One year ago today: March 18, 2016, a history of violence.
Five years ago today: March 18, 2012, Tobacco Road.
Nine years ago today: March 18, 2008, shade-grown coffee.
Random years ago today: March 18, xxxx, WIP
My whole day was burned up by logistics, including doing the laundry for my trip. Say, I mentioned my missing camera. Well, it fell off the shelf and I have this rack of hooks where I hang my work shirts. I only wash those every few times unless they get really bad off. Hey, I used to just replace them and let somebody else look after that. Anyway, the camera has a lanyard that grabbed one of the hooks and there it was when grabbed a shirt this morning. It was a day’s work just to get two electrical outlets trimmed. But they are done right, you betcha.
Here’s a shot of the woven leather inlay on the new dresser set. This is a still from the video made y’day for my estate records. And, of course, the lady friend I’m hoping will come out for an extended visit once I get the place shipshape has to be impressed. I may still be here to help the move Monday morning. The clinic called, they want some labs, which mean I go in a day later. That would be okay, it is still chilly out there. I’d be here to put the tarps down. This beautiful furniture is going to be outside for at least two weeks.
Throne of Solomon.
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JZ called, he’s driving another beater. This one has a bad water pump. The schedule is we go to the county fair again. It’s designed for kids, but always walk an interesting tour of the science projects and they consistently have booths selling new things never seen before. Remind me to sneak in some special food for the petting zoo, it’s called “carrots”. JZ has some free tickets, I won’t say how that happened, but everybody is cheap in their own way. Myself, I don’t wash my work shirts until they get dirty. It’s just so much weirder when rich kids do it.
And just so you hipsters know, your greatest generation is not fixing the exploding battery problem. They are merely inserting a heavier metal plate inside the case that will theoretically lessen your injury. You should be familiar and comfortable with that sort of half-baked solution, as if you did not already know you are also the expendable generation. Your futures have been mortgaged, the good jobs are gone, your parents really are the idiots you think they are, and you dare not speak out against these overseas battery plants, because that would make you racist. Bwaaaaa-ha-ha-ha . . .
Here’s some trivia for you. See this photo? If you have a light colored carpet and you use some tape to make a dark colored rectangle in about the proportions shown, you cat will go sit in it. Another bit for you, why are the Marines called leathernecks? That’s what the sailors called them because in the early days, they wore a stiff leather collar so a scimitar slash could not slice off their heads.
Being serious, JZ and I had a discussion about primer. I had always intended to prime the exterior of my place properly. About a few weeks ago, I read that the correct procedure is an oil-based primer. However, I could not find a word about whether or not it was acceptable to place other than an oil-based outer layer over top. This is one of those typical situations where you are supposed to know, but is really the result of assumptions made by others.
This blog is not ashamed to ask dumb questions, because when a guy like me asks this kind of question, it ain’t me that is dumb—there is something lacking at the other end. JZ says yes, the oil primer can be covered by any other paint. He’s done it, but could not answer when queried if he’d ever gone back to check on a job where this procedure was used, say, twenty years ago. For a bit, I could not figure out why he called about the painting, but then I remembered, I’d mailed him the paintbrush with his name on it.
“These people that get eaten by sharks -
can't they hear the music?”
Myself, I’m still going to research that. There is a reason old paint flakes and bubbles, I’d like to put that to rest. For I never intend to paint this house another time. I’ve noted many of the name brand primers include properties like fungicide and mold inhibitor. JZ says the primer is thinner than paint and will also coat a lot of avenues that insects would use to get at the wood. And he says to thin the primer even further. To me, that defeats the purpose. I understand two thin coats are better than one thick coat. But I have always intended to put two layers of primer wherever any bare wood was exposed.
I’m going ahead with or without any help. I may be crawling forward by other standards, but there is enough progress that there will be an end to the major work. A house always requires something and I tried to find a local source of wooden shakes. It’s one of those things I’ve always wanted to do. Instead, I get all these places who sell shingles, with a disclaimer that they are for decoration only. Cost would not be a big problem if I decide to learn by doing.
In that same vein, who remembers the sewing machine lessons I took back in Hollywood? I still have the sewing machine in perfect condition. The sting there was the only place that gave lessons was frightfully expensive. If I recall, the fee worked out to something like $65 per hour. It was not like you could go there and learn one thing. In my case that would have been the way to cuff trousers. All my life, I can’t find a good fit in a good style. And just last time around, JZ was saying his tailor charged more for the cuff than the trousers cost at the Goodwill. Well, something has come up.
This lady, a disabled senior kind of into Jesus, used to volunteer at a group home in Zephyrhills. I’m ever leery of these homes because I associate them with welfare. And poverty is a relative thing. When I grew up, the welfare kids in town had things I never did. The Ridley kids got nicer presents and a new bicycle every other year. The Johnsons had a color TV and Old Man McAllistar sat in the bar from opening till closing for forty years. When the Goulet’s trailer burnt down, some say no accident, the state replaced it with a four bedroom bungalow, though that would still have been a squeeze for 16 kids. And all the welfare kids that wanted it got college grants.
When I applied—after I was 18—I was turned down because of my parent’s income. I’ve said before how my parents always made enough to disqualify me from any outside help. When I went to college, only one kid in four had a student loan. And most of those didn’t need it. They used the money to buy houses that eventually sold for a half million apiece. A tax free capital gain.
Well, this lady has established a class with a cause. She makes quilts for the group home. They need 70 of them. I could use one around here, you know. I had to take two days off work this week from the cold because I have provision to only heat one room at a time. The living room is not yet insulated, and I’m sleeping in that room while the renovations are going on. Be damned if I’ll shiver in there.
The program works like this. You have to supply your own scissors and pins and such. That’s fair. You learn the sewing skill by her guiding you through the manufacture of six quilts. You then make a seventh quilt that is yours to keep. She has a series of neat-looking guides to cut the patterns. What impresses me most is that she is anti-government. She does not like the way the government treats the group home, or the way they won’t allow her to make the quilts directly for the inhabitants. Nor will they allow her to advertise that the quilts are for a charitable cause or they will cut funding to the home.
She thus sets up a table at the library and hands out pamphlets. However, in the library, the government won’t let her describe the need for the quilts, so one side of the pamphlets is blank. If you step outside, she can give you the full pamphlet describing the program. I’m considering it. Six quilts is a lot of hands-on. And the course is held on otherwise nothing Mondays, I like that.
ADDENDUM
See this tank? The people who built it are far more likely to survive the war than the people who use it. That’s what I spent a couple hours looking into this day. I got curious about the percentage of a species that must die before Darwin’s theory of evolution becomes the selection process he describes. Once again, here’s a simple question which has almost no published or locatable data on-line. Is the question clear?
Darwin and others assert how the weaker specimens get weeded out so that those with the stronger traits eventually survive to pass the advantage on to their offspring. My inquiry was what percentage of the species must die before the effect is evolutionarily significant? One in five? Ten? Twenty?
It would not surprise me with species like insects that 99% get killed and eaten before they reproduce. But I was more interested in the higher species, like birds and man. I’ve long since observed how man is the only species that preserves its weaker members at the expense of the stronger. This is not a discussion of morality and not an invitation to have that argument. I personally question the wisdom of the on-going pouring resources into mechanically or chemically keeping people alive past their time. I view it as an unnatural upset of Nature by people with a poor attitude toward death.
[Author’s note: before any liberal types have a conniption and point out that I take heart medications (chemicals), there is a difference. Read what I said. I’m talking about the artificial prolonging of life and not short-term treatments or inexpensive controls. I would not die within minutes if my prescriptions were not renewed. So there.]
Back to my question, what proportion of birds or humans have to die in each generation so that the effect of evolution becomes material? I found most available writings concern studies of human aggression, focused on the issue of whether conflict [itself] was inherent or man-made. My conclusion is I’m not going to find an answer but here are the more remarkable results. There are less than 500 skeletons of prehistoric man ever found, hardly enough to spot trends. A significant number of these skeletons showed signs of a violent death at the hands of other humans, the usually embedded spear points or marks of cannibalism.
Fine, except I want numbers, not sermons. Apparently enough records exist for historians to determine that up to 25% of adult males died in warfare in ancient times, that is, one in four. This directly suggests that while the casualties were not the best soldiers, they were still among the toughest of the species. The survivors would be the best combatants. Why not leap to the conclusion that therefore the biggest and toughest men are the ones who live to reproduce?
Well, first, look around you. After the brief but long-enough period of the past ten thousand years, why are not there only big, tough goon-like men still around? One theory says all the weaker, smaller, men did not become soldiers, so they are the survivors. But another theory caught my attention. It says that due to the huge casualty rate of early mankind, the impetus to form into protective groups resulted in the rise of nation states. Significantly, these led to armies supported by ever more complicated societies needed to keep those armies in the field.
Thus, there was a movement to cooperate throughout the entire social framework because the presence of nation-states lowered the casualty rates down to 5%. If you had a nation with a military-industrial structure, you had to balance competition with conflict because all your neighbors were doing the same thing. And, your overall death rate among males fell to a fifth of what it was before. Now, instead of the tough guys always winning, it was the side with the best leaders, planners, logicians, factories, farmers, and so on.
It isn’t all positive news. This also means that there will be a larger proportion of the population that do not make good soldiers. This is your traditional tail-to-teeth ratio. In America this has always been an embarrassing 75 to 1. It takes that many people working to keep one soldier fighting at the front. You may find it peculiar that the opposite is Germany, where they can fight wars with only 5 to 1 behind the lines.
In conclusion, I don’t have any answer. But I have some theories. Maybe the wars are not killing the best humans, but just the gronks of the species. In which case, even fantastic death rates in battle would not have that telling an effect on the evolution of the species as a whole. It would result only in a surplus of women, who in the main do not participate in large-scale organized combat. This surplus, no matter how tiny, would, however, be enough to affect evolution much more than the loss rates. In which case, 10,000 years or so might be enough to make a genetic difference between races. And just where would that difference be most pronounced? Probably in areas with the most nation states. That’s my theory. Now will somebody please go out there and prove it so I can be immortalized or something.
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