One year ago today: October 18, 2014, last full-size photo.
Five years ago today: October 18, 2010, I begin looking at sidecars.
Six years ago today: October 18, 2009, see my favorite car.
MORNING
Here’s an ad for a .17 HMR single shot bolt action self-cocking rifle. I found several ads that contained errors before deciding this one was a proper description. I was right about the weapon costing in the $300 range, but was disappointed to find out that there was no new “smaller than .22” weapon on the market that could lower the cost of “plinking”.
As promised, I looked into this .177 “ammunition” issue and I think I may have stumbled on the truth, or at least stubbed a toe on it. It turns out to be a very common misprint, confusion between .17 and .177. What I said about Millennials failing at narration applies to the advertising department in general. They lack the broader base of knowledge required to get through school not that long ago. The .177 remains an air rifle pellet, the mix-up is with the .17 HMR (Hornady Magnum Rimfire) cartridge, and I knew about that in a roundabout way.
I gave up .22 target practice long ago because the bullets got too expensive. The cheapest was the .22 short, but it suffered badly from drop-off. When I hear about the .17 HMR, I thought maybe it was a scaled down .22 but nope. It is a different design and costs just as much, about 25¢ per round. Ammo was the first product I ever recognized as “going up in price” as opposed to ordinary inflation. Because, if you think about it, one item that should never really go up is bullets in America. Think it through.
The .17 was developed to replace an older type taken out of production long ago. It is a long rifle .22 shell casing necked down to .17 to give the bullet a very flat trajectory. Great for target practice for rich kids, but such muzzle speeds will splatter most targets. Also, the report is much louder and sharper. Same as when I was a kid, the cheapest bullet still costs more than 25 times as much as your basic pellet.
Well, isn’t this something. Nobody made it to the club meeting this morning. But they came by later to bring me food I can’t eat (pizza, pastries) and borrow the breakfast budget money to pay admission to go ride bicycles around the state park. Hey, that still leaves me a member of a club far more intellectual than anything else I’ve ever found in the State of Florida. Look on Meet-Up, that’s the type of organization that makes it in this town. “Semi-literal beer-drinking cliques.”
I might add at my age, pastries are supposed to be a little like soda crackers. Not the European ones that are like eating ice cream with jam and syrup. I put them in the freezer.
NOON
Oh look, it’s a picture of the cPod base. I reused the old plate, now cut to 42”. Shown here, I am scraping the old waterproofing compound so I can match up the new, thinner side panels. I won’t barrage you with pictures, as the structure is similar as versions one. That unit was overbuilt something like six times stronger than it had to be, but I had no idea what I was doing. And you know what it is like to ask for any help around this town.
The underside of this wagon is now a mass of wiring. Very expert wiring, though. I also measured and cut the pieces for the new under-seat storage box where the scooter battery used to be. This, and the scraping, took many times longer to finish than I anticipated. All afternoon and early evening until dark, as a matter of fact. And I’m dusty, tired, and full of workingman scrapes and cuts.
My bent and broken drill bit sculpture, having gotten a boost today, is coming along just fine. Time was lost as visitors came by, it takes ten or fifteen minutes each to convince them I’m really busy. Agt. M was over to donate a big bag of organic apples. We are talking about how little use we actually got out of the MIG arc welder. If you don’t do it every day, it gets to be a hassle when you have to. I’ve been thinking about those spot welders that look like an old pair of ice tongs.
Does anyone know if they are handier for small parts? Or is that another thing I’m on my own?
The question remains, how does the scooter behave now with the new battery? I took it down to twelve times the maximum possible current draw, and man, it wants to start now. It leaps to life at a touch of the starter. I hope this doesn’t throw something else off, but I don’t think so. Everything is adequately wired to use only a fraction of the available juice.
EVENING
Lactose intolerance. That is the trivia for today. I read a theory that cheese was invented because some races have genetics that make them lactose intolerant. I did not know that cheese is edible to that group. The study went on to map out how groups who raised cattle or lived in forested areas have the smallest proportions of intolerant adults. They also found that Inuit (Eskimo) can digest fat better and that Native Americans can eat a corn based diet without getting fat. I’ll stick with the cheese.
This is Pete the Cactus, in the back yard. He’s grown into a half-ton monster, a good fourteen feet high. And he’s been regularly trimmed back. This, in spite of growing in partial shade of the big trees next door. Who remembers how he was a spindly twig when I moved here and inadvertently planted a spare fertilizer state in the ground to help the little guy along.
Camouflage, the word is French because the idea, in its modern sense, is also French. Since it may be soon that somebody actually makes a cloak of invisibility (using the theory of bending light around an object that many people read for the first time in this blog years ago), I thought I should look into the history of camouflage in more detail than usual.
Turns out more “than usual” may mean even looking at all. Why? Because you find excellent posts on the subject with only 15 hits. People know the information is there, but can’t be bothered to look. You know these people, they are the el stupidos who pay the bank to hide their identity, the most fantastic waste of money every devised, and the first people who scream and hollar when things go wrong.
While we are here, let me introduce another type of camouflage that is not new, but new in its application. Since I saw my first database in the 1970s, I have allowed for “social camouflage”. You cannot (as many people mistakenly believe) remain totally anonymous in modern society. But what you can do is spoof. I call the area of concealing your location, money, and activities as “social camouflage”, and I introduce the term as new.
I do not propose that anyone really go out of their way to hide any of these three items, but I have noticed since a child these are the topics of most interest intense to gossips, tax collectors, and much as some people fail to realize their existance, one’s enemies. Therefore, it is common sense to develop habits that naturally conceal. I say go one step further, that with minor extra effort, one can also mislead. There is no law that says you cannot carefully control what records are kept of where you spend your money, yet this is now known to be a major source of covert surveillance.
An example of my method would be not to buy food or gasoline with a credit card—unless it is your intention to make someone who surreptitiously views your records think you are living in Colorado. Simple and common sense things like that. Take cash out of your bank account at only one ATM and always in fixed amounts, except one large withdrawal at month’s beginning so the snoop will conclude that is your rent and you live nearby. After a while, one naturally gets very, very good at this type of thing.
But to try to conceal yourself, that smacks of conspiracy theorizing, paranoia, and something to hide. Even in peacetime, you do not reveal either your strengths or weaknesses to predatory onlookers. Caution is not a character flaw. Besides, Wallace, Theresa, and Patsie, people with things to hide don’t publish 10,000 page blogs.
ADDENDUM
Well, there’s dumber and dumber, and then there are women who fantasize they are fashion models. What’s been happening, according to NPR, is photographers hang around film shoots and approach random women in the onlookers, would they like their picture taken? Sure, sign here, take this check for $50. Don’t bother reading what you just signed. Just tell yourself how beautiful you are.
Then the standard NPR glop, these ladies who opt for artificial insemination at “age 39”. The tale from that trailer court was how the lady ordered the sperm, but when it arrived, she met and fell in love with a real man. So she gave the sperm to her girlfriend, sure enough, another marriage. Then a third girlfriend. Yep. Either the sperm was magic, or just knowing it was available caused these women to let down their guards.
Before you conclude it must have been the latter, remind yourself of what all three women had listed as their criteria for the sperm donor. So incredibly unrealistic (tall, rich, handsome, high SAT, professional, athletic, basically Superman) were their demands that the turkey baster was probably their only realistic option. Anyhow, there’s a lesson.
During the next program, I turned the radio off. It was an Africa-accented woman detailing how she got pregnant with twins from two different fathers, who now regard themselves as one big happy family. Yeah, right. No mention of how this family was paying all the bills. The focal point of the broadcast was how “traumatic” it was for the woman, hoping which two of the unspecified total number men she’d slept with were the bio fathers. Oh, the pain she went through just wondering about that alone too up half the air time. My guess is 56.
And that brings us to that ignoramus that tried to turn a political rally into a forum for her own personal issues. Yeah, babe, ask the president who you should screw tonight, that’s a really big national issue. Now, because she is trying to duck the issue, is her picture. She is a dyed-in-the-wool paid Jeb Bush staffer who mingled with ordinary college students when Trump took her scripted question.
As for the question of whether CNN or another lying scumbag entity put her up to it or not, they were quick to cut and paste it into a hit piece. I was present when Batchelder was telecast live and her obvious hostility brought howls of derision. Myself, I pointed out (on the cafe TV screen when I saw the broadcast) that she had fat thighs, wore a skirt that was years too young for her, and the scarf around her neck was all too obviously there to hide her disproportionately small upper torso. Even Trump said he should not have chosen that one. He couldn't comment on her looks, but I can. Because I'm "immature". And not running for president. She has blood coming out of her whatever.
What do I think of people like the crazy lady who confront others with personal issues? My guess is 56. This month alone. I hope she’s got a turkey baster, because she’s going to turn 39 a lonely old cat lady in a fast hurry. We had a few of the already-picked-over types on campus back in my day. They haven’t changed. Working for it didn’t pan out, so now they think they can demand it. Whatever “it” is. They don’t seem to care as long as it is all about them. Did everyone notice she flubbed her line, saying “woman” instead of “women”?
Batchelder, you had one job . . .
Last Laugh
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