One year ago today: October 25, 2015, wooden snowflakes.
Five years ago today: October 25, 2011, Canada, $50 billion in the hole.
Nine years ago today: October 25, 2007, the Hippie: $21.85 per gig.
Random years ago today: October 25, 2008, thoughts on retirement.
MORNING
Mmmm, baked catfish for breakfast. I’m still with the sneezing fits but time to get ack to work. One immediate problem with the hydraulic jacks is there is limited space beneath the house. They require about a foot of clearance when completely collapsed, which may entail digging a bit to get them under the joist plates. I hesitate, since it disturbs the salt-and-pepper soil around the existing piers. And I can see somebody has done this same fix at least once in the past.
These may not be the most exciting pictures on the universe, but they are the big events of the day around here, at least per the ones I’d share with the world. Toning things down is the mandate for the next few years, so yes, a nice new purchase is an event.
I mean, it may not top the charts for thrills, but if you can’t find something new about yourself or your life every day, then maybe retirement isn’t something you’re going to like too much. There’s a lot of that going around. And certainly, if nothing happens that you don’t find worth writing down every single day of your life, forget about keeping a blog. If one’s existence is that dull, they’ll bury anything you write with you.
Have you seen the October Time magazine? It’s become an anti-Trump rag, an establishment mouthpiece. That’s why I quit reading it years ago, and quit buying it long before that. It’s clear Time is part of the entire global private power cartel that has joined forces to stop Trump. The difficulty there is their tactics are confined by their self-created “political correctness” and Trump walks all over them. But they have to fight—they know what is at stake.
The insiders didn’t take Trump seriously until it was too late. They thought they had political power completely so sewn up that no way an outsider could shake their control on the public’s completely brainwashed minds. I see they have switched tactics to now making comments on the so-called inevitability of “mistakes” Trump will make if he does what he says.
Even Time’s choice of words is biased. Saying Trump will cause World War III is bunk. They keeps saying the “professional politicians” support conciliation but that has amounted to selling out the country over the past forty years. Only the reporting of facts is totally protected by the Constitution. Libel is still libel. The mass media reporting style has lost credibility thanks to Trump pointing out their dirty tricks and manipulations. Like those idiotic “interviews” with prearranged and rehearsed questions. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
This last pre-election month is critical. Time says Trump’s statement to investigate Hillary once in power is a sign of “dictatorship”, though a certain other person’s arbitrary statements and decrees drew no such comparison. Hillary’s comment that Trump owes us an apology was top of the page, but she owes no such words to the huge number of people she called “deplorables”. There is a good reason this is the first election in my life that I’ve ever followed.
Time is also trying to claim US-Russian relations are getting worse over Trump, as Russia speaks of re-opening naval bases in Vietnam and Cuba. Nonsense, I know how that game is played. If Trump gets in, he will pull out of endless wars and start sending allies a defense bill. This will “save” so much money, this will cause a vast relative increase in US strength. Another peace dividend. This may be the last chance to get those bases re-opened before that happens.
The big ugly dog on the house up the next corner killed something. They let the animal run wild in the yard and scare people walking past. Yes, people still walk around here. I heard the commotion. I can’t see anything from my front window, but whatever it is, possibly one of the feral cats, it is dying. I’d get a photo but I saw the guy come out his side door and take a look, then just walk back inside. That’s the dog I’ve nicknamed “Bruno”.
Train bridge.
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NOON
Another species of flora I don’t know in the back yard. These are handing on a tree, they are about the size of large walnuts. Close inspection shows they are growing on a vine hanging on a tree. Hey, no use asking JZ what they are because he’ll just say they are a “vine potato”. He’s the guy who ate that fruit in Pennekamp Park ten years ago and couldn’t taste anything for the next two days.
I tend to agree [they are illiterate] because most jobs I’ve had in my life placed me in the midst of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people who did not read at all. I was a union man for most of my career, so it was frequent to meet people who had not read a book in thirty years, but could tell you the entire cast of “Cheers”.
That reminds me, have you seen any recent pictures of that cast, now in their sixties? They may have been charmingly cute when young, but today they look just like the average room full of old farts who don’t tip all that great.
Hmmm, less than ten minutes. Patterson points out how that same ten minutes is often taken up by reading memes, captions, posts, and tweets. Nothing that requires at least an hour of deep thought to analyze. The readers have lost the ability to do so. That’s another point—you can’t suddenly decide to start reading later in life. You’ve missed the accumulated knowledge required to comprehend.
Hell, I noticed that effect in my own family by the time I was ten. You find complete oblivion over topics that were “learned” just the day before. All new input gets routed into a few fixated notions that they call “experience” but which have no basis in reality. My family, admittedly, were not the only ones, just the ones where I first saw it on a permanent and daily scale.
The best example: no matter how many times I explained it, they were incapable of grasping the facts. You see, they already “knew” I was just jealous that my kid brother’s birthday was twenty-one days “before” mine. (The reality: I was miffed because as a result, I always got second-or third-rate birthday presents. If it’s the thought that counts, then dammit, do the counting. He gets a new bicycle, I get a pair of socks. Kids notice these things, so don’t hand me that be-glad-you-got-something line. Time to let the other guy be glad he got something at least once in a while.) Notice when I talk about family how close I write like Dave Barry?
AFTERNOON
So, congratulations. If you simply read this blog every day, you’ve beat the odds. You have just joined the new American elite. These posts are coffee-break length, and last time I checked, that was 15 minutes. Congratulations. Even better, this blog has a high Dunning-Fogg index and tends to contain at least a smidgen of new information every day.
Myself, I read approximately three hours every day. Add in another hour of writing, of which 60% is this blog. (Though this blog is rarely written in one long stretch, more like four ten-minute bursts, and even that includes the required thinking time.) For the record, what material can I recall reading in the last 24 hours? A text on Basic programming, the Smithsonian, two National Geographic, Time, a woodworking manual, a chapter on warfare, the newspaper, several recipes, a field guide (birds), and parts of the Almanac, electrical code, and a rather technical passage on materials used to make the test tubes used in centrifuges.
And you can test me on any word of information contained in any of that material. Try me. Like that article in the library about the black guy who lived to be 134 years of age. Nonsense, back then sons of fathers who deceased while the son was under 17 often “adopted” the father’s birthdate to avoid military service. It’s a practice also common in Russia, where people mysteriously live to very ripe old ages. Back then, you were who you said you were, so tacking on an extra 30 years was no big deal.
Nor is this idle reading to pass the time. The part on warfare was concerning a new method used to estimate the populations of European areas where the census was uncommon. They did it by working back from surviving formulas of “hides”, or the amount of land required by one farmer to support his family. Every ninth farmer was on castle duty while the other eight brought in his crops. So there was always a garrison manning the ramparts. They know from the Romans it took one man to defend 4.25 feet of castle wall, so they can work backwards to find the population. Your turn.
NIGHT
I’ll get to the house in a second, but take a look at the good old angulator. Remember that, back in the days when I could not afford a sextant. This shows the view from 75 feet back of the dead tree. This was an exercise to find a more exact height than the shadow, which is very difficult as it falls north into the neighbors yard. See the batbike peeking through the handhold.
Closer inspection shows this house has already been raised. There are blocks on top of the concrete blocks and the paint matches the last exterior coating. According to Howie, that was some twenty-something years ago. That makes sense, they would not have had the benefit of laser levels and thus straightened only the perimeter. The solution is to raise the entire house and put a permanent foundation, but that is beyond my capabilities. And I’d be happy just to see another twenty-something years.
Rather than under-think the situation, I went out and sang a couple of Karaoke songs. “Pirate Looks at Forty” and “Oh Lonesome Me”. There was a skinny blonde lady who caught my fancy but she was with the gaggle and didn’t show the required interest to get me over there. Agt. R was present and we went over the situation where the jacks are too large to fit under the house. I sketched out some ways to possibly do it by leverage, but nothing so far.
Our decision is to simply try one corner of the house to see if digging a small pit to fit the jack is suitable, though it looks to me like that’s what didn’t work well for the last guy. The jack sinks into the sand as fast as it raises the house, and sinks even faster if you dig a hole to place a support pad.
ADDENDUM
Still shaking the flu, my appetite took y’day off. I still consider the American diet to e largely responsible for the majority of ailments. You can’t open a magazine without multi-page “ask your doctor” ads. Which must thrill doctors to no end. I didn’t reject a lot of foods even ten years ago and I fear by then the damage was already done. To all of us. I just haven’t developed many of the conditions yet. I was shopping and could not find a single brand of soup that didn’t contain modified food starch. When I see it, the product goes right back on the shelf.
There’s your logical progression. If it is on the shelf, the store is selling it. That means 100% of the people who buy soup are eating that substance. I usually make my own soup, but sometimes you want something different. Just not that different.
[Author's note: there is an emerging group of people who claim that humans have been genetically modifying plants and animals for ages. The usual example is the wolf puppy chosen as the friendliest of each litter to be bred finally into pets. Folks, this is assisted natural selection, in the wild those puppies would probably not survive. That's the point, that nature takes its time and eliminates those strains which are too mutated.
It is a completely different matter to chemically or radioactively alter DNA before it is "born". That is what is done to corn and soy. Nature does not produce the gene mix from which the desirable traits are chosen. Monsanto does it in a laboratory. God, some people are so stupid you wonder why it doesn't hurt.
Trivia. If they don’t make incandescent bulbs any more, how come you can still find them in small sizes at the hardware store. Ah, they are the small sizes only, and no, they are not just leftover stock. It turns out that LEDs don’t work well inside fridges, ovens, and many of those small recessed lighting boxes. You still need filament bulbs for that.
It’s a fact many people don’t like paying up to $20 for a light bulb, so they have hoarded cartons of incandescents. But those will disappear since they were intentionally manufactured to last only around 620 hours each. The claim is 1,000, but it is 620. My old singer, Annie, worked in a light bulb factory.
Last Laugh
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