One year ago today: May 23, 2019, Nashville, dogs, etc.
Five years ago today: May 23, 2015, to Deland, FL
Nine years ago today: May 23, 2011, the original club coil.
Random years ago today: May 23, 2007, my first “solo” gig.
Twenty-four years ago I put an end to the closest thing I ever had to a career. Yep, phone company anniversary day. Did you ever notice how few rich or famous people there are who ever once worked for that company? Scarily, I might be the closest representation of such a being. As Pete, a co-worker who quit the same day put it, “It would be a great job if they left you alone to do it.”
Have we seen this picture before? I don’t think so. To the best of my memory, this is somewhere in Montana circa 1970. I was hitchhiking and almost remember taking this photo. It was late fall and fairly warm. There was no traffic so I stood in the middle of the road thinking about those mountains. It could be several places, but those would have had a lot of cars. This picture was in the shed where there may be more from wherever this fell out of. There are very few pictures of myself, since self-timing cameras were expensive in 1970 and same as today, I do not know one person with the aptitude to point a camera and shoot a picture. A phone, yes, but not a camera. When you see a blurry picture of me, it is every time I got somebody else to take the picture.
Don’t laugh, I really do not know of one person who can work a hand-held, although you’d think anyone born before 1995 would be a natural. I learned digital camera technique on my own, beginning around November 2006 when the cameras dropped below a hundred bucks. Why don’t I use a camera phone? Because for unknown causes, even the best of camera pictures are boring. Always as boring and unimaginative as the people who take them. It likely has something to do with the difficulty of “framing” a picture with a camera coupled with certain innate mental problems often misclassified as “learning disabilities”.
lottery ticket sales are dropping amongst millennials. I doubt it is any rejection of gambling or their realization of the long odds. A lot of products are slumping, like beef, mayonnaise and beer. My explanation is just as good as any—gastrozombies can’t taste real food. Milk is losing, so are breakfast cereals. I doubt movie theaters will be around much longer. Letters and envelopes are rare and apparently the XYZ crowd does not care for golf. That could be explained by finances. Most who have a decent job got it by sinking into student debt, and anything perceived as a necessity is a goner.
This photo shows the new Nile dam being built with Chinese credit across the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. It’s part of a methodical Chinese move into the infrastructure of the continent. Geopolitically, it makes sense, as the Chinese need far more reliable export partners than the USA, who can and will impose tariffs. The problem is the river flows through three countries and Ethiopia, which contributes 90% of the water, has a treaty right to only 25%. Likely, this made sense to the British at the time, as they’ve never fully admitted their empire got sold out during the 1930s.
The cover story is that the dam is totally financed by Ethiopia. It goes by various names, like the Great Renaissance, the Hidase, and millennial. Coming hard on the heels of the Three Gorges, it will be within the top ten largest damns ever, requiring up to 15 years to fill. The problem is that this will instantly cut Egyptian hydroelectric by at least 25%. The chief controversy is the rate at which the damn is to be filled, since ultimately all the water still has to flow. The area is bristling with Chinese copies of anti-aircraft missiles. Ethiopia says the issue is African, the Egyptians say it is a matter of international law. Egypt, which has no jungle, has an entire army brigade trained to fight in one. Insert “Jaws” theme sound here.
This is the reason I’ve always considered people who call Africa a black continent to be ignorant. The presence of a few hundred million Arabs who can kick ass any time they want is not to be written off.
Yacht shoes.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Putting down some blocks in the back yard I dug up an old Coke bottle. It’s soaking right now but I think it is green glass. Museum quality. There is some raised lettering on the bottom, we shall see what it says when the layers of grime soak off. One of the words is definitely FLA, which might indicated the bottle was manufactured before two-letter zip codes became popular. Later, the layers of muck had to be carefully soaked off the bottle. It appeared to be full of hair-line cracks so I did not want to scrape anything. We have something. The name “Winter Haven” on the base.
Working till dark and then some in the new lighting, I see the spinner timer on my washer may be fritzed. I hear the pump activate but the motor just buzzes. This is the chance I took leaving it semi-outdoors for so long. It it’s the switch, I’ll bypass it. Which then caused me to take the remainder of the day off. I was tempted to go downtown, but why? There’s better Internet here and on average, less noisy people and better quality music.
I’ve been meaning to read about Operation Blowdown, the simulated nuclear explosion the Australians set off in their jungle during the red scare. Actually, it was much more than a scare, the ugly side effects and even uglier aftereffects are still causing problems today. Australia had troops in Vietnam and Indonesia was doing some awful stuff. The conjecture was they wanted to see if nukes could remove jungle cover. It seems a lot of trouble to do it their way, which amounted to stacking 50 tons of dynamite in the undergrowth and boom.
I’ve never gotten much on the Cape York Peninsula. It is tropical jungle, but why so wild and unhinhabited? Most tropical places teem with tribes and diversity. Instead, this place is bleak and has maybe six or eight roads. There are islands in the Gulf there owned by natives but the government put them all on welfare. Nothing to do and free money, you know how that works. The Aussies have a name for running an illegal drinking house. Sly-grogging. There are rumors of riots that never made the outside world and until recently the only communication was by telegraph.
Dang, Bing got onto my tablet. If there is one outfit I distrust more than Google, it is MicroSoft., but only because they’ve been around longer. It’s a 45 minute job to get into the registry and wipe it out. What I really want to know is how they pulled that off. I was using full screen so I didn’t notice until when I put anything on pause, pop-up ads blotted out the bottom third of my screen. I tried the usual methods but it keeps coming back. I don’t care if it is a good product, I don’t like hijacking. They’ve buried it deep this time, so I went top-down instead of bottom-up and set my default search to DuckDuckGo.
ADDENDUM
Experiment 518, the thermal chimney, did not achieve its purpose. The angle of the summer sun is too nearly vertical. Strange, since the angle is based on one built in India, a location much closer to the equator than my cabin. A complete redesign is likely the only thing that would suffice. Don’t rule it out, the new lean-to demonstrates how pleasant a work place can be with shade and a slight breeze. The chimney’s purpose is to achieve such an air flow in the metal sheds. Give me a nice place to work and I’m happy. Just hobby space, I’m not like Israel, give them the shop space and they built 140 atomic bombs. What? Whoops, apparently the world is not supposed to know that. Disregard the notice.
The previous three weeks of work are a drastic change for me. While it was not backbreaking, I showed stamina that’s been missing a long time. Blog rules, I have to say what’s important around here. The good news is I’ve trimmed quite a bit, the bad news is I’ve gained back 13 pounds. This isn’t normal even if I could eat that amount of food in such a short time. This is nothing new for me and I would like an explanation. A battle between inches and pounds on a diet of around 1200 calories on most days.
I saw a copy of “Hitler’s War” for sale at the [coffee book ] shop, tipping me off that the lady running the shop hasn’t read it. Neither have I, but know it is an accurate historical work that certain people do not like it since it counters much of the Americanized version of events. Best example is that Hitler was anti-religion. False, he regularly prayed in public and asked God to protect his soldiers in battle. The book reputedly details significant events that are never told in post-war accounts. Hitler never wanted war with England, for instance, and offered them twelve German divisions, then the best in the world, to defend then against any attacks. And Hitler knew that England, America, and the Soviet Union had been secretly preparing for offensive war since 1930—and there was only one logical country for them to attack.
Sure enough, I went on a quest to find a newspaper in this part of town and wound up in the deep south end with no luck. And the coffee shop was closed. Hmmm, not open on a Saturday, that tells us something. They’ll need more to draw people in but they are within walking distance of many government offices and I think there is a family court across the way. Maybe weekdays can support the place and I just arrived at a slow time.
[Author’s note: “Hitler’s War” is a work by the highly-praised historian David Irving—-until he researched the wrong topic. He was both rich and famous, internationally applauded for finding the truth behind major past events. His method? To prefer documents over witnessses. He was regarded since age 25 as a world-acclaimed historical research scientist because of the way he methodically based his work on documentation, often uncovering records hidden from public view.
Unwittingly, his thoroughness of his research was his undoing. Then around 1988 he examined documents showing the gas chambers at Auschwitz were built by the Polish government in 1948. This immediately came under attack by the greatest propaganda machine on Earth—the mainstream media. What came next is predictable, the classic Ernst Zundel treatment.
Attempts on his life, prison sentences, lawsuits, fines, and deportations. All his previous work was discredited. And lest we forget, sudden aspersions on his sex life and mental condition, where none existed before. But so far, they haven’t used the only-one-testicle label. I think he might be the same guy who unmasked that faction of university professors who re-wrote a whole segment of history by quoting each other in a covert worldwide ring.]
