One year ago today: August 23, 2016, itching to sell.
Five years ago today: August 23, 2012, memorized talking points.
Nine years ago today: August 23, 2008, nothing happened all day.
Random years ago today: August 23, 2006, a day in the year I lost.
The final layer of soundproofing, that’s what this is. You see the sandwich of tarpaper and drywall. (This is a mock-up only.) The actual product will not be the two equal thickness of board, the inner sheet will be only 1/4” material. Inside the wall will be 5-1/2” of soundproofing material, or if ordinary insulation is as effective as the bedroom, maybe that. And another layer of tarpaper and finish on the other side. This is to isolate the main bedroom from any bathroom noise.
Sure, they report riots at his rallies and violence surrounding his supporters. But it’s like the studies they report that show we are all equal—would they tell you about a report if it said otherwise? I do have a question—why are so many ships colliding and aircraft crashing in the military lately? Okay, time for me to speculate what’s really going on. This could be funnier than Jeff Beck, so listen up.
REASONS FOR FLURRY OF RECENT MILITARY CRAFT ACCIDENTS
• The US Navy has gone millennial. When the Admiral screamed “hard to port”, for reasons that remain classified, the entire poop deck crew were offended. The helmsperson, misunderstanding the order because it was not via smart phone, instinctively opened as many portholes as could be found without reference to gender. Upon discovering the Admiral was furious, the millennials decided they had “won” some kind of argument and busied themselves texting that he meant “the other port”. Truth by majority rule smack into the flank of a Liberian oil tanker.
• The Air Force has gone liberal. The Nixon administration proved that only liberals believe polls and that most liberals aren’t smart enough to grasp said polls. This means a press corps for another five hundred years. By careful wording of the questionnaire, Huffington proved that the pilots of “routine training missions” were “mostly older white guys” while tactfully avoiding the term “supremists”. This caused all libtards on board to stampede to the extreme left, flipping the aircraft over on landing approach.
• The military has been recruiting their officers from college graduates. Unable to read the rulebook on ethics, these 18-month-wonders were still able to trade insider stock options on naval repair yards and aircraft factories “should any unforeseen situation arise that requires the extensive replacement of existing combat weapons”. Take it from there, but remember, they are the offshoot of the $8,000 toilet seat bunch.
• The Pentagon, in a black book project, contracted out the guidance and control apps of our ships, tanks, and planes to a programming facility near Pyongyang. Don’t worry, the code is proof-read and approved by MicroSoft and Google, who must declare if fit for usage. The system they say, “looks just fine” as long as nobody over at WikiLeaks questions a few megatons, er I mean megabytes, of impenetrable subroutining here and there. And everywhere.
What, you think the above could not happen? Didn’t CNN fire that Chinese guy who’s father has been hounding him, “Why you no change name?” And although I have no love for Amazon, it’s clear that outfit has hurt Google and Wal*Mart, who are now teaming up to see if they can’t do something about it. They can’t, I think. Google is a grossly mismanaged company that is heading for something and Wal*Mart has fallen flat on it’s ass every time they tried to branch into anything except suburban malls. These people think they are going to tackle the Internet’s 800-pound snake oil salesman? Sure, I’ll be watching. I’ve been wrong before.
Maine highlands.
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The Sun’s position over central Florida during the eclipse of August 21, 2017. Yes, I did the calculation, and with my penchant for explaining things in plain English, I’ll tell how. It is all a an exercise in modular arithmetic, you don’t need a sextant or clock, or even go outside to calculate the geographic position of the Sun. Ah, somebody out there is thinking, why didn’t I calculated the position of the Moon. It takes two to eclipse.
Because I downloaded the first “almanac” I found on the Internet, that’s why. And I got the millennial version. It has no listings for the Moon. I mean, what kind of total loser calls something an Almanac and leaves out the Moon? Nautical Almanac 2016, that’s www.nauticalalmanac.it, that’s who is that stupid. So stupid I deactivated the link. Now, I must return to the library today to get the missing information.
The brainwork involves a pencil and an Almanac. At any given moment in time, the Sun is directly over only one spot on the Earth. That’s the one place you could stand and not cast a shadow. The Almanac is a “train schedule” of where that spot will be every hour on the hour 8,766 times per year. What? Oh, that’s 365-1/4 times 24. Geez, Ken, do I have to teach you everything?
Somewhere else in the Almanac is a Table of Increments and Corrections, which is misleading because what’s an increment and don’t you have to make a mistake before you can correct it?. But that’s the English for you, and when you look up something in the tables, they call it “entering” when in fact you are taking information out of the book. Come to think of it, maybe there’s a good reason Europe put them all on one little island.
Anyway, the process is straightforward. I chose 2:46 PM on August 21, 2017 because to my observation, that was the moment of maximum occlusion. Later, I found out it was 2:51, but as you may know, the robot club forbids going back and tweaking the criteria. Twisting the facts to fit the conclusion is okay for Jeff Beck, but it will get you kicked off our property. The first thing you do is find the Universal Time. Florida is five time zones west of Greenwich, so the time of observation was 19:46 UT.
Following convention, you look up where the Sun was on the hour of 19:00 Greenwich time, and it was 104° 14.9’ west of that meridian. (Say ‘one hundred four degrees fourteen point nine minutes’.) The terminology can be confusing, since distances are measure in degrees, not miles, and thus this number is called the “Greenwich Hour Angle”. But don’t worry about that, we now know where the Sun was at 2:00 local time and now let’s flip to that Table of Increments and Corrections and find the page for 46 minutes.
As for my calculation, I dunno, something seems wrong about that. But the rule of thumb is trust your instruments. Maybe tomorrow I’ll delve a little deeper. It just seems a little too far to the west. But hey, I don’t make these calculations every day.
[Author’s note: if you’ve been following my celestial navigation studies, you may spot that what I just did above is the second step in finding your position. The first step is you use a sextant to measure your angle to the Sun. The second step is you calculate the spot where the Sun is. Third, you calculated how far you are from that spot along a line. Fourth step is you repeat this from another angle, position, or time, and look at where the two lines cross. QED, not.]
“Red meat is not bad for you.
Fuzzy green meat is bad for you.”
~ Anon.
Since waiting doesn’t work, I took time to plan JZ’s next trip over here to the interior. I understand that thinking ahead is not as popular an activity as it ought to be. I’ve picked five or six days in September to fit the bill. Who wants to plan ahead for gas, time, lost income, and other such costs that nobody without a credit card can afford? Not my pal, that’s for sure. It’s a headache unless you know somebody like me. I’ve mapped out how we can make the trip, visit the new mansion in Punta Gorda, stop for brews at the Limestone Country Club, and get back here in time to chase the non-existent women at the bar.
ADDENDUM
FYI I avoid using Adobe PDF reader because of their bad reputation for installing things you don’t want on your computer. They do this by constantly “upgrading” their flash player. That app itself has not been upgraded in years, it is just a ruse to get you to click on the upgrade so Adobe can install their spyware. (You should be automatically suspicious of any app that is constantly upgrading--except trusted anti-spyware sites.) Instead, I use a product called Foxit, which is nice, but poorly designed for constant usage. For one, when you navigate to a page, the page is inactive. To scroll up and down, you have to waste time clicking on the page. Every time. Look at fifty pages, stop and click fifty times.
This is probably the source of the old Internet saying that if you ask a millennial how to build a watch and he’ll tell you what time it is.
Last Laugh
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