October 14, 2019

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 14, 2018, a generic day.
Five years ago today: October 14, 2014, remember VisiCalc?
Nine years ago today: October 14, 2010, 49ccis not enough.
Random years ago today: October 14, 2007, poetry vs. HTML.

           Up at 5:30AM, my physiology told me this is a work day. Read on for why the Jack Daniel’s photo. This did not stop me from watching the worst Bill Murray movie yet, “Lost in Translation”. That’s where he’s typecast to play an aging actor doing a whiskey commercial in Japan, where he picks up an equally aged Scarlett Johansson. She’s really let herself go, but yeah, if I met her at the club, I’d buy her a round or two to see what comes up. Pre-dawn is also a good time to burn leaves. Check back with me after sunrise. If Scarlett answers, hang up. Time to get to the library and rip out all the Harbor Freight coupons.

           The airwaves are again alive with a renewed Democrat anti-Trump assault. Claiming he’s made 1,447 untrue statements with no word on how many they have made. This Biden person states that Trump will be impeached, but that sounds like a dying echo. Question, if Trump is no impeached, does that make Biden the liar? Biden says the justice department is poring over phone transcripts to build a case. Most of us think if a case exists, why does it have to be built?

           In an equally important event, the Democrat leftists are refusing to recognize Columbus day. They’ve got it unmarked on most calendars and want it to be relabeled “Indigenous Peoples Day”. I thought that was July 4th with all the fireworks they sell. Or is that National Lose Your Ass At The Casino Day? US troops are pulling out of Turkey where they have no business in the first place. They don’t exist as a viable defense force against Russia, and if deterrence is the plan, one or two platoons will suffice. Volunteers would work fine. Volunteers from up near New York preferably from towns with too many politicians.
           Two dead as a hotel collapses in New Orleans. (What were they doing, anyway?) Says the report, the hotel was located in the French Quarter, which surprises and shocks the hell out of everyone. We thought they knew how to build things that lasted in 1815. When the city was still above sea level. Today, be informed, is National Dessert Day. So, I made myself a coffee refill, that new kind that has the faint aroma of polyurethane. But I set it down looking for my missing jab saw. Now I can’t find the coffee or the saw. Nor can I find my box of drawer handles. I wonder if urethane causes amnesia. Or is it the estimated 87,600 cups of coffee in my life? I forget.

           Okay, the whiskey bottle. I do not drink hard liquor, but if I find the empty bottles, I keep them as handy containers for cleaning fluids. When I picked this one up, I noticed the seal was still intact. That’s unusual enough these days to get top blog billing. You are not the only one who will be glad when I get into a good band. The second most exciting event was beginning to relocate the medicine cabinets. These are the cutouts I made before discovering there was no convenient size of sink faucet that would fit without blocking the mirror.
           Not so simple, Chumley. The cuts here raise the cabinet by four inches but it also means moving the electric box in the upper left corner, which is cut into the header. And the wiring has to be drawn back from the stud holes and re-routed. By 9:30AM this came to a standstill. It’s already 85°F out there, so cancel all outdoor work and driving the car to the shop. Bad enough it could boil over, but get stranded in this heat, forget it. And, of all the crazy delays, I cannot find my electrical drill bits. I store them in a special container so this won’t happen.

           Whoa, by 11:00AM I can’t even get under the house in this heat. The climate change people are flooding the radio waves, this time it is about the birds disappearing. As if birds have not survived both hot and cold, oxygen & dioxide, wet and dry long before humans came along. If it gets too warm, they fly closer to the poles. It’s called migration and really, they’ve got a handle on it. I’m giving that Bill Murray movie another chance because we share the same style when it comes to women. Never ask, never push, never joke, never pay too much attention. Do nothing and she’ll either make the move or you didn’t have a chance. All I do is make it easy for her to say yes. It’s not like I’m letting a secret out of the bag, because 99% of men can’t do it. They all have mental blocks. Yes, Ken, in this instance impatience is a mental block. The good news is that means you now have a complete set.

Picture of the day.
Fire hydrant art.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           12:30PM and I’ve got all the A/Cs cranked and the attic fan going. We get days like this but normally it takes until mid-afternoon to max out the heat index. So as not to lose the day, I went through my software storage to find my 2003 copy of Ghost. I need a more capacity on my work computer, which operates XP. I tried, but no luck. Ghost is strictly DOS and it isn’t fooled by Windows cmd mode. While no doubt some people are still running Win 98, most of the people I know who use computers only became experts after they figured out ten years too late they needed the Internet.

           Is there anything a siesta can’t do? I found the drill bits. The container had broken open just enough for them to fall into the box below. It should cool off a bit by late afternoon. Don’t even think of heading for the beaches unless you have a full gas tank and $10 per hour for parking. While it is illegal for you to gouge stupid homeowners on hurricane supplies, it is not illegal for them to gouge you to park in their yard. Like most of America, stupid people are required in order get elected, so politicians favor them. That’s favor them, not represent them. Being stupid, they don’t know the difference.

           Here’s a view of the cutaway and partial removal of the upper frame member. The electrical wiring is visible and I may be in luck. The structure is 2”x6” which may allow me to simply enlarge the existing holes enough to fit the cabinet, which is designed to fit with 2”x4” spacing. The next photo is the template for the medicine cabinet. To recap, what went wrong was first, the dimensions for the faucets specified the height of the top piece, not the height of the spout. Next, the rounded bottom of the chosen medicine cabinets, see template, would not clear the faucet. If move upwards, as shown here, the rounded top blocks the way for the vanity light bar. All of it attributable to inexperience.

           It’s enough into autumn that it cools when the sun gets low in the sky. This gave me a three hour window to get the exterior part of the new joist work underway. In the end, all of the original oak flooring in this place had to be ripped out. Most of it that is not termite bitten is too old and brittle to replace. I still have it stacked outside and it may be suitable for building oak chests or something. When I have time, of course.

           The work under the house is difficult to photograph. It’s mostly about that one rotten joist that was getting wet from an over-tightened supply line. It ran the width of the building and was near where the sections joined. So when it rotted and the frame settled, I have to both raise the building and replace the joist. The on-line videos make it look easy to scab joists. Try it.
           Actually, it is two joists consisting of four eight-foot planks. The next joist over, the one under the bath tub, also settled. The materials are here so please give me a few days of decent weather. One of the first things I’ll do is go shopping for more DVDs. Scarlett & Bill are still dancing vertically and I’m down to two spy movies and a documentary on Elizabeth I. Today’s reading was a follow up on castle building, this time examining how the French did it. They always had trouble keeping out of each other’s way until it seems around 900 AD somebody figured out the way to build forts in such a way that made it difficult to go marauding about the countryside.

           There was more to this in France, which is full of valleys that invaders have to follow to make any speed. Before I thought it enough the castles were all built a day’s march apart, so any group of soldiers never had to camp in the open. A relatively mountainous area in Ireland had 400 castles, yet a similar sized kingdom in south France had only ten. The French castles ring the perimeter with one central castle. Then spread around all over are smaller fortifications that controlled the rivers through the valleys. Could be the French were simply better at it, but it would also make sense if the castles designed to delay an invader until an army could be drawn up.
           My interest is more in the architecture and the various strategies for resisting siege. Given enough time and resources any siege would eventually win, but that gets expensive. I tried to find articles on which castles had successfully resisted and how they did it. This is evidently a topic historians do not find all that exciting to write about. The attackers seem to get all the good press. Maybe so many assaults failed that it makes the good ones epical.

           So I grabbed that Elizabeth video and it is not bad. It portrays the era the way the players would have wanted it. That history, down to 1939, tells the world that diplomacy and ambassadors do not work. If world leaders need to confer, let them meet at Starbucks. A world full of emissaries and envoys always leads to war. Countries without them have a nearly perfect track record of leaving each other alone. Raleigh is a handsome pirate and for all we know, he was. Just as Liz is taking a shine to him, he poinks her handmaiden. One accuracy is the avarice of Spain. The further from Germany you get, the stinkier the politics and Spain is your classic despotism built on plundered wealth. They have built nothing, created nothing, like other southern states they produce the odd poet or painter, but the economy is based more on plunder than on trade.

           They are a tribal mass all about the wrong influences, but positioned where they have access to most of the advances in armaments and warfare that Europe provides. Few things are worse than wars and colonization justified by religion. As Elizabeth says in the movie, the Armada carries the Inquisition. The English may be bad, but at least they arrived in America to settle, not to loot the place. The Spanish found mountains of silver and beyond enslaving the locals to mine it, left a legacy of nothing in the Americas—same as every place else in the world they ever touched. They never quite succeeded in become civilized to the European standard. Even today, they are only a modern country because, like India and China, they copied other people. And we know that copies are never quite as accurate as producing an original.

           There are exceptions, but they are few. As Ann Coulter says, one instance does not change a statistic. As Reagan said, America is the last hope for the world. The people seeking to destroy it, and that includes the liberals in DC, are shortsighted and insane. The good news is I can now capture DVD movie scenes, but so far only on this computer. Sadly, the procedure doesn’t work on Vista or beyond. I don’t believe I’m the only one who has discovered the process, but why isn’t is published all over the net. I don’t hate movie producers but I do hate censors telling me what to do, so I know I’m not alone.

           [Authors note: I rarely copy anything I would otherwise buy. The price tag on the Elizabeth movie was $21.99 and would never have found its own way here. I did not copy it, I bought it second hand, which apparently is now illegal or about to be. You could live your whole life here without meeting and American who supported laws like that.]

Last Laugh