El Kabong, or I Prove That I'm Hard-Headed

Over the weekend, I had an interesting problem with my garage door. On Sunday, I returned from running some errands, put my car in the garage, and hit the button to close the door, then went inside. A couple of minutes later I hear a mechanical whining noise coming from the garage. I go to the garage to find that my door is off the tracks, sideways and generally jammed half closed. Sufficiently half-closed to prevent me from getting the car out.

A neighbor tries to help me get it open, but we can't, so I come up with the great idea to take off a panel or two, thus allowing me to get the car out. I succeed in getting one panel (of four) off. I also succeed in getting myself crowned by the top panel. The resulting mess is shown below.

Fortunately, the only injury I sustain is to my dignity. I call my favorite handyman, and he comes out to take the door down so I can get my car out. I later contacted another neighbor who fixed the door for me. He got the entire door assembled and replaced nearly all the moving parts by himself in about two hours.

It pays to contact an expert - a lesson I painfully relearned this weekend.

Sheer Stupidity, a Two-fer

Two instances of sheer stupidity to start the work week:

1) Rand Simberg wonders why we didn't help the consulate being attacked in Benghazi. Ignoring the fact that we did send a quick-reaction team, the armchair generals there in comments are busily hatching schemes to carpet-bomb a two-mile radius around the safe house with whatever F-18s happen to be on alert at Sigonella. Some other questions:

• How was the F-18 supposed to communicate with the consulate?
• If the F-18 can’t communicate with the consulate, how can it suppress fire? For all the F-18 can tell, the people shooting are Americans.
• Are the (unspecified) commandos sitting at Sigonella on a 15-minute alert? If they’re not, then it will take some time to round them up from beds or the local bars to even get them in the air.
• Do the commandos know where the US safe house is? Do they have a way to communicate with the people at the safe house? Again, absent that, how do you avoid a “friendly fire” incident?

2) In another Rand Simberg Point of Stupidity, he wonders how rising gas prices can be a sign of an improving economy? To which I hearken back to the record high gas prices of 2008.