One year ago today: March 25, 2018, important, but not busy.
Five years ago today: March 25, 2014, it works for MicroSoft.
Nine years ago today: March 25, 2010, people who write cookbooks.
Random years ago today: March 25, xxxx, WIP
It’s a dreary morning. If this picture of doggies in designer raincoats goes viral, I say in my own defense that I was only following orders. Finally I remember this continental drizzle compared to the usual Florida downpour. I seized the opportunity to sleep in. That’s what you get to do when you retire, goes the urban legend. Cancel my train ride but let’s put me down for a coffee much later in the day. Robynette called to point out that Tennessee had gone on or off daylight saving the same day so I’ve lived the last two weeks, including my late night Saturdays, off by an hour. And you know, it didn’t change a thing for my schedule. I get up when the sun does, type of thing. Today, that was early, I’m in mild pain, so you get a lot of reading.
So I guess now isn’t the time to tell them the dogs also have knitted sweaters for when it goes below 45F. A cable-stitch for the big dog and a nice tartan for the little guy. But if you want the real laugh, it is at the liberal left. Just when you think they can’t possibly make bigger fools of themselves, this. They can never admit they were wrong, that’s the surest sign of an American liberal. Instead, they announce there is “not enough evidence” to connect Trump with the Russian thing they invented. Adding that this is also “not enough” to find Trump innocent. This, folks, is why Trump needs to not just can these malicious accusers, they need jail time. Compared to the shady deals and wasted money of the past, Trump’s background is Sunday school sweet.
TMOR, if you (like most Americans) have not followed the boring path of this case for the past two years, the investigation was the result of a non-elect named Schiff (rhymes with ‘schiff’). He outright promised that the president was guilty and that he had evidence. When I first heard this, I correctly inferred this yahoo was just making headlines for himself. But the point is, he has stated almost daily for years that he knows of and has evidence . According to his investigator, it doesn’t. What’s the French expression? “Au poleton!” (To the firing squad.)
Couple that with my natural suspiciousness of people who will break promises if it makes them look good to strangers. I was raised in such an atmosphere so pardon me if I avoid them. They cannot be corrected, only avoided. They’ll shaft you and remain unrepentant for life. They have the attitude that as long as they forgive themselves, there’s no harm done. They kick you in the teeth and then tell you it is time to “move on.” On to the next opportunity for them to kick you again.
Volvo semi driver’s compartment.
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The day remains colorless, although the later afternoons here have the sun poking through. Here’a gif of the railway tracks from y’day. It is intentionally slowed for effect, you know, the old man with two old dogs walking to his horizon. What can I say, I had just finished reading an article on vanishing points and this scene made the grade. The lines in this picture all converge on the west bank of Percy Pierce Lake. Today was quiet, not wasted. I’m experimenting with making a gif appear to run backwards.
And another thing, my Sony camera, the fancy one providing you with all the magazine-quality shots lately, is misbehaving. It will shut itself off in record mode if it detects no movement. That can happen in the ten seconds it takes to walk over to where you want to be in a scene. But the annoying one is it gets into this “buffer” mode. It appears to have been recording so you assume it is. As usual, there is not a word of it in the troubleshooting manual. And like, I’ve got time to go on-line and look. Again, the question remains: why does Sony even still build a camera that can screw up like that?
There’s a Marine West shop in the mall, I’ll drop in to see if they have a 2020 Almanac. I miss doing my sun point calculations. You need the current almanac to do it, but any year will do for practice. This is the calculation of the GP, the single geographic position on the surface of the Earth where the sun is at a given moment. You know, let me admit something that makes me jealous, but not for the reason you think. Long after I learned this hobby, I read about a contemporary of mine, a lady named Adrienne Cahalan. We are around the same age and on a number of counts. Except she became a lawyer, has a degree in Meteorology, and races yachts around the world. But, what makes me jealous is that as far as I can discovery, she has been able to completely eradicate any reports of any kind on where she got the tons of money to do all this.
All the information on-line says is that she is from a non-sailing family and one of six children. Well, that’s two things I have in common with her. But stop things right there with the implication she is some coal-miner’s daughter. I admit I drove taxi, piled lumber, sold vacuum cleaners, taught dance lessons, toiled in factories, cribbed basements, worked the pipelines, and pounded nails. If only these people could admit what they did that got them an estimated twenty times as much money as I could, maybe we can begin to respect them. A bit.
Note that the figure of twenty times is not drawn from thin air. I am a trained cost management accountant. I can calculate to the tenth of a cent what things really cost. And I know you cannot just buy a boat and win races. You have to live near water, have a berth, pay the membership fees, and you can imagine what else. At the age of 19, the best paying job I had paid $3.65 per hour in a union mill. And I know to have the wherewithal to yacht race, the equivalent of $73.00 per hour at that time is not unreasonable. And I would be jealous of anyone who had that kind of money for nothing. I mean, you could not possibly work for it, if you follow where I’m going with that.
No need to conclude my attitude is cantankerous toward sports where competition is mainly based on how much money your daddy has. I’m not alone in this, but I emphasize I am not against the sport itself, if you can call it a sport. Why not must hold the billionaire Olympics and call it that. In fact, I have two suggestions for medal categories:
The Steve Fossett Gold Medal: “My daddy bought me a seat on the stock exchange and I still wasted my life failing to get famous.”
The Julia Dreyfus Silver Medallion: “My daddy bought me the whole television studio to get me out of Paris so nobody would find out what was really going on. But now I’m respectable.”
The Justin Trudeau Bronze Award: “My daddy fucking mortgaged Canada and being a bleeding heart with no eyebrows is all I got to show for it.”
Later in the day, the dogs and I piled in the car and found the Hermitage rapid transit stop. What a dump. Obviously added as an afterthought, or possibly one of those stations build because the approved plan said so, it was vacant. The train goes through there three times in the morning. The ticket is $5.25 each way and the ticket dispenser was out of order. The posted schedule says arrive in Nashville at 7:15AM but the first return train is after 4:00PM. While checking all this, an empty bus pulled up, the Hermitage #6. Like most bus lines, it arrived either an hour early or an hour late, depending on which train you were riding. Since the station is both remote and not in the best neighborhood, that eradicates any plans to commute by rail.
I’ve been active in looking for jam sessions and open mics. Today I got a reply from a band 14.52 miles from here. A video, says country music, average age 56. They are similar to “Aggie Road”, that is, a great band for a 1980s type drunk bar. It’s a format I could play but the caliber was so low by the third gig you’d have me fighting boredom. And that’s not such a swell idea on a stage where I can outplay the lead guitarist. He was also the front man and his stage patter was stale at best. Never hand me a microphone around somebody like that. I’ll pass.
ADDENDUM
Neil Diamond’s “Longfellow Serenade”. Approximately six hours on this bass line so far, it is unlike any other bassline I’ve ever played. I recognize the situation, it was written by someone who had not heard the melody line. You can hear this effect listening to James Gang’s “Funk #49”. When I find a unique bass line, I like to step through it to discover what the musician was thinking. This bass line is not a piano progression, but it would make sense to a piano player. The major 7th note sounds better on a piano than a bass, probably a result of heavy piano in boogie music. The human ear gets conditioned.
I’m liking the notes in that some of them would strike the more professional bassist as ‘wrong’. There are no wrong notes in a hit record, but live you avoid certain notes at certain spots. After a while, your bass hand goes on auto to avoid them. No enter Neil Diamond, and I can’t play that bass line naturally. When this happens, I must do a guitar-player and memorize every note. That is what has taken most of the six hours so far. I’m having real trouble with it, and I’m the guy who can play Mozart on bass.
In the meanwhile, I watched another documentary on tank logistics. No matter how great the design, that fuel and ammo has to be at hand or the tank is junk. Once again, old German World War Two designs show a remarkable advantage over their counterparts. We are used to hearing how Tigers were so expensive and Panthers were untested. For once, I would like somebody to produce a video about, whatever their shortcomings, how they compared with their opponents. Every on-line work, while praising the battle merits, seems to be anti-German in regard to how they did it.
Sure, the Tiger was expensive. But Germany did not have the option of building masses of cheap tanks. No steel, no fuel, no factories. It is sheer propaganda that German set out to enslave the world unless they hoped to create the necessary thousands of tanks and planes from thin air. Germany planned only short, sharp wars to regain territory taken away by Versailles over a war Germany did not lose. I would also like to see a price comparison. The kill ratio of the Tiger was something like 5:1. Did the Tiger cost more than five Shermans or five T-34’s? (The loss ratios I read included break-downs. In actual combat, the Tiger could be said to have a 13:1 ratio.)
And would somebody tell these commentators to do their homework. They keep pronouncing Bagration as “bag-ray-shun”. Not even close. There are other factors that existing documentaries don’t cover. Such Tiger commanders as are visible in the newsreels seem to be maybe 22 years old. And I read another statistic. The Soviet army was one of the few with units of snipers, and those snipers shot 11,000 German soldiers.
It was with some interest, ergo, that I searched for any documentaries on the Yom Kipper war that emphasized the Egyptian side. They are hard to find. They are the only Arab army that ever handed Israel their asses and they did put 500 tanks across the canal. With Soviet help albeit, but that’s modern war. That’s a lot of armor, in terms of late-war Germany, about three panzer divisions. The newsreels are hardly sympathetic but I noticed the Soviet tanks with their frying-pan turrets were the descendents of the T-34. They were cheap to make and the price comparison breaks down because it was easy to repair. Most Soviet tanks destroyed in battle have less than 80 miles on the odometer.
The Egyptian attack was, militarily, a masterpiece. Punch a hole through the Israeli line, pour some pathfinder troops through the gap, and set your anti-tank pieces on the flanks of the approach routes. (For the record, they punched 60 holes through the Bar-Lev line.) Then take a lunch break. In around ten hours, the Israeli tanks will arrive expecting a repeat of 1967. On came the Israelis, using their armored reserve only to discover the Sinai is excellent terrain for the Soviet Sapper, an anti-tank guided missile. So the Israelis call in their air force, to find the Egyptians were ready for that, too. Quite the campaign. In all, if the kills by anti-tank missiles are considered an extension of tank kills, the ancient Soviet equipment is very cost effective.
Not so for the Sapper itself. It was their first attempt at a portable unit, about the size of a suitcase. The weapon works, but not on its own. Rumors are it takes up to 3,000 simulated firings before the operators can hit anything, because it is wire-guided. The missile jumps upward to clear ground obstacles and kicks up a lot of dust. This means if you are watching, you can spot the approximate location of the operator and plaster the area. Since he loses sight of the rocket until it speeds up and heads for the target, if you keep his head down, he can’t guide the thing. You have around 30 seconds at normal ranges, plenty of time to duck behind something.
But don’t rely on these tactics. The operator is usually one of the best trained soldiers in the enemy army and he is smart. He’ll launch the missiles as far from his vantage point as possible, and he’ll wet the ground to minimize dust. These guys have no sense of humor and they plugged 800 Israeli armored vehicles, of which my guess is half were tanks. The missile has been updated and can handle reactive armor. If you know the right people, you can buy one for around.$500. With a direct hit, the warhead will stop any tank in the world. An indirect hit will kill the occupants.
In other news, 3D printers are slated to start a 50-home project in Latin America. How nice it would be for the technology to completely put certain aspects of the US construction industry out of work. They’ve been overcharging and bleeding the system too long. And transistors made with graphene have already been produced and UC Berkeley is using them to detect mutations. When I said this blog was following these technologies, I had little idea things would move so fast.
