One year ago today: March 5, 2018, resumes suck - your privacy.
Five years ago today: March 5, 2014, the real upper case.
Nine years ago today: March 5, 2010, still no hi-speed . . .
Random years ago today: March 5, 2004, unwillingness as incapacity.
Cheese lover’s alert. If you like your cheddar sharp, try this brand if you can find it. It is not ‘seriously’ sharp as the label suggests, but enough to addict you at first bite. Careful, this company has several flavors with similar labels, you are seeking the seriously sharp. It’s on a par with Kraft as far as the tang, but this one lacks all the filler and ingredients found in the big brands. It is also non-GMO, something I long ago will become imperative around this time. That’s once the big labs begin to announce what they knew twenty years ago: the direct link between food allergies and modified grains.
I got a small set of butt hinges onto the box. Shown here I’m hand drilling pilot holes for the hinge screws. I see the chisel work does have to be as intricate as the how-to videos suggest. I learned plenty, like make sure you check there is not a big wood knot right where you need to place the hardware and get myself a decent vice. The small pieces will otherwise move wherever they please. I see the wisdom of building the entire box then cutting the lid. No matter how well I measured, and I even made a jig, a separate lid is almost impossible to both be square and fit square.
Boss Hogg was on some kind of “we’s folks” music trivia all day, but I think it failed in purpose. Most of the tunes were about families who lost the wage-earner and had to fend for themselves. Baloney, because nobody born after 1965 is going to identify with that. Ever since [Lyndon] Johnson opened the welfare floodgates, there ain’t no such thing as hunger and poverty in America. This “coal miner’s daughter” theme has become somewhere between a fantasy and a laughing stock. Nobody goes hungry in America, the people on welfare are in general better off than the working poor right up to what was formerly called the middle class.
In fact, if you factor in the increased opportunities for welfare recipients and their under the table incomes, they have probably surpassed the old middle class in terms of equivalent financial opportunity. Today you have a better shot at a post-grad degree if your mother is on welfare than if your father has a good blue-collar job. This happened to me, my parents made just enough money to disqualify me from any type of assistance. I’ve got a question for you, there’s no right answer. As you were growing up, how much money did your parents unconditionally give you? No, not for chores, or allowances, or birthdays, but say you were at the beach and your father gave you a dollar to go get an ice cream cone.
Or at the fair, your parents got you the five dollar ride pass. Or money for the movies, just in your mind add up what you think is a rough total of how much you got for nothing. If it averaged only $5 a week, that’s over $5,000 by the time you were 18. For reasons I won’t go into, if you are reading this blog, chances are you were of the group that got one hell of a lot more than that. I happen to have written down how much my parents “gave” me in my life. [Where they] just reached in their pocket and said here, this is yours. It was $32.15, with the largest single amount being $3 one time. For tuck at scout camp, or about 10 cents per day. The other scouts all spent dollar bills. Damn rights I remember that.
Black jaguar.
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By afternoon we got cold and rain both. I took time to study a bit and read a little science fiction. I can’t find my SD card reader, so here is the best picture I have of a spore from the shed. The natural color is a pale green, almost white. This photo was filtered blue for detail, not stained. If internal movement is any indication, this is plant matter. Sorry for the blurriness, but I’m out of slide covers. It looks like leaf folds and I see no nucleus. The stem part does not extend into the body, meaning it probably has no locomotive function.
Finally, I get the toll fine for the instance I got run into the wrong lane in Ft. Lauderdale last year. The fine is $25. I wonder if they got the video of the guy who sped up into my turn spot and forced me into the HOV lane? Probably, but it’s not like they would assist anybody to claim a defense. The trip to Miami was one of the most economical yet. The one nice thing about the car is there and back in a day is very doable.
I had left the memory foam in the back from the previous trip for reasons. I am not sure if I’ll be needed, but if I am, the dogs love that memory foam. Let me refine that, they like the memory foam with a flannel blanket on top. I’ll get pictures if it happens again, the blanket had been only partially draped over the foam and they were huddled together like puppies. As for myself, the foam is nice once in a while but I quickly adapt to it. More than a day or two and for me, the effect is gone.
Before I write a note for you about DNA in the addendum, I dug out my old video on vaccine production. I remembered that doctor who wanted to stockpile the vaccines, but the drug companies balked over liability concerns. You see, no vaccine is perfectly safe, and in the case of epidemics, the most deadly are viruses that switch from birds to humans. Didn’t I read the death rate is 50%? Anyway, most vaccines are incubated in bird eggs, but you’ve got a problem when the vaccine kills the egg. The doctor patched in a segment of, what was it, turtle gene? Anyway, his plan got scotched by the anti-vaxxers and the GMO element.
This is an instance where left-wing political philosophy backfires. The idea of vaccination requires the resources of a wealthy state. As it stands, we could inoculate the USA, but the centers where the diseases mutate and spread, that is, the Third World, have had their expectations unreasonably raised. Many have no programs, instead relying on media pressure to demand “equality”. Most countries in Africa and South America have no facilities for producing vaccine. Their game plan is to bury their dead and blame the USA. You don’t have to look far to find out where they learned this brand of thinking.
I heard an uncharacteristic alarm somewhere in the house. I finally found it in the weather center, the room with all the clocks and wireless weather readouts. Since I moved here in 2016 and reset all the devices, it was signaling the lowest record temperature inside the house so far. But something is wrong with the reading, it just is not that close to freezing. The weather center here is also known as the bathroom.
Next, I found a DVD with four Chinese symbols on the cover. The numbers 1942, what is that? I threw it in the player to find it means the year 1942 and China was at war with Japan. Actually, this is propaganda, because the Chinese were just as much at war with each other. This is the time when supplies were flown “over the hump” and the Burma road was being pushed through. Plans were to fly bombing missions on Japan from B-29s based in China. But the country was too primitive and corrupt for even America to afford such airfields. There was deep suspicious the Nationalists were stockpiling military supplies to fight the communists rather than the Japanese. Not to mention the traditional surplus over there of petty warlords, renegades, and roving bands of well-fed bandits.
It’s one of those expensive government-backed movies, all about honor and betrayal, which the Chinese have, shall we say, their own special way of interpreting. The movie seems to be about a village that gets occupied by the Jap army, but after the opening scenes, I could no longer tell the actors apart. Couldn’t they at least wear different clothes? The movie is called “Back to 1942” but the extra two words are not in the Chinese original title.
ADDENDUM
A few of the articles I’ve read lately concerned DNA. I’m no expert, but the world is replete with cases where dudes like me discover something. I doubt it because I’m such a rookie, but I have more than the usual sense of disease always being related in some way to it’s effect on DNA. Remember, I subscribe to the old theory that one of the ways our life arose is when amoeba-like creature tried to ingest a smaller tidbit that not only protected itself, it had a symbiotic benefit to living within the protoplasm without being digested. There later (years later) emerged strong evidence for this, for example how red blood cells lack DNA and the mitochondria have distinct RNA instead of DNA.
In the past century, there are about 40 new diseases in the world, the majority arising in Africa, the remainder in Asia. (There’s probably a connection here that nobody wants to outright say.) There is something about the life conditions in those areas that give rise to new disease, and in particular, viral epidemics. So far the world has been lucky in that most of the new strains have low transmissions rates. But just a hundred years ago the Spanish flu killed in two days or less. They still do not know how many died, but upper estimates put it at 100 million. All dead within 168 days of the outbreak. Then poof, it disappeared so fast it required major research to find the strain for study fifty years later. It was an Asian flu but first reported in Spanish newspapers because of war-time censorship in northern Europe.
The air waves are flooded with the AIDS patient in England with a bone marrow transplant being cured. Yep, the world needs more cured AIDS patients. I stay convinced there is some African and Asian social connection with the emergence of these new diseases. I’ve read some passages on epigenetics, a field of study that says (I think) that some genes control other genes. Before, if you had blue eyes it was because you had the DNA for it. With epigenetics, you have the DNA for any color, but the others were suppressed or the blue was enabled. Epigenetics says DNA is controlled in both function and degree. My natural tendency is to regard such theories as telltale signs that the real causes and effects are not adequately understood.
Add the tendency for humans to “bring down” theories that are too harsh, and epigenetics makes sense. Take the race/IQ connection. It’s for real as hell, but it creates the temptation for lower IQ races to claim the cause is environmental. Why, if I had been raised in southern California with money, I’d have become a state governor turned lobbyist and today collecting four pensions. Instead, having to squander my youth staying alive activated the DNA that says I wound up in a fishing cabin in Florida. One thing I’ll admit, is epigenetics does have some physical basis.
What I mean is DNA is repetitive and contains predictable patterns. I’ll explain but remind you I’m not an authority on this. DNA consists of four nucleotides (A,C,G,T) in combination. There are long strands that would be identical except for times when a C is present and immediately followed by a G. This is common; they are called CpG islands. They seem to act as markers or addresses that can be used to control the expression of the gene to which they are attached. It appears the cell can use this marker to call on the gene when needed. While I agree it happens, I don’t know if that is enough to manufacture a big notion that all genes can be switched on or off. There are too many instances where the gene is simply not there to begin with. That, however, won’t stop the other side from complaining.
