One year ago today: August 25, 2015, on anti-Trump types.
Five years ago today: August 25, 2011, books & bands.
Nine years ago today: August 25, 2007, headlamps & graffiti.
Random years ago today: August 25, 2012, more Colorado.
MORNING
This blurry pic is me pointing out to people to avoid wasting juke box money on these “live” versions. They are always half-assed and do not get the crowd going. I know about juke box heroes, but trust me, play the song that people know. There’s a reason that was what became a hit. The motive for juke box owners to fake you into the live recording is they make a bigger profit margin by avoiding full royalties. No, you will not ever get a faithful live version these days either, because the Millennial Copyright (Digital Rights) means even the artists can’t perform their own hits without making substantial alterations.
“. . . the understanding that a single straight male in his 30’s is going to try to bring women home. As often as possible. Because that’s how it is.”
That’s the spirit, dude. Reminds me a lot of myself. Too honest to go into politics. The new van has a problem with the power steering. I talked with JZ again and he says the van will make it. He’s invited out today to size up what we’ll need and to show me the van. It may not be that bad, Florida is a great place for used vehicles—but not much else.
More time in the library convinces me to repair the floor in four or five segments. Research and further measurements indicate the floor warped independently of the walls and roof. Think of it as a cube with the bottom dented upward. What’s been repaired so far shows that is easy to fix, relatively, by removing the pressure causing the dent. Yes, it destroys the old oak floor. Or destroys it just until I figure out what to do with all those boards. I didn’t throw them out.
Next, since I’m waiting at home again, I read the latest NASA research on the 900-day Mars mission, so long overdue. NASA’s specialty remains how to waste resources on political correctness. How much more will they squander on the “Star Trek” premise that the crew always has to get along. If you follow the NASA experimental logic, you’ll see them bluntly refuse to admit it is always “people who need people” causing the major friction. Does NASA fairly report these findings?
No, because it isn’t PC. Instead they drivel up distorted results that portray the good “friendlies” against the bad “reclusives” who are bent on sabotaging the mission by insisting on being left alone at least once in a while. No mention is made that the reclusives are in the majority. The solution is, of course, to mandate that each person is entitled to as much peace and quiet as he wants. Alas, that will never happen in space, at the phone company, or at your family Thanksgiving dinner.
However, there are alternatives. It may cost a bit more, but providing a separate compartment for each astronaut is not inconceivable, it NASA drops the bullshit and starts now. Quite with the pretense that the trip must be multinational, multicultural, multi-sexual, multi-religious, or multi-lingual. NASA is the only source of the idiocy that an integrated spaceship is some kind of pre-requirement. Take a lesson from historical trips in the past where explorers endured years of hardships in confined quarters—do not let people self-assess for the trip. Or the “friendlies” will lie like dogs to impose themselves on anyone they can.
Look what happened with the biome spheres. For the Mars mission, it is most prudent to choose people of similar backgrounds and dispositions with a long history of getting along. We can’t leave the matter up to “personality”, it’s just too chancy. And as I said after my review of the South Pole explorations, no export of politics, military, or religion allowed. Ban it completely for the trip, make each traveller put up collateral on Earth if he breaks the rule. Focus on the mission, not the man. The time to make speeches, salute like a trained monkey, and thank God is after everybody gets back alive.
My policy on successful space travel will never be followed for two reasons. One, it is a government operation and two, the cerebral have-nots are a majority in every non-private situation. That’s correct, generally speaking, it is the lesser IQs that need more group behavior, there’s safety in numbers. They would never give up the option to bother you whenever and whatever. I have the ability to work beside somebody I don’t like and don’t respect without speaking a word to them in years, and I’ve done it. If they feel offended, that’s just too bad. I have my rights, too.
It’s the old adage, if we are put here to help others, what are others put here for? I’m reading a book by a doctor who agrees. Dr. Denis Leary, there’s an Irish name for you. Here’s a guy with a similar background but from a different generation who has derived the same conclusions as I have, particularly in Chapter Six, “Autism Shmautism”. It’s parents who can’t accept their brats are stupid, lazy, and fat that seek to make that a special needs situation. Here’s a direct quote from page 93:
“The type of guys who spend money in strip clubs are the ones who don’t have . . . enough self-esteem to talk to the pretty girls at work but just enough self-esteem to keep them from hiring a hooker.”
Wanted poster.
NOON
This isn’t what it looks like, a photo of the club grinder and sander at the new location. This is one of your last tales that is actually from the trailer court. You see, last week Agt. M got the crown knocked off his front tooth by an errant tennis ball. Like most guys, he convinces himself he will never get a beautiful girlfriend if his tooth isn’t perfect. So, with the equipment you see here plus some epoxy from my tool kit, he fashioned and repaired and glued the tooth cover back on. You can see the little mirror he propped on the sander to check for alignment but not the spring clamps he used to hold the crown in place until the glue set.
Much as I join with the analysts who tell people not to rely on social security, it is best to keep informed. After all, it is money in the bank and in retirement, all sources should be factored in. I looked at the payouts and folks, it’s at least milk and cookies. I was watching for other changes but except for the age qualifications, nothing much has been altered in twenty years. The danger is not your check, you’ll get that, but since you are being paid with fake money, what will it buy?
As I’ve said, there is now a gap between the age promised to me when I was 18 (which was the month after your 65th birthday), and today, at least a year later for most people. Now I have to come up with cash to cover the difference. That’s the urgency and that the right time to plan is now. In effect, it is like being told by surprise that you’ll have to live a year with your allowance cut off.
One other way to deal with it is boomer style. Leave it to the last moment, then scream, “Poor me!” Or the New Orleans variant, “I never thought God would do such a mean thing.”
This called for a review of expenses this year to date. Extra travel to Lakeland has cost me $634.00 even, not counting materials and lumber bought at the new site. It’s also added $34.00 to my coffee bill, but that’s no surprise since I need my coffee on the road and always buy for whoever I’m traveling with. My miscellaneous for household, taxes, and everything from postage stamps to extra magazines I buy for the Amtrak burgeoned out to an extra $260.00 per month for three months running.
Biggest over-budget item was the scooter, which since June as got a new carburetor, new brake pads, and a new throttle cable, totaling $145.00. When I describe 509 (the new place) as a money pit, I could put some real numbers to that. But I won’t. All I’ll say is the initial outlays appear over with and any new money will be direct value-added—and I’ve been looking forward to that. I like renovating.
At times, you may have noticed better pictures from the new camera. It is a Vivitar again, which reveals its ancestry by eating batteries and locking itself up periodically so even the OFF button doesn’t work—nor does it time out, so you have to remove the batteries to reset the damn thing. Video mode clobbers batteries in a matter of minutes and the camera cannot be powered by the USB cable, so that’s pretty brainless, Vivitar. Here’s where I get to point out that in the 1990’s, video batteries lasted at least two hours—and those camcorders had serious moving parts.
Super-Mouse is back again. This is the one that can defeat any trap, taking the food without tripping the trigger. Brazen, she has learned to escape from the kitchen counter in time no matter how fast you get through the door. This is the mouse that will gnaw through Tupperware and can get on top of the range hood somehow. Alas, I have to camera I can set up to study her moves. She can completely clean the bait off an ordinary mouse trap in a few minutes, even if I smear the bait (peanut butter) directly into the spring and latch.
I agree with Taylor Swift, the biggest on-line nuisance is click-bait. My personal pet peeve is infotainment and docutainment. I estimate there are 95 idiot returns on every search for facts or knowledge. This immense waste of time will endure now that computers have become entertainment for the troll caste. Nobody took up my idea to create a self-policing search engine that channeled users into categorizing results. That is, for example, when you looked up “free movies”, you could check a box that flagged a given site as not free.
My contention is that on-line advertising is so annoying that the majority of people would correctly flag the seven foremost categories of web nuisance. I won’t list them because like “click-bait”, I don’t necessarily know the trending names. But conceptually, I refer to such annoyances as pop-ups, malware, fake surveys, and many subcategories that the world would be better without. The biggest on-line bother is pin-heads to cannot think of better method of advertising their wares than repetition, maybe you’ll buy something just to get them to shut up. Hey, that’s the tactic my brothers use to get laid.
AFTERNOON
Library time again, and I’ve decided on a method to insulate my floor at the cabin. I’ll test your imagination by describing my plan without a diagram. There are eight joists at 2-foot centers, with seven spaces between them. I will cut furring strips to the correct width to staple chicken wire at the right depth, then lay insulation batts with the vapor barrier upward toward the living space. The down on the joists goes my ¾” marine grade plywood. I’ve read that weatherproofing over the plywood makes the room quieter and wood flooring easier to walk on.
This isn’t easy. Ask the Kennedys, Clintons, and Bushes.
I show only R-13 insulation suspended above the chicken wire. My research said since this is insulating a crawlspace, simply blocking any crosscurrent by placing an apron around the house is more effective than thicker insulation. At this time, I suppose either theory is good enough. I’m shying more toward the apron, however, when I remember the labor involved in hauling those nine bags of leaves out to the driveway.
I sketched, the rapidly zonked out and fell asleep for six hours. Not before I read a cookbook featuring absurd cookie recipes. It was not the cookies themselves, but all the contortions made to shapes and icing decoration. What good is a cookie that’s damn near too pretty to eat?
While at the library, I looked at a gable vents. I have two on the front part of the house, but they didn’t bother installing one for the east wing. There are no soffit vents, so insulating the rafters will be somewhat easier since I can push the batts right into the the edges. I looked further at soundproofing the walls, and it seems the most economical method is double drywall with a “high density” paper between. I learned that greenwall, a type of drywall that has a waterproof skin, is no longer approved or recommended for most bathroom work, including tub enclosures. I was busy.
NIGHT
I had occasion to read this blog on a smart phone. Those gadgets certainly do reveal that blogs are mostly prose. This blog, more of a journal, has roots firmly in the era of full size computer monitors and that is how it should be read. My stats page show that only a minority of readers here are using Android, which Trent has long pointed out means I’m not big on the smart phone circuit. Let me think on that. I was here before smart phones came along and know what fads look like.
Having the time, I read some books on floor coverings. Personally, I think a lot of it looks like somebody’s half-cooked ideas on how to recycle construction debris. It doesn’t make sense how a vinyl product with a printed pattern 1/16th of an inch deep can be marketed as flooring. People drag grand pianos across flooring. I saw more than one brand that came with a “touch-up kit”, which is more than a bit much for me.
ADDENDUM
Book Thirteen brings the ending of Darwin’s career and life. You kind of guess that, as everybody is dying all around him. He visits Stonehenge, studies earthworms, and hears about an American making a new-fangled contraption called a “typewriter”. Then decides he’s too old to learn to use it. He wonders if taxes will always go up and thinks his money went toward Britain’s purchase of half the Suez Canal. He wonders which half.
He received around 75 awards and honors, more than Isaac Newton. To his deathbed Darwin exhibits that rich kid “not-my-personal-fault” attitude toward the have-nots. The poor Irishmen are troublesome, the poor Scottish are grumbling sorts, but their upper classes, when properly civilized, are reasonably good company. As always, Darwin never expresses a view on religion notwithstanding that is who is behind all the dissent.
It is evident the few church people who have actually read his book realize Darwin is on the right track. So they invent the off-center argument that Darwin is wrong because he “failed” to declare that evolution was “preordained”, a tack custom-scripted for today’s televangelists. The replacement theory for Darwin will, I predict, come from the discovery of independently evolved life on Mars. In our era, such a theory is not likely to be the exclusive work of one individual, but if it is he will be more of a cheerleader than team captain. And have the same preferences.
No, I would not recommend this book unless you are amused by long passages concerning English gardens, bumpy roads, and never lose sight that Victorian society was a trial run for the New World Order. I mean, do you have any idea how difficult it is to get the lower classes to provide a decent butler? They’re always too busy living on porridge and working 60 hour weeks to focus on what is important in life.
Overall, the book lacks any substantial amount of new information, though it is well-written and researched, enough of that research has a modern bias. For example, nobody in the England of 1862 actually thought the American Civil War was about slavery because it was about rebellion until later. There are colorful characters, but who wouldn’t be next to Darwin? The famous episode with Wilburforce is barely mentioned. The captain of the H.M.S. Beagle was Fitzroy and that weirdo merits independent study of how the Royal Navy promotes out of the ruling class without regard to skills. Remember, this was the same Navy as the H.M.S. Bounty and Captain Bligh.
Fitzroy goes on to become a critic of Darwin, publishes false claims later in life, and finally commits suicide over public ridicule concerning his insane contention that weather could be forecast. What a nut case!
Last Laugh
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