his car, skidding to a stop to notice that the damage to my fender was hardly noticeable.
We exchanged contact infor- mation and we went our separate ways. All day long my ex and I just sank deeper and deeper into adventures in pain. I went to sleep early that night, popping pain killers and booze as did my ex. In the morning I awoke and looked at myself in the mirror. My jaw was swollen where I bit the inside of it. My right wrist was swollen, black and blue, as was my right ankle, and my chest had a bruised impression of the steering wheel, like a circle and slash around my ribcage and stomach.
That was from a fender bender. God help you if a vehicle rolls over at high speed. EMTs will be pulling out pieces of your fucking body. Believe me. Your head will look like an opened chop suey box from the corner Chinese restaurant. You will not be able to crawl from it and hold onto a bullet wound that only bleeds from one side of your body. You will be FUCKED UP for the rest of your life. In the show? Our hero was critical for a few hours, in intensive care for the evening, and in the hospital proper for three days before he discharged himself and hunted down the people who tried to have him killed. I love these fantasy shows. Especially when his girlfriend put on that hot tube top and tight jogging leotards.
Realize that Sir Issac Newton was not called Sir for nothing. This homeboy woke up one day and thought to himself, what is the most DANGEROUS motherfucker on this planet. I mean, the shit NIGHTMARES are made of. So, he studied under SATAN THE DEVIL, who confessed to him that the most FRIGHTENING thing to ever come out of the gates of HELL, was something called
Inertia. So the DEVIL gave Newton a cupful of this shit and told him to be careful. Newton trembled in fear of the cupful of substance for months. So frightened of it he made it the FIRST LAW that he had ever devised. Newton's First Law, otherwise known as the Law of Inertia.
Newton was very clear about it, he said: "
In the absence of a net force, an object will continue with its present velocity. If it is at rest, it will stay at rest. If it is moving, it will maintain its velocity (both magnitude and direction)." So...maybe he wasn't all that clear. It goes like this, unless something is holding you back, if whatever you are on, let's say a skateboard or bike, stops abruptly from a speed of 10mph, your body will continue on without the bike or skateboard at 10mph until something stops it. Air can stop your body, but it's 'Resistive Force' is weak, so it might take 20 feet to stop you (plus the Resistive Force of the concrete that you slide across with your face). A wall, per se, with a greater Resistive Force will stop you immediately. 
Moving on to shit that is not fantasy. I like watching Military Tech shows on Netflix. Well it's a television series actually, but they have seasons one, two, blah, blah, blah on Netflix. I love military tech. One was pretty interesting. They were going to test this rocket's damage on surrounding matter. Especially human matter. What they wanted to do was purchase a number of human cadavers, prop them on stands and space them at intervals several feet each from the epicenter of the blast. But the government wouldn't let them do that shit at all. Too WRONG. Okay, but they were undeterred.
This fucking rocket was a bunker buster. So they built a fucking under- ground bunker, reinforced it with cinder blocks and stuck a control room down there and a bunch of manikin soldiers, some even guarding the narrow approach into the tunnel. It was set up just like it would be in real life. They had soldiers positioned just where they would be normally to see the damage inflicted. Then they had the sentries. Five feet, ten feet, twenty feet, blah blah blah till about something like fifty feet from the bunker. Just to see how far the lethal range of this shit would be.
Remember, these are hard plastic polymer resin dummies dressed like soldiers. Then, these crazy assed motherfuckers left for the NEXT FUCKING TOWN. Yeah. They couldn't even see the fucking target. They used a GPS satellite to get target acquisition. They put this prick in a shoulder launch tube, with a soft launch rocket, the anti-tank Javelin. Soft launch means that the tube spits out the rocket, with saliva and canola oil and all, and before this puppy can fall to the Earth, it fires it's launch rocket and jets into the sky. This considerably lowers recoil and blowback.
Well, the flying fuck took off and that was the last they saw of it. Now these military psychos climbed into their truck and shoot back ACROSS TOWN to the bunker and found a fucking crater. A crater the size of a building or a spacious home. It was a crater with debris all over the place so fine that the largest chunk was about the size of a golf ball. They also checked on the manikins. They were gone too. Now these guys were not stupid. They had high speed cameras rolling in every conceivable direction.
Now please let me explain the laws of thermo- dynamic expansion to you my friends. The missile hit the bunker dead on. It drilled down and then exploded. Now in slow motion it looked like a broad geyser of the greatest energy to come out of an explosion...heat and light. Both many times represented by flash and flame. But that IS NOT THE ONLY ENERGY discharged from a bomb. Next comes a concussion wave where all the molecules of everything, including the air is shunted aside. Some people call it a shock wave. The manikins at the five to twenty feet markers were literally shattered when the blast wave passed over them. They flew all to pieces. Their pieces became part of the Fragmentation Wave, like your fragmented bones, teeth and nails would instantly be.
The next energy that is liberated is called the Frag- mentation Wave. Much slower than the concussion wave because it's composed completely of matter, fragments, dirt, dust, metal, bone, teeth, whatever, flying at you at supersonic speeds...kind of like very tiny bullets. Or like more buckshot from a shotgun than snow in a blizzard. The rest of the manikins were showered by this fragmentation wave, pulverized into tiny pieces.
SOOOOO, now we come to our heroes in television and movies who are closer to an explosive blast than seventy five feet. Hey, I'd take a hundred any day. These guys do not deal with the flame or flash, the concussion or fragmentation waves...nuttin. At best, the sound of the blast throws them from their feet, or sends them flying though the air...in one piece mind you. I shake my head at this. Hollywood wants things bigger and better and more dramatic. They use what are called 'shape charges', specifically designed explosives with 'weak and hard' spots, wherein they can direct an explosive blast in a certain direction.
They take these shape charges and point them AWAY FROM OUR HEROES. Especially those walking calmly away from the blast while they fire them off. And since explosions are expanding gasses, they take the shape of spheres, expanding balls. A shape charge lays this expanding ball of flame and light on its 'side' so to speak. So if you were a cyclops, it would look like an expanding circle to you, but with the naked eye it would look like it was traveling away, obviously useless. Like a cannon shooting away from you. But remember, the camera has only one eye. So the director can make the explosion as large and mean as he wants, it's still traveling away from the actors, but it looks SPECTACULAR!!
You can even have knuckle- headed stunt men jump in the air away from these things, doing swan dives and flips and still not kill the fuck out of anyone. Okay then, take the same explosive force of one of these shape charges, stick it into a back pack and walk through a crowded mall....you get my drift? Boys and girls, please, take my word for it. You don't want to be anywhere near this expression of thermodynamics no more than you want to be in a car that is rolling over at high speed. Back to these fucking cars. These cars are EMPTY when they roll them and THEN they put out the fires, sweep up the glass, sprinkling them around later for dramatic effect. They put the doors back on, the seats back into the car. They use the "Jaw's of life" to stretch out the collapsed roof of the car, and lay comfy blankets and pillows in the twisted vehicle out of sight of the camera....
...and then they insert the actors, with the fake blood and bruises on their bodies. This is NOT real. Or the explosion. Same thing. They put the actor several feet away. Aim the shape charge away...but even when you do that, the heat energy is still dangerous. So they put thermal padding on the back of the actors, and heat resistant gel at the back of their heads in their hair to keep them from getting singed or scorched. Then they have the acrobatic clowns jump in, set off the shape charge and let the drama begin.
You don't want to be near an explosion. Trust me. You want to be near anything else in the world. A hot woman, a bottle of hooch, a fancy car, a good plate of food, a nice doggie, a well placed golf shot, good seats at a Yankee game...you want to be near a million things, just make sure that one of them isn't an explosion. Just make sure.
Now, let me think about explosives and Westwood College. Hmmmm.
Hobobob
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