One year ago today: October 16, 2016, Dolly Parton movie gag-fest.
Five years ago today: October 16, 2012, the Tower video.
Nine years ago today: October 16, 2008, like old family friends.
Random years ago today: October 16, 2013, what about the drop-outs?
Wow, I see my theory that warfare has been around long enough to affect evolution is not that popular with the armed forces. Their credo is the macho tough guy survives and goes on to be a hero. My theory says that the men who operate the tank are far more likely to be killed than the team who designed and built it. Or the crossbow, or the tomahawk, or the lance. Don’t matter, the people who are surviving wars are not he crowd who excel at following orders. My contention is that in organized warfare, a higher percentage of soldiers die than any other class of men. Women don’t count, there is just something so wrong about women on the battlefield.
Here’s one of the Mustang books. You know, in 1986, I did buy a Mustang. It had been parked in a farm shed. I paid $2,000 for it, and that car ran forever. Until pieces of it began to rust off. You could park it for six months and it started fine. It was a 1973 basic model with I think it was a 351 cubic inch V-8. I ran that car until 1989 or 1990, if I recall, when it became too expensive to park it. That, and parts of the floorboards were kind of missing in the back. Besides, by then I had my Cadillac. It was one of the very last full sized Mustangs made, as that was the year I believe they switched over to the dinky toy Mustang II. What a joke those cars were. Anyway, this book will cost you $10, but I’ll ship it by mail for free.
The morning found me once again on the road to Arcadia. Never you mind the details, but it is far easier to travel the 62 miles there than the 51 miles toward Tampa. The people who designed the road system in Tampa were either crackheads or born missing certain important left-brain segments. I suggest that is the same outfit that removed all the Tampa street signs. As far as their worth to mankind, think of the ‘g’ in lasagna. See how far I’ve got my arms apart with my palms facing each other? That’s how way stupid these people are. They are the end of the US empire and I must say it’s been quite a ride. Some of it in a 1973 Mustang.
It turns out my experience with the doors and window beginning to work properly due to work on a distant wall is not at all unusual. But I thought it was, so the blogging remains.
Autobahn.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
According to reliable sources, this is called a ‘griswold’. Yeah, I thought of Chevy Chase, too. You can tell the photo is a Vivitar. The handle screws into a variety of patterns besides the one shown here. This one is completely covered in light rust, so the source of this picture is the need to rig up a pan of rust remover that is long an shallow and can be closed between usages. We have a huge supply of these type of objects that are candidates for rust removal.
Wrong, it is a pastry type thing-a-ma-bob. I watched a YouTube video. I’ve had these fluffy pastries before but found them flimsy and over-priced. What we’ve got is half the set, the half that was more popular. They ranged in price from $20 to $180, so take the lower figure as an idea of what we’ll ever get. I also stopped in to see my legal people out on the Gulf coast and the result was neither happy nor encouraging.
Good thing I was so distracted by this thingee that could have been a branding iron for all I know. You dip the blade into an oil mixture, then into batter, and when the deep-fried part wears off, you get the pastries shown here. Using this tool, each small batch is made by hand and priced accordingly. I’m no longer built for such activity. I was home and crashed by 10:29PM.
“Computers are useless,
they can only give you answers.”
~P. Picasso.
This brand new boat deck and walkway (already dubbed 'the croc walk') is in Lake Placid. We were inspecting it as all the surrounding properties had their ramps and sheds damaged by the hurricane. The wind report for the area was same as here, gusts up to 130 mph. The work shown here was, however, done by a tradesman and also being brand new, all we could discover was a slight warp to the roof. We will fix that with a winch. I was there to talk about my new plumbing. It is clear after a year that JZ is not recovering from the theft of his truck, so I explained to him I need outside help with the project.
This picture is busier than it looks. This is standing out in the lake, looking toward Deb’s private little peninsula. What’s happened is a four foot mother gator has hatched a brood of about twenty baby gators, all nearly a foot long already. They’ve taken up residence in the estuary just to the left of the walkway and are feeding under and around the dock. This picture is looking back toward the mainland, but behind it is a large sandbar island. It is treeless, and you can nearly always see the big male gators swimming back and forth out there to sun.
I only visited for a couple of hours but still didn’t get home until after dark and you know I dislike driving after dark. It’s a motorcycle thing and under normal circumstances I would be driving the motorcycle on a trip like this. A simple day excursion of around 150 miles. But I was also out in that area to schedule medical appointments. It looks like that trip to Miami later this month is becoming a requirement. But happily, that would place me in town during the St. Jude’s Festival, and that event is eye-candy if you like single women as much as I do. Alas, it is not a pick-up joint, so meeting them is almost exclusively dependent on getting an introduction.
ADDENDUM
“Pirate Hunters”. That’s the name of the book I’m into now. I especially enjoy such stories because they emphasize the lesson that if it is easy, it has already been done. The salvage operations, that darling of the magazines is the tail end of the adventure, so most treasure hunting books dwell overlong on the previous lives and struggles of the protagonists. This makes the books dull reading for most, but that is what I’d like to post about. You see, there is a lot of, well, interference, with this career from people who undoubtedly are motivated by greed.
Then, you’ve got entities that claim the treasure belongs to the ship owners or, usually, their descendents. Nor did they go find the treasure, but the usual claim is that they are simply waiting for salvage technology to drop prices to where they can afford it. You spot these crooks because they never file any claims until after somebody else finds the wreck. This picture shows where the wreck was found, if you can see that stick in the water, it was wading distance from shore.
Then, you’ve got UNESCO. The United Nations, the single most self-serving organization ever invented, has countries signing up a treaty that any shipwrecks found in their “territorial waters” belong to that nation, whether or not that nation was ever the owner. Effectively this shuts down treasure hunting except for the few countries that still allow it. Now myself, I would see no drawback with the country getting first pick of the artifacts up to say, 10% of the value provided it was museum-bound, but that’s it. And they must pay for the salvage and estimated value of the find. To claim ownership just because by fluke the ship sank near their coast is bunk. UN-grade bunk, so obviously funded by kick-backs and cronyism.
[Author’s note: What gives the UN any right to cook up these dubious 'treaties', anyway?]
Most treasure hunting is done with a magnetometer, a device that won’t detect precious metals, but can pick up items with iron content that disturb the Earth’s magnetic field. You’d expect even a sailing ship to have nails, muskets, knives, grappling hooks, etc. It’s a torpedo-shaped device towed by an umbilical cord to an on-ship computer. It stays about twenty feet off the ocean floor and sweeps a strip around 75 feet wide. The ship transits back and forth on a grid, a task known as mowing the lawn. The divers must still go over the side to investigate every blip. Not an easy task in this era of universal pollution.
It is further curious to note that the majority of successful treasure hunters have certain similar background traits. Rich families and Mafia connections seem the more common, but let that go because few would not recognize that people who search for sunken ships are an unusual breed. I’m just mentioning how often it seems to be a factor. That is why pirate ships become suddenly valuable. In the few countries that still allow treasure hunting, there can hardly be any legitimate claimants to who owns a pirate ship. Still, the era of the spectacular shipwreck find is being closed down, as if those operations themselves don’t constitute a culture. Until somebody invents a stealth way to do it, every such salvage operation seems to have its shadowers, and that is a problem.
The moral to the story remains, if you find any treasure, don’t tell anyone. Hint, and if you go on a spending spree, that’s telling the government.
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