Bill thank you….

I can't imagine any profession that is not ultimately dissatisfying. Piss-balling about being excepted. We spend our first years piss-balling about, when our basic character is formed according to the Freudians. And many others. It is a shorter period now than it used to be seeing as how the party in power needs you all to work hard and increase efficiency so that it will be popular in the polls for a couple of days before the election, and our last years restoring the pristine dignity of piss-ballologists, Not a few going all the way.

Hence acquiring and exercising a profession expertise in other fields goes against the grain. It is unnatural. The more expertise acquired and the more avidly it is applied the more unnatural it is. The image of the Mad Scientist in folk-wisdom springs readily to mind.

Obviously such a thing will cause our metabolism to become confused as its rate of evolution is such as to leave it more or less unchanged from when piss-balling about was the only profession there was. Unfortunately, our metabolism cannot talk and so its only way of communicating its discomfort is to provide warnings.

These warnings are hushed up by the medical profession with all sorts of wonders resulting in it now having an absolutely enormous partiality to metabolisms flashing warnings and, by extension, and also a most serious allergy to piss-balling about.

Now that The Pope has given the nod to piss-balling, as He did in his Easter Message, we can begin the process of manufacturing fewer and fewer nerds until we end up with just enough elite nerds to manage the ICBMs and the drones while the rest of us drift back into our natural state.

If we keep manufacturing nerds at the rate we are doing we will end up with nerds making movies and TV programmes and managing the bus depot and the chip-shops.

That's how we got tart's knickers curtains in all the pub windows.

And even stranger than the Pope's advice was the reduction in the beer tax in the last budget. Something previously unheard of. Yes--a reduction in the beer tax. Maybe Hell might freeze over after all.

Obviously it is now official policy that pub closures have gone quite far enough despite what the medical profession might say.

Let see I worked for a bio-medical instrument company and love every minute of it for a 33 years career.

My interests in electronic date back to my early childhood where I would do things like rewiring pole lamps in serial and placed two dim and yellow 150 watt bulbs in them explaining to my parents that the bulbs would now last forever as they each was running at only rms 60 volts.

Or build my own transformers and relays or...............

Heaven was radio row in New York where bins of capacitors and others small electronic components was in front of the stories in bins.

My hero was Edison.

I did greatly enjoy working for the NY&LB and CNJ railroads as a summer job when going to college but the field of engineering was where I always desire to be,

Thank you for that term Spend, it's not everyday…..

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=piss%20ball
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pissball

However it's not clear which meaning you've intended

Surprisingly enough that was also my line, writing many instruction books for this field and contributing to ham radio mags

I too. Back in the day when Xmas tree lights were wired in series

Back when a gadget failed one replaced a capacitor or resistor rather than junking the entire unit. Soon a flat tire will be reason to purchase new car

Mine are split between sci and journ, Einstein occupying the former and JK Rowling the latter

At 82 with incipient Alz's I couldn't quite follow Spend above but I believe he was being facetious about split interests such as ours. I assume you lean also to trains and the like

I've never heard of the second meaning.

If you followed my little essay Bill you will realise how very understandable your admirable attitude is.

Along with it goes sportsmen and women being used as experimental organisms for pain suppression research and tunnel vision.

Rowling came onto the scene long after we both became adults.

You might be interest in reading a book call "Venus Equilateral" by George O Smith a hard science fiction book of the 1950s about a relay station to relay communications between the inner planets around the sun.

Tubes, cams controllers,mechanical relays, cyclotrons and super capacitors and taking energy out of the sun and so on.

I found it fun reading a hard science fiction book using the electronic technology from my childhood.

You should have watched Popeye and Laurel and Hardy Bill. Relay communications between the inner planets around the sun sounds to me like trying to avoid the main issue.

But "Venus Equilateral" is an interesting concept.

You have to forgive an old guy Spend but how does speedballing relate to the split profession

Of course she did, I feel like the idiot some of our participants suppose I must be. Anyhow meantime I'm trying to recall

Thanks Bill for that suggestion. In even the visible Universe there must be many suns with more than one inhabitable planet

Somewhat prescient tho obviously inevitable

Nostalgia

A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

Science-fiction author Robert Heinlein once said, "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
While the world has become so complex we do need specialists, there's a point to Heinlein's assertion. Not a bad idea to be able to do a whole bunch of things, even if not to perfection.

If words were to heed Heinlein's advice, the word 'set' would win the prize. It's listed with more than 400 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. The words featured in this week's A.Word.A.Day are not as multi-faceted, but they do have multiple meanings.

I don't believe that anybody who makes it to "old guy" doesn't know how speedballing relates to the split profession.

I can pitch manure dale. Ask farmerman if you don't believe me.

Believe it. Furthermore I'm even still not sure which meaning was intended