Dancing?

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yogi
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Dancing?

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Re: Dancing?

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Amazing! I watched the people in the background to see if the film was sped up. Hard to tell.
Saw something similar on one of the Got Talent type of shows a month or so ago.
Not the same guy, but doing something very similar. He was spinning fast, but not as fast.
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Re: Dancing?

Post by yogi »

I think some of those moves cannot be done slow. About the most daring thing I ever did as a kid was a back flip, and that took a few months of phys ed class and spotters to perfect. :mrgreen:
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Re: Dancing?

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When I was in High School, I was on the Tumbling Team.
Some of our routines were super fast, and the more you practiced the faster you could do them.
One I got really good at was a drop plate cartwheel. Only a few of us could recover from this particular style.
It looks like when you take a dinner plate and spin it and drops down and keeps rolling on it's lower rim. Makes a racket until it stops. We did this using our arms and legs and had to spin back up to our upright cartwheel position again.
It was super hard to do and even harder to get back up again. More often than not your arms just gave completely out.

I did notice on the video you provided, the guy used his forearm and shoulders to get his acceleration up.
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Re: Dancing?

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The phys ed class I took was supposed to be preparation for entry to the tumbling team. There was one trick I could not do at the end of the semester, which disqualified me from team competition. I don't recall exactly what it was, but it was a requirement.

Would you believe Google never heard of "drop plate cartwheels?" I think that's the first time I looked up something there and it had no references. I'm guessing you made up the name, but it does sound like a marvelous exercise. I had great legs from many years of bicycling (delivering newspapers), but my arms had very little strength. I could only do two pull ups, and that was on a good day.
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Re: Dancing?

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Basically it is a cartwheel turning into a forward roll with axis rotation.
Then turning face up, face down, face up, face down, and then come back up to a final cartwheel.
It's not as hard to do as it sounds, or looks. Well, it wasn't when I was 50+ years younger, hi hi.

One way to visualize what this is to think about a normal push-up.
While you are up you flip over to your back, but with enough momentum you end up back to a normal push-up.
When you do this coming out of a vertical cartwheel, you already have the momentum going to make one full revolution of roll-overs, then on the last roll over you pull a leg in and when you do the last push-up your leg helps bring up up, sorta like from a squat. When you flip over during the roll, the back of your head cannot touch the floor or you lose your momentum.
Eventually you learn to get down lower by using your shoulders and slightly bent knees for 1/4 of your round around the axis.
This is what gives the up and own motion of a plate spinning on a table.
Which is why we called it a Drop Plate Cartwheel. I don't think it has an official name for the affect, or if it did, I never knew what it was called. In tumbling there were several moves, rolls, and turns, that only worked if done in Progression. No way to do them as a stand-alone feature because you needed the momentum from a previous move.

Oh to be young and spry again!
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Re: Dancing?

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I think that I get the idea, if not the entire picture, of doing a drop plate cartwheel. The secret to success certainly must be the momentum, but I don't see how it would be humanly possible to end up in an erect position. LOL

I empathize with your lament about being young again, but looking back from my current perspective I can say youthfulness is highly over rated. Along with the strength and agility of youth comes a lot of stress and pressure. You need that strength to get through it all. The only thing one has to worry about when retired is keeping alive and healthy. Even that's not a big burden if you live knowing your goal is to reach the end point. So why dwell on something that is inevitable? The first several years of (early) retirement were discomforting. For me it was very difficult not being expected to resolve one crisis or another on a daily basis. Being responsible for absolutely nothing can make you lose your sense of purpose. After a few years of that, it starts to be enjoyable. How many kids truly enjoy what they are doing?
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Re: Dancing?

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All valid points there Yogi!

Like the guy in the video you posted, when he comes off his shoulders, if his feet were down and one leg tucked he could rise back up to a cartwheel position.
All I can say is he must have strong arms!
I stepped through the first part of the video frame by frame to see how he gets his momentum geared up.
He uses his legs like a pump, similar to when you ride a swing and pump your legs to get going.

Back when I was in high school, they had way too much emphasis on football and basketball, very little on baseball, and even less on gymnastics. It was like 3 months of football, 3 months of basketball, 1 month of baseball, and 2 weeks of gymnastics. If you wanted more gymnastics you had to join an after school activity like the tumbling team.
My grandkids say they don't have physical education in school anymore, but you can join either football or basketball teams both after school activities. They no longer have shop or crafts classes either.

Makes me wonder what they do to fill out the day?
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Re: Dancing?

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All those things you mentioned being deleted from today's schools curriculum have to do with vocational training. The emphasis is on college prep these days, and a measly BS degree isn't worth much in the job market. I was shocked when my school teaching daughter told me they don't teach penmanship either. Scripting is thing of the past. She has, however, taught her 5-6th graders Python; the programming language. You can't believe how amazing that is because she has no clue about coding. She is just following the study guide. LOL

My high school days required physical education because President Kennedy was into it at the time. All schools went through a lot of pain and expense to institute a phys ed program. I guess the idea was a healthy body goes with a healthy mind. I did manage to get out of it one day a week when I went to swimming classes. These were totally amazing classes for reasons you would not expect. The school student body was all males. It didn't go co-ed until the year after I left. The swimming was done in the nude. Today somebody would get arrested if they did that, but the order came right down from the board of education. Everyone was uncomfortable at first, but after a few classes nobody cared about it anymore. I still don't know what logic was behind that decision.

Another funny aspect of attending an all male high school was the Friday night socials. I never went to any of those, but I understand they imported girls from a nearby school. They were outnumbered 10:1 most of the time. LOL
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Re: Dancing?

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I went to Chaminade and Vianney before moving over to the Public School System.
The difference between the two school systems was like day vs night, good vs bad, ahead vs behind.

I don't know why so many companies got behind the college bandwagon, they sure lost out on a lot of good employees by doing so. In most cases, that piece of paper is totally useless, other than to get you into the door of a backward thinking company.

Colleges were meant for higher education, not just teaching you how to work for someone else!
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Re: Dancing?

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My first eight years of education were in a Parochial school taught by Franciscan nuns. The school was on the same property as the church, the rectory for priests, and the convent for the nuns. It was probably the most beautiful church and surrounding landscape in all of Chicago. The surrounding Polish population had no problem supporting it all until about the time I was in sixth grade. That's when the demographics started to change forcing the pastor to beg for money from the pulpit. Nobody liked it at the time, but thinking back on what our donations had to support - all those buildings - it was a small miracle that the parish center lasted as long as it did.

I had the opportunity to continue my education at the local Catholic high school, which was in walking distance. I chose the public school which was nearly an hour bus ride away. It was a magnet school and I happened to be in their district, but more importantly it was well known for it's college prep curriculum. The difference in the environment at the public school vs the parochial school was stunning. The lack of females never bothered me until I started dating. I had absolutely no social skills with the opposite sex. LOL

As Paul Simon did sing:
  • When I think back
    On all the crap I learned in high school
    It's a wonder
    I can think at all
It turns out that was the whole point of high school, and ramped up a magnitude or two in college. Those schools not only taught the basics needed to survive life, but they taught most of the students how to think. Employers almost do not care in what subject you earned a degree. They are only interested in how you made it through the course work. Business decisions require critical thinking, which is what you supposedly had when you picked up that sheepskin. I didn't make it through college completion. I blame it on the nuns. :lol:
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Re: Dancing?

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I don't have a degree Yogi, but still worked for some large companies on a few major projects.
Was even moved into the engineering department as an engineer on two projects.

Being raised in a family business, I had to learn everything their was to learn about the business.
Toward this goal, I attended various colleges over the years, but since a degree was not my goal I usually went as an auditor, and attended numerous seminars.
The advantages of going as an auditor were great. I did not have to have their chain of prerequisites, and my tuition cost was only 1 to 3% of the standard fee, usually 1% unless there were special costs involved. So, where most students were paying 1,300 bucks per credit hour, I was only paying 13 bucks. The only drawbacks were you sat at the back of the room, and could not ask questions. You were not graded and turned in no homework, you could take a test but it was not graded.

I did go to college in Canada to take a class which was not taught in the US. The professor took me under his wing and we worked together on several projects, including my teaching one of his classes for him. When he moved to a different college, he took me with him, and from there we did some volunteer work in Africa. Enjoyed that time period, and achieved the goal I was after as well. In the end, I wound up with three US Patents, which cost me an arm, leg, and my firstborn son, hi hi. Had I known patents were useless pieces of paper I would not have wasted my time or money to get them. They were hard to pay for when you don't have much money to start with.
For everything since I went the Copyright route. A copyright does not cover a product, but it can cover everything anyone could say about it, including images. And a copyright is five decades longer than a patent.

Speaking of nuns, we had the Sister of the Most Vicious Blood, hi hi.
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Re: Dancing?

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When I was in the work force you would have been called a consultant or an independent contractor. The only requirement there was some kind of proof that you could get the job done. Your portfolio or recommendations from the past work you did was usually enough, Consultants were paid good wages compared to the regular employees. But then there were no benefits nor a guarantee that they would have further work after the project was completed.

I think you did the right thing auditing classes instead of enrolling in the degree programs. You got the benefit of the same education but not the recognition of earning credit hours that could be applied to a degree. Obviously you were well qualified without a degree, but many companies look for that sheepskin in lieu of relying merely on one's reputation. You accomplished a lot and can be proud of your successes.

It's a bit amusing reading this thread wherein you say patents are useless. I recall reading in other threads where you cited pharmaceutical companies for being experts at using patents to protect their interests. My guess is they don't consider their patents useless. :grin:
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Re: Dancing?

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Big Pharma has the money to enable them to make use of patent laws.
A patent is useless for someone who is poor, and here's why.
At the time my patents were active, it cost 150,000 to go after an infringer.
Said infringer may not have two dimes to rub together, so even if you win, you end up with nothing, and are out 150,000 bucks.
If you do not go after each known infringer, the big guys see this and make note of it.
All they have to show is you did not enforce your patent against John Doe 1, 2, or 3.
You can't single out one infringer because they are rich if you didn't go after the ones that were not.
They claim you abandoned your patent for not doing so. Since they have the big bucks, they win!

I have a product I manufactured and sold for over 25 years now. I purposely did not patent it, this way I did not have to disclose how I managed to get it to do what it does.
A rather large company tried to duplicate my product. Spent big bucks in advertising. They also sold a lot.
However, their product did not work, it merely fooled the test equipment. So it did not fix the problem the product was for.
During the period of time they put the snake oil on the market, it hurt my business considerably. People just figured if the big companies product did not work, neither did the little companies. It took years to recover from their escapade.
To prevent this from ever happening again, I copyrighted over 50 different marketing blurbs for the product. So there is really nothing anyone can say about a duplicate product I've not already covered. I also copyright pamphlets and booklets explaining how the product works and made the latter quite verbose, hi hi.

Back to the first topic.
I've had some very interesting jobs before returning to the family business, and then striking out on my own.
Fresh out of high school I went to work for McDonnell-Douglas as a draftsman. Not a glorious job, but within a month I got transferred to the NASA division, where we drew parts for space a capsule. Out of something like six different drawings, mine was the one selected. This allowed me to scribe the template used to make the Drop Chute Door for the Gemini XII space capsule. Not a big deal, but it was something to put in my memoirs.
I was drafted, and before we finished boot camp, several us were selected for a special mission and sent to Seven Devils Swamp, where I was the only non-com to become an LCAC pilot. This was a blessing as most of us did not make it home.
Afterward I worked for Sverdrup & Parcel. While in Highways and Planning I helped design the interconnecting Interstate Highways converging over the Poplar Street bridge. They moved me to System Engineering where I worked on the St. Louis Flood Wall a project, mainly on the system of flood gates. Then for the Alton Lock n Dam project, I designed the Eddy Current brake.
Moved on from that company to MRTC where I became their Chief Alignment Draftsman, and responsible for making on-site repair drawings and ordering the bill of materials for the repairs. This took me back and forth from St. Louis, to Texas and Louisiana and point in between quite often.
My father had a heart attack so I left their employ to return to our family business to run it until he could return to work.
This is when I completed my designs on the items I was awarded patents for, and worked on starting a business to utilize them. During the start-up phase for this operation, I was hired by Kraft to fix some problems in the Land Exhibit at EPCOT.
In between everything mentioned above, I worked part time as an apprentice plumber, and as an apprentice electrician, where I worked my way up in both fields to journeyman level so I could get my licenses. I continued in the construction trades to become a general contractor. While still operating a few other side businesses I eventually sold to my hardest working employee at each.
Almost everything was put on hold while I cared for my late wife in her final years. I worked from home when I could, but still kept my foot in the historic renovation industry. After 9/11 everything came crashing down and I hit rock bottom. I decided to stay there, hi hi. Got remarried and moved south, still being a volunteer caretaker for invalids.
Then my health began to decline, and here I am sitting in my garage office, can't do much of anything else.
But I love it here!
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Re: Dancing?

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You did so many things in your working life that it's difficult to believe you spent more than two days at any of those jobs. I don't see how you managed to fit them all into your timeline. Your resumé brings to mind my uncle Ed who was a self-made mechanical engineer. I don't know much about his history but we lived next door to each other for about twenty years. One time he brought home a wire recorder and gave it to me. I'm not sure what his role was exactly, but he had a hand in designing it for a company called Webster Chicago. The company eventually was reorganized into Webcor where uncle Ed's final project was designing the first in dash tape players. I think they were for Ford Motor Company, but I'm not sure on that point. The reason I got the wire recorder is because tapes were the next generation and they no longer needed wire recording in the engineering lab.

Uncle Ed, if I recall correctly, never completed high school. He was hired by Webster Chicago after the war and stayed with them until the new owners of Webcor upped their staff background requirements. A degree from a college was something only management people had in those days. People were hired and retained for their skills and not necessarily their education. Experience helped, of course, but the schooling was not a requirement. I entered the work force right at the end of that era. My intention was to work for a single company until retirement. That's exactly what I did, but not as I had envisioned it to happen. The company was Motorola where the turn around for engineers was high. I was not an engineer which is why I lasted so long. Nobody these days is expected to stay with a single company for 36 years. I read recently where the average employee at Google, for example, stays there only 14 months. Then again, Google won't even talk to you if you only have one university degree in your portfolio.

We are not that far apart in age, but our career paths are drastically different. I don't think it is due to the work environment, but rather due in large to the families in which we grew up. Neither you or I could get a job in today's millennial dominate market. Neither of us have a smart phone. :cry:
Last edited by yogi on 12 Aug 2018, 17:22, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Dancing?

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Wow Yogi - My very first recorder was an old used Wire Recorder my dad picked up for me. A few years later he bought me an expensive VM (Voice of Music) Reel to Reel.

Not to many folks remember the old 4-Track cartridge tape players. The cartridges came in several different sizes. I actually preferred the 4-Track over the later 8-Track. In order to play standard size 4-Track tapes on an 8-Track, we had a separate wheel that clipped in the drive hole, I think it was called a Gidget.

Being raised in a Family owned business opened a lot of opportunities for me to have small side business of my own. Most utilized existing structures we had on the property.
Even when I worked for outside companies and were tied to their time schedules, I still had small side jobs I did in the evening at home and on weekends. Some of the jobs I did start were closely related in one way or another to our family business. One example is a company I started and named Colonial Ribbon Guilding Company. Using the word Colonial was pushed by our new bank and approved by the city council, so a lot of new businesses used the word.
In the florist business we used ribbon banners on funeral flowers, like Dear Grandmother.
We used to buy these from Lion Ribbon Company when they used gold stamping. After they switched to silk-screening their ribbons looked awful. So I bought a Halverfold Big Bench hot foil stamping machine and designed a feed mechanism to handle all sizes of ribbons. When Floral Wholesale Row discovered I was printing our own ribbons for the flower shop, they asked me to supply them as well. Then Giuliani Premiums, a carnival supply house got wind of it and I began printing award ribbons for them. It wasn't long before what was supposed to be a private side job turned into a fairly busy business.
This was one of those small businesses I mentioned that didn't take up a lot of my time. I received perhaps two larger orders per month and could get them finished in a couple of evenings.
It left room to get other small side businesses going that also only got a few orders a month.
At one time, I had over seven small businesses going at once, and a few grew to the point I had to hire employee's to handle the workload. When I lucked out and had an excellent employee who took care of nearly everything associated with the business, and the person responsible for it turning a good profit, I would offer the business to him with lenient terms attached. Basically this meant they had to pay a monthly fee to pay off the machines and whatever inventory was in stock at the time they took over. This worked well for me because I usually amortized the payments over a five year time span.

Not all was great though. I was way to far ahead of my time on some of the businesses I started. Too many hurdles to overcome and bucking against for eg. large insurance companies.
My brother and I started a Windshield stone chip and crack repair business. Although or product worked great, at that time car insurance companies would pay to replace cracked windshields, so our market was only those who carried only liability insurance with no glass coverage. Many years after we closed our business down, after starting another in a similar field for car upholstery, insurance companies started using stone chip and crack repair companies who were now booming. Our upholstery repair business was for Naugahyde materials only. Unlike the way repair materials work today, our system literally rebuilt Naugahyde material in a manner similar to how it was factory made. More time consuming but held up perfectly and you could never see where we made a repair. Lots of trick involved too to perfectly match grain and color. Instead of doing cars, we ended up doing numerous restaurants, and most of those were redye jobs with only a few small minor repairs to materials. We phased out that business also as never becoming profitable enough.

Other businesses that really took off and did great died as technology replaced the items we made and sold.
We had Themal Copiers, both flat and A-Frame for books, Hectograph platform machines, Stencil type Mimeograph printing platforms, and several other machines, all priced under $19.95 for the small home office. We even made a beautiful, fully functional, Oak and Walnut Mimeograph as a desktop accessory for executives, priced three times higher of course because it was a specialty item. Sold hundreds of these in standard, index, and business card sizes.

I could go on for numerous pages of all the things I've done over my 70 years on this planet. Sometimes I made a lot of money, sometimes I made next to nothing, or even less than it cost to make a product. The sad thing is, all the money I saved up for my retirement days went to pay medical bills for my late wife. Left me flat broke in the end, and I'm still here pinching pennies.
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Re: Dancing?

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About the worst piece of office equipment I ever worked with was a mimeograph machine. The envelope company I worked for used them to make shipping labels, but once in a while office correspondence was also mimeographed. There were no copy machines back then. You had to be a perfect typist too because in our office only a select few had an electric typewriter. The impressions made on the mimeo paper had to be equal or the copies looked like crap. Being even handed on a manual typewriter isn't easy. LOL And, correcting errors in typing was a major project. It was often better to just retype the entire document. I think I mentioned this before in another thread. There were about 15-20 people in that office who today could be replaced by a single computer and an all-in-one printer.

You are absolutely correct about how insurance covers replacement windshields and not repairing them. I had to have that done twice in my driving career and in each case the people came out to my home and did the replacement. It's pretty easy in fact if you have the right tools.

I get reflective when I read stories such as the one you tell about your working career. Not only did you work hard all your life, but you also gave a lot to other people in terms of service and merchandise. I'd say you are the quintessential example of the American dream. What has happened to you and your wife in terms of Illness came about through no fault of your own. It seems almost unAmerican for you to have to struggle so much in your later years after giving so much to society in the past.
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Re: Dancing?

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The key to making good Mimeo Stencils was to take the ribbon out of the typewriter.
I preferred using a manual typewriter for making stencils, as the electrics which used carbon film ribbon did not strike hard enough.
I had an old typewriter I used for making the metal Addressograph plates that looked like dog-tags.
You had to really pound those keys with a hard and super fast hit to get a clear impression.
Hard to believe the things we had to go through before computers eh!
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Re: Dancing?

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I could have used your advice about removing the typewriter ribbon about 50 years ago. Today only us old timers even know what a mimeograph is. LOL Another thing I see going the way of the dinosaur is the FAX machine. One or two legal services still require them, but e-mail and electronic signatures are "the thing" these days. We bought our house without signing any papers with a pen and paper. I still don't know why the signatures on those .pdf files were legal, but who was I to complain?
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Re: Dancing?

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In my previous computer I had a valid recorded signature line for outbound faxes.
This new printer has a fax machine in it, but I no longer connect telephone lines for the purpose, and even got rid of my old stand-alone fax machine due to way too many illegal ads coming in over it.

Do you remember the Heyer Hectograph? Stuff from it could be in different colors on the same page, and did not smell like a Mimeograph. I sorta liked the smell of a Mimeograph printed page. Except when they were Exams at skewl.

I'm forever submitting forms for one reason or another, and made a tiff file of my signature to paste to them before sending. Saves making a copy, signing it, scanning it to pdf before sending it back.
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