March 2, 2016

Yesteryear
One year ago today: March 2, 2015, Okeechobee, by land.
Five years ago today: March 2, 2011, Frenchie blackmail.
Nine years ago today: March 2, 2007, rule of best evidence.
Random years ago today: March 2, 2009, a familiar Florida sight.

MORNING
           News from Orlando, the house from y’day is not habitable. They won’t say whether it is because of the condition or the fact that it was a former crack house, but they won’t allow anyone to live there. They could not stop you if it was your house, but why infuriate them? If it is still available in a week, I’ll look again. No doubt about it, however, some organization is sweeping through central Florida buying all available properties under $50,000 or so. I’ll bet it has to do with that pending high-speed corridor going through. And I missed the buying opportunity.

           I need to spend some serious time up there. Toward that end, I hauled my sidecar to the back yard and hitched the camper. That camper, the cPod, is not as well designed as the first unit, so I had to put in an extra few hours on workarounds. For instance, there were a couple of parts that had to be drilled from the “wrong side” and my electrical isn’t grounded right. It was such a nice day, I had the radio on oldies, that I never stopped to take any pictures.
           Nor did I make the Wednesday coffee house as planned. I had to work until past dark, which gave me an opportunity to test the propane lantern. Careful lighting those things, they can flare up. It seems to throw off as much heat as my Mr. Heater. But it is as bright as the lanterns when I was a kid and we had no electric. So I’m used to carrying the lantern around with me. We had to do that to save kerosene. Our lamps were the pump-up kind. I have one, but it is broken and defies being fixed.

           Food. I’m indifferent about tomatoes. I didn’t go out at all except to work in the back yard, so I snacked on what I had in the fridge. Six tomatoes. Is it possible to get a tomato rush? Well, not just six tomatoes, I made a salad, and this morning eggs, but is it okay to eat six? Nobody told me not to. And the rest of the day I wavered between super wide awake and falling asleep sitting down. I’m not prone to this, so blame them tomatoes.
           During break times, I read up on dietary considerations of tomatoes. There are no consequences, not even one. Unless you have gastric conditions aggravated by all acidic foods, the only downside to tomatoes was eating so much of them that you neglect other veggies. But you could say that about any food product. So, maybe I’m the forerunner of the newest fad food attack of the killer tomatoes. What do you think of all this? And don’t you have anything better to do?

           A war movie came on my feed as I nestled in for evening coffee. A 2002 movie called “Deserter” with some great scenery and concerning the Algerian civil war. Quite the historically correct movie, although it is strictly about the Foreign Legion involvement. In real life, it was a hotbed of political intrigue with each faction calling the others traitors. But, that’s France. Not all citizens consider people like De Gaulle to be the leader merely because he was elected. That’s still better than Canada, where the leader isn’t elected at all.
           The movie necessarily gets political after an hour, since the Legion was ordered by local officers to resist orders from Paris which granted the Arabs any independence. Most were jailed or exiled. By the1950s, France was as totally politically corrupt as America is today, but there was no Donald Trump. France has not produced a real leader or hero since Napoleon, and he was from Corsica.

Wiki picture of the day.
The Wawona tree.
NOON
           Ah, it is back in the 90s, finally. Summer again, I’ve got another day planned on the cPod tomorrow, as I have misplaced several small fittings, like the padlock hasp and the quick release lid clamp accessible only from the interior. You don’t want to hear about my camper work, so what else is on the agenda? Oh, there was a spat on the chat. Some lady was on about men to put “no drama” in their dating ads. She says calling it drama is demeaning and condescending. Duh, it is meant to be.

           She further rants that men would not like it if their “thoughts and feelings” were dismissed as drama. Men, she points out, whine and complain all the time, so they have their own drama going on. Did she set herself up or what. There were dozens of instant replies, and everyone was to the point, and very well said. The momentum was that the woman had answered her own outburst by not realizing what she had said—that women’s drama was internalized. Right, “thoughts and feelings”?

           Where men were mostly reacting to external situations that had no immediate solution, women were mostly, as one guy put it, shouting, “Pay attention to ME.” And before I knew it, the sky was pitch black, I’m covered with sawdust, and the day had melted away. Myself, even if I could be unbiased on the drama situation, I would still side with men. Tell the world about the situation, but don't bore us with how it affects you emotionally.
           Why? Because I don’t like it either when men start going on about emotional problems. Part of adult independence is dealing with such events yourself. If you can’t handle it, get someone on the job who can, but don’t stand around moaning about it. Nor is it strictly a woman thing, I don’t think that. And for good reason. I like to point out in this life I’ve met four women who were NOT into the drama thing, and who they themselves disliked it when other women went to childish tantrums.
           Let me think, have I ever dated a woman long term that was into emotional and relationship drama? Yes, in my late teens. Judy. I’m the type that says hey, as long as the good outweighs the bad, let the relationship find its own way. Judy, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes, was constantly probing for the next level of commitment and choosing the worst times to want to discuss such matters. For me, never is a good time. Is never good for you?
           I dropped Judy for one of the most common reasons, because she would entertain passes from other men just to see if she could make me jealous. Or, it seems, just to see how I would react. Usually, my reaction was to leave and go home. If she enjoys their company more than mine, it’s bye-bye time. She never did seem to learn her lesson over that issue. Ladies, you do not flirt with other men on a date, or encourage them in any way. I was often tempted to make a pass at some other woman in front of Judy to see how she liked it, but she was already over-possessive, so I didn’t even joke about such things.

NIGHT
           The more I look into a real beginner’s book on celestial navigation, the more I see it would not be that difficult a production. It’s just that there are ever fewer people learning it due to the misplaced trust in GPS positioning. I’d be more inclined to target the cerebral market, with a title aimed at people who are intellectual. I’m in a position to state that most people who have the alacrity to learn the have learned as I did there is very little good source material. Why learn something marginally useful when the teachers themselves overcomplicate the learning process.

           I can tell you most of what is wrong with the five books I possess on the subject. Worst offense is similar to those who write books on electronics and computers—they learned it the hard way, and dammit, so will you. Not one of these authors appears to have grasped the subject well enough to realize the approach to teaching is wrong and unfair to non-navigators. And by the end of chapter one you always get that aftertaste that they are talking down to you.

           The books also contain useless chapters of repetitious unimportant matter for the casual learner. Like page after page of how to adjust your sextant for mechanical errors. I’d just mention which errors exist and let the user go read a repair manual on his own time. Another mistake is giving formulas verbatim rather than walking the reader through how the formula came to be. Beware of technical jargon, I work hard to never use a term that is not defined in advance, or at least I try.
           Existing publications also contain too much lore, and focus on the use of the sextant. It’s all how and no why. I suppose that makes sense, since that is probably the flashy aspect that the public associates with doing the sailor thing. But in fact, that is not a good idea until you learn why you have to take that reading. Now that I know why, I am an “aggressive” sextant user, able to curse when the instrument when it is wrong and allow for all kinds of errors. This is a major point most of them ignore.

           They have the same rote memorization approach to the tables. And tables like that scare the pants off a lot of people. The existing material does not emphasize the sun is the most important beacon, you can pick up the other objects in a flash once you master the sun. Besides, you should not be sailing at night. I reckon (note the nautical term) I could write a decent how-to book for the beginner in around 60 pages.
           It’s likely another idea that will go nowhere, but I would teach that the most important thing is the position of the sun, not where you happen to be at the moment. Proof, if you were indoors and I told you it was noon, you could probably point out where the sun would be if you could see it. If you can, you should be able to navigate—to a very rough level, mind you.
           Strange, I cannot find any books on “navigation” for dummies. Usually somebody has tried. But it’s like “brain surgery made easy”. You just somehow know if the book is twenty pages long, the author is cutting corners. Of course, I won’t write this book, because as ever, just when you’ve put so much work into it, you find somebody has done it already. There are many good descriptions around, like this navy article.

ADDENDUM
           I find a lot of Australian documentaries and government films to be superior in quality, so I was reading while listening to some youYube videos. One broadcast was about the troops surrounded in Tobruk in WWII. This is propaganda, since Tobruk is a deep-water port and the Germans had no navy in the Mediterranean to effect a blockade. So more like surrounded on about three sides, maybe. Otherwise the accuracy of the material was good, though understandably pro-British.

           But in some of the desert scenes, a flash of dust would catch my eye. I’d glance up but there was nothing, yet moments later, there it was again. What gives? I’ve tried to catch it in these still nearby, and underline it in red. From left to right, it is moving faster than sound. It was as if a streak of slightly disturbed dust momentarily became visible. It was not wind, because wind can’t go horizon to horizon in a split second. Can you guess what it was?

           German 88’s. The shell was so fast it had a flat trajectory. The gun barrel is just ten or so feet above the ground, so the shell would shriek over the desert floor too fast to be seen. But it would kick up little tufts of dust along the path that seemed instantaneous. Only if you noticed the distance muzzle flash or detected the nearby camera jostle of something exploding near the camera would it start to make sense. If the target was a Pommie tank, they would never know what hit them.
           It must also have been a strange sensation to have something like that pass overhead. There was no fluttering noise like the far slower naval shells. I suppose, however, the report of the gun would arrive some seconds later, but until you got used to it, that must have been terrifying.


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